This is my favorite Koko the Clown cartoon I’ve seen (not including him guest-starring in Betty Boop toons). It is hilarious, well-animated, and totally nuts. You’ll want to skip over the first 2 minutes and 11 seconds of it, as some jackass has added a bunch of annoying unrelated footage and commentary at the beginning. Unfortunately, the other versions of this cartoon I’ve seen on the web are taken from a heavily edited version that appeared on MTV’s Liquid Television, which also features a terrible soundtrack… those are to be avoided.
Update: Holmes! of the excellent Barnacle Press blog commented to point us to a better version of this cartoon that he posted here (note… it is a big download, 100MB). Thanks Holmes!
Meet the Peanut Vendor. It is credited to “Len Lye” on youtube (although in the comments, someone claims it is actually by Dave Fleischer). Judging from the other Len Lye films on youtube, it seems unlikely it is by him, as none of the others feature any character animation that I saw… and the character animation in this gem is quite good, and would appear to be by someone with experience. Anyone know the answer to this?
Update 2: Or not… Tyler in the comments points us to lenlye.com, which credits it to Len Lye here. Tyler says:
Hi – I can assure you that this film is by Len Lye – see my comment on YouTube. The monkey happens to be owned by the New Zealand Film Archive, actually. Lye made one other stop-motion animated film – The Birth of the Robot. Anyway, glad you liked the film.
Thanks Tyler! Lenlye.com says:
Experimental Animation (also “Peanut Vendor”) (1934)
3 min, 35mm, b&w, sound
Music: “Peanut Vendor” by Red Nichols and his Five Pennies
The protagonist of this film is a marionette monkey built by the film-maker himself. Lye presented this film as a prototype in the hope of finding partners for a series of puppet films, but without success.
So, presumably, the Internet Movie Database is wrong, which credits the film to Dave Fleischer (item 301) and makes no mention of it under Len Lye’s filmography. Or it’s right and the Len Lye site is wrong, but I’m leaning towards Len Lye at this point, since I have seen no credible attributon to Fleischer. I have no idea who did it, but it’s a great cartoon! Now I want to see The Birth of the Robot…
Here’s a cartoon the Fleischers did with Louis Armstrong and his orchestra providing the music. This is, unfortunately, vastly inferior to the Betty/Cab Calloway cartoons, in spite of having a great soundtrack. This is largely because it is loaded to the gills with offensive and uninspired racial caricatures of black tribesmen, some of who are tastelessly transposed onto the band members… yes, they don’t make cartoons like this any more, do they? Worse yet, it just isn’t very funny, and the animation is not nearly as spectacular or surreal as it is in the Calloway trilogy.
The Old Man of the Mountain is the last of the Betty Boop/Cab Calloway trilogy (I posted the other two previously). It’s my least favorite of the bunch, but is still excellent… it doesn’t have the same level of creepiness that the other two have.
I wonder if this is the cartoon that inspired the way Don Martin drew toes.
A studio called Banana Park recently produced a short adapting some George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips using 3d computer animation (they claim it even made an “Oscar nomination short list” whatever that means)… you can see a short, tiny sample of the results and some stills from it here.
While obviously these are talented and competent folks who are sincere in their efforts, this just looks hideous to me… and I don’t think it is really their fault. Some of their other work looks great. Krazy Kat just doesn’t translate well to film in my opinion, and she REALLY doesn’t translate well to 3D.
They didn’t have much more luck adapting the charm of Krazy Kat to the screen in 1916…
They’re all right cartoons, sure, but they really don’t hold a candle… hell, they don’t even hold a wet match… to Herriman’s masterpiece. This is for a number of reasons I think.
The most obvious reason is that Herriman didn’t have a clean style… his characters were rough and scratchy and different in different panels. This isn’t generally done in animation, and it is pretty unheard of in 3D animation, since you have a computer model that you are moving around in 3d space. Non-canned (i.e. automated squashing, stretching, twisting, etc.) alterations to the model take a lot of effort. The rough lines on the 3d model of Krazy Kat in the pictures above just seem ugly, a pathetic and ridiculous effort to capture the charm of Herriman’s scratchy drawings. I have the same complaint about the Krazy Kat toys I’ve seen come out in recent years. Krazy just looks totally wrong in 3D… she just wasn’t designed for this dimension. I mean, the Kat has been known to peer over the horizon line! What are they thinking?
Another less obvious reason is the way Herriman made the characters live on the page through drawing them the same size and often from the same angle repeatedly… this gives the strips an intimacy in a way that I don’t think can be translated in any other medium. This is a lot of what makes the characters seem like “little sprites” as Herriman poetically put it.
All these cartoons are mercifully silent, although I would guess the 3D one probably has sound that is not on the sample. I pity the voice talent trying to compete with how Herriman’s off-kilter and poetically accented dialogue reads in one’s head.
I could be wrong about all of this though… Walt Kelly’s Pogo would seem to be very hard to adapt for many of the same reasons, but I love the stop-motion animated “I Go Pogo” movie (I’ve never had the opportunity to see Chuck Jones’ “Pogo Birthday Special,” unfortunately). It’s not as good as the strip, certainly, but its as good of a film as you could hope to make out of the Pogo characters, and it is gorgeously animated. So maybe someone could do a good Krazy Kat cartoon someday. Seems like a damn waste of time to attempt it though, when your chances of doing something half as good as the source material are slim to none.
Going off on a tangent, I find it depressing that 3D animation is often considered inherently superior to 2D animation, as if the point of a cartoon was to be realistic. 3D can be charming in the hands of good animators, don’t get me wrong… I love all the Pixar movies. But there are two things that 3D computer animation will most likely almost always fail miserably at… extreme realism, and extreme, off-model cartooniness. Krazy Kat obviously falls into the latter category.
(Note: Ironically, I have many of the same gripes about my largely unsuccessful 3D homage to the Fleischer Brothers, Take Me Away From the River.)
Another gorgeous Fleischer Brothers cartoon with a delightful Cab Calloway soundtrack… this one to his greatest hit, Minnie the Moocher. Here Cab is rotoscoped into a big goofy ghost walrus, of all things. Those Fleischer Brothers sure had some great taste in music.
Another one of the Fleischer Brothers’ best cartoons… this one is their (pre-Disney) version of Snow White. It doesn’t follow the Snow White story closely at all… not that the Disney one does either… but in this one the story is a largely ignored framework on which to build some cartoon craziness… sure, there are some dwarfs in there for about fifteen seconds, a witch and a magic mirror… there’s also a dragon with three duck heads on it’s head. The highlight is when Koko the Clown is transformed into an eerie spectre singing and dancing Cab Calloway’s St. James Infirmary… it may just be me, but besides being funny, I find this scene genuinely chilling as well… it makes the hair stand up on my neck. Stare in the face of your own mortality in the empty eyes of Koko the Clown…
I’m a big fan of Fleischer Studios cartoons and of Mills Brothers music… here are the two together.
The Mills Brothers were somewhat of a novelty act, since the only instrument they used in the 30’s was a guitar… the rest of the “instruments” were produced by their voices. The music would be just as enjoyable without knowing this, though.
If you dig the music of the Mills Brothers, check out this well-made and inexpensive collection of their best recordings from JSP Records. You may wanna check out the rest of the stuff in the JSP Records catalog too… as well as Proper Records. Those two publishers are putting an amazing quantity of wonderful old music into well-researched, inexpensive cd box set collections.
