When I first saw this I thought it was a Fleischer satire of Disney’s Fantasia, but it actually came out three years before Fantasia (1940). I imagine Fantasia was already in some sort of production at that point, so it doesn’t seem unlikely it may have been a satire of the seemingly pretentious and grandiose idea of it at the time, I suppose. This came out before Snow White (1938), Pinocchio (1940), or any of the Disney Features, so the idea of a feature length cartoon probably seemed ridiculous to a lot of people at the time, let alone one that featured animation and classical music.
The Big Cartoon Database claims that besides Foxy and Roxy looking a whole lot like Mickey and Minnie, a lot of the gags in this cartoon were plagiarized. It sure is fun, regardless. The hobos are just great.
Winsor McCay was a pioneer in both comic strips and animated films, and he did both disciplines more skillfully than anyone else attempting them at the time. This lovely cartoon was hand animated on rice paper and color tinted by hand on the film by Winsor McCay in 1911, if you can believe that. 1911!
Please be advised that like much of the popular culture of the era, it contains offensive racial depictions. If this sort of thing offends you, you may not want to view it.
Here’s one of the two cartoon adaptations of Milt Gross’ Count Screwloose. It isn’t a very good translation of the feel and charm of the comic strip, but it is fun and very well animated. The loony bin is nowhere to be seen. Why they decided to change Iggy’s name to J.R. the Wonder Dog I have no idea… and they stole his funny hat! You can see the other Count Screwloose cartoon, Wanted: No Master (also from 1939), here.
Note that this cartoon contains offensive racial depictions, and if this sort of thing offends you deeply you may not want to watch it.
My friend Ken Avidor sent me this hilarious Disney transportation vision of the future from the 1958 Disneyland TV Show episode entitled “Magic Highway USA”. It looks like it was animated by Bruce McCall. Somehow they missed the brilliant modern innovations of talking on the phone and watching movies as you drive, which seem like such obvious good ideas!
Here is an utterly bizarre short by the largely forgotten animator and actor Charley Bowers. You have to skip over the excessively obnoxious first 40 seconds to get to the film. The fantastic animation isn’t until the last half of the film.
Who is Charley Bowers? The inventor of the no-slipping banana skin, unbreakable eggs, and cat-pushing trees! At the end of the 1920s, this unknown genius created and directed a score of cinematic burlesques filled with surrealist imagination, crammed with fantastic sights and animated puppets, among which the most delicious include “Egged On,” “Fatal Footstep” and “Now You Tell One.” His body of work is unique, though the astonishing course his career took has been chronicled by few and left him as one of the more enigmatic figures of American cinema. After a childhood spent with the circus, he became interested in animated drawing, adapting comic strips for the cinema including the “Mutt and Jeff” series created by Bud Fisher. Advances in animation which developed during this period explain the astonishing illusions which emerged in these comedic shorts. In the 1930s he directed “It#s a Bird,” his first sound film. Bowers returned to animation for advertising films, in particular the first short film by Joseph Losey, the oil-commissioned “Pete Roleum and His Cousins,” while also continuing his puppet films. He died in 1946, completely forgotten. To this day, 11 of the 20 short comedies are still considered lost. At the end of the 1960s, vault discoveries provided more of his story and three of the exhumed films were shown in 1976 at the Annecy Animated Film Festival, where they were met with enthusiasm. After 1992, worldwide research retrieved surviving prints of the missing films with requests to the world#s notable cinema collectors, who allowed access to their original elements. For the first time this extraordinary collection assembles the complete films of Charley Bowers which survive today, magnificently restored from the original elements with the collaboration of ten cinema societies.
Another Fleischer cartoon utilizing the rotograph. They use it very well here, having the mundane “real world” scenes take place in 2d, and the 3d scenes in Dreamland. The content seems atypical for a Fleischer cartoon… a sweet & cute little story, entirely free of violence and mayhem. Adult anxieties are present as usual for Fleischer cartoons, though… in this case an apparently single mother trying to support children in total poverty (from 1936, the depths of the Great Depression).
Here’s a fun Fleischer Studios cartoon that makes great use of the Max Fleischer invention, the Rotograph… it is an early example of the technique, as the cartoon is from 1935 and the patent wasn’t filed until 1936. The Rotograph was a technique of building a miniature set on a turntable that could be rotated while shooting cels in front of it to make it appear that the 2d drawings were in a 3d space.
