In early 1975, Film Comment magazine devoted an entire, oversize issue to Hollywood cartoons. It's well worth finding in a library or through an online service, as it contains a comprehensive interview with Chuck Jones as well as an interview with Grim Natwick and articles by Greg Ford and Mark Langer.
One piece was an essay on Walt Disney by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum has now posted the first part of that essay on his website with the second part to follow shortly. As Thad has pointed out in the comments, part 2 is now up.
And here is Rosenbaum on Tex Avery.
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13 comments:
Mark -
Sorry for the off-topic comment , but are you ever going to repost your Al Eugster tribute site ?
Rosenbaum is one of my favorite critics, and I had been wanting to read this piece for a long time, but in spite of him having some apt observations (particularly on how Walt Disney is ingrained into the American subconscious), this first half has greatly disappointed me. I can't get into a full analysis of why though, because perhaps the second half will change my mind.
One note: Rosenbaum seems unaware that Joel Chandler Harris's stories were published after the Civil War, so his "irate" reader was right in stating Song of the South, for all intents and purposes, has a set timeframe. The movie is still a mess, regardless, and also quite bad, though Rosenbaum seems unwilling to say that any Disney film is poor here.
I have no clue who Rosenbaum is and, after reading this article, I have no desire to pursue his writings further. Somehow I got through it all, although my eyes glazed over a number of times at the inanity of his analyses. Thad points out his error on "Song of the South" - add to that his mistaking The White Rabbit's house as belonging to The March Hare, and his believing that Lampwick was speaking cockney English! I'm sorry, but when one is as mixed up with the facts as this joker is, I can't place much stock in his opinions. He comes across as some silly politically correct twit with a huge chip on his shoulder. His comparisons of Disney animation layouts to Nazi propaganda imagery is really stretching things and strikes me as being just plain ridiculous. My two bits...
Hi Dave. I've updated the link to the new location, though it isn't complete. I started it a while ago and then got sidetracked.
Eventually, I'm going to dig out the full size images and re-do the site with a nicer design, but I don't know when.
Also, if you go to http://www.archive.org, you can use the wayback machine to see a cached version of the original site.
Or just go to http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/boulevard/3131/ for a cached version of the original site.
Hey Pete,
I agree that this isn't a great introduction to Rosenbaum, but he's admitted elsewhere that animation isn't his forte and he's never gotten around to fully grasping it and its history (and proves it by saying Bob Clampett did the Foghorn Leghorn series in the same quote).
I recommend the book collecting his essays, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia. I can't think of another writer who could have equally interesting things to say about Touch of Evil, Marilyn Monroe, Billy Wilder's Avanti, Kim Novak, and White Heat in the same tome.
Well, I'll take your word for it, Thad, as there must be better essays than this one. Since having read it fully, I've gone back and skimmed it a bit more but it really seems like he's not saying much of anything here about the films themselves. Instead, it seems like he has an agenda against Walt, using very tenuous speculations to tie him to Leni Riefenstahl's film imagery and, by association, paint him as a fellow Nazi sympathizer. This seems to be hinted at earlier on by his supposed contrasting of Walt Disney with Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", but then why bring that up at all unless actually trying to relate the two? The whole essay stinks, in my opinion - just confused rambling by a guy who I suspect had a vendetta against Walt.
Thanks for posting this article, Mark. Rosenbaum is one of the great critics of a wonderful time in film criticism and theory. He was on a plateau below Sarris and Kael, but brilliant just the same.
Rosenbaum was a regular contributor to Film Comment, thus easily made it into this magnificent issue. It's filled with some of the best animation criticism done up to that time. Langer and Barrier and Canemaker and Adamson and Kausler all in the same issue in 1975. I've read the magazine cover-to-cover at least a dozen times. Everyone SHOULD get their hands on an issue.
You'll remember that Part 2 of the Dream Masters is about Tex Avery.
Pete, I don't think he's got a "chip on his shoulder" at all, as he's frequently named Disney's features as some of his favorite movies (a distinction Casablanca doesn't even get). When comparing the Disney work to things like Triumph of the Will, Rosenbaum seems to have been unable to figure out that both films share an influence, European art in general. Bearing that in mind, the similarities between Riefenstahl and Disney are incidental and unsurprising.
Part 2 is now up.
Having read all of the Disney piece, the second half sort of makes up for the first's weaknesses, ending with the keen observation of Disney understanding children more than any other filmmaker. Few would want to admit it, but he's right on another point too: all of the Disney films are truly episodic.
Even bearing in mind the difficulty of seeing classic animation in the 1970s, the Avery piece is still unremarkable; anyone could have written it, so it's all the more disappointing that Rosenbaum did.
Here's a link for the complete issue, I'll leave it up for a couple of days http://dl.dropbox.com/u/566578/Film_Comment_vol.11_no.1_Jan-Feb_1975.pdf
A small correction to Michael Sporn's comment: I don't have anything in that issue of Film Comment. Greg Ford didn't ask me to contribute.
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