Mother Goose Goes Hollywood Part 3

One of the things that fascinates me about this cartoon is the way it points both forwards and backwards in animation styles. A lot of the Disney cartoons from the 1930's do this. Specifically, I'm fascinated by the differences between Ward Kimball's work and Izzy Klein's.

Kimball, if you haven't guessed, points towards the future. He understands line of action and rhythm in a pose. If you single frame Kimball's work, the poses are very strong silhouettes and the rhythms are pleasing.

By contrast, Klein looks to the past; he started animating at the Hearst studio in the teens and his animation is just fussy. Klein does a pretty good job of capturing the acting style of Oliver Hardy, but his work is less graceful than Hardy himself.

Take a look at these two images. Both are anticipation drawings.

Look at the long, graceful curves in the Kimball drawing. If you look at the left side of the Groucho figure, the curve starts with the hand and travels all the way through the coat tails. If you prefer, you can follow it down the leg to the foot. Those kinds of long curves give the figures a unity and a flow and they're evident in all three characters.
In Klein's drawing, the lines keep getting stopped by changes in direction. They're short and they tend to bump into other lines. The body parts don't feel tied together because the linework doesn't flow between them. A good assistant animator could clean-sheet this drawing, push the pose a bit and use a rhythmic line to improve this significantly.

The same lack of rhythm in Klein's individual drawings is evident in his animation. It's not enough to draw a rhythmic pose, your path of action has to be rhythmic as well. Just as Klein's lines are fighting each other, the movement of his character's parts fight each other too. The fussiness in the animation is because the poses and actions aren't tied together with rhythm.

Fred Moore didn't work on this cartoon, but Kimball's work couldn't exist without Moore's. Moore used rhythm to unify individual drawings and unify the sequence of drawings into a coherent statement. Kimball got it and Klein didn't, which is why people talk about one and not the other.

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood Part 2

Here we have a cartoon where the animators are cast by character. I don't know if this was Wilfred Jackson's standard approach as a director, but he almost never deviates from it here except for Don Patterson's crowd shots and Stokes and Kimball sharing Fats Waller and Stepin Fetchit. Every time Katharine Hepburn is on screen, it's Bob Stokes. Every time Laurel and Hardy are on screen, it's Izzy Klein. Grim Natwick always gets Charles Laughton, W.C. Fields and Charlie McCarthy. Ward Kimball gets the Marx Brothers and and Jackson knows that Kimball is going to give him energetic animation for the climax.

Jackson was a very highly respected director at Disney. He was famous for planning things down to the smallest detail. His filmography includes The Tortoise and the Hare, The Grasshopper and the Ants, The Band Concert, Music Land, The Country Cousin, Woodland Cafe, The Old Mill and during the '50's co-directing Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp. This cartoon is slick as a whistle, with the likenesses of the stars being beautifully maintained and each one given an identifiable piece of business.

1938 was not considered a particularly great year for Hollywood, especially compared to 1939. Had this film been made a year later, I suspect the cast would have been very different. With films like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Stagecoach, we would have seen caricatures of Judy Garland, Vivien Leigh, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and maybe even Andy Devine.

T. Hee's designs are generally great, but there are some weaker ones. I don't think that he captured Eddie Cantor all that well. I also don't think that Hee or anybody else ever really caricatured Fats Waller properly. The stereotypical approach to black characters gets in the way; the lower half of Waller's face was all cheeks, not lips. And Waller's eyes are treated generically, when they were probably his most interesting facial feature.

One of the striking things is how simple the layouts are. The backgrounds are relatively spare and the staging is very straightforward. It's clear that this is an animator's cartoon and the crew really pulled out the stops. More on the animation in a future post.

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood Part 1

It's been a while since I've done one of these. I've just been too busy to put the necessary time in. I've got a bit of breathing room now, but the thesis deadline is out there waiting to get me.

As a lover of films from the 1930's, I'm predisposed to like this cartoon, which contains some great caricatures by T. Hee and animation by heavyweights like Ward Kimball and Grim Natwick.

Thad K. has put up some clips from this cartoon, which is available on the new Walt Disney Treasures set More Silly Symphonies. For me, it's one of the essential DVD releases of 2006. I'll have more to say about this cartoon in future entries.