More on The Reluctant Dragon

This film doesn't get the attention it deserves. It was released between Fantasia and Dumbo, though it resembles Dumbo more in its unpretentiousness. The animators were at the top of their game during this period and this film contains some beautiful comedic acting.

Before getting to that, though, I want to mention some interesting layout. Paul Teolis wrote me about Zach Schwartz teaching the dragon's introductory sequence at Sheridan and talking about how free the layout artists were with changing geography as needed. If you look at scene 20, you can see that the mound that the boy is sitting on is near a rock formation that forms a shower. Yet when the dragon dances past the boy in scene 43, that rock formation has vanished! In fact, once the dragon leaves the shower, the backgrounds are some of the sparest you'll find in a Disney feature.

Director Ham Luske definitely cast the animators by character here. In sequence 12.2, Woolie Reitherman does all of the dragon scenes and in sequence 12.4, the dragon is entirely by Ward Kimball. We usually associate Kimball with broad, comic animation, but the truth is that Reitherman's work here is far broader. Reitherman gets the honor of introducing the dragon and absolutely nails the character's personality. We thoroughly know this dragon by the time Reitherman gets done with him.

Reitherman had sort of a split personality as an animator. On the one hand, he was known for realistic, powerful action while doing characters like Monstro in Pinocchio and the dinosaurs in the "Rite of Spring" segment of Fantasia. On the other hand, he often animated Goofy, such as Goofy attempting to surf in Hawaiian Holiday. This dragon is much closer to Goofy than the Fantasia dinosaurs.

By contrast, Kimball's dragon is much more subtle. It's true that the dragon stays seated in one spot for the whole sequence and the dragon's nonchalance has to contrast with the boy's panic, but it's interesting that somebody chose to put Kimball on this sequence. His animation works fine, but his opportunites are fairly limited.

Paul Murry does a few scenes of the boy. I know that Murry has many fans of his comic book work. For years, he did the Mickey serials at the back of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. Here's an example from issue 185 from 1956.
I have to admit that I'm not a fan of Murry's comic book work. It always seemed lumpy and ungainly to me. He handles the animation of the boy well, but seems to have trouble with the boy's hair. It's not a great hair design, but in Murry's scenes it sometimes looks a little like a loose wig. I do have to say, though, that the boy turning around in scene 25 is a lovely piece of animation.

Walt Kelly's scenes of the boy provide him with better acting opportunities than the Mickey shorts I covered in earlier entries. Kelly seems to have some trouble with the boy's hair as well, but he does keep it rooted. Scene 23 is an original solution to the motion of sitting down. The acting in scenes 35, 41 and 42.1 is very nice. Kelly had a real talent for posing in the Pogo comic strip and it appears that it was developed while he was at Disney.

One interesting thing is that Kelly's runs and walks are lacking. The run in scene 15.1 is weightless and the walk in scene 26 puts more effort into slamming the lead foot onto the ground than in pushing off with the rear foot.

Kelly definitely showed promise as an animator, but the strike cut his career short and he went into comics for the balance of his life. He did try his hand animating one more time late in life when he and Selby created the Pogo animated short We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us around 1970. By that time, Kelly's timing was rusty and some of the animation could have used more inbetweens, but Kelly's animation skills hadn't deserted him.

Last, and never least, is Fred Moore. Moore does the excellent work you'd expect from him on the boy (though even Moore seems to struggle with the hair), but the revelation here is Moore's Sir Giles. We associate Moore with round, soft shapes, whether mice, pigs or girls. Giles is thin and angular. As a design, he doesn't play to Moore's strengths, yet Moore clearly has fun with Giles lanky form. In scene 21, he gets some great poses out of Giles bathing in the tiny bucket. In scene 27, when Giles says "Preposterous!" Moore really pushes the facial expressions for comic effect.

Moore nails Sir Giles and the boy the way Reitherman nailed the dragon. And in this sequence between the two of them, Moore plays them off each other beautifully. Ham Luske knew what he was doing when he assigned these two animators to the three star characters' entrances. By the time this sequence is finished, we know there's a confrontation coming and we can't wait to see how it plays out.

Excerpts from The Reluctant Dragon

Courtesy of Hans Perk, here are animator identifications for sections of The Reluctant Dragon. The film is available on the DVD Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studio, an essential item for anybody interested in Disney history and technique.

I'll have more to say about this in a future entry.

YouTube is the new Vaudeville

Once upon a time, before the internet, before cable, before TV, before radio and even before movies, there was Vaudeville. There were theaters in every city and town in North America and entertainers who spent their whole lives on the road, facing audiences as many as five times a day in the less prestigious venues.

It was the greatest school for entertainment ever invented. Why? Because entertainers got feedback directly from audiences and had the opportunity to hone their material and styles taking audience reaction into account. If you were good, you kept going; if you weren't, you were cancelled. It was a brutal school, but those who succeeded gained knowledge that kept them on top for the rest of their lives and through several media revolutions.

The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Will Rogers, Red Skelton, The Three Stooges, and Mae West were just some of the entertainers who honed their craft in vaudeville and then were able to move into movies, radio and television. They knew what audiences wanted and were able to deliver it.

The best thing about Vaudeville was the ease of entry. It wasn't hard to get a chance to perform. The only person you had to convince was the theater manager, and if you couldn't convince one, there were hundreds of others to call on.

As modern media developed, there were fewer venues and production became more expensive. With only three networks for radio and TV and less than a dozen movie studios, time in front of an audience became precious. The media were not about to take a chance on untried talent or ideas. There was too much money at stake. In order to reduce risk, the media created gatekeepers who only accepted what they thought the audience wanted to see. Those gatekeepers naturally wanted to keep their jobs, so they stuck to the tried and true.

Now things are changing. Anyone can put something on YouTube.com. Scott Kirsner reports that YouTube is developing an advertising scheme that will split revenue with the creator of a clip. Through advertising, you now have the opportunity to sell your work directly to the public without having to go through a gatekeeper.

We're back to Vaudeville's ease of entry. And because anybody can easily see how many times a clip has been viewed, creators (and advertisers) can now gauge audience response directly. We've got the same opportunity to learn from the audience that Jack Benny had.

Somebody is going to create a cartoon character and feature it in a series of shorts on YouTube. If the shorts are good, the audience will build and the advertising revenue will increase. Eventually the revenue will allow the creator to focus exclusively on the character, and more revenue will come from making new shorts and selling merchandise. Film or TV companies will come sniffing around because they're interested in anybody who can attract an audience. They'll offer the creator a feature or TV series starring the character.

Somebody in animation is going to become the next Chaplin or Astaire. It's just a matter of time.

Animators and Acting Part 3

(For those interested, here are part 1 and part 2.)

The speed at which animators work (or rather the lack of it) is responsible for many aspects of animation production. It’s also something that separates what animators do from what live actors do.

One thing that live actors do is rehearse. They do this in order to help learn their lines, but an equally important part of rehearsal is to work out staging. What kind of relationship should characters have with each other in a scene and how should it be expressed? When should an actor sit down or stand up? When should an actor pause and look at the floor? These are the kinds of behavioral details that actors work on in rehearsal.

In the case of a play, rehearsal may last for weeks. Film directors hope to get a week or two for rehearsal before shooting starts, but even if there’s no time, there’s always the possibility of multiple takes. Actors may need half a dozen takes to really nail a shot, but that’s an accepted part of the process.

If every animator did every scene six times, no film would ever get finished. Animators are too slow to allow them to rehearse, so the rehearsal function has migrated upstream to the story department.

In features, story artists are part directors, part writers, part layout artists, part actors and part editors. I’m concerned here with where they overlap with the function of acting. Story artists have to understand the emotional beats in a sequence and their job is to make sure that the staging, character business and poses all work towards communicating those emotions. Because story artists are using fewer drawings than animators (and often drawing more loosely) they are the ones with the opportunity to try a sequence in different ways until they find the approach that works best.

Even in TV animation, where the story artist is expected to stick to the script and has no time to try variations, the story artist still works to make the characters’ physical business and emotions clear. In cases where animation is being sent to a subcontractor, there may also be a character layout stage refining and adding poses before the animator gets the shot.

By the time an animator gets started, the emotional arc and the physical business have been determined by the voice track, the story sketches and possibly the character layouts. The animator is free to do thumbnails to refine what he or she has been given, but the animator has much less room for interpreting the script than a live actor would.

The animator may have a better idea, in which case the voice track and story sketches may be reworked, but the realities of budgets and schedules mean that there are limitations as to how often this can be done. In TV, it’s almost never done, as the schedules are so tight that producers are uninterested in anything that will slow down production.

Though it varies from project to project, animators are not so much actors as refiners, taking what they’re given and polishing it as best they can. There are more ways this is true than I’m detailing here and future entries will explore other limitations that are placed on animators.

Scott McCloud

I hope that everybody is familiar with Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics. There's a lot about design and visual storytelling in the book that applies to animation. McCloud has a new book coming out in September called Making Comics, and he's doing a lot of interviews to promote it.

This one talks a lot about webcomics and distribution. There's no question that it takes less time and effort to create a comic than an animated film. However, because comics are taking advantage of the web, creators are reaching an audience and the field as a whole is being enriched by new voices. Here are a few quotes from McCloud about the advantages of the web.

That's the big difference with digital distribution and webcomics -- there's no penalty to having a small readership. If you have a small readership, you have a small readership. But you get to keep it, because your work is always available. If you go into an average comics shop -- or even a Borders or Barnes and Noble, for all their tremendous variety and selection compared to previous eras -- it's a different situation. A comic which isn't expected to sell at least a few thousand right out of the gate will not be seen at all. It will never appear.

It's the principle that any given square inch of shelf space needs to generate a certain amount of revenue for a shop to survive. And so the people who buy the material for that shelf quite reasonably try to skew their ordering toward those products that are going to sell to the highest number. And if you have five genres, and one sells to 40 percent of the fans, one to 30 percent, and one to 10 and one to five, etcetera, the one that sells to the 40 percent is going to take up 80 percent of those slots.

I just boil it down to: There's no shelf space in cyberspace.

There's limited "shelf space" in movie theaters and on TV and that's why there are gatekeepers to filter out what they think won't sell sufficiently well to make them a profit. The person or company who figures out how to make a profit from animation on the web is going to revolutionize the business and open it up for new creators.

Wacky Bye Baby

I've got the studio documentation for this cartoon, but for some reason, it doesn't include animator credits after scene 24. Clearly a studio oversight.

Thad K. and I have put our heads together to figure out the rest of the scenes. There are scenes where we are in strong agreement (30 through the end), but scenes 25 to 29 are a bit iffy, which is why I listed more than one animator as a possibility. If this whole sequence is Moore, it is not Moore at the top of his game. There are poses and bits of timing that suggest Moore, but they are not strong enough to negate the possibility of Thad's suggestions of Les Kline, Laverne Harding or even Ken O'Brien.

I see some Moore-ish poses even in scenes that the document identifies as Les Kline, so perhaps Lundy had Moore do character layouts for other animators, which would explain some of the confusion if it was the case.

If anybody would like to offer an opinion, please comment.

Lundy is casting strongly by sequence here. Ed Love gets the entire opening. Les Kline gets the start of the ball sequence, which is finished up by Moore and/or Harding. Pat Matthews gets the wild action for the climax, with Moore finishing up with the end gag.

I had the pleasure of getting together with Bob Jaques a few weeks ago and he was laughing at the story for this cartoon. How absurd is it that Wally wants to adopt a baby and then decides to blow up his child with dynamite?

I often wonder how interested Lundy was in stories at all. His Lantz cartoons give me the impression that he'd take any story he was handed and then spend his efforts to make it as attractive as possible. I don't get the sense that he was able to punch up a weak story or pull it into shape. Besides that, he was more partial to fall guy characters than he was to hecklers. Lundy's Donald Duck and Barney Bear cartoons confirm this. In this cartoon, he seems more interested in Wally Walrus than he is in Woody.

After initially fooling Wally into thinking that he's a baby, Woody really only does one thing to go after Wally, and that's throw the metal ball from the andiron at him. Wally is the one who provokes it with the trick ball and Wally is the one who puts dynamite into the trick ball he knows will always come back. All Woody has to do is watch Wally destroy himself.

If the pleasure of watching a heckling character is vicariously getting our aggressions out, this cartoon isn't very satisfying.

Digital Distribution

I want to point you to this blog entry about digital distribution. Continue reading to the bottom of the entry, as it comes back to distribution at the end. Scott Kirsner's blog Cinematech covers all sorts of issues, but he keeps a close eye on the way the economic and distribution models are changing. Peter Broderick is quoted as saying, "The old rules don't apply anymore but the old rulers don't realize it yet."

I'm convinced that the future of animation doesn't lie with large studios or broadcast networks. Their overheads are so high and their investors are so hungry for profits that they've got to keep aiming at the largest possible audience. As a result, they're the ones least likely to try new things.

You don't need to create the #1 film or the TV series that everybody's talking about. You only need to create something that makes enough money to pay your bills and allows you to keep creating. That applies to both individuals and small companies. With the increasing opportunities to reach an audience, I hope that more people in animation explore these possibilities.

Fred Moore's Woody Woodpecker

Fred Moore's late 1940's version of Woody, taken from The Walter Lantz Story by Joe Adamson. You can see Moore's work on Andy Panda here and here, courtesy of Thad K. And of course, for a large sampling of Moore's drawings, check out Jenny Lerew's Blackwing Diaries.

Hogan's Alley

Issue 14 of Hogan's Alley is now out. The magazine specializes in articles on comics and animation. The new issue contains Jim Korkis's interview with Bob Clampett, concentrating on the Beany and Cecil years. It also includes Mark Arnold's interview with animation voice artist Thurl Ravenscroft and Arnold's article on The ABC of Hand Tools, a cartoon Disney made for General Motors in the 1940's.

It doesn't look like Hogan's Alley has updated their website yet, so check your local comics shop. I'm sure that Bud Plant will eventually carry this issue. You may be interested in interviews with Disney story man Bill Peet and animator Marc Davis posted on the Hogan's Alley website.

More on The Little Whirlwind

The more I examine the animator drafts that are coming to light (and I'm grateful for each and every one of them), the more I realize that our understanding of Disney animation is terribly incomplete. There are animators like Les Clark, whose work in the features isn't all that celebrated, yet here he is doing excellent work that deserves to be talked about. That goes for his scenes in Mr. Duck Steps Out, too.

And it seems that each draft reveals a hidden treasure: Paul Allen in Mr. Duck, Cliff Nordberg in All The Cats Join In and in this cartoon, John Elliotte. He was credited on features throughout the 1940's, but I've never read anything about him and am not aware of any of his feature scenes being identified.

While we know about effects animators like Josh Meador, Ugo D'Orsi or Cy Young, this cartoon has a crew of mostly anonymous effects people who do excellent work.

I can only hope that more of these drafts will come to light, especially for the features. I think that there are surprises awaiting us and many unsung animators whose work deserves recognition. The Nine Old Men are not the only Disney animators worthy of attention and some of them, like Les Clark, haven't gotten the attention they deserve.

This cartoon is a case of many hands all working at a high level. You've got typically great animation by Les Clark, Ward Kimball and Fred Moore, but they don't dominate this cartoon's footage the way they do The Nifty Nineties. Instead, animators like Duncan, Jones, Muse, Woodward and Elliotte manage to do personality-oriented action that maintains the standard, followed by straight action done by James Armstrong and Walt Kelly that makes for an exciting climax. Kimball and Moore return to wrap things up.

Just about every animator here has a highlight scene. Les Clark's entrance for Mickey is a walk that verges on dance. It overflows with personality. Clark also did Donald's first scenes in Mr. Duck, so it appears that he was counted on to set the tone for a character. Ward Kimball's best scene is number 13, where Mickey rakes leaves to the music. Moore follows Kimball in this section and you can see his poses in the model sheets I posted yesterday. Two of Moore's shots run 24 seconds or more (16 and 18), yet they never flag. There's not much in the way of gags in Kimball's and Moore's scenes in this section; the appeal comes strictly from how Mickey moves. That's a testimony to their ability to come up with poses and timing that satisfy your eye.

Ken Muse doesn't have much work in this cartoon, but scenes 25 and 26 are a well done comic struggle with the basket.

This is followed by John Elliotte's work. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was Fred Moore's. He seems to have caught Moore's Mickey proportions well and while his posing isn't quite up to Moore's standard, it's pretty darn close. He draws flexible shapes and has strong contrast in his timing. He has a talent for comic action that keeps Mickey's personality front and center. Mickey sneaking around the building includes some funny foot animation and a good take. The battle with the whirlwind in the bag is some of the best material in the film.

I wish I knew more feature scenes that Walt Kelly animated, because it appears from the shorts that he was considered an action animator. Mickey's run away from the tornado is well done and Kelly does some nice perspective animation of Mickey in the bucket. James Armstrong gets a lot of extreme long shots, but the few places where Mickey is a decent size (scenes 34 and 54) he handles Mickey well.

The whirlwind and its larger version are beautifully animated. Both have personality in addition to good rendering treatments. I don't know who did the marching leaves (either Woodward or Harbough), but they always make me laugh.

There are 27 animators on this cartoon! Contrast that to the half dozen or fewer who would animate on a typical Warner Bros. cartoon. Only the Disney studio had a staff so large that it could throw so many people at a short. And maybe Disney was the only studio where the staff was skilled enough to make a cartoon look consistent when drawn by so many hands.

Fred Moore Drawings from The Little Whirlwind

I suspect that many of you have copies of these model sheets (possibly better copies than those above). But if you are unfamiliar with these, they're drawings by Moore from scenes 16 and 18 of The Little Whirlwind.

They're not in the order that they appear in the cartoon. And it's interesting to see how loosely Moore treats the pile of leaves in the upper left corner of the second sheet. Whoever his assistant was on this film, he had to meticulously draw the individual leaves. While that doesn't sound like fun, I'll bet there were assistants who would have gladly done it for the opportunity to work on Moore's drawings.

Barbarians at the Gate

It's official. The bottom feeders have arrived. American Greetings and DIC have announced a cgi Strawberry Shortcake feature, due in theaters in October 2006. Details here.

The Little Whirlwind

My thanks to Hans Perk for publishing the animator draft for this cartoon. Alberto Becattini's website was a huge help figuring out who some of these artists were. I'll talk about this cartoon, available on the DVD Mickey Mouse in Living Color Volume Two, in a later entry.

Still Swallowing Our Tails

Thanks to Paul Teolis, I want to point out this article, entitled "Computer-made cartoons might be nearing a creative crash." I think that a lot of the article is wrong-headed, and as somebody who spent 20 years working in computer animation, I think singling out the medium is as wrong as singling out drawn animation was a few years ago.

But the importance of this article is twofold. First, the critics are beginning to see the sameness of the films. Second, journalists are famous for reading other journalists and parrotting their ideas. When the public reads the same message about animation in every article they see, that's how conventional wisdom gets born.

And while I don't want to review either Over the Hedge or Cars, I want to point out the similarities in their stories. A character with a selfish goal meets other characters who are more community oriented. When the character has the opportunity to realize his goal, he abandons it because he's adopted the values of his new-found friends. The two films are different in that R.J. in Over the Hedge attempts to exploit the other characters where Lightning McQueen in Cars wants to escape them, but the films start and end in the same place. They're just developed differently in their second acts.

As I said earlier, we've got to enlarge the gene pool or our creative babies will be born with two heads and the public won't want to be seen with them.

Vintage Animated Commercials

Mark Evanier linked to this ad today, mentioning that Paul Frees and June Foray provided voices. He didn't mention that it was produced by Shamus Culhane and the characters were designed by Art Heinemann. I don't know who animated it.

Looking around YouTube.com, I found several other vintage commercials of interest. This one for Alka Seltzer was designed and laid out by William Steig and narrated by Gene Wilder. Michael Sporn published Steig's layouts for the commercial here.

This Black Label ad was clearly split in half by two different animators. Greg Duffell told me that he thinks that the first half is animated by Rod Scribner.

Here's a very early Rice Krispies commercial, interesting for the designs on Snap, Krackle and Pop. Not to mention how changing social mores give this film a suggestiveness it was never supposed to have.

This King Vitamin commercial was most likely produced by Jay Ward.

Here, in case you haven't already seen this, are Fred and Barney shilling for Winston cigarettes.

Preston Blair's Sorcerer's Apprentice

This comes from an issue of Cartoonist PROfiles, though I don't know which one. Space has always been at a premium here, and I've torn articles out of magazines for years in order to keep my files under control. I've been good lately at noting the titles and issue numbers of articles, but I neglected to do it for this piece. If anybody knows the issue number, please comment.

Blair claimed in the accompanying text that this was the first scene animated for The Sorcerer's Apprentice. He also mentions that the assistant for this scene was Ken Muse and that live action of a UCLA athlete was filmed for reference. Blair states that the athlete had long hair and he used it as a guide for the follow through on Mickey's robe.

I wonder if these images are tracings Blair did of his originals, as some of the figures overlap. However they were assembled, they're lovely to look at.

Walt's People Volume 3 now at Amazon

Editor Didier Ghez informs me that Walt's People Volume 3 is now available through Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Xlibris.com, the publisher, would only ship the book via UPS, which charges an obscene amount to ship material outside the U.S.

If you missed earlier information on this series of books, it consists of interviews with people who worked with Walt Disney, ranging from the 1920's until after his death. The interviews include many famous animation figures. You can read my earlier blurb about the series here. I know that at least two more volumes are already in the works.

If you are interested in animation history, live outside the U.S. and haven't ordered this book yet, this is your opportunity.

Swallowing Our Tails

Brad Bird says that animation is a medium, not a genre. He's right in principle, but the animated family film is most definitely a genre the same way that teen comedies and thrillers are. Here's just a few elements that are common to just about every animated feature released in North America:

1. Fantasy elements.
2. Children as prominent characters.
3. Songs (either sung by characters or on the soundtrack).
4. Celebrity voices.
5. Villains or their sidekicks played for comedy.
6. Burp and/or fart gags.
7. Feel-good themes.
8. Happy endings.

Feel free to add to the list.

There's a new trailer for The Ant Bully online. I'm not going to comment on the trailer one way or the other, but I am going to point out the presence of an exterminator as a villain. I just saw an exterminator as a villain in Over the Hedge.

The films are starting to blend together. Two recent features both used the hoary old gag of a character being mistaken for a god. Was it The Wild and Ice Age 2? I swear I can't remember.

We had A Bug's Life and Antz and now The Ant Bully. We had Finding Nemo and Shark Tale. We had Madagascar and The Wild. And we're due for a plague of rats. There's Ratatouille, Flushed Away, Rats Amore and One Rat Short.

When you take the genre conventions and add settings or subject matter that have already been done, you're in danger of boring the audience.

Something very interesting happened in the comics field that may relate to what's going on in animation. From the 1960's onwards, comics fans argued for longer, more serious works. While Marvel and DC, the two main companies, did adapt to a degree, they stuck with superheroes and continued to market to their established fan base.

Cartoonists finally took matters into their own hands and started doing personal work that broke out of genre conventions. Between the importation of Manga and mainstream publisher interest in the graphic novel, Marvel and DC have been reduced to minor players in terms of sales and artistic importance.

There are big economic differences between the comics and animation fields, but with the increase in distribution outlets available, there's a chance that the studios producing animated features might find themselves in the same situation as Marvel and DC. They'll continue to be profitable, but the real action will be elsewhere. If the animation industry continues to make cookie cutter movies, they're just inviting it to happen.

Revolving Voices and Changing Heights

Dumbo was a relatively low budget production at Disney and there are some rough edges in it. Some of the strangest things, though, are in the song, "When I See an Elephant Fly."

And they tell me that a man made a vegetable truck.
I didn't see that. I only heard.
Just to be sociable, I'll take your word.
I heard a fireside chat.
I saw a baseball bat.
And I just laughed till I thought I'd die.

For this section of the song, there are 5 or 6 voices on the soundtrack that the characters lip synch to, but there are only 3 crows on the screen! The crow with the striped shirt synchs to 2 or 3 voices, the deacon-ish crow synchs to 2 and the tubby crow synchs to one, but it's not the voice that he speaks with earlier in the film. Furthermore, when the film cuts from a long shot of the two crows to a close-up (see the top two images), the crows have reversed positions!

It's hard to know what they were thinking when they did this. Did they just assume that the audience wouldn't notice? Was there a mistake identifying the voices on the sheets? Did they decide to restage this after the track was recorded?

Dumbo wasn't the only time that the studio did odd things. Take a close look at the Mushroom Dance in Fantasia. Start watching any one mushroom (except for the baby) and follow it through the whole sequence. The mushrooms morph from tall to short and vice versa. This was consciously done by animator Art Babbitt, but why? It's not instantly obvious to the audience. Did Babbitt ever go on record explaining his thinking on this?

Theatrical Cartoons of the 1960's

Greenbriar Picture Shows has an entry about theatrical cartoons of the 1960's, including budget and income figures. If you don't understand why short cartoons disappeared from theaters, this will explain it.