Unfinished Mouse

Thad has posted about Plight of the Bumblebee, a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the early '50s that was animated, but never finished. Included in Thad's post is the pencil test, something I've never seen before.

Rather than steal Thad's thunder, I'll direct you to his site so that you can watch it.

Complete Gottfredson Mickey To Be Reprinted

The Mickey Mouse daily comic strip, done for 46 years by artist Floyd Gottfredson, will be reprinted in its entirety by Fantagraphics Books starting in May 2011.

Rare Mickey

Last June, I posted about Michael Sragow's biography, Victor Fleming: American Movie Master. One of the films that Fleming directed was Around the World in 80 Minutes (1931), a documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks. The reason for my post was that the film contained original Disney animation of Mickey Mouse. I was not aware of this and a quick scan of the animation history books on my shelf didn't lead to any information.

Over at Didier Ghez's Disney History site, JB Kaufman was able to provide some information, as he had screened the film at the Library of Congress.

I recently learned that the film is now on DVD from Grapevine Video. I purchased a copy, and below you'll see some extremely rare Mickey animation. I have no idea who animated it, though I might guess Dick Lundy. Enjoy.

Another Mickey Mystery

I am reading Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow, and Sragow discusses Around the World in 80 Minutes, a 1931 documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks and directed by Fleming.

What's interesting is that the film apparently contains an original animated segment with Mickey Mouse. There is no mention of this in Disney biographies by Bob Thomas, Neal Gabler or Michael Barrier. There's no mention of it either in Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic or Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons. Here's what Sragow has to say about this film.

While Fairbanks and company visit Siam, they watch a performance of a classical Siamese dance troupe; Fairbanks says that the rhythm beneath the exotic moves and music is the same as the fox-trot, then tries to demonstrate that notion by twirling a Siamese gal around a ballroom. Out of nowhere, he announces, "Now, here's Hollywood's most famous star dancing to Siamese music. C'mon, Mickey!" The film turns into a cartoon and Mickey Mouse prances out from a doorway on the right side of the screen. Against a temple backdrop, the mouse pulls off a mix of traditional Oriental choreography and American folk dancing. His hands try to pull off elegant courtly gestures, but his feet can't help tapping or clogging. He slants his eyes for a second or two, in a mixture of frustration and homage -- no slur intended, all in good fun -- then does a series of keep-on-truckin' clogs that would make R. Crumb proud.

It's a genuine novelty: the rarest Mickey Mouse cartoon. How it ended up in Around the World in Eighty Minutes remains anybody's guess. United Artists (of course) released the movie, and UA had agreed to distribute Disney's cartoons after the animator had fulfilled his still-running contract with Columbia. But no Disney cartoon received an official UA release until the summer of 1932; Around the World opened in December 1931. And Disney kept no record of any contract or correspondence between him and Fairbanks. Disney must have known that Fairbanks and Fleming were big fans of his. By then Doug had told the press that only Mickey Mouse fully exploited the capacity of the sound film: "These cartoons get their tremendous appeal from the perfect rhythm, in comedy tempo. of the little characters and of the accompanying sound. It is not merely synchronization; it is more than that; it is a rhythmic, winging, lilting thing, with what musicians call the proper accent-structure." So Disney might have simply done Doug a favor and cooked up that Mickey cameo for a renowned, vocal supporter.

Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney reports that Disney signed with United Artists in December of 1930, so while Around the World in 80 Minutes predates the start of releasing his cartoons through UA, the deal was already in place at that time. Furthermore, my assumption is that because the animation was included in a feature, it fell outside the shorts distribution contract that Disney had with Columbia, as did the animation in MGM's Hollywood Party, made while Disney was releasing through UA.

The Museum of Modern Art has a print of Around the World in 80 Minutes and there is another copy at the Library of Congress. To the best of my knowledge, the film is not available on VHS or DVD. Has anyone seen this sequence or have more information to add?

UPDATE: You can read more about this clip thanks to Didier Ghez and JB Kaufman.

UPDATE 2: If you want to see the animation from the film, go here.

Thru the Mirror Part 3

Some beautiful animation by Bob Wickersham, showing how entertaining flexible shapes in motion can be. This is the underlying essence of animation and one that is too often ignored in favour of design or dialogue. I defy anyone to look at these drawings without smiling.

I'm going to write more about the animation in this cartoon, but Mickey achieves a kind of perfection in Thru the Mirror in terms of his proportions and his flexibility, especially in the hands of Wickersham and Dick Lundy. While The Band Concert might be a better cartoon, I much prefer how Mickey looks in this one.

Later cartoons with Mickey push his acting farther and are slicker. Maybe they're too slick. This cartoon is balanced between Mickey's primitive design origins and sophisticated motion. As the motion and drawing become more sophisticated in later cartoons, the balance tips and a lot of Mickey's basic visual appeal gets lost.

Thru the Mirror Part 2

While animation fans are still looking at Disney and other cartoons from the 1930's, they're not always aware of how the cartoons were influenced by what else was happening in the movies at the same time. Animators were going to the movies just like everybody else, and when it came time to create cartoons, they often referred back to films that they'd seen. Steamboat Willie is heavily influenced by Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr, both in terms of the setting and also the relationship between Buster/Mickey and the captain of the ship. In Thru the Mirror, the Disney artists were working from the two dominant strains of musicals in the mid-1930's.

After the initial flurry of musicals at the dawn of the talkie era (roughly 1927-1931), musicals fell out of favour. They were revived in two different ways later in the 1930's. At Warner Bros. in 1932, 42nd Street contained musical numbers created by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley wasn't interested in dance so much as he was interested in patterns of motion. He was more interested in moving people, props and the camera around on the screen than he was in presenting fancy footwork. He was also noted for his overhead camera shots. 42nd Street was so successful that Berkeley created the climactic musical numbers for a whole series of Warner musicals as the 1930s progressed.

The other branch of musical was dominated by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers starting in 1934 in Flying Down to Rio. Dance in their films was an expression of romantic feelings between the pair or else was played as a novelty. Astaire often danced without Rogers, instead working with props.

Thru the Mirror blends both branches of 1930's musicals, though it leans more heavily on Astaire than it does on Berkeley. Leonard Sebring's scenes (particularly shots 26 through 28) and Ugo D'Orsi's (shots 39 and 40) present masses of cards in patterns of movement in a Berkeley-like fashion. Shot 28 by Sebring is a typical Berkeley overhead shot.

Footlight Parade (1933)

Thru the Mirror (1936)

In Thru the Mirror, the Astaire influence is heavily felt in Dick Lundy's Mickey scenes. Mickey is surrounded by the accessories of Astaire's costume: the top hat, gloves and cane. Berkeley's dancers might be wearing anything, but Astaire was usually found in formal wear. In particular, there's a very strong influence from the title number in Top Hat (1935) in Mickey's dance animation. Mickey uses a matchstick as a cane in a similar way that Astaire handles his cane, smacking it on the ground for rhythmic effect. Mickey uses it to make the top hat he's dancing on rise and fall. Furthermore, the climax of the "Top Hat" number is Astaire using his cane as a gun, shooting the other dancers. In shot 22, Mickey shoots at the top hat with his cane in a similar way.

Top Hat (1935)

Thru the Mirror

You can see the complete Astaire number from Top Hat here if you're interested.

Thru the Mirror

More on this cartoon to come.

A Mickey Mystery

A fan/historian going under the internet handle The Spectre pointed out that the draft for Mickey's Birthday Party lists the Music Room as responsible for the majority of footage in the two Mickey Mouse dance sequences. Ken Muse is credited with a small amount of footage for the first scene and Riley Thomson a small amount of footage for the second. Footage attributed to the Music Room (which was really the director's room) means that the scene either had no animation or had existing animation lifted from another film.

When I did the mosaic for the film, I definitely didn't look closely enough at the draft and assumed that the credited animators were responsible for the whole thing.

In comments when I printed the mosaic, Galen Fott said that he had a drawing of Mickey that he was told was from Mickey's Surprise Party, which was a commercial that the Disney studio made for Nabisco for use at the 1939 World's Fair. Galen's drawing matches the costuming of Mickey in that cartoon, but there is no dance animation in it. Furthermore, the pose in Galen's drawing matches a frame in Mickey's Birthday Party pretty closely.

At this point, I do believe that the dance animation pre-existed Mickey's Birthday Party, but there are several unanswered questions. Was the animation originally done for Mickey's Surprise Party and cut from the film for some reason? If not, what film was the footage done for? Finally, who animated this great dance? It always looked like Ward Kimball to me before I got a look at the draft. Is it Kimball? Fred Moore? Of course, it's possible that Muse and Thomson animated the scenes for an earlier film and then added some new material to make it fit into the new film.

If there is anybody out there who can shed some light on this mystery, I'd love to hear from you.