Is That You, Popeye?

The above was created by artist Lee Romao.  You can buy a 7 by 10 inch print of this for $15, as well as well as getting the image on canvas, stationary, or iPhone or iPad skins.  Aren't you glad that Genndy Tartakovsky is making the next Popeye feature and not Spielberg or Zemeckis?

(link via Boing Boing)

Bob Jaques

In this 1982 photo, that's Bob Jaques in the center. Behind him on the left is Dan Haskett and to the right is Chris Armstrong.

I'm late mentioning this, but I wanted to dig up a visual to go with talking about Bob's new blog. I met Bob at Nelvana in Toronto in 1980 or '81. While I had come from New York and had worked in the New York animation industry, I was far more enamored of animation that had been made in L.A. To be honest, I looked down my nose at a lot of the people working in N.Y. animation.

My only excuse is that I was young and stupid. I came to realize that the difference between N.Y. and L.A. had more to do with opportunity than with talent. One of the people who wised me up was Bob.

Bob had stared at the Fleischer and Famous cartoons long and hard. Comparing what he saw on the screen with the sparse animator credits on those cartoons, he had methodically figured out how to recognize the styles of just about every animator. Bob was the one who opened my eyes to the brilliance of John Gentilella, an animator whose work was as good as anybody in California and done under much less friendly conditions.

Bob now has a blog dedicated to identifying the animators on the Popeye cartoons. As these cartoons are finally becoming available on DVD, his timing couldn't be better. (Bob has also done some audio commentaries for future Popeye DVD releases). New York animators never received the attention of their L.A. counterparts and were rarely interviewed. It's great that Bob is sharing his knowledge, filling in gaps in our understanding of the Fleischer/Famous animators.

Lantz and Fleischer DVDs

Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew has announced a collection of Walter Lantz cartoons that will appear on DVD this July. I'm assuming that readers of this blog are already aware of this, but they may not realize the importance of the cartoons on this set as the Lantz studio has been very poorly represented on video and DVD.

This set contains cartoons directed by Shamus Culhane, a very underrated director who never got the opportunities he deserved. In the '30's, Culhane worked just about everywhere, including a stint at Disney where he was something of a Pluto specialist. He worked on Snow White, Pinocchio (though there's confusion as to how much of his work is in the finished film), Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town.

At Lantz, Culhane took a studio that was turning out weak cartoons and jump started them with his interest in experimenting and his aggressive sense of timing. Culhane's best work at the studio was possibly the Swing Symphonies. While he admitted to having no feeling for jazz, he worked well with it and his musical cartoons are really vigorous. Abou Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam are excellent cartoons and worth seeing.

The set will also contain cartoons by Dick Lundy and Tex Avery. I admire Lundy's craftsmanship but not his directorial personality. He was a good animator and his cartoons are always slick, but I find his point of view to be pretty pedestrian. However, his cartoons contain the some of the best animation in the history of the Lantz studio and are worth watching for the animation alone.

Tex Avery's affect on the Lantz studio was much the same as Culhane. At the time Avery rejoined the Lantz studio, it was out of creative energy. Avery was able to bootstrap the studio with his posing, gags and timing. His four cartoons are a textbook case of how much impact one person can have on the output of a studio.

The animators who worked on these cartoons include Fred Moore, Ed Love, Emery Hawkins, Pat Matthews, Grim Natwick, Dick Lundy and LaVerne Harding. If you are interested in this style of character animation, this set is a bonanza of material.

There are other studios whose cartoons are not available on DVD, such as Famous Studios and Terrytoons, but the Lantz cartoons are probably the most interesting of this bunch and this release is long overdue. If you have any interest in 1940's style animation, I guarantee you that there will be cartoons and moments in this set that will entertain you and show you the high standards that were once commonplace in animation.

If it wasn't for the release of the Popeye cartoons, also in July, I'd say that the Lantz DVD was the animation history release of the year. The Popeye cartoons have had even less presence in home video than the Lantz cartoons, due to some rights issues that have finally been settled.

The Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s are worth watching for different reasons than the Lantz cartoons. The animation is not as slick, but the stories, characterizations and layouts are all of a high standard. In the 1930s, there were many different streams of animation all running in parallel. The Fleischer cartoons were urban, gritty, and focused on adult concerns like sexual competition. In the early '30s Fleischer cartoons, the world is a surreal place where anything could be alive and nothing could be taken for granted.

There's no question that Popeye, especially when voiced by Jack Mercer, was the most complex animated personality of the 1930's, far more complex than anything Disney, MGM or Warner Bros. offered up in short cartoons. It's only when Disney expanded to features that he began to approach the level of character depth that Popeye routinely displayed. Ironically, it's when the Fleischers expanded to features that Popeye began his decline, but that's not until volume 2 of the Popeye set.

At any given moment, there are dominant styles in animation. Right now, we've got the Pixar style, the Cartoon Network/Nickelodeon style and the anime style. While we're immersed in a style, we take it for granted as the way things have to be, but the thing about styles is that they eventually change. The best thing about these historical DVD collections is that they show approaches to animation that we don't take for granted. It's stimulating to see films from different places and different times and I hope that the release of these DVDs will shake things up a little and get people thinking in new (or old) directions.