Animation on Turner Classic Movies

Robert Osborne (left) with John Canemaker

Steve Stanchfield

Tom Stathes

On Monday, October 6, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time, TCM will be running three specials featuring animation historians John Canemaker, Steve Stanchfield and Tom Stathes.  Canemaker will be talking about Winsor McCay, Stanchfield will be talking about the Van Beuren studio and Stathes will be talking about the Bray studio.  All three programs focus on animation done in New York and contain many examples.

This is the 100th anniversary of McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur as well as the 100th anniversary of the start of the Bray studio.

You can read about the Van Beuren cartoons that will be screened here and read about the Bray cartoons here.

If you have any interest in animation history or just want to see cartoons that you've never seen before, I highly recommend these programs.  Each of these people is an expert in the field.  John Canemaker is an Oscar-winning animator and author of many animation related books.  His most recent are The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheiss & the Secrets of Walt Disney's Movie Magic and Magic, Color, Flair: The World of Mary Blair.  Steve Stanchfield is the proprietor of Thunderbean Animation, a production company that also produces restored DVDs and Blu-rays of classic animation.  Tom Stathes runs film screenings in the New York area.

Later the same night, TCM will screen Lotte Reineger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Max and Dave Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels, Akira Daikubara's Magic Boy, and Chuck Jones' The Phantom Tollbooth.  That's ten solid hours of animation.

Anniversaries

For a short month, February has a lot of anniversaries, and this February marks several milestones.

February 8 was the 100th anniversary of the release of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur.  First performed in vaudeville by McCay, it was not the first animated film by McCay or others, but it was arguably the most influential of the silent era, as it inspired many other cartoonists of the time to try their hands at animation.
February 2 was the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's debut on film in Making a Living.

That was followed on February 7 by the release of Kid Auto Races at Venice, the first film where he wore the costume of his tramp character.

February 1 was the 120th birthday of director John Ford and February 6 was the 20th anniversary of Jack Kirby's death.  Both of these men continue to occupy my thoughts and their work continues to occupy my attention.

The Flying House: Resurrection or Ruination?

Independent animator Bill Plympton is using Kickstarter to raise money to "resurrect" Winsor McCay's 1921 short The Flying House. Plympton is digitally cleaning the film, colorizing it, replacing word balloons with audio dialogue and adding music and sound effects.

I am torn about this. On the one hand, the film is in the public domain. I personally think that copyright has become way too restrictive and that the public domain is a good thing for society at large, allowing past work to be re-issued and to inspire new work. What Plympton is attempting here is fully within the law and an example of how the public domain can feed contemporary creation.

On the other hand, the historian in me believes that the past has value and to remake the past is to distort it. I was always against colorization when it was applied to black and white films. I also believe that there is great value in attempting to understand the past by immersing yourself in it. The world was a different place socially, culturally and technologically, and understanding how the world has changed can only be accomplished by understanding how the past was different from the present.

I don't think I'd have a problem if Plympton decided to remake the film. Leaving the original alone and offering a new interpretation of a past work is something people have been doing throughout recorded history. Restoration has always been focused on returning a work to its original state. This is a posthumous collaboration. Because film is mechanically reproduced, the original is untouched, but is this something like changing the background behind Mona Lisa or revising Duchamp's painting so that it is Nude Ascending a Staircase?

It's not fair of me to judge an unfinished work as it's impossible for me to come to a conclusion, but the project does raise questions.

Animating for the Concert Hall

(The following came to me from Børge Ring.)

At Toonder's Amsterdam Studios during the 70s, we made an animated film for the famous British rock band that called themselves Pink Floyd. We delivered the film in a silent version, and the Floyds ran it on the concert stage. Hidden behind the film screen, where they too could see the film, the Floyds performed the whole soundtrack in a live performance.

The film was written and designed by a well known London artist named Allan Aldridge. At that time Winsor McCay, the founding father of American animation, had not yet been rediscovered, excavated and repositioned on his rightful throne. McCay was practically unknown outside a small circle of comic page archeologists.

Allan Aldridge knew about McCay .He dug up one of Winsor's virtuoso newspaper comics of yore. Winsor's story (about a small boy) was named Little Nemo in Slumberland. Allan redrew it in his own drawing style and added ideas of his own, so as to bring the story on film length. Little Nemo dreams that his bed has long, long legs and gallops with him through Manhattan in the night.

Pink Floyd liked the story. Their backer sent it to us to be animated and everybody loved the finished film.

Some of you might call this artistic theft. But the majority of the highest regarded live action films - produced during Hollywood's golden years - were "based on" somebody's theatre play or novel or were a remake of an older successful film.

The name of Winsor McCay was not mentioned on the titles of the Floyd cartoon.

Their backer considered Little Nemo in Slumberland to be a grave find in the public domain.

To the lovers of rock music, Winsor's name was as familiar as Sutton Ho.

Winsor McCay's Influence

Click this link for a slideshow by Joshua Glenn tracing the visual influence Winsor McCay had on various movies.

McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

This July will see the publication of Ulrich Merkl's collection of all of Winsor McCay's comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. While the strip is not as well known as Little Nemo in Slumberland, it contains some of McCay's most interesting work. Nemo deals in spectacle from a child's point of view, and while Rarebit has no shortage of surprising visuals, it focuses more on adult hopes and fears. You can find details about the book, including sample pages, here.