Our two biggest references for this podcast series on Fantasia are VERY MUCH WORTH YOUR TIME!

Fantasia Box Set A three disc Fantasia collector’s set, featuring two different audio commentaries, unseen animatic, unused sequences, SO MUCH production art from both Fantasia and Fantasia 2000!

Fantasia by John Culhane The definative book on Fantasia – and available in good second hand condition for a VERY low price!

The Nutcracker Suite is the second section of Fantasia. It has been called by John Canemaker the  most exquisite expression of fantasy that came out of Disney and a special effects tour de force. Let’s find out why it’s so highly spoken of!

MAJOR PLAYERS
Sequence Director: Sam Armstrong (Snow White background artist) He oversaw a team of 53 artists )only 22 recieved credit in the program of the Fantsia performances)
Story Director: Dick Huemer – He was in charge of this entire section – making sure the scenes ran well together, doing daily checkins with everyone under him, as well as Walt.
Continuity Development: Jerry Brewer
Storyboard Artists: Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Bianca Majolie, Ethel Kulsar, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Graham Heid
Character Designer: John Walbridge (concept sketches), Elmer Plummer (the mushrooms in color) and Ethel Kulsar (the thistle dancers), Curt Perkins, Herman Schultheis
Art direction: Robert Cormack, Al Zinnen, Curtiss D. Perkins, Arthur Byram and Bruce Bushman
Background painting: John Hench (later SVP at WED, the company founded to design the Disney parks after working on Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice), Ethel Kulsar and Nino Carbe
Animation: Art Babbitt (and his assistant, Bill Hurtz), Les Clark, Don Lusk, Cy Young, Robert Stokes (responsible for the distinctive skip-stepping of the frost fairies), Ugo Dorsi, Don Lusk, Sandy Strothers, Brad Case, George Rowley (responsible for the falling snow sequence)
Choreography: Jules Engel (head of the graphics and animation department at CalArts until his death in 2003)
Layouts: Bruce Bushman

Earliest known production date: Ballet Des Fleurs – 1935

A note on Sylvia, Bianca and Ethel – they are particularly known for picking flowers in the lots around Disney studios, bringing them back and then painting them until they morphed into the creatures that would populate this section of the movies. As a bit of a girly girl and as an artist, I can’t say that I can think of a much cooler job than this. Huemer recollected their work and sense of fun fondly.

I also want to take a second to point out that women were an essential part of the Disney Studio. A google search will lead you to many examples of rejection letters that Disney Studios sent to women in this era, telling them they could not be accepted into specific departments because they weren’t jobs that women did, so we don’t want to romanticize the facts of the era or the studio, the truth is that Walt Disney employed women in areas that required craftsmanship and artistic abilitiy – and the women he emplyed were very, very good at what they did. Mary Blair is perhapts the most famous of them, but here’s a link to an article published my the Walt Disney Family Museum called “Worth as much as man: Cracking the celluloid ceiling”

THE MUSIC

Is from a ballet called The Nutcracker composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. What you are hearing on Fantasia is the Nutcracker Suite – Suite being a musical terms for shorter movements selected from a larger work to be performed on their own. The Nutcracker ballet tell a very specific story of a young girl from a Dickensian era called Clara, who receives a Nutcracker as a gift for Christmas who comes alive, has a battle with the mice and rats who live in the house, and then takes her on an adventure to the land of candy.

It’s a very specific story – and Disney wasn’t interested in adhereing to it. Tin Soldier piece that would make it into Fantasia 2000 had been in development since the original Fantasia, so it would have been two similar concepts – or maybe Disney just wanted to do his own thing.

Let’s put this in contex of the music history of the time. The Nutcracker was a ballet first, but at the time of Fantasia’s making it was not in production anywhere as a ballet – only as a concert piece. It wouldn’t be revived byt the NYC Ballet as a Christmas piece until 1954 – but it has stayed in production there ever since!

THE GOAL

“This type of cartoon did not rely upon telling a story, but rather it attempted to create an emotional response in the audience by using form and color in motion to interpret fine music.” Disney, The Story of the Animated Drawing Nov 30, 1955.

In many ways, Nutcracker Suite was the punctuation to a decade long artistic endevour by the Disney animation group to explore and vitalize nature int he medium. There had been a Silly Symphonies episode for each season of the year put out from 1929-1930, and an unevolved form of what would eventually be developed into the Nutcracker Suite called Ballet de Fleurs was in preproduction as early as 1935 (technically making it the earliest known production of anything relating to Fantasia, although not the official earliest date of any work done for the movie itself.)

We’ve said that Disney wanted to tell a differnt story than that of the original ballet. The decision was made to cut the first two movements of the Nutcracker Suite (the Overture and the March) and theme the selection around nature almost at the same time, although each decision supports the other one. The concept of ballet never left the project, and throughout this piece plants of all kinds dance – not just actually as in the Russian Dance or the Chinese Dance, but interpretively, as in the Arab Dance, and symbolically, as the leaves blown by wind in the Waltz of the Flowers. You dont have to be an artist (or six years old) to look at flowers and see decorative skirts where the petals are!

THE ANIMATION  

The Nutcracker Suite section of Fantasia is about fifteen minutes long, and it  consists of six of the eight movements of the  Nutcracker Suite section of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, animated around the theme of nature. The Nutcracker (the ballet) is  a modern Christmas favorite, but as it appears in Fantasia, winter only briefly makes an appearance, and religion not at all. The changing seasons of a year are described, starting with plants waking for spring, and ending with ice covering and snow falling. We see a lot of fairies in this section, far predating Tinkerbell’s appearance in Peter Pan. You can also see similarities between the goldfish in this section and the goldfish in  in Pinocchio. The underwater scenery clearly inspired the underwater decor of the Little Mermaid.

Mary Cicely Barker’s “The Poppy Fairy”

Audience response has indicated that this section is the most delightful to the viewer.

The original idea Disney had had was to bring the sprites seen in this section in every section of Nutcracker Suite. In fact, the concept of the fairy- born of the Sugar plum fairy – was the only concept from the story told in the original ballet that came forward, but the desire was to very much to set the whole Nutcracker Suite in the setting of fantastical nature. This was a huge trend of the era I think, although Roy Disney has said that part of the reason that sort of thing isn’t as popular anymore is because we’re a more urban society, so we’re not as aware of what nature looks like as we were even in the 1930′s. I’ve seen a lot of examples of flowers and fairies being a part of storytelling in art in the 1800′s – the beautiful work of Mary Cicely Barker comes to mind – but the trend tend to die out with the globalization of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. About minute and a half long, this sequence shows  a multitude of faries bringing spring to the world. In the blue light of what could both be the early morning and the last cold snap of winter,  delicate fairies the color of early flowers spread light and dew across a natural landscape, encouraging flowers to bloom, and bringing low level light to small area. Just to drive the point home, one sleepy warm-yellow fairy is woken when another fairy’s misfired dewdrop catches her on the head. The land is waking up from winter, and it’s time for all the ice to melt! The sequence ends when several fairies collide in a shower of dewdrops, which drift down to the mushrooms of the next sequence.

This sequence was produced after the concept for the Russian dancers as thistles had been developed by Ethel Kulsar. because of her success, Disney sent four artists, including Ethel to an actual nature preserve to develop sketches for this section. The most interesting thing that I learned about this section of Fantasia is that in terms of development, lots of the theories of abstraction crossed over into this first piece to follow on the Toccata & Fugue section. In order to decide what elements of nature belonged in what section of the Dance of SugarPlum fairy, Disney sat in a dark room, listening to Sugar Plum and having the concept art that Ethel and her coworkers brought back from their trip to the nature preserve played on a big projector, so he could decide what imagery belonged with what part of the music. Does a drwing of a front fairy belong here? Yes. Does the color orange belong in this part of the music, no, no … Should milkweed be a plant you see with this phrasing? Maybe … Frankly it sounds awesome. I want to sit in a dark room, listen to classical music and look at beautiful art!

The fairies were designed to move like hummingbirds by Les Clark. The decision to do that may not seem a big deal to the viewer, but it was one of the subtle ways in which this piece was so carefully designed to create a specific atmospheric effect.

The Chinese Dance. About a minute long. Seven anthropomorphized red and white mushrooms  perform a short dance. The youngest is both the focal point and the clumsy child trying to keep up – one of the many moments of comic relief sprinkled throughout Fantasia. The original program calls them “Hop Low and the Mushroom Dancers.” Possibly the most succinct expression of the principles of animation that has ever been made. Roy Disney stated proudly that they sold a lot of mushroom salt and pepper shakers because of it!

Originally planned as dancing lizards, commanded by a frog Mandarin, using mushrooms as background details. Designer Walbridge – under Armstrong’s direction – created the mushroom creatures for their bit parts of lamplighters. The inspiration for translating the mushrooms into a symbol of the east is said to have come from a member of the Disney Camera Club who had a bound book of mushroom photos kept in the studio – but we weren’t able to find the name of that photographer. John Walbridge was the first artist to interpret the the mushrooms into characters on paper. (DATE HERE) Brewer’s original  vision included has the dance being “Chinese, Japanese, Javanese or Siamese: with “decorative headdress, short, tightgt skirt, and curled toed shoes … before a background of swaying oriental girls.” The animation was developed in this direction for a year, with the mushrooms as background characters, until (DATE) when Brewer brought the animatic to Disney, who looked over things such as a Frog Mandarin, saw the mushrooms and fell in love with them. He told Brewer that less is more, to keep it simple, and that the mushrooms were all that was needed to make the point. Walt was not a man afraid to say that it was time to give up everything that had been developed in a year and going back to an earlier stage of development. Sam Armstrong took over this piece from Brewer at this time, and it was at this time that the idea of having the big mushrooms moving with the ‘big’ part of the music (INSERT MUSIC SAMPLE) and Hop Low moviing with the ‘little part of the music’ (INSERT MUSIC SAMPLE)

In the version that made it to the final cut, Art Babbitt drew inspiration from the three stooges when he was setting up the choreograpgy – especially Curly’s leg movements. He’s spoken of Hop Low as a warm sympathetic character, and said that while he didn’t know a lot about music, the musical phrase that is made and repeated in the music allowed him to create the architecture of the piece. He kept the score at his desk, so he could visually see the melodies of the piece, and relate actions to every line in the music. Babbitt’s ability as an animator, often spoken highly of (Culhane referrs to him as “A Camera with brains and a pulse”), can be exemplified by the fact that the only direction he was given by Walt was to have Hop Low’s final bow come a moment too late for the timing, emphasizing his childlike inability to keep up.

We’ll have a pick of his jump sequence for Hop Low on the website. If you’re an animation student and want to learn about squash and stretch, look at it. In fact look at it anyway – in a minute’s time, one character with no words and practically no faces communicates to the audience everything they need to know about him!

Hop Low’s jump cycle

The art in this, to a modern eye, relies pretty heavily on some stereotypical imagery. To put this in the context of the time, keep in mind that Fantasia was worked on just prior to WWII, when US sentiment about many China wasn’t that great, and much more negative depiction than this was pretty standard. See some of the WWII political cartoons of Doctor Seuss for example!

An example of Dr. Seuss’s WWII political work.

Dance of the Reed Flutes. About a minute and a half long. Chaplin once told Disney not to be afraid to make his audience wait for things. This is advice he took specifically to this section. Falling blossoms dance on the surface of a brook. Love the animations of flowing water. If the previous section belonged to Art Babbit, this one belonged to Cy Young – who was an animator as well as a special effects artist. This section is so lovely, so light and delicate. I love especially how the cenral flower, when she stars danceing, she turns one way , then back, then back again, and her petals  swirl like skirts – continuing to move in the other direction even after she’s stopped turning. This sequence looks like it must have been so labor intensive – so many moving pieces!

Arab Dance. 3 minutes – the longest of the Fantasia sequences. Filmy-finned goldfish dances underwater. The most sinister (for lack of a better word) music of this section, coupled with the alternating shyness and seductive (again, for lack of a better word) approaches of the fish leave the viewer with the unsettling and accurate sense of the true forces of nature being beyong our reach and out of our control.

If you listen to this piece of music with no for knowledge fo the story or association with Fantasia, it comes across as beautiful, and probably feminine, but a little bit sad and a little bit sinister – which makes sense, because Disney wanted the piece to communicate what you saw in video travelogues of Harems at that time.Disney used a lot of specific words that refelct this when he was describing his desires for this sequence. Suggestive, voluptuous, shadowy, transparent, fascinating, graceful, coquettish, and my favorite: ‘almost like a hootchie-cooch.’ He also drew connections between the natural patterns of exotic fish and the lingerie fashion designs of the era. Naughty! Remember that the original context of this dance within the story of the Nutcracker ballet is that Clara is being entertained by the old-fashioned stereotype of a harem girl. I would go so far as to say that there are many aspects of sensuality being explored through this piece – there are fish that get startled and run away when they realised they’ve been seen, and there are groups of fish moving together pretending they don’t see you watching them, then there is the final performace from a fish who makes this very sultry eye contact with the watcher, clearly moving around in a ‘see how beautiful I am?’ kind of a way.

These are some sexy fish!

Keep in mind when you watch this sequence that the animation team was doing multiple exposures on one set of film – Frank Thomas has been quoted on some of the scenes taking up to 20 exposures. No room for mistakes – one mistake and everything’s ruined. Think about that, especially when the water flurries the scene in and out of focus!

The whole thing is totally child appropriate of course, but if you’re an adult, you look at this and it brings to mind what we think burlesque entertainment was like back then. The whole scene is laid out to channel that harem feel – the idea of private, enclosed entertainment (we never see the surface of the water), the bubbles rising constantly like inscence smoke (or perhaps the smoke of something stronger.)

Technically speaking, a lot of the things learned from the fish in Pinnochio were brough to this piece. As we hear over and over again, something was invented specifically for this purpose by Disney studios – transparent paints.

I love this sequence!

Russian Dance. One minute, fifteen seconds. Dancing thistles do a traditiona Russian dance, with flower women playing their partners. Disney saw this section almost as energetic as a tumbling act, and that’s carried through in the opening jumps from the thistle dancers. Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Biance Majolie, Ethel Kulsar are credited with developing this segment entirely, picking wildflowers near the set and sketching them into cossacks and peasant girls. We’re still in summer flowers and colors here, as we were in the Chinese Dance and the Dance of the reed flutes. The major animator on the piece was Art Babbitt again.

John Canemaker once asked Babbitt how he managed to work this scene so that there was no confusion at all about what was going on. His response was that he used a lot of subtle stretch and squash drawing, and overlapped action in a discrete way that makes it impossible for the viewer to not pay attention to what’s going on.

Waltz of the Flowers. About 4 and a half minutes. Winter comes, with a return to the fairy and flora motif in the dance of the Sugarplum Fairy. He was concered about this sequence repeating something that had already been said, which is why the colors and patterns of autumn and winter became the drive behind this piece, rather than the summery stuff that had already been explored. They continued with the theme they’d been exploring throughout the Nutcracker Suite section of Fantasia, the dance that a ballet dancer would do is performed by leaves, petals, seeds and other elements of nature being carried by wind and water. Green becomes gold, accompanied perfectly by the sound of harps strings and deep woodwinds. There was suposed to be a sequence in Bambi where the two last leaves of fall converse before dying and falling off the tree – which would have taken its roots from the dance duets of the two orange maple leaves that takes place here. As in the first sequence, fairies are helping the season change, and my favorite example fo this is when one fairy opens a milkweed pod, and all the fluffy seeds slowly are carried away by the wind, looking for all the world like deliacate ladies in fluffy ballet skirts. Putting it in perspective, each individual drawing of each individual milkweed ballerina took AN HOUR or more to complete due to the complicated coloring process which involved the standard inking and coloring, but also the ubtlest puff of airbrushing, AND THEN drybrush texturing! This whole sequence can be seen in action in the film “The Story of the Animated Drawing,” a 1955 Disney Television film about the history of animation to that point. You can see selection of this film, as well as Ethel’s beautiful thistle-men drawings, the unused frog-mandarin from the Chinese Dance section, and some lovely concepts of ent-like tree creatures, some sexy fish drawings that are frankly, hilarious, and some very sultry flower fairies on the Fantasia DVD box set we keep talking about. Canot say enough how great that thing is!

Then we get frost sprites, bringinf frost to the plants and ice to the water. The snow starts to fall, and the snowflakes themselves are faries. Here we see some of the background  effects that we saw int he Toccatta and Fugue sequence. This part reminds me of the Tom and Jerry episode where Jerry floods the house and freezes it so he can go skating. The fairies ancing on the ice were clearly modelled after real iceskaters.

Lets’ talk about the falling snowflakes. The process for this was another multiple exposure, but the exposure that had just the snowflakes on them worked something llike this: scientifucally acurate drawings of actual snowflakes were created and colore int he susual way, but instead of being filmed rotating by hand, they were mounted on rotating cogs which in turn slowly moved down a curved track. The machinery was covered in balck velvet (the greenscreen of it’s day) and the flackes were filmed that way. Mind blown yet?

Disney wished he could have done the whole thing as a ballet in the air, and he got very close to it. It’s so beautiful!

PERSONAL RESPONSE

Suz: There’s a lot of water aanimation in this section of Fantasia. Animating water (and horses) are two of the hardest things to do in animation. To give you an idea of how hard water is, I first saw Ratatouille in the theatres with an animator who actually cried in the falling down the sewer sequence in the opening of the movie because the water had been animated so well. And yet here, 70 years earlier, is water refelcted naturally and beautifully, and done by hand, in one shot takes. It absolutely blows you away!

TRIVIA

Not relevant to this part specifically, but I just found this out – Christopher Lloyd based part of his performaces as Doc Brown in Back to the Future on Leopold Stochowski!

Christopher Lloyd and Leopold Stokowski

Disney said that you really had to lose yourself in music, almost fall asleep to it, and let it in through the skin. He really described the act of listening to music in a way that makes it sound like he thought of it as a transcendental experience. The man said of himself that he didn’t know anything about art apart from he knew what he liked, but he sure sounds like someone who knew how to appreciate the stuff!

It’s worth picking up the Fantasia book by Culhane just to read the story about a dancer who came in to do reference dancing for the Arabian Dance section!

Guess what’s next in the Fantasia series …

Buy Adventure Time Season 1 Here
Download “I Remember You” Here

In this episode, we’re going to discuss Adventure Time, alternative storytelling and Rebecca Sugar. This episode of the Animated Things Club contains heavy spoilers for “I Remember You,” the episode of Adventure Time that aired on October 15, 2012.

It only seems fair to say that this episode of our podcast will include some topics that might be hard for some people to listen to, just as the episode of  Adventure Time we’ll be talking about took on an issue that brought out a lot of emotion in some of it’s viewers. First I’m going to give you an overview of why storytelling in Adventure Time is different than anything else on TV. Then I’m going to give you the background of the specific characters that the episode “I Remember You” involved. Finally,  I’m going to talk about the episode and why it’s important.

Before I get started, I’d like to give a shout out to Susan from the History Chicks Podcast, for inadvertantly getting this podcast episode started by asking me how to better appreciate Adventure Time, as her son is a big fan. The History Chicks is a fantastic podcast that discusses the lives of all sorts of historically important women, and Susan and her partner Beckett really make history entertaining. My initial response to Susan had been something along the lines of “This might be something you just don’t like.” I thought about it for a while, and decided that this wasn’t a good enough answer. My hope is that if you just don’t get Adventure Time, at the end of this podcast, you’ll understand why it is so appealing.

This episode was written ands storyboarded by Cole Sanchez and Rebecca Sugar, the latter of whom is the first woman to ever land a gig creating a solo show for the Cartoon Network. This 2009 (guessed) graduate of SVA  writes quite a few of the songs in the show as well as writing and boarding the show itself, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us.

Storytelling in Adventure Time

The main characters in Adventure Time are Jake the Dog and Finn the human, with Princess Bubblegum a close third. Adventure Time is a show that’s really approached storytelling in a very alternative kind of a way. The first season of the show gave me the impression that it was a show based entirely on random storylets. That was fine by be – I fell in love with the show when I saw the episode “Dungeon” from the first season (download it here).  It wasn’t until a little further along that I cottoned on to the fact that a universe backstory was being built for the Adventure Time universe though one-off comments, and easter egg style visual clues. Basically, it seems that this world (called Ooo), inhabited by one human and a variety of sentient creatures based on both mechanical and organic items (candy people, living robots, talking dogs) is intended to depict an earth that is many hundred years after a  nuclearapocalypse that is referred to in the show as the ‘Mushroom Wars’.

So not your standard cartoon.

Creator Pen Ward has stated that the full story of what happened to planet earth as we know of it today turn it into the Land of Ooo will never be fully spelled out, leaving the viewer to piece things together through backstory. This allows the present-day story arcs of Ooo to unfold with very little interferance. Each individual episode also has it’s own stand alone story.

This is one of the reasons why the comic book sales for Adventure Time have been so good. Fans know they can learn things about the backstory of the universe in the comic books that they can’t pick up elsewhere, and because understanding the backstory of the universe is like playing “Where’s Waldo” with every episode of the show, flying off the shelves.

Marceline and the Ice King

“I Remember You”  focused on Marceline and the Ice King, the first episode to show them interacting at all.

This is Marceline

Marceline is a nearly-immortal vampire daughter of a character who is basically intended to be Satan. She, her father, and the Ice King are immortal or nearly immortal, having been alive for at least a thousand years, and are the only characters on the show that have been around since the Mushroom Wars. Before “I Remember You” aired, this is what we knew about Marceline …

• Marceline is a vampire, but doesn’t eat blood, she eats the color red.
• Marceline is a bit emo. She writes music about, and plays guitar. In one of her earliest episodes, she writes a song with the beautiful lyrics “Daddy, why did you eat my fries. I bought them, they were mine. Daddy, do you even love me?”
• In the same episode, we find out that her dad actually is a jerk. Not just a jerk, also a stand in for the devil. (Hell in the Adventure Time universe is an alternate dimension called the Night-o-Sphere.)
• At one point her father actually kidnaps her and brainwashes her to take over his job as the ruler of the Night-o-Sphere. It’s pretty clear at this point that she wasn’t just being emo – her father really is incredibly dysfucntional and sees Marceline as a pawn.
• Marceline had only one posession that she cared about – a beat up, patched up teddy bear. It was stolen from her by her one known ex-boyfriend and sold to a witch, being valuable for spells because it was loved so much.

This is the Ice King

The Ice King is the first and primary villain of the Adventure Time series. In the earliest seasons, he was the most commonly used antagonist, as he was obsessed with kidnapping a princess to marry him – specifically princess Bubblegum, but his obsession extends to pretty much any princess. He lives alone in a palace made out of ice, a small penguin “army” his only company. Before “I Remember You” aired, this is what we knew about the Ice King …

• He’s pretty bad at being a villain. He bungles a lot, and despite clearly being the most overpowered character on the show, rarely uses that power to win anything. Most of his attempts at causing mayhem seem to be deliberate attempts to get attention more than actual means to an evil end.
• He’s delusional. Now, bear with me, because there’s a lot of cartoon character whose characteristics and personalities, when real life is applied to them, could be called psychopathic, delusional, bullies, sexual harassers, or a multitude of other analytical buzzwords, and that ususally doesn’t matter because it’s a freaking cartoon. However, in Adventure Time, characters have realistic reactions to realistic situations, and that plays a part in why “I Remember You” is so intense, and for that reason I’m using these descriptions for the Ice King.
• The Ice King is delusional, easily confused, and easily angered.
• The Christmas 2011 episode of Adventure Time dropped a huge bomb about the Ice King when Finn and Jake found a bunch of VHS diaries he had made apparently before and during the Mushroom Wars. In “Holly Jolly Secrets” a two-episode arc, viewers learned that the Ice King was once a bookish human named Simon, possibly an archeologist or anthropologist. In a classic horror trope, Simon discovered a crown that he put on to make his fiance (whose pet name was Princess) laugh, but was instead possessed by.  He experienced blackouts where the ‘Ice King’ personality took over, which slowly grew more and more common, until he was no longer human, with no memories of his human experience.

“I Remember You” reveals that the Ice King and Marceline met in the aftermath of the Mushroom Wars. She was a child, I guessed five or six, crying on the streets while everything is destroyed all around her. The Ice King, then still holding onto a majority of his human characteristics, gave her her stuffed bear. As is often the case with Adventure Time episodes, if a viewer then rewatches previous episodes, a huge amount of background detail corroborates the facts revealed in this one, and spell out an additional narrative. (For example, Simon/Ice King would coax a younger Marceline to eat when she was too depressed to have an appetite.)

Ice King meeting Marceline

Has that sunk in yet? if you watch Adventure Time, this isn’t new to you. If you don’t, this can be a lot to take in.

 ”I Remember You” and Why It’s Important

This episode starts with the Ie King trying to write a song, and failing miserably. He packs up his music gear, and flies off to Marceline’s house, so he can learn how to write a good song from her. While initially resistant to the painful memories, his presence brings, the usually blase Marceline becomes frantic to make Ice King remember who he used to be, and what their relationship was.

If you’re not drowned in backstory yet, the basic concept that this story illustrates is the complex and painful emotions that arise when a loved and needed parent no longer has the capabilities to be a parent.  Here’s where I give you a little of MY backstory.

When we came back from our season break, our intention had been to produce two or three episodes a month. Real life interfered when a close family member of mine passed away after several years living with a mentally degenerative disease diagnosed as Lewy Body Disease – a disease which presents with symptoms associated with Alzheimers Disease, Parkinsons, Dementia, and depression. Basically, I went through a situation that many other people have – I watched a loved one slowly lose their identity to a disease associated with aging.

This episode is important because it deals with a real topic, and real emotions. This is a children’s show, and it has never been bland, but it makes a move here into art. Art does, after all, imitate life. I am predisposed to be moved by something like this due to my personal circumstances, but I can’t believe that I am alone in my reaction.

Children transition as they age from needing to be protected from things they don’t have the faculties to understand to needing to be funneled all possible information about the world around them. From what I remember about being at that age, I felt a little bit like Marceline, starving to eat, but wanting non-condescending stories rather than the color red. The first story I ever read or watched that hit that appeal for me was a Neil Gaiman Sandman graphic novel – and if you’re familiar, you know what I’m trying to say. Tweens are capable and hurgry for real emotions and interactions in their entertainment, and what the fine crew behind Adventure Time gave them here was a very satisfying meal.

Adventure Time episodes are short (only fifteen minutes long) and there’s a lot going on in this one. Two scenes stand out as delicately true to life – the Ice King tangling himself up in cords and not knowing how to get out, and reacting with shame and embaressment, and wanting to hide when he realises that he did something he shouldn’t have. The most moving sequence here is when Marceline sings to the Ice King a letter that he wrote to her when he was in an inbetween stage of the disease: fully aware of what was happening to him, knowing he couldn’t stop it, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to look after a child who needed him.

Ice King and Marceline

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

Our two biggest references for this podcast series on Fantasia are VERY MUCH WORTH YOUR TIME!

Fantasia Box Set A three disc Fantasia collector’s set, featuring two different audio commentaries, unseen animatic, unused sequences, SO MUCH production art from both Fantasia and Fantasia 2000!

Fantasia by John Culhane The definative book on Fantasia – and available in good second hand condition for a VERY low price!

Major Players

• Director: Samuel Armstrong
• Art Director: Robert Cormack
• Animation Director (Uncredited): Oskar Fischinger (Nov 28, 1398-Oct 1, 1939) a pioneer of abstract animation in his own right. More on Fischinger later!
• Story Development: Lee Blair (brother of Preston Blair and husband of Mary Blair), Elmer Plummer. Phil Dike
• Effects Department: Cy Young – credited for the artistis success of the Fugue section of the piece by John Canemaker, Joshua Meador
• Background: Joe Stahley, John Hench, Nino Carbe
• Story Artist: John McLeish
• Animation: Cy Young, Art Palmer, Daniel McManus, George Rowley, Edwin Aardal, Joshua Meador, Cornett Wood
• Earliest Known Production date: November 8, 1938

The Music

Tocatta & Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, completed in 1717 and orginally composed for the organ. A tocatta usually a quickly-paced piece, and a fugue is what a piece of music is called when a composer elaborates on a single musical theme with two interweaving instrumental voices – in this instance, stringed instruments and woodwind instruments. As Stochowski edited it, this section in Fantasia is about ten minues long.

The Animation

The first of the Fantasia pieces, the Bach section introduces the audience to the basic concept of animation being a tool with which to visually interpret music. “You will be able to SEE the music and HEAR the picture,” Walt Disney hoped. The intorduction is pretty gentle – you have some locvely shots of Stochoswki in various asillhouetted tones, and sillhouetttes of the musicians performing their sections, with long, multiple shadows, each isn a slightly different color. This all serves to show the audience how colotr and changing color town can flow and intertwine with the music, and begins to demonstrate how emotion, color, and pace all work together in animation.  There’s also several shots that highlight specific members or instuments in the orchestra.

The overlay of colors and shapes in this part of the piece was very technically challenging at the time. It doesn’t look hard to the modern eye, because of the wonders of photoshop, but having the sillhouettes of the musicians duplicated in different colors and sizes on the film here was both labor intensive and technically challenging! If you have ever developed camera film by hand, or developed photos from film by hand, this might be a little easier to understand, but there are many instances in this section where the film of the movie has had two or three or four exposure on it, each pass including a different layer of abstract animated sequences. This is a process that takes an immense about of skill and attention to detail, with no room for error at all.

Layers of muscians performing Bach!

After about four minutes of this introdution, the piece take a turn for the abstract, showing cloudlike  backgrounds that are topped beautifully liquid shapes that are suggestive of bows in the beginning, but then morph in to pure, lighthearted abstraction, as delicate as the  music itself. There are visual patterns int he piece that are remeniscent and suggestive of later sequences in the movie – towering shapes similar to the landscames of the Beethoven section, colors that will resemble the skylins int he Dance of the Hours section, something that looks similar to the traveling frosst int he Nutcracker section, and light patterns very similar to the  Ave Maria section. Culhane says specifically in his book that This first piece is concluded with a camera return to Stochowski, framed by a the suggestion of a setting sun.

We’ve talked about how Disney was really breaking ground enthusiastically on Fantasia, but he had a lot of ambitious ideas that didn’t end up in the final movie. One of those is that he wanted this section of the movie to be 3-D, so that the animations of the theme could come closer and closer to the viewer as they built up in the music. Keep in mind – the first color 3-D movie wouldn’t come out until 1952! Unfortunately, both this plan and his plan to make the movie widescreen were simply not something he could do financially.

So, for this piece, Disney’s instructions to his creative team included listening to the music with their eyes closed, imagining themselves in a concert hall, so that they could visualize abstractions along with the music. Turns out that Stochowski had a heavy input on the direction that this piece took – he wasn’t just the conductor and musical consultant. When asked what Tocatta and Fugue represented, his description (“A motif or a decorative pattern which gradually develops more and more … finally it becomes perfectly free … it is a growth like a tree growing from a seed.” Can you imagine being an animator at this studio at this time? They got to listen to a master musician explain the form of music!

This is from a section of the Toccatta & Fugue sequence that took at least four exposures of animation on one set of film. One mistake would have ruined everything!

Stochowski was bringing some resources to the table here – he had once conducted a concert that included a color organ – an 18th century electromagnetic device that bound specific color to specific notes on a scale, and projected those colors when music was played. Disney had also been inspired by the color organ, having seen one in action back in 1928. He had also been inspired by the work of Len Lye, a filmaker who had colored an abstract film he made by painting on the cells themselves, and had been itching to work with abstract colors before Fantasia was born.

The significance of this early piece is pretty big. This was the first abstract art animation presented in a commercial feature film. The merging of sound and moving shapes has been put in the same category as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Abstract Expressionist as an art form would not really become a thing until after the end of World War II, so the leaps Disney was taking were probably about a decade ahead of popular opinion (a double edged sword). The merging of rythm and design has been lauded by art critics as helping to make abstract painting understandeable to the general public.

Synesthesia

Contrasting Sounds by Kandinsky, 1924

Synesthesia ”The phenomenon–its name derives from the Greek, meaning”to perceive together”–comes in many varieties. Some synesthetes hear, smell, taste or feel pain in color. Others taste shapes, and still others perceive written digits, letters and words in color. Some, who possess what researchers call “conceptual synesthesia,” see abstract concepts, such as units of time or mathematical operations, as shapes projected either internally or in the space around them. And many synesthetes experience more than one form of the condition.” American Psychological Association.

The concept of sounds being visible things isn’t new to art – most notable artist to explore this is Kandinsky who is also creited with being the first purely abstract painter. It’s not clear if he was actually a synesthete, but his painting deliberately explore the synesthetic universe. Synesthetic  also implied in the works of  Van Gogh, and the writings of Poe and Baudelaire. Some known synesthetes are writer Vladimir Nabokov, artists David Hockney and Kilford, and composers Tori Amos, Leonard Bernstein, Franz Liszt, Billy Joel, and Rimsky-Korsakov (one time mentor to Stravinsky, composer of “The Rite of Spring”.)

Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger is an uncredited contributor to this section of Fantasia. He was an independant German animator who broke ground as an abstractionist in the 1920s, and would invent the Lumigraph in 1955. He was himself a pioneer of animation and music, but had a consistant stream of bad luck in his American filmmaking efforts, never being paid at MGM, never recieving credit at Disney, and his works never being broadcast at Muntz TV. I don’t necessarily pity him though – he requested to be let of contracts, he didn’t want credit if he couldn’t have things exactly the way he wanted them, and when he was commisioned by the Guggenheim to create an abstract movie in 1947, he took their money but declined to follow their commision requests. These things cumulatively damaged his professional reputation to the point that he was never again approached for his personal work.

Fischinger was a true abstractionist. Nothing of his work had any representation to it at all, and Disney as a creator was a representationalist, and I think had a resistance to true abstraction, despite his desire to push the envelope. This is why, in the piece, some of the abstract shapes become reconizeable things – clouds are put in a background to allow the audience to recognize rolling red shapes as a landscape, and icy darts assume the shape of violin bows for long enough to allow the audience to make that connection as well. I wonder if, despite the ambitious break into an abtstract media, Disney was ultimately worried that pure abstraction would be too different for the audience at Fantasia. He and Fischinger also butted heads on the amount of action on the screen – Disney wanted only one action at a time, so as no to overwhelm the audience, and Fischinger wanted to maintain his usual style of having multiple actions occurring at the same time.

There seems to be a bad rumor about every aspect of Disney’s professional career, and the stigma attatched to this piece is the rumor some believe that Disney stole this idea from ideas the filmaker had developed independantly, and then fired him when he wasn’t useful anymore. Given that Fischinger isn’t credited on the piece, and that he had created an abstract animation to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in 1931, it’s easy to see how that assumption could be made, but the facts that we discovered during research don’t really ppoint in that direction. Here’s what we know. Fischinger had approached Stochoski asking to use his recording of Toccatta & Fugue for an abstract piece, but Stochowski had refused based on doubts about Fischinger’s financial backing. Transcripts of Disney story meetings show that Disney and Stochowski listened to and discussed the options of Tocatta & Fugue on September 10, 1938, and announced internally that it would be on it as the accompanyment of the abstract section of Fantasia on September 29 – 2 months before Fischinger joined the staff of the movie. Fischinger did not stay on long with Disney – he quit after about a year, before Tocatta was completed. Incidentally, he had been fired a few years earlier from Paramount only six months into a contract, when he could not adhere to the timeline, budget, or  the color requests of the studio. There’s no bitterness in the Disney camp over the split – in his book, Culhane describes the indie filmmaker this way: “Fischinger was obviously an artist who was not at his best working in a group – particulalrly a group that he did not control.” Sometimes, great artists aren’t good at taking direction.

According to a 1977 article by William Moritz, Fischinger also animated the Blue Fairy’s wand in Pinnocchio for Disney. That article (found here) transcribes some of the production notes that went back and forth between Disney and Fischinger on Fischinger’s work on Fantasia.

Trivia

Fun Fact: Deems Taylor didn’t think this was a good piece of music to open Fantasia with, preferring an traditional opener – an overture. Disney didn’t care about what was traditional, he wanted a piece that demonstrated the workings of the orchestra to the audience.

Fun fact: Disney once considered this piece of music to accompany the witchery that was ultimately depicted in the Night on Bald Mountain segment.

Personal Response

Suzannah: It wasn’t interesting to me as a child. As an adult it intrigues me greatly, but I untimately end up feeling that it was a toes-in-the-water take on abstract animation. These animators, who could animate the wind blowing and waterfalls and tear drops that a viewer really believed in, had to make a pretty big gear shift when they were asked to animated how this music made them feel. I would have liked to see Disney revisit the subject again and push it further. Tombstone section.  I really enjoyed listening to the recorded transcripts that came on the dvd, as well as some old interviews with Diney about it, because I really enjoyed listening to Disney talk about how he researched the composers and his descriptions of their creative process (he refferred to Bach as splashing around in music, which is a wonderful image) and his laughing at the critics who tried to get super-analytical and figure out what each section of this piece meant.

Jon: Disney quote from a Dec 8, 1938 meeting “This is not the cartoon medium … We’ve got worlds to conquer here … (This is going to be) four precious minutes when we’re through.”

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

In this Episode we talk about 7 great cartoons to watch this Halloween.

Scary Godmother’s Halloween Spooktacular (buy it here , buy the book here, and the comics here)
Courage the Cowardly Dog, “Human Habitrail”  (buy it here or download it here)
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, “Luna Eclipsed” (watch it here or download it here)
Halloween is Grinch Night (buy it here )
Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, “Nightmare on Wilson Way” (download it here)
Home Movies, “Coffins and Cradles” (buy it here )
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown  (buy the remastered dvd here, the blu-ray here, the pack with You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown here, or download it here. buy the music here or download it here)

Fall is  one of my favorite times of year, and here in the northeast US, it’s been the best fall I can remember – with color staying on the trees for over a month! Something about the leaves, the way the light changes, the smell of the air (even when you live in a very urban area like I do.) And, of course, there’s the pumpkin spice flavor that almost every food chain or manufacturer injects into every edible product on the market really makes this season special. As a child, I always looked forward to the beginning of a school year, and for a long time as an adult, I associated the colors and smells of fall with optimism of the fresh start that a new beginning like that offers. But the very best reason to love this time of the year is because of Halloween, the holiday that kicks off five straight months of holidays. It’s the most fun holiday that comes with the least obligations to travel or buy stuff.

Also, my office really goes out when it comes to costumes. There’s one guy in particular who really goes far, making great costumes from scratch, and I’ve seen him in complete Darth Vader, Superman, and Green Lanterns, and Iron Man costumes. But we’re not going to talk about what it looks like when Darth Vader stops by your desk to pick up the daily Fedex shipment. We’re going to talk about Halloween cartoons!

1) Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular

I really like this show! Actually, I like it for a couple of different reasons. It’s based on a 1997 childrens’ book by comic book superstar Jill Thompson, and saw multiple incarnation in both book and comic book form, and I’m always excited to see a creator-owned comic book property have the kind of legs that this project did. The original book and one of it’s four sequels were both adapted to hour-long tv specials, the first one having a US debut in 2004 on the Cartoon Network, and pretty consistently showing every year since. The script is funny, the characters are fully developed, and it has a great sense of macabre and light-heartedness at the same time. It’s great for little kids who have trouble with the scarier aspects of the holiday, but still funny and smart enough to be fun for the rest of us big kids.

2) Courage the Cowardly Dog – Human Habitrail

Courage the Cowardly Dog is spooky all year round!

Any Courage episode works for Halloween. ANY COURAGE EPISODE! Seriously, this show was so delightlyfully creepy and off-beat that it’s like having Halloween all year round, but I’m going to specifically recommend the fifth episode from the second season, “Human Habitrail.” Why? Just because it’s my favorite Courage episode! The plot details are as excellent as any other Courage episode, but this episode is specifically recommended for the scene in which Courage chases a psychotic, human-sized gerbil on jet-skis through a sewer.

3) My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Luna Eclipsed

Pony’s dressed up for halloween … there could be some meta cosplay here!

Luna Eclipsed is a great show that expolores the concept of why people like to be scared at Halloween, even though the fear is of their own construction. This episode meets the ususal high sstandards of the show to be able to break down complex concepts for children age 8 and under, but it’s also incredibly fun to watch based on how much fun the team that works on the show had with Halloween costumes on the background pony characters. Fans of the show should note this episode (although I’m sure that hardcore fans of the show like myself already have) for appearances of both Luna and Zecora.

Halloween is Grinch Night!

Nightmare on Wilson Way!

Jason and Melissa from home Movies

7) It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Check out the hand-painted scenery in this classic!

This one you may already have in your library, but what you REALLY need to have is the remastered video. It  doesn’t have to be bluray, but that wouldn’t hurt. Why do you need this? The colors and the lines are crisper than the leaf pile that Linus jumps into while holding a wet sucker, and since it’s a property that means a lot to just about everyone, it’s an investment. Especially appropriate this year, some versions come  boxed with  ”You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown.”

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

A recent google search lead me to believe that there is NO guide to good cartoons for girls! I did find one very short list, but it seemed to exist mostly so that the writer could bash what they thought bad cartoons for girls were. So I made one! Today we’re going to talk about four great cartoons for girls.

Doc McStuffins (buy it here or download it here)

Josie and the Pussycats (buy it here or download it here)

Jane and the Dragon (buy it here or download Season 1 here and Season 2 here, and the original book series here)

Rainbow Brite (buy the show here, the movie here or download the movie here)

I wanted to compile a list of great cartoons for girls, so I started with the shows that I love. Consuting with Jon, I drew up a list of guidelines to define what a good cartoon for a girl was. Then I opened up the question to our listening audience and friends on twitter. I asked parents of little girls what shows they thought were good for their daughters. I asked adult women what inspired them as children, and adult professionals in comics and animation what works made them want to enter the field. The response was a little overwhelming, so what I ended up with was a pretty long list of great shows, and then a short list of shows that met with all of the following criteria …

WHAT MAKES A CARTOON GOOD FOR GIRLS?

• The lady characters can’t be one-dimensional.
• Main target audience cannot be adults.
• The cartoon had to pass the Bechdel Test. I modified the Bechdel test to accomodade for some of non-movie formats.  The conversations between female character have to occur at least twice in every season of a multi-season show, and the conversations can’t focus on ANY male character, or a ‘girl talk’ subject such as makeovers, identity crisis, or conflict resolution.
• There has to be either at least two female leads, or some other indication that the female lead isn’t a token character.
• The main female characters in the show can’t fall into any of the following categories:  unwanted romantic pursuer, parent or guardian figure, extended family member, or foil of the male main characters.
• If a female lead is smarter or more talented than the rest of the cast, it can’t be partnered with the cynicism that it won’t get her anywhere.
• Sterotypical girly things such as depictions of ballet, cake-making and resolving conflict, should not take up more than half of the show.
• The concept of gender has to exist in the show – no all-girl casts or gender neutrality.
• The show or movie has to have quality that stand up over time.
• I can’t be the only person who likes it.

When I was narrowing the final list of five best cartoons for girls, I found a lot of very good shows for girls that just didn’t pass all of the criteria. In this episode, Im going to talk about two shows that are good for the littlest of viewers, a show about an all girl band, and a colorful queen of badassery.

1) Doc McStuffins

The Doc is in!

This is a Disney Junior show that is currently on the air. In my area, it plays at least once every weekday morning, and you can also catch at least one episode on the Disney Junior website. It’s a 3D CG animated show, and while it airs on the Disney Channel and Disney Junior, it’s made by Brown Bag Films, which is based in Ireland and LA. (They also make the Olivia and Octonauts cartoons.) Season 1 of Doc McStuffins started in spring of 2012, and has been renewed at this time for a second season to come out around the same time in 2013. The lead character of the show, Dottie McStuffins, has a magic stethoscope that allows her to talk to toys (this isn’t explained in every episode I’ve seen, but it doesn’t need to be). The show is super educational, as Dottie helps the cure the toys of their illnesses – such as a hungry hungry hippos game with a stomache ache, and a stuffed cow that was left out of the rain, so tiny viewers learn a lot about good health habits and what they can expect from a trip to the doctor. She also acts as counselor, helping the hippo discover why they felt like they had to eat too much, and the stuffed animal forgive her owner for leaving her out all night. This part is perhaps the greatest strength of the show, because it’s very educational about emotions, and why certain things might make the viewer feel a certain way.

What really makes this a great show for girls?
Well, the main character is a girl, and a doctor. That’s a pretty big deal – but she’s also very confident, works hard to solve problems, and is all-around the kind of girl character that I would be very happy to have any little girl watch.

Why is this show not in the top five best cartoons for girls?
Well, apart from a snowman toy and a dragon toy, there doesn’t seem to be any male character that Dottie interacts with – no playing with other boys her age, only girls. Also, Dottie’s two number one toys, that dragon toy and a ballerina lamb seem to pretty clearly respresent the stereotypes of little boys and little girls, with little room for a middle ground representation of what it means to be a boy or be a girl.

2) Josie & The Pussycats

Josie, the Pussycats, and their entourage.

In the late 60s, Hanna-Barbera wanted in on the commercial success that Filmation was having with The Archie Show, cartoon based on the Archie Comics characters. They, like MANY other companies, tried to develope their own teen band based cartoon: Mysteries Five. Mysteries Five was a flop, and was backburnered in development until it re-aired under it’s more familiar name of Scooby Doo, Where are you? If you remember back from episode 2 and a half of our podcast, this show would eventually become Scooby Doo, and yes, Scooby Doo was directly based on the Archie Comics gang. If you don’ remember, you can catch up on that episode here! Rather than try and fail again, Hana-Barbera went directly to Archie Comics and collaborated to adapt their other band-based property into a show. If you’re familiar with the original comic book series, it was at this point in time that some characters were dropped from the book and some started to appear. Josie, the cute female lead and her ditzy blond friend found their trio rounded out not by Pepper (who looked like a modern-day hipster) but by Valerie, who would be the first african-american female main character on a Saturday morning cartoon. Together, they formed the cat-suit wearing band. Pepper’s boyfriend Sock also phased out at this time, replaced by Alan M, the band’s faithful roadie with a big crush on Josie. Alexander and Alexandra, rich, mean siblings travelled with the band. Alex was managment, but his sister was alternately trying to get into the band, trying to seduce Alan M, or simply carrying around her unusually intelligent cat Sebastian. Aside from everything else about this show being great, there’s some wonderful animation in the opening sequence of Melody drumming and Valerie playing the tambourine – of much better quality than a lot of what you’d expect to see at that time. A few years later, the show morphed into Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, where the band wandered from planet to planet after accidentally being launched up in a missile.

What really makes this a great show for girls?
This wasn’t a show that I watched as a child, and I never really thought of it as being pro-girl, until I was buried with emails and tweets from women who cited it as being inspiring. The forerunner to Jem and the Holograms, Josie and the Pussycats were strong ladies who cared more about making music and getting to a gig on time than they did about finding the right man. In fact, the only man-chaser among them was Alexandra, and her prioritizing of romance over the good of the band (which was, after all, the income of all six characters) always leads to no good.
Why is this show not in the top five best cartoons for girls?
Because it’s just not that deep, Melody is a bimbo (albeit a very funny one) and Valerie is shown playing the tambourine instead of the guitar. It doesn’t always pass the Bechdel test, and Alexandra does fall into the category of unwanted romantic pursuer.

3) Jane and the Dragon

If only this picture could really show exactly how much butt Jane can kick ...

Based on a book series that began in the late 80′s, Jane and the Dragon is a CG, 3D animated show that ran for 26 episodes.  It was made by New Zealand’s Weta Workshop and Canada’s Nelvana, and was broadcast by PBS here in the United States. The first book in the trilogy is summarized in the show’s theme song – Jane was unhappily training to be a lady-in-waiting when the Prince was kidnapped by a dragon. She saved the prince and won the right to train to be a knight instead, with the ultimately friendly dragon as a sidekick. It had a well-deserved Annie Award nomination in 2008 (Best Animated Television Production) proably at least in part because the scripts are excellent explorations of the role of the girl as adventurer, encompassing all the challanges involved in questioning the status quo without any cynicism about her ultimate potential – a problem that haunts a lot smart and capable girl characters. The animation is pretty good on this show, even if the models, now seven years old, seem a bit uncanny valley. If you have a little girl who loved Brave, this is a great series to carry on the tradition with.

What really makes this a great show for girls?
Jane questions everything around her, and stand up for everyone who needs championing, from the kitchen-maid who is bullied by the spoiled prince to the orphaned dragon himself as he searches for his origins.

Why is this show not in the top five best cartoons for girls?
That’s a really good question. Frankly, it belongs there, but unfortunately the Uncanny Valley aspect of the CG animation makes it hard to call it timeless.

4) Rainbow Brite

o Rainbow, y u so colors?

Rainbow Brite was a cartoon made by Hallmark to support their Rainbow Brite doll line. DiC Enterprises was behind the animation. There were thirteen episodes and a fulll-length movie,  and the show started airing in 1984. While merchandise line was was rebooted by differnt liscensees in in the past decade, none were massively successfull and the show itself was never relaunched. There are fresh animation bumps of the Hallmark website, (the one called “return to Rainbow Land” looks suspiciously like it could be the beginnings of a pilot) so maybe it’s something they’re working towards. In the decade of reboots, it’s something that would be cool – if it was done well.

Do we like the new Rainbow Brite, or do we want to kill it with fire? Decide for yourself after watching the previews on the Hallmark website.

What really makes this a great show for girls?
Rainbow Brite is the ruler of her world – and not just because she’s the girl with the magic belt, the snobby horse, a council of advisors, and an army of fluffy peasants – although all of those things are true. She’s braver than everyone else, she’s stronger, and she fights to protect not just all of her friends, but also the worlds that she’s responsible fore – including earth! Nothing ever comes before her job, and I never saw an episode where she cared about shopping, makeup, boys, or anything other than doing what was right and saving the world.
Why is this show not in the top five best cartoons for girls?
The color coding of gender is something that has been discussed by a lot of people who are a lot more intellectual than I am, and this show does it quite a bit. The only boy characters are red and blue, and that’s one thing, but when you add the Tickled Pick character into the mix, things fall under fire a little bit. There’s also the problem of Shy Violet, the stereotypically smart character who has no social skills and the plainest of all the outfits. This stuff is nitpicky. It’s details that aren’t really what the show is about, which is why the show is on this list, but it’s enough to keep it out of the top five.

Did you agree with these choices? Disagree? Have suggestions for other shows that are great for girls? Email feedback@animatedthingsclub.com and let us know!

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

This is the first of a series of podcasts we’ll be releasing about Fantasia. In this episode, you’ll get an introduction to the history and context of the movie, why it is so important, and who the major players are.

Fantasia was Walt Disnye’s second theatrical release, and the first movie to ever pair music and motion with the deliberation to create an ‘art’ experience. It might actually be the first ever art flick! It’s significant because it’s the first appearance of the modern version of Mickey Mouse, and some of the things that went into the making of Fantasia laid the groundwork for the the setup of Buena Vista, the Disney distribution company in 1953, but also because if you look behind the scenes a little bit, you get a fantastic look into the scope of Disney’s vision.

1940 Fantasia release poster!

Here’s the gallery of movie release posters that have been issued with Fantasia over the years!

Additionally, since we’re taking such a close look at Fantasia throughout this podcast series, we want to plug our sources. There’s a book called Fantasia, written by John Culhane, which is probably the definitive work on the movie, but we also referred to Disney’s art of Animation by Bob Thomas and The History of Animation by Charles Solomon and the Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters by John Grant.

The Major Players!

Walt Disney: Disney reminded Stochowski of Diaghilev – the founder of the incredibly important Ballet Russe in early 20th century Russia. Remember that comparison, it’s going to be important when we get to the ‘Rite of Spring’ podcast! Disney was 36 when he started working with the conductor, Stochowski. He met the man (according to Stochowski) when they were seated in nearby tables in a restaurant, and Disney invited the conductor to join him, and pitched the idea of animating ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ to a very favorable response.

Leopold Stochowski: 56 at the time of starting work on Fantasia. He had taken up a casual orchestra based out of Philadelphia in 1912, and turned it into what was referred to by the NY Times as “the greatest virtuoso orchestra in America and, most likely the world.” It’s hard to imagine in modern times, when there really isn’t a modern equivalency to what popular conductors were at that time, but Stochowski was famous not just for his accomplishments in the musical world, but was also a public figure — he starred in ‘normal’ movies as well as films made of concerts he conducted. He even dated Greta Garbo! Culhane (author of Walt Disney’s Fantasia) called him flamboyant, and Yehudi Menuin said “Stochowski epitomized for most Americans what the symphony  conductor should look like, how he should behave …”

Sources conflict as to whether this poster was from 1940 or the immediate re-release, but it was most likely 1940.

Deems Taylor: was a prominent music critic and composer in his own right – ending up in the brain trust of development for Fantasia. He’d also the narrator.

We’ll talk about animators and story artists on each piece when we discuss those pieces.

Fantasia!

The movie consists of 7 pieces of classical music, each artistically interpreted through the medium of animation, with music conducted by  Leopold Stochowski, who also helped to adapt the music to shorter versions to keep the movie at two hours.

Fantasia was made in a new studio that Disney had bought with the money from Snow White. In context of history, it was made in the early era of WWII, so everything that was affecting the country also affected both the day-to-day running of the studio and the reception of the movie. Production began in 1937 — the same year Disney won an Academy Award fro the multi-pane camera system he had invented for Snow White. It’s creation was finished before the Disney workers strike and subsequent unionization that occurred in 1941. Disney’s rules on the production of the feature was that there had to be visual clarity, simplification of complexity, and a reason for everything that existed on screen.

The movie premiered on November 13, 1940, which is  really early considering the content, two days after

This is from the 1956 release. The characters look similar to the 40's poster, but the design elements have moved forward in time.

the last frames for the Ave Maria sequence were completed, two weeks after Hitler’s unsuccessful attempt to u=invade Britain in the Battle For Britain air strike, and 13 months before the US entered the war. It was intended to revolutionize animation as an art form (Disney’s original vision included pumping the smell of flowers into the theater, showing sequences in 3D, and making the sounds of the movie themselves really surround the audience). While it’s easy to see that now, it was critically received and the subject of quite a bit of controversy when it was actually released. The movie also lead to some landmark events in Disney history — Disney’s distributor at the time wasn’t all that enthused with the project, so he was allowed to hire a man called Irving Ludwig to do it, personally reporting to Disney. This is significant because Ludwig would go on to found Disney’s distribution company – Buena Vista – a little further on down the road. Ludwig personally installed  dimensional sound systems in theatres (at the cost of $30K each in 1940s money) and hired trained staff for each theatre so that they could be sure that a trip to see Fantasia would mean a very specific audience experience. Now, the multidimensional sound system that Disney developed for Fantasia was called Fantasound, and it has a really interesting history of it’s own, but we won’t really be covering it on these podcasts because that side of the technological advances aren’t really a priority interest for us.

It was released to only 14 theatres, but stayed in rotation on Broadway or a year – which was record breaking at the time. The cost of the music installations that Ludwig had taken care of drove the ticket prices up, which made it harder for the average person (who Walt firmly believed would be able to appreciate the film) to go to see it. Music critics declaimed the movie for the editing down of the various pieces of music, for the attempt to pair classical music with any kind of visual medium, and Stochowski’s editing choices. Movie critics said that the general populace wasn’t smart enough to appreciate the highbrow classical music at all. But Fantasia was neither attempting a big-screen concert, nor attempting to make the music itself more accessible – they were trying to push animation through to the next level of artistry. There was a lot a of great critical response as well! The LA Times called it “An Earthquake in motion picture history, and the New York Times said “Terrific as anything that ever appeared on the screen,” and “Motion picture history was made …” One critic even compared it to the early works of the Ballet Russe under Diaghilev. (Remember the name Diaghilev – he’s going to be coming up again throughout the Fantasia podcast series.) Other critics went so far as to compare the advancement in conceptualism of the movie to being as great as the inclusion of sound in the movies. But despite all this positive response,  it just wasn’t a big hit. Some have said that the reason was that the critics took a purist attitude and trashed it, but others have said that the general populace couldn’t really think about art when they were more worried about a genocidal dictator that was slowly but surely conquering Europe. Others think that people just weren’t ready for what Fantasia was bringing to the screen.

In response to pressure stemming from the lack of immediate popularity of the movie, it was  cut by 50 minutes and put through general distributions, where it continued to not make much money. It was restored and released again in 1946, and still did not produce a positive return on it’s cost — but Disney never regretted making it.

The 1969 release poster makes is the biggest deviation from the classic Disney style of all the posters released.

It finally succeed upon it’s release in 1956 – 16 years after it’s original release. It was a hit, then, but nobody seems to know why it was a hit at this time specifically rather than before. Perhaps we were all just finally ready for music and moving pictures together. It was released for theatres again in 1963 and 1969, and began to gain a popularity with the psychedelic set. Animator Ollie Johnson said in a 1990 Herald Journal article of that release:  ”They thought we were on a trip when we made it … every time we’d go to talk to a school or something, they’d ask us what we were on.” The 1969 release was advertised with posters designed in the psychedelic style of the time, which either deliberately or coincidentally tapped into that market.

In 1981 (41 years after the original release), the original sound recordings of Fantasia had so deteriorated that Fantasia became ANOTHER first in film by giving it the first ever digitally recorded motion picture score. Conductor Irving Costal, who had supervised music on West Side Story and The Sound of Music was brought in to re-record the original music, but took great care to remain faithful to the Stochowski (who passed away in 1976) interpretations. Now if you have SOMEWHERE a recording of the Fantasia soundtrack – perhaps on record or on a laserdisc or betamax or something around your family home that predates that year, it might be the original Stochowski recording. If you do, PLEASE let us know, we would LOVE an opportunity to hear the original version.

This 1980 release poster is my favorite. The design and the colors are so clean, and so exciting to look at.

Significance!

In retrospect, it became the turning point for the design of Mickey Mouse. It was the first movie to ever merge sound and music in such an artful and abstract way.

Breakdown!

The seven pieces in the movie are as follows:

1 – “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Bach, interpretively animated to create a scene that looks an awful lot like an impressionist painting brought to motion.

2 – “The Nutcracker Suite” by Tchaikovsky. Various sections of the ballet that we now think of as holiday music is reinterpreted to scenes of nature, filled with dancing plants, goldfish, fairies, and depictions of the changing of the seasons. Pieces from the ballet include Dance of the Flutes, Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, Waltz of the Flowers, Chinese Dance, Arabian Dance, and Russian Dance.

3 – “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Dukas. Illustrates the story of an apprentice who takes on more than he can handle, with the role of the appretice played by Micky Mouse! Perhaps the most important of the pieces of Fantasia to the personal history of the Walt Disney Company, this was the first appearance of the Mickey Mouse that we know and love today.

The 1990, 50th anniversary release poster featured gradients and colors very much of the 80s - and there's even some airbrushing in there!

4 – “The Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky. Disney set this already controversial ballet to scenes of dinosaurs and comets, interpreting ‘spring’ to be the early history of our planet, rather than the season of spring. This is the most controversial section of the mivie, probably because it is the only section in which the composer was alive at the time of filming.

After this section was an intermission where the audience gets to meet the soundtrack in a cute animated sequence.

5 – “Pastoral” (or 6^th) Symphony, by Beethoven. Set in a scene of greek mythology, this was Suzannah’s favorite scene – the colors, the flowers, the ponies, it was tailor made of a  little girl. It also features some pretty racist imagery that has since been cut from the movie, and the only frontal nudity in a Disney film. OBVIOUSLY in a Dinsey film, lol.

6 – “Dance of the Hours” by Ponchielli. The blatant comedy scene of the piece, this features ballet being performed by the most unlikely of creatures – ostriches, elephants, hippos and crocodiles.

7 – “Night on Bald Mountain” by Mussorgsky & “Ave Maria” by Schubert. The movie is wrapped up by the only spiritual or religious section of the piece, showing the antics of the giant demon Chernabog (often perceived in the move as the devil) followed by a piece depicting the tranquility and rest offered by faith.

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

The Contessa, Winner of the gold in fencing.

Animalympics was born as a 7-minute short when creator Steven Lisberger made it happen out of $10K grant from the American Film Institute shortly after his graduation from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. NBC backed his dream to turn the short into a full-length movie, complete with seven figure budget. Orginally made with the intention of releasing it theatrically, but that’s not what happened. What happened is that it was picked up by NBC to air as two specials, (one showing the winter Olympic sports, one showing the summer) previewing the  the 1980  Olympics in Moscow. The winter games section aired, but summer games section didn’t, as the United States boycotted the Olympics (taking place in Moscow) when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The two parts were edited together and new footage added to form the Animalympics film that most people know, and it was released in 1980 on HBO. Cult following commenced! It’s a little more than an hour and fifteen minutes long, and  Steven Lisberger,  wrote, directed, and produced the work with Producer Donald Kushner and writer Michael Fremer, both of whom would also join him on what is perhaps his best-known movie: Tron.

Animalympics was a cartoon depiction of the Olympics, featuring animals as athletes, with a background storyline punctuated by strings of punny scenes and sight gags. Here’s some samples of the punny script. The voice cast that seems to have been pretty exclusively pulled from the cast of Saturday Night Live: Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, etc. This cast isn’t the only thing that makes this movie come across as totally 80′s – the music and the visuals, and pop culture references are incredibly dated. (There’s also a few jokes about nationality and race that have been edited out of some editions of the movie that somewhat borderline by modern standards, but at least everyone seems to be mocked with equal disrespect.)That doesn’t work against the movie – if anything it makes it more fun. But apart from being a basically fun and lighthearted  movie, there’s a couple of things that really make it stand out. The first is the animation, and how it works with the soundtrack, the second the portrayal of women, and the third is the fact that the movie proved to be a proving ground for people who would go on to have great animation careers.

Animation & Music

There isn’t much of story to the movie – it’s more of a series of gags and tableaus about athletics, the Olympics, and nationality – but there is a nice little background story that gives the movie something to push it forward, and it’s a surprisingly deep story. The principle is that there is a 14 day marathon (realistic, right?) that ends up in a dead heat between the reigning champion, a French goat called Rene Fromage, and the first woman ever be a contender to win the marathon, an african lioness called Kit Mambo. They spend most of the movie pacing each other, while we get glimpses of what is running through their minds – all that they’ve sacrificed to be there, and what winning would mean to them.

The animation isn’t consistent. The dubbing usually doesn’t match up. There are definitely moments when incredible reproduction of natural gesture is achieved. There also a lot of recycled  motion cycles and sections of frozen frames with voice overs. The nature of the movie really supports a slapstick approach to motion and movement, but it’s not universal, especially during the musical interludes.

The soundtrack is by Graham Gouldman, a Brit who went on to work on the soundtracks to a lot of movies and shows, including The Social Network, The Office, Deuce Bigalow,  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. It’s a series of songs set up to give emotional consistency to the piece, and brings a reasonably deep level of upbeat emotion to a lot of the otherwise jokey scenes. The only bittersweet musical piece gives us a look into the mind of Rene, the French goat. It explores everything that he’s done to get to where he is, and what he had to give up to do it.  As we watch it, we learn that while it’s too late for him to change course , he’s realizing that what he really wants isn’t the victory.

Maybe I’m super-sucesptible to the emotional side of this tableau, but I see a lot high quality animation in this sequence. The emotion of the character’s actions are enhanced by the music, but stands alone as well.

Women in the Movie

Women stand out a little in this movie to me. Most of the characters are parodies of athletes of the era – but children watching that movie then and later on didn’t really know that – all they saw was a diverse cast of ladies. Kit Mambo was a strong, competetive character, who goes through a surprisingly realistic reaction of becoming irritated when she realises she’s interested in her competitor. The fact that Kit exists at all is kind of awesome, and this is the reason why.

Consider this for a moment – women’s distance running was not part of the Olympics when Animalympics was made. The women’s marathon wasn’t even a part of the Olympics until 1988, nearly ten years after Animalympics started production! (Incidentally, Avon is one of the reasons that changed.) Women weren’t allowed to run in any marathon at all until 1972, just a few years before Animalympics was made!Yes, that’s right folks, as recently as 40-50 years ago, women were banned from running marathons because it supposedly caused damage to the uterus. The first woman to run in the Boston Marathon with a registered number (Katharine Switzer) ran  in 1967, and that was apparently so incendiary that a race official attempted physical assault on her during the race. Fortunately, a male runner proceded to literally punch the official off the track  - and that’s a story unto itself that you can catch up on here, on this Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast.

My favorite character by far came out of the fencing sequence. I don’t even care if this was a parody of some other scene – it’s set up so a big mean warthog beats up a little squirrel, and a swashbuckling hero – who just happens to be a LADY – shows up, fences him into a corner, wins gold medal and dashes off. She’s a female Robin Hood, a female Zorro, and she’s awesome! How many lady swashbucklers do you remember seeing in animation, or for that matter, live movies and tv?

The animation is also particulalry on-point in this scene.

Proving Ground for Greats

This movie turned out to be a proving ground for a lot of famous people in the animation world. Our beloved Brad Bird was an animator on this movie – his earliest animation credit! Animator and Art Director Rogers Allers would go on to work on almost all of the Disney Renaissance movies, directing the Lion King and writing on the highly underrater Emperoro’s New Groove. Animator Bill Kroyer would also go on to direct – among other things – FernGully: The Last Rainforest. Dan Haskett would go on to work on numerous broadcast tv shows including Smurft, Bill & Ted, Batman, and Johnny Bravo. Chuck Harvey, John Norton, and Bruce Woodside, they all got their start on Animalympics. Well, Bruce Woodside had been working Animalympics, but it was still early in his career.

Other notable moment include and underwater sequence that was clearly inspired by The Yellow Submarine, designed by Arne Wong.

By the way – this is NOT to be confused with Animal World Soccer, which has been making the rounds in the past few years as potentially the very worst animation that has ever been made. I’ve put my favorite links from that on the website, and it’s HILARIOUS.

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

Spoilers are all over this podcast! Go watch it if you haven’t before listening – we both think you should go see it anyway!

We have a lot of articles to recommend to go with Brave. NOT the one that compared Merida to Bella Swan – and said they were alike!

Brenda Chapman, director, writer, and story developer on Brave discusses the origins of the movie.

As per usual, Pixar invented new tech for a movie. Learn more about Merida’s hair system here.

LA Times give a harsher review than we did, but that’s their job.

Lauren Faust, My Little Pony re-inventor, feminist, and animator reacted thusly when Brenda Chapman was replaced.

LA Times gave a pretty harsh assessment of the same.

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

Jon doesn’t have a computer yet, but he has two tin cans and a string, so we are back to recording – YAY!

Our themes for this season are going to include women in animation (professional women in animation, lady characters in cartoons, and what cartoons are the best for girls. We’re inspired by Brave & Brenda Chapman) and the relationship between animation and music!

What are we watching/looking forward to/ have been doing since we last podcasted?

It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown!

• LEGEND OF KORRA!
• Suzannah is cancelling cable and switching to Hulu and Netflix through her Wii. Saving $15 a WEEK!
• Check out Winters in Lavelle - by Jon’s friend from college!
• Jon is looking forward to Gravity Falls!
• Suzannah’s watched the Flashbeagle DVD and She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown. Surprisingly anatomically accurate animation!
• Jon loves Bon Voyage and Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.
• Happiness is a Warm Blanket is AMAZEBALLS!
• Jon wants more Thundercats, but we may not get another season! And they did such a cool shoutout to Rankin Bass!
• We’re looking forward to the new TMNT, and you can’t tell us not to! 
• Jon’s been rewatching Woody Woodpecker.
• Not animation related, but Grace Jones (who once gave birth to a perfume bottle on camera) hula-hooped and sang at the queen’s diamond jubilee. This chick is awesome.
• Suzannah’s watching Total Drama: Revenge of the Island.
• We both LOVE Adventure Time! Goliad is a particulalry great episode. Suzannah started on Dungeon way back, and it’s still one of her favorite Adventure Time Episodes ever!
• Jon likes Regular Show. Suzannah loves the episode where Benson has a supernova meltdown.
• We LOVE Bob’s Burgers! The proofreader in our office dressed as Tina for Halloween last year! Maybe we’ll have some pics to show!
• Tron is great, and so is Phineas & Ferb. Disney’s really be doing great things recently! Here’s the link to the song from ‘Meapless in Seattle’ that we were talking about. You can buy the whole episode here. 
• Hotel Transylvania is coming from Sony  - the first new project from Genndy Tartkovsky (creator of Dexter’s Lab, Sym-bionic Titan, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars Clone Wars.) We’re always stoked to see what he’s working on.
• ParaNormal looks exciting!
• Suzannah bought Coraline.
• Jon has never seen Finding Nemo! We’ll be going to see it when it gets the 3D release this fall!
• Jon’s looking forward to Monsters University.

Hey ATC listeners! Welcome to the end of season wrap up. It’s going to be a short podcast, and the reason for that is the same reason our season 1 is ending  earlier than we’ve planned: Jon’s computer went kablooie. He will be back as soon as he’s able to replacement, and rest assured that as much as you might be upset that you have to wait for our next episode, just think of poor Jon, who will be waiting the same amount of time to be able to check email and stream Netflix again.

First world problems, we know.

So we’re breaking from the podcast for a few weeks, but we’re going to take the downtime to be super prepared for  Season 2. We’ve had a lot of listener requests that we’d like to follow up on – and you can still send us suggestions to feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

So, in the meantime, at the end of this episode, I have special guest Steve, discussing the premier of Legend of Korra. Three cheers for Steve! I’m also going to outline a few things that Jon and I recommend of what’s been airing recently.

Thundercats has been back on the air for a little while, and an episode aired on April 14^th thatJon recommends as the highlight of the season so far. It’s called “Native Son” and deals with Tigra’s actual tribe and family (for those of you who don’t regularly watch the show, Tigra is Lion-O’s adopted brother in this incarnation of the property), and is heavily flavored with horror movie influences. It’s the first of what seems to be a series dealing with the backstory of the supporting cast of Thundercats.

My Little Pony just had their series 2 finale, which I couldn’t recommend highly enough. It was a two episode finale that aired on the same day in the same hour, featuring 3 new songs, a pretty awesome fight sequence, and really truly reads like a one-hour long Disney movie. As always, you can catch MLP on iTunes (the finale is called A Canterlot Wedding), and you can also check out the My Little Pony podcast that Jon and I put out in January to hear a lot more about what we think about the show. You can find that episode (and the rest of the ATC library on our website, Animated Things Club.)

In other news, we’re going to have another Muppet Movie, yay! The press release has been out for a while, but it’s still news to some people.

We both recommend Korra, and after the break you’ll hear Steve and I talk about the show a little bit.

Hey, ATC is on iTunes! Maybe you drop by and review us sometime, huh?

Facebook

Twitter

Email us: feedback@animatedthingsclub.com