Yes, the big animation studios (Warner Bros., Disney, etc.) dominate the list. But a few “indies” manage to squeak in there. Take for example Winsor McCay’s seminal 1914 creation “Gertie the Dinosaur.” Or Bambi Meets Godzilla. A student film created by Marv Newland in 1969, Bambi Meets Godzilla (above) runs only 90 seconds. Of which, 48 seconds are devoted to the opening credits, and 27 seconds to the closing credits, leaving only 12 seconds of “action,” which is mostly stillness. The timing is the funny.
The short film circulated in theaters across the U.S., shown before screenings of Philippe de Broca’s feature film King of Hearts. Over the years the publicly-available versions of Bambi Meets Godzilla became worn and faded. So, in 2013, Coda Gardner produced a frame-for-frame HD re-creation. You can watch it below.
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In 2003, Disney released a six minute animated short called Destino, finally bringing closure to a project that began 57 years earlier. The story of Destino goes way back to 1946 when two very different cultural icons, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí, decided to work together on a cartoon. The film was storyboarded by Dalí and John Hench (a Disney studio artist) over the course of eight months. But then, rather abruptly, the project got tabled when The Walt Disney Company ran into financial problems.
Now fast forward 53 years, to 1999. While working on Fantasia 2000, Walt Disney’s nephew rediscovered the project and 17 seconds of original animation. Using this clip and the original storyboards, 25 animators brought the film to completion and premiered it at The New York Film Festival in 2003. Destino would receive an Oscar nomination for the Best Animated Short Film, among other accolades from critics.
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For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly inoffensive. For equally obvious reasons, the rare works that criticize the regime tend to do so rather obliquely. This wasn’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion animator Jiří Trnka, “the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe.” In its central conflict between a humble harlequin who just wants to sculpt flower pots and a giant, invasive gloved hand that forces him to make representations of itself, one senses a certain allegory to do with the dynamic between the artist and the state.
“Trnka’s personal experience of totalitarianism under the communist regime is projected and rearticulated in the meaning and knowledge he transmits through his short,” writes Renée-Marie Pizzardi in an essay at Fantasy Animation. “The state-run studios had the power to approve or censor certain topics and control funding accordingly. Trnka was thus dependent on their funding, yet resistant to their politics, and this ambiguity limited the freedom of expression in his work.”
In the harlequin, “Trnka crafts a character through which he not only portrays himself as the artist, but any free-thinking individual who gets robbed of their agency and induced into following and acting according to an ideology and regime.”
Completed in 1965, The Hand would turn out to be Trnka’s final film before his death four years later, by which time the rulers in power were hardly eager to have his animated indictment in circulation. 1968 had brought the “Prague Spring” under Alexander Dubček, a period of liberalization that turned out to be brief: about a year later, Dubček was replaced, his reforms reversed, and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic “normalized” back to the ways of the bad old days. Banned after Trnka died in 1969, The Hand would remain not legally viewable in his homeland for two decades. But today, it’s appreciated by animation enthusiasts the world over, and its expression of yearning for creative freedom still resonates. In the late sixties or here in the twenty-first century, fear the government that fears your puppets.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
MTV stands for Music Television, and when the network launched in 1981, its almost entirely music video-based programming was true to its name. Within a decade, however, its mandate had widened to the point that it had become the natural home for practically any exciting development in American youth culture. And for many MTV viewers in the early nineteen-nineties, youthful or otherwise, nothing was quite so exciting as Liquid Television, whose every broadcast constituted a veritable festival of animation that pushed the medium’s boundaries of possibility — as well, every so often, as its boundaries of taste.
Liquid Television’s original three-season run began in the summer of 1991 and ended in early 1995. All throughout, its format remained consistent, rounding up ten or so shorts, each created by different artists. Their themes could vary wildly, and so could their aesthetics: any given broadcast might contain more or less conventional-looking cartoons, but also stickmen, puppets, early computer graphics, subverted nineteen-fifties imagery (that mainstay of the Gen‑X sensibility), Japanese anime, and even live action, as in the recurring drag-show sitcom “Art School Girls of Doom” or the multi-part adaptation of Charles Burns’ Dogboy.
Burns’ is hardly the the only name associated with Liquid Television that comics and animation fans will recognize. Others who gained exposure through it include Bill Plympton, John R. Dilworth, Richard Sala, and Mike Judge, whose series Beavis and Butthead and feature film Office Space both began as shorts seen on Liquid Television.
The Tongal video above credits the show’s influence to the insight of the show’s creator Japhet Asher, who saw that “the attention span of your average TV viewer, particularly young people, was getting shorter and shorter.” Hence Liquid Television’s model: “If you didn’t like the current short, another one, which would be totally different, would be along in a few minutes. Furthermore, if a segment was so inexplicably bizarre and brain-tickling, perhaps an even more compelling one would come next.” At the time, this would have been taken by some observers — much like MTV itself — as a disturbing reflection of an addled, over-stimulated younger generation. But with Youtube still about a decade and a half away, it’s fair to say they hadn’t seen anything yet.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In previous centuries, unless you were a member of the nobility, a wealthy religious order, or a merchant guild, your chances of spending any significant amount of time with a Medieval tapestry were slim. Though “much production was relatively coarse, intended for decorative purposes,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the tapestry still commanded high prices, just as it commanded respect for its owner. And as other decorative arts of the time preserved historical memory—or certain political versions of it, at least—tapestry designs might embody “celebratory or propagandistic themes” in their weft and warp.
“Enriched with silk and gilt metallic thread,” writes the Met, “such tapestries were a central component of the ostentatious magnificence used by powerful secular and religious rulers to broadcast their wealth and might.” Such is one of the most famous of these works, the Bayeux Tapestry, which commemorates the 1066 victory of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. The famous wall hanging, housed at the Bayeux Museum in Normandy, was “probably commissioned in the 1070s” by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, making it a very early example of the form. So the site of a Victorian-era replica writes, and yet “nothing known is certain about the tapestry’s origins.” (The first written record of it dates from 1476.)
While the Bayeux Tapestry may have been inaccessible to most people for however many centuries it has existed, you can now stand before it in its home of Bayeux, or see the very convincing replica at Britain’s Reading Museum. (You’ll note in both cases that the Bayeux tapestry is not, in fact, a tapestry, woven on a loom, but a painstaking, hand-stitched embroidery.) Or, rather than traveling, you can watch the video above, an animated rendition of the tapestry’s story by filmmaker David Newton and sound designer Marc Sylvan.
During the years 1064 to the fateful 1066, a fierce rivalry took shape as the ailing King Edward the Confessor’s advisor Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror vied for the crown. Once Edward died in 1066, Harold seized the throne, prompting William to invade and defeat him at the Battle of Hastings. The Tapestry gives us a graphic history of this bloody contest, “a story,” writes the Bayeux Museum, “broadly in keeping with the accounts of authors of the 11th century.” “The Tapestry’s depiction of the Battle of Hastings,” historian Robert Bartlett tells us, “is the fullest pictorial record of a medieval battle in existence”—and the animation above makes it come alive with sound and movement.
Note: The Animated Bayeux Tapestry above was originally created as a student project. David Newton provided the animation, and Marc Sylvan created the original music and sound effects. Enjoy!
If you enjoy modern Japanese animation, you can no doubt name several masterpieces of the form off the top of your head, whether acclaimed series like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop to the work of cinema auteurs like Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyazaki. What may cross your mind less readily is how much these and other anime productions owe to Astro Boy, or as it was known in Japan, Tetsuwan Atomu (“Mighty Atom”). First conceived on the page by artist Osamu Tezuka, remembered today as “the Godfather of Manga” (i.e., Japanese comics), it became an animated television series in 1962, a production overseen — and fatefully under-budgeted — by Tezuka himself.
“It was a stupidly low number,” Tezuka later wrote in his autobiography of the per-episode figure he quoted to his reluctant sponsors. Yet despite the manifold production stresses it caused, it forced — like any severe limitation — a good deal of creativity.
In time, writes Matt Alt in Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, “the beloved hallmarks of Japanese animated fare — the striking of theatrical poses, the lingering freeze-frames, the limited ranges of motion — evolved from desperate cost-saving workarounds into factors that distinguish anime from content produced in other lands.”
When they were first publicly screened in November of 1962, the first episodes of Astro Boy were accompanied by a lesser-known Tezuka project: Tales from a Certain Street Corner (ある街角の物語), a 40-minute film crafted with an “anti-Disney” aesthetic. At Nishikata Film Review, Cathy Munroe Hotes describes this as “the first of Tezuka’s jikken animation – or experimental works – which Tezuka made for artistic rather than commercial purposes. Although the animation does employ some unusual techniques such as a POV shot of a plane tree seed flying to the ground, it is not ‘experimental’ in the usual sense of the word.”
The term better suits some of the other works included in the playlist at the top of the post, which collects clips of a variety of Tezuka’s experimental and quasi-experimental animations produced between the mid-nineteen-sixties and the late eighties (many of which can easily be seen in full on Youtube), which collectively exhibit both imaginative power and a sense of humor. “Memory” (めもりい), from 1964, mixes traditional animation with Monty Python-style cutouts to depict the yearnings of a postwar salaryman. The omnibus Pictures at an Exhibition (展覧会の絵), made a couple of years later, satirizes modern society in ten different ways, each scored with a movement of the eponymous Mussorgsky piece.
By the last years of Tezuka’s life, the style of his animation seems to have evolved in several directions at once. “Jumping” (ジャンピング) from 1984, imagines what it would be like to jump ever-more-superhuman heights from a first-person perspective; “Push” (プッシュ), from 1987, uses a more conventionally cartoonish aesthetic to render a post-apocalyptic world dominated by vending machines. That same year, Tezuka — a descendant of famed samurai Hanzō Hattori — also released “Muramasa” (村正), a nuclear-annihilation allegory about a haunted sword. The threat posed to Earth by man was also the major theme of Legend of the Forest (森の伝説), left unfinished by the time of Tezuka’s death in 1989 but later picked up by his son Makoto: just one of the countless animators, Japanese and otherwise, working under the Godfather’s influence today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A vague sense of disquiet settled over Europe in the period between World War I and World War II. As the slow burn of militant ultranationalism mingled with jingoist populism, authoritarian leaders and fascist factions found mounting support among a citizenry hungry for certainty. Europe’s growing trepidation fostered some of the 20th century’s most striking painterly, literary, and cinematic depictions of the totalitarianism that would soon follow. It was almost inevitable that this period would see the birth of the first deeply philosophical animated film, known as The Idea.
The Idea first emerged as a wordless novel in 1920, drawn by Frans Masereel. Masereel, a close friend of Dadaist and New Objectivist artist George Grosz, had created a stark, black-and-white story about the indomitable nature of ideas. Employing thick, aggressive lines obtained through woodcut printing, Masereel depicted a conservative political order’s fight against the birth of a new idea, which eventually flourished in spite of the establishment’s relentless attempts to suppress it.
Setting to work in 1930, a Czech filmmaker named Berthold Bartosch spent two years animating The Idea. Bartosch’s visual style remained true to Masereel’s harsh, vivid lines. His version of the story, however, took a decidedly bleaker turn—one that was more reminiscent of the writings of his compatriot, Franz Kafka. Whereas Masereel believed that the purity of good ideas would overwhelm their opposition, Bartosch, working a decade closer to the Nazis’ ascendancy, was wary of such idealism.
Above, you can watch what film historian William Moritz has called “the first animated film created as an artwork with serious, even tragic, social and philosophical themes.” Paired with a haunting score composed by Arthur Honegger, the 25-minute animation is a powerfully moving meditation on art, struggle, purity of thought, and populist savagery that remains untarnished after eight decades.
Trying to describe the plot of Fantasmagorie, the world’s first animated cartoon, is a folly akin to putting last night’s dream into words:
I was dressed as a clown and then I was in a theater, except I was also hiding under this lady’s hat, and the guy behind us was plucking out the feathers, and I was maybe also a jack in the box? And I had a fishing pole that turned into a plant that ripped my head off, but only for a few seconds. And then there was a giant champagne bottle and an elephant, and then, suddenly I was on an operating table, and you know how sometimes in a dream, it’s like you’re being crushed to death? Except I escaped by blowing myself up like a balloon and then I hopped onto the back of this horse and then I woke up.
The brainchild of animation pioneer Émile Cohl (1857 – 1938), the trippy silent short from 1908 is composed of 700 drawings, photographed onto negative film and double-exposed.
Clocking in at under two minutes, it’s definitely more diverting than listening to your bed mate bumble through their subconscious’ latest incoherent narrative.
The film’s title is an homage to a mid-19th century variant of the magic lantern, known as the fantasmograph, while its playful, nonsensical content is in the spirit of the Incoherent Movement of the 1880s.
Cohl, who cut his teeth on political caricature and Guignol puppet theatre, went on to create over 250 films over the next 15 years, expanding his explorations to include the realms of live action and stop motion animation.
Above, you can watch a somewhat restored version of the film, featuring music by Fabio Napodano. To get a feel for the original grainier silent film, watch here.
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