Just a quick heads-up that I’ll be introducing a double feature Max Fleischer’s two great animated features, Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes To Town (1941) at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, California on Friday September 25th. Both will be presented in 35mm, with uncut IB Technicolor prints projected on the large screen, just as they were meant to be seen. Mark your calendar now! More details about this event will be posted when we get closer to the actual date.

Sam Henderson has uploaded a rare, heavily illustrated article about UPA on his Magic Whistle blog. The article, by Catherine Sullivan, appeared in the November 1955 issue of American Artist. The text is rather slim, but the images are from a variety of UPA works including commercials and industrials, as well as theatricals like The Jaywalker (pictured above). Worth a look.

I love this record. And I couldn’t resist showing off the label (above).

Marquis Howell (of Hobo Jazz.com and bass player for Janet Klein and her Parlor Boys) handed me this record at the show last night. He found it in a thrift shop for a buck and gave it to me as a gift. Thanks, man! I’d heard the track before, but I don’t recall ever seeing the label for it.

You can listen to the classic Daffy Duck’s Rhapsody on You Tube — as well as it’s flip side, I’m Glad That I’m Bugs Bunny, both written by Warren Foster and Michael Maltese, with incredible vocals by Mel Blanc. For more information on vintage Looney Tunes recordings, visit Golden Age Cartoons. Click thumbnails below see larger images of the labels and record sleeve.

The Iron Giant was released ten years ago today—August 6, 1999. Wired magazine celebrates the occasion with a commentary by Scott Thill that contrasts Brad Bird’s thoughtful filmmaking to today’s “dumb” Hollywood efforts like Iron Man and Transformers:

Big guns and fiery explosions have been Hollywood’s status quo for a long time, with mindless violence selling tickets — and a warlike message, which The Iron Giant stands on its head. Hogarth dons the requisite helmet and BB gun after his future pal wrecks the nearby woods, and the boy even salutes himself in a mirror, armed in defense of America against the Sputnik-launching Russians, before galloping off to meet the “enemy.”

But after watching the Iron Giant (voiced by Vin Diesel) scream in pain while caught up in power lines, Hogarth’s compassion is activated as he realizes that his interstellar visitor can communicate. It is something Mansley could realize himself, if he wasn’t so busy pursuing his wargasm. Yet he does not, and that is Bird’s brain at work: Consumed by what philosopher Theodor Adorno once controversially called the “authoritarian personality,” Mansley is possessed by cynicism and a quest for power. He simply cannot conceive a world where robots fall from the sky to do anything other than annihilate America.

Here’s one for the hard-core cartoon historians: Recently, Brew reader Neil was replaying an old Paramount Popeye cartoon, and made a surprising audio find. On the soundtrack of Shuteye Popeye (1952), when the mouse’s audio is slowed down to about 40%, it’s clear that the track is actually a vocal outtake (perhaps director Isadore Sparber, or I suspect Seymour Kneitel) protesting that he doesn’t know what to say. Have a listen for yourself:

Francis Thompson (1908-2003) made this striking work, NY, NY: A Day in New York, in 1957. Trained as a painter, he was interested in finding a way to capture the effects of Surrealism and Cubism in photography. He achieved that through a variety of lenses, reflectors, optical effects and editing tricks. The film works both in the abstract and narrative sense, and while it’s not animated, Thompson’s creative use of the cinema medium is fresher and more emotionally engaging than many of today’s artificial worlds created through motion graphics and digital means. Thompson was secretive about how he made the film, describing the production simply as, “a magic, secret process of bending, twisting, and turning inside out. It was a self-funded project that involved my roaming about New York City with a camera over my shoulder.”

Aldous Huxley once wrote about this film:

“And then there is what may be called the Distorted Documentary a new form of visionary art, admirably exemplified by Mr. Francis Thompson’s film, NY, NY. In this very strange and beautiful picture we see the city of New York as it appears when photographed through multiplying prisms, or reflected in the backs of spoons, polished hub caps, spherical and parabolic mirrors. We still recognize houses, people, shop fronts, taxicabs, but recognize them as elements in one of those living geometries which are so characteristic of the visionary experience. The invention of this new cinematographic art seems to presage (thank heaven!) the supersession and early demise of non-representational painting. It used to be said by the non-representationalists that colored photography had reduced the old-fashioned portrait and the old-fashioned landscape to the rank of otiose absurdities. This, of course, is completely untrue. Colored photography merely records and preserves, in an easily reproducible form, the raw materials with which portraitists and landscape painters work. Used as Mr. Thompson has used it, colored cinematography does much more than merely record and preserve the raw materials of non-representational art; it actually turns out the finished product. Looking at NY, NY, I was amazed to see that virtually every pictorial device invented by the old masters of non-representational art and reproduced ad nauseam by the academicians and mannerists of the school, for the last forty years or more, makes its appearance, alive, glowing, intensely significant, in the sequences of Mr. Thompson’s film.

Graphic designer Heinz Edelmann, who developed the psychedelic look of the Beatles’ animated 1960s film Yellow Submarine, died on Tuesday, aged 75. The Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, where Edelman taught illustration from 1986 to 1996, confirmed the report of his death by German daily Stuutgarter Nachrichten. AP report here.

Yesterday Michael Sporn posted a commentary about how the musical composers at animation studios of the past served as a trademark for a particular studio. Each had a unique style and sound which immediately identify the cartoon to its makers.

Scott Bradley, who composed the music for MGM cartoons from 1934 through 1957, was one of the best. His delightful scores are upbeat and lush sounding, and perfectly capture the right feel of the upscale MGM animation. But what if Bradley had composed a score for a B-Studio like Universal? Well it just so happens that Bradley did take on such a freelance assignment in 1938 just prior to joining MGM full time, where he’d be under contract for the rest of his career (He had previously been a composer at large, creating music for Ub Iwerks and Harman-Ising cartoons).

Baby Kittens (1938) is an unremarkable, run-of-the-mill Universal short, directed by Alex Lovy for Walter Lantz Productions. It’s made even more unbearable by the voice-over “thoughts” of the dog character. Print uploaded (embedded below) has time code obscuring part of the picture, but we present it here for its soundtrack not the animation or story. Bradley’s trademark themes and music cues are all there, and are much more sophistcated than what Lantz house composer Frank Marsales was doing at the time. If you close your eyes and just listen to the track (and try to ignore the dog), you might think you are listening to a 40s MGM cartoon - proving Michael Sporn’s point entirely.