Christmas in Manhattan, 1934

...as imagined by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Woody Van Dyke, inspired by Dashiell Hammett and interpreted by Myrna Loy, William Powell and Asta, I give you Christmas morning with the Charles family.

Walt Disney sends his regrets, 1938

click to enlarge

The original of the letter shown here was an item for sale at the bookshop I once worked in, Larry Edmunds in Hollywood (still there, and still well worth a visit). At $400 dollars my 21 year old self couldn't think of buying it, but at least I made a copy. It must have been a quite a soiree for Walt to have been invited; he certainly took some pains to produce an elegant reply.

The woman he's responding to, Carrie Jacobs Bond, was an author of popular songs famous in the first half of the twentieth century. Wikipedia cites her best-known composition as that wedding stalwart "I Love You Truly", but my favorite would be "A Perfect Day".

I happen to know that one because it's beautifully performed in a favorite film of mine, the Mitchell Leisen-directed "Remember The Night"(1940). For an added Disney Studio connection bonus the singer is none other than Sterling Holloway--the voice of Disney's Cheshire Cat, Kaa and Winnie the Pooh:

Great Inspiration: music-only soundtrack for Lampwick's transformation in "Pinocchio".

I just found this on the blog written by Jaime Weinman, Something Old, Nothing New-which he in turn found on youtube. It's arguably the most frightening scene in animation history-Pinocchio witnessing the wages of childhood sin on his new friend Lampwick.
Everyone's seen it numerous times, but here it is presented with no dialogue or other track-nothing save the dramatic score of composer Leigh Harline. The character animation is primarily the work of Fred Moore, Ollie Johnston, Milt Neil, Milt Kahl and Eric Larson.



I can't remember how I initially found Weinman's blog (and in all honesty I don't check in with him often enough these days), but in my internet wanderings he's one of the best writers on film and other popular entertainment I've come across. His entries are frequently so fascinating that I'll become interested in a title I either had no patience for or any curiosity about before he examined it. That's obviously not the case with "Pinocchio", a film I probably put at the top of my animation mountain, but it figures it's Jaime who shares something that's a must-see for anyone who loves animation. Be sure to read his accompanying comments about composer Harline.

Pix[ar] is [not just] for kids.

"If you want to make a movie for children then make a movie for children. The experience for a parent or guardian is that they are spending time with their children at their child's level. The movie is not meant to satisfy an adult in the audience. You do not have to consider adults when creating content or story lines for "childrens" movies. Far to often mature content is blended into scripts only to promote the feature as "something for all to see". The marketing of this movie was selfishly aimed at drawing young children to the theatre. You call it "PG" but then you market it for a younger audience. Creating many 6, 7, 8 ,9 and 10 yr old Birthday parties/gatherings when this content is way too deep for them to handle and or enjoy. Pixar...Step back and really think about what you product is saying and who will be watching and effected by it. Two thumbs down from Daughter and Dad."
— ke flannigan, boston

-from the New York Times readers' responses to Manohla Dargis' review of "Up"

I finally saw "Up" last weekend, and I mean to write some of my first impressions in a future post. I'd avoided most of the reviews, wanting to see the film with as little baggage as possible, so I had to go back to see what was said about it including its review in the New York Times. Ms. Dargis' take was mostly positive, I think-albeit with some slightly schizophrenic and vague caveats. Her piece seemed possibly edited down.

What really caught my eye was the "Reader's Review" that I quoted above--a comment posted underneath the online version of Ms. Dargis' review. I thought it would be a good springboard for writing a bit about "Up" in particular and all animated films more generally.

So about the comment of "ke": what he writes is simply wrong.

Now, I'm of the opinion that very few if any reactions to a film are ever wrong. How could they be? All artistic experiences are subjective; one person's honest impression is as valid as another's, really, as far as it goes.

Obviously there are plenty of riders on that subjectivity: one person simply might have what I'd call better taste (more subjectivity at work there): they might be more educated about films, more experienced in life, awake, more receptive, generally appreciative of art and/or craftsmanship in all its forms(this can lead to a negative as well as a positive reaction, by the way). Another might have life experiences that drastically affect his or her judgement of a film, whether it's "The Sorrow and the Pity" they're watching or "Duck Soup".

All this might seem obvious, but I've read reviews from professionals that I admire-Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, et al-where once in a while they seem-to me at least-to be oblivious to some pretty extreme personal biases. But the bottom line whether professional or paying audience member is that each is entitled to their own opinion--it's the nature of the art.

In the comment above "ke" is taking another tack entirely. He's dead certain that the filmmakers of "Up" have made a cardinal error by misunderstanding who their audience is--children. He's actually dead wrong. Because children as some separate group are not who the film was made for. Certainly it was hoped they'd be part of the audience. Absolutely the reactions of children mattered to the crew, whether they happen to be parents themselves or not.
But so do the reactions of the dads in the audience--and the moms, teenagers, older people, and any other permutation. All of them make up the imagined audience. Yet even then, without forgetting or dismissing them, they aren't who the films are made for, it's who they are shown to--hopefully with the result of entertainment.

I'm going out on a bit of a limb here because I don't work at Pixar, I haven't spoken to the people who worked on this about it, and to date I haven't read any interviews specifically about its production. But I'm still sure I'm right.

"Up" was made for the same people it was made by. That isn't accusing the artists of solipsism-the inability to look beyond one's nose. It's about telling a story with a with a personal meaning, a personal intent. When you start with that, you-and eventually your coworkers-are the litmus test for whether your idea communicates. You know what you want to do, and then you proceed to do your best--everyone pitching in--to accomplish it.

Contrary to some reports Pixar's method isn't really a special secret, magic trick or rocket science. It also isn't easy. I'm sure sometimes it doesn't turn out films exactly as originally imagined. But it stems from individual imaginations: someone with an idea they're totally committed to doing. Other artists are brought on immediately to work on it if it's a go; they too put their stamp, their spin, their characters and their ideas into the mix. The film story usually begins to change, veering one way, then the other. There are peaks and valleys aplenty in the long years of production. There always are. I haven't read of any animated feature production anywhere that was entirely smooth sailing in the story process (well, maybe "Gulliver's Travels" at Fleischer's in 1938-enough said). So with all that work involved over a period of years, there has to be, hopefully, someone at the helm who knows what they want and why it should be there. To say a film is aimed "at children' is too vague, broad and vast a goal. But to please the child, young adult and grownup that the director has inside him or her is not only doable, it's imperative. Certainly the head of a production seeks out other eyes and ears and opinions, but the buck has to to stop somewhere and someone needs to know what the point of it all is.

It's long been a monkey on the backs of both animation lovers and professionals that "cartoons" have been so firmly fixed in many people's minds as primarily directed at children--often, small children. With every non-kid animation watershed in our generation--Roger Rabbit, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons, Beauty and the Beast, Shrek, anything produced by Tim Burton, anything written and directed by Brad Bird--it's been hoped that the old cliches about "animation is really the domain of wee ones" would finally be busted wide open--or at least dropped by the critics who really should know better by now.

But weirdly, with all those successes and very un-totlike films' releases--even with a studio or two whose entire output is well-known and successful for more adult oriented comedies--it still hasn't happened, and each time a film is released there are always too many writers who scratch their heads about why on earth something not specifically focused on preschoolers found its way into an animated film.

They forgot, if they ever knew, that even the very first, most famous commercial animated feature had adult thrills, action, and moments of beauty that were aimed at everyone: the grand premiere of "Snow White" had virtually no children present at all (exceptions being perhaps Shirley Temple, or Wallace Beery or Eddie Cantor taking a daughter). No, the stamping, shrieking, laughing and applauding audience was made up of all of the adult producers, directors and actors of Hollywood--everyone from Zanuck to Dietrich. A film made by adults, for adults-and for everyone else who could enjoy it, whatever their age. Why has this been so completely forgotten? Why is it a forgetting that recurs over and over again?

The agenda or template "ke" thinks Pixar should be following is a harrowing one. I've read enough to know that not everyone in animation fandom is pleased with "Up", but I can't believe that anyone, no matter what their take, would believe the answer is Pixar gearing their features for small children.

Why is this father so annoyed that the filmmakers of "Up"--a fable about an elderly man at the end of his life that includes a little boy but has much more, plainly, to do with the elderly man--didn't aim it at a "child's level" in any case? Which world does his daughter live in? Does it have old people and adults in it? Has his little girl ever felt sorry for someone(or herself), or had any sort of loss--even if it was only, say, a balloon she let go of? Does she like to play pretend? Does she like animals and stories?

If the answer to any of those questions is "yes" than she's got a lot in common with the filmmakers, and she's just as much a part of the potential audience as "ke".

Or "jl" for that matter.

RIP Jack Cardiff

A great artist has died: Jack Cardiff was 94, a cinematographer of genius and a notable director. Perhaps the most brilliant "painter of light" with Technicolor that the movies have had--I certainly would given him that title without any hesitation. He worked with Hitchcock, Olivier, and John Huston("The African Queen") to name a few highlights, but for me it was his collaboration on the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, "The Archers", that seals it.

Kim Hunter in the opening minutes of "A Matter of Life and Death", one of my favorite films. It was the first Powell & Pressburger film I saw, and its color took my breath away. Id never seen anything like it before.

Obviously this isn't about "animation", but animation is filmmaking, and this is filmmaking of the highest standard-and also, the most imaginative and artistic. Thankfully not "artistic" in the usual way it's used for film-something noncommercial, or worse, dull-but in the very same sense as it's applied to the best of animation. I've always felt that animation has as much to teach live action film as the other way round, and I've been pleased to find that some of the top talents in live action today agree. Yet so much of what could be done with design, color and every other aspect of assembling a film shot by shot, scene by scene seems to make no use of the extra-ordinary applications that animation can produce so brilliantly.

In Jack Cardiff live action had a man who thought out of the box, and the results are obvious. Each of the shots reproduced here is a screen capture from his films. I could and should add more, but these are what I found from some of the DVD review sites on the net. One of those has a terrific review of AMOLAD, great reading for anyone, which is here. If it doesn't make you want to see it, nothing will. I've seen it myself several times with an audience(Martin Scorcese, a huge P&P fan, was responsible for its rerelease some years ago), and it's a wonderful experience, but it's on DVD as well. However you watch any of these films, turn off the phone, sit yourself down and don't do anything but give them your full attention for their running time. I'm sure it will take only the first few minutes to see why..




from "Black Narcissus", another masterpiece

So here's to the life work of a very important figure in our shared industry-film. Hail and farewell, Jack Cardiff.

Donald Duck and Ginger Rogers

Ginger at work, winding Donald. Check out the version wearing what looks like a sombrero behind her.

Lovers of classic film often double as lovers of everyday items from the same era--clothes, magazines, housewares--or toys. Watch enough films of the 1930s and occasionally a famous face will spring out from the prop settings : Betty Boop, Snow White, Bugs Bunny, etc. It's always a treat to see something that would be a vauluable collectible now featured then as what it was meant to be in the first place--an inexpensive child's plaything. There are many examples. This might be the most extensive: in a really fine comedy from a great year for movies, Garson Kanin''s 1939 film "Bachelor Mother" has terrific performances from Ginger Rogers, David Niven, the incomparable Charles Coburn--and Donald Duck.



It's quite a display of product placement: Disney providing numerous sizes and permutations of Donald Duck toys for their distributor, RKO. And one particular windup waddling, quacking Donald has a crucial role throughout--right up to the denoument of the story. Curiously, although the Duck is in the film as part of a large department store's toy department stock, I've spotted no glimpses of Mickey or any other Disney characters on the set. It's all Donald--dozens and dozens of him.


Bachelor Mother is such a well-written and cleverly plotted comedy--one of the very funniest of its era. That it could be made at all well after the Production Code was in full effect is a testament to--well, I don't know what, but it has some really wild double entendres (and some flat out jaw-droppers), unsurprising as the story is one of an unwed mother--albeit a mistaken one. It just works, squeezing comedy out of every opportunity, as well as some charming if improbably screwball romance.

He even features in a brief, slightly hallucinogenic montage

The screen caps here (only a few of The Duck's scenes represented) are from a colorized version on YouTube; it was made in glorious black and white and should be seen that way. Look for it on Turner Classic Movies.
Your trivia for the week.


quacking away

Film studios need their archives/libraries/past to thrive

this photograph is titled "Wrecking ball at the movie palace"; I think it's apropos

I periodically keep apprised of industry doings by scanning Nikki Finke's peppery blog Deadline Hollywood Daily. Like the trades(Variety and the Holllywood Reporter), I've found that it's in those supposedly non-animation arenas that I always seem to find out the dope on what's going on around town. Often we animation people are too busy drawing, animating and living life outside of work to immerse ourselves the way our live action brethren do. I can't count how many times I've read an announcement about a project I had no idea was in the works--at my own studio. Also like my colleagues I'm interested in all film and perusing film news can be addictive. So the blogs like Nikki's are interesting and indispensable.

Here's a recent piece of news from DHD that I think matters:

"WHAT A DAMN SHAME! 20th Fox To Close One Of The Last Studio Research Libraries"

If the closure happens--and there's no reason to think it won't--it's sickening.
Believe me, these archives are incredible and invaluable--much more so than even the resources of the internet can provide as they date back almost a hundred years, containing browsable materials that were painstakingy accumulated and used over and over again for countless films. Books--most probably long out of print and unavailable at any price--hundreds if not millions of photographs and clip files, all kinds of stuff. "Browsable" is the key term, and now that all of us are internet-savvy it's something I think everyone can appreciate: if you want some information on what a kitchen would look like-what they'd be cooking and eating--in 1905, sure-there are places to Google. but good luck if Amazon doesn't happen to have a title dedicated to just that topic with "1905" in the title.

On the other hand, a Studio Research Library may well have shelves filled with period cookbooks and illustrated housekeeping volumes whose titles appear nowhere on the internet. All cross-indexed and even just searchable by the naked eye on a shelf. Collected over many decades by researchers working for countless directors, art directors, costumers, set designers, writers, even actors.
The famous Margaret Herrick Library at the Motion Picture Academy has a description of its holdings (available to the public by the way) that gives a tantalizing idea of this sort of thing.

Obviously these libraries saw their busiest days when the studio lots were self-contained with dozens of projects constantly in production, but well after the demise of the "old" studio system they were still going strong. As the post points out the costs of running such a department is negligible, and they're historically priceless.

The Disney studio famously maintains an Archives and Animation Research Library, one that isn't going anywhere thanks to the wisdom of the studio management over the years. While it would seem that their existence would be unique to an animation studio's need for storing reams of valuable production art and materials, at the time Walt instituted the morgue such repositories were already common in live action; in fact they were started during the silent era.

[One surprising fact I had no idea of: apparently the Samuel Goldwyn Research Library is housed on the Dreamworks Animation campus. Say what? Heaven only knows where they've stashed that--DW is fast running out of space these days and frantically building out. You can bet if I'd known the Goldwyn collection was there I'd have made it a point to have a peek. Or two.] 

But thank goodness Disney realizes the value (and I don't mean monetary value) of its past-not for sentimentality's sake but for hardcore learning and vital, irreplaceable information. It pays back in that it helps us make better movies.

The same is true for these other Libraries, believe it. The cost of keeping them open is next to nil but once dissolved they can never be replaced. The internet isn't the answer to everything.

HERE is an archived article about the closure eight years ago of Universal's research library. Same old story.
Very depressing reading.
George Lucas, where are you? You're our only hope.*

* Someone read my mind: here's one of the reader's comments on Nikki Finke's post about the Fox Library closing:

"This is indeed horrible news about the Fox Research Library closing. It is sad that these resources are disappearing from L.A. However, there seems to be some misinformation posted here about other film research libraries. George Lucas RESCUED the Paramount and Universal Research Libraries and has made them available to film and TV production personnel throughout the industry, not just for Lucasfilm employees. Both of these collections would have been sold off piece-meal if it wasn’t for him. Lucas also started his own research library back in the late 1970s, and employs a staff of full-time research librarians. All of the library collections housed at Lucasfilm are available to the filmmaking community, and have been for years -– these materials have been used by many film, TV and stage productions. George Lucas is a huge advocate of libraries, and should be commended for his efforts in preserving these studio collections which would have otherwise languished or disappeared altogether."

I hadn't know Lucas has already gone to bat in a big way for those other collections, but I'm not surprised. Hopefully either he or another such will step in here. We can hope.