{animation} – Page 58 – { feuilleton }

Mouse Heaven by Kenneth Anger

Mouse Heaven: Minnie and Mickey.

Kenneth Anger’s paean to Disney rodent memorabilia, and one of his most recent works, turns up at the Grey Lodge. Mouse Heaven is a distinctly minor piece, an awkward mix of film and video which juxtaposes shots of mouse figurines with a song-based soundtrack. Scorpio Rising this isn’t but the editing is up to his usual standard, and it has a curious, if rather grotesque, charm.

Rabbit heaven: Bugs drags up again.

I suspect I’m not the ideal audience for a film such as this, never having been very taken with Mickey and the rest of the Disney crew. This seems to be a generational thing. My parents are about Anger’s age and they watched Disney shorts regularly at the cinema, while older Americans would have seen the Mickey Mouse Club on TV in the 1950s. By the time my sisters and I were watching cartoons on television Disney had retreated into the pop culture background. Plenty of merchandise was available, of course, but the animations that gave birth to these characters were rarely seen on British TV since Disney was worried about over-exposure of their precious assets.

The consequence of this (which I doubt they realised) was that a new generation of kids could happily and eagerly watch all the Warner Brothers Merry Melodies (and MGM’s Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery cartoons) whereas I’ve still seen very few Mickey Mouse cartoons. Those that did turn up were either primitive (Steamboat Willie) or presented a Mouse character that was actually a suburban middle-class American. The contrast between Donald Duck’s irritating petulance and Daffy’s wisecracks, or between the Mouse in a house and a bisexual rabbit, could hardly be more striking. The last shred of any potential Disney charm was dispelled when I read the priceless demolition of Disneyworld and its inhabitants, Mickey Rodent!, by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, in a reprint of MAD magazine:

Strolling in the foreground of the opening panel is Mickey himself, with a four-day stubble on his face and a snapped mouse trap on his snout; his left arm has a TV screen, smashed in the middle, with “Howdy Dooit” sunrays visible. (That’s an inside joke: in a previous issue, parodying “Howdy Doody,” Mickey was seen at the edge of the opening panel, grasping and shouting, “That’s MY sunray from MY movies behind his head and I wannit back!”) Around him a melodrama unfolds: Horace Horszneck is being dragged off to jail “for appearing without his white gloves.” The animal chorus behind him clucks, moos and barks their annoyance with “Walt Dizzy’s” rule about wearing white gloves at all times… “In this hot weather too!” “And it’s so hard to buy those furshlugginer three-fingered kinds!” (Read the rest of the description here and try and see the comic for yourself; it’s a masterpiece.)

There was no going back after that, and Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy was merely the icing on an already mouldering cake. So, sorry Kenneth, but I’m an apostate; Bugs Bunny rules my blue heaven.

• The Look traces the history of Wally Wood’s scurrilous poster from hippie to punk to Alison Goldfrapp

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• Relighting the Magick Lantern
• The Realist
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally

John Whitney’s Catalog

YouTube keeps turning up the abstract cinema goods with this great seven-minute John Whitney showreel from 1961. And recent additions include a better copy of Whitney’s Arabesque as well as Permutations from 1966.

Update: Two masterpieces by John Whitney’s brother, James, Yantra and Lapis, are now on YouTube at last!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Karel Zeman

Inspiration (1949).

Karel Zemen (1910–1989) is a filmmaker I’m often telling people about but whose work isn’t easy to see, so it’s good to find that YouTube has gained some clips of his animations and examples of the partly-animated adventure films he made in the Fifties and Sixties. Zeman was yet another great Czech animator, and the YouTube collection includes his most celebrated short, Inspiration, which gives life to glass figurines, an unyielding medium that he moves as expressively as if it were clay or plasticine.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1961).

The adventure films are predominantly based on Jules Verne and place live actors into animated settings, many of which are taken directly from (or intended to imitate) the engraved illustrations of the original novels. The animation enabled Zeman to fill his films with dirigibles, submarines and various steam contraptions which would be too expensive to create otherwise. Zeman’s The Fabulous Baron Munchausen took the Gustave Doré illustrations for its visual style which is something this particular Doré enthusiast appreciates, and the film is closer to the spirit of the Raspe novel than the Nazi adaptation of 1943 or Terry Gilliam’s later version. The results are a lot more artificial than the seamless blend of animation and live action attempted by Ray Harryhausen in his own Jules Verne film, Mysterious Island, but the artificiality gives the films a distinctive charm.

• A Deadly Invention aka The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne trailer (1958)
• Excerpts from Baron Munchausen (1961)
• The Special Effects of Karel Zeman pt. I | pt. II

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Barta’s Golem
• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker

Before the Law from The Trial (1962).

I’d wanted to write something about this pair of animators last year but at the time there was none of their work available for online viewing. This situation has now been remedied thanks to the ubiquitous YouTube.

This is Kafka-related once again since most people have seen Alexeieff/Parker’s work—if at all—in the prologue they provided in 1962 for Orson Welles’ film of The Trial. Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian illustrator and animator who met Claire Parker, an American art student, in Paris in 1930. The pair formed a life-long partnership and together developed a new style of animation using a pinscreen, a white board containing thousands of pins whose shadows when pushed out of the board provide the grey tones required to create a picture. At the time they began working with this most animation was flat and cartoony; the pinscreen enabled them to create the kind of subtleties of shading seen in pencil and ink drawing. Many of the effects they created are stunningly lifelike.

The prologue for The Trial is a pictorial rendering of Kafka’s parable, Before the Law, which Welles narrates. This is an impressive piece (and I always loved the distinctive Piranesi-style walls) but for a real taste of their breathtaking skill you need to see Night on Bald Mountain, whose Goya-like transformations precede Disney’s Fantasia version by nearly a decade, or their adaptation of Gogol’s The Nose. It’s a shame that YouTube’s compression degrades much of the detail in these films, they really deserve to be seen on a bigger screen, but—as with many of these obscurities—it’s good to know they’re available at all.

Alexeieff and Parker on YouTube:
• Night on Bald Mountain (1933)
• En Passant (1944)
• Before the Law (1962)
• The Nose pt. 1 | The Nose pt. 2 (1963)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka

The Demon Regent Asmodeus

The Demon Regent Asmodeus (2006).

Alan Moore readers have finally discovered my little easter egg on the Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD so I can now talk about the creation of this miniature work. Director Dez Vylenz and I thought it would be nice to have a hidden extra somewhere on the main disc and this was the result.

Glykon and Asmodeus by Alan Moore (1994).

I’d always liked the Asmodeus section that Alan reads on the first Moon & Serpent CD and had the idea for some kind of animation based around the reading using his 1994 portrait of Asmodeus for the visuals. I used Apple’s Motion application for the animation of the DVD menus and it was this application that also animated the three-minute film. Alan’s picture was the sole source for all the visuals even though for most of the running time these are a kaleidoscopic mesh of circles and hexagons. The reading (with sound effects by Tim Perkins) works symmetrically, building to a central point then reversing itself so that the words from the first half are read in reverse order. I followed this scheme with the animation; the film begins in abstraction, evolves into the Asmodeus portrait then devolves back into abstraction. There’s also a symmetrical split to the visuals which are matched along a vertical axis in the centre of the screen. I had James Whitney’s Lapis in mind when creating these circular patterns although Whitney’s forty-year-old film remains abstract throughout. Whitney’s film was also done the hard way, one frame at a time, without the luxury of computer filters.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore is available via mail order from Shadowsnake Films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alan Moore in Arthur magazine
• Of Moons and Serpents
• Lapis by James Whitney