The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy  (buy it here or download it here)

Daria (buy it here or download it here)

The Simpsons (buy it here or download it here)

The Last Unicorn  (buy the movie here or download the movie here. buy the AMAZING  GRAPHIC NOVEL HERE. you can also get an audiobook  of author Peter S. Beagle reading the book here)

Feedback we got on Part 1 of Best Cartoons for Girls

AnimationAnomaly.com picked up on the Best Cartoons for Girls project. Thanks for the shoutout! Here’s what they had to say:

” … a lot of the time, we look at a show as being appropriate for girls or otherwise aimed at them, but neglect to take everything into account. With that in mind, it’s healthy to remember that a show that’s good for girls can have a male lead. I’d argue that a well-balanced show is better than a one-sided one …”

I absolutely agree — you’ll see that in our ratings guide for best cartoons for girls, it doesn’t anywhere say that the lead character has to be a girl. However, keep in mind that while it’s cool for a girl to like a high quality guys show, guys who like girls shows are often given a hard time — just ask the bronies. There are pros and cons to both, and in the Best Cartoons For Girls arc, we’re going to hit on specialized shows as well as broader ones. The most defining quality of all of them will be their greatness of content, not their focus or target audience.

The best cartoons for girls that we’re talking about today are cartoons that didn’t make the best of the best just because they present a pessimistic view of the future available to girls in it. You could argue in most of these cases that this is in fact, realistic, and that’s a great thing in it’s own right, but when I was putting this together, I wanted the best of the best cartoons to err on the side of being inspirational to lady viewers. These are all still awesome cartoons.

Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy 

Let’s start with perhaps the most pessimistic of all the female leads available in any cartoon ever made with The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. This show ran for six years on the Cartoon Network, starting in 2001, and can still sometimes be seen in their Cartoon Planet programming block that runs on Friday nights. It was made out of Cartoon Network Studios. It orginally aired in part of a show called “Grim and Evil”, which was a show that included Billy and Mandy stories as well as shorts from another show that would also eventually get it’s own series, ‘Evil Con Carne’. Of the two, Billy & Mandy was clearly the runaway success. Creator Maxwell Atoms had worked on I am Weasel and Cow and Chicken prior to successfully launching his own shows, and went on to work on Chowder after Billy & Mandy was done. He currently serves as executive producer on Disney Channe;’s Fish Hooks.

In The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, the stars are two fourth grade-ish aged kids thrown together by sheer force of both being complete social outcasts. Mandy because she’s so smart and clinically unemotional that she’s a borderline sociopath, and Billy because he’s really not smart, and does really dumb and wierd things all the time. In the first episode of Billy and Mandy (airing in the Grim and Evil block in 2001), Billy’s hampster dies, and when the Grim reaper shows up to claim him, Mandy invokes the trope everyone know – she challenges him to a game for the life of the hampster, with the added caveat that if he loses, he has to stay and wait on them hand and foot forever. Of course he loses, and that’s how a two little kids, one a sociopath and one a moron, got all the supernatural powers of death and the afterlife at their command.

This show was an absolute breath of fresh air when it aired. I’ve said before that I love surrealism and love dark humr, and this show is amazing at both of these things. It also didn’t hurt that it was airing on the heels of the powerpuff girls and shared some of the design styles of that show, Mandy’s design lampooning the PPG designs adroitly. (I’d guess that the PPG crew appreciated that as a complimnt, as they found ways to shoutout Mandy in their show that followed PPG – Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.) If we were toake away the best cartoons for girls thing we’re doing, I would still highly recommend this show – especially their Christmas special and  2007 TV movie “Big Bogey Adventure”.

But this is about great cartoons for girls, so let’s talk about Mandy, and why she’s an awesome cartoon character for girls to see. I called her a sociopath, and understand that that terminology is only accurate in the sense that everyone’s behaviour on this show is extremely exaggerated for comedic effect. What she is is smarter than everyone else around her, and unlike almost every female character on television, unburdened by interest in the twee emotionalism that is sometimes shoved down the throat of little girls everywhere. Mandy wears a pink dress with a big happy flower on it – and a massive scowl, as many little girls who are just not into pink or being seen as cute often do. Don’t get me wrong, I love pink, and I love cute, but like many ladies, it’s not the only thing I’m ever going to enjoy.

When I was a late teenager and in my early twenties, I was very very shy, and rarely spoke up in group scenarios, whether it was professional or social. When I did, it was only because I really truly believed in what I was speaking up for, and there were many times when my assertions were met with “That’s sooooo cute!” responses – I wasn’t the first or the last girl to go through something like that, but Mandy is the character that embodies the way that this kind of treatment makes girls feel. She’s smart, she knows what she’s doing … and all people ever register is her exterior cuteness. Billy’s equally dumb friend Irwin is convinced that she’s secretly in love with him because he’s in love with her. He parents have so little an understanding of who she is that they’re afrraid of her! The only genuine conncetion with another person that she has the whole show is the Grim Reaper – because as an immortal who’s been everywhere and seen everything, he’s the only (ahem) living thing in the entire world that doesn’t think she’s supposed to be something other than who she is. He also is unburdened by an obligation to feel affection for her, which probably doesn’t hurt.

What makes The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy a great cartoon for girls? Well, Mandy is far and away the smartest character on the show, and she’s the total opposite of an ooey-gooey cuties pie.

Why didn’t The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy make the final cut? The reason Mandy and her show didn’t make it to the best of the best cartoons for girls category is that the show itself is bleak, and so is her future. She occasionally has glimpses into the future where she’s become grossly obese, stupid, and married to Irwin, who she currently hate. She becomes forced into an identity she doesn’t want by societal pressures. It’s bleak. In all fairness, there’s also episodes where she’s shown ruling the world as a dictator when she grows up — with the absence of all human connection. There’s no hope for Mandy’s future, no matter how smart, capable, or truly awesome she is.

Daria

This section is going to be a bit long – Daria is one of my favorite cartoons.

Daria ran for 5 seasons from 1997-2001 on MTV. Daria was created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn for MTV, and got her own show after appearing multiple times as a realistic and sensible foil for the titular characters on Beavis and Butthead (which I was not allowed to watch when it originally aired.) Eichler was a story editor for Beavis & Butthead, and before that he had written for The Maxx, Rugrats, Clarissa Explains It All, Married With Children, and MST3K. Since his work on Daria, he’s gone on to write and produce this little teeny show (I don’t know if you’ve heard of it) called the Colbert Report. Lynn had been producing Beavis and Butthead, and after Daria continued to produce tv aimed at the High School/College set in work for MTV, CMT, and G4TV – serving as Executive Producer on 8 different shows in one particularly busy year. She also voiced Andrea (aka ‘the goth chick’) in some Daria episodes.

The show was produced by MTV Animation. Designs and storyboards were made here, but the actual animation on the series wa contracted out to Plus One Animation and Rough Draft Korea, both animation companit’s located in South Korea.

Mike Judge, who created Beavis & Butthead agreed to release Daria’s character to her own show, but had no involvement in her show itself, and B&B never appeared on it. It’s just as well, the two shows were completely different, and served two different purposes – Beavis & Butthead was more of an animated MST3K that promoted music videos instead of campy movies, and Daria was an animated sitcom for the “alternative” lifestyle. A 1998 New York Times article about Daria‘s popularity points out the fact that Daria rated the lowest with males 18-24, which was Beavis & butthead’s core audience. This makes a lot of sense – in B&B, Daria’s character is really there to be made fun of.

In the same article, Neena Beeber, one of the shows writers states that one of the secrets to the appeal of the show is that modern teenagers (modern to 1998, anyway) didn’t want to be thought of as teenagers – they wanted to be thought of as young, young adults. Adjusting a writing style with that view in mind strips the sugar-coating and condescension out of a story, and allows it to deal with real issues, that really affect teenagers. (More on that later!)

Daria was a show that truly took advantage of the medium. It foreshadowed the Adult Swim network early programming that would come into its own in the early 2000s in that it allowed grown up humor to be explored in the animated format. Daria premeiered at a 10:30pm time slot, and Adult Swim made an industry out of late-night programming. A real-life sitcom about a character like Daria would likely have failed, but as with the Simpsons before it, ugly, imperfect, human characters become palatable when they don’t have an actually human face associated with it. Both shows would have failed had they been live-action. By the end of Season 1, Daria was one of the top rated shows on MTV!

Here’s a list of quotes that endorse Daria:

“A good spokesperson for MTV, intelligent but subversive.”  MTV Network Manager Van Toffler

“The show is biting the dust without ever getting the credit it deserved: for social satire, witty writing, and most of all, for a truly original main character.” Emily Nussbaum (Slate.com)

TV Guide placed Daria in their “Top 50 Cartoon Characters of All Time.” ALL TIME! That’s some big names she beat out!

Doug Walker of Thatguywiththeglasses.com ranked Daria in his favorite TV shows of all time.

Huffington Post placed Daria in the top 15 best shows about school, where as you can imagine, she beat out many live action shows.

So, it’s a damn good show – this is established.You can’t do any kind of googling about Daria without running into film & tv critics effusing about how this show captured what high school was really, actually, truly like. Everyone seems to love it. But WHY is it such a great cartoon for girls?

Well, lets start with how strongly Daria breaks the mold for the pressures that affect almost every middle and high school girl feels, and often breaks them down into realistic circumstances. One of the simplest examples of this is the Season 3 Episode “Through a Lens Darkly”, which show Daria bowing to the pressure to try contacts, not being able to because of sensitive eyes, refusing to wear glasses again, and then feeling like she betrayed her principles by putting herself through something like that for the sake of appearance. Let’s continue with how dark real life situations are not avoided, such as in the Season 2 episode “I Don’t”, when Daria‘s younger sister is hit on by two adults – one of them being a priest performing a wedding. There’s an episode where the a modeling agency recruits high school students, there’s an episode where the school becomes over-run with soda machines when the Principle sacrifices student health for the advertising money it brings the school, there’s an episode where the school alters student artwork and then tries to suspend the students it belonged to when they try to change it, a more standard high school episode where Daria realizes that she and her best friend’s boyfriend would be a better match than they are, and an episode where an artist gets frustrated when she realized she could make millions knocking off other artwork when she wants to work on original stuff.

In Daria, you see life through a teenagers eyes – really. All adults are idiots, all the kids are selfish or mean. It’s realistic, and it’s comforting, and it doesn’t talk down to the teenage audience it’s aiming for. Watch it if you’re young and you’ve never heard of it. Watch it if you’re old and want to nostalgia trip on the real side of high school life.

Teens now watching Daria should keep in mind that there are some differences due to how many things have changed in the 10-15 years since this show was on the area – characters have beepers, used cellphones, and no one is really depicted as using the internet in the way that we take for granted now (and by that I mean Reddit.)

If you’ve never seen Daria, check out the pilot, “Sealed With A Kick.” It’s only 5 minutes long, and it’s a rough animatic (that means it’s one step up from a storyboard instead of a finished animation) but it gives a great impression of what the show is actually like.

Also, my brother was in a band in the 90s that did reasonably well – and one of his songs was used in the “I Don’t” episode.

What makes Daria a great cartoon for girls? What doesn’t make this show a great cartoon for girls!

The reason Daria didn’t make the best of the best? And I really, really wanted it to be in the best of the best – is that it’s just too cynical. Not just in the sense that life sucks all over for the characters in the show, but in the sense that you never get the impression that life or society is going to treat Daria better – ever. But like Lisa Simpson, Daria’s future seems to look like it’s going to suck. Also, while most of the show remains fresh, the fashions and some topics are now kind of outdated. I would love to see how this show would handle hipster culture and facebook.

The Simpsons

So, how do we analyze the implications of a cartoon that might be the single most influential animated entity in the entire history of animation. We’ll we’re going to skip most of it, and this is why. Firstly, we really want to go into this show in-depth in the future, ans secondly, you would have to be living under a rock in almost all of the countries this podcast is downloaded in to not have seen The Simpsons or be familiar with the principle of the show, so you don’t really need me to explain the basics to you. Additionally, the show and the roles the characters have played have changed over the 25 years the show has been around. The short story is that Lisa Simpson, the little girl of the family is smarter, more talented and more informed than almost everyone around her, but the flip side of the coin, is that for Lisa, there is no escape. She may never be able to go to college, and she, like Mandy, will either end up marrying someone she has nothing to share with out of sheer desperation for some sort of familiar company, or die alone.

Or, she could get a full ride scholarship to a college where she finds the people she’s meant to be friends with, who knows! I find her prospects to be cynical, despite the fact that her existance as a character and a show to be be revolutionary.

What makes The Simpsons a great cartoon for girls? Like Mandy, Lisa is smarter and more talented than everyone around her, and in early episodes especially, the ways in which a gifted child doesn’t really fit in to the school system are illustrated with great compassion.
Why didn’t The Simpsons make the final cut? Lisa has no future, and the show is realistically bleak. This is part of why the show was such a raging success, but for these purposes, it keeps the Simpsons off the best of the best list.

The Last Unicorn

This is a movie based on a 1968 novel by Peter S. Beagle that has a cult following in it’s own right. Part of the reason for the fandom of the book is the same reason why it’s on this list. In an era fairytale adaptations where the happy ending is pretty firmly attached to the marriage of the lady protagonist to a handsome prince who is practically a stranger, the unicorn protagonist makes a choice between being  human, mortal, and sharing the love of the prince, or being a unicorn, imortal, and unable to feel feelings. She doesn’t choose the prince, but sadly and realisticslly, she is no longer the same as the rest of the unicorns, because she has experienced love and regret. The Last Unicorn is a Rankin Bass movie, but was also produced by ITC Entertainment, an amazing english company run by an amazing enlgish man, Lord Lew Grade,who is kind of a fascinating character into himself, as he basically changed the face of Tevelvision in the UK. For now, we’ll jest say that Lord grade was the only person in America or Enlgand who was willing to greenlight a little variety-style show that you might have heard of called “The Muppet Show.”

Here’s the context of the making of the movie.

The Last Unicorn, released in 1982, was the last theatrical animated feature that Rankin-Bass ever made and I’m going to skip a lot of their contextual history in this podcast for the sake of not sidetracking. This is hard, because their’s a lot to talk about there! Maybe it’ll be for a podcast of another day … Rankin Bass was of course an American company, but all of their animation, both the 2D cel animation and the stop-motion best known in their beloved holiday specials, were contracted out to Japanese companies. If you didn’t know this already, this probably makes sense if you look at the heavily Asian-influenced artistic style of not just the Last Unicorn, but Thundercats, which was also Rankin Bass.

It was not a huge success. Variety, in a review that didn’t even look 100 words long, referred to the Unicorn’s appearance as ‘vapid’ and opened their review with the phrase ‘a rare example of an animated kids’ pic in which the script and vocal performances outshine the visuals.’ While I do think it’s true that the animation doesn’t hold up to the modern eye, and it is definitely true that the performances of the voice cast (including Rene Aubejonois, who voiced the crazy chef in the Little Mermaid and played Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) are particularly excellent, I don’t agree with the harshness of that statement. There are many beautifully animated parts of the movie.

It’s also fair to say that the late 70s and early 80s were not a great time for animated movies. The market was changing, and even Disney was thinking about phasing out of animation entirely. Animated movies hit a big trend of adaptations from fantasy novels that weren’t really stories accessible to young children (such as Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 Lord of the Rings), were adapted in a really dark way (Disney’s 1985 The Black Cauldron) or just had an emotional impact that is tricky to adapt into the market at all … like The Last Unicorn. The industry was flailing about a bit, kind of had been ever since the social change of the 1960s hit – and why wouldn’t it? The little boys and girls who loved Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty had grown up and were watching Fritz the Cat.

Here’s the plot overview. With a sense of waking up from a dream, a unicorn realizes that she hasn’t seen another unicorn in a long time. (Unicorns are immortal, beautiful,  can’t really have feelings, and yes, they do have this thing for ‘pure’ women in this world.) She begins a hunt for others of her kind, which she learns have all been imprisoned by a creature called the Red Bull. While searching, she is captured by a witch who sees her for what she is, and exhibits her as a unicorn in a circus — the irony being that she has to put an fake horn on the Unicorn in order for the general populace to recognize her for who she is. Someone who does recognize her before she escapes is Schmendrick, an incompetant apprentice of the witch’s who ends up traveling with the Unicorn until the end of the book What is made clear int he book, but not so much in the movie is that Schmendrick is also immortal, having been cursed by his former master to not age until he finds a way to unlock the magic powers he clearly has. So now we have two immortal travelers questing together – the unicorn, unable to feel, searching for the rest of her kind, and a human with great power he is completely unable to access searching for a way to unlock the abilities that he has been told reside within him.

The next enccounter in the book is with a band of robbers. Schmendrick is briefly imprisoned, and conjures an illusion of Robin Hood and his merry men, which the ignoble group is transfixed by. Molly, the bandit’s equivalent of Maid Marian, is the next to join the Unicorn’s traveling party. She is middle aged, and worn out from basically a youth misspent on a guy who wasn’t her equal (the bandit leader) and is reminded painfully of her younger ideals when she sees the unicorn.

From here, the next significant encounter occurs when the Red Bull finds the traveling party. In an attempt to save her, Schmendrick’s unleashes some magic he can’t really control, and turns the unicorn human. It saves her from the Red Bull’s attention, but both the unicorn and Molly are initially horrified — it’s a fate worse than death to go from the glory and superior life of a unicorn the impurity of being a human. Unable to turn her back, the trio press on to the castle of the King who is controlling the Red Bull, and take up residence there – Molly working the kitchen, Schmendrick as a jester, and the unicorn taking the human name Amalthea. The king of course has a son who falls in love with Amalthea.

The next section of the story takes place here in the castle. The unicorn has never been capable of love before, so she doesn’t respond initially, but she’s slowly losing her memory of being a unicorn as the identity of being a human takes her over. We learn why the old King, with no ability to feel and completely isolated from most human interaction, has used the Red Bull to collect and imprison unicorns in a failed attempt to bring some sort of joy and value into his life. The prince has been valiant and brave all his life, and has a crisis of identity when he realises that none of this makes Amalthea any more interested in marrying him than say, staring at the wall in her room.

Eventually the trio find their way to the Red Bull via an underground passage. They are at this point joined by the Prince, and some of the most crucial and emotional exchanges of the story take place as Amalthea confesses her true identity and quest to the Prince. When, knowing her true self and ambitions, he loves her anyway, she is emotionally overcome, and wants to abandon her quest and truly forget her Unicorn identity so that she can settle down with him. Get your hankies out ladies, because he doesn’t want her to give up her goals, even if it means losing her! The Unicorn has so been changed by her experience as a mortal that she begs Schmendrick not to reverse the spell as hard as she resisted it when he first turned her. She gets turned back into a unicorn anyway of course, and the Prince throws himself between her and the Red Bull to protect her, and Schmendrick manifests his own destiny when he can turns Amalthea back into an immortal unicorn, regaining his own mortality in the process.

The Red Bull is defeated and the unicorns are free. Schmendrick is mortal, the Prince has realized that true heroism comes from the heart, not from inheiritance, and Molly has an implied romantic future with Schmendrick, who (now that he is in control of his abilities) is the most powerful magician that ever existed. The unicorn is still alone — even though her kind have returned to the world, she will never be the same as any of them again, as she has experienced both love and regret, and mourns the loss of what other unicorns would never understand.

What we basically have here, is an allegory for growing up – and the any stage of life that can take place at. The story itself shares many introduction to life elements with a similarly metaphorical book, ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ — except the focus in the the Last Unicorn is on interpersonal relationships and ethics, whereas ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ is about the consequences of your actions and making the leap between what you are taught in school and real life application of intelligence.

So why is The Last Unicorn so great for girls? It’s not just the Unicorn’s fate of not marrying the prince and living happily ever after (notice I said ‘fate’, not ‘choice’.) Although, Amalthea’s situation of it just not working out with the Prince and that being sad is kind of cool is nice to see. What I love the most about the book is Molly’s storyline – the fact that she’s lived (and presumably been sleeping with) unmarried with a guy who frankly sucks, and that doesn’t make her less valuable, or have any less potential. Rather than the fairytale beggar girls who ascends to queendom by marrying the right guy when she’s still a teenager, Molly is a character who chooses to leave a bad situation, and gets a fresh start without any kind of sense that she’s damaged goods from her experience. And rather than getting a happy ending, with marriage and children, Molly’s story concludes with a sense of a future with whatever oportunity she wanted to make for herself being an option.

Actually, the only people who settle down to have babies at the end of the book are the inhabitants of a village affected by a subplot that meant they had been refusing to have kids for years in fear of the bad King killing them all.

Why didn’t The Last Unicorn make the final cut? The reason why The Last Unicorn didn’t make the best of the best cut is in part the same reason why it’s on the list at all. It deal with the real life emotions … that really are tremendously sad.  You could argue that the emotional impact is part of the success of the show, but it’s really the epitome of bittersweet. Also, the animation doesn’t hold up thaaaaaaaaaat well.  It also loses quite a bit in the adaptation, where some kind of important aspects of the story don’t really come across as they should. So even though this podcast is about the best Cartoons for girls, I really can’t talk about it withought recommending the graphic novel adaptation of the story. Illustrated by Renae DeLiz (an incredibly talented, self-taught artist who would go on to found Womanthology.) The book reads as a supplement to the movie because of how closely the book illustration resebles the movie designs, but the content itself stays incredibly book accurate. The graphic novel collection was on the NY Times bestseller list for over two months, and I think it should have been on for longer – it is freaking incredibly beautiful. DeLiz is currently working on a book-accurate adaptation of Peter Pan which promises to be equally astounding.

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?

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Shezow and Internet Uproar

So, there was a huge media hit this week about a show called Shezow coming to the Hub. It was covered not just by the Animation industry news sites, but made it to things like the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and quite a few other big sites. It’s a show about a young boy who becomes a superhero when he puts on a magic ring, but the aspect that everyone is reporting on is that the superhero he becomes happens to be a woman.

We don’t really know much about the show yet – all that’s available in the US right now is the intro and theme. Here’s what we do know – some people (myself included) think that this is an awesome concept with a lot of potential for excellent stories, sharp comedy, and subversive mockery of the bad side of gender roles. Other people are attacking the show on social media (my favorite being someone who called the concept occult on facebook – I’m pretty sure they didn’t actually understand the dictionary definition of occult.) So we have people both praising and condemning it for one aspect of it, knowing nothing about the writing, the animation, or the production quality. Given that it’s been specifically press-released with the crossdressing aspect of the show as a marketing standpoint, I’m sure these reactions are something that the Hub wanted – because now everyone is talking about the show, and when it hits the air on June 1^st (which will have probably happened by the time this podcast airs) there should be a lot of people tuning in to find out what the deal is.

The intro gives the impression that the main character isn’t actually transgender himself, and the humor of the show stems from the fact that he doesn’t want to be in that outfit, wearing that wig,and doesn’t know how to operate his lipstick laser,  but he’s kind of stuck like that anyway! I grew up in England, where guys having to dress in drag because of circumstance is a standard humor trope, but it does seem that even now it’s kind of taboo in the states. I do like the concept of a 10 year old suddenly having high heels, lipstick and ridiculous hairstyles forced upon him – because his reaction of WTF is this is one that’s shared by a lot of little girls who hit a certain age and don’t understand at all how to make the costume of a female our society demands work, and don’t understand why they would want to.

The show has been on the air in Canada since last year, with at least 13 episode having been broadcast and more in the can. If you’ve watched it and have an opionion you’d like to share, or if you’ve watched the US debut, please let us know what you think at feedback@animatedthingsclub.com

So there were a lot of people reacting to Shezow like it was a big deal, saying it was going to be a great step for the LGBT community, or saying that it was indoctrination of our children to transvestism and homosexuality (by the way, I think people who think like that don’t understand how people work.) But another thing that kept popping up over and over again in response comments to all this press all over the internet was “Remember Ranma ½?”

The Origins of Ranma ½

Ranma ½ is the brainchild of Japanese comics master Rumiko Takahashi, and ran as a manga serial in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1987 to 1996, and was later collected into 38 volumes of material.  It was brought to the US in 1993 by Viz Media, a company owned in part by Shogakukan, who also owns Weekly Shonen Sunday. The English language adaptations were flipped so as to read right to left instead of left to right, as originally published, and some of the jokes were adapted. (Takahashi has gone on record as saying that while she doesn’t always think the translated jokes are great, she says that this is because she they are tailored for sensibilities that she doesn’t have, understands why an American might find them funny, and understands why the original would have lost humor in translation). The US releases wrapped up at 36 volumes in 2006.

The Plot of Ranma ½

Ranma Saotome is a 16 year old boy who has been traveling in China, learning martial arts under his father Genma Saotome. They have come to live with Genma’s old training buddy, Soun Tendo, at his dojo in Japan. Soun has three beautiful daughters – Kasumi, Nabiki, and Akane, but no male heirs, and because of an old agreement, it is decided (much to the three modern daughters dismay) that Ranma will marry one of them and take over the Tendo Dojo. Akane, the youngest daughter is nominated by the other two, as she is the same age as Ranma, she’s incredibly versed in martial arts herself, and last but not least, she seems oblivious to the attnetions of boys. The plot twist comes when we discover that Ranma is under a curse – when he gets splashed with cold water, he turns into a gilr – one that looks nothing like him, and only turns back into a boy when he’s hit with hot water.

Akane and Ramna resent the match being made without their consent, and don’t want to admit that they like each other. They’re also both kind of immature (they are 16) and spend more time getting on each others nerves than anything else.

Takahashi (who wrote and drew the original manga) handles the whole thing with such a light sense of humor that both readers of the manga and viewers of the anime never have the sexual implications of any of the circumstances shoved into their faces. Like some high school series in the genre, the first kiss is borderline fetishized, and sex is out of the picture completely, apart from the few times when Genma or Soun discuss how happy and proud they will be when the marriage is consummated, much to the horror of the intended couple. In fact the focus here is the humor of the situation above all, and Takahashi masterfully uses every aspect of the situations at her disposal to create funny stories. Things reach a Shakespearean level of ridiculousness similar to the love quadrangles of Midsummer Night’s Dream as additional characters are added – a bevvy of young men in love with Akane, multiple girls who have reason to believe that they are also engaged to Ranma, and four more characters appearing in both the books and the cartoon who are also cursed to take on a different form in cold water in the anime, an additional three exclusive to the manga, and an additional two exclusive to the anime. Some characters turn into animals that other characters are deathly afraid of. Hijinks ensue!

Ranma 1/2 in Animation

It was adapted to an animated format multiple times. This gets a little complicated. First we should talk about Kitty Films, the studio that originated the Ranma animation. It ran for one eighteen-episode season in 1989, and was cancelled due to low ratings. It relaunched less than a month later after being retooled by the same animation team, and ran for 6 seasons, making a total of 7 seasons and 161 episodes. While Kitty Films was actually producing the Ranma animation, the animation itself was being contracted out to Studio Deen, who also did the animation on adaptation of some of  Rumiko Takahashi’s other creatuions: Maisson Ikkoku an Urusei Yatsura through Studio Kitty. Studio Deen still exists, and worked on Miyazaki’s SPirited Away. Studio Kitty, on the other hand, is another story. The studio, established in 1972 was reall a music company, and they had suffered huge losses before they began to produce Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura in 1981 — their very first animation project ever. All of the companies that actually animated for Studio Kitty did tremendously well and still exist, but when the Ranma wrapped up in 1992, many of their significant employees left the company, and by 1995 they were done with animation. The company technically still exists, but since all they do is artist managment, and the rights to all of their animated properties have been sold off, from an animation perspective, the Studio Kitty is dead.

The animated series basically follows the plot of the books in the beginning, but deviates as the series goes on – kind of mandatory, since the book series didn’t conclude until after the animated series was done. (Speaking of, what’s going to happen with Game of Thrones when they run out of books to adapt?)

So that’s the tv series. Now let’s talk about the movies and the OVA’s. There are officially 3 movies, although only the first two are widely available in the US and UK – and the names theye were given for US release by Viz Media are completely different than the actual names. THe movies are called The Battle of Nekonron China – A Battle to Defy the Rules,  Battle at Togenkyo! Get Back to the Bridges! and Super Indescriminate Decisive Battle! Team Ranma vs. the Legendary Phoenix. The US release titles of the first two are Ranma ½: The Movie, Big Trouble in Nekonron, China and Ranma ½: The Movie 2, Nihao My Concubine. The second of these two is often described as being OVA like. Third of the trio is considered an OVA by some fans, and that’s probably at least in part because it is released together with the OVAs by Viz, who also changed the order of the show episodes and released the first and second productions of the cartoon together as one whole series.

Hold up. What the heck is an OVA?

So what is an OVA? OVA stands for Original Video Adaptation, and it’s a term that evoled out of the Japanese animation market pretty exclusively. It’s a straight-to-dvd release. However, it’s not really companrable to the Little Mermaid 2 or the Three Musketeers movie starring Mickey Mouse. For one thing, OVA’s aren’t necessarly released that way because of market pressures or lack of funding – sometimes it’s purely to keep up with audience demand, sometimes it’s becasue content or length prevents the animation from broadcasting without problems, and some OVA’s are released purely to conclude the plot of a show that went off the air before completion, or are a bonus episode to a show still running. Some OVAs are standalone movies. Some come in series of episodes or box sets. Eastern OVAs are a much bigger and more influential bucket of fish than Western direct-to-dvd releases. The Ranma 1/2 series has 11 OVAs, and fans of the series praise these above any other animated adaptation, because they for the most part are strict adaptations and explorations of specific chapters and storylines in the manga series. I would highly recommend them! The animation is fantastic, and the stories are selected from a time in the Manga when Takahashi had really hit her stride with character development.

The eleven OVAs were released in quick succession between Dec of 1993 and Jun of 1996 – after the show had wrapped. And that was that — until just a few years ago, when a 12 OVA was released in January of 2010 at an exhibition called “It’s a Rumic World.” This exhibition, btw is sort of a Convention devoted ENTIRELY to Rumiko Takahashi and her works (“Rumic” = “Rumiko’s work”). A whole convention just beacuse this woman’s stories are so damn popular! She’s written and sdrawn at least 9 manga series, with a total of 170 volumes of her manga in print. AND SHE”S ONLY 55! And my favorite takeaway from the research on this is that Takahashi deliberately sets out to create works targeting a female audience – women and girls. WHile female comic book readers in Japan make up about a third of the comic book audience, here in america, in btoh comics and animation, a much smaller market share of product is reserved for girls.

Viz Media spokepeaople have gone on record as saying that Ranma 1/2 is by far and awya their most successful property in the US market. At the first America Anime Awards in 2006, Ranma 1/2 won two of the twelve available categories.  In Japan, 49 million copies of Ranma Manga books have been sold.

Ranma ½ is about as unoffensive as anyone, even the guy who accused Shezow of being occult, could ask for. It’s funny, light hearted, inventive, and touching. The manga was the first manga I ever read, and really was the gateway to the genre for me. It’s Takahashi’s ability to build a story with the elements available to her that made Ranma ½ so successful, and I’m sure that Shezow will stand or fall based on similar merits.

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

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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

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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.”

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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.”

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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—> Animated Things Club Episode 06: Gargoyles Part 2 <—

History (very briefly) of the show creator, Greg Weisman

The show was created by Greg Weisman. Does his name sound familiar? It should! His resume includes Darkwing Duck, Gummi Bears, TaleSpin, Bonkers, Raw Toonage, DuckTales the Movie, Aladdin the Series, The Mighty Ducks, Ben 10, Jem & the Holograms, Men in Black: The Series, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Kim Possible, The Batman, W.I.T.C.H., Spectacular Spider-Man, Starship Troopers Chronicles, Max Steel, Legion of Super Heroes, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and Young Justice (listen to our response to the Young Justice premier here). He’s got a solid history of animation successes now – but Gargoyles was one of his first forays into his own original creations.

He’s not just an animation industry pro. He got his start as a college student, working as a writer for DC. After graduation, he started as an Associate Editor (he describes this job as a glorified photocopier) and worked his way up through the ranks of the editorial staff. I think he may also still have been writing at this point.

He left DC to go to grad school, but while in college this time, wrote and sold a script for Jem and the Holograms, and that was his door into the animation industry. After he graduated, he went to work for Disney as a story developer. He worked on a lot of the DuckTales spinoffs and Ducktales universe characters, and he didn’t really stick to one area – he wanted to learn as much as he could about every aspect of the animation industry, so he’s worked in a lot of different departments, but his biggest breakthrough is known to be Gargoyles. He did 65 episodes, and then was “invited to leave” (his direct quote from a 123 Film Easy interview.) He’s obviously still happily emotionally invested in the property, as he’s referenced in at least an episode of Young Justice, and wrote the comic book series, which started in 2006 and ran until 2009 – and was more likely cancelled due to liscensing expense more than lack of interest.

You can find him on s8.org - the premiere Gargoyles fansite.

The show premise

In the year 994, supernatural beings known as gargoyles roam the Scottish highlands, turning to stone by day and flying around kicking butt at night. One clan of these gargoyles, lead by a guy called Goliath, are magically betrayed. All but six are destroyed, and those six are cursed to remain in their stone forms until the castle they inhabit rises above the clouds. Which happened in 1994 when an excentric millionaire called Xanatos bought the castle and had it transplanted to the top of a skyscraper in Manhattan. The show then evolved around two  major concepts – the thousand year old creatures learning how to cope with living in modern NYC, and the slowly unfolding plotline of the real story behind Xanatos.

The context of the show

Gargoyles ran from 1994 to 1997. It followed in the footsteps of Batman: The Animated Series by taking the darker tone that the Batman animation was known for, and wrapping it up in complex storylines. There were 78 half-hour episodes split into three seasons, the first two airing under the Gargoyles name, and the third under the name Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles. Greg Weisman was only involved in one episode of that season, and doesn’t consider any of it cannon.

It also followed on the heels of Beauty & the Beast in a lot of ways. A lot of the concepts are continued – don’t judge a book by it’s cover, don’t be afraid of something that’s different. Right from the pilot, people turn out not to be who you expected them to be based on their character designs, and character interactions are incredibly complex. Definately paves the way for the likes of Avatar: The Last Airbender that came along half a decade later.

It also (clearly intentionally) drew connections to the Star Trek universe. During the years this show was on the air, TNG was wrapping up, DS9 was in full swing and Voyager was launching. Frakes and Sirtis (Rinker and Troi in TNG) voice two main characters in the show – with no attempt to disguise their voices, and the actors who played the Star Trek Characters of Sisko, Janeway, Uhura, O’Brian, Laforge, and Data also voiced character throughout the series.

Greg Weisman’s work ethic

We did a lot of research for this podcast, including listening to a lot of  Weisman’s interviews. It seems really clear that he has a wonderful attitude about the industry – he’s happy and enthusiastic about everything he works on. What we like even more is his work ethic. He did his research, and worked through both his runs in college, starting as an undergraduate sophomore. He started small and didn’t care (we can’t tell you how many potential interns we’ve met who get huffy when they find out that an internship won’t immediately be followed by a job as a lead artist on a comic book.) He made it his job, both in comics and animation, to get to know everything he could about every aspect of production, his film credits reflect this, as he’s worked as a writer, a producer – and even does a little voice acting. Both in comic books and animation, you have nothing if you don’t have a good story, and his start as a writer supports that idea. All of his projects have been story driven, with complicated, deep characters.

So what makes Gargoyles a great show?

Story Design!

• Weisman drew on college exploits in England and Scotland, where he collected photos of gargoyle statuary. Those of us living in the U.S. don’t really know what it’s like in countries where buildings in the town or the next town over might be over 500 years old.
• Shakespeare as a major influence. There’s a reason the man is still considered one of the best writers of the past thousand years, but sometimes it takes a modern writer to bring that to our attention.

Show Design!

• Big, long stories, spun out so many episodes, and so super complex and challenging!

Success of the Show

• While Gargoyles has never been a headliner of the Disney library, as of at least 2009, it had never been off the air. Even when it was airing late at night, it has been airing somewhere for at least 15 year, which means there has been a market for the show for at least that much time.

How we got into the show

Kevin & Jon: Got into it through advertising for it in Disney magazines, and stayed in it for the darkness and complexity.

Suzannah: Saw it as a child and dismissed it because of over saturation of Star Trek voices. I got into in on Kevin’s recommendation and LOVE it.

How YOU should get into the show

Start at episode 1, for the full Gargoyles story effects.

6 Degrees of Brad Bird

Gargoyles included a very varied voice cast, and Tim Curry worked on 7 episodes. Tim Curry also voices Nigel Thornberry in the The Wild Thornberrys, which was produced by Arlene Klasy and Gabor Csupo of Klasky-Csupo. Gabor Csupo worked as a supervising animation director on Season 1 Episode 1 of the Simpsons  (Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire) and that episode had on it an Executive Consultant by the name of Brad Bird!

Bonus trivia: Klasky-Csupo produced early seasons of the Simpsons, and Gabor Csupo was an animator on The Tracy Ullman Show, where the Simpson family first appeared as a series of shorts!

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We apologize for the delay on the second podcast on Gargoyles! It’ll be up later this week  – cross our hearts and hope to die, stick a cupcake in our eyes!

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—> Animated Things Club Episode 06: Gargoyles Part 1 <—

History (very briefly) of the show creator, Greg Weisman

The show was created by Greg Weisman. Does his name sound familiar? It should! His resume includes Darkwing Duck, Gummi Bears, TaleSpin, Bonkers, Raw Toonage, DuckTales the Movie, Aladdin the Series, The Mighty Ducks, Ben 10, Jem & the Holograms, Men in Black: The Series, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Kim Possible, The Batman, W.I.T.C.H., Spectacular Spider-Man, Starship Troopers Chronicles, Max Steel, Legion of Super Heroes, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and Young Justice (listen to our response to the Young Justice premier here). He’s got a solid history of animation successes now – but Gargoyles was one of his first forays into his own original creations.

He’s not just an animation industry pro. He got his start as a college student, working as a writer for DC. After graduation, he started as an Associate Editor (he describes this job as a glorified photocopier) and worked his way up through the ranks of the editorial staff. I think he may also still have been writing at this point.

He left DC to go to grad school, but while in college this time, wrote and sold a script for Jem and the Holograms, and that was his door into the animation industry. After he graduated, he went to work for Disney as a story developer. He worked on a lot of the DuckTales spinoffs and Ducktales universe characters, and he didn’t really stick to one area – he wanted to learn as much as he could about every aspect of the animation industry, so he’s worked in a lot of different departments, but his biggest breakthrough is known to be Gargoyles. He did 65 episodes, and then was “invited to leave” (his direct quote from a 123 Film Easy interview.) He’s obviously still happily emotionally invested in the property, as he’s referenced in at least an episode of Young Justice, and wrote the comic book series, which started in 2006 and ran until 2009 – and was more likely cancelled due to liscensing expense more than lack of interest.

You can find him on s8.org – the premiere Gargoyles fansite.

The show premise

In the year 994, supernatural beings known as gargoyles roam the Scottish highlands, turning to stone by day and flying around kicking butt at night. One clan of these gargoyles, lead by a guy called Goliath, are magically betrayed. All but six are destroyed, and those six are cursed to remain in their stone forms until the castle they inhabit rises above the clouds. Which happened in 1994 when an excentric millionaire called Xanatos bought the castle and had it transplanted to the top of a skyscraper in Manhattan. The show then evolved around two  major concepts – the thousand year old creatures learning how to cope with living in modern NYC, and the slowly unfolding plotline of the real story behind Xanatos.

The context of the show

Gargoyles ran from 1994 to 1997. It followed in the footsteps of Batman: The Animated Series by taking the darker tone that the Batman animation was known for, and wrapping it up in complex storylines. There were 78 half-hour episodes split into three seasons, the first two airing under the Gargoyles name, and the third under the name Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles. Greg Weisman was only involved in one episode of that season, and doesn’t consider any of it cannon.

It also followed on the heels of Beauty & the Beast in a lot of ways. A lot of the concepts are continued – don’t judge a book by it’s cover, don’t be afraid of something that’s different. Right from the pilot, people turn out not to be who you expected them to be based on their character designs, and character interactions are incredibly complex. Definately paves the way for the likes of Avatar: The Last Airbender that came along half a decade later.

It also (clearly intentionally) drew connections to the Star Trek universe. During the years this show was on the air, TNG was wrapping up, DS9 was in full swing and Voyager was launching. Frakes and Sirtis (Rinker and Troi in TNG) voice two main characters in the show – with no attempt to disguise their voices, and the actors who played the Star Trek Characters of Sisko, Janeway, Uhura, O’Brian, Laforge, and Data also voiced character throughout the series.

Greg Weisman’s work ethic

We did a lot of research for this podcast, including listening to a lot of  Weisman’s interviews. It seems really clear that he has a wonderful attitude about the industry – he’s happy and enthusiastic about everything he works on. What we like even more is his work ethic. He did his research, and worked through both his runs in college, starting as an undergraduate sophomore. He started small and didn’t care (we can’t tell you how many potential interns we’ve met who get huffy when they find out that an internship won’t immediately be followed by a job as a lead artist on a comic book.) He made it his job, both in comics and animation, to get to know everything he could about every aspect of production, his film credits reflect this, as he’s worked as a writer, a producer – and even does a little voice acting. Both in comic books and animation, you have nothing if you don’t have a good story, and his start as a writer supports that idea. All of his projects have been story driven, with complicated, deep characters.

So what makes Gargoyles a great show?

Story Design!

• Weisman drew on college exploits in England and Scotland, where he collected photos of gargoyle statuary. Those of us living in the U.S. don’t really know what it’s like in countries where buildings in the town or the next town over might be over 500 years old.
• Shakespeare as a major influence. There’s a reason the man is still considered one of the best writers of the past thousand years, but sometimes it takes a modern writer to bring that to our attention.

Show Design!

• Big, long stories, spun out so many episodes, and so super complex and challenging!

Success of the Show

• While Gargoyles has never been a headliner of the Disney library, as of at least 2009, it had never been off the air. Even when it was airing late at night, it has been airing somewhere for at least 15 year, which means there has been a market for the show for at least that much time.

How we got into the show

Kevin & Jon: Got into it through advertising for it in Disney magazines, and stayed in it for the darkness and complexity.

Suzannah: Saw it as a child and dismissed it because of over saturation of Star Trek voices. I got into in on Kevin’s recommendation and LOVE it.

How YOU should get into the show

Start at episode 1, for the full Gargoyles story effects.

6 Degrees of Brad Bird

Gargoyles included a very varied voice cast, and Tim Curry worked on 7 episodes. Tim Curry also voices Nigel Thornberry in the The Wild Thornberrys, which was produced by Arlene Klasy and Gabor Csupo of Klasky-Csupo. Gabor Csupo worked as a supervising animation director on Season 1 Episode 1 of the Simpsons  (Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire) and that episode had on it an Executive Consultant by the name of Brad Bird!

Bonus trivia: Klasky-Csupo produced early seasons of the Simpsons, and Gabor Csupo was an animator on The Tracy Ullman Show, where the Simpson family first appeared as a series of shorts!

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

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Suzannah and Paul discuss the DC Nation programing block on the Cartoon Network, including Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Young Justice, and the amazing DC Nation shorts! Mild spoilers.

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By now, you probably know that Rango and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore are our new oscar winners. Any thoughts, guys? Don’t forget to check in your area to see if there’s movie theater playing the nominated shorts as a single event – totally worth it!

Legend of Korra

There’s a new Legend of Korra trailer! I’ve been saying for years that Avatar: The Last Airbender was required viewing for anyone working in children’s entertainment, and I’m excited to see if the sequel will fill those big shoes! It’ll have less episodes than the original, but a lot of the world has already been established, so I don’t think there will be any detriment there.

You can find a lot of show art here!

Want to catch up before the new show starts? The DVD sets aren’t that pricey right now – you can pick up the  Book 1 DVD set, Book 2 DVD set, and Book 3 DVD set for a very reasonable price. The art of the show book is one of my personal favorites, and you can pick that up here!

Changes to the Website

You may have noticed, if you’re on the site regularly, that there’s a new area. We now have an Animated Store, which is basically one area on the site where you can go to buy things that we’ve talked about in the show, and everything you can buy is listed by podcast topic, with a section on the bottom for what Suzannah and Jon recommend in books about animation, video games, and comic books. We’re still linking to stuff in the podcast notes, but this collects everything together.

The store is powered by Amazon, which means that we get a tiny percentage of the profits if you buy something from our a-store. We’re looking for a way to offset the cost of webhosting, so if there’s anything in the store you want to buy, or if you donate through the paypal button on the site, you’re supporting the podcast.

It’s not a final thing. We’re hoping to find other, less obtrusive ways to cover the costs of webhosting.

Here is the podcast —-> Animated Things Club Episode 05: Nezha nao hai <—

Today, we’re talking about a movie with a few different names. It’s a Chinese movie, and unlike Blossom, I haven’t been brushing up on my conversational chinese, so please forgive me if I’m mangling anything with the translations.  We’re going to call it Nezha (pronounced NIyah), but the full title of the movie is Nezha nao hai which roughly translates to Nezha Conquers the Dragon King. Just for clarification, we are talking about a seventy minute movie made in 1979, not the 52 episode series from CCTV, nor Havoc in Heaven, a 1964 movie from a the same studio telling the story of Nezha’s battle with a Monkey King.)

Nezha Conquers the Dragon King was difficult to track down, and might be hard for you guys to find. It is absolutely worth it though – I would call it an ESSENTIAL addition to any modern animator or animation fan’s library. Before we go any further, here’s a few of the options available if you want to add it to your collection, which we highly recommend.

You can find the Chinese version of the movie with English subtitles as a region-free 25th anniversary DVD here on the Purple Culture website and here on Moviesville. The movie studio also put out a book featuring artwork from the movie which you can find here on Amazon. You can also find a book of the story that is phenomenally illustrated in watercolor here on Chinese Parent.

One of the reasons that it is hard to find here in the western hemisphere, is because it never made it here in the first place, and it’s had a few different names.  We’re going to break this down into a few parts. The talent that produced the movie, the context of the plot, and finally – the last is always the best – the beautiful, beautiful animation. The studio that produced it is really interesting on it’s own, so I’m going to do a minicast on it.

The studio & the creative team.

Nezha was a 1979 movie released by a company whose name translates to Shanghai Animation Film Studio that clocks in at about an hour. It was released in China with the title Nezha nao hai and screened in the Cannes Film Festival of 1980, (although not submitted into the competition) under the name of Le Prince Nezha Triomphe du Roi Dragon. The international/English title was Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King, and there was a dubbed version from the BBC called Little Nezha Fights Great Dragon Kings that featured a slightly edited down version, and different music. I grew up with this version of the movie, but as an adult have to say that subtitled original is arguably better. I’d recommend both, but if you can only take one, I’d say go with the original for the sake of the missed footage, and soundtrack that makes sense. (The dubbed version has been debated in fan circles for the assumed accents and the westernized soundtrack.) It won a Huabiao Award for Outstanding Animation from 1979, which is the highest governmental award that a Chinese film can earn, and a Hundred Flowers Award for best animated film from the China Film Association in 1980, which I understand is somewhat equivalent to a Golden Globe on the other side of the globe. It was also the first Chinese animated film made in panoramic screen.

Nezha was directed by three people: Yan Ding Xian, Wang Shu-Shen and A Da (Xu Jing Da). Yan Ding Xian had been working for the studio (when it existed – more on that in the minicast) from 1960, when he won an award on his directorial debut, a short film called “The Small Tadpole Looks for his Mother.” I couldn’t really find any information about that film on it’s own, but based on the name alone, I would guess that it has similar themes to Nezha. He co-directed the first color animation in China. His hovie credits up to 1987 have him still working with the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, but continuing to work of projects that were being distributed in other countries. Wang Shu-Shen and A Da (Xu Jing Da) were very difficult to find information on – I found nothing on the first, and only a brief mention of the second with a reference to the raw emotional effect of Nezha in a 1986 issue of a croatian magazine called Sineast. If anyone knows anything about them, let me know, or if there are any librarians with mad research skills out that that would like to help me learn how to improve my research skills, please email us at feedback@animatedthingsclub.com!

The story Nezha is based on.

The story of Nezha is the story of Taoist deity. He is supposed to have lived during the Shang Dynasty, which is 1600-1000 BC, so that’s the era that

A Nezha statue

this movie is placed in. The premiere source of the story is the Fengshen Bang (also known as Fengshen Yanyi.) The title of the book translates as The Investiture of the Gods or The Creation of the Gods and was first published in China in the 16th century. His parents, Li Jing and Lady Yin (rulers of the area) are childless until Lady Yin become pregnant late in life – and stays pregnant for over three years. When she does give birth, it is to a fleshy ball (it looks more like a seed or a pearl in the movie.) Li Jing strikes the ball with his sword, afraid that it is a demon. The seed opens into a lotus, and Nizha breaks out of the ball, a fully formed, tiny boy who can walk and talk. He clothes himself in a lotus petal from the flower he came from.

Deity Taiyi Zhenren (who seems in the movie to be both immortal and human at the same time) takes him on as a student. In the myth, Nezha jumps out of the seed with the ribbon of chaos and the ring of the cosmos in his hands. In the movie it seems as though Taiyi gives these items to him – or at least explains what they are, calling them the silk of steel and the ring which nearly fits the universe. The ribbon looks like a long, transparent scarf, and the ring is about the size of a dinner plate in comparison to Nezha. They are animated to look like he’s almost dancing with them.

I’m going to go over the rest of the story first before breaking down the difference between it and the movie version. In the original story, Nezha washes the ribbon of chaos in a river when he is seven, which causes an underwater earthquake. The son of the Dragon Emperor comes to the surface to fight Nezha, and is instead killed by him. Not pleased, the Dragon Emperor (Ao Guang) rallies his armies, and surrounds Li Jing’s palace, demanding a son’s life for a son’s life. Horrified that his son is a killer, Li Jing is about to turn Nezha over, when Nezha, furious at his father kills himself to save him the trouble. Sounds a bit emo. In different versions of the story, Nezha either disembowels himself so that his flesh and bones can stay with his parents, with his organs are to be given to Ao Guang, or simply slits his own throat. Moved by the disemboweling gesture of family loyalty in the first version, or satisfied that his son’s murderer is dead in the second, Ao Guang retreats. Either Nezha’s soul flies to Taiyi, or Taiyi plucks it out of the twisting nether, but Taiyi resurects Nezha into a body he creates from lotus roots. He then gifts him with two additional weapons – wind fire wheels and a fire-tipped spear. The fire wheels he travels on (think roller skates) and the spear is a new weapon to go with the ring and the ribbon. And that’s where the movie splits from the book version. In the story, Nezha and his father continue to clash after his death in a manner that ultimately leads to war, but in the movie you never see his parents again, so that’s not really relevant to the purpose of this discussion.

The plot of the movie.

The movie stays faithful to the original story until Nezha is a very wild six year old  with a pet deer that he rides anywhere he wants to go. The area at this time is terrorized by four dragon kings (not one emperor), who rule rivers and the oceans, and control the weather. The Dragon Kings have two forms each – a human with a dragon’s head, and a dragon form. In the movie, you see the villagers making sacrifices to them by dropping food into the rivers which is taken to the dragons kingdoms at the bottom of the seas. The Dragon Emperor role is taken by the blue-colored Dragon King of the Eastern Ocean, who controls rain, and is currently withholding it until he can have a child to eat. They are more tender than chicken apparently.

On a outing where he lets a local boy and girl ride his deer in the ocean, where the girl is promptly kidnapped and eaten by Blue Dragon’s son. Using his cosmic ring, Nezha defeats the Dragon’s Guardian, turning him into frog. The frog runs back to the Blue Dragon’s palace, and tattles. Nezha, grossed out by the frog slime, is washing his ring and silk in the ocean, causing an earthquake in the dragon king’s palace. Off goes the Blue Dragon’s third son (a lilac and red dragon), on a seahorse mount with a lot of soldiers to kill Nezha for being such a big jerk. Turns out that this guy personally ate Nezha’s friend. Nezha gives him a few warnings to back off, then kills him, pulls out his backbone, and throws his body back to his troops, who take it back to his dad. Blue Dragon king threatens death to the world if he can’t destroy Nezha.

Blue Dragon visits Li Jing (interrupting a beautiful sequence of the lord playing an instrument that I don’t recognize), and tells him that he wants blood. Nezha is summoned, bringing his new toy – the dragon spine. Nezha is presented at this point as a little kid that doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions – the way kids don’t really know why some things are wrong when they are to their perspective righteous.  His father tries to explain that Dragons are sacred and what he did was huge problem, and Nezha’s response is “Um … YOU ATE SOMEONE!” The Blue Dragon dissapears, threateneing to tell the King of Heaven what happened, and Li Jing is mortified with the shame of it all. Unsure of what to do, since his father gives him no support, Nezha then goes to Taiyi for advice.

Taiyi has an almost motherly forgiveness of Nezha, but warns him that the Blue Dragon is going to bring war down upon his whole country for what he’s done. Nezha responds that since he did wrong, not his father or anyone else, that this isn’t fair. Taiyi sets up a prank of Nezha intercepting the Blue Dragon at the gates of heaven, briefly pretending to be the ruler of heaven (the balls on this guy), beating the Dragon up, and making him promise to cancel the drought and never eat children again.

Nezha tells his father what he’s done, and his father, correctly thinking that everyone is doomed, takes away his ring and silk, has him tied to a pillar, and disowns him. Blue dragon King summons the dragon kings of the Northern, Western, and Southern Oceans to attack Li Jing’s kingdom. The other three dragons are White (with the power of snow and ice) Black (with the power of hurricanes and tornados), and Red (the power of fire). They give Li Jing and ultimatum, your son’s blood, or everyone dies. Li Jing resists, but gives in … but can’t bring himself to kill his own son. Looking around and seeing the devastation, Nezha snatches up his father’s dropped blade and slits his own throat. Don’t worry, his back is to the camera.

Nezha and Li Jing’s relationship is played out very well here. When the dragons show up, Li Jing begs for negotiation. Nezha is freed from imprisonment by a servant who want him to hide, but instead he begs his father for the return of his ring and silk, with which he can defeat the dragons. His father ignores him, but his pet deer runs to fetch them, and there is forlorn sequence of him arriving a few minutes too late to deliver them to his master. Nezha is not dead yet, and sees her, but can’t reach the ring and the silk. I remember being just fascinated with the sequence as a child, but as an adult, I can only say that it is a triumph of emotional impact in animation.

We cut to the Blue Dragon’s palace, where he’s throwing a big party for all of the dragons to celebrate the freedom to do whatever they want as the only person powerful enough to stop them is now dead. The party scene is great – there’s  an octopus, frog, crab and shark band, gladiator snails, lady shellfish performing some sort of traditional looking dance, and a giant turtle juggler. It’s a nice humorous break after the death scene.

We cut to Taiyi’s cave in the mountains and some lovely strobe effects. He grows a lotus bloom, out of which Nezha materializes, now clad in lotus petals  and lotus leaves.  Shocked to find himself alive, he hugs his master, sobbing.  Nezha’s first thought is to stop the four dragons, so he is gifted with his wheels and spear. He a we have a lovely sequence of Nezha getting to know the new tools. You never see his ring and silk being returned to him in the BBC version, but you do see him from here on in wearing a silk that looks very similar to the one from his first childhood.

Here’s an interesting thing. Obviously, the original story of Nezha focuses strongly on the conflict between father and son. In the BBC translation, Li Jing calls Nezha a changeling, and when he talks about Nezha not being his son, he means is for real, not just in a disowning sense. In the original story, there’s lines about Lady Yi conceiving after being touched (in a non-sexual way) by some sort of monk or sage, and Taiyi makes it clear at Nezha’s birth that he is not a regular human. As an aside I think it’s interesting that this religious story focuses on the fallout between father and son when the father finds a godly cuckoo in his nest, especially when that sort of thing is completely side stepped in other religious texts.

Either way, the reason I’m bringing it up is because there’s a very quick scene here that has Nezha breaking a plaque with his spear before heading into the ocean to confront the dragons. I couldn’t really figure out if it was a plaque on a shrine for offerings to the dragons, or if it was the name plaque on Li Jing’s palace, but I like the idea of it being the latter. That way, Nezha sneaks one quick jab in at the father who never stood up for him, and sacrificed family for politics.

Nezha goes super-saian!

The Blue Dragon determines that Nezha is human enough to die even though he has the appearance of a god.  We have some beautiful fight sequences and Nezha fights various sea cratures, somehow sets fires to others, and then uses his ring and silk to shatter the palace (clearly he did pick them up somewhere. The final boss fight has him against the four dragons, so he pauses a moment to go super-saian, growing two extra heads and and two extra pair of arms for the occasion – bringing him closer to the way he’s sometimes depicted in sculpture and art throughout through out history.

So, boss fight. The Dragons shift in and out of their two forms a lot here, and Nezha gets hit with their various powers. He summons a red bird that looks like a phoenix swallow the Red Dragon’s fire, who is later able to melt him when he’s frozen by the White and Black Dragons. He defeats the Red, Black and White dragons first, then goes after the Blue Dragon, pinning him to the ground with his firey spear, after which the Dragon turns to stone. The story ends with the narrator sayin “The children swam and the ships sailed. The seas belong to everyone. Even dragons must serve life and not feed upon it.” We get a cut to the children from his village, the servant from Li Jing’s house who freed him prior to his suicide, and his pet deer, all awaiting his return to the mainland. There’s a happy reunion, and Nezha jumps back onto his deer and goes for a majestic run over the end credits.

Emotional impact.

We finally get to the best part – the animation! Let’s kick this off with a google chrome assisted translation of a passage from that 1986 article I found in Sineast Magazine. (The words that didn’t translate have been removed from the quote.) “Not only perfection of performance and traditional way of painting, but also carry a wonderful tenderness and warmth, the emotion that leaves no one indifferent.” It’s a great quote to apply to Nezha, because even thought he background art is beautiful, even though the storyboarding and plot are so delicately handled, and the animation is so incredibly fluid, the most incredible part of the movie is the emotional impact that it carries. Both as a child and as an adult, I can’t be unmoved by watching it. As a child, I remember specifically being able to relate to Nezha’s character and his perspective when contrasted with his father’s, and his idealistic desire to do what is right. As an adult, I understand his Li Jing’s frustration with his Nezha’s wildness and how important is to do what it takes to look out for everyone who you are responsible for – not just your children, but in this case your servants and subjects as well. When Nezha kills himself and his deer weeps, you cry too. When Nezha throws himself into Taiyi’s arms, weeping, you really feel the sense of security and safety that a child feel int he arms of a trusted parent. The emotional impact is amazing.

The visuals are stunning too. I would absolutely buy a book of the art that went into making this movie. As a child I watched it over, and over, just mesmerized by the colors and patterns. They’re hypnotic and refreshing, but not hypnotic to the point of trippiness the way The Thief and the Cobbler is. The patterns of the lotus are all the way through the story – specifically in major growth scenes for Nezha. Poses straight out of buddhist and taoist art are worked through the storyboarding. So the design is great, but the animation is really the crown jewel of this movie.

The animation.

• Nezha animation: he’s animated to seem almost like a circus performer before his rebirth, especially when playing with his silk and ring. It definately had reminiscences to both circus performers and that gymnastics performance section of the Olympics when the gymnast works with objects. After his transformation, his motions become more aggressive, as he works through what looks suspisciously like a tai chi sequence with the spear, but it’s lightened up with his rollerskating approach to the rings. Gestures of other characters are often also extremely fluid, and each character walks with very distinct mannerisms and gestures.
• Hands: the hands in this piece get a special section because they are so darn beautifully done.
• Dragon animation: they move a like a cross between snakes and creeping cats. Nothing could have been a better pick for evil dragons.
• Crane animation: Taiyi’s pet crane has several beautiful sequences. When Jon saw one, he said it was the smoothest animation he had ever seen!
• There’s also the deer. Dainty is the only word that really works in context of the deer.
  

  Hokkusai's 'Wave'

• Oceans. Most of you listening & reading probably know what Hokkusai’s ‘Great Wave’ print is, even if you only know it by name. Here’s a BBC podcast that will fill you in on the significance of that piece of artwork. All of the oceans look like, and move, like this print looks like it should.

Six degrees of Brad Bird:

Nezha director Yan Ding Xian directed a 1989 animated adaptation of Peter Spier’s book Noah’s Ark, which was narrated by James Earl Jones, who was once the voice of the narrator on the 1990 Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror episode where he read the  Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven – an episode on which Brad Bird was an Executive Consultant!

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• We had the season 3 finale of Adventure Time right before Valentine’s Day – with the introduction of a very new character. Can’t wait to see season 4!
• Starting in March, we’ll have the DC Nation block of shorts on the Cartoon Network. This one-hour time slot will include new half-hour shows Young Justice and Green Latern: The Animated Series, and the shorts that we talked about here from Aardman, and shorts from Lauren Faust (who we talked about here).
• Next season of Thundercats is coming too! Whoo hoo!
• Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie short is going to be a movie! This short was one of his earliest works – I wonder if this is going to be a prelude to retirement for him, or just the closing of a circle? Either way – can’t wait!

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

Here is the podcast —-> Animated Things Club Episode 04.5: Valentine’s Viewing <—

Love stinks, Linus style.

I don’t know anyone who looks forward to Valentine’s day. Even when you’re content in a relationship, it tends to be a “holiday” that causes an awful lot of stress. One of the best antidotes I can think of for this is to sit down with a copy of the cartoon classic Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown.

Charlie Brown animated specials have been giving people a sense that all will be well with the world since 1965. This particular special both celebrates the cuteness of telling someone you love them, and strips away the idealism of the holiday, as almost no character has the Valentine experience they had planned on.

Flapjack gets lovesick!

As long as we’re talking turning Valentine’s Day on it’s EAR, check out the gruesome Flapjack Valentine’s episode (Love Bugs) that aired a few years ago.

And finally, “Love Among The Toons” is a Tiny Toons short in the “Spring in Acme Acres” short  from 1990 is a upbeat romp about Cupid getting fed up with all the smoochy hooey that he has to be around all the time. It’s on the Season 1, Vol. 1 DVD set, or downloadable here. Entirely worth it for the stop-motions style cut scenes and the the slow motion kissing session between Babs and Max.

And of course there’s always the classic Pepe Le Pew Looney Tunes episodes, a good old Disney movie, the “I’m not your boyfriend” episode of Chowder, and the “Frankie My Dear…” episode of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends!

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• Dreamworks is having an Art of Puss in Boots exhibition at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Fransisco. I thought that movie was just beautiful, and I love production art, so I would say go – it’s only there until April 22.
• **UPDATED FOR NEW EVENT** Bellarmine College in LA is having a BIG event on February 23. It’s an all-day event discussing race in comics and animation, and LeSean Thomas (the Boondocks cartoon, Black Dynamite, Ben 10, Batman:The Brave and the Bold, and Green Lantern: First Flight) and Brandon M. Easton (new Thundercats writer) will be there.

Michigan

• The Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing is showing an exhibit of WW2-era Disney cartoons.

China: Hangzhou

• Not yet a museum, but beginning construction this year is the China Comic and Animation Museum. Check out the design of this place, it looks awesome.

As per usual, if you miss anything, you can watch it again on Hulu. My favorite for animation so far is the post-apocalyptic effects in this ad!

And this gets an honorable mention based entirely on the “what was that?” reaction it gave everyone at my place.

What do you think? Good stuff this year?

Suzannah discusses the 3D rerelease of Beauty and the Beast with guest host Paul.

Here is the podcast —-> Animated Things Club Episode 04: Beauty and the Beast 3D <—

So, Disney’s got a plan to re-release a total of 5 movies as 3D presentations over the next two years. It was kicked off with ‘The Lion King’ this past summer (which took in over $100 million) which was such a massive success that four more movies were added to the roster! While we did not get a chance to see it, we’re both VERY excited to catch the next movie in the series, ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ Suzannah is especially stoked for the final movie in the set, and her favorite movie of all time – ‘The Little Mermaid.’

So what does this mean for animation consumers? The simple – and wonderful – answer is that wonderful movies that a lot of parents have great memories of can now be shared with their own young children. Adults without kids get the opportunity to indulge in some serious nostalgia on the big screen. By all accounts, the 3D rendering looked VERY good on Simba, and Beauty and the Beast was just excellent! Here’s hoping that the huge success of the re-release of these movies from the first Disney renaissance helps to inspire another one.

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Suzannah and Jon discuss the phenomenal remake of the My Little Pony franchise. Spoiler alert: it’s good.

Here is the podcast —-> Animated Things Club Episode 03: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic <—

This is one of a two-part crossover podcast that Animated Things Club is doing in conjunction with the Bronyville Podcast. In this podcast, we’ll be discussing the more technical side of why the new My Little Pony show is so great. On the Bronyville show you can listen to Suzannah discuss with the hosts of show why the way the show’s creators interact with the fandom is significant. You can listen to the Bronyville podcast by searching for them on iTunes, or by going to their website.

History (very briefly) of the My Little Pony franchise.

My Little Pony is owned by the toy company Hasbro. Originally launches as My Pretty Pony in 1981, it was relaunched in 1983, and was produced in various incarnations until 1995. The toys from that time can be divided into three generations, although there are many, many subcategories in each generation. The first My Little pony cartoon was a tv-broadcast movie in 1984. Hasbro produced various cartoon movies and series as well as comic books and graphic novels to support the toyline pretty much solidly from 1984-2009, which brings us to the current incarnation: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It’s broadcast on The Hub, which is a channel Hasbro owns, but isn’t included in many cable packages, and we unfortunately don’t really have the time to discuss today. You can get the show for a VERY reasonable price on iTunes!

History (very briefly) of the re-imagineer, Lauren Faust.

Lauren Faust was an animation student at CalArts in the middle of her junior year in 1995. Despite not having yet graduated, and her resume consisting of just 3 months of layout work on MTV’s The Maxx, she was offered a job as an animator at Turner Features  on their Cats Don’t Dance feature film. She was part of the animation team for a main character.

Faust's parody art from "Cats Don't Dance." Originally posted on cdd4ever.com.

Let that sink in for a minute. Without even finishing her degree (which I am given to understand is essential in the education of animators), Faust was able to hold down a position as a member of the animation team of a lead character in a feature film.

According to this interview, one her favorite scenes, both in the movie and a representation of her work, is the “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” scene. Here’s a clip – start at 0:26 to skip the lousy uploader intro.

After that, Faust’s next notable project was The Iron Giant, where she worked as part of the team handling Hogarth and Annie. Brad Bird directed that movie. I think from here on in, all cartoon topics shall be reviewed under the “Six Degrees of Brad Bird” rule.

After this,it seems she found reliable work, a niche group of animation creatives, and her husband at the Cartoon Network. (Suzannah says: Being a woman in a ‘boy’ industry myself, and having dated within it, I know it’s a really big freaking deal to be recognised for your own merits rather than for those of your significant other. I almost feel weird bring up the fact that Lauren Faust is married to Craig McCracken, in case anyone makes the wrong assumption about the amount of work she’s done on show’s he’s created. She herself often mentions that he’s her husband, so I’m going with that precedent. I just don’t want to encourage any inclination anyone might have to underestimate her achievements based on who she married.) She did a metric ton of work on The Powerpuff Girls (earliest credit 2001), and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (2004-2009), and was a part of the pilot for Codename Kids Next Door.

So, at least as early as 2004, Faust started shopping around an original concept of hers called Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls. So far she’s had at least one book and a line of soft dolls through FAO Schwartz, and hopefully more to one of the stops she made while looking for a company to work with the property was Hasbro. The story goes, that at the end of a one-on-one pitch meeting, the woman she was meeting with said something along the lines of: “I like your art. Have you ever heard of My Little Pony?”

Production began in 2008, with Faust developing and animation taking place at Studio B in Canada, and the first season aired in 2010. We’re in the second season right now, and episode can be viewed on the Hub (the Hasbro network) or can be purchased on iTunes.

Now, Faust is still credited as the developer of the show, but in the second season she stepped down from everything outside of some minor consultation, leaving the show in the capable hands of everyone else who helped to make the show great in the first season. Heading up the show team now is Supervising Director Jayson Thiessen. Ever since her step down, Faust and Thiessen seem to be having an internet fight that seems to consist of each trying to get the other to take a bow for their work on the who. It’s kind of adorable.

A brief overview of the show premise.

A very studious pony (Twilight Sparkle) spends so much time in her books that she knows more than just about anyone, but she doesn’t have any interest in a social life or making friends. Her mentor (Princess Celestia) sends her away from her court to a town called Ponyville, where she lives in a library and is able to continue her studies, but is asked also to make friends and report back to her about what she’s learning. In the two-episode pilot arc, the friendships she forges with five other ponies (Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Fluttershy) allow them the ability to do a sort of “By our powers combined ..!” spell that has the power to defeat bad guys. Although initially resistant to her involuntary relocation (“No mom, I don’t wanna go out an play!”) Twilight wants to stay with her friends in Ponyville, so she does, basically learning a new social skill in every episode, either through her own experiences, or by observing stuff that happens in her friends circle.

Concept Design for the 'Mane 6' characters of MLP:FiM

So what makes My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a great show?

Concept Design!

• The best rule of thumb for character design is that you should be able to look at a still image of a character, and know almost everything about them. Maybe one day we’ll do a breakdown of some great examples of this. You can see in the image on the right, that between the body language and the choice of shapes and graphics, the personality in all of the characters is about as evident as it gets.
• Choice of color is a super big deal in children’s entertainment. You really want to make things look like candy, and work in food imagery whenever you can. The list of apple treats in the two-episode pilot has that taken care of!

Show Design!

• The structure of the show is pretty great. You get a short opening scene that sets the scene for the conflict or story of the episode, with usually a genuinely funny punchline. Such as “Yay!” Not every episode gets a song, but there are quite a few songs worked through the series, by the excellent show composer, Daniel Ingram. Almost every show ends with a main character (Twilight Sparkle) writing a letter to summarize what she learned during that episode – and thus reinforcing the lesson of the show. You get moral lessons delivered very nicely. Suzannah particularly likes how the realistic situations are portrayed – she’s a big fan of animation when used as a teaching tool for little kids, and thinks the execution of lessons about social interactions in My Little Pony is particularly deftly done.

Technical Animation Quality!

• Does everyone listening to the podcast or reading these notes not know what a big deal it is to be able to animate horses running and walking is? In the intro sequence to Episode 5: Griffon the Brush-Off, Pinkie Pie is shown not just trotting, but breaking into a gallop as well. There’s nothing more to say about that … it stands for itself.
• This is some seriously expressive animation in this show.

It’s REALLY Popular!

The show can really be considered a success based on how popular it is. It’s that much of a break out. But exactly how popular is it? Well, a million billion international fanboys can’t be wrong.

• Equestriadaily.com, the premier fansite for the show, has had as of January 11, 2012, over 100,000,000 hits. At that time, It wasn’t even a year old, having come online on January 24, 2010. If you don’t know anything about that what a normal amount of hits are, that’s normal, it’s considered private data. I was told by a friend who works in web advertising that a new site rarely breaks 100,00o in one year unless it has a lot of funding behind it.
• Show developer, Lauren Faust’s DeviantArt page (more or less her only web presence) has had a lot of hits since the show went on the air. As many 206,104 hits in a month. I perspective, prior to this the highest amount of hits she got per month was 8,919. Incidentally, her DA name is based on the name of her favorite childhood MLP character – Firefly.
• A study conducted by a clinical psychiastrist (found on bronystudy.com) garnered several thousand responses in a weekend – by contranst, the Doc running the show (Patrick Edwards, Ph.D.) stated at his Jan 2012 Bronycon panel that often psychiatrists spend months looking for 200 people willing to take a survey.
• The show is only in it’s second season, and there’s already been two fan conventions in NYC, the second of which was so attended that fire regulations had to be enforced.
• Although the show’s target demo is little girls, it was specifically designed to be accessible to Moms and Dads say that families could watch together. Side effect: the show is a massive, massive hit with men from 18-35.

That’s about it for our My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic discussion. In closing, links! First, here’s a blog post Faust wrote for Ms. Magazine, in a counter argument to another post on the site that suggested that the show is homophobic, racist, and smart-shaming. Second, Faust recently posted the answers to many of the FAQ that she gets – including topics from working in the animation industry, working on MLP, and a little bit about herself.

Best Pony: Jon likes Fluttershy, Suzannah likes Pinkie Pie, with Twilight a close second.

Best Pet: We both agree that Gummy is best pet!

*We recorded this podcast before the episode The Last Roundup aired. Here’s a great fan response.

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Also I was very remiss in not mentioning the Annies with all these Golden Globes and Oscars posts. D’oh! My only real objection is the lack of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in the television categories – I don’t think the Canadian production of the show precludes it …  Zooey Deschanel is up for her collaborative work in Winnie the Pooh for Music in a Feature Production!

Disney has just announced thru official PR lines that they’re working with LUCAMAR Productions to produce a film version of “Into the Woods.” Rob Marshall, fresh from Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides will direct and James Lapine will adapt for the screen. (LUCAMAR belongs to Marshall and John DeLuca.) Marhsalls got a pretty good – and diverse – resume that includes musical experience. Sounds exciting!

If you’re not familiar with the Sondheim musical, it’s a reworking of a minor fairytale about a couple who want to reverse a curse that has left them childless, that incorporates better known fairytale stars such as Cinderella and Red Riding Hood. It seems likely that the movie will be live action (if not a mix, a la Enchanted).

So why am I talking about it if it’s live action? Well, because it’s freaking relevant, that’s why. If you’re into comic books at all, you might have heard of a little thing called Fables. It’s a phenomenal, long story about what would happen if the land of fairytales was invaded by a foreign enemy, and fairytales characters were forced to escape into the real world that we all live in and hide. That’s a really short sentance that truly does not do justice to the phenomenal storytelling of the series.

The popularity of the series isn’t an inspiration for the current TV shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time according to series creator Bill Willingham. Fables can’t really be called the pioneer in it’s field, as for better or for worse, Twilight forced open the door for the stuff of folklore to be seen as viable entertainment material, and before that Shrek was turning a white knight into a farting couch potato and Wicked was showing us a relatable side to the wicked witch. However, Fables is most likely what has held that door open since the shine wore off the controlling vampire boyfriend. Fairytales and realistic takes on them (the first issue opens with a scene of Beauty and the Beast pleading to Snow White that they need either a spell to disguise Beast’s monstrous appearance or, as he only turns into a monster when his wife is upset with him, marriage counselling) are very hot right now, because they are being told as fantastic stories in at least one forum.

Back to Disney and “Into the Woods.”

How hard would it be for Disney to do an animated take on that sort of ironic attitude to fairytales? They’ve put all of their stars together before (remember House of Mouse?) I’d love to see a movie of the Disney princesses in a realistic or ironic setting. It’s probably not going to happen with “Into the Woods”, but it seems like the natural next step!

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Oscar Nominations are in!

Hugo‘s up for a LOT of awards! Best Picture (remember back when Beauty and the Beast was the first animated feature film to get a best Picture nom?) Art Direction, Costume Design, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Writing (Adapted Screenplay)! That’s six nominations! I’d love to see it to win in Art Direction particularly, but how great is it that an animated film is so well-received across the board?

The nominations for Best Animated Feature Film are pretty gratifying (at least for me!) I’m very happy to see A Cat in Paris  on the list, and Puss in Boots left me feeling happy and smiley for days. The other three nominations are Chico & Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, and Rango.

I think this might be the first year that Pixar released a movie that didn’t make it in to this category. I think this is right – Cars 2 was fun, but it wasn’t Oscar-worthy, and that’s ok. Pixar has still made more life-changing movies that most movie houses, and a higher percentage of amazing movies per total release than almost anyone.

I love ALL of the nominations for Animated Short Film! They are Dimanche/Sunday, The Fantastic Flying Lessons of Mr. Morris Lessmore, La Luna, A Morning Stroll and Wild Life.

Finally, not exactly an animated thing, but very animation-adjacent, “Man or Muppet” from this year’s Muppet Movie has a best song nomination!

There’s no category for best surprise appearance of Jim Parsons. Sad face!

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A 1964 animatic of the The Hobbit is making the rounds on the internets. Cartoon Brew has some great details on it. It’s definitely not super faithful to the book, but the most important thing about it (in my mind) is that it’s just beautifully illustrated. Would be interesting to compare it to the other animated versions of The Hobbit someday.

Tintin and Hugo both just won golden globes – and I haven’t had the time to see either of them yet! Does anyone else feel guilty about stuff like that?

I was listening to a Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast about imaginary friends, and thinking back to the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends show in conjunction with the actual scientific data about the subject that the podcast offered. One of the best things about animation (to me) is the ability to hook into the way kids learn and think.

Beauty & the Beast 3D is out and getting insanely great reviews! The Tangled: Ever After short is also being talked up a lot in our animation-nerd circle. Go see ‘em!

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Here are the show notes for the podcast.

Suzannah and Jon discuss the broadcast history of Scooby Doo. Did you know that Shaggy once had a robot butler? Or a girlfriend?

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—> Animated Things Club Episode 02: Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc. <—

Wait, stop! We know you want to learn all Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc, but in this case, a little bit of knowledge about the Scooby Doo franchise would help you! Please head over to howstuffworks.com and listen to Josh & Chuck tell you where Scooby Doo Came from. You should also subscribe to them on iTunes – they’re great!

We’ll also be putting out a minicast shortly, overviewing the previous incarnations of the Scoob.

We’ll be here when you get back!

All caught up with Scooby Study? Let’s get it going.

We LOVE this new incarnation of Scooby Doo. Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc first aired on the Cartoon Network in April of 2010, part of an effort to revive classic library properties under the guidance of Sam Register, who is Executive Producer on this property. His resume includes Hi-Hi Puffy Amiyumi, Teen Titans, and Ben 10, all incredibly successful properties. Ben 10 in particular was a great success in the fact that it’s very premise involves very clever merchandising! It’s also pretty entertaining.

Here’s the video of Sam Register that we discussed in the podcast. It’s his keynote speech from MipJr 2011. He talks about Looney Tunes, Thundercats, and Super BFF as well as Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc.

Victor Cook is our director. Victor Cook worked on Gargoyles - which we have plans to cover. Do you hear me, Kevin? He’s worked with Greg Wiseman on comic book properties such as The Spectacular Spider-Man, which seems to be regarded as the best recent animated incarnation of your friendly neighborhood webslinger. Spike Brandt and Tony Cervone are looking like our first animation theme in the podcast – they are supervising producers here as they are for the Looney Tunes Show, our Episode 01 podcast subject.

The high points of why we love this show: Scooby Doo doesn’t take itself too seriously – it embraces it’s own campy style. At the same time, it throws out a lot of references to Scooby Doo history, not just in the voice casting, but also in the plots, the history and there’s one episode that is clearly a tribute to the history of the Scoob! The original Scoobey Doo, Where Are You was pretty groundbreaking, and dark in a way that lots of other cartoons weren’t, and this incarnation definitely follows in it’s footstep there.

Also, it’s FUNNY.

Here’s the Eddie Izzard quote on how Scooby Doo can lead to international peace. Try not to get too distracted with how awesome he is, and finish the podcast!

Voice Acting! The voice cast is wonderful. Here’s an abbreviated list of them, with a short list of what you might know them for.

• Grey DeLisle as Daphne: Mandy from Billy and Mandy, Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Patrick Warburton as Sheriff Stone: Joe from Family Guy, Kronk from The Emperor’s New Groove
• Lewis Black as Mr. E: A comedian best known for his work on The Colbert Report
• Vivica A. Fox as Angel Dynamite.
• Casey Kasum as Shaggy’s Dad:  The original voice of Shaggy, Robin from the original Batman cartoon, and Alexander Cabot III in Josie and the Pussycats
• Matthew Lillard as Shaggy: Lillard played Shaggy in the live action Scooby Doo movies: Scooby Doo, and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.
• Maurice LaMarche as Vincent Van Ghoul. Just look at his IMDB page – he’s done it all! But I love him as the Brain half of Pinky and the Brain.
• Cree Summer – we’ll get to her later!
• Frank Welker as Fred: He’s the original voice of Fred and Scooby Doo! He was also in Star Trek III - which is awesome if you’re a cross-genre nerd!
• Harlan Ellison plays himself! If you don’t know who he is, just google him.
• Linda Cardellini as Hot Dog Water: She played Velma in the live action Scooby Doo movies: Scooby Doo, and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and Lindsay in Freaks and Geeks.

Storyboarding!

Episode 2 is set up like a horror movie rather than a cartoon. Suzannah loves it when animation is given the same treatment as any other film-making would get. As an aspect of the overall storytelling, the storyboarding reflects the high-level of achievement in every aspect of production – writing, animation, and the building of a grand plot.

Character Development!

• Velma: What this show does with Velma is a great example of how they’re exploring these characters. She is very naturally adapted from her original self – with a lot of great depth. Jon thinks her dating relationship with Shaggy came out of left field, but Suzannah thinks it makes sense.
• Professor Pericles: A totally new character, he’s just fantastic, but we can’t talk about it without spoiling anythng. Sorry!

Fave Episodes!

• Jon says Episode 6: The Legend of Alice May. Jon loves the callbacks to the original series, adn the ground getting laid for the Creeper. There’s a Vincent Van Ghoul cameo.
• Jon says Episode 26: All Fear the Freak. Jon didn’t think Scooby Doo was capable of something like this. His jaw was on the floor.
• Suzannah says Episode 2: Creeping Creatures. Suzannah loves this because it’s the episode that converted her to the series, and because of how INCREDIBLY funny it is. It’s also beautiful – all neon colors and beautiful storyboarding.
• Suzannah says Episode 16: Where Walks Aphrodite. This super-creepy episode really gives us an introduction to Professor Pericles (although it’s not his first appearance.) He’s such a great character – so complex and sinister!

If you’re going to start watching the show, start on Episode 1 or 2. You really can’t start later than that if you want to get the benefit of the series storyline. Jon says start at 1 if you’re an old school Scooby fan and want the full homage, Suzannah says start at 2 if you want to be an instant convert.

So, buy the DVD set. You’ll watch the whole season once, and then watch the whole thing again to catch everything you missed! You can buy it, and sorts of other Scoob DVDs, here.

In closing: Cree Summer guests in one episode as a barista/ fortune teller called Lady Marmelade. She works in Velma’s mom’s cafe, where she makes mocha chocka lattes. I was hoping to find a video clip, but no luck! You CAN watch some video clips here. Just be careful not to watch “Who is Angel Dynamite” so you aren’t spoiled!

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Suzannah discusses the legacy of Cosgrove Hall (source of Danger Mouse, Count Duckula, Bananaman, and adaptations of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books) in our first minicast.

We mentioned at the end of our Looney Toons Show podcast that the creator of Danger Mouse passed away. We were talking about Mark Hall, who died on November 11, 2011, presumably of complications relating to the cancer he was living with. Here’s a link to Mr. Hall’s NY Time obit. His lifelong partner in crime is Brian Cosgrove, who is still with us, and together they not only created Danger Mouse, but established two animation houses. One of these studios, Cosgrove Hall, would go on under their leadership to create internationally known cartoons, win an international Emmy, and develop a reputation for being a premier animation house in Europe.

Cosgrove Hall may have been best known for their 2D children’s entertainment, but they also worked with stop motion an CG. Their most famous stop motion, which has to be seen to be believed, is their adaptations of The Wind in the Willows which started with a 75 minute movie and then ran for four seasons in the early/mid eighties. They continued to work in stop motion right up until their closure in 2009, but perhaps their most notable other work in this category is The Fool of the World and The Flying Ship, which won an International Emmy in 1991 in the Children and Young People category after airing on Christmas Day in 1990. It’s mesmerizing. It is available on DVD, but was only released in the UK. It won an international Emmy in 1991. I STRONGLY recommend you buy it, but in the meantime, here’s a taste via youtube.

In addition to these achievements, Cosgrove Hall worked on properties such Andy Pandy, Postman Pat, and the animated adaptations of  Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Terry Pratchett’s Truckers, Wyrd Sisters, and Soul Music. Not only did they dominate the animation market in the UK, but they also worked in a cross-genre setting, using traditional 2D, stop-motion, and CG techniques, in both 2 and 3D arena. This is particularly impressive to me, especially when you compare it to todays industry where you can specialize in such minute areas of animation. It’s also notable that while they adapted from fairy tales and animated liscenced properties, Cosgrove Hall also created – and arguably had their best commercial successes – with their original properties. Not too shabby!

Here’s a full list of Cosgrove Hall’s impressive production resume.

Cosgrove Hall came to a sad end. Both of the founders retired in 2000, and the company spent a few years working on revamps of classic properties. The implications that I saw in the articles I read on it were that creative control was taken away from the studio at this point. In 2009 it was more or less liquidated into ITV, its parent company. It was a little unclear to me how long ITV was the majority shareholder of the company, but I think that it had been for a long time, and that the decision was based on the studio’s consistant inability to turn a profit following the co-founders retirement. It’s a valid business decision – but a loss in more ways than one.

One of the last original shows to come out of Cosgrove Hall was the Carrotty Kid. (It rhymes with ‘karate’ if you have an English accent.) According to the property’s creator, the reason that it never made it past the pilot stage, despite positive reception, was a decision on the part of the network to end their children’s afternoon programming block. Some groups are trying to fight that decision. Here is a link to group that is trying to ensure that high-quality children’s entertainment remain a priority in the UK. 

If you want to learn a little more about the great of Cosgrove Hall, this seems to be the premier fansite. Those of us who grew up with Cosgrove Hall’s works tend to think of ourselves as pretty lucky, so here’s hoping that new talents will rise to take the place of the greats that came before them.

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Best Animated movies are Tintin, Rango, Puss in Boots, Cars 2 & Arthur Christmas. So far I have only seen one of these – but have plans to see two more before the end of the year. I wanted to see Rango – it looked so surreal -but ran our of time.

Cyanide and Happiness will be a Comedy Central animated cartoon. This is great news! BUT that’s not all – they’re also adding ‘Robots’, which has talent from ‘The Office’ behind it and ‘Trip Tank’ which looks like it’s going to be a collection of shorts in a vein similar to what Cartoon Network used to be in the business of.

If you saw the Muppet Movie recently (and if you’re reading this I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t want to) you probably went home ready to re-watch every piece of muppet filmmaking you own. Cartoon Brew has some neat deets on “Alexander the Grape” which is backgrounded on Jim Henson’s Red Book. Quite neat and VERY 70′s …

Suzannah and Jonathan discuss the new incarnation of Bugs Bunny the rest of the Looney Tunes in our first real episode! We talk about the legendary June Foray,  and what makes a good reboot of a cartoon concept.

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

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In which you meet your lovely hosts, Suzannah and Jonathan, and get to learn a little bit about who we are and why we want to podcast about cartoons.

Cartoon Brew has the 2011 Annie Award Nominations. All of these nominations are great choices, but we’re particularly excited about Andreas Deja’s nomination for his work on this year’s Winnie the Pooh movie, and the two nominations that Adventure Time picked up!

Speaking of Adventure Time, we’re planning a podcast on the show, but won’t be releasing it until 2012. After the last 2-3 new episodes, it’s impossible to discuss anything without massive spoilers, so we’re going to give people a little time to catch up. Same goes for Thundercats.

The Monster Engine website  seems to be down for now (probably from the amount of hits it’s been getting from this  article from Elezea.com.) It’s a series of illustrations that explore children’s drawings with the eyes of grownups. Being that a lot of cartoons are for children, it’s a great look at the difference between the way adults and children think.

Billie the Unicorn is going to be an animated storybook for your fave Apple product. I do love Brianne Drouhard’s artwork, and with a bit of luck it’ll be animated by her as well!

• Mentalfloss.com has some landmark moments in early animation history.
• Cartoon Brew’s first ever animation festival starts on December 1st!
• Amethyst of Gemworld is coming to the CN’s DC programming block, via the very talented Brianne Drouhard. Maybe if we’re lucky Marvel will adapt Crystar too!