It’s a pretty short one today since it’s a time-crunch here to get something done in the next day or so! I’m really looking forward to having less things on the plate here; for some reason everything is sort of due at once. As I’m finishing the thing that’s due tomorrow, I took a break for a quick Thunderbean Thursday. I’ll have big news soon from Thunderbean – but we’ll get through the current things here first so I have something to share.
Today’s cartoon!
To relax a little, I’ve been hunting through various cartoons that have used the music from the Rainbow Parades as stock music so we can have a ‘music only’ selection for a film or two on the ‘Rainbow Parades 2’ set. I came across this cartoon from the ‘Aesop’s Fables’ volume 1 Blu-ray, and thought it
Calling a cartoon Hunting in 1950 in 1926 seems like a great idea— and presents all kinds of possibilities.
Sadly, there isn’t *anything* in this particular film that would suggest that the film was set 24 years in the future. While it’s not clever in that way, there’s a lot of fun gags to make it at least an enjoyable but somewhat thin-plot-ed cartoon.
The plot that is there consists of Al hunting. This includes chasing a bear with a rifle, then chasing a skating leopard (getting its spots knocked off at one point). There’s a few other little humorous moments including a knight’s armor gag, if that’s your thing. There’s also an enjoyable sequence featuring the various jungle animals dancing to piano music that has pretty happy animation. My favorite gag has Farmer Al waiting for a Lion to get his nails trimmed and sanded before Al’s allowed to shoot him- leaving him waiting on a rock and having a fantasy in a thought bubble of the dead lion. Somehow the dead lion’s body makes him giggle. Despite being around animals in nearly every film, he has a terrible animal rights record!
As I’m trying to find whatever music pieces I can for the Rainbow set, I was especially happy to hear the track on this one since it features a pretty nice piece of music from the end of Bold King Cole. What else can you identify?
Have a good week all, and stay away from stampedes!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
A cute cartoon, with a surprisingly well-synchronised soundtrack. The music we hear while Farmer Al Falfa is hunting the rabbits comes from the live-action intro to Van Beuren’s “Spinning Mice”. I can’t identify any other cues offhand, but if I have a few minutes later on I’ll cross-reference them against the Rainbow Parades and see if I find any matches.
I was very entertained by the manicure scene. According to what I remember of the novels of Sinclair Lewis, a manicure was a sign of social status in the 1920s. Male characters with manicured nails — and there are a lot of them in these novels — tend to be vain, smug, pompous, and self assured. On the other hand (I didn’t intend a pun here, but I’ll let it stand), in Lewis’s MAIN STREET, Mrs. Kennicott is distressed to learn that her new husband, though a prosperous doctor and community leader, still trims his fingernails with a penknife. The manicurists themselves were presented as pretty girls and very flirtatious, dependent as they were upon earning tips.
So in this 1926 cartoon, it makes sense that the lion, as king of beasts, would have his claws professionally manicured. Farmer Al would definitely be one of the penknife-wielding hoi polloi.
There is no doubt in my mind that Paul Terry had a manicure every week — and that he was a lousy tipper.
There’s a lot to enjoy about this short, in spite of it being a pre-sound Paul Terry cartoon – the gags have a snap to them, the inkblot animation moves at a brisk pace, and the music fits in well despite having been composed and arranged years after this short’s release. There’s also a bit of blood at the 2:55 mark, during the hunter’s fantasy of a dead lion, which might be the earliest use of sanguine humor in animation!
I can see this being one of the shorts Harman, Ising, and others were watching in the studio’s privacy from copied film prints, taking notes of what works and what didn’t, before implementing them into an Oswald short.
One of the very early ones to feature a ‘director’ system where there was one lead animator– the director himself– with other animators working as either assistants or in their own scenes. I think Jerry Shields was the director here. This was around the time Bill Tytla was promoted? to full time animation work on these Fables.
You can see a great example of early Tytla in THE WHITE ELEPHANT (1929). After the shutdown of Fables, he would return to Terry in early 1931 after his vacation in Europe. More of these silent Fables need to be uncovered and I’m glad there are efforts of some caliber to recover them all.