First – a little Thunderbean update:
We’re sending a batch of the special sets this week, and late next week we’ll be kicking off two official sets, the long out-of-print repressing of the Noveltoons Blu-ray along with the long-in-progress Rainbow Parades volume 2, hitting a mailbox near you. I’ll talk more about that title as the pre-orders start to ship. Thanks to everyone who has helped made these projects possible!
…and onto a cartoon! The Toy Shop (1934)
You know, I’d really love if there was deeper dive into the Walter Lantz cartoons of the 30s detailing the films along with the artists. Because of the inability to see a lot of the films for many years, they really did vanish except for the real die-hard cartoon collectors. It took me many years to even see something less than half of them, mainly because just bait the only way you could see them is if you had a friend that had them in 16mm- or if you got prints yourself.
The late 20s and early 30s shorts, under free-wheeling animator Bill Nolan, have a beautiful way of trying to avoid the conventional wisdom of other studio’s discoveries in favor of funny action and gags. That isn’t to say that improvements didn’t happen- but with Nolan and Vet Anderson handling a lot of the animation in each short, there was often a much less-structured approach to everything. By late 1933 drastic changes were happening. Like all west coast studios, the influx of additional talent, plus the influence of both the Harman/Ising product and Disneys, led Lantz away from those more haphazard spontaneous adventures and into a product that looked and acted a lot more like Disney’s Silly Symphony fairy tales mixed with H/I’s musical Merrie Melodies. The now-active production code certainly had some influence as well.
Of course, like every other studio, what Lantz produced *needed* to improve as the industry grew and produced slicker work. Of course we all look back and can find merit in both early and mid-30s approaches. I love the quality of the animation here, but I love the rollicking fun that every Nolan scene brings with it. I even love Vet Andersons sloshy and stiff characters along with the funny action he often created.
By the point this short was made, Nolan appears to be in a supervisory rather than production role, and Vet Anderson is now gone. Les Kline is one of just a handful of seasoned Lantz lead animators still at the studio, along with Fred (Tex) Avery. Fred Kopietz, who had cut his teeth at the Iwerks’ studio, starting on Fiddlesticks, was already know for his solid drawing and animation abilities. His work certainly improved the overall quality of animation at Lantz, as he helped train some of the younger artists. He ended up at Disneys by the early 40s, working on both shorts and features.
The Toy Shop (1934) is a perfect example of the studio trying hard to use elements from those other studios above developing their own style and direction. At this point, Manuel Moreno seems to be helming animation direction. There’s a great article from Cartoon Research by Tom Klein that gives a little detail into Moreno learning animation from Nolan, but developing further in this period. Read it here!
It seems like the biggest struggle in many Lantz shorts in this period in trying to find solidity in story and direction. There are charming aspects to many of the shorts (Toyland Premiere, a color short from this same year, is one of my all time favorites), but they’re often pretty uneven. Heck, nearly all are still fun little films. I’d love to see all of these from the 35mm negatives. Wouldn’t you?
So- here’s Oswald in The Toy Shop, from a 16mm print that’s starting to head south due to vinegar syndrome. We thought we’d scan to give it one last hurrah.
Have a good week everyone!
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.
I’m always so glad and perked up to hear of THUNDERBEAN news in the positive side of getting new product. I did order some of the “special“ discs that you are shipping. So incredible!
I also look forward to the second volume of “rainbow parade“ cartoons. I really like the “Oswald, the Lucky rabbit“ cartoons from Walter Lantz. I’m sure this one is really great as well.
is Spooky Cartoony Halloween shipping out in September?
This could almost be a Silly Symphony or an early Mickey cartoon. Lots of charming touches. Oswald has definitely reached the point like Mickey or Porky when he plays host in his own cartoons rather than being showcased as the prime mover and shaker of the action. Speaking of which, there seems to be something about a cartoonJack-in-the-Box that spawns villainy. Maybe it’s being cramped up in such a small space. I can think of several other examples in which a Jack-in-the-Box stirs up trouble. “The Christmas Visitor” comes to mind, as well as the “Steadfast Tin Soldier” segment of “Fantasia 2000.”
Will this short happen to be on the upcoming Lantz Studio Treasures Blu-ray?
Unfortunately, this cartoon is just yet another forgettable rip-off of the Silly Symphony “Midnight in a Toy Shop” and is light-years away from the creativity of the early Oswald cartoons by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan.
Alas, the year 1934 marked a turning point in the history of animation, as the diverse and unique styles of each animation studio gave way to a standardization of techniques and artistic style modeled after the Disney studios.
This obviously had catastrophic consequences, as each animation studio brought about its own downfall by striving at all costs to produce imitations of the Silly Symphonies.
It wasn’t until a certain Tex Avery rebelled against this system that gags gradually returned to the center of the action in cartoons.
Aren’t you over-analyzing this time? I mean most of the studios pretty much opened up due to Disney’s success in the late ’20’s. If they weren’t mimicking the “Silly Symphonies” before, they were imitating Mickey.
This statement is true only for the Harman-Ising studio and, to a lesser extent, the early cartoons from the Ibwerk studio; these two studios did indeed seek to imitate Mickey from the very beginning, but this was not the case for other animation studios.
The contrast is all the more striking when we revisit Lantz’s early Oswald cartoons. In their early days, in 1929–30, these films possessed a visual identity and comedic energy all their own. Animation was not yet confined to a single model: each studio experimented, developing its own characters, its own rhythm, and, above all, its own conception of the gag. Animators could still get away with all sorts of eccentricities, distortions, and visual innovations without constantly having to wonder whether their film resembled what was coming out of the Disney studios enough.
However, beginning in the early 1930s—and more specifically around 1934—this freedom would gradually disappear within the animation industry. Disney’s phenomenal success helped establish a new industry standard: smoother animation, cuter characters, more elaborate backgrounds, more structured stories, and, above all, a desire to make cartoons appear increasingly “respectable.” On paper, these advances might have seemed beneficial. In practice, however, they also had an unintended consequence: instead of encouraging each studio to refine its own style, they pushed much of the industry to chase after the same model.
Thus, we witnessed a veritable “Disneyfication” of American animation. Studios that, just a few years earlier, had distinguished themselves through their respective personalities gradually began producing films that seemed to come from the same mold. Animals became more anthropomorphic, movements more restrained, stories more sentimental, and gags increasingly subordinated to a supposedly elegant style of direction. Everything that had defined the irreverence, comic brutality, and anarchy of early cartoons was gradually deemed outdated.
The problem, of course, wasn’t the existence of the Silly Symphonies themselves. The problem was their competitors’ tendency to try to copy them instead of seeking an alternative. Disney had found a formula that worked both commercially and artistically; rather than responding to this success with greater originality, the industry too often chose the easy way out: imitating Disney. And this imitation eventually became so pervasive that it helped stifle the unique identities of many studios.
And it is precisely this trend that makes certain cartoons from this period so frustrating to watch today. Technically, they may be cleaner, smoother, and sometimes even better animated than their predecessors. But this technical improvement does not necessarily mean artistic progress. What’s the point of having more frames per second, more detailed backgrounds, and more sophisticated animation if the film no longer has anything personal to say? Technical virtuosity then becomes an end in itself, while imagination takes a back seat.
In the long run, this standardization had particularly damaging consequences. In their efforts to compete with Disney on its own turf, several studios ended up abandoning the very things that could have set them apart. They failed to understand that the best way to compete with Disney was not to become a copy of Disney, but to offer something that Disney did not do.
It wasn’t until the emergence of a new generation of animators that this approach truly began to be challenged. Tex Avery probably embodies this reaction against the growing seriousness and standardization of cartoons better than anyone else. With him, the gag reigned supreme once again: the story was nothing more than a pretext, logic was shattered, characters could undergo the worst transformations imaginable, and the fourth wall no longer had any reason to exist. Avery did not seek to outdo Disney by applying its principles even more meticulously; on the contrary, he sought to demonstrate that there was another way.
That is where the true significance of this revolution lies. Animation didn’t need to become a perpetual imitation of the Silly Symphonies to evolve. It needed to reclaim its freedom. Tex Avery’s cartoons—as well as those that followed at Warner Bros., MGM, and other studios—would prove that an animated film could be technically sophisticated while remaining completely crazy, irreverent, and unpredictable.
Thus, that poor Oswald from 1934 ultimately appears as a symptom of a much broader problem: that of an industry which, fascinated by Disney’s success, began to confuse progress with standardization. The early Oswald cartoons may have had fewer artistic pretensions, but they possessed something that this production sorely lacked: a genuine personality. And when a studio abandons its identity to chase after its competitor’s success, it does not become its equal. It simply becomes its imitator.
In my view, that is precisely what makes this period so regrettable: while American animation could have become a wonderful testing ground for different styles, it too often chose to become a gigantic waiting room where everyone was trying to get their own ticket to the kingdom of Disney.
I rest my case.
I think Holyfer makes a great case for his analysis. I haven’t already seen enough of everything to know if I’d come to exactly the same conclusion, but what I have seen matches this description perfectly. The early 30’s stuff is funny! From many different places. And then, a lot of that is lost as technique advances, and claims the focus. I’d differ in that I can still enjoy today’s cartoon, for example, for what it is, while I enjoy earlier, wilder cartoons *more*.
Ditto.
can you please, PLEASE do a thunderbean thursday devoted to rainbow parades volume 2 next thursday?
please dont do another random cartoon next thursday…..i would like a whole post covering rainbow volume 2 since it’s being shipped next week
thank you
Foo. Let Stanch post whattee wantz.
I appreciate seeing Toy Shoppe in this new transfer, and thanks Steve for the link to my old post about Moreno and Nolan. One thing I’d like to mention is that despite the early collaboration between them, especially making the ‘Fable’ animation for King of Jazz, the Universal Cartoon Dept by 1934 had been separated into units in a manner by which Manuel Moreno was more typically supervising and/or directing the animation for the cartoons that were on Lantz’s side of the producing ledger. The title card says that Toy Shoppe is a Walter Lantz-Bill Nolan Cartoon, but I doubt this was truly co-produced. Within the units, the responsibility to produce a given film during that year generally fell to either one or the other.
The top billing of Manuel Moreno among the Artists is to me an indication that Lantz was the producer here, and 1934 was a year in which he had quietly entrusted Moreno to handle directing (much of) his half of the slate. That’s not to say that Walter wasn’t holding his own with other studio functions. It would take a full column to talk about the ways Lantz was shifting around his workload, doing many urgent things, but a simple way to frame this period was to view Moreno as the guy who was increasingly the de facto director for Lantz-unit films and not Nolan-unit films. Although the credits do not always accurately reflect all the animators, this one lists four (Moreno, Kopietz, Kline, Grandpre) plus the BG artist Smythe, so I’d argue there’s no Nolan animation here. But I’ll admit the French doll dancing in the spotlight seems to show an animator very much influenced by Nolan, at least imitating Nolan, so who knows – maybe it is Nolan?
I also like Holyfer’s analysis of the film in comments, that Toy Shoppe has a “genuine personality” that doesn’t much conform to Disney. There’s such a quirky, almost pulp-horror vibe to some gags, including the can of Face Paint at the outset. And then the Jack jumps Out-of-the-Box, chasing the Dutch dolls, only to meet a gruesome yet clever end. There’s a LOT of characters here, showing a commitment to production showmanship. There’s also some pretty strong technical sequences. Kline and Kopietz contributed good work on this, and this looks to me like a good example of Moreno beginning to take the helm, showing his directing style (as well as his animation, since he had to meet the same footage quota that all others did).