I’m toying with the idea of following it roughly though in order while trying to theme it at the same time. This could be biting off more than I can chew and may well collapse under the weight of its own ambition / pretension but let’s give it a try and see how far it gets.
Taking it back to my earliest influences, let’s kick off with cartoons. Specifically, two types of cartoon in particular…
Looney Tunes, Tex Avery & Tom And Jerry
“Hmm, those are all well and good but aren’t they just for kids?” A statement that is wrong in almost every conceivable way. Something that’s often forgotten these days is that cartoons were just a part of the cinematic experience alongside the film as well as newsreels and episodic adventure serials. They were just another form of entertainment. In fact, if anything they were seen as disposable (as evidenced by the fact that the studios used to wipe the original animation cels after use in order to be able to reuse them) which worked in their favour as the animators were largely left to their own devices. Conversely, this has created entertainment far more enduring than a lot of the films they were created to support. Let’s cherry pick a few examples to illustrate why they’re great.
What’s Opera, Doc? & The Rabbit Of Seville
Both of these are classic examples of what can be done with sparse / no dialogue (unless you count singing), a stunning combination of character and background and character work and a use of music as part of the action (which music always is in a Looney Tunes cartoon) rather than just an incidental afterthought. What’s Opera, Doc? Is often hailed as the best of the bunch but I have a real love for The Rabbit Of Seville. Both contain some standard elements - Elmer chasing Bugs, an escalation of efforts and Bugs in drag.
Duck Amuck
An early example of meta humour as this involves breaking the fourth wall almost all the way through as Daffy is tormented by an unseen (until the very end) animator. It’s a selection of gags about the process of making a cartoon, highlighting the artificial nature of the medium itself and not the sort of thing you found in film at the time. It’s both an in-joke for creators and invitation to the audience to come inside that world. It’s also very funny.
The Cat Concerto
Another example of the overlap between music and comedy (something that will crop up time and time again throughout these given the importance of rhythm and timing to both) and also shows how, once you’ve fully established the character dynamic, you can transplant those characters into pretty much any situation; in this case, Tom being the concert pianist disturbing Jerry’s attempts to sleep in the piano.
Northwest Hounded Police & Red Hot Riding Hood
Tex Avery was another big influence and another director producing fourth-wall-breaking material such as the wolf running off the edge of the film at one point in Northwest Hounded Police. Also, you can't talk about classic cartoons without mentioning the wolf’s reaction to Red Riding Hood (as recreated by Jim Carrey in The Mask).
And that’s not even mentioning Duck Dodgers In The 24 1/2th Century; Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck! Rabbit! Duck! (the “Rabbit season! Duck Season!’ ones); Fast And Furry-ous (the template for Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons); One Froggy Evening (the one with the singing frog who keeps refusing to sing in front of an audience); and a good few hundred more. Cartoons were definitely a formative influence as well as continuing to be one to this day. It wasn’t just Bugs, Daffy, Droopy, Tom and Jerry that had a formative impact, though...
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