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Sunday, June 11, 2006
Contra Snow White: Cartoon Dialectics
With a nod to Adam Roberts . . .
I suppose that Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the best-known movie version of that story. For all I know it may be the best-known version of that story, period. But it’s not the only animated version of the story that’s been made. I know of at least two others.
The first is older than Disney’s and was made by the Fleischer brothers. It’s a Betty Boop cartoon that’s built around Cab Calloway’s rendition of “St. James Infirmary.” Not only do we hear Calloway’s vocal, but his body movement has been rotoscoped onto Koko the Clown, who does the on-screen singing. It runs a bit over seven minutes long (the sound is set rather low at the source so turn it up on your machine):
For extra credit: Was this surreal excursion made for kids?
A somewhat different version was made by Bob Clampett at Warner Brothers under the title of Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs. This was made in 1943. The Warner Brothers cartoon studio had, in some measure, evolved to being an anti-Disney. Where Disney aimed at cute and realistic, Warner Brothers went for wacky and stylized. While it would be hard to call this seven-minute wonder a parody of the Disney version - it is so very different in sensibility - it is certainly playing against it. For that matter, it’s playing against other things as well; for example, there’s a clear allusion to Citizen Kane (1941).
Though Warner Brothers has been reissuing their classic cartoons to DVD, this one has not been reissued. The title spelling gives an indication why not; stereotypes abound. You can find an appreciation and apologia for it here, and another one here. This piece is not an apologia, but nonetheless feels the cartoon is worth seeing. Coal Black is a brilliant piece of work. It too is available on the web, though the quality is poor. But you get the idea (beware: the sound is set somewhat louder than the Fleischer):
For extra credit: Does this film stand in a dialectical relationship to both the Fleischer and the Disney versions?
Finally, let’s look at a Disney cartoon, but not Snow White. This is called All the Cats Join In and is set to music by Benny Goodman. It appeared in 1946; that is to say, it appeared not long after Coal Black. To my eye it doesn’t look like your standard Disney cartoon. The body styles and movements are off. In fact, it looks like Disney’s animators may have borrowed a move or two from Coal Black. You be the judge:
For extra credit: Might we call this sequence of cartoons, from Betty Boop through the jumpin’ cats, an evolutionary one? Why? Why not?
Michael Berube has recently observed that “Bugs Bunny was black" (see comment 32). Does this sequence of cartoons illustrate that phenomenon?
Comments
Thank you for the Betty Boop cartoon. I’ve been wondering what it was for years; I had a distant memory of seeing it on late night TV, but I didn’t remember the title or plot. Just the surrealism. I remember thinking “That’s so surreal, it’s like the characters are mythological gods.” I’ve struggled to remember it ever since.
I still think so; the cartoon space is some olympian/dreamtime/creation space where godlike characters play out their epic battles; it would take Northrop Frye to explain it properly. These cartoons are what Americans have instead of mythical gods. Thomas Pynchon puts large sections of _Gravity’s Rainbow_ in a cartoon setting for this reason.
The others, which play so much with race, I don’t think have so much mythical power. Michael and B, Ph.D. are right that Bugs is black, and John Updike has written that the original Mickey Mouse was black, though he changed in the fifties when they gave him some pink cheeks and made him a suburban dad.
All true, but it’s more complex than that: Bugs is sometimes black, more often blackface minstrel, but always an ambiguous trickster who transcends such mortal boundaries. The thing that fascinates me about Bugs is not his racial transgressiveness, but his gender transgressiveness. Have you noticed how fluid his gender is? I mean, Bugs is really, really good at using female disguise to fool Fudd—he’s even seductive. All this transgressiveness, I guess, might give him some of that mythical dimension I liked in Betty Boop.
The last one is the most meta-cartoonish, for those who like that sort of thing. The others play with the medium, but _All the Cats Join In_ calls attention to the fact that it’s playing with the medium.
So, I don’t see an evolution there. I’m tempted to say it’s a devolution. But to be fair, I don’t see any sort of progression, except in technical skill and technology; I see three cartoons with vastly different sensibilities, each one with something very neat to offer.
What evolution were you fishing for in your leading question?
Quick question/suggestion:
Could you put the videos below the fold, so that those on older machines don’t have their whole computer grind to a halt whenever they click on this page? (Plus, if they have it set to autoplay, they’ll get dueling audio.)
P.S. I say this hypothetically, since I have Firefox set up not to see video and/or flash animation. But I could imagine it being a problem.
For another view on Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs go to Dean Esmay’s Dean’s World. Be sure to read the comments on it.
One thing to note is that, like the Fleischer Brothers, Bob Clampett did seek out black musicians and entertainers before making the short, the better to get the right feel. Furthermore, the characters are black stereotypes about blacks of that period. It is very much a black film made for a black audience. It is especially black in that it has black heroes. Broadly comical heroes in the low comedy sense, but heroes. You don’t see that in white films with black characters.
Note too that it is the little guy against the powerful. Authority figures get their comuppence in Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs. A common trope in Bob’s work with and after Warner Brothers. CF Falling Hare for an example.
Haven’t seen the third short, and dial up is lousy with streaming video. I do rememeber the crow sequence form Dumbo, so seeing Disney do a black film doesn’t surprise me.
Bill..."extra credit”, indeed - of course they weren’t just made for kids - the transformation of animation into “kid’s stuff” happened w/television. And - since I (following Bakhtin’s entirely apt critique) don’t see dialectic as “useful”, I’ll decline your second...albeit (of course) it’s in a dialogic relationship w/both Fleischer & Disney, but that should go w/out saying. By the way, the WB style was actually strongly-influenced by the more bizarre earlier Fleischer material, so the dialogical relationship in both cases (albeit in different ways) is very strong.
But, re your third (evolutionary) point, I’d say not - directly. The evolution here was in animation techniques/viewpoints...and these three films are much more evidently the result of same than they are offspring of each other. Instead, cartoons of the period loved to play w/archetypical narratives - and these are three v.different examples of same from a period when the techniques were evolving very, very rapidly. So, Disney artists probably had little interest in Fleisher’s “Snow White” - yet their formal approach was evolved (partly) in contra-distinction to their main rival of the 30s, the Fleischer studio (niche separation?). Moreover, one of the key tech innovations of Disney was a (patent evading) elaboration of the multi-plane approach that Fleischer both pioneered & under-used (due to financial constraints). Similarly, although the WB approach derived in certain ways from both Fleisher (visual invention & “violence”...see Popeye rather than Betty for the latter) & Disney (mostly the “full animation” that Klein insightfully explores), by the stage of “Coal Black”, this approach was radically itself...and so, any play w/the much-earlier Disney feature was incidental amidst a seriously full-on intercourse between the mature WB style & LA black culture of the period - mediated (of course) by a parodic relationship w/the original tale. And so, evolution - in this case - is not at all well-represented by these three out of context…
Oh...and Berube is, at most, partly right. Sure, Bugs takes in black trickster tropes...but, he also takes in slicker vs. rubes tropes (as well as many, many others). Genuinely GREAT archetypes - like Bugs turned out to become - invariably transcend all such simplistic models - which is exactly why they are “great”. Berube - Hey, should I ignore the “rube” trope? I think not - should’ve known better…
And, by the way, I recently posted a review of your “Beethoven’s Anvil” on my site - and made the point that, in combination w/Steven Mithen’s “The Singing Neanderthal”, scientific approaches to music have now, from being backrunners, have rapidly reached the stage where they are now a standing reproach to the rest of our critical/aesthetic endeavours!
Interestingly, I’d have to say that animation theory is now a good contender for a decent place in said race - mostly due to Norman M. Klein’s “Seven Minutes: the life & death of the American animated cartoon”. Not that he addresses neurobiological (or evolutionary) issues..."merely" that he makes very real sense of a key couple of decades of cultural history in this form, in a way that really should make other cultural historians ashamed of their own lack of analyzing/synthesizing power…
all the best
Here’s a direct link to Dean Esmay’s discussion of Coal Black.
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1145252830.shtml
One of the commentators points out that the evil queen is hoarding goods that were rationed during wartime. Thus she has tires stockpiled while Prince Chawmin’s car doesn’t have any tires at all, but shoes.
RM:
The last one is the most meta-cartoonish, for those who like that sort of thing. The others play with the medium, but _All the Cats Join In_ calls attention to the fact that it’s playing with the medium.
This is an interesting issue w/ respect to cartoons. We’ve had meta-toons since the beginning. Winsor McKay’s earliest cartoons combined live-action and cartoons and were explicitly about doing animation—of Little Nemo and of Gertie the Dinosaur. One of Disney’s early Alice films—a series combining live action and cartoons—has a cartoon mouse attempting to harass a live-action cat. This is done in a matter-of-fact manner, with little or no self-consciousness. Cartoons were full of gags—as you know, a term of art—and self-reference just seems to be one more gag. In 1951 Warner Bros release Duck Amuck, in which an off-screen animator repeatedly redraws both Daffy Duck and his setting while Daffy tries his best to adapt.
What evolution were you fishing for in your leading question?
This discussion is what I had in mind. Evolution’s been a recurrent topic of discussion around here.
JHC:
Bill..."extra credit”, indeed - of course they weren’t just made for kids - the transformation of animation into “kid’s stuff” happened w/television.
That’s when it happened, though I’m not sure just why. Comics got clipped at the same time. The curious thing is, things went the opposite way in Japan, again at about the same time. It’s a puzzle.
And, by the way, I recently posted a review of your “Beethoven’s Anvil” on my site - and made the point that, in combination w/ Steven Mithen’s “The Singing Neanderthal”, scientific approaches to music have now, from being backrunners, have rapidly reached the stage where they are now a standing reproach to the rest of our critical/aesthetic endeavours!
Yes, Mithen’s book is quite interesting. And thanks for reviewing mine.
Bill...possibly (just reaching here, by the way) the nature of writing in Japan (being at least partly ideographic & with, therefore, a much, much greater scope for visual expressiveness w/in the accepted tradition) made it much more difficult to easily relegate other forms of expressive (rather than naturalistic) visual narrative in the way that happened in the alphabetic world…
I said I was “just reaching”...but, I do think that this had something to do w/it. Whether it was the main factor, of course, would be damnably hard to “prove”. For instance, we could also argue that manga served as a purely formalist (hence impossible to easily see as oppositional) cultural form resistent to the sweep of postwar Westernization...but, still (I’d argue) the reason for said formalist strength was partly due to the way the ideographic tradition worked in a society where (comparatively) neutral modern (esp. post-printing) alphabetic ideals were not at all culturally-dominant.
Interested to see what you think about this, because (to my mind, at least) it does help explain the way these cultures divided on this issue in modern times…
all the best
The writing system is an obvious candidate, JHC, and I’ve thought about it. By my thinking bottoms out pretty soon. On the one hand, I’d like a fairly specific account of just how and why this happens; perhaps there’s a good one out there somewhere that I don’t know about. And then there’s the fact that the writing system’s existed for a long time, and manga have existed for most of the century, but they didn’t really flourish until after WWII.
So, like you, I’m inclined to look to something about the post war period, though I don’t think it’s a form of resistence to Westernization. For one thing, it’s clear that manga owes a debt to Western cartooning and comics. And we know that the late Osamu Tezuka, a major figure in the manga world, was entranced by Disney animated films when they finally arrived in the late 40s. Beyond this, manga and anime seem to cultural sponges, absorbing anything from anywhere. Here’s what I wrote in a review that’ll be published in a year or so:
I suggest that we consider an analogy with the concept of an evolutionary bottleneck. When, for example, a meteor came crashing to earth some 65 million years ago and kicked ash and debris into the atmosphere, that created a bottleneck. Large animals such as the dinosaurs could not find enough food and so they perished. At the same time, small scampering mammals now had more food and living space and so they began to thrive.
I am suggesting that the loss of the war and the subsequent American occupation had a similar effect on Japanese culture; certain beliefs and attitudes where placed in doubt while others, consequently, had more room to grow. During the previous century Japan had transformed itself from an isolated feudal nation into an industrial state and world power. With the crushing defeat in World War II the imperialistic belief structure that had sustained that rise to power was discredited. Something was deeply wrong in the heart and soul of the Japanese nation. Something had to change. And the American occupation was there to force changes in the political system while, as a side effect, bringing American popular culture to Japan.
One of the main cultural beneficiaries of the new dispensation was a lowly form of narrative intended mostly for children: manga. Because it was a popular form, and a lowly one at that, the arbiters of culture - both the Japanese and their American minders - didn’t pay much attention to it. Manga was able to thrive and explore a wide and wild range of new cultural possibilities, including flattened hierarchies and new gender roles. In the 1960s anime made its appearance on TV and in turn began to thrive. As Murakami’s exhibition and catalog make clear, these were not the only vehicles of new culture, but they were and remain among the most important.
Then there’s an article I’ve read that says manga were used in post-war literacy education in the Osaka area. That sort of thing might well create a fundamental manga bias in the population that would, over time, become amplified into a large demand for manga.
So let’s say that between the writing system, a long tradition of visual narrative, and this and that about post-WWII cultural conditions accounts for the blossoming of manga and anime in Japan. What about the converse move in America?
TV may well be at least part of the story for cartoons. But I don’t see how that can explain the comic-book purges, which also happened in the 50s. That was mixed in with hysteria about juvenile delinquency. Where’d that come from? There must be a literature on it, but I’ve not looked into it. I’ve casually entertained the notion that it was slip-streaming on anti-Communist paranoia and a-bomb fears. But who knows?
Bill,
In the case of Japan I’d say it was the Japanese reaction to having been conquered and occupied by the United States. The adoption of American cultural elements and their transformation into Japanese cultural elements can be seen as a way to emulate the conquerer, and so prove the Japanese’s worth to be treated as a partner in the new American Age.
Then too, for all their reputation as a bunch of conformists, the Japanese are rather fond of the lone hero. The independent agent who takes action on his own initiative to deal with an immediate threat. Thus the American superhero was a natural for a culture seeking something in common with their new lords. Add in a newfound love affair with gadgets and you get giant robots and mecha.
America was another story.
We had just beat up on Germany and Japan and saved the world from rotten people, and Russia had to go and betray us. In the early years of the Cold War the message was, “We’re all gonna die!” Or become communists, or lose our individuality, or something like that. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (based on Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters) is a good example of this sort of thing.
Our world had been turned up-side down and we wanted a return to normality. To the verities of home, apple pie, and God in his heaven. We wanted assurance. The Soviet Union exemplified upset of the natural order and conformity. We would exemplify tradition and individuality.
Add in a doctrinaire Freudian psychiatrist nee moral authoritarian with no real knowledge of comicbooks, or how humans think, and you get a near brush with a constitutional violation.
Which was forestalled when comics publishers of the time formed the Comics Code Authority. (Though not all. Bill Gaines shut down his comic book lines and turned Mad into a magazine rather than sign on to the Comics Code Authority.) The result was to so gut the business most publishers went out of business, or were bought up by either DC or Timely (later Marvel Comics). Not until Stan Lee of Marvel and Carmine Infantio of DC showed how to tell superhero stories under the code did things get better.
BTW, the code was voluntary. You didn’t have to follow it. But, if you didn’t follow it, you couldn’t sell your comics.
That was not the work of the other publishers, or the government. It was the work of shopkeepers. Back then comic books were sold in drugstores and grocery stores. Most of their customers could give a rat’s ass about comic books. But there were moral watchdogs ready to raise a ruckus; which usually involved going to the local newspaper and stories placed on the front page and editorials in the opinion section. Thus creating the appearance of imminent societal collapse, and the subsequent pressure for store owners and proprieters to dump the vile stuff.
Except when the books had the Comic Code Authority seal of approval, which store owners could point to as proof the stuff had been screened and passed moral muster.
By now most of you should be getting some idea of just what the hippies and other counter-cultures were rebelling against.
It should come as no surprise Robert Heinlein included those days in his “The Crazy Years” era of his future history.
Bill...I can definitely see what you’re getting at - as usual, real cultural history tends to be damnably complicated - but, I am wondering about how the economics of printing may have also connected w/this?
Presumably, the rise of manga was associated (probably w/a delay) w/the rise of large-scale fully mechanized colour printing in Japan. I’d be interested to know whether or not there was anything along those lines that could be connected w/it’s post-war triumph, or whether the latter is independent of any technological advance?
On the U.S...even before the cultural hysteria, I think we do have to factor in the writing system & the growth of mass literacy during the relevant period - as well as television’s niche marketing of cartoons - in combining to turn non-naturalistic visual narrative from a potentially-interesting one to a near-despised one. Before more recent times, remember, the number of barely-literate adults was much higher & often schooling was v.short - so, it was considered fully acceptable that mixed forms (such as strip cartoons) could serve to mediate between these.
Once all kids were really expected to become fully-literate - given the old alphabetic stereotype that writing is a neutral technology - comics eventually became the targets of a backlash designed to enforce people (especially teenagers) to fully embrace it...sans visual narrative. The “juvenile delinquent” hysteria was probably mostly separate in origins from this, and related more to rising affluence/expectations + advertising targeting producing a more differentiated age-demographic...although, certainly, extra schooling was a factor here, too…
As usual, though, such “explanations” are only the beginning of real understanding, of course.
all the best
Presumably, the rise of manga was associated (probably w/a delay) w/the rise of large-scale fully mechanized colour printing in Japan.
Manga are generally printed in B & W.
. . . On the U.S...even before the cultural hysteria, I think we do have to factor in the writing system & the growth of mass literacy during the relevant period . . .
1950s seems rather late for this. I think mass literacy in the US happened well before that time.
One idea shot...but, do you know just when fully-mechanized printing became widespread in Japan? Or when the mass literacy took hold? Because I still suspect they’ll be linked to the initial rise of manga.
On the US point, I wasn’t talking about functional literacy, but at the (much later) project to get everyone up to a higher standard. Because, it wasn’t young kids reading comics that were the target - it was teenagers, who “ought” to know “better”. Also remember that such programs tend to be ongoing - and, there CERTAINLY was a higher expectation re average levels of education in the post-war period.
all the best
I really don’t know about printing technology in Japan. But obviously it was highly industrialized before WWII. As I indicated above, I’ve read an article linking manga to literacy education after WWII in the Osaka area.
As for education level in America, this graph should be useful.
"Snow White” and “Coal Black” are no longer available on YouTube. They’ve decided to crack down on copyright violations as result, I believe, of a letter from Warner Brothers. I don’t understand why the Disney is still available.
i’m a big fan of betty boop i so love her but i haven’t seen these cartoons b4