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Post by guttersnipe on Jun 22, 2017 10:23:37 GMT -8
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 22, 2017 12:17:30 GMT -8
I'm getting a bit of a Spooney Melodies vibe from those videos. Although given that Fischinger's work is animated, I assume that's coincidental.
I also suspect that Chuck Jones was influenced by this guy in his later works.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jun 25, 2017 14:30:44 GMT -8
I checked out Cryin' for the Carolines as you mentioned it as a parallel, which I found quite neat, although I think it's a bit more Lotte Reiniger than Fischinger, possibly a bit Dudley Murphy too, who used animation quite sparingly but shot and edited real footage in an 'animated' style (Fischinger's more in the vein of Walter Ruttman and Hans Richter). I would agree there's probably some influence on Chuck Jones, particularly The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, though obviously his approach is typically tongue-in-cheek.
Somewhat tangential, but does anyone else remember the animated skits from Sesame Street better than the Muppet stuff? The pinball numbers sequence is a stone-cold classic.
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 25, 2017 20:04:45 GMT -8
I checked out Cryin' for the Carolines as you mentioned it as a parallel, which I found quite neat, although I think it's a bit more Lotte Reiniger than Fischinger, possibly a bit Dudley Murphy too, who used animation quite sparingly but shot and edited real footage in an 'animated' style (Fischinger's more in the vein of Walter Ruttman and Hans Richter). I would agree there's probably some influence on Chuck Jones, particularly The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, though obviously his approach is typically tongue-in-cheek. Yeah, Jones isn't too avant-garde, although his work in the '60s and '70s tends to border on the bizarre. Now Hear This is one of the strangest and most visually ambitious Warner Bros. shorts ever created, but it also perfectly showcases his ability to marry animation with sound. I remember the Typewriter Guy cartoons. Those were fun. Too bad kids today have no idea what a typewriter is. |
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Post by guttersnipe on Jun 29, 2017 11:07:18 GMT -8
 OK, so I just checked out Now Hear This, and wow, that was genius. I like to think I'm fairly au fait with Chuck Jones, but really, I've barely made a dent in his huge filmography, so it's great to find something like this hidden in there. What makes it work so well is that the choppy animation (pretty much as smooth as you'd expect from, say, Wacky Races) and the near-forgotten backgrounds don't actually hinder its principal strength one bit, which is to work as a platform of ideas. I love games with echolocation in film, and this is largely a machine-gun riff on devising abstract images to fit extraordinary sounds, and very funny it is indeed. |
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Post by Jeremy on Jun 29, 2017 14:42:40 GMT -8
Yeah, I figured it'd be up your alley. The visuals are particularly amazing given that the short was produced on such a tight budget. (And much credit must go to the sound effects of the great Treg Brown.) Now Hear This is notable for being perhaps the last great short produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons - shortly after its release, the division was taken over by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, and the cartoons they produced during the late '60s are quite awful.
And yes, Jones' filmography is quite expansive. He's obviously best known for his Looney Tunes work ("Duck Amuck" and "What's Opera, Doc?" are all-time classics), but perhaps his unsung masterpiece is the Phantom Tollbooth film - which, while certainly flawed, boasts some very impressive visuals for its era. Not everything in Jones' oeuvre was successful (I never cared for his Tom and Jerry shorts), but he really is a pioneer of animation.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 29, 2017 16:25:41 GMT -8
Now Hear This reminds me of the inane "videos" I'd make with PowerPoint when I was nine with titles like "Word Art World" and "Wacky Word Art." I wish I could find them.
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