From the Bookshelf: Of Mice and Magic
Apr. 20th, 2019 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerVery often entering a used or remaindered-bookstore results in me leaving having bought something, although sometimes that just feels like fulfilling an obligation. When I saw several copies of Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic marked down not that long ago, however, the “that’s for me!” feeling did seem quite strong, and I picked one up.
I’d first read Maltin’s history (realising now that Jerry Beck, who has his own association with animation, was listed on the title page as “research associate”) of American theatrical animation quite young, signing an increasingly tatty copy out of my home town library over and over until one day the book wasn’t there any more. It had helped fill me in a bit on the old shorts from three or four different studios easy enough to find back then on TV (although I mostly saw them when visiting my grandparents, closer to major broadcast centres). The book felt quite familiar as I returned to it, but I did grow a little conscious I’m not as in touch with this particular branch of animation as I once was; even if I’d managed to see a collection of UPA’s 1950s shorts in the past decade I got to thinking it would be interesting too to see Tex Avery’s work for MGM and some of Max Fleischer’s Popeye or Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
Along with the works I felt “sold” on, though, were some capsule summaries with more dismissive judgments (to say nothing of whole studios suggested to pretty much grind out reels by formula), and I have to admit I contemplated how I seemed to accept them where negative opinions of entertainment in other contexts can leave me wincing. Perhaps there was enough genuine positivity and enthusiasm too I could accept all of it; perhaps, as I said, I’m not that close to these works any more.
The last chapter in the book, as I remembered, summed up the wreckage left in the 1960s and beyond after the era of theatrical short subjects had passed (and I have to admit, having brought up how many of Maltin’s pre-1960 judgments I just sort of accepted, I was always sort of relieved to see Bill Melendez’s “Charlie Brown specials” included in that short, heroic list of works for television that escaped total dismissal), with Yellow Submarine singled out for praise in starting “non-Disney theatrical features” rolling (although, given the introduction explained the book was working within a distinct boundary, I wondered to what extent that movie was a British production). In the version I bought, it had also been updated to touch on most of the 1980s, but stopped just short of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the attention-getting features from Disney that had supercharged the tradition going forward, stuck with having to deal with merchandise-flogging mid-decade productions and occasional grand efforts where the story didn’t quite seem to match up to the effort made on animation, and trying to find small hope in independents. One quote about the difficulty of holding attention with “character designs” as opposed to real actors, who can converse for stretches that might get dismissed as “illustrated radio” in animation (although for me this also called back to several different efforts described in the book to combine cartoons and live action in the silent 1920s), had me thinking of specific, often quite commercial works from one particular country able to draw on a full-bodied comics tradition, and which had been building up its own English-speaking audience since the 1960s. Still, for all I know programming myself to like the way a great many varied-within-bounds anime designs look can also bring to mind all those comments, somewhere between superior smirks and full-blown moral panic, about “substitutes for three-dimensional reality.”
I’d first read Maltin’s history (realising now that Jerry Beck, who has his own association with animation, was listed on the title page as “research associate”) of American theatrical animation quite young, signing an increasingly tatty copy out of my home town library over and over until one day the book wasn’t there any more. It had helped fill me in a bit on the old shorts from three or four different studios easy enough to find back then on TV (although I mostly saw them when visiting my grandparents, closer to major broadcast centres). The book felt quite familiar as I returned to it, but I did grow a little conscious I’m not as in touch with this particular branch of animation as I once was; even if I’d managed to see a collection of UPA’s 1950s shorts in the past decade I got to thinking it would be interesting too to see Tex Avery’s work for MGM and some of Max Fleischer’s Popeye or Walter Lantz’s Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
Along with the works I felt “sold” on, though, were some capsule summaries with more dismissive judgments (to say nothing of whole studios suggested to pretty much grind out reels by formula), and I have to admit I contemplated how I seemed to accept them where negative opinions of entertainment in other contexts can leave me wincing. Perhaps there was enough genuine positivity and enthusiasm too I could accept all of it; perhaps, as I said, I’m not that close to these works any more.
The last chapter in the book, as I remembered, summed up the wreckage left in the 1960s and beyond after the era of theatrical short subjects had passed (and I have to admit, having brought up how many of Maltin’s pre-1960 judgments I just sort of accepted, I was always sort of relieved to see Bill Melendez’s “Charlie Brown specials” included in that short, heroic list of works for television that escaped total dismissal), with Yellow Submarine singled out for praise in starting “non-Disney theatrical features” rolling (although, given the introduction explained the book was working within a distinct boundary, I wondered to what extent that movie was a British production). In the version I bought, it had also been updated to touch on most of the 1980s, but stopped just short of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the attention-getting features from Disney that had supercharged the tradition going forward, stuck with having to deal with merchandise-flogging mid-decade productions and occasional grand efforts where the story didn’t quite seem to match up to the effort made on animation, and trying to find small hope in independents. One quote about the difficulty of holding attention with “character designs” as opposed to real actors, who can converse for stretches that might get dismissed as “illustrated radio” in animation (although for me this also called back to several different efforts described in the book to combine cartoons and live action in the silent 1920s), had me thinking of specific, often quite commercial works from one particular country able to draw on a full-bodied comics tradition, and which had been building up its own English-speaking audience since the 1960s. Still, for all I know programming myself to like the way a great many varied-within-bounds anime designs look can also bring to mind all those comments, somewhere between superior smirks and full-blown moral panic, about “substitutes for three-dimensional reality.”