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All The Funny Folks

All The Funny Folks

The Wonder Tale of How the Comic Strip Characters Live and Love “Behind the Scenes” (1925)

In 1926, William Randolph Hearst hired cartoonist Louis Biedermann away from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and assigned him to serve as his first licensing artist at King Features Syndicate. King Features distributed the comic strips and feature stories from Hearst’s New York Journal to thousands of newspapers all over the country. Biedermann’s initial task was to create a picture book that would bring together all of Hearst’s cartoon stars into one story. To write the book, Hearst tapped Jack Lait who served as a jack-of-all-trades staff writer for King Features. Lait was known primarily for celebrity gossip and sports coverage, but for All The Funny Folks he decided to try his hand at rhyming doggerel. The poorly written text jams all of the characters together in crowds organized by species and age, and shoehorns snappy colloquialisms into their dialogue without much regard for the characters’ established personalities. The story consists mostly of superficial references to events from the strips, and it manages to provide an anchor for the illustrations, but that’s about all that can be said for it.

Biedermann was handed an almost unreadable story composed of reams of dialogue and scene after scene of complicated crowd shots. In the newspaper, each comic strip existed in its own world with its own situations and logic. The style of drawing varied from strip to strip too. This wasn’t going to be an easy book to illustrate. Clearly Biedermann was more at home with the styles of Winsor McCay and George MacManus than he was Billy DeBeck and George Herriman, but he was able to arrive at a happy medium where the characters could co-exist side by side without clashing.

The layout and color of the book is brilliant. Our high resolution PDF is set up to be viewed as two page spreads so you can appreciate how the images lead from one side of the spread to the other. Not much is known about Biedermann, but he illustrated calendars for King Features as well. If you have more information, please let me know.

REFPACK020: All The Funny Folks

Adobe PDF File / 130 Pages / 345 MB Download

DVD QUALITY VIDEOS:

Charlie Bowers

Two Films By Charlie Bowers

He Done His Best (1926) / A Wild Roomer (1926)

What do you get if you take the imagination of a great animator and cross it with the mind of a brilliant slapstick comedian? The answer is… Charlie Bowers. Almost forgotten today and rarely mentioned in histories of silent comedy, in his day Bowers was a successful and well known film maker, a peer of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.

Bowers started his career as a cartoonist for Raoul Barré on the Mutt & Jeff cartoons. But he was a gifted performer as well as being a cartoonist, and in the mid 1920s he starred in a series of silent live action comedies. These shorts are unique because they employ animation to create eye-popping fantastic effects. The French surrealist André Breton spoke very highly of these films. We are happy to be able to share two of these shorts with you… “He Done His Best” and “A Wild Roomer”, both from 1926. Bowers performs in these shorts as a “regular fella” much like Keaton and Lloyd, but the slapstick isn’t the thing that distinguishes these shorts. I think you’ll be amazed by the inventiveness of the mechanical effects and stop motion animation.

REFPACK020: He Done His Best / Wild Roomer

MP4 Video File / 47:28 / 845 MB Download

DVD QUALITY VIDEOS:

Puppet Love

Puppet Love (1944)

A Popeye Cartoon in HD

Thanks to our Advisory Board member Steve Stanchfield, we have another Famous Studios Popeye cartoon to share with you in high definition. Famous Studios cartoons tended to have plot devices derivative of other studios’ films, but this short is quite unique. The animation isn’t as flashy as the last HD Popeye cartoon we shared, “We’re Going Down To Rio”, but it makes up for it by engaging in some good natured sadism directed at all three of the principle characters.

Make a point of still framing through the action in this cartoon. High definition reveals a lot about how the drawings are constructed and how the movement is planned. We hope you find this to be useful for study.

REFPACK020: Puppet Love

MP4 Video File / 7:28 / 420 MB Download

Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!

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Thursday, June 1st, 2023

LAST CALL! RefPack051: A Peek At The Early Anime Downloads

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over a couple of weeks, we are posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like. Today we are sharing the Early Anime section. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

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Lately, Animation Resources board member JoJo Baptista has been researching the early history of Japanese animation. He has searched out video copies of 1960s anime to add to our Animation Archive. Over the past year, he has accumulated hundreds of hours of rare television programs. We will be will be sharing some of them with you in our Reference Packs. Our members have asked us to share complete films and publications with them, not excerpts, so we will be sharing complete half hour episodes with you. We don’t claim that everything here is great. But there are great bits. You can sift through them and discover the gems for yourself.

SD VIDEO:

Big X

Curated by JoJo Baptista

Eps. 41 & 50 / TMS, Osamu Tezuka (1964)
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Big X was created by Osamu Tezuka, and it was the first television series produced by TMS (Tokyo Movie Shinsha). It debuted on August 3rd, 1964 and 59 episodes were made, of which only 22 survive. The story involves a Nazi secret weapon that is smuggled out of Germany by surgically implanting a card with the formula inscribed on it into a young man named Shigeru. Years later, Shigeru is living in Tokyo. The card is discovered in his body and is removed. Nazi sympathizers steal the card, and a serum from the formula is made by the grandson of a Nazi scientist. It turns out to be a drug that turns a man into a giant. Shigeru’s son Akira recovers the drug and uses it to fight various evil doers and monsters.

Big X was one of the very first television cartoons made in Japan. The process hadn’t been established yet and it shows in this show. The staging from scene to scene is completely random. A downshot will be followed by an upshot, characters face left in one shot and right in the next, perspective is off with the character level in a completely different plane than the background, lipsync consists of randomly exposed “gum chewing” cycles that aren’t always lined up to the beginning or end of the dialogue, and there are reuse scenes and camera errors everywhere. There’s absolutely no direction or context to anything that happens on the screen in Big X.

But although there isn’t anything in this show to learn in the way of technique, it does a good job of what it intends to do… give kids a half hour of weird fun. While Tezuka’s manga is plot heavy, the animated adaptation is almost completely without continuity. It resembles early Van Beuren cartoons in that it appears to have not been storyboarded. Sequences must have been handed out to animators to do whatever they want with. Every animator seems to have his own idea of what kind of show they were making, and styles vary from cut to cut. These styles have considerable appeal, and randomly juggled throughout the half hour, at least they give everyone something to like.

Not everything is poorly drawn though. In episode 41, there are several scenes of the main character that are animated volumetrically in good perspective (see the scene that starts at 21:27.) There are also character designs that are drawn in a very funny style (see 02:39, 06:18, 08:44). These designs are even animated funny (10:03, 18:09).

Episode 50 starts out with a sequence that seems to be influenced by UPA’s Mr. Magoo feature, 1001 Arabian Nights. There’s another strange perspective shot and a very odd walk cycle at 03:24. At 07:21 the whole cartoon shifts to a parody (?) of Disney, along with lots of random cuts that don’t play out long enough or hook up with each other. At 12:59 there’s a funny sequence with squirrels (or are they monkeys?) At 17:58 there is a dragon lifted straight out of Sleeping Beauty.

The individual moments succeed in sustaining audience interest, but don’t look for context or putting across character’s personalities or a story here. If I had to pick one word to describe this show, it’s “slapdash”. But there’s enough enthusiasm and fun to make it sort of worthwhile. The animators on this series had lots of big ideas without the experience nor the resources to pull them off. But they take a valiant stab at it and create something fun, even if it is primitive and random. The fact that the main character pokes himself with a hypodermic needle in the title sequence pretty much guarantees this series won’t be re-run ever again.

I’ll have more early Japanese TV series to share with you in our next Reference Pack.

REFPACK051: Big X Ep. 41

MP4 Video File / SD / 25:55 / 186 MB Download
REFPACK051: Big X Ep. 50

MP4 Video File / SD / 25:56 / 217 MB Download

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Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

LAST CALL! A Peek At The International Downloads

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

What are you waiting for?

JOIN TODAY!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

The world of animation is much bigger than it might appear to us at first glance. We are all familiar with the films we grew up with, but Hollywood wasn’t the only place that produced great cartoons… Poland, Japan, Russia, China and Europe all have their own traditions and a rich history of animated film making. Animation Resources’ archive contains many foreign films that are rarely seen in the United States. We feature a sampling of interesting animation from around the world in each Reference Pack.

SD VIDEO:

Stompy

Fyodor Khitruk / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1964
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In previous Reference Packs, we shared Fyodor Khitruk’s adaptation of A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie the Pooh. This time, we are sharing one of Khitruk’s early films, “Stompy”.

Fyodor Khitruk was a Russian Jew who studied graphic design in Moscow at the OGIS College For Applied Arts. He joined the staff of Soyuzmultfilm in 1938, learning his craft by animating in over 200 films until he was given the opportunity to direct his first film, “The Story Of A Crime” in 1962. This film was a huge success and inspired the artists at Soyuzmultfilm to abandon the hyper-realistic style the studio was known for and explore graphic stylization, not unlike the effect UPA had on Hollywood animation. His films tend to be leisurely paced, but not slow, and the motion of his characters is always carefully observed and relatable.

Khitruk made both adult satire and children’s films, like “Stompy”. This film has some narration, but it isn’t necessary to understand it to follow the action of the film. Khitruk’s design in this film is brilliant, especially the use of flat areas of color surrounding lush textures. It makes you want to reach out and pet the characters.

REFPACK051: Stompy 1964

MP4 Video File / SD / 9:25 / 247 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

Mystery Of The MK204 Turning Point

Karel Dodal / Prague, Czechoslovakia / 1934

In one of our previous Reference Packs, we included two commercials from Czechoslovakia. This time, we feature a very early animated commercial by Karel Dodal.

The history of animation in Czechoslovakia goes back to the 1920s. Karel Dodal, not only produced advertisements like this one (some featuring Felix the Cat), but also puppet and experimental films. The notes that came with this film were sparse and all in the Czech language, so we don’t know much about them. If you have information about Dodal you can share with us, please drop us a line.

We hope to have more Czech animation to share with you in future Reference Packs.

REFPACK051: Mystery 1934

MP4 Video File / SD / 3:28 / 40 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

The Breakdown

Klaus Georgi & Lutz Stutzner / DEFA, East Germany / 1988

The DEFA studio (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) was independently established in the Soviet Occupied Zone in 1946 to produce propaganda films with the intent of re-educating the East German populace, who had just emerged from under the Nazi rule. A year later, control of the studio was taken over by the Socialist Unity Party, a Stalinist political group, and many of the original founders were ejected from the governing board. The studio got absorbed by the government when the German Democratic Republic was established in 1949. The ideological oppression discouraged most talented filmmakers from working at the studio, and by the time Stalin died in 1953, only 50 films had been produced. Within a couple of years of the end of Stalinism, DEFA began to grow exponentially, and between 1955 and 1992 when the studio closed, DEFA produced over 800 animated films.

Lutz Stutzner was trained as a designer of posters. While attending school in Dresden, he met Otto Muller the head of the DEFA animation studios, who encouraged him to apply as a trainee at the studio. He rose to the position of director and teamed with Klaus Georgi who had helped to establish the animation division at DEFA. Georgi directed over 80 animated films in a variety of techniques: cel animation, cut outs, silhouette and puppet animation. When the Berlin Wall fell, many of the state owned businesses were liquidated, including DEFA. Lutz Stutzner was instrumental in organizing efforts to rescue important artifacts and film elements from East German film studios from being dispersed.

Originally, the film ended with a procession of tanks following the motorcade, but state censors forced them to alter the gag to just infer military vehicles, rather than fully depicting them. Even so, the animation division enjoyed much more of a “hands off” treatment from the government censors than the live action filmmakers at DEFA. This kind of political satire would never have been allowed in one of their live action productions.

REFPACK051: The Breakdown 1988

MP4 Video File / SD / 3:22 / 125 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

Professor Balthazar in “The Rise And Fall Of Horatio”

Zlatko Grgic / Zagreb Films, Croatia / 1967

In a previous Reference Pack we featured several Maxi-Cat mini-cartoons by Zlatko Grgic, a Croatian animator who later emigrated to Canada to join the Canadian Film Board.

Grgic is best known for his series of cartoons featuring the character Professor Balthazar, an old man who solves problems for his friends by creating inventions with a magical machine. Produced between 1967 and 1973, the series ran all over the world. Its silent pantomime with voice over narration made it easy to translate to other countries. It aired everywhere from New Zealand to Romania to Zimbabwe. In the United States it was featured on Chuck Jones’ television program, Curiosity Shop.

Altogether there were 59 episodes of Professor Balthazar produced between 1969 and 1978. We will be sharing more with you in upcoming Reference Packs.

REFPACK051: Professor Balthazar Ep. 02

MP4 Video File / SD / 7:57 / 121 MB Download

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