Animation &Hubley &Richard Williams 08 Apr 2006 08:33 am
Rambling Rambling
To put it in a nutshell:
Back in the early ’60′s animation busted out of the studios. The Hubley surprise Tender Game of 1958 was followed by Moonbird in 1959. Suddenly people realized full well that they could use this medium to do more than make people laugh – and they could do it Independently and out of schools and on a shoestring. Annecy and Zagreb showed up to show the films, and a new world was born from the remains of UPA.
Dick Williams did The Little Island. George Dunning did The Flying Man. Borowczyk and Lenica did Dom. Fred Wolf did The Top. Bruno Bozzetto did The Two Castles. The Zagreb studios grew wildly and quickly and made exciting films.
– The first feature to capitalize on this 60′s renaissance of animation (excluding Hubley’s own feature Of Stars and Men) and rehash what had been done by the Independent crowd, was The Yellow Submarine.
The Beatles sponsored something just this side of daring. However, those of us in the know were aware that it had already been done in shorts. We’d seen it in festivals. We’d seen it at ASIFA. The modest success of that feature made it more mainstream, and it wasn’t long before Beavis and Butthead came along.
- I remember the streets of New York lined with cels from The Yellow Submarine. Every Manhattan stationery sold them. Marketing. Those cels stayed in store windows for years, it seemed. (click on image to enlarge.) For the most part, they were selling for $75.
I remember not thinking they were worth it.
Today, of course, they sell for $1000 and up, but then it’s probably the same difference given the value of money today.
- I’m glad to see that Bruno Bozzetto will have a retrospective in Ottawa. It was in Ottawa in 1978 that his feature Allegro Non Troppo was a surprise midnight screening. An instant hit with that crowd. No advance publicity had us all walking on heaven when that film ended. I can still remember the bubbling enthusiasm when we left the theater at 1:30am. It was an animator’s delight. It’ll be nice to see the return to Ottawa.
(New Yorkers will have a special ASIFA East meeting to honor Bozzetto and see his films just prior to Ottawa in September.)
on 08 Apr 2006 at 4:17 pm 1.Mark Mayerson said …
Mike, can you think of any animated film that used spontaneously recorded dialogue before Moonbird?
I’d forgotten that The Tender Game came before Moonbird. Somehow, I had it in my head that only The Adventures of an * was before it.
on 08 Apr 2006 at 4:45 pm 2.Michael said …
Hi Mark, Amid had followed up a comment on his Cartoon Modern site by saying that Jim Backus’ dialogue for Magoo in the the early ones was improvised for Hubley. I hadn’t heard this elsewhere, but it sounds plausible. Somewhat like the Popeye improvisational muttering the actors did for the Fleischer films.
on 08 Apr 2006 at 8:29 pm 3.Amid said …
I can’t remember where I got that, but if I look around I can find the source. If I recall, it’s a direct quote from either Hubley or maybe Bill Hurtz. You can totally feel the improvisational nature of a lot of Backus’s lines in the Magoos, especially in the character’s muttering asides.
on 10 Apr 2006 at 5:53 pm 4.Tom Minton said …
Gene Dietch may have done something in NYC with improvised dialogue that predated Hubley’s films. Much of his stuff still can’t be seen anywhere today.
on 10 Apr 2006 at 5:55 pm 5.Tom Minton said …
Damned typo! Deitch.
on 11 Apr 2006 at 9:38 am 6.Michael said …
Gene Deitch worked for Hubley in NY (for a very short period) in his early years prior to going to UPA-NY. He didn’t direct anything of substance until after Hubley had already been doing improvised dialogue.