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Cartoon Movie Posters

September 14th, 2008 by Scott Marks

My friend Tomi over at Celebrity City asks, “Did cartoons get billed with the main feature with lobby posters?”

Many cartoons didn’t even have lobby posters. There would be a stock one sheet with a blank space for theatre owners to insert a title card. In the case of the stock Warner Bros. poster pictured above, the short of the week was Friz Freleng’s Tweety Pie (1947). If there was room, exhibitors would frequently stick the names of popular cartoon stars on the marquee.

According to movie poster guru Bruce Hershenson, “The studios never cared very much about making cartoon posters…Perhaps the studios felt that since theatres already had to display two posters for their double feature, they wouldn’t have space for a cartoon poster.

“In the case of cartoons for which individual posters were made, very few survive. For silent cartoons, there are only a few examples known for most series, even though some series lasted many years, and for some series no examples exist. For 1930s cartoons, a greater number of posters are known on each series but still only a small percentage of the total number made. Most of the posters made after 1940 are known to exist, but certainly not all of them.”

All of these scans come from my collection of animation books, most notably Mr. Hershenson’s Cartoon Movie Posters (1994). Just for the record, I would kill for a copy of that Warner Bros. Cartoons poster. More than an original Holiday, hell, even more than The Day the Clown Cried, that’s the one sheet I’d love to wake up to every morning.

From Disney, to Warners to Avery to Terrytoons and many, many more of your animated favorites, visit the Cartoon Movie Poster Gallery here.

And for even more anthropomorphic fun, check out the Cartoon All-Stars Gallery.

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Miley Cyrus flashes her bra in new Disney photo scandal

April 21st, 2008 by Scott Marks

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Remember the good old days when everyone would talk about how big Mouseketeer Annette Funicello’s boobs were without actually seeing them unsheathed? Or when Walt Disney, eager to protect his studio’s reputation, had a conniption fit after his protégé Hayley Mills expressed an interest in playing Lolita?

Were Uncle Walt alive today he’d be desperately kicking and scratching at the inside of his cryogenic chamber. Disney’s house the Mouse built is turning into a chicken ranch for young sluts. First Britney, Christina and Lindsey traded in their lollipops and sasparilla for Camel Lights and Cristal. Last year nude photos of High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens, then 18-years-old, surfaced on line.

Now it’s squishy-faced Miley Cyrus’ turn. Publicly, the 15-year-old Hannah Montana star espouses her Christian faith and vows to remain celibate until marriage. Just like her role model Britney Spears. In an interview with Barbara Walters, the teen phenomenon said,

“For me, as I know that some people don’t have a family to fall back on like I have. And that’s when something greater comes in and that’s faith and that’s what I have. For me, that’s what keeps me strong. And I think a lot of people do have Christian families and they’re just not seeing that they’re so much greater than the materialistic things that are there right now like going out and that parties and whatever.”

Forget about Jesus. What would Uncle Walt say if he saw the recent photos of Miley flashing her bra and assuming a seductive pose with a male friend that are now flooding the internet? And what about her mullet-headed father Billy Ray Cyrus? Is he poised to achy-break the neck of the young stud putting his paws all over daddy’s little meal ticket?

She’s fifteen-years-old, for Christ’s sake! How much lower is the age for sexualizing nymphets going to drop? Can we expect views of a bare Elle Fanning or how about shots of Suri Cruise strapped to her crib with a red ball in her mouth? As for using religious faith as a shield, it only works for Republicans.

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Dig A Hole: Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney’s Nine Old Men

April 15th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Ollie Johnston

And then there were none. Ollie Johnston, the last of Walt Disney’s exalted Nine Old Men has died at the age of 95.

The term, a variation on Franklin Roosevelt’s invective for the nine ultra conservative justices of the Supreme Court, referred to an elite core of animators who collaborated on every feature length Disney classic from Snow White through The Rescuers. Disney’s inner circle consisted of Les Clark, Woolie Reitherman, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

In their gargantuan squash-and-stretch Bible Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life Thomas and Johnston commented on their noble personage: “We never thought of ourselves as some elite group, and the only time it ever crossed our minds was when Walt made a kidding remark about his Nine Old Men being over the hill, or getting too decrepit to work, or losing all their old zip.”

“While no two of us were alike,” they continue, “we still had many traits in common. Foremost among these was the desire to put the finest possible entertainment on the screen…For twenty-five years this remarkable team worked together, dedicated to Walt and the medium and its constant improvement.”

Ollie Johnston was born in Palo Alto, California and later attended Stanford University where he worked on campus humor magazine the Stanford Chaparral. It was here Johnston met his future animation partner and fellow “Old Man,” Frank Thomas. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, and Chouinard Art Institute he accepted a position at Walt Disney Productions where he worked from January 21, 1935 to his retirement on January 31, 1978.

Ollie found romance in the Ink and Paint department and in 1943 married a fellow Disney artist Marie Worthey. Marie Johnston died May 20, 2005.

Around the time of Peter Pan (1951), Uncle Walt was already setting his sights on television in addition to a new type of amusement park he’d been dreaming up. Frank Thomas remembered, “We knew the moment Walt climbed onto a camera boom, we’d lost him.” While Walt still attended storyboard sessions, it dawned on the Nine Old Men and director Norman Ferguson the could no longer have the boss’s undivided attention. “Maybe there was less involvement (by Disney) with Peter Pan, but he was the motivation for the picture, so that didn’t matter much.”

According to Wikipedia, “Ollie’s lifelong hobby was live steam trains. Starting in 1949, he built a 1″ scale backyard railroad, with three 1/12th scale locomotives, now owned by his sons. This railroad was one of the inspirations for Walt Disney to build his own backyard railroad, the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, which again inspired the building of the railroad in Disneyland. In the 1960s Ollie acquired and restored a full-size narrow-gauge Porter steam locomotive, which he named the ‘Marie E.’ In 2005 it ran during a private night event on the Disneyland Railroad. This engine was sold to John Lasseter (of Pixar Studios fame). The engine is fully operational and ran recently at the Santa Margarita Ranch in May of 2007.”

On November 10, 2005, Ollie Johnston was among the recipients of the prestigious National Medal of Arts, presented by President George W. Bush in an Oval Office ceremony.

Animation historian John Canemaker referred to the team as “actors with a pencil.” By giving his staff members a way to animate all the characters in his scene, Disney offered even more control to his artists. In 1995 the studio released Frank and Ollie, an intimate, and profoundly affectionate documentary about how “their friendship changed the face of animation.” It’s as entertaining a story as any Johnston ever animated and next to watching one of the classics, there isn’t a better way to remember the man.

 

 

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Review: Walt Disney’s ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS Platinum Edition DVD

March 5th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Original Window Card for “One Hundred and One Dalmatians”

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske & Wolfgang Reitherman
Written by Bill Peet, based on the novel “The Hundred and One Dalmatians” by Dodie Smith
Featuring the voices of: Rod Taylor, Betty Lou Gerson, Cate Bauer, Lisa Daniels, Ben Wright, J. Pat O’Malley and Tom Conway
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Running Time: 79 min.

Rating: ★★★★☆

You never forget your first time. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was my entree into feature length Disneyana and a five-year old Scotty couldn’t have been more mesmerized.

My first look came seventeen features into Disney’s animated oeuvre and Dalmatians was the last production that Uncle Walt lived to see through to fruition. He never much cared for the film’s sketchy graphic style and was angered over circumstances that forced his animators’ hands to adopt a visually rougher approach.

The lackluster box office of Walt’s previous release, Sleeping Beauty, prodding his studio to adopt cost cutting measures, something that never set well with a visionary that prided himself on innovation and artistry. The studio pruned its animation department from 500 staffers to less than 100, and in an attempt to further reduce overhead set aside their multiplane camera and decided to give the new Xerography process a try. This technological breakthrough eliminating the hand inking stage thus enabling animators to copy their drawings directly onto cels. What began on the animation stand no longer went through dozens of hands and the end result was more consistent drawings.

Initially, only thick black outlines were possible. What better characters were there to base the first feature to employ Xerography on than dalmatians? This bold approach would remain the Disney studio’s house until The Rescuers (1977). Several years later, renegade Disney animator Don Bluth perfected the technique with colored lines in The Secret of N. I. H. M. (1982).

Credit Disney lifer Ub Iwerks (he animated Mickey in Steamboat Willie) with adapting the process for film and bringing it to Walt’s attention. The studio experimented with Xerography in Sleeping Beauty and gave the process a trial run in the short Goliath 2. The multiplane camera, an Iwerks innovation and a studio trademark since Bambi, is only visible in a handful of shots most notably during the double wedding of Roger to Anita and Pongo to Perdita.

The Wedding of Pongo & Perdita

Continue reading Review: Walt Disney’s ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS Platinum Edition DVD

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3 new Walt Disney Treasures DVD collections slated for release

February 21st, 2008 by Scott Marks

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Destino (2003)

The Disney Vault is once again ajar. Walt Disney Home Entertainment announced the new lineup for their highly coveted Walt Disney Treasures collection. The year’s releases include Chronological Donald, Vol. 4, Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow and Destino.

The latest Donald Duck anthology will showcase the tail end of the irascible Mr. Duck’s career. The 31 cartoons in the set were produced between 1951 and 1961 and include all of Don’s CinemaScope shorts presented in their original widescreen aspect ratio for the first time on video.

Later period Donald, particularly when teamed with chipmunks or nephews, is not exactly the duck that laid the golden egg. A complete list of titles has yet to be issued, but for sentimental reasons, I sure hope they include Donald in Mathmagic Land and Donald and the Wheel. My first and only viewing of these shorts was at the Roosevelt Theater in downtown Chicago. I was six at the time and am still curious to understand why my parents made be don a sport coat and tie to see a couple of cartoons.

Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow first aired as three separate episodes on Disney’s weekly TV show under the title The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, was later edited for theatrical releases in England and the U.S. This DVD set includes all three of the original TV episodes plus the theatrical version of the film that was released in England. Never had any interest in Dr. Syn. With the exception of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, live-action Disney, particularly the stuff produced for TV, is anathema.

There’s gold to be mined in the Destino set. It all began in 1946 as a collaboration between Uncle Walt and famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali and was originally intended as a newfashioned experimental work to be included in a compilation film. Disney and Dali met in 1945 at a dinner party hosted by Jack Warner. At the time, Dali was working on the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. The two artists expressed mutual admiration and it wasn’t long before they came up with the project.

Fifteen seconds of footage was produced before the short was abandoned due to financial constraints. Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney rediscovered the project while making Fantasia/2000 and this meeting of legends finally saw the light of day in 2003.

It’s a stunning 7 minute short, easily the best work of animation the studio has attached its name to this decade. Destino played the festival circuit and was eventually picked up by Landmark Theaters and shown as a short subject before The Triplets of Belleville. Their press release described the film as “set to a Spanish song, devoid of dialogue and without a linear story line. It follows a dark-eyed ballerina on a journey among strange objects through a desert landscape in a dreamlike atmosphere. It is a love story as only Dali could envision it, complete with images of ballerinas, baseball players, melting clocks, tuxedo-clad eyeballs, ants that turn into bicyclists, and two giant heads carried on the backs of the Fates (represented as giant turtles.)”

How does a 7 minute cartoon justify a 2 DVD tin? Also included is an all-new feature-length documentary that examines the surprising partnership between Dali and Disney plus two new featurettes; “The Disney That Almost Was,” an examination of the studio’s unfinished projects; and “Encounters with Walt,” which addresses the surprisingly diverse group of celebrities and artists who were attracted to Walt Disney’s early work.

All three collections are due to hit store shelves on November 11.

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Disney’s “Toy Story(s)” to get 3-D makeovers

January 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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Disney announced plans to debut 3-D versions of Pixar’s Toy Story on Oct. 2, 2009 and Toy Story 2 on Feb. 12, 2010.  This is all intended to start the PR bandwagon rolling for Toy Story 3 which has a June 18, 2010 release date.

While I’d prefer that they dig back a bit farther in the vaults (how about some 3-D pink elephants on parade?), any animation transformed into Disney Digital 3-D is welcome. Here is the rest of the scuttlebutt from the studio press release:

“ Academy Award®-winning filmmaker John Lasseter (director of the first two “Toy Story” films and chief creative officer for Disney and Pixar Animation Studios) will personally oversee the creative side of the 3-D conversions for “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” with his acclaimed team of technical wizards handling all the necessary steps in the conversion process.

Commenting on the announcement, Cook said, “‘We are committed to bringing moviegoers the best and most exciting 3-D movie experience, and we think they’re going to love seeing Buzz Lightyear, Woody, and all the wonderful ‘Toy Story’ cast of characters in an eye popping and dazzling way.  John Lasseter and the animation team are putting all their passion and hard work into making this the greatest 3-D experience yet, and we’re excited to share their efforts with audiences everywhere.”

Lasseter added, “The ‘Toy Story’ films and characters will always hold a very special place in our hearts and we’re so excited to be bringing this landmark film back for audiences to enjoy in a whole new way thanks to the latest in 3-D technology.   I am sure that this is going to be nothing short of fantastic and people are going to be blown away by the experience.  With ‘Toy Story 3’ shaping up to be another great adventure for Buzz, Woody and the gang from Andy’s room, we thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way.  3-D offers lots of great new possibilities for the art of animation and we will continue to use this new technology to tell our stories in the best possible way.”

In converting “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” to state-of-the-art 3-D films, the technical team is retrieving all of the original digital elements and rebuilding them in 3-D.

Originally released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1995, “Toy Story” was the first feature film from Pixar Animation Studios and director John Lasseter.  The film went on to receive Oscar® nominations for Original Score, Original Song, and Screenplay, and earned Lasseter a Special Achievement Award “for the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film.”  “Toy Story 2” was released in 1999, and reunited voice talents Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, in their roles as Woody and Buzz.  The film became one of the most popular animated features of all time, and received an Academy Award® nomination for Original Song.”

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