Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
And, yes, I know I haven’t announced the FREAKS & GEEKS winners yet. I’ll include them in my next DVD Shelf column, which is in progress as you read this. For now, let’s focus on this group of winners. Take it away, Beaks:
First, I’d like to thank everyone who sent in entries, as nearly every one evinced a clear love for animation and its limitless possibilities. It was rough narrowing the field down to ten, and there are a lot of runner-ups who’re just as deserving as the lucky folks below.
In any event, let’s get things underway and check out the winning entries. First up is Tim Moore’s inventive (and copyrighted) tale of “The Colourbars”:
My idea is that your old type of colourbar slate, the one that use to be just five or six vertical bars, was actually a piece of live action footage and the bars were living entities that would together, like a barber shop courtet, sing the tone colourbars make. Every film or television show would have to shoot this scene first before continuing on with their production, so these colourbars are very busy. However, they are aware of their popularity and take full advantage of it, demanding star treatment from everyone they work with. Basically, everyone hates them but can't do anything about it, given colourbars are a necessity in the industry. It would be an animated documentary-like film, where the presence of the filmmaker is very apparent (you'd hear him asking questions, etc.) because he, being me, is trying to find out who the colourbars really are (he sees a certain humane characteristic in them). It starts out rough, the colourbars treat the filmmaker just like they do everyone, but they eventually come around and start to show their true colours. The red one especially. Eventually, the filmmaker and the red colourbar become friends and the audience sees that the colourbars take pride in their work. They are actually very excited about a favored director's new film. However, when the shoot comes around, the colourbars are replaced by a digital version. The red colourbar, instead of staying with the group, runs away to Europe and the filmmaker follows, more as a friend than a filmmaker. He documents their time together where the red colourbar calms down and accepts the situation. They return and the colourbars, given the film industry hates them, decide to form a band, something of a past time that was touched on earlier in the film. I think Don Hertzfeld would be best at conveying how real these characters are, ex. Lily and Jim, through actions and dialogue. And the colourbars would be coloured rectangles so that seems equivalent to a yellow banana or a bussle thing.
Good stuff, Tim! Next, meet A.E. Anie, who’s got a unique contribution to the ever popular cartoon mouse genre:
Inspired by a true incident, the animation starts with a through-the-lens view of two sets of human legs in front of a camcorder. The couple talks about setting up the Interval Recording feature, and some exposition about the elusive mouse that has been taking the bait out of the trap without setting it off. After they walk off, a little girl comes into shot, also faceless, babbling cutely and placing a stuffed animal next to the trap for the mouse, before the family turns out the main light and retires for the night.
What we see from here on is the interval recording footages of 5 seconds every 10 minutes. The dimly lit part of the room with the trap and the stuffed animal next to it, and after a suspenseful wait, the mouse suddenly appears on the scene, and after 5 seconds, it disappears. The next few sequences are similar and also show the mouse prancing about, pausing, etc. Then in a suspenseful moment, it approaches the baited trap. Just as we're close to finding out how the mouse does it, it cuts. The 5-sec intervals that follow are fanciful. It starts with the dining scene, after the mouse has extracted the bait. The start of the 5-second segment shows the mouse sitting at a very tiny table in front of the trap, complete with table cloth and bait on plate, and the bib. As the mouse lifts a utensil in each hand, it cuts. One of the other scenes involves the mouse and the stuffed animal. The table is gone, the mouse approaches the stuffed animal in comically slow and exaggerated steps with a knife pointed high. As it gets very close to the obliviously innocent stuffed animal, the scene cuts, and the subsequent scenes show the stuffed animal fallen over, with only the lower half visible in the footages.
I would choose Adam Elliot of Australia to make my mouse come alive. After watching his Harvie Krumpet, I'm convinced he would bring humor and light poignancy to my story.
I’m fast becoming a fan of Adam Elliot myself, whose “Brother”, “Cousin”, “Uncle” trilogy is featured on the very DVD we’re giving away. I also just saw “Harvie Krumpet”, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short this year, and highly recommend y’all check it out.
Adam Prosser’s idea was probably the most ambitious of the submissions, blending a number of tropes from classic children’s, and creating something that sounds darkly fascinating:
In Victorian England, three children of wealthy parents (oldest daughter Rebecca, middle child Franklin, baby Isaac) hear from a travelling salesman about a wonderful land he's been to, "Better than America", called Isotopia, where the technology is years ahead and everyone is free to do whatever they wish.
A few days later the children get a new governess to look after them when their parents are away. They're imediately terrified of her: she acts very strange, insisting on feeding the kids a strange medicine "of her own design", and sometimes, where the light catches them just right, her eyes look like a cat's. The children make plans to run away from home until she's gone...
Until one night, soon after, the toys in their nursery change into horrifying creatures and attempt to kill them. They are saved, to their astonishment, by the Governess, who uses an umbrella from which all sorts of strange items can be drawn to beat back the malevolent toys. She reveals that she had been sent to protect Isaac, who's the heir to the throne of Isotopia, switched at birth to protect him from the forces threatening their kingdom. Now that their cover has been blown, she reveals that their parents in England are dead and that she must escort them all to Isotopia. They set off with a magical baby carriage protecting Isaac, on a perilous journey to this dangerous land.
Basically, as mentioned, it's a sort of a dark riff on Mary Poppins, with the subtext being a metaphor for going from childhood to adulthood. Though Isaac is the "MacGuffin", the real journey is Rebecca and Franklin's, as they travel through the "dark woods" of adolescence in the care of a somewhat frightening guardian.
As for the ideal animator: Henry Selick. The fit with his sensibility should be obvious, and having the animation be stop motion would provide a nifty dark edge to it.
Sounds like something I’d like to see Selick tackle after he finishes up his adaptation of Gaiman’s CORALINE. Our next winner is Rob Ewen, who first won me over with his mention of LONESOME GHOSTS, and then secured his autographed disc by invoking the taken-for-granted Richard Williams:
I've always enjoyed watching the supernatural in an animated format, ever since I had a toy film projector with a minute or two from the Disney classic LONESOME GHOSTS with Mickey, Donald and Goofy to run on it. Ub Iwerk's skeleton dance also thrilled me as a child.
I love the recent stop-motion masterpieces i.e. THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Tim Burton's VINCENT and Paul Berry's SANDMAN. The latter in particular made me jump a couple of times, and the final shot, with the little boy turning on a light switch to reveal dozens of children in a similar situation, brought a lump to my throat.
I felt angry when Universal recently decided to pull the plug on their CGI FRANKENSTEIN film, but perhaps they weren't sure of their audience. They may have deemed it too scary for the kids and not mature enough for adults, which would have left them without a sufficiently substantial market to justify its completion.
They would have been on safer ground with the short-film format, which is why I'd like to see a production of Bram Stoker's DRACULA'S GUEST, which was the chapter excised from the main novel and published under separate cover. You could take a surreal approach with this story by highlighting Harker's own feelings of self-import as reflected in his exaggerated body-size.
I'd like a hand-drawn style of animation for this project, something which I find has more depth to it than the computer-perfected but often soulless offerings we have nowadays. The person who would be perfect for it would be RICHARD WILLIAMS, whose CHRISTMAS CAROL, with its Dickensian caricatures and fluid story-telling, was a televison mainstay for many years. Since ROGER RABBIT, he's been languishing in the background for far too long. The human touch is becoming more and more infrequent in animation. I am sure that DRACULA'S GUEST would bring him back in triumph, and provide a shot in the arm for the more personal approach of hands-on animated stories.
Kudos to Dan Lawrence for his proposed resurrection of an old counterculture fave. Reading his pitch made me think I’d also like to see a FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS feature length cartoon:
It must be done!!! A narrative version of Dan O'Neill's Odd Bodkins comic strips. The adventures of Hugh and Fred Bird, as taken from Hear The Sound of My Feet Walking Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking, and The Collective Unconscious of Odd Bodkins. I first read these compilations when I was a kid and I fell in love with his philosophy, leftist politics and psychedelic humor in one fell swoop. O'Neill draws his characters in a scratchy, line-drawn way, in black and white. The key would be to replicate his style in motion. Not do something fancy and CG, and color (although maybe for some of the trippier sequences.) Do a picaresque thread, which allows the filmmaker to do small episodes and walk with the various characters they meet in HTSoMFWŠ and then make the big story about Fred Bird and Hugh and Five Dollar Bill O'Brady (a gunslinger who looks an awful lot like Abe Lincoln) as they get their political consciousnesses raised, learn the truth about Mars, and form the American Expeditionary Counter Invasion Task Force to travel to Mars to stop a Martian invasion, (Mars' air is half gasoline, y'see? So them Martians planned to invade the planet by giving us the gasoline engine and softening up the atmosphere.) Unfortunately, our heroes die, and then go to Hell. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. It's big and deep! It'd make a great great animated movie. I always heard The Smothers Brothers as voicing the main characters, but that's for the director to decide.
And who to direct this? Dan O'Neill is still alive, but I don't think he's an animator. I think Ralph Bakshi should do it, but the Bakshi of Coonskin. Bakshi would be a terrific fit. Adult sensibility. Good timing with characters and voices. A line style that compliments O'Neill's visual sense. It would be so cool!
Eric Murphy’s idea is a perfect marriage of concept, music and animator(s). He’ll be happy to learn that Schwizgebe’s “La Course a L’abime” is included on THE ANIMATION SHOW DVD:
The cartoon I have been dreaming about for years is ananimated Fantasia-esque rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. It is a perfect piece of story music, but far too adult for Disney tastes. In the first movement, the protagonist (Joe, for simplicity) sees a woman for the first time (who has her own special musical theme in the piece) and instantly falls madly in love with her. In the second movement, he sees her at a waltz, but she is continually swept away from him before he can speak with her. In the third movement, the Joe is slowly walking through the country, and sees a shepherd playing his horn across the valley and being answered by a distant horn on the unseen other side. As Joe sees this, he tries to think cheerful thoughts of love but fears that he has already been rejected. As the movement ends a storm is approaching on the horizon and the shepherd’s horn is now unanswered – a foreshadowing of solitude to Joe. Joe, deciding he has been rejected and no longer wanting to live without his love, attempts to overdose on opium, but doesn’t take quite enough. He begins to hallucinate wildly. The fourth movement is his vivid dream that he has killed the object of his affection, and is being taken to the chopping block to be executed. The movement ends with a graphic musical depiction of the Joe thinking of his love as his head is severed and bounces a few times before coming to rest. The fifth and final movement is the Witches’ Sabbath, where the protagonist is assaulted by witches at his funeral representing the evils he has committed in life. As he spirals towards hell, the witches get louder and faster until the piece ends in a whirlwind leading to blackness.
Two animators I think should work on this are Georges Schwizgebel and Frédéric Back. Both have a shifty and hazy style of animation that would be wonderful in depicting the fragile mental state of Joe in his normal life, and the wild fantasy of his dreams.
It’s been years since I saw Back’s “The Man Who Planted Trees”. At a half-hour, it’d be too long to include in THE ANIMATION SHOW, but I’d love to see someone bring it to DVD. It’s a remarkable work.
Zachary Lis’s wonderfully macabre entry is next:
I once conceived of a poem that told the tale of an ironic murder. Showing no love for anything but food, a neglectful husband is killed by the consumption of broken glass. The jagged crystal came from his wedding china that was secretly fed to him in his wife’s homemade meatballs. I believe this brief butchery entitled “The Glassless Widow” would make an excellent animation short. When contemplating what cartoonist could truly capture the violently funny death of internal bleeding, only Robert Crumb came to mind. His mastery of combining the cute and the vile with detailed ink shading gives his viewers images of both heaven and hell. Only Crumb could visually represent the true gluttony of a greasy man-pig eating himself to death.
I find the most interesting way to capture the slaughter is through the wife’s perception. Neglected and desperate, a wife begins to loathe her once slim hubby. Crumb would enhance her growing hatred by inking hallucinations and fantasies of the maddening spouse. Once imagined homicides begin to present themselves in reality, the wife’s desire to become a widow grows with every appetizer. Exaggerating his heavy exterior and the amount of greasy food on his plates, this underground comic veteran would become part of another masterpiece. Crumb will focus on the path of the broken china as it goes from a cupboard, to being hit by a hammer, to being shoved in meatballs, to being picked up by a fork, to being chewed, to finally tearing the insides of the bottomless gut. Perhaps there could even be a way in Crumb’s genius to incorporate the poem that originally told the story. While it is impossible to envision the cartoon entirely, I believe its appeal is obvious. Only the father of gritty cartoons could make a disgustingly attractive tale of revenge have a fairytale feel.
“Violently funny death of internal bleeding?” You’re my kind of guy, Zach.
Patrick O’Connell’s absurd idea for a short made me smile:
This short MUST be done by Hertzfeldt himself, for the idea seems to flow from the madness that is his. The opening shot is of is a barbarian, fully armed, closeup with lots of movement behind her. The view slowly pans out, showing a huge army of barbarians, something right out of Return of the King or Braveheart. They look intense, standing on a knoll ready to start their charge at any moment. Suddenly the original barbarian lets loose a huge scream, and the whole mass of them begins running, tearing towards the screen from what looks like several hundred yards away. As they get closer and closer, the sound of their stampede grows into a roar. Slowly, as they get closer, the sound of a carnival begins to intermix with the stampede. The camera pans down as the mass gets to the camera and pans to show where the barbarians are charging, and they slow to get in line to get into the carnival. As they walk into the carnival slowly talking with each other, they get through the gate and begin their rush again, breaking into groups going to different rides. Fades out.
Jason Young reminds us that endangering children is always funny:
My entry for the Dream Animation Contest would have to be an animated version of "Keep Out of Reach of Children", a dark and surreal short story I wrote several years ago. It tells the story of a group of babies who one day float up, up and away from their parents. The mommies and daddies chase the-rapidly rising infants, trying to get them back. They string volleyball nets between skyscrapers, chase the airborne babies down with cherry picker cranes and hijack helicopters, all to no avail. The story ends with the desperate parents standing on the beach with rifles, shooting their drifting babies down in a last attempt to get them back.
My dream animator would be the one and only Mr. Plympton. He's got the talent, wit, and just plain nastiness to make the film work.
The final entry from Eric Scheur was probably my favorite, and I’d love to share it here, but, alas, he’s shopping the idea around, and doesn’t want some unscrupulous bastard to steal his idea. So, I’ll just say good luck shopping Herb Gardner’s I’M NOT RAPPAPORT as a Ren and Stimpy vehicle, and leave it at that, Eric.
Finally, this runner-up will be receiving his copy of RAINBOW BRIGHT AND THE STAR STEALER shortly:
My Dream Animated Project.
By Harry J Knowles
I've never attempted to win one of these crummy contests before, but I love that show to death, so, I'll give it my best shot.
My Dream Animated Project is to do a 12 minute Black & White with Multi-plane camera technology BETTY BOOP cartoon directed by Dave Fleischer and animated by the ex-Bray Studio/Florida Fleischer Animation Studios. As a lover of Betty's SNOW WHITE and MINNIE THE MOOCHER and OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN toons, I've always dreamt of the one Cab Calloway song that I most wanted to see turned into a Betty Boop super epic.
REEFER MAN.
The toon would have Cab Calloway rotoscoped into a Zoot Suit Wolf-ish man with the insides of his coats lined with row after row of reefer joints. The overall story would be about Betty at school, bored to tears being wiped away by wipers forming out of her eyelashes. During Lunch she meets that "Funny Funny Reefer Man" and he introduces her to not only a brilliant musical number that transforms all the cloned children in the school into crazy hipster animalistic pagan kids. The school itself begins puffing and huffing and Betty and that "Funny Funny Reefer Man" float on wacky tobacky clouds - and she becomes more and more risque in her dancing and grinding with the Reefer Man... when suddenly Heavenly Soldier Angels come to rescue her from his so-called evil grips... but Betty and the Reefer Man fight by blowing binding pot filled smokerings and converting their puritism and repression to COOL.
Ain’t he shameless?
Thanks again to all who submitted. And be sure to head over to the official ANIMATION SHOW website to order your own copy of THE ANIMATION SHOW DVD, as well as to check out the latest news about Vol. 2.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
Awesome work, everyone. That was hellacious fun, and I commend Beaks on his choices as much as I commend the authors of the pieces. Except for that creepy Knowles guy. How’d he ever get published here? I thought we had SOME standards, for pissakes...
"Moriarty" out.
