Inspiration!
Sorry, didn’t have time to get a Music Post together this week. However, this short doc on Chuck Jones is highly recommended.
Feel free to use this as an open MD thread!
[amazon template=image center&asin=B005DMHHHY]
Glyph
Glyph is worse than some and better than others. He believes that life is just one damned thing after another, that only pop music can save us now, and that mercy is the mark of a great man (but he's just all right). Nothing he writes here should be taken as an indication that he knows anything about anything.
I *love* the “Every Frame a Painting” guy.Report
I haven’t watched his other essays aside from the Edgar Wright one. I stumbled across this one a while back and bookmarked it to post on a rainy day, and have watched it probably eight or nine times since then. Really well-done.Report
Well, I can see I’m going to need to work my way through these. This 3-min. one on Drive is also good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsI8UES59TMReport
Compare Woody Woodpecker to Bugs Bunny.
They’re both more or less wizards from the same elemental plane of chaos, but Bugs Bunny comes off as infinitely less of a bully because he doesn’t want confrontation or a problem. He just wants to be left alone. It’s after the opponent pushes it that “this means war”.
Woody Woodpecker, by comparison, has a number of cartoons where he’s the primary antagonist. If he’s going door to door to sell brushes and the person refuses to buy, Woody Woodpecker goes full “this means war” even though, hey, Wally Walrus has every right to say “No, I don’t want to buy any dang brushes GOOD DAY SIR.”
Which makes Woody a bully and Bugs an everyman.Report
I don’t know that one approach is necessarily superior to the other, from a comedy/entertainment perspective. I liked Woody Woodpecker as a kid (though I haven’t seen it since then), and here I still laugh at early Daffy cackling maniacally as he defies physics and bounces across the water.
But you have to be careful about how you do it, and you’re right in saying it tends to define who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. I think The Cable Guy is actually sort of an underrated picture, and Matthew Broderick is definitely in the right in saying, “No, I don’t want to buy any dang
brushescable GOOD DAY SIR.”ReportBoth were voiced by the incomparable Mel Blanc. In my nerdier days, I always wondered how Mel Blanc would have been at anime dubbing. He was one of the greatest voice actors of all time but it would be interesting to see how he handled more dramatic fair than Looney Tunes or the Flintstones.Report
If you haven’t yet, gentle Reader, please do take the ten minutes needed to watch the video embedded in the post. It’s charming and it points to some very perceptive observations about art that transcend making silly cartoons for children.Report
Marvelous. “Some of the greatest short films ever made.” A big statement, quietly and definitively backed up in the space of a few minutes. Of course, it was a statement I already agreed with, but the pleasure of Tony Zhou’s essays are in his friendly offer to make you feel like an expert by letting you see things though an expert’s eyes.Report
I am looking forward to watching this doc in a bit (once I’ve got some dinner), but in the meantime, here is an unintentionally amusing NPR article which nevertheless has some good-to-excellent Youtube music in it:
Musicians You’ll Tell Your Friends About in 2015
I have told my friends about exactly one of these musicians, Leon Bridges, and I feel like NPR was somehow cheating with that one because I had forgotten all about him and then stumbled across his (NPR) Tiny Desk Concert. Which, like, if the only reason I am telling my friends about your faves, NPR, is because you keep dropping them in my lap on Facebook, well, I don’t think that counts.
Anyway, I like Leon Bridges. And I like a bunch of the other stuff in this article too. Maybe someday I will tell my friends about it. 😉Report
Yeah, I would put Jones up there with Kubrick. Way to often overlooked genius.
Thanks for putting that up @glyphReport
Okay, so the Tralfamadorians come down in their time/space ships and say: “We will destroy all copies of the works of Kubrick, or the works of Chuck Jones. Your choice.”
What’s your choice?Report
Well, if every citizen of Earth gets a vote, and they base it on which works they’ve actually seen, Jones is gonna win that in a landslide.Report
“What is your choice?”
Go out in a blaze of glory, while weeping for humanity.Report
That was swell, and I’d never seen anything by the documentarian before. Thanks!Report
Man, that took me back. I think I saw every one of the cartoons used at least a couple of dozen times going up. It never struck me as strange at the time, but when I was going up everyone listed the WB cartoons — Jones’ WB cartoons — as their favorite. Not the current ones, made for kids of our generation.
I can’t remember if anyone ever posted this here at the time, but the Jones film reminded me a lot of this one on Jerry Seinfeld writing a joke from a few years back.Report
If I had to pick a single favorite cartoon ever, it would be One Froggy Evening, which is (of course) Chuck Jones. Second would come Ducking the Devil (“I may be a coward, but I’m a greedy little coward”), which was directed by some guy named Robert McKimson. (Wikipedia says that he created Foghorn Leghornn, the Tasmanian Devil, and Speedy Gonzales, so I guess he’s not just some guy.)Report
The single best joke in a cartoon comes from the very first episode of Rocky and His Friends, when the explosion caused by the mooseberry pie-based rocket fuel has blown away the right half of its recipe, leaving just things like “1 cup”, “two tablespoons”, “a pinch”, and so on. Bullwinkle explains “I know how much, just not what of.”Report