Animated Short of the Day: "Plastic Man in Puddle Trouble" (Andy Suriano, 2006)

Animated Short of the Day is a series showcasing short cartoons from every possible genre, era, and format. For an archive of the films previously featured, click here. To suggest cartoons for future installments, email me or contact me on Twitter.

For the most part, this series will focus on cartoons that were released theatrically. In many cases, TV episodes don't stand alone as well as theatrical shorts do. I love Phineas and Ferb a lot, for example, but the show follows such a strict formula that it's hard to select one episode as a stand-out. Other shows do individual episodes very well, but including them would completely altar the tone of this series. I could easily write about a dozen different Hey Arnold! or Gargoyles episodes, but those shows bear so little resemblance to what we think of as "animated shorts" that such a post would require far more set-up and explanation than I have planned for this series.

But today I'm going to make an exception. Kind of.

"Plastic Man in Puddle Trouble" was commissioned by Cartoon Network in 2006 and never aired on TV, so its status as a "TV episode" is debatable. It was released online later that year, where it became a big hit among the nerds.

Whether one considers it to be a TV show or not, one thing that's clear is that it's very much in the spirit of Looney Tunes, its corporate sibling. The animation is loose and free (a stark contrast from the stiff 1970s Ruby-Spears series), with Suriano wisely pitting his hero against a villain just as pliable as himself - water-based criminal The Human Puddle, created just for this cartoon. The visual gags make good use of Plastic Man's powers, and there are plenty of solid verbal jokes as well (particularly a punny montage of other foes Plastic Man has defeated).

The designs and storyboards were done by Stephen DeStefano, a long-time comics artist who drew one of my all-time favorite Captain Marvel stories, among many other wonderful things. He doesn't stray too far from the original Jack Cole design (below). Instead he keeps what had been working for decades, simply streamlining the design to allow for more fluid animation.

Plastic Man is voiced by Tom Kenny, best known by his alias Tom "Spongebob" Kenny. His version of the character was so well-received that he went on to reprise the role in several episodes of Cartoon Network's Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Even more recently, the team behind this cartoon has reunited to make several more Plastic Man shorts for that same network's DC Nation block. I haven't seen those shorts yet (I'm really hoping a DVD release of all of the DC Nation cartoons so I don't have to click around online for them), but if they're as much fun as this cartoon, that's good news indeed.

Animated Short of the Day: "The Three Little Pups" (Tex Avery, 1953)

Animated Short of the Day is a series showcasing short cartoons from every possible genre, era, and format. For an archive of the films previously featured, click here. To suggest cartoons for future installments, leave a comment or contact me on Twitter.

Tex Avery directed only seventeen Droopy cartoons, but the series went through a number of variations during that brief time. The first few entries followed a formula in which the little sadsack outsmarts the howlin' wolf from Red Hot Riding Hood. Later cartoons paired Droopy (voiced by Bill Thompson, a familiar voice actor who played several recurring roles on radio's Fibber McGee and Molly) with Spike, a large scheming bruiser of a dog. 

With "Three Little Pups," Avery returned to using a wolf as an antagonist. But this clearly isn't the same wolf. Rather than a would-be ladies' man from the city, the wolf is now a simpleton from the South. Frank Graham's slick characterization is replaced by Daws Butler, using the same laid-back drawl he later employed as Huckleberry Hound.

In this cartoon, Avery introduced another changes to the series formula. First among them is the treatment of Droopy himself. Here he's joined by his two identical brothers Loopy and Snoopy. Droopy is recognizably the same character - he's clearly the smartest of the three - but he isn't quites as unflappable as in previous cartoons. While lecturing his brothers, he seems quite worried about the wolf's approach. His characterization would change even more in future cartoons, but this feels like the first step.


The level of comedy, however, is very much in line with the earlier cartoons. In the film's standout sequence, Droopy holds up a variety of items to hit the wolf as he bounces up and down. This is Avery working at the peak of his powers, offering one stellar gag after another.

A few other thoughts:

- The wolf's line "If this don’t work, I'll go into television!" offers a major signpost of the early 1950s. Many animators were moving to TV during this era, including Avery's old WB contemporary Bob Clampett, who was making the puppet show Time of Beany.
- Charles Schulz's Peanuts had begun three years earlier, but it was still a relatively-unsung comic strip. It's likely that Avery used the name "Snoopy" without being aware of Charlie Brown's dog. 


- The DVD version of this cartoon (and some others on the set) suffers from problems caused by a digital noise reduction process. Intended to clean up dirt on the image, it also erased parts of the animation itself, notably outlines. It can be quite off-putting, but I'd still recommend that DVD set. The cartoons are well worth owning.

 - One of the animators here was Michael Lah, who directed the  last seven (unmemorable) Droopy cartoons after Avery stepped down from the series.

Animated Short of the Day: "Your Face" (Bill Plympton, 1987)

I imagine I'll feature Bill Plympton's works a number of times in this series, so I'll start out today with one of his best known. Plympton has had a varied and interesting career. In addition to his shorts, Plympton has directed five feature films, doing most or all of the animation by himself. He's also the only person so far to create music videos for both Kanye West and "Weird" Al Yankovic.

"Your Face" consists mostly of a single stationary shot of a man's face while he sings a lovely, haunting song (true fact: I convinced my wife to let me put it our wedding dance.) The song was written and sung by Maureen McElheron. The music was slowed down to sound like a man's voice, ostensibly because Plympton, by his own admission, "was too cheap to hire a male singer." He's selling himself and McElheron short, though. The effect gives the cartoon a bizarre quality that it wouldn't have with a more standard voice.

(For those interested, here's a version of the song sped up 40%. It isn't McElheron's original track, but it's a likely approximation of what it might have sounded like. Big thanks to Guillermo Gomez for modifying that track for me!)

Aside from the music, most of the delight of "Your Face" comes from watching Plympton experiment with all of the ways he can alter this image. For two and a half minutes, things happen to the face. It multiplies, stretches and squashes, it gets crushed, it gets turned inside out, and it's broken down into blocks. It's a three-minute class on animation techniques, and it's also hilarious.


Your Face - Bill Plympton [1987] from SlimGus on Vimeo.

One final note - I didn't mention this yesterday, but I'd really appreciate any suggestions for future shorts. Send me an email or contact me on Twitter.

Animated Short of the Day: "Old Mother Hubbard" (Ub Iwerks, 1935)

For the past few days, I've been posting one animated short per day on Facebook and Twitter. I decided it would be a better idea to post them here at the old blog for easier access. The goal of this project is simple - introduce people to animated shorts they might not have seen before. Some of them shorts featured will be well-known, others will be more obscure. There's about a trillion animated shorts online - shorts really are ideal for online viewing - and most people don't think to seek them out.

(Previously featured were the 1973 E.B. White adaptation "The Family That Dwelt Apart" directed by Yvon Mallette and Chuck Jones's hilarious Sherlock Holmes parody "Deduce, You Say" from 1956.)

Today's entry is "Old Mother Hubbard" made by Ub Iwerks in 1935.

Iwerks is best known for his collaborations with Walt Disney, especially his work on the Silly Symphonies series. He left the studio in 1930, feeling overworked and under-credited. (His grand-daughter Leslie has created an excellent documentary about his life and work entitled The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story. It's on the Disney Treasures: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit DVD, and also currently on Daily Motion in five parts.)

He would eventually return in 1940, but today we're going to look at something from his between-Disney years. During that time, he released the "ComiColor cartoons," which contained a bunch of these weird cartoons based on nursery rhymes. "Old Mother Hubbard" is one of my favorites. There's an old mother, and a dog, and a cupboard, but it mostly just uses the rhyme as a jumping off point for a bizarre story.

I especially like the sequence in the middle where the king sings about his poor health. Look at all that pain on his face!

Talking Pictures

As you may have noticed, I've updated this blog exactly once in the past 3 1/2 years. I've decided it's time to do something about that. I watch a lot of movies, so I'm going to try to write a short post on each of them, starting with the Seven Chances piece below. If nothing else, it will help me actually improve as a writer. I feel like I've stayed on pretty much the same level since high school.

We'll see how that goes.

Seven Chances (1925)

The IMDb trivia page for Buster Keaton's Seven Chances tells me that, "Keaton later called it his least favorite feature and tried to keep film historian Raymond Rohauer from restoring the only known copy of the movie." I cringed when I read that. I suppose he maybe felt that way because it was based on a play rather being an original idea, but he was being ridiculous - Seven Chances isn't perfect, but it made me laugh a whole lot. If it had been destroyed, it would have been a pretty terrible loss for comedy fans.

The plot is both ridiculous and overly familiar. Keaton's grandfather dies and leaves him $7 million in his will, provided Keaton is married by 7:00 PM on his 27th birthday - the same day, of course, that he receives the news. After a misunderstanding that makes him think his long-time sweetheart Mary (Ruth Dwyer) won't marry him, he frantically tries to find someone - anyone - who will marry him. Meanwhile, his business partner gets an article printed in the afternoon, which leads to the film's most famous image - dozens (hundreds?) of women chasing Keaton down the street, hoping to become his wife and get a piece of the fortune.

You don't get any points for figuring out how it ends. But the ending isn't really the point. The gags are, and most of them hit their marks, especially during the second and third acts. But before we get there, we have to watch Keaton's failed attempt to propose to Mary. It's a standard-issue misunderstanding of my least-favorite type ("the whole plot could have been avoided if people would just communicate with each other"), and it doesn't have many inventive comic bits to raise it above the level.

Things start to pick up once we reach the "seven chances" of the title, which are the seven girls at a country club that Keaton's business partner happens to know. Keaton proposes to all of them and then to every other woman he sees (including a young, brunette Jean Arthur!). This allows for every possible rejection gag Keaton can think, and it's marvelous. Particular standouts include a well-timed bit where he proposes to one girl on his way up the stairs and another on the way down, and an argument/near-proposal with a hatcheck girl (played by Rosalind Byrne in a performance so funny I made a point of looking up her name).

The final act - with the gold-diggers pursuing Keaton through the streets of town - manages to sustain that momentum. Keaton loved staging long chase sequences (see, for example, at least 70% of The General), and he always knew how to keep them from getting boring. In the case, he accomplishes that by switching focus midway through. To avoid the women, Keaton runs down a hill and finds himself dodging an avalanche of rocks instead. Mike D'Angelo of The AV Club discusses that sequence in more detail here, so I'll just say that I was genuinely terrified for Keaton's life and leave it at that.

Seven Chances is only the fourth Buster Keaton movie I've seen (after The General, Go West, and Sherlock Jr.), so I'm not going to pretend that I know where it falls among his larger body of work. But it's very funny, and definitely worth the 56 minutes you'll spend watching it.

Other thoughts:

• The title is more or less irrelevant. He doesn't have seven chances - he has "number of women that happen to be in the area" chances.
• I really liked the way the opening sequence tracks the passage of time - by showing how much Keaton's dog has grown since the last time he tried to profess his love to Mary.
• In the "How did people think like that 87 years ago?!" department, there's a gag where Keaton walks up behind a woman, sees that she's black, and walks away without saying anything. It's not that I'm surprised by casual racism in a movie from the 1920s, but it's completely foreign to me that "Of course he can't propose to her! She has a different skin color than he does!" could constitute a funny joke.
  
• As long as I'm documenting the movie's racism, Mary's mother also has a servant/employee that is clearly a white man in black face. It's . . . unpleasant.
  
• The joke where Keaton accidentally proposes to a drag queen lands much, much more successfully.
• For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, the chase sequence reminded me a lot of Monty Python's The Life of Brian. I guess it's the fact that Keaton can't marry all of these women any more than Brian could serve as a savior to all of his followers.
• I'll probably be watching most of the Buster Keaton movies on Netflix Instant over the next few months (including College, The Navigator, Steamboat Bill Jr., and Our Hospitality.) I also might try to rewatch Sherlock Jr., which was the first silent movie I ever saw. I tape-recorded an early-morning airing on AMC in about 1999, and it blew my 9th-grade mind.
  
• Man, remember those days, when AMC was commercial-free and showed things older than Twister?
• I am a cranky old man.
  

Matthau/Lemmon Bowl

Last year, my wife and I established a new tradition of watching a bunch of movie comedies on Super Bowl Sunday, and this year we continued that tradition. Last year, it was just a hodgepodge of (all excellent) stuff from the 30s-40s, but this year we had a more coherent theme - 4 Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon movies, three of which I'd never seen before.

The Fortune Cookie was I had seen, and it's still great. One of Billy Wilder's most underrated movies. Walter Matthau won his only Oscar for it, which I think is all kinds of delightful. It's a very comedic performance - not at all typical Oscar bait, certainly not in the year that A Man For All Seasons won Best Picture - so it's nice that the Academy could recognize how stellar it is.

The Odd Couple is easily one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had watching a movie. I love the sitcom a lot - I own the first two seasons on DVD, and I've been meaning to buy the others - so it was strange to see the film after all these years. And on the same set as the first season of the TV show, I think. (Does anyone know if that's accurate? It sure looked the same to me.) That said, the character Lemmon's playing isn't quite the same one Tony Randall played. He's newly divorced, so he's a lot sadder and more conflicted. Still, not bad if you like Neil Simon. I do, most of the time. And it's always nice to see the Pigeon Sisters!

In a strange way, the movie The Odd Couple reminded me of most was Buffy the Vampire Slayer - I have an enormous amount of affection for the TV show, and I viewed it as something of a not-quite-in-continuity origin story.

Billy Wilder's The Front Page from 1974 isn't as good as Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (based on the same play by Ben Hecht, but in a vacuum it's pretty terrific. It moves like lightning, the performances are all strong, and it has a wonderful period flavor. The update of the script mostly involved adding a lot of profanity, which was par for the course in 1974, I guess. I didn't think it was too distracting, in any case. My wife has never seen His Girl Friday, and she thought Front Page was "such a great movie," and I had to agree. I'd always dismissed it, but that was silly of me. It's definitely worth watching if you're a fan of either Hecht or Wilder.

Also, it features maybe the funniest epilogue text I've ever seen. Every single character's fate is revealed in a different, funny joke. And it has both Austin Pendleton and Charles Durning in it, five years before The Muppet Movie! You can't beat that!

Finally, the best word I can think of to describe Grumpy Old Men is "cute." It's probably the worst of these four, but I enjoyed it. It helped to watch it right after those others, because the age on Matthau & Lemmon's faces really jumped out at me. They're supposed to have a history going back decades, and I believed it more because I'd just watched them age 27 years in an afternoon. I've never seen any of the three movies they did together after this one, but I imagine that "It's Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau together! But they're old!" was probably fun exactly once.

A nice touch for us Northerners: Lemmon's character has a "Legalize Lutefisk" magnet on his fridge.

One thing I noticed that all four of those movies have in common - they're billed pretty much equally, but Jack Lemmon is always the actual lead. His characters drive the story and show actual growth, while Matthau is always the colorful support. Even The Odd Couple is the story of Felix learning to be okay with his divorce. Oscar's growth consists entirely of learning to be okay with picking cigarette butts up off the carpet.

I'm not complaining - that Matthau character would get awfully tiresome in a lead role, whereas he's used very well in all four of these movies - but it seems like no one ever really talks about that dynamic between the two of them, so I thought it was worth noting.