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| Tom... |
 Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 11:55 am |
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(View this article with images and live links here:
http://cartoonsonfilm.blogspot.com/2009/11/stop-motion-matinee.html )
I'm proud to announce Cartoons On Film's STOP MOTION MATINEE, a new
release produced in conjunction with Inkwell Images, Inc. This DVD
collection is an exploration of early stop-motion animated films, and
should serve as a great introduction to a most interesting aspect of
animation history. It demonstrates the level of talent possessed by
several filmmakers of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s who were able to
produce visually stunning films using three-dimensional objects
without the aid of computers. It can be argued that these works, in
turn, are true film feats compared to the commonplace animation
produced today.
First in the show is THE AUTOMATIC MOVING COMPANY (1912), a film by
Romeo Bossetti. Wrongly attributed to Emile Cohl since the 1970s, this
film was in fact produced by Bossetti for the Pathe company two months
after Cohl left the studio. Bossetti worked at the Gaumont Studios
during an earlier period in which Cohl produced a film with the same
theme, Le Mobilier fidele (1910); now only viewable at the
Cinematheque Gaumont-Actualites.
Animation historian and author Donald Crafton makes the important
distinction between the two films in his book Emile Cohl, Caricature,
and Film (Princeton Press, 1992) and suggests that Bossetti must have
had the pleasure of watching Cohl at work during the Gaumont period
and experimented with furniture in an earlier 1911 film as well.
THE AUTOMATIC MOVING COMPANY is a short yet charming film depicting
actual furniture unloading from a moving truck and arranging itself in
a second-floor apartment without the aid of a human moving crew.
In that same year, famed animator Ladislaw Starewicz produced our
second film, THE REVENGE OF THE KINEMATOGRAPH CAMERAMAN (1912). This
dramatic telling of a lecherous couple, the Beetles, has a humorous
edge in that a grasshopper cameraman provides the climax by showing
his secretly-captured, incriminating film at a cinema where the
Beetles are in attendance. Husband and wife betray each other and yet
they remain together at the end of the film with a bottle of wine to
bind them!
Starewicz uses actual preserved insects as subjects in this film. And
to think I throw them away after I swat them...
Our third feature is THE DINOSAUR AND THE MISSING LINK (1917), a
Conquest Pictures production distributed by Thomas Edison. Willis
O'Brien animates superb, lifelike figures in this film which is part
of a prehistoric-themed series he produced in the mid-to-late 1910s.
Miss Araminta Rockface, the protagonist, is called on by local cavemen
The Duke and Stonejaw Steve. These two cavemen are rivals, and Steve
throws The Duke into a pot of boiling water! Theophilus Ivoryhead, the
"unassuming hero" as an intertitle introduces him, eventually wins the
love of Araminta - but I'd better not spoil the rest of the plot for
potential viewers! The film features an almost stunningly similar
precursor to KING KONG, "Wild Willie," who serves as the antagonist
and is also the 'Missing Link' of the film's title. O'Brien's work is
revisited later in this program.
Jumping ahead to the eve of the Great Depression, we find ourselves in
the fantastic world of Chip the Wooden Man. Kinex Studio's CHIP IN THE
LAND OF WHIZ (1929) is one of various toyland-like adventures. Kinex's
series such as Chip, Snap the Gingerbread Man and Doodlebugville all
feature characters crafted out of wood and other materials in a much
more "cartoon"-like style, whereas realistic bugs and human-like dolls
were predominant characters in earlier stop-motion films. While not
much is known of the Kinex Studios, historians believe their films
were produced in approximately 1928 to 1930 as silent films for non-
theatrical 8mm and 16mm distribution by Kodak's Cinegraph branch. Ex-
Kinex staff went on to produce a small number of sound films such as
Hector the Pup (1935).
As promised earlier, the work of Willis O'Brien is revisited. This
time we're showcasing a rare reel that saw no general release until
its discovery in recent decades. O'Brien designed sets and dinosaur
figures which were built by Marcel Delgado for a short-lived project
dubbed CREATION (1931). The plot was to have featured a submarine
discovering a lost island where dinosaurs still roam. David O.
Selznick scrapped this project when he became head of production at
RKO in 1932, however, work already completed on the project convinced
Selznick's assistant Merian C. Cooper that this technique of
filmmaking was feasible. This rare fragment represents what eventually
bore fruit as the wildly famous King Kong (1933).
Our program concludes by revisiting the work of Ladislaw Starewicz. By
1933, Starewicz fine-tuned his skills in the medium and moved on to
using some cartoonish characters alongside anthropomorphized objects
such as wine glasses. A true surrealist work with a Depression-era
European edge, THE MASCOT concerns Duffy, a cute stuffed-animal dog,
facing some strange adventures before returning to his human masters'
home. This film is the only in our program to have been produced with
a soundtrack.
This collection represents a turning point for me as an early
animation collector and historian. I've been interested in early
animation history since the mid-1990s, when I was a young child. Out
of sheer frustration caused by the general unavailability of these
films, I began collecting them around a decade ago and started my home-
based operation of selling DVD collections under the Tom's Vintage
Film moniker in the Summer of 2005.
This year, 2009, has been an important period as colleague David
Gerstein helped with the formation of my new Cartoons on Film website.
Also, fellow animation historian Ray Pointer of Inkwell Images, Inc.
sought to help upgrade my product to something that has a better focus
and a much more professional presentation. I'm grateful to both for
their collaboration in producing Stop Motion Matinee, with Ray serving
as fellow director and David as package designer, respectively.
Please enjoy a video preview of STOP MOTION MATINEE at
http://www.youtube.com/v/lZ_YSnMr3HY
Needless to say, we all look forward to working on future releases of
historic animation. For the moment, though, let's enjoy Stop Motion
Matinee!
Visit http://cartoonsonfilm.com for ordering information. |
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