Wednesday 4/17/24
I've been watching and studying quite a few avant-garde and animated short films of late, ranging from Stan Brakhage to Joseph Cornell to Norman McLaren to Tom and Jerry.
Thought I'd go through some of these, starting with two Christmas-themed films from Canada, which are enchanting and clever.
The first is The Great Toy Robbery from 1963, by Jeff Hale. The title, of course, is riff on that of The Great Train Robbery, the 1903 silent film by Edwin S. Porter which has never really left North American popular culture any more than Elvis, Disney, Abraham Lincoln, The Wizard of Oz, and baseball have done. It's one of those things that's always there, even when people aren't aware it's there because they're looking at the offspring of its offspring of its offspring, popular culturally-speaking. Think about almost every pop culture vampire: They kind of come from Bela Lugosi, right?
So even when we don't know the original film--or even that there was a film about a train and a robbery, it's as if we're born with the gist near to hand. There's no train in this picture, but there is a thin-hipped/barrel-chested hero and his (maybe not so faithful) steed, and bad guys. But we also have Santa Claus in the desert--or out on the prairie--and a less than lion-hearted hero who saves the day by accident and bad guys who enjoy playing with their toys. I like how Santa knows exactly how to behave when being robbed.
The best animated works have one quality above others in common, I'd say, and that's wit. A certain visual felicity, which is a wit source. That's an interesting thing about animation. A work might not have a joke as an end goal, but visual cleverness produces the same response in us that wit can.
Remember, this is 1963, and Westerns--at least on TV--were still huge. There were fewer of them at the movie theater, but think of all the Western series that were going strong at the time or had recently wrapped up: Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Have Gun - Will Travel, Bonanza, Wanted: Dead or Alive, and so forth.
Then we have the same year's Christmas Cracker, helmed by no less than four directors: Hale, McLaren, Grant Munro, and Gerald Potterton. This is a favorite. Pure Christmas to me. Animated shorts can sometimes remind of a Daniil Kharms story or something by Voltaire. Candide is a very much a literary cartoon. In Kharms, things happen fast--there's no mucking about to set things up. Things just are. I like that. So often I see works where we know how things are going to be. And you sit there knowing you're just going to have to wait, and wait, for whatever to be finished just so that thing that you know is going to be there can be there. Why not just have it be there? Quickly?
There's a lot happening in this short. The between bits are stellar with Munro as the clown who is more like a festal version of Lear's fool, and a chiptune rendering of "The Holly and the Ivy" that I find unforgettable. This is one of my favorite carols, and while it's not obscure, it's not very well known; it's faster here, and once heard it sticks with you.
The segment with the Christmas star is so good and very Kharms-like. Guy wheels out his space ship and you don't have to wait. It's all just clever and funny. We don't need to dwell on rules and getting around them. Writers especially never realize this--you can just have things be what they are. You don't need to explain them away or account for why they're that way. People will go with you if you're not questioning yourself and the world you're in or making isn't questioning itself either. I love the part when he goes out and captures the star. That little beat--it always surprises me when he actually gets the thing. Perfect.