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Director: Earl Hurd
Release Date: January 28, 1923
Stars: Bobby Bumps & Fido
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
I was already impressed with ‘Fresh Fish’, but Earl Hurd’s next Bobby Bumps picture, ‘Chicken Dressing’ is even better.
Earl Hurd, jr. again is a director at a “large film company”, in which Bobby Bumps and Fido co-star a live action cat, rabbit and chicken. These real animals interact marvelously with the cartoon starts, and one immediately believes they’re movie stars, as well.
Only after 4 minutes the ‘real’ picture starts, with Bobby Bumps and Fido being firefighters, rushing to the fire on a live action-rabbit pulled cart, and assisted by the real life cat, while the chicken plays the damsel in distress. Highlight is when Bobby Bumps takes out one of the smoke drawings, handles it as if it were a spring, and complains to the director about this badly drawn smoke.
Soon some real smoke enters the picture, making Bobby faint. The director asks Bobby whether he wants to go to a real life hospital or a cartoon hospital. After imagining the first (also starring two live action children as a doctor and nurse, respectively) , Bobby wisely chooses the latter. In the end the whole cartoon appears to have been the chicken’s dream.
‘Chicken Dressing’ is an absolute delightful cartoon, mixing live action and animation to a satisfying end, and providing some great gags along the way. Earl Hurd makes great use of the animals, sometimes superimposing drawings on them. This cartoon shows that Earl Hurd should be counted among the animation greats, and not only remembered for his cel patent.
Watch ‘Chicken Dressing’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Chicken Dressing’ is available on the Blu-Ray/DVD-combo ‘Cartoon Roots: Bobby Bumps and Fido’
Directors: Alain Gagnol & Jean-Loup Felicioli
Release Date: September 12, 2015
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
2015 was a good year for French animation. June already saw the release of the great movies ‘Avril et le monde truqué’ (April and the Extraordinary World) and ‘Tout en haut du monde’ (Long Way North), but these were topped in September by the Franco-Belgian production ‘Phantom Boy’.
‘Phantom Boy’ was created by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, who have been working together at the French Folimage studio since the mid-nineties, and who brought us the entertaining feature film ‘Une vie de chat’ (A Cat in Paris) in 2010. But compared to the earlier feature scenarist Gagnol adds an extra layer of depth to ‘Phantom Boy’, because this is not only an adventure film, but it also tells about a boy suffering from a deadly disease.
‘Phantom Boy’ is a children’s film set in New York, and tells about Léo, an eleven years old boy, who’s seriously ill (he’s probably suffering from cancer, but the exact illness is never revealed) and hospitalized. In the hospital Léo discovers that his spirit can leave his body and look around, encountering other spirits while doing so.
During one of these wanderings, he encounters the spirit of Alex Tanguy, an injured policeman. Tanguy is after a master villain, the “man with the deformed face”, who threatens to shut down the whole of New York with a computer virus if not delivered a huge sum of money. Unfortunately, Tanguy is stuck at the hospital, but he discovers Léo’s spirit can snoop around for him. Thus, Léo can help miss Delauney, a feisty journalist, who’s also on the villain’s trail. There’s a catch, however, Léo’s spirit must return to Léo’s body in time, or Léo will certainly die…
The film is thus a very nice mix of adventure, in which Léo’s superpower is used to a great effect, and drama, because the film makers never lose sight of Léo’s illness, and show the ails, fears, and sorrows of Léo and his family, as well. Thus, the film is not only exciting, but knows some really moving scenes, too.
Nevertheless, the film never becomes heavy-handed, and in fact is often very funny. Especially the master villain’s two helpers are great comic relief, but the best gag goes to the master villain himself, who several times tries to tell the story behind his deformation, only to get cut short all the time.
The film has a very pleasant visual style, courtesy of Jean-Loup Felicioli, who has given the film a very idiosyncratic take on the Franco-Belgian comic strip tradition. Typical for Felicioli is a strongly graphical and very angular style (not a thing is straight in this film), and the slant eyes of most characters. The man with the deformed face is practically cubist, with his multi-colored and checkered face. The color palette is warm and appealing, and the animation uses the jittery style often encountered in independent shorts.
Films like this prove that traditional animation is far from dead (‘Phantom Boy’ was even drawn on paper, and hand colored, even though the final composition was done on the computer), and in fact allows for a less generic and more adventurous style than contemporary computer animation. I’ll even go that far to name ‘Phantom Boy’ the best animated feature of 2015, despite serious competition from both ‘Shaun the Sheep Movie’ and ‘Inside Out’.
Watch the trailer for ‘Phantom Boy’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Phantom Boy’ is available on Blu-Ray and DVD
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: March 31, 1939
Stars: Betty Boop
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
In ‘So Does an Automobile’ Betty Boop owns a car hospital for ill anthropomorphized cars.
Although this cartoon features a musical number, it mainly consists of inspired spot gags, making this short the only Betty Boop entry in the spot gag genre. And, in true gag cartoon fashion, this cartoon saves its best gag for last.
For a Betty Boop cartoon from the second half of the 1930s, ‘So Does an Automobile’ has a surprisingly silly atmosphere, which harks partly back to the early 1930’s, Betty Boop’s heydays. The number of gags and the silly atmosphere arguably make the short one of the best Betty Boop cartoons of the second half of the 1930’s, right behind ‘Betty Boop and Grampy’ (1935) and ‘Pudgy Picks A Fight‘ (1937). Unfortunately, ‘So Does an Automobile’ was to be Betty Boop’s last great cartoon, as her series stopped four months later.
Watch ‘So Does an Automobile’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Betty Boop cartoon No. 80
To the previous Betty Boop cartoon: My Friend the Monkey
To the next Betty Boop cartoon: Musical Mountaineers
‘So Does an Automobile’ is available on the French DVD Box Set ‘Betty Boop Coffret Collector’
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: May 29, 1938
Stars: Popeye, Olive Oyl
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
‘I Yam Love Sick’ opens with Olive Oyl reading a romance.
Popeye drops by, but Olive ignores him completely. Later she explains she has a new boyfriend now, Bluto. To win her back, Popeye feigns to fall very ill. This leads to a bizarre, and rather surreal series of hospital scenes, in which weird bearded doctors try to examine Popeye. In the end Popeye reveals he was only fooling, only to get clobbered by Olive.
‘I Yam Love Sick’ is full of delightful nonsense. The best gag is when Olive steps out of the panel to address the audience with an ‘is there a doctor in the house?’.
Watch ‘I Yam Love Sick’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This Popeye film No. 60
To the previous Popeye film: Big Chief Ugh-Amugh-Ugh
To the next Popeye film: Plumbing is a “Pipe”
‘I Yam Love Sick’ is available on the DVD-set ‘Popeye the Sailor Volume Two’
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