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Airing Date: June 1, 1996
Dee Dee’s Room
Director: Genndy Tartakovsky
Stars: Dexter
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
In this episode Dexter tries to retrieve a bread slicer from Dee Dee’s room.
Dexter treats his big sister’s realm as a foreign planet, and enters it in a space suit. The humor comes mostly from Dexter’s pompous, overblown voice over, making the events much more exiting than they really are.
There’s strikingly little animation in this episode, as many scenes are done in stills, and many movements done in only three or four drawings, with no inbetweening whatsoever. This visual style does add to the dreamlike atmosphere that permeates this episode. It thus is a great use of limited animation as an artistic choice, not necessarily an economical one.
Directors: Paul Rudish & Genndy Tartakovsky
Stars: Dial M for Monkey
Rating: ★
Review:
Dial M for Monkey: Huntor
‘Dial M for Monkey’ never were a successful addition to the ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’, but the ‘Huntor’ episode is particularly disappointing.
In this episode Monkey has to battle a lion-like alien hunter with an Australian accent. This is a particularly talkative opponent, and Huntor’s rambling fills almost the entire soundtrack.
This alone accounts for a tiresome watch, but this episode also demonstrates that the ‘Dial M for Monkey’ doesn’t share the same eye for design as the surrounding ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’ sequences. The character designs are more generic, more like the dull 1970s Hanna-Barbera designs than Dexter’s 1950s UPA world, and the color schemes are uninventive and ugly. In fact, ‘Huntor’ emulates the cheap, ugly and forgettable cartoon style of 1970s Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoons too much for comfort. The 1970s were a low point for studio animation, and I don’t want to be reminded of that, thank you.
The Big Sister
See the post devoted to this episode
‘Dee Dee’s Room/Dial M for Monkey: Huntor/The Big Sister’ is available on the DVD ‘Dexter’s Laboratory Season One: All 13 Episodes’
Director: James Algar
Release Date: 1942
Rating: ★★½
Review:
Of all milestones of Disney animation, ‘Four Methods of Flush Riveting’ is the most unassuming and certainly the most boring.
It was made in early 1941, thus before The United States had entered the war, for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which was located nearby the Disney studio at Burbank. The film was “produced under the technical direction of the Lockheed Aircraft Cop.”, and without doubt very useful, but it was in fact a pilot film. As the title card states:
“The following film uses a simplified technique developed by the Walt Disney studio to demonstrate the quickest and cheapest method whereby the animation medium can be applied to National Defense Training”.
Both 1940 features ‘Pinocchio‘ and ‘Fantasia’ had lost money, and Disney was looking for new opportunities to earn some. In World War I J.R. Bray had demonstrated that animation film could be used perfectly for training the troops, thus pioneering the educational animation film. Nevertheless, between World War I and World War II only few educational films were made.
Disney’s new technique is in fact limited animation. As such it is the mother of all animated instruction films up to the present day, but even more of limited animation as an art, which would be explored more and more during the 1950s and 1960s.
The immediate effect on the Disney studio was that it sprouted commissions for several instruction films, mostly for the army and the navy, starting with ‘Stop That Tank!‘ for the National Film Board of Canada.
During World War II the Disney studio produced no less than 200 different training films for the armed forces. Moreover, limited animation immediately entered propaganda shorts, like ‘The Thrifty Pig‘ (1941) and such, as well as features, like ‘The Three Caballeros‘ (1944).
The film itself is very dry, and as educational as it is dull. Its most interesting feature is the use of a structured blue monochrome background against which the clean, airbrushed objects read very well. The idea of using monochromes and structures in backgrounds was going to be of as much importance as limited animation to the more forward looking forces in the animation field, and the UPA studio, which sprouted from the 1941 Disney strike, in particular.
Watch ‘Four Methods of Flush Riveting’ yourself and tell me what you think:
Director: Ben Sharpsteen
Release Date: July 21, 1942
Stars: The Three Little Pigs (in a cameo)
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
Arguably the most ridiculous of all war time propaganda cartoons, ‘Food Will Win the War’ tells us about the successes of American agriculture.
A bombastic narrator makes all kinds of outrageous comparisons to illustrate the farmer’s huge production. Examples are baking all fruits of America into one big pie or frying all America’s meat on four Vesuvius volcanoes. The result is so absurd and its message so out to lunch that the short is actually great fun to watch.
Throughout the cartoon the animation is very limited, almost absent. The limited animation gives the short a poster-like quality. Full animation is limited to four short sequences:
1) a bowling ball bowling down skittles which resemble Hitler, Mussolini and a Japanese general
2) a giant pie thrown at the earth
3) Chickens laying eggs
4) The three little pigs leading an army of pigs.
‘Food Will Win the War’ was the last animated short directed by Ben Sharpsteen. In the 1940s he had moved more and more towards production. He would supervise the production of a.o. ‘Fun and Fancy Free‘ (1947), ‘Cinderella‘ (1950) and ‘Alice in Wonderland‘ (1951) before moving to live action, working on Disney’s True-Life Adventures (1948-1960). He retired in 1962.
Watch ‘Food Will Win the War’ yourself and tell me what you think:
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 