Disney’s official fan convention, D23 Expo, is currently in progress (at the time of writing this, it’s the final day)! I’ll quickly list some of the announcements that caught my interest the most.
Penny looks lit in that Tiana gown!
I was naturally excited to see a brand-new look into the second season of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder. Something was telling me beforehand that an update on the series would drop around this time. My expectations for it to be as entertaining as season one are high! Can’t wait for February!
Next, on the Pixar side of things, we got preview images for their upcoming projects Elemental (and yes, I agree the blue guy does look like Osmosis Jones), Win or Lose (their first series not based on one of their films, not counting SparkShorts), and Elio.
I’m getting vibes of the Big Nate series on Paramount+ with this animation style here.
But easily the biggest surprise was their announcement of…[drumroll]
Speaking as a fan of the first film, it sounds interesting, but I thought Pixar said no more sequels after Toy Story 4 (plus, they already broke their promise by alluding to the possibility of making sequels to the Lightyear spin-off film). Oh well. I’m still optimistic to see Riley’s emotions again, even if I’m a little concerned about Bill Hader and Mindy Kahling not returning as Fear and Disgust respectively (those two happen to be my favorite characters).
Moving right along, we finally have our first teaser for the Little Mermaid remake starring Halle Bailey as Ariel. In just that one clip of her singing “Part of Your World”, Halle proved my expectations right about her doing a beautiful interpretation of the fish-tailed girl, on par with Jodi Benson’s original performance. Screw the haters! You go, Halle! I can’t wait for May 2023!
The last one I’ll bring up for this post is Walt Disney Animation Studios more or less returning to their 2D-animated roots for a feature film with the upcoming 2023 movie Wish (seriously, though, can we stop with these generic, single-word titles for animated features?) Technically, it’s 3D animation with a 2D watercolor filter over it (almost like that lovely Paperman short), but still. Sounds like Eric Goldberg wasn’t kidding when he brought up the idea of Disney returning to 2D. Also, the movie’s premise exploring the origins of the wishing star that’s so symbolic of the company is a sweet way of celebrating their forthcoming centennial.
Beautiful concept art.
However, going back to Disney+ stuff, it’s too bad there doesn’t seem to be any new updates on Rhona Who Lives By the River, which is supposed to be Emily Kapnek’s second animated series since As Told by Ginger. I totally forgot that was supposed to be a thing. Hopefully, it’s still coming out soon.
So those were some of my thoughts on the D23 announcements. I’m curious to hear YOURS!
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Let’s talk a little bit about Floyd Norman. Well, technically, we’ll be talking a lot about him today since this is a review of his book, but I’ll briefly introduce him to the unfamiliar. Basically, this 86-year-old animation veteran is an underrated legend, a Disney Legend to be precise (though he’s worked for several other studios as well). In 1956, Floyd, already an admirer of their films, was brought into the Walt Disney Studios during his late youth, back when Black animators in the industry were scarce at best. During those early years of his career, he would graduate from inbetweening projects like Sleeping Beauty and The Mickey Mouse Club, to playing a vital role in crafting The Jungle Book‘s story, all while being mentored by “Uncle Walt” himself and his top animators collectively known as “the Nine Old Men”. Overall, Floyd’s resume consists of a mix of him storyboarding and assisting animation on Disney films (both from the main Feature Animation studio and Pixar), laying out dozens of ’70s and ’80s Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and even running his own studio with business partner Leo Sullivan called Vignette Films, where they did those “rocket launch countdown” sketches in Sesame Street‘s first season, short films celebrating Black history, and the pilot to Fat Albert. Seriously, this man’s career is one worth going on about.
Ever since I watched the documentary film Floyd Norman: An Animated Life in 2016, I’ve look up to Mr. Norman as if he were my unofficial mentor. As an up-and-coming Black animator myself, I not only appreciate Floyd’s accomplishments once his career was at full swing, but I also emphasized with both his fascination with learning how the pros work their magic, and his relationship with trial & error. With that said, it really helps that he is an awesome storyteller who shares insightful article after insightful article through his lenses as someone who worked alongside Walt Disney himself. He is this likable mix between someone who never wants to stop learning, and your typical “back in my day” senior citizen. Not many animation people from those Golden years live up to this current era we’re in, so we should be grateful for Floyd’s presence however longer it lasts.
In addition to telling these amusing studio stories through interviews or blog posts, Floyd is gifted with the ability to satirize the animation industry through gag cartoons, making him one of the few notable editorial cartoonists whose specialty is riffing on the relatively unsung politics that goes on behind the toons. The book that I’m reviewing today, Son of Faster Cheaper, is one of a few collections of such cartoons that Floyd doodled based on his observations of his workplaces like Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and Pixar. To be more precise, it is a sequel to, as you might have guessed, Floyd’s first compilation entitled Faster! Cheaper!: The Flip Side to the Art of Animation (1992). At the very beginning of Son of Faster Cheaper, Floyd recalls its predecessor being a “publishing experiment”. While I’ve yet to get a copy of Faster! Cheaper! (thankfully, it’s back in print again since October 2020), I do believe that experimentation really paid off. Also in that same opening page, he briefly brings up a fire that happened in an unidentified (in this book at least) LA animation studio, quotes an investigator asking, “Who would burn down a cartoon studio?”, and then quotes an artist responding with, “Apparently, you’ve never worked in one.” As hyperbolic as it may seem to compare a hazardous fire to beefs between animators, that opening paragraph was a good way of preparing us readers for the creative team craziness Floyd’s got to share.
The gag cartoons are organized into seven chapters. The first one, “Working for Walt”, is self-explanatory, as it illustrates Floyd’s partnership with “the Old Maestro” from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. The cartoons typically caricature Walt as a vexed, hunchbacked curmudgeon who somewhat intimidates his team of animators and artists. Even his harsh cough was jokingly referred to as a sign that “man is in the forest.”
Chapter Two, “The World of Bill and Joe”, focuses on poking fun at (you guessed it) Hanna-Barbera and their cheap business practices during those bleak times in American TV animation in the ’70s. One highlighting gag involved a smirking “Taskmaster Bill” Hanna reading a newspaper announcing the Year of the Rat, telling “Hollywood Joe” Barbera, “Hey Joe! We oughta do well this year!”
In the next chapter, “The New Disney”, Floyd illustrates the atmosphere that the Walt Disney Company was inhaling upon his return during the ’80s (in other words, the Eisner/Katzenberg/Wells era starting in 1984). The relationship between executives Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, and their tendency to make money out of anything with the Disney brand on it (even literal dirt as depicted in one gag) were just wonderfully lampooned.
Chapter Four, “The Story Artist”, is also self-explanatory, as Mr. Norman shows us how truly “crazy” and “thankless” the position of a storyboard artist could be. At Disney, in Floyd’s point of view at least, storyboarders are treated as scapegoats if the movie they worked on bombed, tediously spend up to four days going over a few panels, and tend to get attacked by the director for failing to please him. In fact, quite a few of these gags remind me of the scene in “Stimpy’s Cartoon Show” from Ren & Stimpy in which Ren (portrayed as a caricature of his own problematic creator) dramatically tears down Stimpy’s storyboards due to not meeting his satisfaction.
In Chapter Five, “Animation Boom”, we get a clever portrayal of how much of an “Animation Bizarro World” Walt Disney Feature Animation was during the Renaissance era’s second half following The Lion King‘s surprise success. At this point in his career, Floyd returned to Disney once again in the ’90s as a story artist on films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (on which he got his first on-screen credit in a Disney production…took them long enough), Mulan, Sweating Bullets (a.k.a. Home on the Range), and the eventually scrapped Wild Life (which, from what I heard, would have been pretty risque on the levels of Shrek). Gag cartoons that highlight the chapter include…well, ALL five that satirize Hunchback, but especially the one where the three main characters are dancing idyllically, lampooning Disney SOMEHOW making a kid-friendly(-ish) adaptation of Victor Hugo’s grim novel.
Contrary to its title, the sixth chapter, “What I Really Want To Do Is, Direct”, sums itself up by saying, “Anyone who wants to direct, probably shouldn’t.” As you might have guessed, Floyd’s cartoons in this chapter illustrate the stressful nature of directing. Constant story revisions, listening to the dreaded “I want” song, and getting yourself “re-pinned” (literally) are among these challenges.
Finally, we’ve reached Chapter Seven, “To Insanity…And Beyond!”, in which the Disney animation work environment since the 21st century is covered. As the title implies, Pixar, where Floyd contributed to Monsters Inc. and the nightmarish production of Toy Story 2 (amazing how THAT film still managed to turn out great), plays a major part here. Computers are in, and pencils are out, to the point where you might be caught dead if you’re drawing with one. Beefs between Michael Eisner and Pixar founding fathers John Lasseter and Steve Jobs were apparently common, particularly around the time of Disney agreeing to purchase the CGI studio in order to continue collaborations. Right off the bat, my favorites in this chapter include one cartoon where a Pixar employee alerts his disgruntled fellow artists to “start having fun” for the cloying news reporters who barely know the true temperature inside an animation studio, another where a man shows a woman a framed piece of “original Disney digital art” (literally a computer code!), and yet another where Floyd himself is depicted as a Survivor contestant being “voted off” the Disney Feature Animation “island”.
Throughout these seven chapters, Mr. Norman mostly presents his editorial cartoons as loose, rough, black-and-white sketches, although a few did seem to be originally full-colored. Since these were drawn within multiple decades, the quality control of his cartoons varies, whether they’re drawn with pencil or ink. The caricatures could range from single-pass scribbles that still form the recognizable shapes of a human, to much cleaner sketches with a more clear (but still stylized) depiction of what it’s aiming to visualize. I assume the reasoning behind the sketchiness of Floyd’s cartoons being rather inconsistent is due to either dependence on the amount of spare time available for him to doodle each of them, or simply his skills going through metamorphosis. Either way, this, along with a couple of typos like misnaming “the 1990s” as the “the 1900s” on one page, is just nitpicking. The one-liners and cynical remarks written are the shiniest stars of these gag cartoons, while Floyd’s cartooning style holds its own set of lively charm to sprinkle on said jokes.
To sum everything up, Son of Faster Cheaper is a very amusing satire collection to come from the self-described “Mr. Fun”. Even if you haven’t worked professionally in the animation industry yet, you could be at least someone who loves to research juicy behind-the-scenes trivia, thus still finding enjoyment in this book. I look forward to expanding my library with more Floyd Norman titles, including the original Faster! Cheaper!, Animated Life, and How the Grinch Stole Disney. Once again, we should be all blessed that such a terrific, young-at-heart animation veteran has been sticking around the planet for this long to provide witty commentary in the form of doodles.
If you’d like to keep up with Mr. Norman, follow not just his own social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram) but also the social media pages for the team behind Floyd Norman: An Animated Life (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook). Also, if you’d like to see AND hear Floyd illustrate his stories about working at Disney, check out his Vimeo page (the “Walt’s Bran Muffins” video is particularly intriguing).
I love posters like these that summarize the product with such an eye-catching execution while getting in all the important characters.
Ah yes! Another major animation anniversary that I was waiting all 2017 for (second to Cartoon Network’s very underwhelming 25th birthday)! 80 years ago, 20 years away from an entire CENTURY, Walt Disney unleased his terrific way of saying, “Ha! I told you pretentious naysayers I could make an hour-and-a-half-long cartoon picture! It’s a ‘folly’ no more! I’M KING OF THE CARTOON BIZ!! Well, I technically already was king of animation thanks to the mouse, but NOW I’M SUPER KING!! CHOKE ON THAT, YA JERKS!! Now excuse me as I try to figure out how to make this bratty wooden puppet as likable as that bug who crawls around him.”
That’s right! The one that started it all (for the Disney Animated Canon at least), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! A perfect way introducing of the stereotypical Disney movie formula. The climax of Walt and his brilliant crew making a name out of themselves in the 1930s animation industry. Whether you find it a purely fun experience (‘specially on an artistic standpoint), or a dull, obnoxious sack of sugar that’s nothing more than an extended Silly Symphony due to its lack of a complex story, this film was nonetheless highly important to keeping the Disney name alive. As someone who considers this my favorite of the “Golden Age” Disney animated movies (consisting of Walt’s first five features), I could see how folks of 1937 and 1938 were left amazed by these 83 minutes of hard work. The titular dwarfs were all adorable, the Queen/Witch was…well…WICKED, the Magic Mirror was quick to pointing out that the Queen was holding a pig’s heart instead of Snow White’s, the Huntsman was a charming sissy, and just all the lively animation, beautiful artwork, and striking emotions it displayed. Overall, you couldn’t ask for a better graduation from the experimental school of Silly Symphonies.
Speaking of graduation, for the rest of this paragraph, I’m going to metaphorically describe how Snow White turned out to be a landmark in Disney’s history, by taking inspiration from the speech Ginger gave at the end of the amazing As Told by Ginger TV movie “Butterflies Are Free”. Laugh-O-Grams and Alice Comedies were the little eggs that Walt laid using his pen. Eventually, these eggs were able to hatch out two caterpillars, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (before he fell under the torturous hands of some jerk named Charles Mintz) and that delightful rodent, Mickey Mouse. Then, Mickey split into a bunch of smaller caterpillars with big plans on their minds, otherwise known as Silly Symphonies. Out of these shorts came the cocoons, a.k.a. key elements such as individual characterization, three-strip Technicolor, and nailing the multiplane camera. Finally, a flock of big, beautiful butterflies burst out of those cocoons bringing smiles to millions of theatre goers with how grand it was! And that flock of butterflies spawned other flocks for the next 80 years!
And that’s what should be respected the most about Snow White. Not the absolutely obnoxious misconception about it being “the first feature-length animated film ever” (more on that later), but how it is a great story in animation history on how Walt’s ambitious goal of creating a moving piece of art that rivals any of Mickey’s best shorts came to fruition despite skeptics in and out of Disney Studios. More than five decades later, this type of story was repeated when John Lasseter, an animator fired from Disney after pitching an all-CGI film, wanted to make an all-CGI film about toys, eventually resulting into a movie that may be even more revolutionary than Snow White, the masterpiece known as Toy Story!
Alright, now as much as I enjoy Snow White, both as its own thing and as a cherished piece of film history, I would like to politely get this little problem regarding this film of my way…
WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP CLAIMING THAT SNOW WHITE IS THE WORLD’S FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH ANIMATED MOVIE EVER MADE?!?
Hon! Est! Ly!
Look, I know that 1917’s Argentine El Apostol has been lost for DECADES (possibly forever, I’m afraid), and that the oldest-surviving animated feature, Germany’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is just plain obscure (even if it apparently made a huge impact on Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar), but you shouldn’t have to be a professional animation buff like Jerry Beck in order to believe that there were at least EIGHT animated features from various foreign countries made within TWO DECADES before Snow White. Ah-ah-ah! I see you reaching for the keyboard in order to type, “uh, but is it at least the first animated movie with sound and color?”! Wrong, and double wrong! 1931’s Peludopolis, another Argentine movie, had a synchronized soundtrack provided by Vitaphone, and Prince Achmed had its film soaked in blue dye.
“Okay, well isn’t at the VERY least the first animated feature from Disney specifically?” you might ask. Well, to be honest, that’s where things get tricky. From what I discovered this year (or maybe last year), there was a 41-minute…thing, titled Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons, a compilation of Oscar-winning Silly Symphonies (with no bridging segments as far as I can tell) produced to promote Snow White seven months before its premiere. But considering its short length, it isn’t considered a true feature film by institutes like AFI (yet the one-minute-longer Saludos Amigos is). Heck, not even the official Disney encyclopedia by Dave Smith included it as an entry! So…in other words, if you want to believe Snow White was Disney’s first movie, that’s perfectly fine. I’m certainly with you on that. But still, remember that other thing exists, too? (tilts head like Dr. Hutchinson from Rocko’s Modern Life) ‘Kay?
So, Disney is a phenomenal provider of animation, there’s no doubt about that. But occasionally, I can’t help but interpret them as the one kid in class who gets all the credit for a big school project that others had worked on, too. Walt himself gets too much credit as well; technically speaking, he wasn’t even that much of a legit animator than he was a film producer. By the time he hired people like Ub Iwerks and Friz Freleng in the mid-20s, Walt gave up on hand-animating his own shorts. Also, he never directed any of his animated features, especially not after he failed to direct one Silly Symphony titled The Golden Touch, which apparently turned out to be a disaster. I’ve seen the short two years ago, but it wasn’t that bad.
In short, when it comes to making the products that he had the most success with during his lifetime, Walt barely did jack crap. Almost all of the credit belong to the many hard-working artists who worked at Disney during the Golden and Silver Ages, including Ub, the Nine Old Men, Joe Grant, Bill Tytla, Grim Gatwick, Art Babbitt, and my man, Floyd Norman.
Misconceptions aside, Snow White, and Disney feature animation in general, turning 80 truly is an important animation milestone to acknowledge this year. And what more can I say about Disney’s significance in keeping animation alive? They may not have always been first, but if there is one thing they DO deserve credit for, it’s perfection! Perfection of the slightly overlooked medium of animation! And that’s why, eight months before this anniversary, I put a lot of heart and soul into this massive beauty of a collage:
Can you name all of the characters I included!
Originally, I wanted screenshots of each film to make up the collage, before deciding that digitally-painting the characters on FireAlpaca in a style reminiscent of the Disney Golden Books was a much more special execution. Outside of the big #80, we got the birthday girl, Snow White herself, centered in between the ‘8’ and ‘0’. I would bad if Mickey was excluded, so there he is in his famous apprentice outfit on the bottom left corner. Besides, he does appear at the beginning of several VHS tapes of Disney movies, right? Tinker Bell was also a mandatory inclusion to the picture, since she’s the company’s second mascot after Mickey. Finally, I’ll address the inclusions of the Reluctant Dragon, a Mary Poppins penguin, Roger Rabbit, Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the one and only Buzz Lightyear. They’re honorable mentions, essentially. Walt Disney Animation Studios did take part in development and/or production of those films, whether they’d be fully animating the characters of Roger and co., or collaborating a little bit with Pixar in conceiving Toy Story. And like I said earlier, the story of Toy Story is quite reminiscent of that of Snow White.
Oh, and I managed to blend the man himself into the starry sky, and have the iconic 1985-2006 castle on the bottom right! All of this make up a magic tribute!
Well, that does it for 2017, everyone! It’s been a crazy year for me, in terms of my art improving and becoming semi-popular on Twitter. Here’s an artistic lookback on my year:
Another underrated Disney movie is celebrating its anniversary this month. Today, it’s the 35th anniversary of one of my long-time favorites from my childhood (for 10 years to be exact), The Fox and the Hound. Tod and Copper went from being the best of friends, to the worst of enemies in a several-year-span. On one hand, it’s sad; but on the other hand, it’s just the animals’ instincts naturally growing along with them. Overall, The Fox and the Hound is a cute but rather depressing movie with the only amount of light being provided by those two birds, Dinky and Boomer, trying to catch that caterpillar. Plus, there’s an awesome black bear fight, courtesy of Glen Keane! A scene that was undeniably ripped off by Balto, 14 years later.
Well, I’m sure it would all look like My Little Pony compared to The Plague Dogs. I haven’t seen it yet, but I read about how it is one of the most depressing things in the history of Western animation.
Of course, since Disney doesn’t want their audience to be totally upset, they didn’t let Chief get killed off, like in the original novel by Daniel P. Mannix. So, this adaptation garnered mixed reactions from people who read and love the novel.
Now for some behind-the-scenes facts! This is the last Disney production Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy (who eventually returned to work on Pocahontas), and nine other animators worked on, before leaving to start up Don Bluth’s studio to beat Disney to a pulp! Traitors! Fortunately, after three years of losing to Bluth at the box office, Disney gave him a taste of his own medicine in 1989, when a certain undersea film came out, and knocked out Charlie the dog!
Back to The Fox and the Hound, not only it was a moderate success with critics and the box office (during the dark age of Disney, which began after Walt’s death), but it’s also notable for boosting the careers of a whole lot of people who became major contributors to the Renaissance era and beyond. These include:
John Lasseter (one of Pixar’s founding fathers, and creator of Toy Story)
John Musker and Ron Clements (directors of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Great Mouse Detective)
Andreas Deja (supervising animator of Jafar, Scar, Gaston, and Hercules)
Tim Burton (some guy into horror, surrealism, and Danny Elfman’s music)
Glen Keane (supervising animator of Ariel, Aladdin, the Beast, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and Rapunzel)
Brad Bird (creator of Family Dog, director of Warner Bros.’ Iron Giant, and Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and a fan of the code A113)
Randy Cartwright (animator of Aladdin’s Carpet)
Chris Buck (co-director of Frozen and Tarzan)
Henry Selick (director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Coraline)
Mark Dindal (director of The Emperor’s New Groove, Cats Don’t Dance, and the god-awfulChicken Little)
Mark Henn (supervising animator for Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, Tiana, and Basil of Baker Street)
And, to me, the strangest one of them all is Guy Vasilovich, creator of Moville Mysteries, a Nelvana show so hideous that it makes Duckman look like Sleeping Beauty (and you know how Duckman loves to sleep with beauties 😉)!
If you’re a huge animation buff like myself, that list should be like an A-list to you! Not to mention, The Fox and the Hound is the last production where Disney’s Nine Old Men, such as Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, had major involvement in.
So in the end, The Fox and the Hound may be more popular than Basil of Baker Street, but people still overlook it. I understand, since, like I said, it’s not a very cheery film compared to, say, The Jungle Book. Well, here’s some oddball advice for you: if you see a DVD of The Fox and the Hound 2, SMASH IT WITH A RAW WHOLE CHICKEN!!! And wash your hands afterwards.
Best of friends or not, Tod and Copper are still MUCH better than a certain pair of ugly girls on Nickelodeon. And no, I’m not talking about Sam and Cat.
Oh, I almost forgot. The co-director of this movie, Richard Rich, went on to make garbage, a.k.a. The Swan Princess and Alpha and Omega.
While nowhere near as a favorite of a Disney icon for me as Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh is a character who I can’t imagine anyone hating. Well, if it’s the 2007 Playhouse Disney show My Friends Tigger & Pooh you’re talking about, that’s understandable. Owl should have never been given the boot. But even then, nobody got on my nerves.
But for now, let’s focus on the Disney animated debut of A.A. Milne’s bear literature star, in the 1966 featurette, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, one of the last ever productions with Walt’s involvement. In this funny little story, honey-addicted Pooh, who’s in serious need of rehab or something, forces his poor, chubby, stuffed bear body into all sorts of hell, just to get some honey in his…wait. If Pooh is supposed to be a stuffed toy, then how can he eat and digest anything? Why am I asking this, when I am fully aware that this is a fantastical work of fiction? Pooh, with the help of his loyal pal, Christopher Robin, floats up with a balloon to the bees’ honey tree (why not a hive, I don’t know), but the plan backfires as the bees become belligerent. Next, Pooh goes over to Rabbit’s house to hoard off his entire honey stock, until Pooh gets so bloated that he can’t push himself out of Rabbit’s hole. And he remained stuck for months, until one morning he loses a tiny amount of weight, and everyone in the Hundred-Acre Wood (except Tigger and Piglet) gave him the “heave-ho”. It’s a really cute short, with my favorite part being where Rabbit puts out a sign in front of Gopher reading “DON’T FEED THE BEAR!”. Just the way he dramatically said it had each word punctuated for emphasis, to the beat of his pounding on the sign, and Buddy Baker’s terrifically timed music. Speaking of Gopher, I like how he is aware that he isn’t an original character from the books. Unfortunately, Disney took note of that snarky, fourth-wall-breaking remark, by having Gopher stop appearing in their Pooh franchise for almost 20 years. I really miss Gopher.
The Honey Tree was a hit, and its sequel from 1968, The Blustery Day, was even better, thanks to Tigger and Piglet’s introductions, and especially the “Hefflalumps and Woozles” sequence, which I say is more colorful than Dumbo‘s “Pink Elephants”. It’s no wonder why it earned Walt a posthumous Oscar for Best Animated Short. Then in 1974, my least favorite Pooh featurette (I haven’t seen A Day for Eeyore from 1983 yet), Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, was released. The highlight of that entire thing for me was the part where Rabbit was alone in the dark forest, and he shows off his many frightened facial expressions as the strange sounds get louder and louder, until Tigger bounces into him. Oh, and speaking of Tigger’s bouncing, Rabbit was a real jerk when he yelled at Tigger to quit his bouncing, forgetting that bouncing is what Tiggers do best. Silly rabbit.
All three were then merged into Walt’s original vision of Pooh’s first foray into animation, a full-length feature, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), which in my opinion is Disney’s Pooh at its best. The New Adventures of Winnie of Pooh and The Book of Pooh were also frequent exposures of Winnie the Pooh for me as a kid, but now, I’m really attached to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. As for the 2011 sequel (?), ingeniously titled Winnie the Pooh (where Tom Kenny of all people voices Rabbit), I have not seen it in its entirety to have a real opinion on it beyond “it’s not as good as the first one”.
Oh, Winnie the Pooh! How I hope that you do something with that sticky sweet tooth of yours, before fatal consequences occur. Well, at least you’re more under control than Cookie Monster…but then again, Cookie eats healthy snacks of all food groups. You, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to pig out on anything but honey! Why hasn’t Christopher Robin put you on a diet yet? Anyway, at least you’re less gluttonous than Garfield.
Another Disney-related anniversary is today! This year marks the 15th anniversaries of three of my favorite Disney animated TV shows, House of Mouse, Lloyd in Space, and The Proud Family. Obviously, it’s Lloyd’s birthday today (Feb. 3), so let’s talk about him! Note that while all of these cartoons don’t share the popularity as DuckTales, or Phineas and Ferb, Lloyd is the least popular of the three.
Unsurprisingly, you might not even know what the hell is Lloyd in Space. Yeah, this show is like the Pelswick of Disney Television Animation. It was ignored, and many of those who DID remembered it either thought it was either average at best, or unfavorably similar to Doug, with only a minority of people who thought it was brilliant.
Created by Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere, the duo responsible for the way more popular Disney’s One Saturday Morning show Recess, Lloyd in Space is all about the futuristic life of an alien boy in the eighth grade named Lloyd Nebulon, who lives in a massive space station somewhere in the galaxy. His family consists of his mother and commander of the station, Norah; his horrifically manipulative little sister Francine, who has freaky telekinetic powers that rival those of Matilda; and his Grandpa Leo, voiced by the Flying Dutchman himself, Brian Doyle-Murray. Lloyd spends much of his time with his diverse trio of buddies, including lone human Eddie, lovable blob Patrick—I mean Kurt, and the literal brains of the gang, Douglas, whose glasses are his eyes (a la Duckman). Lloyd’s adventures (or misadventures) mostly center around his newly-budded adolescence, and his encounters with the ups and downs of growing up. It’s been the focus since the very first episode, “The Big 1-3”, where Lloyd officially becomes a teenager at 13, but takes his new “maturity” too far.
Yeah, the premise of the show is really average, and because its premise is so basic and overdone, people overlook the true highlight of the show: the execution of everything. I have no idea why I would often ignore Futurama (though I recently started to like it more), because on Lloyd in Space, its creativity on the futuristic space environment, the behaviours and abilities that some of the characters reveal to have, designs on the characters, and the amazingly weird concepts Lloyd’s world offers appeared to be done with almost the same amount of ingeniousness. However, because sci-fi isn’t a genre I indulge into often, I won’t go as far as to say that all the impressive things Lloyd in Space does are revolutionary (at least not for sci-fi cartoons specifically), but it’s definitely delightful. One example of how creative this show can be is a memorable episode where Lloyd starts to go through puberty, sexually and mentally speaking. Whenever he thinks about girls, not only does his antenna glows (because Disney isn’t sick enough to allow a more obvious equivalent to an erection), but his masculine alter-ego from his little fantasies zaps out from his antenna as a hologram if Lloyd’s hormones don’t control themselves. Ha! That puts the pituitary gland to shame! No offense to the As Told by Ginger episode “Dare I, Darren?”, though. Then, there was a wonderful episode about this nerdy new student named Larvel, who goes through a caterpillar/butterfly-like metamorphosis from a puny kid, to a popular buff teen, to an independent man…IN THE DURATION OF A FEW WEEKS! Those two examples should be enough for you to see how cool this show is.
But there’s more! The voice cast is a very acceptable selection; it’s a noticeable mix of actors and actresses from Recess, including Courtland Mead (Gus) as Lloyd, April Winchell (Ms. Finster) as Norah, and Anndi McAfee (Ashley A.) as the Alpha B!%@# Brittany. We also got Justin Shenkarow (Harold Berman), Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick Star), Pamela Hayden (Milhouse Van Houten), Tress MacNeille (Agnes Skinner), Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson), Eddie Deezen (Mandark), Brian Doyle-Murray (The Flying Dutchman), Diedrich Bader (Kenny from Baby Blues) and Brian George (I don’t know him for any other roles) are all fun to listen to as their respective roles. My favorite of the main characters is Station, who’s the kind British butler-like computer serving all around Lloyd’s apartment-building-like space home. Of the supporting cast, I’ve always loved Lloyd’s crabby ol’ robot teacher, Mrs. Bolt, who’s basically Agnes Skinner from The Simpsons in a robot’s cold, rusty body.
So, to wrap up this birthday wish, I am so disappointed with how underrated Lloyd in Space is, even more so than another great One Saturday Morning show, Teacher’s Pet. At least the latter won four Emmys, and (somehow) got a theatrical movie. Oh, speaking of which, happy 60th birthday, Nathan Lane (voice of Spot/Scott Leadready II)! Back on topic, Lloyd in Space got nothing beyond its 39 episodes, plus one alleged “lost” episode, “Picture Perfect”, which never got aired in the Western part of the world. This was a show that I was obsessed with when it aired every weekday afternoon on Family Channel in 2006, back when they still cared about animation. In fact, I used to consider it to be my #1 favorite Disney animated series, years before Gravity Falls came into my life. Now, it’s at #3, after House of Mouse, and Gravity Falls. Either way, Lloyd in Space shall remain my #1 favorite underratedDisney cartoon for another several years.
So, while you One Saturday Morning fans continue to reminisce Recess, I’m going to take advantage of my nostalgia for its brother of the future.
Beautiful medium-blending fan art I made for the show this year.
Welcome to the first post of my new Ze Blog spin-off, NoParking Berry’s Cartoony and Muppet-y Library! Above is the evolution of my 30th anniversary Pixar art.
My second real anniversary celebration (after 15-year-old Disney cartoon House of Mouse‘s anniversary, which was mentioned last month on Google+) is today! One of the founding studios of traditional animation’s #1 rival, computer animation, residing at Emeryville, California, is 30 years old today. Pixar Animation Studios may be mostly known for their streak of theatrical animated hits, from Toy Story to Finding Nemo and so on, but their origins were quite on the humble side of fame rising. Preceding Pixar was the Lucasfilm Graphics Group, where then-fired Disney Animation employee John Lasseter animated a two-minute-long encounter between a guy in a fez and a bumblebee, titled The Adventures of André and Wally B. But because the short was produced two years before the Graphics Group was relaunched as Pixar, it’s debatable on whether or not André and his bee buddy (or enemy?) should be technically considered an official Pixar short film. Well, the studio themselves does, so if they say so, it shouldn’t be much of a debate.
Either way, John Lasseter was ambitious to start up a CGI bandwagon, ever since he saw the ingeniousness in 1982’s Tron. But one day, when Johnny Boy pitched an idea for an all-CGI movie to Walt Disney Productions, the studio was probably like, “Are you crazy? Have you been dreaming up pink elephants or something? Can’t you think about how expensive that idea is?” And then he was fired. However, John was still eager. He joined forces with Edwin Catmull, and Apple’s own Steve Jobs, in a venture to fulfil John’s dream. On February 3, 1986, Pixar was born as a computer software company. Six months later, they experimented with a short film introducing their future mascot, Luxo Jr., which was also the first CGI thing to be nominated for an Oscar. Then, the shorts Red’s Dream (1987), Tin Toy (1988), and Knick Knack (1989), followed. Out of the three, Tin Toy is the most historically important. It’s famous for being the first CGI-animated short to win an Oscar, but infamous for the HIDEOUS baby! My God, if you thought the first Toy Story was outdated, this baby will traumatize you!
Speaking of Toy Story, please thank Tin Toy for being the main inspiration for the world’s first ever all-CGI film. Although I sometimes wonder if it’s even true about Toy Story being first. People constantly mistake Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first ever feature-length animated film, even though there were earlier, more obscure attempts around the world, like Prince Achmed (1926) in Germany!
You might be able to figure out the rest of Pixar’s history. John creates Toy Story, it becomes an understandable phenomenon, and by the time they released their fifth film, Finding Nemo (2003), Pixar became the household name that it is today! Not to mention, traditional animation fans received a new scapegoat for why their medium has declined in the early 2000s!
Of the two major CGI animation movie studios in California, these guys and DreamWorks Animation, Pixar is my choice, since I love Disney in general. Toy Story is my #1 favorite animated movie franchise, with the first adventure being my favorite of the trio (which, unfortunately, is becoming a quartet soon, because of greed). While I can’t agree that all of their productions are 100% original ideas, it’s how they let out their imagination that warrants my love for them. However, what I’m not fond of Pixar now is their upcoming sequel streak, starting with Finding Dory this year. Then, we got Toy Story 4, which I know I’ll dislike, because there was nothing wrong with the franchise being a trilogy. But in between, the originality vacation won’t be long, with Coco coming out in 2017 (I hope, unless it goes through Good Dinosaur-esque production troubles). Well, at least we’re finally getting the long-awaited Incredibles sequel at the end of this decade.
Benthelooney’s infamous rant on Pixar had him ranting about the “superabundance” of Pixar sequels, thus making the studio “money whores”. Keep in mind, this rant was made in April 2013; Pixar only had three sequels out at that time (it was two months before Monsters University)! How is that a sequel obsession? At the time, DreamWorks had twice as many sequels, plus spin-off TV series! Ben was being hyperbolic as usual. Also, I disagree with him on his opinion on the Toy Story sequels being “pointless”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought they do have a purpose, which is to actually develop the toys’ character and storyline even further. Of course, I do agree with him on Cars 2 having no purpose other than to sell toys.
Moving on, here’s my listing of every Pixar film by what I love the most to the least:
Toy Story
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 2
Inside Out
Monsters, Inc.
Monsters University
Finding Nemo
A Bug’s Life
WALL-E
The Incredibles
Up
Ratatouille
Brave
The Good Dinosaur
Cars
Cars 2
Opinions can change at any time, so this list isn’t final. To date, not every Pixar film I remember, nor did I sat down to pay attention to the whole thing. However, Toy Story‘s spot on my list will remain unchanged.
So, let Pixar’s legacy go beyond infinity for more years to come!
D.J. Berry 