“Wanna Be a Member?”
The idea of an ambulance charging up inside a downspout just blows my mind. It’s from one of the Fleischer brothers’ cartoons, though I couldn’t tell you which because I haven’t tracked it down lately. I should.
The Fleischers, Max and Dave, took animation in a different direction from Disney in ‘30s. What they did will never be duplicated today, because hand-drawn gels are just different from CGI and its relatives. Not saying one or the other is better, but the hand-drawn springs directly from the mind. No machine could think that way.
My daughter, Caitlin, got her degree in filmmaking from Temple U. by drawing 3,000 stills that flowed together to form an animation of less than two minutes. No one else in her class attempted anything like it. In the days of Toy Story Infinity, it’s unlikely anyone will again.
Which of the Fleischers’ bits features a locomotive running along a track that ties itself into a knot? The engine follows the knot through its whole convolution and out the other end. The kind of mind that lay behind that. The mental outlook was not – which I think is paramount in animation today – “Let’s see if this will work,” but “Wow, fuckin’ awesome, gonna do it.”
Where mistakes can be erased easily, the original idea often becomes diluted if not obliterated.
Betty Boop: Minimal clothing, sultrily sumptuous motions and a big head at a time when sex was Evil in the movie theater. Well, fuck you, code, Betty’s got guys in the back seats jacking off into their baseball gloves. Was Betty really sexy? Or something else? When Mae Questel, who did her voice for the cartoons, died in 1998, I saved the obit (still have it) because her interpretation of Betty was superb, iconic.
My personal favorite Fleischer cartoon? Bimbo’s Initiation. Bimbo was a pretty much independent Fleischer character from the early to mid '30s who later tagged up with Betty. He had Betty’s square face but great big doggish eyes. I guess he was a dog in his anthropomorphic way.
In BI, he falls into a sewer and is propositioned to join a brotherhood of sheeted, plumber’s-plunger-hatted goons obviously based on the KKK. They stand in front of him, undulating, chanting “Wanna be a member, wanna be a member?” I still find myself mouthing this to myself as I walk through my woods: “Wanna be a member, wanna be a member?”
Like me, Bimbo didn’t wanna. He dashed through the sewers, at one point chased by an animated, slavering knifeblade, one of the most hideous “cartoon” images I’ve ever run across.
The thing with Betty, with Popeye, with Bimbo, is that they went beyond. Whatever was there, whatever you saw and whatever the animators manipulated, there was always another level. Not a lit-crit level, but something inherent in how the images were put together. It’s easy (all right, not so easy) to portray fear, confusion, sexual allure, righteous testosterone, the whole schmeer, but when you sit down and begin to draw, to make that sweeping outline that will define the whole, doesn’t something mysterious, back-of-the-brain happen?
For those of you who are writers, if you’ve grown up with computers or succumbed to computers as the easiest, most correctable way to compile a manuscript, try this: Find a typewriter somewhere (your local junk shop?) and type a few paragraphs. What happens? Maybe you go back and xxxxx out some stuff, but mostly you move forward and worry about revising later. On a computer, if there’s a pause in your thought pattern, you go back and revise (which is why so many stories these days are better at the beginning than the end – constant early revision, then a zooming to wrap it up).
Let’s step further back. Write it longhand. What happens? Your mind moves faster than your hand. Halfway through a sentence, revisions take place internally before the pencil even makes its mark. Later, you go back and strike out a few things here, make a couple Boswellian notes in the margin there, but it’s already in a pretty cohesive form.
Again, one approach is no “better” than another, but the various approaches are different enough to make for slightly different outcomes. Without any proof whatsoever (since I can’t draw at all), I assume it works the same way with artists and animation. Your penciled hand draws that line, and as it starts a sweep to the right, your brain sweeps to the left. The resulting compromise or continuation creates something that a computer would find too goofy to contemplate. So the train traverses every whorl and wonder of that knotted track.
Toy Story and all are wonderful. But they’re not the same as, and they cannot, as I think their perpetrators believe, duplicate the imagination of the Fleischer days. Some things can happen only once, because the conditions only exist once. And that’s good.
At least I think it is.
by Derek Davis