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One of the reasons I started doing “Comics in Context” was to criticize critics.  As the mainstream media grew more interested in comics and cartoon art in recent years, various film critics and other writers would make assertions about the subject that were condescending, prejudiced, or outright wrong.  

Matters have improved over the last three years, but the release of Pixar’s new animated feature Cars has drawn some very strange reactions indeed from certain major film critics, as I shall discuss next week.

One mistake by a major reviewer, however, gives me the opportunity to delve into a subject that has long been waiting to take its turn in this column. 

“The animation of the inanimate has been a staple from the dancing brooms of Fantasia right up to the talking clock in Beauty and the Beast and the remote-control car in Toy Story,” wrote Anthony Lane in his New Yorker review of Cars (June 19, 2006).  The brooms don’t dance, but lumber back and forth to music, but Lane has a bigger mistake to make.  He continues, “In each case, however, these were bit parts, put there to fidget and fuss while the humans, or humanoids, or the mice got on with their narrative tasks.”  And that’s not true.

In interviews, Cars director John Lasseter has repeatedly mentioned that he got the idea to put the cars’ eyes in their windshields from the 1952 Disney animated short Susie the Little Blue Coupe, whose title character is a living car. 

In fact, Disney has a tradition of doing animated cartoons that present an entire culture composed of animals or of objects that in real life are inanimate.   Except for The Incredibles, the Pixar features fall into this tradition, depicting communities of toys (Toy Story and Toy Story 2), insects (A Bug’s Life), monsters (Monsters, Inc.), fish (Finding Nemo), and now automobiles (Cars) that are analogues to human society.  (The Incredibles portrays a community of superhumans existing within a larger “normal” human society. See “Comics in Context” #62.)  Whereas the earlier Pixar features acknowledged that humans also exist in their worlds, Lasseter takes the concept further in Cars by depicting an alternate Earth dominated by automobile society, in which humans – or, for that matter, animals – do not exist.

This animation tradition is a subject that I originally intended to address in my reviews of last year’s retrospective by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, “I Love to Singa: Cartoon Musicals,” curated by animation historian Greg Ford.  Previously I wrote about the programs with cartoons directed by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones (“Comics in Context” #100, 101 and 102), cartoons from Max Fleischer Studios (“Comics in Context” #116 and 117), and classic Disney “Mickey Mouse” cartoons (“Comics in Context” #109).  I had to postpone my review of another Disney program, “‘Sillies’ and Other Symphonies,” but Cars provides me with an appropriate occasion.  Better late than never.

The main subject of this program was the “Silly Symphonies,”  a series of animated shorts that Disney produced alongside its “Mickey Mouse” shorts in the 1930s.  As their name suggests, the “Silly Symphonies” were often designed around musical themes. Other studios blatantly mimicked the “Silly Symphonies” name for their own cartoons:  hence, Warner Brothers’ “Looney Tunes” and “Merry Melodies,” which would evolve quite far away from the “Silly Symphonies” format.  The title of Bob Clampett’s 1943 Fantasia parody, A Corny Concerto (see “Comics in Context” #101), would be yet another variation on the “Silly Symphonies” name.

Disney used the “Silly Symphonies” to venture into subject matter that was very different from the “Mickey Mouse” shorts (and its spinoff “Donald Duck,” “Goofy” and “Pluto” cartoon series), such as fairy tales:  Disney’s Three Little Pigs was a “Silly Symphony,” as one might guess from the famous song it introduced, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Disney also used the “Silly Symphony” series to experiment with new animation methods.  Many “Silly Symphonies,” including some that I mention in this column, can be seen on Walt Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies, a DVD set released back in 2001. 

In his program notes for the “Sillies” program, Ford noted, in rather academic prose, that “From the outset, the “Symphonies” were apt to pictorialize self-enclosed communities of cartoon beings tied to fixed visual themes,” such as insects or cookies or even musical instruments.

The first “Silly Symphony” in the Lincoln Center program, Musicland (1935), provides a perfect parallel to Cars.  Musicland depicts a world, or at least a pair of islands, where humans and animals do not exist:  the Island of Symphony and the Isle of Jazz, separated by the Sea of Discord. Every character in Musicland is an anthropomorphic musical instrument.  The Queen of Symphony and her daughter are violins.  The King of the Isle of Jazz is a saxophone, caricatured to resemble Paul Whiteman, a famous orchestra leader of the time who conducted jazz; the King’s son is also a sax.  Musicland necessarily goes further than Cars, not only giving its characters eyes and mouths, but also hands and feet (so they can move).  On the other hand, Musicland has no dialogue:  its characters speak in musical sounds.  The princess sounds like a violin, and she even moves to classical music.

Furthermore, virtually everything else on the two islands is a musical instrument, or designed to evoke music.   A tree resembles a bass violin.  A park bench is shaped like notes of music.  When the prince writes a letter, he inscribes musical notes, not letters, on a sheet of paper.

Since there is no dialogue, Musicland is something like a silent movie with a musical score: the storytelling is done through entirely visual means.  Anyway, the story follows a familiar pattern: it’s basically Romeo and Juliet, albeit with a happy ending.  (It also foreshadows, and perhaps influenced, the romantic subplot of the Fleischers’ 1939 animated feature Gulliver’s Travels.)  Despite the rivalry between their nations, the Princess of Symphony and the Prince of Jazz fall in love with each other.
The queen discovers their tryst, and sends guards (more violins) wielding guns (their bows), who imprison the Prince (within a giant metronome). 

Soon war breaks out between the islands.  The King of Jazz conducts long horns, resembling guns, which fire bursts of music.  The Queen of Symphony conducts her own set of cannons:  enormous organ pipes, which play (what else?) Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”  And here we once again have the image of the conductor, which turns up in so many musical cartoons.

Notice that there is no King of Symphony, nor a Queen of Jazz.  Is Musicland suggesting that classical music, and high culture in general, is a feminine domain, personified by the grim, humorless Queen,  while jazz is somehow “masculine,” as personified by the jolly, extroverted King?  Does the war between the King and Queen symbolize tension between one’s parents?  Or, metaphorically, are the King and Queen two sides of the same personality, which must be reunited?

Carrying a white flag of truce, the Princess rows across the Sea of discord in her boat, which is really a bass violin case.  The “boat” is hit and sinks as the Prince, escaped from prison, rushes to her rescue.  Seeing their children in danger, the King and Queen halt the battle.  (In Romeo and Juliet, sorrow over the deaths of the rival families’ favorite children puts an end to their feud.) The Prince rescues the Princess, and together they sink (in symbolic death), but are immediately rescued (and symbolically resurrected, unlike Romeo and Juliet), as a couple.  The King rises above his anger and extends his hand to the Queen, who reciprocates, and another couple is united:   Mom and Dad are no longer at odds.

The cartoon thus ends with a double wedding, presided over by a bass violin as preacher.  Now that she’s in love, one of the Queen’s violin strings breaks, presumably as a sign that she’s no longer so tightly strung.  The islands are now physically united by the “Bridge of Harmony,” and musically united by the playing of another Wagner theme, the Wedding March from “Lohengrin,” in a jazz arrangement.

Like Cars, Musicland has a love story at its center, although Musicland‘s is presented more like a parody of operetta-style romance, rather than evoking strong emotions in the audience.

The main parallel between Cars and Musicland is that each impresses the viewer with how much thought and imagination went into designing its alternate universe. Perhaps Musicland is even more remarkable, in that Walt Disney and company obviously put so much effort into the elaborate visual design for what was only an animated short subject.

Another important parallel with Cars is that Musicland shows the old (classical music) and the new (jazz) learning to accept each other and forge a union, just like Pixar’s Woody and Buzz becoming best friends.

Back in 1935, jazz represented the cutting edge of popular music:  an African-American form of music that was being popularized among the white majority by musicians such as the aptly named Whiteman.  But with time, the best of popular culture, whether in music or in animation, becomes part of the accepted cultural canon.  Now “Jazz at Lincoln Center” has become part of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, alongside the Film Society and such “high art” institutions as the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and The New York City Ballet. 

Hence, today Musicland can’t have the same impact on audiences that it had back in 1935.  If Musicland were to be remade today (And why not?  Musical instruments would lend themselves to computer animation.), what two forms of music would be used instead?  Classical and rock? Classical and hiphop?  And what would a hiphop version of Wagner’s Wedding March sound like?

Then I realized that the pairing might well end up being rock and hiphop, which represent a generational shift in musical tastes from the Baby Boomers to today’s youth.  The use of classical music in Musicland (and, for that matter, Fantasia), suggests the more prominent role that it played in American culture back then than it does now.  Back then Leopold Stokowski and opera singers such as Lauritz Melchior and Rise Stevens appeared in Hollywood movies;  Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony from the same Rockefeller Center studio now used by Saturday Night Live.  It’s hard to imagine comparable classical artists playing similar roles in movies and commercial network broadcasts today.

The next cartoon on the bill was Funny Little Bunnies (1934), which isn’t a minor masterpiece like Musicland, but isn’t as infantile as its title suggests, either.  This time the Disney studio imagined an entire community of rabbits who work in a sort of factory outdoors (in an Impressionist-like forest) where they prepare the eggs and chocolates for children’s Easter baskets.  It’s as if there were not one Easter Bunny, but many, acting as a counterpart to Santa’s elves.   Like Mickey’s band in The Band Concert (see “Comics in Context” #109), the Easter egg “factory” could even be an analogue to Disney’s own animation studio, which also creates artistic products for children. 

Once again there are various clever touches.  Most of the rabbits wear clothes, but some bunnies pose as “nude models” for other bunnies who are busily sculpting chocolates into rabbit shapes.  In yet another variation of conductor imagery, a chicken “conducts” her fellow hens in laying eggs in unison.  The bunnies paint the eggs with different patterns, which, oddly, are ready-made in the can:  there is spotted paint, and striped paint, and checkerboard paint.  The rabbit who uses “Scotch” paint wears a kilt, of course.

When you watch films from over seventy years ago, you should expect that every so often you will find disconcerting evidence of how the culture has changed over time:  in this short there are bunnies in blackface working on chocolate.

In the next cartoon, The Cookie Carnival (1935), the Disney studio again created a civilization in which the inanimate become animate.  Just as Cars begins with an auto race held in a stadium packed with thousands of sentient cars, The Cookie Carnival opens with a marching band of cookies leading a parade straight towards the “camera,” set in “Cookietown.”  (This anticipates the parades that are a daily feature at the Disney theme parks.)

The Disney studio could give the cookies shapes that were more human than the Musicland cast, and considerably more so than Cars‘ title characters.  The cookie parade celebrates a beauty contest of sorts, whose winner is to be crowned Cookie Queen. So, following the marching band, there are a series of floats featuring the humanoid cookie contestants, “Beauties on Parade”:  there’s Miss Peppermint, atop a cake;  Miss Cocoanut (an Eskimo, accompanied by penguins, as if Disney had its poles mixed up); Miss Banana Cake;  Miss Strawberry Blonde;  and, surprisingly, Miss Licorice (a black girl).

Cookie motifs do not dominate The Cookie Carnival as completely as musically themed visual motifs did Musicland, but there are some clever ones:  a pretzel serves as a bicycle, and a dog biscuit acts like an actual barking dog.  Later lollipops project colored spotlights.  A Gingerbread Man is what Depression-era Americans would call a hobo, and what today we would term a homeless man, and he carries his knapsack on the end of a candy cane.

Foreshadowing a later Disney feature, The Cookie Carnival is an interesting variation on the Cinderella story.  The Gingerbread Man encounters an impoverished girl cookie who is crying because she wants to be in the parade but hasn’t any “pretty clothes.”  The Gingerbread Man declares that she will be the Cookie Queen. As if he were her Fairy Godfather, using ingenuity instead of magic (or maybe her version of Henry Higgins), he proceeds to create a fancy costume for her out of the materials to hand.  For example, he molds cookie dough into a wig, and turns a candy wrapper into a skirt.  The girl sees the result of her transformation by looking into a shiny lollipop, which shows her reflection like a mirror: she is “the sweetest one of all” (a phrase that refers to a cookie’s taste as well as her looks and personality).

Thus metamorphosed, the girl cookie enters the competition, whereupon the judges declare her to be “A pip! A peach! A wow!”  She ascends to the top of a wedding cake, where she is crowned Cookie Queen.

A wedding is the classic ending of a comedy, but obviously, something is missing from the top of the wedding cake.  The Judges tell the Cookie Queen that she must have a King, and tell her she can pick anyone she chooses.

So another competition begins, with various male singing cookies bidding for the Cookie Queen’s favor. 

There are “old-fashioned cookies,” dressed in 1890s costumes.  In 1935, that was not so very long ago.  It would be comparable to the 1960s from today’s vantage point!

Two Angel Food cakes wear halos and long gowns and come off as effeminate. Now there’s something one doesn’t expect to find in a Disney cartoon, but the unmistakably gay Reluctant Dragon will star in his own Disney feature only six years later. 

Next come Devil Food Cakes, scat-singing, obviously meant to be black people.  They’re described as “nice and naughty.”  Keep in mind that Disney theatrical cartoons were made for audiences of both children and adults.  That “nice and naughty” phrase would sail over the kids’ heads, but adults might pick up a sexual subtext there.  If you think I’m overreading the meaning of that phrase, just wait till we get to two later cartoons in the Lincoln Center program, each of which has – ahem! -  the word “cock” in its title.  

Guards try to stop the Gingerbread Man when he shows up.  But, of course, he is the one that the Cookie Queen chooses to be her king.  In Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” this is the scene of the recognition of the hero, who is rewarded for his kindness to the heroine.  What interests me most about this turn of the plot is that it is Cinderella with a sex change.  Now the heroine saves the hero, plucking him out of poverty and obscurity and elevating him to the roles of both husband and king.  This could even be seen as an improvement on the standard Cinderella story:  in this version the hero and heroine help each other equally.  Thus The Cookie Carnival ends with what Campbell called the “sacred marriage,” as the newly crowned Cookie King and Cookie Queen kiss, applauded by the entire community. The Gingerbread Man and the cookie girl are lonely outsiders no more.

After the 1930s and Fantasia in 1940, the Disney studio continued to do “Silly Symphony”-style musical material as segments of feature films, such as Make Mine Music, which were not full-length stories, like Bambi or Cinderella, but were effectively anthologies of short subjects. 

This is why the Lincoln Center program was titled “‘Sillies’ and other Symphonies”: along with the “Silly Symphony” shorts, curator Greg Ford included some of these musical segments, in which the Disney studio continued to experiment with the medium of animation.

First up was a segment from The Three Caballeros (1945).  Asked by the federal government to foster awareness of the United States’s allies to the South, Disney produced both this film and Saludos Amigos (1943), both of which consist of loosely connected vignettes about Latin America.  These films also seem to have taken advantage of a growing popular interest in Latin music in 1940s America (hence the Hollywood career of Carmen Miranda, whose sister turns up in Caballeros).  

Demonstrating that he has already surpassed Mickey Mouse in popularity by this point, Donald Duck is the star of Three Caballeros who represents the United States.  The second Caballero is Jose Carioca, the Brazilian parrot who acts as Donald’s guide to South America.  The dapper, well-spoken Jose projects a sense of cool that contrasts sharply with Donald’s raucous persona:  Donald seems very much the naive, unsophisticated American tourist.  The third Caballero, who debuts in this film, is Panchito, the Mexican rooster, who compares quite favorably to the Mexican stereotypes in so many theatrical animated cartoons, who seem to be permanently on siesta.  Panchito, on the other hand, is hyperactive, as we shall see.

When I was a child, a shortened version of Three Caballeros would regularly turn up on the weekly Wonderful World of Disney, and even then I realized that Caballeros was much stranger than any other Disney animation.  For some reason, the Disney animators made Caballeros their vehicle for delving into pop surrealism, as in a musical segment in which a dancing (live action) woman in silhouette transforms (via animation) into a silhouetted cactus.

The Film Society showed a different part of the film, which set me wondering whether there are effects that hand-drawn “2D” animation can achieve that “3D” computer animation cannot.

The least celebrated sequence in Fantasia is the one with the sentient sound track, which ventures onscreen at narrator Deems Taylor’s invitation, and morphs into various abstract shapes and designs  representing different musical sounds.  

The visual sound track returns in this segment of Caballeros, taking a guitar-like shape.  Jose and Donald dance around the pulsing sound track, casting semi-abstract shadows of pure colors, as if the characters’ movements have become part of the music.  Then Donald somehow merges with the onscreen soundtrack.  As the music continues to play, Donald’s recognizable form distorts in ways meant to visualize the sounds.  Described in print, this may just seem weird, but in the Film Society theater, the audience burst into laughter at Donald’s surreal contortions to the music.

Afterwards I wondered if this gag could work in a computer-animated film.  Except for “3-D” movies watched through special glasses, film images exist in only two dimensions.  However, when we see a person onscreen (or in a still photograph), we understand that this is an image of a real human being who exists in three-dimensional reality.  This carries over to animated characters like Donald Duck:  he actually “exists” only in two-dimensions, but we interpret his image as that of a duck who exists in three dimensional reality.  After all, Donald is drawn to look as if he has three-dimensional volume, as well as height and length:  he doesn’t vanish when he turns to his side.

But we automatically accept elements of movies such as titles, credits, and subtitles as two-dimensional:  these letters have height and length but no volume.  The animated sound tracks in Fantasia and Caballeros likewise look “flat” and two-dimensional.

Yet then Donald, the supposedly three-dimensional duck, merges seamlessly with the “flat” soundtrack, reminding us (if we bother to think about it after laughing) that Donald, being a cartoon character, is just as “flat” an image as the soundtrack clearly is.  After all, they are both drawings.

On the other hand, though computer-animated characters (except in literal 3-D films like the 3-D version of Chicken Little) are also flat images on a movie screen, computer animation creates a more persuasive illusion of depth and volume than hand-drawn animation does.  A CGI version of Donald couldn’t seamlessly merge with an obviously “flat” soundtrack:  if they merged, it would look as if Donald had suddenly been flattened by a steamroller.   

Nowadays we might term Caballeros a “meta-cartoon” (not unlike Chuck Jones’s renowned Duck Amuck), or postmodernist.  Most animated films encourage us to suspend our disbelief and pretend that the animated creatures onscreen are real.  In contrast, Caballeros keeps rubbing out collective noses in the artificiality of animation.  In part it does so through juxtaposing the animated Donald with live action humans.  The sequence with the onscreen soundtrack is another of Caballeros‘ “meta” tricks. Caballeros also openly exults in its own artificiality by heightening the unreality of conventional cartoon gags.   We see this in the late Ward Kimball’s celebrated animation for the performance of The Three Caballeros‘ title song, in which he seems bent on outdoing even Tex Avery at his wildest.

Donald’s purgatory as a living sound track comes to an abrupt end with an explosion and the entrance of Panchito, firing his pistols and bidding Jose and Donald (restored to normalcy), “Welcome to Mexico!”  Moments later, Panchito launches into singing the title song, with Donald and Jose acting as backup dancers, moving in rhythm, as all three stand in a spotlight.

A spotlight?  Just where are they supposed to be?  Panchito said they were in Mexico (but how did they get there?).  The spotlight suggests that they are on stage, but there is no real background.  The “stage” is really the screen.  The “story” of the movie, such as it is, has come to a halt, and the Three Caballeros are performing directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall.

As the song proceeds, the laws of reality are bent way out of shape.  At one point Panchito’s gun momentarily comes to life and sings a line. The images in the lyrics get their visual equivalents.  When Panchito sings about rain, lightning flashes (but weren’t they inside?), and rain pours down, filling the rim of Panchito’s sombrero.

The song culminates with Panchito holding a high note interminably, thanks to Disney’s audio technicians, as Donald and Jose race about, frenetically trying to stop him.  They briefly trap Panchito in a coffin (some unexpected morbidity in a Disney cartoon);  they saw a circle around him in the floor, whereupon, according to the laws of cartoon physics, the floor falls away and Panchito remains, unaffected by gravity;  they plant a hedge around him, which within a fraction of a second grows taller than he is, and then burns away within another split second.  A gag like the one with the saw is standard fare in a “Bugs Bunny” cartoon.  It is the relentless, rapid fire pacing of this barrage of gags, all occurring while Panchito is holding the song’s final note, that makes this sequence extraordinary.  It revels in its own absurdity;  just where are Jose and Donald getting all these props?

So enthralled was the Lincoln Center audience that when the Caballeros’ song abruptly ended (it was only an excerpt of the film, after all), they went “awwwwwwww” in disappointment before breaking into applause at Kimball’s virtuosity.

Now the program returned to “Silly Symphonies” and the 1930s, with Cock o’the Walk (1935), which, as the title indicates, is about chickens and sex. 

Like The Cookie Carnival it starts with a parade, but this time the non-human community consists of farm animals:  mostly chickens, but also ducks, peacocks, and even caterpillars.

Atop a float covered with awards is the “Champion,” a rooster from the city who appears to be a champion boxer.  But he’s really being celebrated for his sexual power:  he is a big city alpha male.  Hens flock from their homes to see him in the parade, as if they wanted to form a harem for him.

Next we meet our hero and heroine: a country rooster, dressed like a stereotypical country bumpkin, and his girlfriend, a hen in a bonnet, who looks like a young version of Miss Prissy from Warners’ later Foghorn Leghorn cartoons.  The country rooster presents the shy hen with corn, as if it were a bouquet of roses.  We observe that when this country rooster feels sexual attraction, he moves quickly and excitedly and crows. 

However, the hen sees the Champ practicing his boxing and is fascinated by this display of macho prowess. The Champ takes a fancy to her and invites her into the ring, where they proceed to dance.  It has been observed that in 1930s musicals, dancing becomes a metaphor for sex, and that’s clearly what the Champ and hen have in mind here.

The Disney studio turns the dance into a big production number that seems to envelop this entire barnyard world. A scene of hens strutting down stairs unmistakably parodies the Busby Berkeley dance spectacles of the period.  Ducks swim in rotating circles; unhatched eggs sprout legs that tap dance.  Foreshadowing the later short, Woodland Café, caterpillars shimmy, and a chick with obvious predatory intentions dances with another caterpillar.  Perhaps that latter dance serves as a hint about the Champ’s attitude towards the heroine.

The country rooster sees his girlfriend dancing with the Champ, and gets angry.  The two roosters start fighting, using their sharp beaks like (phallic?) swords.  Then the Champ steps on the country rooster’s foot, pinning him in place, and starts beating him as if he were a punching bag:  not only is the country rooster defeated, but he’s been reduced to the level of an inanimate object. The country rooster flees, and the fickle heroine applauds the victor.

But then she sees a photo of the Champ with his wife and many children.  She finds the country rooster, lying beaten and unconscious.  In a role reversal version of Sleeping Beauty, she kisses the country rooster, awakening, and figuratively resurrecting him. 

And that’s not all her kiss did for him.  He turns red, crows ecstatically, and turns into a whirling dervish.  The conventional assumptions about Disney films once again prove to be wrong:  the country rooster has clearly been sexually aroused.  Full of energy, he beats up the Champ.

Then the country rooster and the heroine hen begin dancing, much more energetically than she did with the Champ.  If dance is a metaphor fir sex, the country rooster is proving to be the better lover.

They kiss passionately, and the country rooster crows, then coughs (His transition from the Clark Kent of chickens to SuperRooster isn’t completely smooth), and then crows again, and better than before:  the hen heroine looks delighted at his sexual display.

The Hollywood Production Code was in full force by now, but Cock o’the Walk provides a textbook example of how to get sexual subtext past it.  And in an animated cartoon for family audiences!  And in the 1940s Tex Avery would go even further in his MGM Cartoons (see “Comics in Context” #100).

The next cartoon, Who Killed Cock Robin (1935), features a society comprised entirely of birds. This short uses the familiar nursery rhyme for building a musical satirizing the legal system.  The jury sings, “We don’t know who is guilty so/We’re going to hang ’em all.” One might compare this to the trial scenes in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) or the Gershwins’ Of Thee I Sing (1931), but I suspect that the ultimate source is the Gilbert and Sullivan canon of comic operettas, specifically Trial by Jury.  Like Musicland, Cock Robin shows how much American culture has changed.  How familiar are today’s audiences with the Gilbert and Sullivan style?

Another marker of cultural change is a blackbird who is a sleepy-eyed caricature of an African-American.  The Keystone Kop-like police and the courtroom guards hit the blackbird. I’d like to think that the Disney studio meant to mock the guards’ and cops’ racism and win audience sympathy for the blackbird.  But maybe they just thought that hitting blackbirds – or black people – was funny.

By the mid-1930s the Disney Studio was a successful part of the Hollywood community, and it was caricaturing movie stars in its cartoons. So Cock Robin sings like Bing Crosby, but in personality he comes off as a male ingenue;  Crosby hadn’t yet developed the laid back master of cool persona that later Crosby caricatures in cartoons mimic.  A cuckoo resembles Harpo Marx. The leading lady is named Miss Jenny Wren, which may be a reference to the 19th century singer Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale.”  However, she is drawn as an avian caricature of Mae West, whose movies were hardly family fare. She sounds like West, too:  her sultry command, “Fascinate me!”, got a big laugh from the Lincoln Center audience.

In the cartoon’s final moments, the bird who shot Cock Robin with his bow and arrow turns out to be Dan Cupid, depicted not only as a bird but as yet another caricatured gay.  Cupid’s presence sets up the romantic ending.  He reveals to the court that Cock Robin isn’t dead. Then, just as in Cock o’the Walk, there is a role reversal Sleeping Beauty scene, in which Jenny revives, resurrects and, presumably, sexually arouses Cock Robin by kissing him.  The cartoon ends with Jenny, in her Mae West voice, uttering an orgasmic “Ohhhh,” giving yet more proof of how different Disney cartoons were back in the 1930s.  

One of the forerunners of Pixar and Lasseter’s A Bug’s Life (1998)  is the Disney masterpiece Woodland Café (1937).  Here is another one of Ford’s “self-enclosed communities of cartoon beings,” this one consisting entirely of insects and other “bugs,” such as a spider. 

The cartoon is set at the Woodland Café, which seems to be an all-bug version of the real life Cotton Club.  The band consists of brown grasshoppers, one of whom even sings that they’re “here in Harlem.”  Despite the grasshoppers’ thick lips, they seem acceptable caricatures of African-Americans by contemporary standards.  They’re not lazy or childlike:  they are accomplished musicians, whose vigorous performance drives the film.  Like the Fleischer studio, the Disney studio clearly appreciated African-American music of that period.  (R. Crumb fans will be pleased to hear the lead grasshopper announce, “Everybody’s truckin’!”)

Apart from the rhythmic patter of the band leader (perhaps meant to be Cab Calloway?), there is no dialogue in Woodland Café.  But there is continual music, which the characters’ movements usually match.  Even in the opening scene, customers arriving at the cafe are walking in rhythm. 

The cartoon concisely introduces a wide array of characters, such as a dancing pair of melancholy snails, whose presence slows down the otherwise bouncy score as long as they are onscreen.  Making recurring appearances are a large, elderly bee and his smaller, peppier trophy girlfriend: she dances up a storm atop a table but he ends up being carried out on a stretcher – yet still happy with his night out. 

The centerpiece of the cartoon is presented as a show within a show, complete with a theatrical curtain raised at the beginning.  This sequence was showcased in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark exhibition of Disney animation art (also curated by Ford), which is where I first saw it. It’s a parody of an “Apache dance,” associated with French cabarets of the period, and here performed by a large male spider and a small female fly.

The casting itself satirizes the sexist ethos of an actual apache dance, in which a dominant male roughly treats his female partner. In this case the spider repeatedly chased the fly through his web, and at one point bounces her up and down as if she were a basketball.

The fly’s character design is reminiscent of Minnie Mouse, but also Betty Boop: she has a sultry walk, and invites the spider’s attention with a come-hither shake of her shoulder (all in time to the music).  However, the fly comes across as something of a proto-feminist heroine. She answers the spider’s initial predatory advances with a slap in his face, causing his head to spin around.  Even when he seizes her by her antennae and holds her aloft, she somehow forces him to back away through simply glowering at him. Ultimately the spider is tangled in his own web.  The fly snaps her fingers at him in contempt, poses under an overhead light in relaxed triumph, smokes a cigarette (!), and blows out the light, whereupon the curtain closes over her silhouette.  She’s a film noir heroine who arrived onscreen several years before her human counterparts would.

It is then that the grasshopper band leader first speaks/sings, launching the infectiously energetic concluding dance number, as the director cuts repeatedly between the bugs jitterbugging on the dance floor and the musicians vigorously playing their instruments.  The montage builds climactically to a crashing cymbal, and the Lincoln Center audience erupted into loud applause.

The program again jumped ahead a decade to A Jazz Interlude Featuring Benny Goodman & Orchestra:  All the Cats Join In, subtitled, “A cariCature,” a sequence directed by Jack Kinney from the Disney feature Make Mine Music (1946). 

Here’s another instance of a sequence that hand-drawn animation can do, but seems unsuited to computer animation.  First we see a sketchbook, which is pushed open by a pencil, held by an unseen hand, presumably that of the animator.  The pencil then draws a cat, which, in typically feline manner, watches itself being drawn, until it is erased.  The pencil then redraws the cat as a teenage boy (a “cat” in 1940s slang).  The background is completely blank.  The boy decides to call his girlfriend.  (There is no dialogue:  the soundtrack consists of Goodman’s big band music, and, eventually, a song).

The pencil draws a wire leading to a phone, and then it draws a bobbysoxer girl, who answers the phone.  As you see, props, scenery, and even cast members appear onscreen only when needed.  The pencil draws a staircase, so the girl can leave her room;  the pencil then draws a railing, which her kid sister slides down.  Then the pencil draws a car, and the two girls get in, and pick up their friends at various houses, which are no more than unrealistic stick figures.  The pencil draws a malt shop, the “cats” go in, and the pencil draws stools for them just as they sit down. The pencil even draws a new girl with a large behind, and then, the animator reconsidering, erases part of her derriere, evoking laughter from the Film Society audience.

Just what would be the equivalent in CGI?  The filmmakers have gotten the audience to simultaneously think of these teenagers as real characters in a malt shop, and as drawings being created before their eyes by offscreen animators!  It’s amazing to me that the Disney studio was confident that the audience would accept this “metacartoon” approach.  This sort of sophisticated experimentation seems to foreshadow the stylized U. P. A. cartoons of the 1950s.

All the Cats Join In is intriguing in other ways, too.  Consider that Disney was able to get Goodman, one of the biggest names in 1940s popular music, to contribute the score.  Yes, nowadays Disney gets Elton John and Phil Collins to write scores for animated features, but long after they were at the top of the charts.  In the 1940s Disney, still a young studio, was embracing and celebrating current trends in popular music and dance. 

The sexuality in the sequence is remarkable, too.  There’s the shapeliness of the girls and the fiery energy of the dancing.  Early on, the sequence even teases the audience, having the lead girl get undressed behind a shower door, but getting hold of a towel in the split second before she emerges.  As in Woodland Café, the dancing builds in energy, until it finally ends in a climactic burst (with sexual subtext?), in this case with a juke box literally exploding into musical notes.

Yet at the same time All the Cats Join In seems so innocent.  These teenagers are at a malt shop, after all, having ice cream sundaes!  At one point the “cats” throw out a boy who shows up in a dated 1920s outfit, complete with ukulele, for the sin of uncoolness.  Now the “cats'” clothes look dated, yet the characters still feel vividly alive.

The program then went back in time to the decidedly unhip Wynken, Blynken & Nod (1938), based on a children’s poem about three children sailing in a giant shoe through a dreamworld.  The kids try to catch fish, which appear as glowing stars.  Space is visualized as waterlike, and the moon is shown, as if in soft focus. An enormous cloud with a human face blows at the shoe/ship, and eventually the children tumble from their ship.

Were the filmmakers paying homage to pioneering cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay, whose Little Nemo’s beautiful dreams usually turn to nightmares?  It’s not a surprise that at the cartoon’s end the giant shoe turns into a bed,  but I was amazed that the three children merge into a single dreamer.  What could this mean?  That a solitary child’s imaginary friends are versions of himself?

Then the program swerved back to Disney’s pop surrealism of the 1940s, with Bumble Boogie, directed by Jack Kinney for the feature Melody Time (1948), and set to a “boogie” arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” that spotlights the piano.   An animated brush creates the protagonist, a bumblebee, before our eyes.  Again here’s the duality:  the bee is presented to us both as a character and as a drawing. This prepares us for the wild transformations to come, as piano keys turn into flowers, and horns, and butterflies, and menace the hapless bee, all to the racing rhythm of the music, winning a big round of applause from the audience. 

The Lincoln Center program concluded by moving decades ahead to the Rhapsody in Blue sequence, directed by Eric Goldberg, from Fantasia 2000, which I had originally seen at its New York City premiere in Carnegie Hall.   Set to George Gershwin’s music, the sequence is drawn in the style of the theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (and even quotes onscreen Hirschfeld’s celebrated caricature of Gershwin).  Both men are closely associated with New York City, and the sequence is set in Manhattan during the Great Depression, the same period in which Walt Disney was making his “Silly Symphonies.” 

Unlike most of the Pixar and Disney animated films discussed in this week’s column, this animated Rhapsody in Blue has a cast of human beings.  But it resembles them in other ways.

For one thing, the single note sounded by a clarinet that begins Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” is visually echoed by a single line on screen, which soon becomes the outline of Manhattan skyscrapers, and then fills in the outlines of the buildings, creating a stylized but recognizable setting.   It’s like the pencil in All the Cats Join In and the brush in Bumble Boogie:  an onscreen acknowledgment that what we see onscreen is both a representation of reality and the creation of offscreen artists.

The animated Rhapsody has no dialogue whatsoever:  like some of the cartoons mentioned earlier, it relies on visual means and the moods conveyed by the music to tell its story.

The segment swiftly introduces us to a variety of characters, representing a cross-section of New York.  First is a young African-American man who is a percussionist looking for his big break, but is making his living as a construction worker.  Considering the black stereotypes in early Disney cartoons, and the rarity of black characters in later Disney animated films, this character’s appearance is particularly noteworthy. 

There’s also an unemployed man, a victim of the Depression, who looks fairly desperate, and contemplates stealing an apple but is deterred by the nearby presence of a cop. (Having had my own employment worries, I found myself sympathizing with him.) 

The financially well off have their own problems.  A little rich girl has problems that perhaps relate more to those of today’s children.  The girl’s every moment seems programmed with after-school activities, as her severe tutor drags her from ballet class to a singing coach to swimming lessons to still more. 

A bespectacled, cherubic middle-aged man has similar problems:  dominated by his wife, he tries whenever he can to express the free spirited, childlike side of his personality.  Encountering an organ grinder, he even playfully imitates his monkey.

Beyond these four principals, the segment shows us many, many more city residents in passing.  We glimpse individuals briefly, such as a milkman and his horse, making their early morning rounds, and a tired, bored waitress.  To the rapid, bustling rhythms of Gershwin’s music, large numbers of people burst out from a hotel (named “The Goldberg”) or rush in and out of a subway station.  The drummer rushes to work; the little girl is taken from lesson to lesson; the wife drags her reluctant husband along.  Amidst the crowds and tumultuous movement of the big city, all four principal characters find themselves ironically isolated and unfulfilled.

As the music becomes slow and romantic and even wistfully melancholy, we find that all four of the principals are dreamers.  The sad little girl imagines herself skating with her parents (whom, it seems, she sees too seldom) at the Rockefeller Center rink. The unemployed man skates too, envisioning a dollar sign.  The middle-aged husband visualizes himself skating up into the sky, flying among the birds.  The construction worker imagines himself playing drums in a spotlight.

This segment of Fantasia 2000 is a contemporary reworking of the romantic image of New York City:  as a magical metropolis filled with opportunities, where dreams can come true. By sheer chance the unemployed man passes the construction site, is dragged in and given a job.  The little girl runs out onto the street after her ball and is nearly hit by cars, but is saved by her formerly absent parents, as the tutor faints away in symbolic death.  The drummer gets his chance at “Talent night” at a club in Harlem (perhaps meant to be the Cotton Club, the inspiration for Woodland Café?), where the husband turns up, freed from his wife, and finally able to enjoy himself.  As the Rhapsody moves into its final measures, the film cuts between the formerly unemployed man, ecstatic in his newfound job; the little girl reunited with her idealized parents; the drummer finally fulfilling his artistic ambitions; and the husband dancing with a more appealing female partner; before ending with a final shot of Times Square aglitter at night and the final, triumphal notes.   Earlier in the program, we had seen communities of musical instruments, insects, and cookies, among others.  this is a celebration of the community of New Yorkers, and the Lincoln Center audience erupted into applause.

I liked the animated Rhapsody in Blue when I first saw it, but it impressed me still further when I saw it at Lincoln Center.  In part that may be because, after the September 11, 2001 attacks, this sequence becomes emotionally moving as a celebration of New York City. 

It’s also because, in the context of Greg Ford’s program, it becomes clear that Goldberg’s Rhapsody fits solidly into long, honorable traditions of Disney animation:  in its use of music, in its depiction of community, and in its visual experimentation.  It shows that that tradition is still viable and still alive.

Writing about the “‘Sillies’ and Other Symphonies” shortly after seeing Cars similarly makes me aware of how much the Pixar films carry on the classic Disney tradition, more than Disney’s own animation division was in recent years.  

“I’ve always loved animating inanimate objects,” John Lasseter said in Fortune (May 17, 2006).  Twenty years ago he completed Pixar’s first computer animated short, Luxo, Jr., starring the bouncing lamp that has no anthropomorphic features whatsoever.  Yet it conveyed its personality to audiences, and continues to serve as part of Pixar’s logo on its films to this day.  With Cars Pixar and Lasseter finally bring us a feature film with an entire community of “inanimate” objects.  This is part of their tradition, and Disney’s, and Cars proves it to be still vital, as I shall discuss further in a forthcoming installment
of this column. 

Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson