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New book celebrates animationMaryanne DellThe Orange County Register_I knew I was going to love The 50 Greatest Cartoons as soon as I saw Betty Boop and her dog, Pudgy, on the cover.Then I caught a glimpse of Gertie the Dinosaur and I was hooked.Mind you, at that time I didn’t know who Gertie was — I just fell for the look of her. OK, I thought she might be Cecil the sea monster from Beany and Cecil. But I learned all about her.The 50 Greatest Cartoons is a breeze, a visual delight that brings back childhood afternoons in front of the tube watching Bugs outwit Daffy for the hundredth time in Rabbit Seasoning and college afternoons when I should have been in class but instead spent the time watching Jerry outwit Tom for the thousandth time in The Cat Conerto.It’s also a cartoon primer, offering not just visuals from the 50 cartoons (chosen by a group of more than 1,000 animators and cartoon historians) but also a history of the genre and enough details about how these things work to satisfy anyone with a modicum of interest in the subject.Take Gertie. Reading The 50 Greatest Cartoons, I learned she’s a “petulant, childlike dip-lodocus who cries when admonished” drawn by Winsor McCay, an early 1900s newspaper cartoonist and part-time vaudevllian who turned some of his static characters into moving pictures for his audiences. What’s unique about Gertie: She was the first cartoon character to have a personality. And she took McCay more than a year to illustrate. (He made 24 frames for each second of screen time.)The book has lots of firsts: Steamboat Willy, the Mickey Mouse talkie that was the first to combine animation and sound; The Band Concert, the first color Mickey Mouse vehicle; and The Skeleton Dance the first of Disney’s SillySymphonies.There’s no historical basis for the choice of these 50 cartoons. They run the gamut from Bugs to Mickey to Betty Boop to Popeye to Little Red Riding Hood to Felix the Cat to Quasi, a yellow creature who visits the Quack-adero, a sort of futuristic Disneyland-meets-Freddie Krueger. The 1975 feature is one of the few in the book from an independent animator.Cartoons from the big studios — Warner Brothers, Disney, MGM, United Productions of America — take the bulk of the book. Considering the minds working for the studios in the early years, it’s no wonder. Anyone who’s watched cartoon credits will recognize the names Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Walt Disney and, of course, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.But independents are well-represented, too, with minds no less sharp and ideas no less clever than those from the studios.One thing this book drives home: A lot of cartoons are anything but fluff. (Tune in on any Saturday morning these days and, with few exceptions, you’d find that hard to believe.) The people who created the likes of Bugs, FelLx and Betty Boop were thinkers who in some cases were far ahead of their time — the racy Betty Boop cartoons of the early 1930s were toned down once the Motion Picture Production Code took effect, forcing cartoonists to lower her skirts and invent more mainstream co-stars (which is how Pudgy came to be).Some of the cartoons are animated morality tales: Peace on Earth asks for just that, through the story of several fuzzy, cute squirrels who ask what war’s all about and get the answer in disturbing detail.The Big Snit follows a couple who, oblivious to the world around them, carry on with their mundane lives while nuclear war breaks out.Even if you don’t want to learn anything of cartoons, this book is worth the price of admission for the visuals. And if you’re at all interested in the medium, it’s a gem of a show.
Newspaper Details
Panama City News Herald
Panama City, Florida, US
Wed, Nov 16, 1994
Page 25
Full Page
Clipped by
D F.
AL, USA 08 Oct 2023
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