Friday, October 12, 2007

TOONS. GETS 'EM EVERY TIME: As noted below, Al Gore has built his global-warming campaign through a variety of pop-culture media, but in our discussion (which was more heated than usual precisely because of climate change, right?) we somehow missed a crucial venue for Gore's Nobel-worthy ideas: animated cartoons. Like pop-culture visionaries before him, Gore realized that your story can reach a much wider audience if you tell it with toons.

Filmmakers had experimented with animation off and on during the early 20th century, with Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo" (1911) and "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914) attracting the most popular and critical attention. By the 1920s, animated shorts had become part of the typical line-up at most movie theaters, and the decade's favorite cartoon character was Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat. Felix was a familiar type, a comic troublemaker full of energy and desires, but thanks to animation, he could break the rules of physics and biology at will, as seen in "Felix Dopes It Out" (1924) or the hallucinogenic "Felix Woos Whoopee" (1930). Felix's celebrity was reinforced through licensed merchandising, a clever money-making and brand-building concept that would become standard practice in animation.

By the late 1920s, though, Felix's pre-eminence was being challenged by a new cartoon critter: Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse. At first, Mickey wasn't all that different from Felix; in his sound-film debut, "Steamboat Willie" (1928), he's a rather rascally rodent, spending most of his time abusing animals in order to make them squeal "Turkey in the Straw." But Disney smartly followed the popular mood, and as Depression-era Americans turned away from Jazz-Age enthusiasm toward what Steven Watts calls a sentimental populism, Disney modified Mickey accordingly, making him more domesticated, more human, more childlike. In "The Band Concert" (1935), he's trying to fend off the mischievous pranks of Donald Duck -- pranks that Felix and Mickey 1.0 would have gleefully participated in. Heck, by the late 1930s, Mickey even owns a dog.

Mickey's evolution into a respectable citizen (along with Disney's growing focus on feature-length animation) left the field open for a new boisterous cartoon personality: Warner Bros.' Bugs Bunny. Beginning with 1940's "A Wild Hare", Bugs revived the frenetic, anarchic style of Felix and early Mickey, combining sight gags, wild chases, violence, and of course, cross-dressing; in 1942's "Fresh Hare" (1942), we even get an early-model Elmer Fudd and a bizarre blackface-minstrels finale. By the end of World War II and the classic "Baseball Bugs" (1946), the rabbit and the mouse were arguably animated equals.

I could wrap this lesson up with some profound question about the subversive qualities of animation, the ways in which cartoons allow artists to say things they couldn't say through live performance. But since it's the last class before fall break, I'll end with a much simpler query:

Mickey or Bugs. Who ya got?

Next week (no class on Monday): the studio system, Hollywood's Golden Age, and the movies in wartime.

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