“A DREAM IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES” fromCinderella(1950)
Music and Lyrics by Mark David, Jerry Livingston, & Al Hoffman
Performed by Illene Woods
A dream is a wish your heart makes When you’re fast asleep In dreams, you will lose your heart aches Whatever you wish for, you keep Have faith in your dreams and someday Your rainbow will come smiling through No matter how your heart is grieving If you keep on believing The dream that you wish will come true.
Pocket Full of Colors: The Magical World of Mary Blair, Disney Artist Extraordinaire - by Amy Guglielmo and Jacqueline Tourville, illustrated by yours truly, Brigette Barrager. A magical book about a magical lady!
The famous “bouncing ball” device—during a song, a ball bounces on each word of the lyrics when it is sung, helping an audience sing along—was invented in the 1920s by Max Fleischer, of Fleischer Studios (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman).
Seeing these ancient “Screen Songs” cartoons now, I get incredibly melancholic. It’s like wandering through a derelict building: the chattering voices of old ghosts still echoing through the empty halls, the toasts, laughter, the merriment. Sometimes, happy songs are the saddest songs.
It’s here! The updated sheet for the Toonkind homebrew race is finally done! (Mostly it took so long because I was determined to do new art as subrace examples, sorry)
Rubberhose is the term for the style in a lot of 1920s animation, due to their noodly limbs. Think Popeye, Betty Boop, very early Mickey Mouse shorts–Cuphead is a beautiful tribute to the look.
FrankThomasand Ollie Johnston were two of Disney’s Nine Old Men, the original animators that started the company. They literally wrote the book outlining the principles of animation, The Illusion of Life.
Warner Bros. was the first big studio to syndicate animation on a large scale and made Felix the Cat into the first worldwide superstar. Nowadays they’re most well known for making Looney Tunes.
United Productions of America, or UPA, was an animation studio founded in the 40s by disgruntled former Disney employers, who had grown tired of keeping things grounded and realistic (and also being overworked and underpaid), and instead explored how far the 2D medium could be pushed, with emphasis on minimalism, shape, and abstraction.
Ray Harryhausen was a stop motion animator who animated monsters, creatures, and other special effects across dozens of action, fantasy, and sci-fi films and shorts from the 40s to the 80s.
Jean Blanchard’s Bugs Bunny model sheet for the McKimson Unit, 1947. Bob McKimson had drawn the definitive Bugs model in 1943 and then Blanchard designed this strikingly different version of the character a few years later. The range of expressions and attitudes shown here in her model sheet only begin to suggest the unbelievable range of animated “acting” achieved in Bob’s cartoons throughout the 1940s and how the great characters like Bugs developed different nuances as the decade progressed. McKimson was a great, underrated animator.
The 1941 Disney animator’s strike was bitterly fought, as Walt Disney refused to grant the concessions that all the other animation studios had agreed to, and instead grew paranoid and accusatory, convinced the “Communist infiltrators” had turned his animators against him.
One poorly remembered – but vivid! – moment from the strike was when Chuck Jones led Warner animators came to join the picket line in solidarity, bringing with them a working guillotine with a mannequin styled to look like Gunther Lessing, the Disney attorney.
As Gizmodo’s Mat Novak notes, we tend to gloss over the more radical elements in union history in our contemporary retellings of famous strikes, but these were not polite, timid affairs. Unions attained their goals through radical, relentless action that put them at risk and brooked no compromise.
It’s the Scooby Doo 50th anniversary and they just released a sequel to one of their best animated movies ever on the last full moon of Friday the 13th until 30 years from now. What a powermove.
I also want people to remember that Scooby and the gang was designed by this man: Iwao Takamoto.
An American artist who was forcibly incarcerated into the concentration camp when he was a teenager. He was eventually hired at Disney in 1945 but his family were still interned.
Here’s an interview he did with CartoonBrew from years ago.
Following the success of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, naturally a sequel was planned… a sequel that was actually a World War Two-based prequel, going by the title of Roger Rabbit II: The Toon Platoon.
The project eventually fell through, but the script says the film (linked here) would have covered Roger’s hunt for his biological mother after his human adoptive parents reveal that he’s a Toon, his meeting with radio star/future wife Jessica, cameos by FDR, Churchill and Stalin, and Roger’s trip to Occupied Europe to rescue Jessica after she’s kidnapped by the Nazis, who intended to force her into a propaganda role, a la Lord Haw-HaworTokyo Rose.
Oh, and film also revealed of who Roger’s dad was…
I’m… Actually kind of curious how this would have gone, as an early moment in Who Framed… included some details from this approximate period (the film takes place in the late 1940s roughly a decade after Toon Patrol would have been set) during an early sweep of human protagonist Eddie Valiant’s office.
Some of these moments including the reveal that Eddie and his brother apparently saved Donald Duck’s nephews from a kidnapping and the brothers helping clear Goofy from being falsely accused of being a Nazi spy, which is kind of funny.
BONUS FACT: In addition to being a successful radio actress prior to Roger even starting his showbiz career (his getting his first job in a cartoon is another event covered in the film), we also learn Jessica’s maiden name: Krupnick. Which means that, in universe, Jessica might be Jewish apparently?
Fantastic Films article on the 1980 debut of Thundarr the Barbarian.
The interview is worth reading just to get a sense of how brilliant and creative guys like Steve Gerber struggled under the often arbitrary restrictions of children’s animated television.
During the production of the 1953 film Peter Pan, Walt Disney shares a laugh with three children, performing as live-action reference models dressed as, from left to right, Wendy, Michael, and John Darling. Walt Disney’s animators would famously use live-action models as references for drawings and animations to create realistic movement, scale, and facial expressions. In addition to Peter Pan, live-action models were also used in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Pinocchio (1940),andSleeping Beauty (1959).
Our Walt Disney doc airs September 14 and 15. Check out our Walt Disney gallery for more Walt Disney images!
Ahh ok so I know this is an artblog and I never reblog anything, but I had to chime in!
So the whole white glove thing comes from early black & white animation, most notably the Mickey Mouse shorts, but also the Looney Tunes and the Max Fleischer toons. The gloves serve two purposes:
One; the gloves are big and makes those over-the-top hand gestures more prominent. It allows the characters to be more expressive, which is necessary for some of the mute cartoons.
Secondly, these characters tend to be completely black, like Felix the Cat (who was one of the inspirations for Mickey). The black color is easier to animate, but you end up with a problem: if their hands were over their bodies or a dark background, you wouldn’t see them! In Mickey’s first appearance in Steamboat Willie, Mickey and Pete don’t have their gloves, and everything kind of bleeds together.
Adding the gloves in the later shorts, you can see the distinction between his body and hands. Problem solved!
Even after technicolor cartoons arrived, the gloves stuck.
Apparently, Bugs Bunny didn’t wear gloves for a bit after the color cartoons came, but audiences asked why he stopped wearing them so the animators changed it back.
OH MY GOD THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING THANK YOU SO MUCH YOU SOLVED ONE OF THE MYSTERIES OF MY LIFE.
Animator, Director, and Producer Burny Mattinson has officially become the longest-serving Disney employee ever, and the first (and only) holder of a Disney 65-year Anniversary pin. Burny started at Walt Disney Animation Studios on June 4th, 1953.
