As recounted in Stefan Kanfer’s fantastic history of animation, Serious Business (1997), early in 1933, Walt Disney gave a personal tour of the Disney animation studio to movie star Mary Pickford. Disney was considering making a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland with Pickford in the title role, and in fact shot some test footage of the actress…
One of the most entertaining cartoons to come out of the 1990s features a trio of sweet little girls named Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup … and despite their cutesy names, they just happen to be some seriously ass-whoopin’ superheroes. Those girls–originally called The Whoopass Girls before being renamed as the more family-friendly Powerpuff Girls–were created by Craig…
(This post was originally published on the sadly now-defunct site The Cinementals.) After the phenomenal success of Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), cartoonist Winsor McCay realized that he had found his passion in animation, and he was eager to create even more films. But his animated output was limited at the demand of his employer, publishing…
Lord knows, I love me some Disney. I feel the need to state this upfront just to underscore how much I enjoy the Disney animated canon. I grew up with those films, watching them over and over again, singing the songs, pretending to be a princess (or one of the dancing ostriches from 1940’s Fantasia–I loved…
Considering that lately I’ve been in a rebellious frame of mind, it’s fitting that my selection for the Horseathon stretches the rules of “horse” as well as “classic film.” Having grown up with horses, there is no other suitable excuse for what I am about to do, except perhaps that I’ve reviewed National Velvet (1944) at…
In 1918, Max Fleischer, the innovative mind behind early Walt Disney Studios rival Fleischer Studios, began producing a series of silent cartoon shorts called Out of the Inkwell. Much like earlier efforts by animation pioneers such as Winsor McCay, many entries in this series combined live-action with animation, showing Fleischer drawing the figures that would then…
“Aw, come on, Dad. This could be the miracle that saves the Simpsons’ Christmas. If TV has taught me anything, it’s that miracles always happen to poor kids at Christmas. It happened to Tiny Tim, it happened to Charlie Brown, it happened to the Smurfs, and it’s going to happen to us!” –Bart Simpson This…
Yesterday’s Google doodle honored the 100th birthday of Disney artist Mary Blair, and you know I couldn’t let that go by without a mention. So this week’s Saturday Morning Cartoons entry is dedicated to the beautiful, bold, and brilliant work of a true pioneer in the art of animation. Blair showed her talent for art…
True Classics 