Capsule Reviews – August 2016

More opinions in the atmosphere can only benefit discussion. This is a new feature where OTO editors and other contributors will post capsule reviews (short, paragraph-long reviews of a given film). The post will update throughout the month as more reviews are added. Since some of the OTO editors are busy working on longer posts, it might be dominated by my reviews at first (I’ll try to get one out weekly).

But more importantly, anyone can contribute to this. If you have a short, 1-2 paragraph review for basically anything, contact me on twitter or in the comments below. Audience participation is encouraged!

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What Makes Daffy Duck (Art Davis, 1948) [tamerlane]

Jaime Weinman’s verdict on Art Davis, that his cartoons “with their somewhat weightless animation […], post-war suburban settings and interchangeable little-wiseguy characters […] feel to me like they wandered in from some other studio and got outfitted with the trappings and production values of a Warners cartoon,” (Lantz being that “other studio”) accords with the official history. Skittish about losing his job, Davis rarely took the initiative to unify his animation and scripts to a single purpose, cloistering himself in the former while letting writers Bill Scott and Lloyd Turner go their own way. But sometimes the scattered Davis unit could harmonize in wonderful ways. Here, a dandified Daffy evades a hungry fox and a particularly mirthless Elmer as they compete for his head. In typical Warner fashion Daffy plays the two stooges against each other, but Scott and Turner imbue Daffy with an urbane refinement (“I have some lovely etchings up in my apartment”) that’s something like their calling card. Davis’s penchant for luxuriant character acting also pays off. Bill Melendez’s scenes are full of gesticulating and heavy smears in the vein of Manny Gould but it’s Emery Hawkins who steals the show. Hawkins, pace Weinman, tends to animate “the entire body” but that doesn’t undermine intent; the excessive follow-through, that ‘underwater’ quality, does better to sell Daffy as a superfluous man than the standard Warner arsenal ever could, to say nothing of Elmer’s “I’ll catch you, you scwewy chawacter!”, probably the single funniest cut in Davis’s entire catalogue. If the Warner cartoons are 20th century parables, talking animals and all, then the lesson here can be gleaned in Daffy’s final line: “Obviously, I’m dealing with inferior mentalities.” For once in a Warner cartoon, the effete wins out.

Narcissus (Norman McLaren, 1983) [toadette]

The last film in the great Canadian animator and filmmaker Norman McLaren’s oeuvre, on the surface it appears to be a live-action, balletic retelling of the tale of Narcissus, who fell in love with himself to the point of self-destruction; McLaren was at this stage of his career interested in the expressive potentials of ballet, and had made two films to this effect (Pas de deux and Ballet Adagio). When Narcissus begins dancing with a clone of himself, however, the film becomes a last hurrah for several of the unique techniques and visual effects McLaren experimented with over the course of his career: for instance, in an early scene during this sequence, the music (by longtime collaborator Maurice Blackburn) features graphical sound, in which patterns scratched onto the soundtrack of the film would read as sound, and during that same scene the manner in which Narcissus’s clone often “pops” in and out of the frame harkens back to his Blinkity Blank. Most notably, Narcissus is McLaren’s most explicit expression of his own homosexuality; in the film’s early scenes, Narcissus dances far more enthusiastically with a male companion than with a nymph, though both are rejected in the end, and the manner in which he becomes enamored with his own handsome self has homoerotic overtones. Ultimately, however, in keeping with the original story, Narcissus’s self-lust dooms him; just as he begins trying to make love to his reflection in a lake, the illusion is revealed for what it is, and, having been unable to overcome his misguided passion, Narcissus finds himself trapped—physically and spiritually.

Even as far as McLaren’s films go, Narcissus is unconventional. It is perhaps a summation of McLaren’s career: in addition to the aforementioned homosexuality, Narcissus’s entire dance with his imaginary clone can be interpreted as McLaren’s search for the best means of cinematic expression throughout his lifetime, reliant as it is on the techniques he had experimented with, and those techniques are executed with a virtuosity befitting one of Canada’s most eclectic filmmakers in his final days. Overall, the film is not meant for casual viewing, and for the most part is not exactly “animated”—but for those who have seen McLaren’s other works or those with a taste for experimental films in general, Narcissus is both a fitting, testamentary end to an illustrious career and a fine art film in its own right.

Big Bug Attack (Martha Colburn, 2002) [tamerlane]

If convincingly argued, even cliches can be read as new. Martha Colburn’s work is a test case, where progressive and reactionary impulses gel into something that feels exciting even if the underlying sentiment is only a few steps above Facebook platitude. Each of her films evangelize a liberal cause – opposition to the Iraq war, the war on drugs, patriarchy, consumerism, a recent web short parodies Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – with a moral sternness that’s essentially Dantesque (“I’d like to think I could kill 10 dictators from my bedroom”). Her images are the grotesquerie of a woke social crusader; in Big Bug Attack, centipedes and beetles creep out of telephone receivers, tape recorders, type writers (various symbols of old media that could plausibly stand-in for the internet) as they literally stifle class consciousness by worming into the users’ brains, transforming supermodels into mantises, the cycle beginning anew. Communication itself becomes a vector for spiritual disease. Her films are made through collages of the Stan Vanderbeek type but while that technique has seen a number of anemic Dada rituals over the years, Colburn jolts her dolls alive with a violent energy. She’s not playing a linguistic joke only the educated will find funny but building a vision of Hell that is both disturbing and impermeable (her recent films use a multiplane setup because she “wanted to emulate the way they did it at Disney”). There is no revolution, only the unresolved jitter of anomie, the Marxist Paradiso nowhere to be found. Though not one of her major films (sadly, none of those are online), Big Bug demonstrates that no sin is too small for a worldview that is truly complete.

The End of the World in Four Seasons (Paul Driessen, 1995) [tamerlane]

We’re inclined to think that the structural film toolkit – predetermined, simplified structure, emphasis on repetition and series, slow expanding complexity – are the sole domain of recherche slow cinema, but there’s plenty examples of these techniques elsewhere. After all, if structure can take the spotlight, why worry about ideas? Any of Paul Driessen’s cartoon limericks could serve as demonstration of this fact but The End of the World strikes me as particularly offensive. Per Vivaldi there are four segments, each presenting about 7-9 miniature scenes develop (or loop) simultaneously as panels against a black background. Why Driessen chose this method is anyone’s guess: the interaction between different cells is either straightforward or nonexistent, and their individual content so shallow as to never convey an impression beyond low-hanging caricature. What’s worse, this commitment to a grand structure dilates the passage of time; for me, this was far more patience-defying than any Michael Snow experiment. Perhaps unsurprisingly Driessen says that he only concerns himself with the processes behind filmmaking and never cares to watch the end result. But this excuse only works for artists taking structuralism seriously, improving themselves through creative restrictions or by engaging the medium through its own limitations. Outside of a faculty for making the motion of small figures readable, there’s little to interpret here. These films can only trick those who confuse the ‘art film’ posture for its prestige.

Kitty Foiled (William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, 1948) [toadette]

A not-so-typical example of Tom and Jerry at their prime, this cartoon introduces a pet canary into the well-established violent dynamic. Unlike later cartoons in which the side characters were just a way of thinly disguising that the series was out of ideas, here the canary’s presence as Jerry’s new ally results in several gags even more ingeniously offbeat, brutal, and manic than usual, backed up by Hanna’s solid timing, top-notch character animation by the likes of Irv Spence, Ken Muse, and Ed Barge, colorfully brash sound effects, and an excellent, somewhat powerful score by Scott Bradley that quotes liberally from the overture to Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville.

The sequence involving the gun is surely one of the finest moments in the entire series. Just as Tom lunges at the canary, the latter picks up a gun and begins backing towards the terrified cat with it over a long distance; the fear that both characters feel in the presence of the dangerous weapon is all too authentic, hence Tom mindlessly handing the gun back to the bird when he drops it at one point rather than using the opportunity to take it for himself! When Jerry deliberately drops a light bulb, the resulting noise convincing Tom that he has been “shot” right in the heart, the poor cat puts on one of the most hilarious gun death enactments in cinematic history: stumbling across the room with a frighteningly funny expression (his whited-out pupils!) while making pained groans, he looks into the mirror only to see his grave, and, thus convinced, slowly sinks to the ground while flipping a coin, spins around, and “dies” —much to Jerry’s and the canary’s great elation. It must be noted, though, that this is just one highlight among the many brilliant scenes that make up this cartoon, among them the climactic sequence in which Tom, in a truly demented fit, actually tries to run over Jerry with a toy train only to meet his final demise in a hole created by a bowling ball dropped from high up by the canary; even the lesser gags have a bizarre streak and animator-infused personality that make them enjoyable, like the scene in which the bird and Jerry disguise themselves as Indians in order to get away from Tom (animated by Irv Spence). Easily one of the best Tom and Jerry cartoons ever made, Kitty Foiled demonstrates the wonders that can be achieved with a cat, a mouse, and a bird, a diverse team of great animators, a violent imagination, an uncanny sense of comedic timing, and a gifted musical arranger-composer.