Canadian animator Nick Sung has written a nice appreciation of Ward Kimball’s TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953). He’s using TOOT as inspiration for a personal short film that he’s currently working on, and includes on his blog a few pages of compositional studies that he did from the film. I’ll be writing more about TOOT in the future, but in the meantime, be sure to check out the great set of frame grabs from the film at Ward Jenkins’s Ward-O-Matic.
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Nice, thanks for the hint, love it!
Comment by Thorsten Hasenkamm — November 29, 2005 @ 5:32 pm
Hi Amid–
Thanks for the nice mention!
I hadn’t seen too many 50’s cartoons before researching for my film, but after watching a few, I was really surprised to discover how markedly different they all were; I guess I always assumed they’d be more uniform–as common as their descendants today. There are definite similarities in design and format film to film, but truly, each one I watched was singular and unique; it was as if one could see the experimentation in progress.
I think that that’s why there’s much to learn from comparing Melody and Toot. It was as if they got to make a film twice or something. You can see the way they decided to formalize and expand their compositions; adjust design to add warmth and coherency with backgrounds; refine the use texture and colour; and of course, guide narrative, music, staging and editing with more elegance and structure.
Both films are kind of neat because they try to teach you about vaguely abstract subjects–the former about… the nature of melody, I guess, with a focus on subject matter; the latter about the four types of musical sound, furnished with examples, intended to show you breadth.
It would certainly have been interesting to see more from the series, or even to find out how they planned to structure them as a group, if indeed they did venture at all into the proposed further titles. Would different subjects have inspired different handling? How would they have further refined the design and techniques of their filmmaking?
In the end, it seemed to me to be a pretty singular experiment–one that was allowed to evolve over the course of two films–creating something fairly refined and individual in the end. I mean, maybe there are other examples–I’m not entirely familiar with the era, so I don’t know; but it does make me wish there was more access to the films of our past; it’s probably a pretty interesting, pretty informative progression.
Anyway, I think they’re pretty great; from what I’ve seen, definitely a high point.
Thanks again.
Nick
Comment by nick sung — November 30, 2005 @ 11:34 am
Yes, thanks for the mention Amid, and to you, too, Nick! My intent on putting up the images from both MELODY and TOOT was so that others would be inspired and hopefully see that the past holds keys to our design of character and color for the future. Too many artists/animators these days are using piss-poor design examples for creating characters — most holding the notion that old school is ‘uncool.’ Well, the old guard at Disney and UPA still can rock in any era with the amount of talent and skill that was being hired at that time. They were creating timeless films at the time and having a ball with side projects like TOOT. I’m very excited about the new Disney’s Rareities DVD coming up in December, as there were some great small and odd flms that were produced during the 40’s and 50’s that the filmmakers were given free reign.
Thanks again, Nick, for your thoughful ruminations on TOOT and MELODY. Can’t wait to see more.
Comment by Ward — November 30, 2005 @ 12:55 pm
Thanks so much for the thoughtful comments, Nick and Ward. Nick, your thought about how there’s so much variety in Fifties cartoons is actually the topic of one of my upcoming posts. I’ll have more to say on that when I post it next week.
Also it was very interesting to read your thoughts on the contrasts between Melody and Toot. I personally think Kimball’s conception of MELODY wasn’t as strong as TOOT. Part of that may be because it was the first film Kimball had ever directed. But also, I think it was because he finally had this total freedom to do whatever he wanted, after years of being kept in line as an animator, and he just sort of goes nuts. Melody is such an eclectic blend of styles, and Kimball is seemingly trying out every different style and technique that he can think of, children’s style drawings, cutting out greeting cards and such. There’s a lot of great design in MELODY but it doesn’t come together as well as TOOT. Kimball’s next projects — the space specials (Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars & Beyond) — are something of a continuation of Melody and Toot. They’re also “educational” cartoons that teach difficult, often abstract, concepts with a droll sense of humor. I think he reaches another high point with MARS AND BEYOND, which is an incredibly solid marriage of form and content. Anyway just some random thoughts.
Comment by Amid — December 1, 2005 @ 6:26 pm