It seemed most of the effort got blown on the opening sequences. You’re seeing fewer of the 12 Principles of Animation that were laid out by Disney animators. The latter are less elastic, less vivacious-altogether less cartoony-than older stuff. Watch an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, literally any one of them, and then put on an episode of He-Man or Brave Starr, and you’ll see the difference in quality as clearly as night and day. The medium for telling these stories, it’s important to remember, was the theater rather than the television, and cartoons’ transition to television in the form of Saturday morning cartoons in the post-war era slowly began to change how kids watched them, even as Bugs and Daffy and Tom and Jerry continued making their debuts at the theater through the ’60s.īy the ’80s, with President Ronald Reagan’s de-regulation of cartoons-a withdrawal of rules that basically prohibited them from being hyped up toy advertisements-cartoons became as crass and loud and devoid of nuance as the era that was producing them. Which is to say, you don’t need to have seen any previous Looney Tunes or Silly Symphonies or Merry Melodies pictures in order to follow along-unlike “serials,” which made stars out of characters like Flash Gordon and, like comic books, generally required you to have seen the last one. When you look at the animation of the early 20th century-the Fleischer brothers, Disney, Warner Brothers-you see shows based around music (to take advantage both of the new sound features of “talkies” and, in the case of Merry Melodies cartoons, to capitalize on Warner Brothers’ extensive catalogue of film soundtracks and record company acquisitions), and featuring ensemble casts of mascot characters who are performing a disjointed series of skits. I’m still willing to bet you one tumbler full of Scotch and actual rocks that it will fail to deliver on all these selling points as effectively as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? already did 30 years ago.Ĭartoons themselves have largely left their weird roots in America, and it’s difficult to really say for sure why or how it happened. It will probably, in several places, feature computer-generated imagery that tries and utterly fails to fool the eye. It’s being billed as the biggest event of our young century, the plot threads of which are sure to spin out into a dozen other feature films where any and every ancillary character is given his or her full-length feature. It’s a movie so huge that it needs to be divided into two parts. It took every last dirty trick in the book to get Spider-Man on the same screen as the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy in the upcoming superhero smash-up Avengers: Infinity War.
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