Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted April 30, 2020 Hash Fellow Posted April 30, 2020 Look at the difference in the "white" on the characters in these two frames from Disney's "Barn Dance" (1928). Whenever a character goes into a hold they pop to gray. I presume this is because their cel level is getting shuffled to the bottom of the stack and the not-completely-clear cel on top is graying it out. Those must have been thick cels back then. Later in the 30s they would mix paint in shades to compensate for the color shift of cel layers but in 1928 they seem to have black paint and white paint and that was it. Quote
Wildsided Posted April 30, 2020 Posted April 30, 2020 Walt: You can have any colour or shade of paint you want. Animator: Wow! really? Walt: So long as it's black or white. 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 4, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 4, 2020 Here are a couple frames from "The Haunted House", released a year later in 1929 In this one they have different shades of gray. The shack Mickey is knocking on is animated to collapse and is painted in at least two shades of gray. The cartoon as a whole has an occasional pop-to-gray but not nearly as obvious as "Barn Dance." 1930 industry review in Motion Picture News ... "Darb"? I had to look that up. That is genuine jazz-era slang for "something excellent". "Animation:Master is a darb!" Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 5, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 5, 2020 Sometimes they just paint the cels wrong. "The Delivery Boy" (1931) This is NOT a darb... Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 8, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 8, 2020 "Shanghaied" (1934) For a brief moment before Pegleg Pete ker-plops onto this desk you can see an open book with pictures of the three little pigs and the wolf... Enhance!... Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 10, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 10, 2020 "Hell's Bells" (1929) Dancing rubber-hose demon... runs into jagged wall... turns into cubist, 8-bit demon. Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 13, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 13, 2020 "Mickey's Steeplechase" (1934) Mickey and associates trying to sober up a drunk race horse. Note the alleged hangover cures at the bottom. Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 17, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 17, 2020 What is Clarabell reading? Three Weeks! The critics and moral guardians hated it, just about guaranteeing to be a best-seller. NY Times September 28 1907... Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted May 18, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted May 18, 2020 "Good Time for a Dime" (1941) On the DVD, Leonard Maltin pops in at the start to explain what a "peep show" was. Yes, Donald is looking at exactly what he looks like he's looking at. 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted June 2, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted June 2, 2020 Cartoon mouse irritating live-action cat in one of Walt Disney's early pre-Mickey "Alice" films... Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted June 5, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted June 5, 2020 The original New York Times notice of "Steamboat Willie" (1928) at the end of a review of the now-lost, part-talkie "Gang Wars" Note the reviewer's weariness of the gangster genre which had only been around for about a year, since Josef von Sternberg's "Gangland" (1927) Trade ads for "Gang War" Lobby Card... The Olive Borden resembles Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Jack Pickford had a substantial career but this was his last film. Quote
Wildsided Posted June 6, 2020 Posted June 6, 2020 makeup services for Gang War provided by, Shady Pines morticians. "If it looks like a pre funeral viewing, then it's a Shady Pines," 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted June 12, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted June 12, 2020 According to Neal Gabler's biography, "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination", among the many pieces tentatively considered for "Fantasia" was Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov's "Iron Foundry". "We could do something with machines," Walt Disney suggested. A contemporary Soviet complaint about the piece was that the workers it was supposed to inspire didn't actually like this sort of stuff. I was expecting to read Mosolov got sent to the gulag for this but instead he got sent to the gulag for a barfight. Klank! Bonk! Wham! Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted June 18, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted June 18, 2020 According to Neal Gabler's book, the film "Four Methods of Flush Riveting" was created by Disney in 1942 as a demonstration industrial training film, a rather new-ish concept at the time. Walt Disney himself was taking this reel to various War Department offices and war-production industries to try to scare up some desperately needed business during WWII. 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted June 23, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted June 23, 2020 Anecdote from Neal Gabler's book... During his 1947 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee Walt Disney identified the League of Women Voters as a communist organization because of critical letters he had received from them during the animators' strike in 1940. Later, when one of the studio lawyers checked the files for these letters it turned out they were from the Hollywood League of Women Shoppers. D'oh! 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted September 3, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted September 3, 2020 Disney would often send reels to foreign film festivals. That is pretty much the assessment of every college textbook on classic film, also. Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted September 28, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted September 28, 2020 It turns out that gag with Clarabell was a joke too far. According to Gabler's book (p. 153)... Quote A board of Ohio censors rejected one Mickey Mouse cartoon in which a cow was reading Elinor Glyn's scandalous novel Three Weeks... The Shindig (1930) The difficulty of predicting what the many local film censorship boards would allow in a film was a big reason the Motion Picture Code finally got traction in the industry in 1934. They decided it was easier to eliminate the objections up front rather than try to fight them on the ground. It is around this time that the cow udders and gun fire disappear from Disney cartoons. 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted September 30, 2020 Author Hash Fellow Posted September 30, 2020 Photo from Shorpy Quote Los Angeles, 1954. "Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse stuffed toy astride large world globe." Color transparency from photos by Earl Theisen for the Look magazine assignment "Here's your first view of Disneyland," a year before it opened in Anaheim. You'd think, with all his attention to detail, he would have gotten a more on-model version of Mickey to pose with when he had to do shots like this. They never look right. Quote
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