In Betty Boop: Snow White, these sounds usher in Koko’s mesmeric song, which tells of his baby stretched out on a long white table / She so sweet, so cold, so fair, and imagines his own funeral, the details of which in turn act upon his animated body.
Music is literally what gives this animation its motion-characters run, bob, waltz, twirl, bounce, swell, shrink, transform, hoot, holler in time with the soundtrack, perfectly synched by a device called the “cue-meter.” It also signals the transitions between different spheres of being: when you hear that wah-wah of the trumpet with its stem-in Harmon mute, or the minor-keyed chorus of horns, you know a dark evolution is about to take place. His animated cartoons always relied heavily on surrealism for their effect.”
Caligari (1920), in which a strange shadow-an accident of projection-swells at the corner of the screen, bulges and quivers like a tadpole, Woolf conceives that emotions such as terror or anger might yield other forms, like “a black line wriggling upon a white sheet.” Richard Fleischer-son of Max, who with his brother Dave invented the rotoscope, the rotograph, and created Fleischer studios of Betty Boop and Popeye fame-recalls that he too was hypnotized by Caligari, the first film his father brought him to, at age seven: “Perhaps with this film, he was initiating me into the world in which he lived. In 1926 Virginia Woolf wrote of early cinema’s potential to make visible “some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak,” asking: “Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?” Prompted by a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Everything has life, is connected, ripples, reacts, full of possibility. In which a clown named Koko, inspired by vaudeville and the costumes of German clowns and Bessie McCoy doing “The Yama Yama Man,” dances and sings and stretches and transforms-like he is made of rubber, like he is fluid, of some unholy substance, like he takes part in his own animation, like his graphic consistency is of another world entirely, which it is. In which long icicles that hang over a doorway spontaneously curl themselves up and then down, like thick ribbons or locks of hair or muscled, alien fronds, and then grow faces to sing in chorus, her step-mama the Queen! In which a mouse pokes its head from the pocket of a pair of long johns spread as a red carpet for a curvaceous, black-clad, squeaky-voiced, enormous-headed woman, and raises its hat, hiya kid! In which suits of armor weep and dance, fall apart and tumble to the ground benevolent trees liberate a woman bound to them with rope and seven dwarves ski down a hill with their beards streaming behind them like wind socks. In which a mirror sprouts arms with white-gloved hands and buffs a vain Queen’s nose with a small towel that it pulls from its backside.
James Infirmary Blues” sung by Cab Calloway, available on YouTube and the Internet ArchiveĮditor’s note: In light of the fact that movie theaters in New York City, where 4Columns is based, and other cities throughout the US remain closed during the coronavirus pandemic, we have invited our contributors to revisit films that are particularly significant to them and that are easily found online.Ī world in which nothing is indifferent to us, nor we to it, imagine. “That delicious character”: the shape-changing, fantastical world of the 1933 film.īetty Boop: Snow White, directed by Dave Fleischer, animated by Roland C.
0 kommentar(er)
