Crumbling Paper: Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse

Here’s an example I scanned of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse from March 16, 1941 by Walt Disney. Just kidding. The Donald Duck one is by Al Taliaferro and the Mickey Mouse strip is by Floyd Gottfredson.

Click the image to view the full strip.

Click here to read about Al Taliaferro at lambiek.net.
Click here to read about Floyd Gottfredson at lambiek.net.

INTERESTING LINKS: Chris Ware/Andrew Bird Quimby the Mouse Video: May 4th, 2009

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My good friends at Big Time Attic called my attention to this wonderful little animation of Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse set to music by Andrew Bird, apparently done for This American Life.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Carl Barks’ Porky of the Mounties : February 17th, 2009

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Carl Barks is best known for all his fantastic work on the Disney Duck comics, but he did other wonderful kids comics for Dell as well. Today, Cool-Mo-Dee brings us his one Porky Pig comic book, Porky of the Mounties, which was Four Color issue #48. Pictured above is a small image of the Porky of the Mounties painting that Barks did for the cover of the 1977 Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide.

INTERESTING LINKS: Koko the Clown Flipbook at Uncle John’s Crazy Town: February 17th, 2009

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Uncle John’s Crazy Town brings us a cool little Koko the Clown flipbook you can print, apparently from a book called Betty Boop’s Movie Cartoon Lessons. I hope he posts more stuff from the book!

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Nimbus Libéré

THE CARTOON CRYPT

A excerpt from a weird and ugly (but interesting) WWII propaganda cartoon made by inept and humorless nazis featuring Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Donald Duck, Goofy, Felix, and horrible Jewish stereotypes. I’ve seen a lot of WWII propaganda from the Allies, but not much from the Axis… presumably most of it was destroyed. If all their animation was this uninspired, it is no wonder we won the war.

WARNING: This cartoon contains offensive ethnic caricatures. If offensive stereotypes bug you, you may not want to view it.

INTERESTING LINKS: The Stuff of Life Trailer :December 12th, 2008

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I just haven’t had time for much blogging lately… so sorry for the lack of updates. I hope you’ll find this blog worth following in spite of the feast or famine nature of the postings.

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

My good friends at Big Time Attic and Puny Entertainment recently completed this hilariously wonderful promotional cartoon for Big Time Attic’s new genetics graphic novel, The Stuff of Life (in collaboration with Mark Schultz).

Go here and here to see some interesting “making of” information. I can’t wait to read the book. The pages I’ve seen are stunning. I’m guessing this will probably be the prettiest educational comic ever made… and seeing this video and knowing the work of Big Time Attic, it will probably also be one of the most entertaining ones.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Philips Broadcast 1938

THE CARTOON CRYPT

This is a short cartoon from 1938 by George Pal advertising Philips radios. Special effects pioneer George Pal was the king of what is known as “replacement animation” in the world of stop motion animation.

Replacement animation is an extremely labor intensive process (in the already inherently labor intensive process of animation) where different elements of an animation puppet are removed and replaced with another similar item in a slightly different pose. A single character can potentially have hundreds of replaceable elements in different poses.

It is very common for this technique to be used with character’s heads… Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas is a good example of a very-well done puppet with replaceable facial poses.

The Phillips Broadcast animation is remarkable in how much of it is done with replacement animation… the heads are replaceable on all the characters… but so are entire bodies. The shapes distort and transform wonderfully with the kind of physical exaggeration generally only seen in hand-drawn animation.

It boggles the mind how much labor must have gone into this short film. It has to be seen to be believed. It is truly a masterpiece of stop-motion animation.

Note that it is REALLY, REALLY worth your time to go and view this cartoon at a higher resolution with much more brilliant color here on the Europa Film Treasures site (unfortunately that version is not embeddable on this website).

WARNING: This cartoon contains racial depictions that many will find offensive. If this sort of thing bothers you, you may not want to view it.

Go here to check out the George Pal DVD set George Pal – Flights of Fantasy
on Amazon, which contains this and many other cartoons.