Whitney Museum and More Vulgar Modernizm!

The Whitney Museum of Art Comic Art show covered the gambit of cartooning from comic strips to comic books to todays topic, animation.

Vulgar modernism sounds like an insult. I'd say it's pure Americana. My favorite flavor!

Enjoy!

Talk to you soon.

Frank "Tish Tash" Tashlin - Cartoon-y Director

Born this day in 1913, cinematic cartoon director and cartoony live action director Frank Tashlin would be 97 years old today!

Frank Tashlin was the guy who's mind was always on his next job. He was never complacent in any position he held, but rather was thinking of the things he wanted to do next.

I kind of understand this. Sometimes it takes so much effort and work to get somewhere, that by the time you get there, you've expended all the energy you have for that thing and your interest falls to what's coming next.

Tashlin went to work for Van Beuren animation studios in the early 1930's. Van Beuren was the knock-off version of Fleischer Brothers, the work there was cheap, hurried and uninspired. In this field though, he gained a reputation as being a very fast animator and was soon heading for Warner Brothers Cartoons in Hollywood.

While working for Leon Schlesinger's Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes unit, he began moonlighting, doing a newspaper comic strip called "Van Boring", a jab at his old boss Van Beuren in New York, and was moderately successful. Then one day Leon (who was as sticky fingered a business man as you ever met) told Frank he wanted to get a piece of the action as well, since Frank officially worked for him. Frank told Leon where to go, and left Warners.

After a couple of years, Warners lost director Tex Avery to MGM, and Schlesinger (sleezeball though he was with money, he still knew talent...that's how he MADE money after all) hired Tashlin back, this time as a director.

Here's some of Tash's work from this period:









Termite Terrace (as the Looney Tunes animation facility was nicknamed) was right on the Warner Brothers movie lot, so during the day as Frank was working on cartoons, he would see the live action movie stars passing by and would often step out and chat with them. You'll also see an odd thing in Tash's cartoon work...it's not cartoon camera angles he's using, but rather more cinematic shots like you'd see in a live-action film.

That's right, while Tash was a successful cartoon director, his mind was moving on to being a film director.

So he moved on too.

The ironic thing is, while his cartoon style was styled after dramatic angles you'd get in live action, once he got into directing films, he was a cartoonist all the way. The gags he wrote were pure cartoon over the tip fun and the situations he created were bigger than life. Which is why cartoons are better than life.

Here's a trailer for a Tashlin film made in the first years of a new music the kids are calling "Rock and Roll". Cartoon and Rock and Roll fun!



Below is the first segment of a Martin and Lewis film (their last) directed by Tashlin. It's really worth viewing the entire thing and YouTube has it all if you just continue to follow the links at the end of each segment. In this modern age of "huge event comic book" movies, this may be the best live-action-cartoon-about comic books ever made. Pure fun and inventiveness. It also got Shirley MacLaine (as The Bat Lady) a permanent spot in my "Spank Bank", all thanks to Frank's leg fetish! She's been there since I was a kid and first saw this gem.



Of course while Tashlin was working as a big budget feature film director...his mind was on his next task. He wrote and illustrated a few books, such as "The Possum That Didn't" and "The World That Isn't". While oft thought of as children's books, these are the best kind, one's where it takes an adult mind to fully understand what's being said.



In the early 1960's, while at MGM, former co-Termite Terrace director Chuck Jones directed a cartoon based on Tash's best known book "The Bear That Wasn't".

Tash passed away in 1972, after a long career...or should I say careers?...no career, doing everything that interested him. Animation, Cartooning, Directing, Writing, Illustrating (putting really good looking actresses in leg-revealing outfits), I'm very jealous.


Thanks Frank, for having fun with your life and doing some really great work while you were doing it!

Chuck Jones - A Thinking Man's Cartoon Evolution!

Born today in 1912, Chuck Jones would have been 97 years old today.

In the course of his career at Warner Brothers, Chuck evolved as much as the characters themselves.

When Chuck first came to Warner's in the mid-1930's as an animator, he was just that. Another cog in the machine along with others, learning how this fledgling medium worked. Learning how to get ideas across in motion, motion created with 24 still drawings per second.

He was good at what he did though, and put thought behind what he did as well. So as directors moved on away from Warner's and new directors were needed, and in 1937 at 25 years old, Chuck Jones assumed the directors chair.

Unlike his counterparts Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Frank Tashlin who were pushing the envelope and beginning to make some of the wackiest cartoons to hit the silver screen and truly setting the Looney Tunes-Merrie Melodies style, Chuck was interested in studying the Disney technique. Utilizing more natural movements and...I hate to say it because there is benefit to this...a treacly, cutesy type of characterization. Case in point:



After a few years of this, and of really honing his craft, the other directors pulled him aside and basically told him, "Hey, this ain't Disney...we're making FUNNY cartoons...get with the program!". So he did. He showed 'em.





You can't really cartoon or lampoon anything without knowing how to do the real thing. And Chuck knew. By the 50's he was doing some of the funniest, most Warner Brothery-est cartoons made.







Chuck was a thinking man. He directed these characters from a psychological point of view. And he was a true artist. By the 1960's he was wanting to expand the medium all the more. And he did, with cartoons like this:



Of course after Warner's closed their doors in 1963, Chuck went on to many more things. A little inconsistent at times, but always good for his desire to try something new. Here's a brief take of Chuck on himself.



Thanks for thinking about what you were doing Chuck. I'm still thinking about it!