The most amazing part of this film for me is that it was done by the Toronto Second City crew. That means it stars Eugene Levy, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Harold Ramis. Just outstanding cheese.
Eugene Levy, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Harold Ramis.
TIL! So Ramis was Zeke, huh? I thought he did a good job with that, but Candy to me was unexpectedly great as Den. Really captured the spirit of a young man transported in to a big, muscled figure.
Rock & Rule is another one from that era. It goes hard. René Laloux did full on Metal Hurlant movie later in the decade too. Kinda wild that Moebius and Jodorowsky projects never managed to get an animation treatment over the years (although it is not like Incal or Airtight Garage really need it).
Disney's peculiar business practices more or less mangled the feature length animation as serious art for decades. The damage they inflicted upon the animation industry is astonishing - lots of projects underperformed or died in pre-production because Disney conditioned mass audiences that animation is for kids and got the best infrastructure to corner the market.
Bakshi was an outlier for a while but Fire and Ice was the end of his run - which is sad because the world needs FRAZETTAVERSE. Disney exile Don Bluth had some great and surprisingly mature stuff in the 80s (and Dragon's Lair is god tier immersive death simulator). The Last Unicorn follows the same vein as Bluth's movies but somehow even more somber. Lucas produced Twice Upon A Time and it is outstanding so naturally Lucas never really did anything like that ever again. Meanwhile Richard Williams never really had a chance but even in its mangled form The Thief and The Cobbler is marvelous. It took Tippett 40 odd years to finally get a proper feature done and his 80s dinosaur movie is ridiculously good.
Animal Farm is high watermark of non-Disney animated feature. As is Son of the White Mare. Martin Rosen's Watership Down and Plague Dogs are probably the best western animation ever got by a long shot. When the Wind Blows too. That movie pulls no punches.
Kinda wild that Moebius and Jodorowsky projects never managed to get an animation treatment over the years
FWIW, Moebius was the lead designer on "Masters of Time" (1982), did concept art for Dune, and probably worked on others, as well.
Disney’s peculiar business practices more or less mangled the feature length animation as serious art for decades. The damage they inflicted upon the animation industry is astonishing - lots of projects underperformed or died in pre-production because Disney conditioned mass audiences that animation is for kids and got the best infrastructure to corner the market.
Very good points. Indeed, I was arguing this stuff a couple weeks ago with Mental Edge (who posts the Moomins). I do think that while Walt was alive, his films were fine all-ages fare. Not to mention, he'd personally revolutionised the animation industry with his standards and dedication. But it's also true that over time, Disney's films drifted more and more towards outright pandering to money, via childish audiences. Really, it's been hard to watch one their classically animated films for decades, due to the facial expressions and reactions being so over the top, not to mention the usual gang of wise-ass characters present where none were needed, previously.
Anyway, I could go on, but wanted to throw a proper response out to your extensive comment.
Moebius also did The Fifth Element which is basically Valerian meets Incal (and quite glorious at that). My fave Moebius film work is the Nemo Adventure. It goes harder than it should.
The thing with Walt is that his negatives outweigh the positives BY A LOT. He fought his competition by playing as dirty as it gets.
He pushed out Sullivan Studios Felix The Cat by doing essentially Temu version of the character with Mickey Mouse.
Then he got screwed by Winkler Pictures and it led to copyright galore that still goes on even though the studio itself died a death soon after Walt raised a stink about copyright snatching. So he went scroched earth against post-Winkler Screen Gems and they never really managed to get into feature length market.
He screwed Van Beuren studios out from distribution and it killed the studio shorly after (these guys also did latter iteration of Felix the Cat, funnily enough this one was also one-upping Mickey Mouse).
The whole Iwerks mess - first he screwed Iwerks while they worked together, then Iwerks left to do his own thing so Walt bled him and bought his studio out of spite.
Harman-Ising is another story of petty low blows.
He went full on total war on Fleischer Studios and it got ugly even though Fleischer legacy is probably far deeper and far reaching than Disney ever got (basically the whole rotoscoping thing and adult animation template goes all the way back to their work).
He did the same to Walter Lantz because there can be only one Walt i guess.
Walt's response to 1941 Strike led to creation of UPA and Walt made sure it would be destined to stay in the television ghetto. As a result Hanna Barbera never even tried scaling up.
Walt tried to fight with Warners and got literally bitch slapped for once.
But don't worry - he blocked the Animal Farm adaptation in the american market and it made sure british animation would never really get going at scale.
He did the exclusive Technicolor deal that locked out everyone else from using the tech and it put a brake on the entire industry up until the TV resurgence in the 1950s.
Then he went copyright bullying over multiplane camera tech even though Disney didn't invent that thing - but he sure did bitch a lot about it.
Investing into CalArts more or less directed the talent pipeline straight into Disney.
Also Walt's Red Scare hysteria destroyed many careers because reasons. He threw Hilberman under a bus out of spite.
The way he treated Art Babbitt, the man who made Disney what it was was baffling. Same for Culhane and Tytla. The jealousy and racism towards Tyrus Wong was embarrasing.
The Oskar Fischinger debacle. So you hire the abstract visual music animation pioneer and then demote him to effects animator role with much of his work reworked into house style and then bully the guy into quitting because "fuck this guy". Can you imagine having Oskar motherfucking Fischinger in your company and not letting him cook?
Also the whole "BUT WE HAVE OSCARS SO WE BETTER" thing is just fucking annoying.
Interesting stuff, if on the horrid side. Where did you happen to learn about these things?
As I was following up just now to see if there was a "Behind the Bastards" ep on Disney, I discovered this fascinating comment: (yes, at the evil empire)
Me, I've traditionally tended to consider the impressive accomplishments of early and middle-period Disney without getting too much in to Walt himself. I knew he could be a bastard, but this stuff deserves a closer look IMO.
@[email protected],
I'm thinking you might be interested in the above comment I'm replying to.
As a result Hanna Barbera never even tried scaling up.
TBF, H-B was never founded with that direction in mind. If anything, they were all about finding ways to cut every little bit of unnecessary technique, steps and costs to become as absolutely efficient as possible while still maintaining a quality product. And it worked. At least, I think most of their 50's - 60's work was solid, if a bit on the vapid side at times.
Maybe H-B really did ponder the idea of scaling up, but at the same time, it seems like it would have been in diametrical opposition of their core philosophy, and that tends to be risky stuff in the world of business IMO. Still, if you have the evidence...
there's a book called Hollywood Cartoons - it's an extensive look at the american scene and Disney is basically a recurring villain. There's also a book by Neal Gabler about Walt. It is very funny because Gabler tries very hard to be neutral about Walt but it is kinda hard to do at times.
H-B applied Disney factory method to Terrytoons/Warner/Fleischer style cartoons and then wrangled it further into a very cost-effective production. It would've worked on feature length projects with the right tech and talent but most of it was literally locked with Disney - they had no means and they didn't wanted to start a fight they knew they couldn't win. Their only real shot to compete was in the 60s when they did Flintstones and Yogi Bear and Disney fatigue started to show its first signs but they chose to stay on TV and long-term it was better for them. In hindsight - they would've wiped the floor with Disney if they did Johnny Quest or Jetsons feature length sci-fi extravaganzas
Thanks for those details. Yeah, several people laud the Gabler book in that thread I linked above, and I like that approach of neutrality. The long comment mentioned proposes that Disney was indeed a bastard, but a bastard for different reasons than usually charged. For example, instead of being a cutthroat capitalist who coldly and cynically drained the life out of his colleagues and employees, instead he was a true visionary who was addicted to working on his passion projects, and in fact all-thumbs at finances. A naive political stooge who could be easily manipulated by his protegees, and highly sensitive when it came to his employees' perceived loyalty to him, a big part of his anti-union activities, evidently. The comment and the book also mention some positives about Walt, which I won't parrot here since I haven't actually read the Gabler one.
H-B did make the Yogi and Flintstones movies back then, so there are those. I have to think that if they'd been profitable-enough, they would have just kept going with that. I mean, why not?
they would’ve wiped the floor with Disney if they did Johnny Quest or Jetsons feature length sci-fi extravaganzas
I've watched a tonne more Venture Bros than I have Johnny Quest, so couldn't say on that one, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the Jetsons' viability. The original show only lasted one season, and it had nowhere near the depth and originality of the Flintstones. Basically just a way to briefly cash-in on Space Age mania. I've watched maybe 50%+ of the episodes, and they get pretty vapid pretty quickly, with nowhere-near the writing quality as on the Flintstones. I frankly don't think it would have been anything special as a movie, and turning it in to a 'SF extravaganza' would have been like reinventing the show, and that wasn't H-B at all.
Indeed, across their entire set of franchises, I'm really not sure they had many that were theatre-viable within that 50's-60's time-frame. So no, I don't really think they would've wiped the floor with *anybody* , much less Disney, which was vastly-better geared to do smash-hit animations. Just look at what 1966 held, the final year of Walt's life-- yes, that masterpiece called The Jungle Book.
true visionary that had a habit of crushing his competition with unfair business practices and weird fetish for hiring other visionaries and then defacing their work and relegating to secondary roles like what happened to Oskar Fischinger. Wasting his time on Fantasia only to change the whole thing was a bitch move. Dude did too much ugly shit to get any grace.
The Jungle Book is trash. It is technically sophisticated waste of source material. I don't like in-name-only adaptations that craps all over the source material because it work better with the audiences. If that's so - just do your thing - should've just changed the names instead of "mining the IP" if he didn't liked the book's message that much. The book is about survival and it gets quite grim getting its point across - so naturally instead of that we get a bunch of namechecking and some Broadway setpieces. It just makes "sense:. It is very hard to take any of the Disney movies seriously because they are quite bad at adapting their source material and more often than not they convey the opposite of what the source material was.
As for H-B - their fighting chance was with embracing New Hollywood and providing a total alternative to Disney. They showed they could do that with Yogi Bear and Flintstones - these movies are weird and inventive. Jetsons had their issues but they also had one thing that could keep them rolling - a setting and given the sea change by the mid 70s and the postmodern return of film serials (spearheaded by Star Wars and later Indiana Jones) - they could've morphed even more into proto-Futurama kind of sci-fi (or go full Lost in Space for the hell of it).
oh cool.
speaking of movies - the recent movie adaptation was so bad and it was kinda impressive how bad it gets. Like seriously - it is Exorcist 2 level of "why?"
Shōgun wasn't terrible or anything, but IMO was a significant downgrade over the original 1980 series. Some of the scenes were also fantastically ridiculous, such as Mariko trying to fight off a group of samurai preventing her master from leaving Osaka Castle.
The Willy Wonka one was interesting, but also a massive downgrade from the Gene Wilder original. They even managed to turn the original, adorably hilarious Oompa-Loompas into something out of a freak sci-fi novel.
I'm trying to think of others, but I guess my main problem with modern Hollywood remakes is that they generally pander towards whatever might make them the most money, usually leaning over-hard on special fX as a substitute for good writer, director and producer material / decisions.
Oh... LotR was certainly solid, but it too suffered from a certain amount of 'Hollywood BS,' and of course the Hobbit sequels were an outright disaster. As silly as the original Rankin-Bass one was, it had worlds-better characters & songs, and it knew how to tell a story efficiently, dammit.
Lastly, most of the Star Wars sequels skated on some very thin ice in terms of re-adapting original material and somehow making it worse almost every time. And utterly charmless. George (and Disney) sure missed Marcia Lucas with those...
yup
The most amazing part of this film for me is that it was done by the Toronto Second City crew. That means it stars Eugene Levy, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Harold Ramis. Just outstanding cheese.
featuring the greatest soundtrack of all time
TIL! So Ramis was Zeke, huh? I thought he did a good job with that, but Candy to me was unexpectedly great as Den. Really captured the spirit of a young man transported in to a big, muscled figure.
I saw this when I was very young and it has beena strong influence in my life and part of what made me want to be an artist!
cool. It took me a while to get my hands on the movie itself but we had a soundtrack at home and it was one of my gateway records.
To me, this and Bakshi's Fire and Ice a couple years later were revelations.
...That animation could be every bit as skillful, imaginative and powerful as classic Disney, without actually being Disney.
Rock & Rule is another one from that era. It goes hard. René Laloux did full on Metal Hurlant movie later in the decade too. Kinda wild that Moebius and Jodorowsky projects never managed to get an animation treatment over the years (although it is not like Incal or Airtight Garage really need it).
Disney's peculiar business practices more or less mangled the feature length animation as serious art for decades. The damage they inflicted upon the animation industry is astonishing - lots of projects underperformed or died in pre-production because Disney conditioned mass audiences that animation is for kids and got the best infrastructure to corner the market.
Bakshi was an outlier for a while but Fire and Ice was the end of his run - which is sad because the world needs FRAZETTAVERSE. Disney exile Don Bluth had some great and surprisingly mature stuff in the 80s (and Dragon's Lair is god tier immersive death simulator). The Last Unicorn follows the same vein as Bluth's movies but somehow even more somber. Lucas produced Twice Upon A Time and it is outstanding so naturally Lucas never really did anything like that ever again. Meanwhile Richard Williams never really had a chance but even in its mangled form The Thief and The Cobbler is marvelous. It took Tippett 40 odd years to finally get a proper feature done and his 80s dinosaur movie is ridiculously good.
Animal Farm is high watermark of non-Disney animated feature. As is Son of the White Mare. Martin Rosen's Watership Down and Plague Dogs are probably the best western animation ever got by a long shot. When the Wind Blows too. That movie pulls no punches.
That's at least half-a-dozen posts of interesting content, mate.
gotta get them posters then!
FWIW, Moebius was the lead designer on "Masters of Time" (1982), did concept art for Dune, and probably worked on others, as well.
Very good points. Indeed, I was arguing this stuff a couple weeks ago with Mental Edge (who posts the Moomins). I do think that while Walt was alive, his films were fine all-ages fare. Not to mention, he'd personally revolutionised the animation industry with his standards and dedication. But it's also true that over time, Disney's films drifted more and more towards outright pandering to money, via childish audiences. Really, it's been hard to watch one their classically animated films for decades, due to the facial expressions and reactions being so over the top, not to mention the usual gang of wise-ass characters present where none were needed, previously.
Anyway, I could go on, but wanted to throw a proper response out to your extensive comment.
Moebius also did The Fifth Element which is basically Valerian meets Incal (and quite glorious at that). My fave Moebius film work is the Nemo Adventure. It goes harder than it should.
You really like that phrase, don't you? 😁
i guess so. gotta find another one
The thing with Walt is that his negatives outweigh the positives BY A LOT. He fought his competition by playing as dirty as it gets.
He pushed out Sullivan Studios Felix The Cat by doing essentially Temu version of the character with Mickey Mouse. Then he got screwed by Winkler Pictures and it led to copyright galore that still goes on even though the studio itself died a death soon after Walt raised a stink about copyright snatching. So he went scroched earth against post-Winkler Screen Gems and they never really managed to get into feature length market. He screwed Van Beuren studios out from distribution and it killed the studio shorly after (these guys also did latter iteration of Felix the Cat, funnily enough this one was also one-upping Mickey Mouse). The whole Iwerks mess - first he screwed Iwerks while they worked together, then Iwerks left to do his own thing so Walt bled him and bought his studio out of spite. Harman-Ising is another story of petty low blows. He went full on total war on Fleischer Studios and it got ugly even though Fleischer legacy is probably far deeper and far reaching than Disney ever got (basically the whole rotoscoping thing and adult animation template goes all the way back to their work). He did the same to Walter Lantz because there can be only one Walt i guess. Walt's response to 1941 Strike led to creation of UPA and Walt made sure it would be destined to stay in the television ghetto. As a result Hanna Barbera never even tried scaling up. Walt tried to fight with Warners and got literally bitch slapped for once. But don't worry - he blocked the Animal Farm adaptation in the american market and it made sure british animation would never really get going at scale. He did the exclusive Technicolor deal that locked out everyone else from using the tech and it put a brake on the entire industry up until the TV resurgence in the 1950s. Then he went copyright bullying over multiplane camera tech even though Disney didn't invent that thing - but he sure did bitch a lot about it. Investing into CalArts more or less directed the talent pipeline straight into Disney. Also Walt's Red Scare hysteria destroyed many careers because reasons. He threw Hilberman under a bus out of spite. The way he treated Art Babbitt, the man who made Disney what it was was baffling. Same for Culhane and Tytla. The jealousy and racism towards Tyrus Wong was embarrasing. The Oskar Fischinger debacle. So you hire the abstract visual music animation pioneer and then demote him to effects animator role with much of his work reworked into house style and then bully the guy into quitting because "fuck this guy". Can you imagine having Oskar motherfucking Fischinger in your company and not letting him cook? Also the whole "BUT WE HAVE OSCARS SO WE BETTER" thing is just fucking annoying.
Interesting stuff, if on the horrid side. Where did you happen to learn about these things?
As I was following up just now to see if there was a "Behind the Bastards" ep on Disney, I discovered this fascinating comment: (yes, at the evil empire)
https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1biqbz7/hey_yeah_where_is_the_walt_disney_episode/kvn0clf/
Me, I've traditionally tended to consider the impressive accomplishments of early and middle-period Disney without getting too much in to Walt himself. I knew he could be a bastard, but this stuff deserves a closer look IMO.
@[email protected],
I'm thinking you might be interested in the above comment I'm replying to.
TBF, H-B was never founded with that direction in mind. If anything, they were all about finding ways to cut every little bit of unnecessary technique, steps and costs to become as absolutely efficient as possible while still maintaining a quality product. And it worked. At least, I think most of their 50's - 60's work was solid, if a bit on the vapid side at times.
Maybe H-B really did ponder the idea of scaling up, but at the same time, it seems like it would have been in diametrical opposition of their core philosophy, and that tends to be risky stuff in the world of business IMO. Still, if you have the evidence...
there's a book called Hollywood Cartoons - it's an extensive look at the american scene and Disney is basically a recurring villain. There's also a book by Neal Gabler about Walt. It is very funny because Gabler tries very hard to be neutral about Walt but it is kinda hard to do at times.
H-B applied Disney factory method to Terrytoons/Warner/Fleischer style cartoons and then wrangled it further into a very cost-effective production. It would've worked on feature length projects with the right tech and talent but most of it was literally locked with Disney - they had no means and they didn't wanted to start a fight they knew they couldn't win. Their only real shot to compete was in the 60s when they did Flintstones and Yogi Bear and Disney fatigue started to show its first signs but they chose to stay on TV and long-term it was better for them. In hindsight - they would've wiped the floor with Disney if they did Johnny Quest or Jetsons feature length sci-fi extravaganzas
Thanks for those details. Yeah, several people laud the Gabler book in that thread I linked above, and I like that approach of neutrality. The long comment mentioned proposes that Disney was indeed a bastard, but a bastard for different reasons than usually charged. For example, instead of being a cutthroat capitalist who coldly and cynically drained the life out of his colleagues and employees, instead he was a true visionary who was addicted to working on his passion projects, and in fact all-thumbs at finances. A naive political stooge who could be easily manipulated by his protegees, and highly sensitive when it came to his employees' perceived loyalty to him, a big part of his anti-union activities, evidently. The comment and the book also mention some positives about Walt, which I won't parrot here since I haven't actually read the Gabler one.
H-B did make the Yogi and Flintstones movies back then, so there are those. I have to think that if they'd been profitable-enough, they would have just kept going with that. I mean, why not?
I've watched a tonne more Venture Bros than I have Johnny Quest, so couldn't say on that one, but I'm not sure I agree with you about the Jetsons' viability. The original show only lasted one season, and it had nowhere near the depth and originality of the Flintstones. Basically just a way to briefly cash-in on Space Age mania. I've watched maybe 50%+ of the episodes, and they get pretty vapid pretty quickly, with nowhere-near the writing quality as on the Flintstones. I frankly don't think it would have been anything special as a movie, and turning it in to a 'SF extravaganza' would have been like reinventing the show, and that wasn't H-B at all.
Indeed, across their entire set of franchises, I'm really not sure they had many that were theatre-viable within that 50's-60's time-frame. So no, I don't really think they would've wiped the floor with *anybody* , much less Disney, which was vastly-better geared to do smash-hit animations. Just look at what 1966 held, the final year of Walt's life-- yes, that masterpiece called The Jungle Book.
true visionary that had a habit of crushing his competition with unfair business practices and weird fetish for hiring other visionaries and then defacing their work and relegating to secondary roles like what happened to Oskar Fischinger. Wasting his time on Fantasia only to change the whole thing was a bitch move. Dude did too much ugly shit to get any grace.
The Jungle Book is trash. It is technically sophisticated waste of source material. I don't like in-name-only adaptations that craps all over the source material because it work better with the audiences. If that's so - just do your thing - should've just changed the names instead of "mining the IP" if he didn't liked the book's message that much. The book is about survival and it gets quite grim getting its point across - so naturally instead of that we get a bunch of namechecking and some Broadway setpieces. It just makes "sense:. It is very hard to take any of the Disney movies seriously because they are quite bad at adapting their source material and more often than not they convey the opposite of what the source material was.
As for H-B - their fighting chance was with embracing New Hollywood and providing a total alternative to Disney. They showed they could do that with Yogi Bear and Flintstones - these movies are weird and inventive. Jetsons had their issues but they also had one thing that could keep them rolling - a setting and given the sea change by the mid 70s and the postmodern return of film serials (spearheaded by Star Wars and later Indiana Jones) - they could've morphed even more into proto-Futurama kind of sci-fi (or go full Lost in Space for the hell of it).
Oh btw, we're doing an interpretation of that. French-language, but I'm trying to help bring it to Anglo audiences:
https://piefed.social/c/eurographicnovels/p/1670736/miss-bangalore-is-not-backing-down-from-the-briliant-recent-animal-farm-update-series-4
oh cool. speaking of movies - the recent movie adaptation was so bad and it was kinda impressive how bad it gets. Like seriously - it is Exorcist 2 level of "why?"
I haven't seen a good re-adaptation in years.
Shōgun wasn't terrible or anything, but IMO was a significant downgrade over the original 1980 series. Some of the scenes were also fantastically ridiculous, such as Mariko trying to fight off a group of samurai preventing her master from leaving Osaka Castle.
The Willy Wonka one was interesting, but also a massive downgrade from the Gene Wilder original. They even managed to turn the original, adorably hilarious Oompa-Loompas into something out of a freak sci-fi novel.
I'm trying to think of others, but I guess my main problem with modern Hollywood remakes is that they generally pander towards whatever might make them the most money, usually leaning over-hard on special fX as a substitute for good writer, director and producer material / decisions.
Oh... LotR was certainly solid, but it too suffered from a certain amount of 'Hollywood BS,' and of course the Hobbit sequels were an outright disaster. As silly as the original Rankin-Bass one was, it had worlds-better characters & songs, and it knew how to tell a story efficiently, dammit.
Lastly, most of the Star Wars sequels skated on some very thin ice in terms of re-adapting original material and somehow making it worse almost every time. And utterly charmless. George (and Disney) sure missed Marcia Lucas with those...
Great flick!
it has something for everyone and also an alternate mix of Mob Rules