![]() Bimbo: " What a pippin!" ( Bimbo's Initation).Bimbo: " Hello, beautiful!" ( Bimbo's Express).Bimbo: " Boop-Poo-Pah-Doop-Boop!" ( Dizzy Dishes). ![]() Is Snow White the quintessential/best/your favorite Betty Boop cartoon, or would you give that honor to another? What's your favorite gag from the film? What other "fractured fairy tales" would you put in the same class (I have one more coming up on this list myself.Track down the blu-ray if you want more it looks superb. The film is also available on various Betty Boop collections, though at the moment Netflix DVD seems to have reverted them all to the dreaded "Saved" category. A sharp HD transfer was finally uploaded to YouTube a year ago, befitting its bustling compositions.However, if you haven't seen the film before skip that upload and check out. I paid visual tribute to Snow White in 2010, with a series of screen-caps followed by the video on YouTube.I discovered Snow White on AugI can confirm the date because I commented under the great Acidemic blog post by Erich Kuersten and registered my immediate astonishment: "that just may be the best cartoon I've ever seen." Then I immediately watched it again. I don't just mean vocal performance either Calloway's memorable dance was rotoscoped so that every move we see is his own, giving this loose, rubbery cartoon an uncanny sense of weight at its center. James" is such a fantastic Calloway performance. I adore all the details that fly by so fast you have to watch the film several times to catch them all - Snow White has the spontaneous energy and dazzling brilliance of an in-the-moment jazz improvisation, even though we know Crandall probably labored endlessly over each image. I love how it reinvents a well-known fable while just barely hitting each story point (Snow White's encounter with the dwarfs is compressed into a few seconds, as her ice-entombed form slides through their hut and they carry her out the back). Classics like Minnie the Moocher and Bimbo's Initiation ("Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?") are also worth shouting out, but pound-for-pound this may be the masterpiece. There's incredible verve and wit to all the early Betty Boop cartoons (the Code killed the Boop magic, although the series limped on for another five years). The result is remarkable, every frame stuffed with hilariously random invention. Produced by the Fleischer brothers, it was largely the work of animator Roland Crandall who, according to Wikipedia, was given free reign to create this stream-of-consciousness cartoon by his own hand (which took half a year). Packing one hell of a punch at seven minutes and seven seconds (one for each dwarf), the 1933 Snow White beat its more famous companion by four years. On second thought, maybe these two films are pretty different. ![]() Most memorable of all is the music these films share - hallmarks of Sing-A-Long Song videotapes cherished by millennial children, in which the bouncing ball struggles to keep up with Cab Calloway in clown/ghost drag, lamenting his dead lover while his head detaches and becomes a giant bottle of "boooooze." The two Snow Whites also depict our heroine's escape from execution in similar fashion: the queen's knights destroy their weapons before brawling with the tree stump on which they were going to chop off her head, punching and kicking the scowling block of wood as it wraps its roots around them like tentacles. Not the Snow White you were expecting to see here? True, Betty Boop's version of the Grimm tale isn't exactly identical to the Disney feature, but there really are quite a lot of similarities! Both display the Evil Queen's jealousy when she discovers that Betty, er, Snow White is the "fairest in the land" by honing in on her face, with its wide eyes and bulbous nose, as it morphs into a frying pan with two sizzling eggs.Roland Crandall) appeared at #37 on my original list. ![]() The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Snow White (1933/USA/ani.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |