After almost 11 years as a work-in-progress, It’s the Cat finally sees the light of day. © Mark Kausler.

It’s the Cat
Ub Iwerks lives on in It’s the Cat, a short by Mark Kausler that is finally making its festival debut after a decade and a half in a work-in-progress limbo of private screenings for lucky industry professionals. Kausler has been animating his short on the sly during production lulls on nearly a dozen traditional-animation day jobs, mainly for Disney. During downtime while on the payroll of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Oliver and Company and Beauty and the Beast, Kausler drew his way through It’s the Cat one scene at a time. He was still pushing his pencil off-hours while at the drawing table for Osmosis Jones a decade later — and then producer Greg Ford flew his production savvy and completion funds, into the mix so Kausler could finally deliver a finished product last year.

It’s the Cat was traditionally animated in glorious 2D. To try to nail down the plot of this wisp of whimsy would be like bronzing a kite, so suffice it to say there’s this cat, see, and it’s walking on a fence, and annoying a dog, and flying off into the stratosphere like a helicopter, and pouncing, and annoying three blind mice. There are sunny backyards and scary shadows thrown onto high buildings. There are bricks and there is a garden hose. Also a rubber duck, a wading pool and small chunks of moon rock. The short is in color, but the elementary design catalog of circles and ellipses and the tone of gentle anarchy are straight out of the early black-and-white sound era. The music is vintage, too — a catchy hot-jazz toe-tapper from banjo baron Harry Reser and his Syncopators.

(Not to digress, but I should mention a trend I see forming. You’re aware, of course, that cute little bunnies are a virtual guarantor of success in animated filmmaking — witness the examples set by Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me, Make Mine Shoebox, and, of course, The Shining in 30 Seconds. What you may not have known, but should now realize, is that a hot jazz soundtrack will bring the same results. You can’t lose if it’s Trad, Dad, as proved in recent years by such offerings as the Nastuk/Persi animated version of the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ The Ghost of Stephen Foster, Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh’s short, Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose, and David Stone’s nukes-on-the-family-farm adaptation of the Bonzo Dog Band’s Jollity Farm from 1991.)

Between majoring in fine arts at Kansas City Art Institute and earning a degree from Chouinard Art Institute in 1970, Kausler managed to earn a credit as assistant animator on Yellow Submarine. In the decades since, his many credits as animator include the “Maybelline” segment in Ralph Bakshi’s Heavy Traffic, Brad Bird’s “Family Dog” episode of Amazing Stories, the 1990 Mickey Mouse short, The Prince and the Pauper, the Happy Happy Joy Joy song from Ren & Stimpy and “Pomp and Circumstance” from Fantasia/2000.

Kausler’s savior Greg Ford has been cheerleading for animation for 20 years in non-fiction venues, as well as directing new animated product. His credits as director include Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, The Duxorcist and Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers. As producer he was responsible for two must-have music CDs in every animation fan’s collection, volumes one and two of The Carl Stalling Project: as well as the feature-length documentaries Freleng Frame-by-Frame and Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. You have (1) new messages in mailbox (1).