Animation
World Magazine, Issue 2.4, July1997
Serious Business: Serious Book?
Book Review by Mark Kausler
Oh! My
achin' eyeballs! Now, there's yet another new book on the animated cartoon,
Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America From
Betty Boop to Toy Story, by Stefan Kanfer and published by Scribner.
I think I'll put it on the shelf next to the spate of other recent "dubious
achievements" spawned by the animation boom; Enchanted Drawings,
The Fifty Greatest Cartoons, Seven Minutes, Cartoon Monikers, Animating
Culture and Walt Disney, The Dark Prince of Hollywood. All of
these books share common problems: they are poorly researched, often paraphrased
from seminal books on animation, they consistently misspell names, they
mix-up film descriptions by often mis-matching titles and plots and the
proper chronology of events is often disregarded. Worst of all, the books
are often hatched from a premise that was not worth writing about in the
first place, or paid for by big corporations as promotion devices.
The title Serious Business led me to believe the book might cover
the business side of animation, history reflected through numbers, and
include profit and loss statements, salary highs and lows for animators
and other creative workers, and reports on profit participation by producers.
I'd love to know if Leon Schlesinger or Fred Quimby got any kickbacks or
percentages of their operating budgets, and how much! Instead we get a
book that tries to squeeze the entire history of the animated cartoon into
235 pages, and yet falls far short of any real understanding of the medium.
Being a friend of Chuck Jones, Kanfer makes sure that Chuck's favorite
story about the inspiration behind Daffy Duck's voice (Leon Schlesinger's
very pronounced lisp), gets printed not only on page 94, but also on the
inside flap of the dust jacket. Of course Chuck has already told the story
in loving detail in Chuck Amuck, and it makes an amusing anecdote, however,
existing recordings of Leon's voice (Schlesinger Christmas Party Reels,
l938-39, and You Ought to Be in Pictures, which Kanfer erroneously
believes that Bob Clampett directed instead of Friz Freleng) indicate that
if there is a lisp there, it is barely detectable. Keith Scott, linguist
and voice performer whose excellent book on Jay Ward awaits publication,
is my expert witness on this "lisping Leon" business. Keith has
such a sensitive ear for human speech that he was able to figure out who
did Screwy Squirrel's voice (Wally Maher) when no other animation scholar
could crack the mystery. He too is unable to discern Leon's lisp from the
existing sound recordings.
Sloppy Research
Kanfer, because of obviously sloppy research,
repeats and perpetuates errors such as Leslie Cabarga's delusion about
the lyrics that Louis Armstrong sings in Fleischer's I'll Be Glad When
You're Dead, You Rascal You. If you listen to the soundtrack, Louis
clearly states: "You bought my wife a bottle of Coca-Cola, so you
could play on her Victrola ." Cabarga, in his book The Fleischer Story,
quotes it as: "so you could play on her vagola." Obviously this
story appeals to prurient interest, but it's phony. If Kanfer had checked
the cartoon, he wouldn't have repeated Cabarga's error. Kanfer loves to
point out sexy gags wherever he can find them, and seems scandalized by
so-called "racism" in American entertainment. Here, he belabors
the obvious. The history of popular American entertainment is loaded with
sexy jokes, minstrelsy and jokes at the enemy's expense during World Wars.
These vintage jokes may only be fit for the memory hole, and too outrageous
for today's delicate sensibilities, nevertheless they were told. They are
part of American history. To cast aspersions and vilify the animated cartoons
and their makers for being part of the humor of their times is short-sighted.
Many of the films he talks about, such as Der Fuerher's Face and
You're a Sap, Mr. Jap , have been withdrawn from distribution for
years, and studios often refuse access to these titles even to researchers.
It seems to me that the end result of all this finger pointing about racism
will be that these cartoons will be even more mercilessly censored and
locked up like some vile pornography, when the caricatures in them were
seldom intended to be mean to anyone; they were created to entertain an
audience.
Kanfer not only errs in quoting sloppy authors, but he fails to understand
chronology. On page 194, he quotes Freleng's disgust with network television,
then accuses him of being "part of the problem." You see Friz
is a dreaded Capitalist. He made pro-business films for the Sloane Foundation,
apparently after Warner Bros. closed their animation department. If you
look at the facts, By Word of Mouse was made in 1954, eight years
before Warner's closed. Kanfer quotes Norman M. Klein (dubious achiever
and author of Seven Minutes ) that the sinister message here is
about the "changing role of cartoons, from film toward more obviously
consumer-driven television." Actually, The Sloane Foundation would
put up more than just the cartoon's negative cost if their message about
the American business system could be included in the story. Friz did not
choose to do this; the deal was between Warner Bros. and Sloane. The statement
Warners seems to be making here is "if above-the-line profits can
be made, make 'em!"
When Did That Happen?
As further evidence of Kanfer's disregard for
chronology, on page 115, he states that "Daffy Duck was the studio's
(Leon Schlesinger) answer to Woody Woodpecker." This simple sentence
shows a regrettable lack of understanding. Daffy made his debut in Porky's
Duck Hunt (1937), which Kanfer thinks (page 116) is Bugs Bunny's first
cartoon. Woody didn't appear until 1940 in Knock-Knock. "Daffy
was Leon's answer to Woody," sounds like some more of that "retroactive
plagiarism" that Chuck Jones likes to talk about. Woody is more of
an echo of the Crazy Rabbit that appeared in Ben Hardaway's Porky's
Hare Hunt and Hare-um Scare-um. When Ben moved over to Lantz
in 1940, he took the notion of a crazy character with the 'Ha-Ha-Ha-Haaaa-Ha!'
laugh and made it a woodpecker instead of a rabbit. Mel Blanc supplied
the laugh for both characters. To further damage his credibility, on page
117, Kanfer thinks that Bugs says "What's Up, Doc?" in Porky's
Hare Hunt and that Avery directed it! He is also under the impression
that the line "Of course you realize this means war!" became
part of Bugs Bunny's vocabulary in later years, when in fact Ben Hardaway's
Crazy Rabbit used the line in his first picture, Porky's Hare Hunt
(1938)!
Let's see, what other Deviltry seems to affect Kanfer's book? Page 154:
Art Babbitt's name was supposedly "expunged from the credits of Snow
White and all the other films he had worked on, as well as any related
printed materials..." Well, at last check, Art's name (spelled correctly,
which Kanfer can't seem to do) is still on the credits of Snow White,
and his name is still on all the studio lists that name all of the animators
on Disney cartoons. So, Walt's "order" must have been ignored.
On page 189, he seems to think that Hanna-Barbera's system of "planned
animation" used a dialog system that "ignored" consonants!
A mouth system with only vowel sounds would have the character speaking
with its mouth open all the time. The Hanna-Barbera mouth drawings
might have been redundant, but they did include both opened and
closed positions! On page 143, Kanfer has Dave Fleischer directing Slay
It With Flowers at Paramount. Dave Fleischer produced Slay It With
Flowers in l944, at Columbia's Screen Gems cartoon studio, after the
Fleischer Bros. studio was closed by Paramount. Bob Wickersham directed
it for him. Kanfer also implies that Dave Fleischer continued to direct
Popeye and Superman shorts during his involvement with Fox and Crow.
Kanfer seems unaware of the history of Columbia's cartoon studio which
was founded by Charles Mintz in 1929. It gets no mention at all until Frank
Tashlin takes it over and that isn't until page 131.
Then there's the "revisionist" spelling of proper names such
as "Seamus" instead of Shamus Culhane, Bob "McKimpson"
instead of McKimson, and Eddie "Seltzer" instead of... Well,
you get the idea.
The Looking Glass is Dirty
Kanfer summarizes his book this way: " To
watch these funny pictures...is actually to peer into a distorted looking
glass that catches the light and gives back pictures of ourselves."
Yet, when cartoonists really do give us a distorted picture of ourselves,
Kanfer is uncomfortable. The book's tone smacks more of The National
Enquirer than The Saturday Review. Kanfer incessantly quotes
from Walt Disney, The Dark Prince of Hollywood, as if it was all
true, instead of a collection of everybody's favorite `Horrible Stories
About Walt,' many of which are hearsay and unsubstantiated. He finds creeping
capitalists and racists and makers of mediocrity behind every tree, but
he reveals very little about the artists who created the films this book
is supposedly about. He mainly quotes Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng; almost
nobody else gets to speak. Because of his close alliance with Chuck Jones,
history gets a lot of Jones-friendly interpretation. To dismiss Hanna and
Barbera's entire Tom and Jerry series as "mediocrity,"
seems to serve Jones very well. After all, the failure of Chuck's version
of Tom and Jerry is justified, the characters he had to work with were
never that good. He makes sure that Chuck gets full credit for Hell
Bent For Election and The Dover Boys. John Hubley and Bobe Cannon
are never mentioned. Chuck also gets the credit for the dubious achievement
of creating the market for "re-drawn and painted cels" in the
1970's. This "market" was really developed jointly by Disney,
Lantz, Hanna and Barbera, Friz Freleng, Shamus Culhane and Chuck Jones
as a way of cashing in on the animation art boom that occurred in the 1980's.
Chuck doesn't like animation historians very much. In his new book he likens
them to "hemstitchers." If great historians of the animated cartoon
like Mike Barrier, Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck, John Canemaker, Keith Scott,
Milton Gray and Will Friedwald are hemstitchers, then they have sewn beautiful
garments that flatter their subjects. Kanfer and his ilk mainly sew smothering
patchwork blankets that cover their subject without revealing it.
Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from
Betty Boop to Toy Story. by Stefan Kanfer. New York: Scribner, 1997.
256 pages, illustrated. Trade paperback, $27.95; ISBN: 0-684-80079-9.
Mark Kausler is an animator who has been working in the industry for
25 years. He is currently working at Walt Disney Feature Animation on Fantasia
2000.
