Word: cartoonable
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Instead of attacking the National Review for its facility with political cartoons, the staff should maybe consider the more important issue to which the cartoon points, namely the illegal and unethical actions at the highest reaches of our government...
...that animation has been recognized as art, it's time to remember that it has always been big business, bad business--Serious Business, to borrow the title of a helpful cartoon history by Stefan Kanfer, a former TIME film critic and senior editor. (The book is published by Scribner, which, oddly enough, has no cartoon division.) From the Jones, Canemaker and Kanfer works emerges a picture of the industry that might have been painted not by Disney but by Goya. It's compelling and instructive, and it ain't pretty...
...Cartoon directors are kids at heart, and the Warner aces (Jones, Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett) were brilliant kids, all in their 20s or early 30s, when they created Porky, Daffy and Bugs. Freleng was the anchor, making crisp vaudeville comedies. Clampett bent his stories and pummeled his characters into manic, surreal, endless inventive farce; his great period (1942-46) deserves a book of its own. Jones' films were about people--all right, barnyard critters, but human withal--who endured life's vithithitudes (as Daffy would say) with amazing grace and Charlie Chaplin's physical...
...bosses of these geniuses were, for the most part, miserly dolts who never tested positive for a sense of humor. Fred Quimby, boss of the mgm staff, disliked Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's first Tom 'n' Jerry cartoon so much he forbade them to make any other cat-and-mouse films--until exhibitors demanded more Tom 'n' Jerrys...
...even weirder at Warner. Harry Warner, the studio's money czar, said he knew nothing about his cartoon unit except that "we make Mickey Mouse." Leon Schlesinger, the stingy despot who ran the unit until 1944, would begin his viewing of dailies with a curt "Roll the garbage." Schlesinger did inspire his troops once: his lisp was the basis for Daffy Duck's voice. Schlesinger's successor, Eddie Selzer, hated the notion that his slaves might enjoy their work. He once sputtered, "What the hell has all this laughter to do with the making of animated cartoons...