Though his popularity lasted less than a decade, Felix the Cat remains one of the seminal figures in pre-sound animation. The mischievous, clever cat appeared in over 150 animated shorts throughout the 1920s, many of which served to influence an entire generation of animators to come. The origins of the character have long been questioned,…
This week, each of your True Classics crew members has shared her own “movie memories,” ranging from the classics to the not-so-much-but-still-wonderful films that we love. Today we wrap up our second annual Movie Memories celebration (and return to our long-running Saturday Morning Cartoons series) with Brandie’s recollections. We didn’t go to the movies very…
We’ve talked previously on this blog about the influence of cartoonist/animation pioneer Winsor McCay, but I’m going to mention it again (and again and again and again), as it would be nearly impossible to overstate his importance in promoting animation as a viable artistic medium. Films like Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) directly inspired countless…
Ralph Phillips is bored, bored, bored. While his schoolmates mindlessly chant their math lesson (“Two and two is four. Four and four is eight …”), Ralph stares dreamily out the classroom window, imagining himself as a bird, flipping and flying freely through the sky–until his reverie is rudely interrupted by his teacher. She, for some…
After Warner Bros. terminated his long-term contract in 1962, Chuck Jones moved on to MGM, producing a series of cartoons featuring that studio’s famed pair, Tom and Jerry. Jones’ time wasn’t completely consumed by the antics of the cat and mouse, however; the animator/director worked on several other projects for the studio, one of which–The…
Just a warning: this post is brought to you by the letter “X” and his two friends who are–funnily enough–also named “X.” (This is my roundabout way of telling you that there may be what we will politely term “delicate content” in this post, and if you are easily offended by pornography, you may want…
As recounted in Stefan Kanfer’s fantastic history of animation, Serious Business (1997), early in 1933, Walt Disney gave a personal tour of the Disney animation studio to movie star Mary Pickford. Disney was considering making a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland with Pickford in the title role, and in fact shot some test footage of the actress…
One of the most entertaining cartoons to come out of the 1990s features a trio of sweet little girls named Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup … and despite their cutesy names, they just happen to be some seriously ass-whoopin’ superheroes. Those girls–originally called The Whoopass Girls before being renamed as the more family-friendly Powerpuff Girls–were created by Craig…
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