Archives for June 30, 2004

“The scene in Mrs. Smythe Leigh’s living room, Charles sometimes thought afterwards, was one which must have repeated itself continuously in other places. Mrs. Smythe Leigh’s living room was an intellectual fortress and it stood for the larger world. As Mrs. Smythe Leigh told him later, there was no reason to get in a rut because one lived in Clyde. Clyde was a dear, poky place, full of dear people, but one could always open one’s windows to the world. One could bring something new to Clyde, and this was what she always tried to do…a few reproductions of modern pictures, a bit of Chinese brocade, a few records of Kreisler and Caruso, and the American Mercury and the New Republic and of course Harper’s and the Atlantic, and the New Statesman and L’Illustration. All one had to do was open one’s windows to the outer world–and the surprising thing was the number of congenial spirits who gathered if you did it. Sometimes, frankly, she had thought of giving up the Clyde Players. There was always the inertia, but the old guard, Dr. Bush and Katie Rowell, always rallied around her and would not let her give up. Once you had the smell of grease paint in your nostrils, you could never get away from it, and there was always that joy of getting out of oneself by interpreting character on the stage. Charles was a newcomer, but someday he might be the old guard, too.”

John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

From Something Old, Nothing New:

Roger Rabbit was the first movie to acknowledge the nostalgia element in cartoon fandom. What I mean by that is that cartoons had usually been thought of as “timeless”; the repackaging of Warner Brothers cartoons–for television and in compilation films–usually presented the cartoons as belonging to no particular time or place, endlessly recyclable entertainment aimed mostly at kids. Roger Rabbit, with its ’40s setting, presented classic cartoon characters as belonging specifically to that period, part of a genre that had vanished just like the film noir genre to which Bob Hoskins’ Eddie Valiant belongs. It acknowledged that cartoon fans weren’t necessarily kids, and that what made the old cartoons great were the elements that had been sucked out of them by TV broadcasting (the violence, the political incorrectness)….

I’ve never seen this put better, which is probably another way of saying that it tallies precisely with my own experience.

Prior to the release in 1988 of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I no longer watched animated cartoons save on the rare occasions when I found myself in a hotel room on a Saturday morning with nothing to do. Seeing Roger Rabbit reminded me–forcibly, immediately–of how much I’d loved those old cartoons, and also got me thinking for the first time about why I loved them. Never before had it occurred to me that they might possibly be a serious form of cinematic art, stylistically continuous with the great live-action screen comedies of the classic period of American filmmaking. Until then I’d simply thought of them as charming commodities, even though my memories of One Froggy Evening or Bully for Bugs were at least as vivid and accessible as my memories of, say, His Girl Friday (more so, in fact, since they were a part of my youth in the way that live-action screwball comedy was not). What Roger Rabbit did was put a frame around those memories and make them available for critical reconsideration.

The next step was up to me, and I took it with a vengeance: I started reading such books about non-Disney animation as were then available, and seeking out the uncensored collections of Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons that had only just started to appear on videocassette. So did a lot of other people, which is one reason why the various all-animation cable networks now make a point of telecasting classic cartoons seven days a week. Sixteen years later, I know at least as much about animation as I do about any other branch of filmmaking, and take it every bit as seriously. I even own a cel set-up from The Cat Concerto, which hangs on my kitchen wall right around the corner from my Neil Welliver woodcut.

As for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I recently watched it on DVD, and found it as smart and funny as I did when it was released. It’s more than just a staggeringly well-executed series of special-effects gimmicks driven by nostalgia: it’s aesthetically compelling in its own right. If it hadn’t been so good, I don’t think it would have rekindled my love of cartoons, or anyone else’s. And if you haven’t seen it recently, or at all, I suggest you do so. Of all the films released in 1988, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being the one that’s best remembered in 2038.

I’ve been doing some long-needed repairs on “Sites to See” (knocking off dead blogs, updating links, etc.). I decided that a few sites were in the wrong sections, and moved them to the right ones. In the course of doing all this, it occurred to me that it might be time once again to explain how the blogs and sites listed in “Sites to See” are arranged:

– The first section of “Sites to See” contains blogs that are wholly or mostly about the arts (like “About Last Night”).

– The second section contains non-blog Web sites that supply useful art-related information.

– The third section directs you to the arts-related pages of major newspaper and magazine Web sites (including the on-line archives of certain critics). It also contains a few Web sites maintained by individual writers which are not blogs but nonetheless are art-relevant.

– The fourth section contains blogs not about the arts that Our Girl and/or I visit regularly or semi-regularly.

In case you don’t know, “About Last Night” is hosted by artsjournal.com, the daily digest of English-language news stories and commentary about the arts. To visit artsjournal.com (which you should do each morning without fail), click on the logo in the upper left-hand corner of this page. In addition to “About Last Night,” artsjournal.com hosts several other art and culture blogs, all of which are listed separately in the bottom module of the right-hand column. They’re worth visiting, too.

All of which reminds me: please drop us a line if there’s a blog or Web site not listed in “Sites to See” that you think ought to be there. We promise to take a look, sooner or later.