There's a popular story, attributed* to Carl Sagan, where, when asked whether the music of Bach should be included on the Voyager Golden Record**, he replied, "No, that would just be showing off."
Well, apparently aliens did get to hear of Bach. And they like him too. Have a listen:
* Actually this little story features in an essay by a guy called Lewis Thomas
** The phonograph records that contained various sights and sounds of Earth and were sent out on the Voyager spacecraft
When done well, animated cartoons have always appealed to the engineer in me. I don't mean as childish entertainment, nor as films in their own right - though they are appealing in both these regards too. I mean as an expression of visual art. As drawings, as paintings. I suppose what really appeals to me is the fact that there is something like an objective standard to which I can compare each frame in the animation, viz., the immediately preceding and succeeding frames. Not only must each frame appeal by itself, it must also look almost like the ones on either side - thereby proving the ability of the artist to be consistent. It is a particular skill that most other visual art forms don't necessarily require. I know that, in this day and age of computerisation, that consistency is no longer so demanding as it once was. In many ways, it has even become trivial. But that doesn't diminish the impressiveness of the cartoonists of the pre-computerised animation era. And in that era, no one did it better than Disney.
Now, I'm not an artist, nor do I claim to have a connaisseur's fine sense of the artistic. But I do know what looks 'pretty'. And Disney's cartoons were that. In an age when the many competing cartoons' visuals were only functionally good, Disney was taking pains to make its cartoons really visually memorable. This is obvious even in films that are supposed to be a few minutes' entertainment for toddlers:
But when they were asked to let their hair down, as they were for Fantasia, Disney's artists were simply superb. Again, I don't know whether it is any 'serious' art critic's idea of art (by which I mean I know it's not), but it is mine. Have a look:
Disney's 'Snow White', which was shown first in 1937, was a landmark achievement in the history of cinema. As the first feature length, fully animated film, it showed everyone that such a film was possible and could be a commercial success too. And in an age without computer graphics, it must have been a Godsent revelation for movies that needed special effects. Upto that point, anyone wanting to depict a centaur, say, would have to show two chaps in half a horse suit. No matter how accomplished the actors, that's just not going to work for anything other than the most ribald of slapstick sketches. And I'm sure everyone will agree that it takes something of the gravitas away from a film when the devil in a Faust adaptation is seen wearing a rope up his arse for a tail and twigs for horns. Animated cartoons solve the problem beautifully. Since the mundane and ordinary is depicted using the same pseudo-realistic drawings that depict the fantastic, everything blends and nothing jars or feels out of place. Take a look, for instance, at this centaur courtship:
This begs a question:
Disney had a lot of rivals (HB, Warner Bros, etc...). Why did none of them make full length animated films as often as Disney, or with the same level of visual artistry !?! And why didn't people who wanted to make fantasies use full length feature films more often !?!
