La belle au bois dormant (1935)

LA BELLE AU BOIS DORMANT (1935)
aka Sleeping Beauty
Article 5235 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-21-2016
Directed by Alexander Alexeieff
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Freaked-out fairy tale

A prince journeys through a castle to find and waken Sleeping Beauty.

If yesterday’s movie was a somewhat inconsequential entry in Alexeieff’s oeuvre, this one is not. It’s a surreal but balletic puppet animation telling of the climax of the Sleeping Beauty story, with rather trippy and somewhat abstract moments. In some ways, Alexeieff comes off here as a slightly less grotesque version of Wladyslaw Starewicz, but the style has a very different feel to it. I really can’t describe this one, and it doesn’t really work on a linear level; it plays with its various ideas, and even throws in characters from other fairy tales; Puss in Boots and Red Riding Hood pop up. This marks the third Alexeieff movie I’ve seen, and all three of them have proven to be very different from each other. I look forward to seeing more of his work.

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Nocturne (1954)

NOCTURNE (1954)
Ariticle 5234 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-21-2016
Directed by Alexander Alexeieff and Georges Violet
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Animated blanket advertisement

A butterfly represents the ideal body temperature for sleeping.

At the time this short/advertisement was passed on to me, I was told that that it was perhaps the least interesting work from animator Alexeieff as well as the one with the least fantastic content. Now, I’ve had one other encounter with Alexeieff in my cinematic journeys (NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN from 1933), so I know how interesting he can get. This one consists mostly of a fluttering stop-motion butterfly whose only function is to represent 37 degrees Centigrade, the ideal body temperature for sleeping; it’s a blanket commercial. If this doesn’t sound compelling… well, it isn’t. The butterfly is well animated, but without anything to really do, it never rises above what it is. And, for that matter, an animated fluttering butterfly hardly qualifies for fantastic content, either.

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A Nymph of the Waves (1900)

A NYMPH OF THE WAVES (1900)
Article 5233 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-20-2016
Director unknown
Featuring Catarino Bartho
Country: USA
What it is: Not much

A woman dances while superimposed waves roll by.

Pardon me while I kick myself. This short is listed as a 1903 movie in the Walt Lee guide. When I searched on the title on IMDB, I found a movie from 1900 and one from 1903; naturally, I chose the one with the matching date. Since the 1903 listing has a handful of votes on IMDB, I did several searches for the movie over the years and found myself frustrated because all the hits I found on the movie turned out to be the 1900 movie of the same title; after a while, I got very annoyed with this. Finally, the movie was about to hop into my “ones that got away” list, and while preparing the write-up for it, I went back and double-checked the Walt Lee guide for the nature of its fantastic content. It was only then that I realized something. Though the Walt Lee guide listed the 1903 date, the cast list and company name didn’t match the IMDB movie; instead, they matched that of the title listed for 1900. So, for three years or more, I’ve been hunting for the wrong movie and getting annoyed at the fact that I’ve been only been finding the right movie. And, to top it all off, what does the movie consist of? Nothing but a dancing girl superimposed over rolling waves. That’s it! Okay, maybe she’s supposed to be a nymph, but I can’t think of a bigger cheat in terms of its fantastic content since I covered ELLA LOLA A LA TRILBY.

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Les exploits de Feu-Follet (1912)

LES EXPLOITS DE FEU-FOLLET (1912)
aka Nipper’s Transformations
Article 5232 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-19-2016
Directed by Emile Cohl
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Animated film

An animated man has several stream-of-consciousness adventures.

This short movie made it to my hunt list under the title of NIPPER’S TRANSFORMATIONS, where it languished until it dropped off into my “ones that got away” list. Then a friend of mine tracked down that the movie was actually a retitled copy of this animated short by Emile Cohl. If you’re familiar with Cohl’s work, it won’t surprise you to find out that it’s mostly a plotless stream-of-consciousness excursion into mutating animated objects, though it does follow something of a story in the middle where the title character takes a balloon to the moon but ends up swallowed by a fish in the ocean. I myself enjoy Cohl’s work, but I can see it boring some people, but since the short is only four minutes long, it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

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Have You Got Any Castles? (1938)

HAVE YOU GOT ANY CASTLES? (1938)
Article 5231 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-17-2016
Directed by Frank Tashlin and Friz Freleng
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc, the Four Blackbirds, Delos Jewkes
Country: USA
What it is: Warner Brothers musical cartoon

Books come to life and perform swingin’ musical numbers.

I think Warner Brothers tried this concept several times; books come to life (usually in punning ways) and perform musical numbers. It’s definitely a fantasy concept, but it does get some extra horror credentials right off the bat when we get Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, the Phantom of the Opera and the Frankenstein monster performing a rinky-dink little dance that includes playing patty-cake with each other. Books that have been adapted into movies will often feature caricatures of the performers; Charles Laughton appears in “Mutiny on the Bounty”, William Powell shows up in “The Thin Man”, etc. It may be minor Warner Brothers animation, but it’s still a bit of fun. I’ve had public domain versions of this one for years, but for this one, I chose to watch the version released in one of the Warner Brothers cartoon collections and discovered that there’s extra footage missing from the others; namely, opening and closing sequence involving a Town Crier.

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That Man is Pregnant! (1972)

THAT MAN IS PREGNANT! (1972)
aka The Broad Coalition
Article 5230 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-16-2016
Directed by Simon Nuchterm
Featuring William Reilly, Anita Morris, Sloane Shelton
Country: USA
What it is: Pregnant man comedy

A cop’s girlfriend becomes involved with a women’s liberation group, and it complicates his life. When he’s sent to infiltrate the home of the women’s lib group, he becomes an experimental subject for one of the residents…

This is the third comedy I’ve seen about a pregnant man for this series. Personally, I’m surprised there are so many. Sure, it does have a few comic possibilities, but I think a single episode of a thirty-minute TV sitcom would be enough to exhaust them; I don’t think the concept has enough going for it to fill a single movie, much less three. Maybe that’s why the pregnancy angle doesn’t come into play in the movie until it’s almost two-thirds over; up to that point, it’s mostly peppered with scenes with the cop and his girlfriend, the cop and his fellow cops, and the girlfriend and her friends in the feminist organization. I’m not surprised at the feminist angle in the movie; after all, the whole concept of a pregnant man seems like a feminist dream designed to cause a man to understand what a woman goes through. However, I’d hardly call this a feminist movie; the members of the women’s lib organization are portrayed to these eyes as buffoons, and the lesson they intended to teach is largely there to be exploded. I do somewhat admire (from a distance) the style of the movie, as it feels as if much of the dialogue is improvised in a Robert Altman style; unfortunately, it doesn’t do it very well and the end result is a mixture of the obvious and the merely odd. I wonder how many more of these movies I’m destined to see.

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The Haunted Bedroom (1913)

THE HAUNTED BEDROOM (1913)
Article 5229 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-15-2016
Director unknown
Featuring Herbert Prior, Mabel Trunnelle, Augustus Phillips
Country: USA
What it is: Ghost drama

A young couple wishes to marry, but the father of the young man will not agree unless the young woman can produce a dowry of ten thousand francs. She manages to raise one of two thousand, and her brother, a gambler, vows to quickly turn it into ten thousand. He does so, but incurs the wrath of criminals, hides out in a hotel room, hides the money, and then dies. Will the woman ever get her dowry?

It doesn’t say so in the description above, but the rest of the plot involves the ghost of the dead brother fulfilling his promise to get the dowry to his sister. This is one that ended up on my “ones that got away” list, but popped up on YouTube afterwards. It’s an okay drama, but it’s a little on the dull side at least as far as this presentation goes; the movie is hand-cranked and I suspect is somewhat slower than it would be otherwise. It is nice to encounter an early silent in which the ghost is not faked, like so many of them were. Once you get past the exposition, the story is fairly predictable.

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Hare Tonic (1945)

HARE TONIC (1945)
Article 5228 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-14-2016
Directed by Chuck Jones
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan
Country: USA
What it is: Bugs Bunny Cartoon

Elmer buys Bugs at the market in order to use him as an ingredient in wabbit stew. Bugs counters by convincing Elmer he carries a contagious disease called “rabbititus”.

It’s interesting to compare this Bugs and Elmer cartoon with THE HARE-BRAINED HYPNOTIST from a couple of days ago. In that one at one point, Elmer is hypnotized to believe he is a rabbit, while in this one, he fears that the dread disease will turn him into a rabbit. This one is the better cartoon; it features a number of gags in which Bugs bamboozles Elmer into believing he’s contracted the disease (including a version of the mirror gag in which Elmer sees Bugs as his reflection), a sequence in which Bugs plays a character named Dr. Kilpatient, and a final gag which breaks the fourth wall by having Bugs tricking the audience into thinking they’ve got the disease. Outside of the talking animal detail, I suppose the fake disease could push this one into fantastic territory, though I’ll admit that’s a stretch. However, there is a sequence while Bugs is having a fit where he transforms himself into a robotic version of the Frankenstein monster for a few seconds, so that gives it a little more content. This is a fine entry in the Bugs/Elmer series.

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The Golden Touch (1935)

THE GOLDEN TOUCH (1935)
Article 5227 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-13-2016
Directed by Walt Disney
Featuring the voice of Billy Bletcher
Country: USA
What it is: Disney Silly Symphony

A greedy king is given the ability to have everything he touches turn to gold by an elf, but he discovers the power is a curse.

Here’s a musical cartoon version of the famous story of King Midas, and if you’re familiar with it, there’s not a whole lot of surprises here in the plot. The opening song about gold is fun, though, and the story even has some touches of horror when he begins to see visions of death surrounding him when he discovers he is unable to eat. It’s also quite well animated; in fact, this short would be the last time that Walt Disney would hold the directorial reins himself. However, Disney himself hated the short and refused to talk about it, which is probably why it was his last one as a director. It’s a decent enough cartoon, but not one of the studio’s best.

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The Hare-Brained Hypnotist (1942)

THE HARE-BRAINED HYPNOTIST (1942)
Article 5226 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-12-2016
Directed by Friz Freleng
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan
Country: USA
What it is: Bugs Bunny Cartoon

Elmer Fudd seeks to defeat Bugs by using hypnosis, but Bugs proves to be a rather tough case… and also knows hypnosis.

You know, whenever I cover a cartoon and say that the fantastic content consists of talking animals, it always feels like I’m cheating a bit; talking animals are a cartoon convention in the same way that people spontaneously breaking out into song and dance is a musical convention. Therefore, it’s nice to occasionally cover one that has a bit more than that. In this case, we have hypnotism thrown into the mix, and it even works up a little horror frisson… during the opening credits anyway. There’s even a passing reference to Dracula. It’s a good Warner Brothers cartoon (if not one of their best), and it has a bit of fun with the Bugs/Elmer relationship by reversing it at one point when Bugs hypnotizes Elmer into thinking he’s a rabbit. As usual, the gags, sound effects and music are quite creative.

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