Cartoon a Day: Hook, Line and Stinker

Hook, Line and Stinker
1958
Directed by Chuck Jones
Available on: Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 6

The 13th Road Runner / Coyote short is not the strongest of the batch, but it's hard to go wrong when these characters are in the hands of Chuck Jones.

The right elements are all there...the great backgrounds, the crazy inventions (especially the final one used in this cartoon), the great reaction shots...these are the things that make the Road Runner films great. There is one thing that really gets in the way in this short, however. It may seem like nit picking, but the music is just all wrong.

I know nothing of John Seely, who is given the music credit on this film, but for this film he needed to take a few lessons from the maestro Carl Stalling. Stalling knew when to let it rip with the music and when to lay low. Here the music just draws attention to itself...which is exactly what film music should never do.

Cartoon a Day: The Skeleton Dance

The Skeleton Dance
1929
Directed by Walt Disney
Available on: Walt Disney Treasures - Silly Symphonies
Also: Walt Disney Treasures - The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

For Halloween there was just no other cartoon as appropriate to review than "The Skeleton Dance." This short remains one of the greatest animated films of all time. It is amazingly creative, using images both funny and scary to create an important animation milestone.



One of the reasons this cartoon is so great is the marriage of the visuals and the music. Ub Iwerks animated the film, we talked about his great contribution to animation before, but we mustn't overlook maestro Carl Stalling. His music works right along with the animation, bringing out the humor in some pretty gruesome images. Stalling would later go on to music for the Looney Tunes.

In animation anything is possible! A skeleton can jump out of it's grave, throw his head at an owl, and then start dancing around a graveyard before playing another skeleton like a xylophone...where else but in a cartoon! Filmmakers were still figuring that out in 1929, this film was a huge step forward. One reviewer over at the Internet Movie Database called this "six of the most important minutes in film history," I'd have to agree.