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ANIMATED FILMS Part 4 |
Animated Films Bill Melendez and the Peanuts Animations: Bill (J. C.) Melendez, who first worked at Walt Disney Studios during the classic animated 40s era, then moved to Leon Schlesinger Cartoons (AKA Warner Brothers Cartoons) in 1942 at the time of the Disney strike, where he made a number of notable Looney Tunes cartoons.
Ultimately, Melendez would be involved as director of over 30 Charlie Brown prime-time TV specials after 1965. He also 'acted' by providing the voices of Snoopy and Woodstock. Melendez' feature-length film collaborations with Schultz included:
Melendez was also the producer of a 1983 Saturday morning cartoon show called The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. A stage version of the Peanuts comic strip, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, first appeared in 1967 in an off-Broadway Greenwich Village theatre, and remained for four years. The show was later revived on Broadway in 1999 for a short run, and won two Tony Awards.
Another Peanuts variation was the computer-animated full-length feature film The Peanuts Movie (2015). Adults-Rated Animations in the 70s and After: Ralph Bakshi
Writer/director Bakshi's next X-rated animated feature (later re-cut and re-released with an R-rating) was the violent, gritty and misogynistic Heavy Traffic (1973), a semi-autobiographical tale about a misfit comic-book cartoonist that was loosely adapted from Hubert Selby's novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. It blended together animated and live-action sequences in its urban scenes, and also layered old film clips into cartoon backgrounds. The animation auteur also released the controversial Coonskin (1975) (aka Street Fight) that was accused of being racist and offensive. It contained urban-oriented, politically-oriented blaxploitation content about a rabbit that ruled the streets of Harlem. The surrealistic animator Bakshi also directed the animated cult film Wizards (1977) - a tale of good vs. evil. It was a test run for his next animation - The Lord of the Rings (1978) - the first cinematic production of the story that combined The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers into the final animated film. His plan to film the final chapter of the trilogy, The Return of the King, never materialized. Bakshi's film had an adapted screenplay co-written by Peter Beagle (based, although incompletely, upon books in J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy), and was noted for its extensive use of the animation technique of rotoscoping, in which human actors were filmed and 'traced' as cartoon characters.
Bakshi also released the not-for-children sword-and-scorcery animated Fire and Ice (1983), with work by fantasy design artist Frank Frazetta. (Bakshi also directed various dark and psychedelic-flavored episodes of the Spider-Man cartoon series on ABC-TV beginning in its second season in the late 1960s.) One of his later works was the Paramount studio-financed, poorly-received Cool World (1992), containing a plot with similarities to the parallel animated Toon World in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). It also raised the intriguing question of whether a live-action person could have sex with a cartoon character, and featured Brad Pitt as the voice of a Las Vegas cop, and Kim Basinger as cartoon sex symbol creation Holli Would, who wished to become a 'noid' in the human world. Rankin-Bass: The team of Arthur Rankin-Jules Bass was most known for its holiday specials aired on television, such as the object-animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) - with the voice of Burl Ives, Frosty the Snowman (1969) - with the voice of Jimmy Durante, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970) - with voices of Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, and Keenan Wynn. Also, the team of Rankin-Bass produced the anime-like mythological tale The Last Unicorn (1982). It was a sophisticated story from a screenplay by children's book novelist Peter Beagle. It told about a lonely, last-remaining unicorn (voice of Mia Farrow) who set out on a quest to confront a beast of fire named Red Bull that had eliminated all the other unicorns. Other Exceptional Animations with Mature Subject Matter in the Late 70s-Early 80s: Nepenthe Productions and writer/director Martin Rosen (and animator Tony Guy) made two dark films with mature (serious-minded) subject matter - both based on Richard Adams' best-selling novels about animals and ecological concerns:
The inventive animated fantasy Twice Upon a Time (1983), executive produced by George Lucas, told a story about two heroes and their friends who tried to prevent a maniacal madman from giving children nightmares. It used the same cut-out paper animation that South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), the most profane animated film (with 399 swear-words), would also later employ. The Stop-Motion Animation Work of Phil Tippett: One of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen's animators was Phil Tippett, who followed in his mentor's footsteps with Oscar-nominated and winning work in Visual Effects, often for LucasFilms and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). He worked on the following fantasy films:
Rock-Oriented Animation Favorites: Other pioneering animations in the early 80s relied heavily on rock music, adult themes of sex and violence, and capitalized on the post- Star Wars (1977) sci-fi fantasy boom. They have since become cult favorites for midnight movie fans:
Early Claymation and Gumby: Claymation is a type of animation that uses hand-crafted, sculpted plasticine or clay. This form of stop-motion animation was first associated with director Art Clokey's clay-hero character named Gumby for children's TV - a slant-headed bendable figure. (Clokey filmed the animated motion study Gumbasia at USC in the early 1950s. Gumby shorts were inaugurated in the mid-1950s - and the character first debuted on The Howdy Doody Show in 1956.) Early on, the technique of claymation was mostly associated with the directorial work of Will Vinton, most recognized for his work on the TV commercial about California Raisins in the late 80s. He was the co-director of the first Claymation film, Closed Mondays (1974), which won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar award. His work was evidenced in the first full-length feature film showcasing claymation titled The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) (aka Comet Quest), a biography of the US humorist derived from Twain's own Huckleberry Finn sequel Tom Sawyer Abroad. James Whitmore provided the voice of the title character on a transcontinental, riverboat balloon journey to find Haley's Comet. Twain's classic tales were featured in various segments, such as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and "The Mysterious Stranger". The Vinton studio also provided claymation effects for the live-action fantasy Return to Oz (1985). |
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But
his biggest success was his collaboration with comic-strip cartoonist
Charles M. Schultz, and the making of the first animated
Peanuts special on CBS-TV, the irreplaceable Christmas special A
Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). It was a surprise hit, and became
an annual Christmas time favorite, and led to further TV specials and
feature films. The next four prime-time TV specials were equally
popular - Charlie Brown's All Stars! (1966), the Halloween
special It's
the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), You're in Love, Charlie
Brown (1967), and He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968). 
Normally,
animations are regarded as an innocent, innocuous form of entertainment, even
though iconoclastic writer/director Ralph Bakshi's, adults-only rated-X feature
(in its original release) Fritz the Cat (1972), based upon cartoonist
Robert Crumb's underground comics character, was the first X-rated
animated feature in Hollywood history. It was also the first independent animated film to gross more than $100 million at the box office.
The film featured a hippie-like, sex and
drug-loving cat. 
They
also created the parody-spoof of monster films, their only feature-length
animated film titled Mad Monster Party? (1967), with characters
based upon many of the Universal 'monsters,' including Frankenstein
(voiced by Boris Karloff), Count Dracula, The Wolf Man, King Kong,
The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and The Creature
from the Black Lagoon. The film used the stop-motion "animagic" process
to animate the three-dimensional puppets. Two future Mad Magazine contributors,
Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis, were responsible for co-writing the
screenplay and design work. Reportedly, Tim Burton found this film
to be extremely influential upon his own later work. 
The French/Czech-made, science-fiction oriented Fantastic
Planet (1973, Fr.) (aka La Planète Sauvage) possessed similarities
to Fritz Lang's 
