Hoch Hech!

Is anyone familiar with the Zagreb (Croatia) School of Animation?

I'm sure I've seen that Zagreb Film horse logo before, maybe on a Public Domain video. After which I would presumably have fast-forwarded through the cartoon, expecting there to be a culture and/or language barrier.

I think when most people think of Eastern European animation, they think of this:



From the Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled", where kids' TV show host Krusty the Klown shows a cartoon starring "Eastern Europe's favorite cat and mouse team, Worker and Parasite!" The title, gloomy music and settings (a factory and a bread-line) are clearly meant to invoke images of the austere, work-driven Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, and the joke is that it is neither entertaining nor comprehensible to anyone who doesn't live east of the Iron Curtain in the '50s.

(As a side note, in another Simpsons episode from the same time, "Mr Plow", Homer tries to buy a car from "Crazy Vaclav's Place of Automobiles", and is told that the car was built in a country which "no longer exists". I like to think this was the same country that produced "Worker and Parasite", whose titles are written in a fictional Slavic language. And the head animator of the Rembrandt Films Tom and Jerry series, animated and scored - but not written - in 1960s Czechoslovakia, was named VACLAV Bedrich! Coincidence?)

Soviet-era Eastern Europe may well have produced animated shorts which bring "Worker and Parasite" to mind. But the Zagreb cartoons from the 50s and 60s I have found have, I think, a universal appeal. They are generally dialogue-free but manage to tell stories through animation and music. I don't know if their creators had American animation in mind when they made them - were they trying to copy the style of U.S. cartoons, or react against it, or neither?

This cartoon, "Ersatz/Surogat", has the distinction of winning an Academy Award (an Oscar to you and me). It's very quirky and doesn't look anything like a U.S. cartoon... well, not a mainstream U.S. cartoon anyway. It's still easy for Western audiences to follow and be entertained by it, but putting it out as an example of Croatian animated film making kind of implies "they don't think the way we do".



The same director, Dusan Vukotic, was also capable of creating cartoons that were much more recognisable to people in the West. This one tells a story of childhood rivalry and ingenuity that's familiar to all who have been children, but still exaggerated in a suitably cartoony way. It's a bit like the final act of "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow", where Buster and Babs fool Elmyra into thinking she's travelled to another planet.



The events from 6:15-6:50 bring to mind the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

Another director, Zlatko Grgic (who previously worked as character designer on Vukotic's cartoons) appears to have had two favourite themes: "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished" and "I Don't Know How To End This Thing". Here's his "Musical Pig". Watch as the poor pig brings happiness to all around him by his singing, and how his refusal to let them eat him anyway (!) causes conflict, strife, and even war!

Oh, and the knife-eating sound effects are painfully convincing!

If you're gonna preach, for God's sake preach with conviction!

People often call this Tiny Toon Adventures segment "preachy". I'm not really sure why. In order to be preachy, surely you have to be preaching something. People say it's preaching against eating meat, but when you compare it to the great Simpsons episode "Lisa the Vegetarian" (executive produced by vegetarian David Mirkin) it's really just a cartoon run-around in a factory, and an amusing look at the attitudes to meat production in a world of anthropomorphic animals. (No-one whines about classic Bugs Bunny versus Elmer Fudd cartoons being "anti-hunting" soapboxes, but then, the world has many more meat eaters than hunters)



Of course, the captions "Me" and "David" are not part of the actual episode; they are annotations added by the YouTube poster. I'm interested in the story behind them...

I do rather like the "Happy the Cow" bit (which puts me in mind of Suicide Food) but the gender-confusion irritates me, as you'd probably figured out.

And of course the ending kind of hits you over the head with the message that "this is a fantasy world where even vegetables have feelings - it has nothing to do with real life. We're not suggesting you actually go vegetarian or something!"

I can't speak for other vegans or vegetarians of course, but I expect both we and omnivores have problems with this cartoon, and for completely opposite reasons! But maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?

Eels!

It seems that this old copy of "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" has a couple of pages missing. That's a bit annoying. Maybe I should try and find another one.

In the meantime, here are some thoughts regarding Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, specifically the infamous banquet scene.

In the extra features on the DVD, we hear Lucas and Spielberg saying how they wanted the scene to be full of old-fashioned slapstick comedy. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz express their interest in Indian culture and Hindu religion. No-one suggests there's any sort of clash here, but I think there might be. Huyck and Katz wanted to make a film which takes place in 1930s India, while Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make a film which takes place in a fictional India which might be found in a 1930s film.

You ever seen this early draft of the script? It's discussed in this great article "Raiders of the Lost Drafts", but there's a few things the article doesn't mention but which I think are worth calling attention to. The banquet is there in all its glory, but it's followed by a scene with Indy and the English colonial officer. Indy reads the "bizarre choice of menu" as a clue that Pankot Palace is not what it seems, as "a devout Hindu would never touch meat". That may be a generalisation but if so it's a lot closer to the truth than the implication made in the film - that live eels served in the body of a snake, soup full of eyes and chilled monkey brains are representative of Indian cuisine.

Of course, this short scene doesn't appear in the film. My idea is that Lucas and Spielberg devised the banquet scene without really thinking about whether it was "accurate" or not, because they weren't really thinking of it as taking place in a real version of India. Huyck and Katz, with their genuine interest in India, tried to explain the strange food by calling attention to it as being a sign that Pankot Palace did not follow usual Hindu beliefs. But Lucas and Spielberg didn't feel that the banquet needed any explanation and so, with their powers as executive producer and director, they cut it.

(You'll note I refer to "Lucas and Spielberg" throughout this post, as I'm not sure which person was responsible for each decision)

So, who was "right" then? The writers or the producer/directors? Well, I've read posts on forums by a few people identifying themselves as Indian, some who like the finished film and some who feel offended by it. So I guess there's no one answer. But I think the portrayal of the Indian characters in any version of Temple of Doom is better than the portrayal of the African characters in the proposed "Monkey King" film, which contains an "ADORABLE" pygmy named Tiki, who is studied by a zoologist and lives in a zoo cage.

(Note: Although the online version of the script indicates it was written in 1995 as a potential fourth film, it was later found out that it was actually written some time earlier as a potential *third* film -- you can see some elements in the script which wound up in Last Crusade)

And if you'd prefer that I defended my own culture instead, well, I can do that too. I'm not from the Highlands myself but even I can tell that the supposedly Scottish characters in the opening scenes of Monkey King are not at all like anyone you might find in this country, bearing names such as "Seamus Seagrove" and "Bottomley", using expressions like "truer than an angel's kiss" and "like you've seen a screamin' banshee" and dropping their 'H's all over the place. The only positive thing I can say about these ridiculous Irish stereotypes is that they aren't supposed to be Irish characters...