Forgotten Movie Songs #25: "Little April Shower" from BAMBI

Walt Disney's Bambi is, officially, the only movie I ever saw alone with my father. It must have been re-released the theaters when I was ten or eleven. Even though my parents had been taking me to adult movies--rated PG, or M, or R--for years, I found myself drawn to the G-rated Bambi, probably due to TV commercials for the re-release. Back then, my family used to go to the drive-in a lot. We

Film #137: Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

When I hear about something like Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (what a fantastic title), as I just have today, I feel both behind and in front of the times. Behind because this has become an "internet sensation" with nearly 1.5 million hits on You Tube. In front of, because I think it deserves many more hits, and it doesn't even have an entry on IMDB. It's directed and co-written by Dean

Film #134: What On Earth!

I first remember seeing What On Earth! as a between-features offering on HBO in the early 1980s. May I say, what a great time for that channel it was; you could see all manner of short movies on it then--everything from the latest "videos" (on a feature they called Video Jukebox) to things like 1978's Special Delivery or Jim Henson's 1966 curio Timepiece. This was about 15 years after What on

Film #116: Begone Dull Care and Film #117: Neighbours

"I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (...) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war." --Norman McLaren The Scottish-born McLaren had been

Film #107: Feed The Kitty

Of course, as a cat lover first and a dog lover second, I have to adore Chuck Jones' 1952 Warner Brothers cartoon Feed the Kitty. With only three characters, minimal dialogue, and the barest of plots--bulldog Marc Anthony absurdly tries to hide the teeny kitten he's adopted from the lady of the house--Jones' film is absolute animation mastery. The director once described himself as "an actor

Film #96: Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning!

Max and Dave Fleischer were sibling animators who made film history with their long series of Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman cartoons, and with their groundbreaking full-length 1939 movie Gulliver's Travels (the first non-Disney animated feature and the first film to use a process of animation called rotoscoping, based on tracings of live action images, later popularized further by 70s/80s-era

Film #91: The Dover Boys at Pimento University, or: The Rivals at Roquefort Hall

Warner Brothers animator extraordinaire Chuck Jones says that, after he and head animator Robert (Bobe) Cannon produced the groundbreaking 1942 cartoon The Dover Boys, he almost got fired from WB's Termite Terrace (the name for the WB animation house which included Frank Tashlin, Friz Freling, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson and other WB-contracted animators). The wacked-out style of "smeared"

Film #54: The Secret of NIMH

Former Disney animator Don Bluth was so fed up with how the pre-Little Mermaid animation department was going that he broke away and formed his own animation studio, with The Secret of NIMH being their first offering. At a time when Disney animation seemed dead--the early 80s--Bluth's first solo effort was an extremely welcome pleasure that trumpeted a new force in the animation field. But,