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book reviews
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Animation
in issue 65
Pixar's Up: The Japanese Connection
"It's just a little less Disney."
By Lee Weston Sabo
in issue 64
Tex Avery: Arch-Radicalizer of the Hollywood Cartoon — "Avery's pics confirm an always-lingering suspicion that the many radical plays with movie syntax and the numerous distancing techniques employed in '60s live-action films, of 'New Wave Cinema' extraction, were, in fact, first invented, and used for purely comic effect, in animated cartoons."
in issue 63
The Responsible Dream: On Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir — "We were the Nazis."
in issue 58
Monsters, Inc.: An Interview with Ray Harryhausen — "I wrecked Washington, and I wrecked New York, and San Francisco. That got rather tiresome after a while."
in issue 57
Rat's Eye for the Straight Guy: Disney/Pixar's Ratatouille — Eat first, talk later? If only!
in issue 55
Reflecting the Theoretical Beyond: The Quay Brothers Talk About Art, Life, and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes — "It's hard to be intuitive when you've got 42 crew behind you and they're like, 'Look, they don't know what to do here. They're panicking, look at them!'"
One Small Step for a Penguin: George Miller's Happy Feet — Getting down way down under
in issue 54
The Ant Bully: 3-D to the IMAX — When ants got big, and kids got small
No Tobacco Juice, but Funny! Monster House, Rockin' in 3-D! — Bob Zemeckis and Stephen Spielberg want your money. Give it to them.
in issue 51
Expanding the Possibilities: Peter Chung Talks About Aeon Flux, Matriculated, Dark Fury, and More — "The more you're able to project your own world upon the work, the more power it has."
in issue 49
Bikini Bottom Babylon: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie — He's fun-damental, not fundamentalist!
in issue 48
Only in America: On Team America: World Police — Trey Parker and Matt Stone fight Hollywood ignorance with some ignorance of their own
in issue 47
"It's Amazing I've Survived": An Interview with Bill Plympton — "The football game where the chicken mascot runs around crazy with an erection was inspired by a story that someone told me..."
Faith Hubley — Hers may have been the real sensibility behind the Hubley Studio
in issue 44
What's The Point? The Legendary 1971 Animated Feature on DVD — In a freethinking, whimsical world, relativism reigns and there is none . . . or is there?
in issue 43
Down with Underrated Masterpieces!! Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Down with Love — The sound of no hand clapping
in issue 42
Private Snafu's Hidden War: Historical Survey and Analytical Perspective — The famed doofus of WWII propaganda served purposes patriotic and perfidious
in issue 41
Of Psychotic Environments and Corporate Hallucinations: The Animatrix on DVD — Masters of anime riff on The Matrix in this sizzling collection of shorts
in issue 38
The Wizard of Awe: Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away — The creator of Princess Mononoke brings his sleek Boschian vision to America, courtesy of Disney
in issue 36
It’s Alive! Jan Svankmajer’s Little Otik — If only "little" Otik had stayed that way!
in issue 34
On and Off, On and Off: Riding Through Roger Rabbit's World — There’s more trouble in Toontown than even the Toons imagined
in issue 33
Hand Me That 14-Inch Willy! The Puppet Artistry of Barry Purves — This brilliant Brit’s artistry breathes life into wood and wire
in issue 30
Tableaux Vivant: Lawrence Jordan — Jordan's collage films are "moving" in two senses
in issue 23
That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960 — A review of Henry Sampson's book on black imagery in commercial cartoons
in issue 22
"What's up, Tex?" A Quickie Look at the Life and Career of Tex Avery — As if radically rethinking the Hollywood cartoon weren't enough, our boy Tex can also be thanked for inventing or perfecting Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and perhaps the greatest character in animation, Bugs Bunny.
Goosing Mother Goose: The Fairy Tales of Tex Avery
For young audiences, Avery preserves the trappings of the fairy tale genre — talking animals, supernatural events — and adds the cinematic touch of physical law constantly challenged. For adults, he litters his work with sexual innuendo and distancing devices that replace the sense of reassuring archetypes with a modernist construct that merges the story with its audience, puts adult preoccupations (e.g., sex) in place of children's, and imagines characters not as clueless tabula rasas awaiting moral enlightenment but as sophisticated, willful creatures with a bottomless bag of tricks.
Oskar Fischinger's Visual Music — By 1935, the films of avant-garde animator Oskar Fischinger were being shown on cinema screens and at film festivals throughout the world as the last word in modernism.
in issue 21
Queer Cartoons — Cartoons have always been a rich repository of queer subtext. How else to explain all those too-close buddies and their serious lack of female companionship?
in issue 16
Betty Boop — With a head like a giant peanut,
vast mascara'd eyes, too-kissable lips, baby-doll voice (courtesy of singer Mae Questel), flattened marcelled hair, and mere threads of a dress exposing miles of hot flesh, she was the perfect celluloid sex toy.
