The Dynamic Duo of Pixilation

The Pixilation Exhilaration of Len Janson & Chuck Menville


This Sergeant is Swell!

A teacher came into the library the other trying to track down a 16mm film we used to own called Blaze Glory (1968). She described it as a live-action parody of Westerns that used a frame-by-frame, stop-motion animation technique called pixilation (which may have been "invented" in 1952 by Norman McLaren in his Oscar-winning short Neighbors) and was a great classroom exercise in judging who's the hero and who's the villain. We no longer have this film, but it turns out we have two more 16mm films by the same LA-based directors: Len Janson and Chuck Menville. The films in question are the motorcycle gang parody Vicious Cycles (1967) and another Western spoof, Sergeant Swell of the Mounties (1972). Not only does the Enoch Pratt Central Library own these films, but we have screened them in the past as part of our periodic "Film Shorts" programs.

Unfortunately, little has been written about these talented filmmakers.

Wikipedia entry for Chuck Menville:

Menville was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19 with aspirations of becoming an animator. There, he got a job with Walt Disney Productions and served as an assistant on the 1967 film The Jungle Book. Unhappy with the climate at Disney, Menville soon branched out into writing, and began a long working partnership with his friend Len Janson.

During the mid 1960s, Menville and Janson co-produced a series of short live-action films, among them the Academy Award-nominated Stop Look and Listen, an innovative stop-motion pixilation experiment in which the main characters "drive" down city streets in invisible cars...In the mid-1970s, the team began a stint at Filmation, during which they brought their irreverent style to Star Trek: The Animated Series. (Menville authored an episode titled "The Practical Joker" for that series, which is now seen by many within Star Trek fandom to have been the genesis of the holodeck.)...Menville died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in Malibu, California in 1992.

Wikpedia entry for Len Janson:

Len Janson is an American animator, writer and director whose career in animated cartoons and live-action motion pictures spanned several decades beginning in the 1960s. He began work as an in-betweener at the Walt Disney cartoon studio. By 1965 he had become a story man with his first screen credit in Rudy Larriva's Boulder Wham!. Soon after, he teamed with Chuck Menville to produce a series of live-action films which used the pixilation technique. By the early 1970s, Janson and Menville had become major names in the animation industry and welcome storytellers at studios such as Filmation and Hanna-Barbera. Their partnership ended with Menville's death in 1992. Janson remained active for a few more years, mainly as story editor for Sonic the Hedgehog. He also wrote episodes of Baywatch Nights.

Even more unfortunately, Janson and Menville's humorous independent exercises in pixilation have never come out on video or DVD; but, thanks to the Internet and the researching skills of the folks at Cartoon Brew, they can still be seen.

Here we go, then!

*******************

STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN!
directed by Len Janson and Chuck Menville
MGM, USA, 1967, 10 1/2 minutes

This one shows up on Turner Classic Movies occasionally because it's now part of the Warner Brothers archives. It was nominated for an Oscar in 1968 (Best Short Subject, Live Action).

IMDB description by jhailey@hotmail.com

A man wearing suit, tie, black-framed glasses, and a hat, leaves his house in LA's San Fernando Valley and heads off in his car. Except his car is him, seated on the ground - he moves via stop motion. He's careful and methodical, but when a cigar-chomping hotshot cuts him off, he engages in a bit of passive aggressive driving. We watch one of the drivers get gas, receive a citation from a cop, and deal with a flat tire. The two rival drivers are eventually in quite a race, which ends when one hurls off the road. At the end, a woman in gold slippers puts a tip in the driver's hat.

IMDB reviewer Wes-Connors adds:

With a hat resembling Buster Keaton's, well-suited Len Janson walks out of his sunny southern California home, breathes in some fresh air, and whistles himself into an imaginary car. Through "stop/action" photography, he appears to be hitting the road. Elsewhere, wearing a hat like James Cagney's, sporty Chuck Menville lights up a cigar, vainly checks his appearance, and unsafely shaves while driving. After guzzling some gas, Mr. Menville is pulled over for a speeding ticket. Continuing to speed, he causes problems for Mr. Janson, who tries to drive more safely. The painstaking trick photography got this entertaining short safety film nominated fro an "Academy Award". It was admirably written, directed and performed by Janson and Menville.

Watch Stop, Look and Listen


*******************

VICIOUS CYCLES
directed by Len Janson and Chuck Menville
Pyramid Films, USA, 1967, 7 minutes

The leader of the badass Vicious Cycles gang is played by Len Janson, while Chuck Menville portrays the leader of the goodie-two-shoes Mild Ones Scooter Club.

Watch Vicious Cycles


*******************

BLAZE GLORY
directed by Len Janson and Chuck Menville
Pyramid Films, USA, 1969, 10 minutes

A stop-motion pixilation spoof of old-time westerns in which actors appear to ride non-existent horses. A stagecoach is robbed by the villain, heroine Annabelle Twitterheart is abducted by The Pig-Nosed Kid, and Blaze Glory eventually recovers both the heroine and the money.

Watch Blaze Glory


*******************

SERGEANT SWELL OF THE MOUNTIES
directed by Len Janson and Chuck Menville
Pyramid Films, USA, 1972, 16 minutes

A pixillated romp across the great Northwest in which Sergeant Swell of the Mounties (riding an imaginary horse) repeatedly rescues Emmy Lou from Billy the Creep and a trio of unlikely Indians led by Chief Silly Savage in a spoof of old Western movies.

Watch Sergeant Swell of the Mounties Part 1

Watch Sergeant Swell of the Mounties Part 2

Weekend Toon Up

AN ANIMATED WEEKEND AT THE MOVIES

Inspired by MICA's Suzan Pitt retrospective Thursday night, I spent all day Saturday watching animated films at area theatres.

DAY WATCH



First up was the the "The 2007 Academy Award Nominated Animated Short Films" program at the Landmark Theatre, where I saw all five short films nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2007 Academy Awards (a separate program addressed the live action short film nominees). One of those films was the amazing Madame Tutli-Putli, which I had seen previously and was sure would be the pick of the litter and a shoo-in for this year's Oscar. But after seeing the full line-up, I wasn't so sure. In other words, this is a great program of immensely talented animators, one in which everyone's a contender! In fact, I was so impressed by the impressionist watercolor technique employed in the Russian short My Love (Moya Lyubov) , I have to give it the Oscar nod (though I Am the Walrus was easily the most enjoyable short).

The 90-minute program was perfectly paced and included (in order of appearance):

MEME LES PIGEONS VONT AU PARADIS (EVEN PIGEONS GO TO HEAVEN)
(directed by Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse, France, 9 minutes, French w/ English subtitles, CGI)

A priest tries to sell an old man a machine that he promises will transport him to Paradise. This funny short was a great opener, managing to entertain while also showing the hypocrisy of Catholic theological excess in a way only Europeans raised under Church ideology can.

MEME LES PIGEONS VONT AY PARADIS Trailer

MEMES LES PIGEONS at Internet Movie Database

MY LOVE (MOYA LYUBOV)
(directed by Alexander Petrov, Russia, 27 minutes, Russian w/English subtitles)

Alexander Petrov has been nominated for four Oscars for Best Animated Short Film, winning previously for THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1999). Inspired by Ivan Turgenev's novella First Love, this long short set in 19th-century Russia tells the story of a teenage boy in search of love who is drawn to two very different women from two very different social classes. Da, da...typical Russian epic novel fare with a typically tragic Turgenev twist (readers of my Lazy Eye post take note - it involves strabismus!). But it's handled with great imagination and amazing technical skill - Petrov employs the time-consuming technique of painting pastel oils on glass, giving his film the look of one of Monet's impressionist paintings come to life. The effect is visual poetry at its finest.

MY LOVE - PART 1 (extract from You Tube)

MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI
(directed by Chris Lavin and Maciek Szczerbowski, Canada, 17 minutes, Claymation/CGI)
Official Madame Tutli-Putli Website


Jeepers, creepers, where'd you get those peepers?

A timid woman boards a mysterious night train and has a series of frightening experiences. That's the non-narrative plot of this stop-motion puppet animation film, but its real story lies in Madame Tutli-Putli's expressive eyes. Those emotive orbs were the creation of Jason Walker, who crafted a production process in which he seamlessly added live action human eyes to stop-motion animation. The process is explained in detail on Jason Walker's official web site (http://madametutliputli.com):

Jason developed a system of separating and analyzing the previously shot stop-motion puppet moves, choreographing, rehearsing and shooting a human actor's corresponding "eye performance" to match each puppet move, at the same time recreating as closely as possible all light and shadow passes original to the stop-motion. Once the human eyes were shot, each eye was individually positioned, scaled, re-timed and digitally composited onto the puppet scenes. As different actors were cast for almost all the characters, the requirement was not only to integrate the human eyes onto each puppet, but on a frame by frame basis, match the subtle movement of the puppets, the camera, and the train – all the while retaining the flow of the acting. "This required every trick in the book and more!" exclaims Mr. Walker. The creation of the film and this extraordinarily painstaking process took 4 years from concept to completion.

Beyond its technical aspects, the film is also a thought-provoking psychological exercise, for Mademe Tutli-Putli certainly carries more than just Samsonite luggage aboard the train. Like the characters in Suzan Pitt's Asparagus and Joy Street, the protagonist is clearly taking a trip to the center of her mind.

MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI Trailer

I MET THE WALRUS
(directed by Josh Raskin, Canada, 5 minutes, English, 2D Animation)
Official Web Site: www.imetthewalrus.com

Animators looking for ideas, take heart: this is a prime example of how to make something out of nothing. In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan (pictured left) snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto with his tape recorder and persuaded him to do an interview. This was during John and Yoko's "Bed-In" to promote world peace phase. Levitan got 5 minutes worth of conversation about various topics, including war and peace, music and, unfortunately, his dislike of George Harrison (what's his problem? George was my fave of the Fab Four!). It all wouldn't have amounted to much, except for Josh Raskin's imagination and skill as an animator and director 38 years later. He uses a stream-of-consciousness technique to illustrate basically every word that comes out of Lennon's mouth. More specifically, he employs James Braithwaite's pen sketches and Alex Kurina's digital illustrations to create what the film's official web site quite rightly calls "a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message." That message is illustrated below:



The look of the animation reminded me of both Terry Gilliam's Monty Python work (which of course harkens back to the cut-up collage techniques of Stan Vanderbeek) and Frank and Caroline Mouris' FRANK FILM (1973), especially in regards to the latter's pacing and thematic synching of images with narration.

Check out the trailer below:
"I Met the Walrus" trailer

PETER & THE WOLF
(directed by Suzie Templeton, UK & Poland, 27 minutes, stop-motion Claymation)
Official Web Site

The kids in the crowd loved this one the best, and why not? It's a familiar story to them, but this version of Prokofiev's classical music drama of a young boy and his animal friends who face a hungry wolf is told with a different slant. The director nixes all that "cry wolf" foreplay and gets right to the matter at hand, the action and Prokofiev's music propelling the narration-free story forward until it reaches a new, "re-imagined" non-violent ending. There are also ample bits of humor, thanks to Templeton's amusing animal models.

Suzie Templeton is best known for her award-winning film DOG (2002), which told the story of a boy coming to terms with the death of his mother. This film has won many prizes, including a British Animation Award and a BAFTA.

Watch Official Trailer

The short was also featured on PBS' GREAT PERFORMANCES. Check out the clip below to see director Suzie Templeton talking about the maing of her film:
The Making of PETER & THE WOLF

NIGHT WATCH

Then it was up to the Charles Theatre to finally catch Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2007, France/USA, 95 min), which I had been hearing about since my animator friend saw it at the Annecy Animation Festival in France. First-time director Marjane Satrapi did a marvelous job adapting her graphic novel of the same name to the big screen (after all, who else knows the material as well as its author?), and I like the way she used black-and-white to depict her life under an oppressive regime in Iran and color for her life in the West.

Satrapi's story of her coming-of-age, from a 9-year-old during Iran's Islamic Revolution, a teenager during the long war of attrition with Iraq and as a young woman eventually escaping to the West is both a history lesson and the story of one woman's independent spirit and quest for artistic and creative freedom. Particularly amusing is the appeal of "decadent" Western culture in the form of punk, ABBA, Iron Maiden and Michael Jackson for Satrapi while in her homeland, as contrasted with her contempt for its excesses in the West. For example, when she is Vienna hanging out a middle-class group of friends made up of mohawked nihilists and punk rock-listening anarchists, she can't figure out exactly what they're rebelling against, other than boredom. They seem to have it all too easy while in her country listening to something even as innocuous as the Bee Gees was enough to get one imprisoned.



As has been pointed out by other reviewers, the emotional highlight of Satrapi's film is the unironic use of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" to represent her resolve to change her plight and strike out for personal and artistic freedom. Westerners may snicker at the cheesiness of the song's sentiments, but irony is a luxury for oppressed people whose main concern is survival.

It would be easy after watching Persepolis to smugly assume that the West has religious freedom and that that Iran's religious regime is an all-too-obvious form of fascism. But religious fanaticism of all every stripe came off pretty poorly in the films I saw today, from the mean-spirited imans and nuns in Persepolis to the conniving priest in the animated short Meme les Pigeons vont au Paridis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven).