Saturday Morning Cartoon

This the third Oscar nominated animated short film. It's called La dama y la muerte or The Lady and the Reaper. It's written and directed by Spanish animator Javier Recio García.

It's about an old woman who is waiting for death so she can rejoin her departed husband. Things don't go as planned.

Maybe it's my dark sense of humour but I find this one to be pretty funny and surreal.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

This week's cartoon is another of this year's Oscar nominated animated shorts. French Roast is from France and is directed by Fabrice Joubert. It tells the amusing story of a man in a restaurant who discovers that he has forgotten his wallet. You can find the official site here.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Today's animated film is the Oscar nominated animated short Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty.

It's the story of Granny who torments her granddaughter with a bedtime story.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Editor Steve's been worrying about werewolves lately and the moon is full so today's cartoon is a werewolf cartoon called Fangface.

It aired in 1978 on ABC and was produced by Ruby-Spears Productions who also made such cartoons as The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show, Dink, the Little Dinosaur, Thundarr the Barbarian, Goldie Gold and Action Jack, Mr. T, Rubik the Amazing Cube, Turbo Teen, the 1983 version of Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Centurions, the 1988 Superman series, and the American Mega Man series.

The plot was another Scooby Doo rip-off where a group of teens drive around and solve mysteries. Of course one of the group turns into a werewolf when ever he sees a full moon - be it the real moon or just a picture of the moon.

It was later combined with The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show and a baby werewolf named Fangpuss was added to the cast for no real reason.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Today's Saturday morning cartoon's theme is that of the great and mighty shark.

First up is a lame 1976 cartoon from Hanna-Barbera called Jabberjaw.

Jabberjaw is another of Hanna-Barbera's Scooby-Doo and Josie and the Pussycats knock offs that they liked to pump out. It's 2076 and Jabberjaw is a talking great white shark who is also a drummer in a band full of humans.



In the 1994, in an attempt to cash in on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze, DIC Entertainment came up with Street Sharks. The story has four brothers getting turned into half shark / half human crime fighting creatures. They dislike pizza though and say lamer catchphrases like "jawsome". Ugh.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Jackie Chan's latest dismal watered down kung fu kid's movie The Spy Next Door opened in theatres yesterday with a naturally lousy 7% on Rotten Tomatoes. So today's cartoon is the 1970's Hanna-Barbera Productions Hong Kong Phooey.

Phooey was a crime fighting dog in a world full of people. He worked as a janitor in a police station but nobody ever seemed to figure out that the only walking and talking dog in the city might be the walking and kung fu fighting dog. Voiced by Scatman Crothers, Phooey was comically incompetent and only succeeded with the help of his partner a striped cat named Spot.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

"Okay, maybe my dad did steal Itchy, but so what? Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing the Honeymooners, we wouldn't have the Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sgt. Bilko, they'd be no Top Cat. Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney. Your honor, you take away our right to steal ideas, where are they gonna come from?" - Roger Meyers from The Simpsons episode "The Day the Violence Died".

After the success of creating one of the most iconic superheroes ever, Bob Kane eventually moved out of the comics field and in 1960 started "creating" characters for cartoons. He came up with Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse - a parody of his Batman and Robin characters. Strangely this cartoon foreshadowed the more campy version of Batman that would soon follow.

The only opening credits I could find are in another language but it adds some charm to the show.




In 1966 Kane did what everyone else was doing - he jumped on the super spy bandwagon with Cool McCool. McCool was an inept spy that managed to save the day in spite of himself.

It's awfully similar to the earlier 1965 live action TV series Get Smart but with Dick Tracy inspired villains. For that matter the later cartoon series Inspector Gadget is similar to Cool McCool. They even both have mysterious characters who are always sitting in chairs (in McCool it's his boss Number One, in Gadget it's the evil Dr. Claw.) The recycle never ends.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

It's the new year and while everyone is making their best of lists, I usually take a quick look to see what movies I've missed. And one that I heard about but have yet to have the opportunity to see is a Belgium film called Panique au village or A Town Called Panic.

It's a stop motion animated film that's based on a cult TV series of the same name. It follows the adventures of Indian, Cowboy and Horse. They are all plastic toys and their adventures are hilarious and bizarre. The TV episodes are only around five minutes long so it was only natural for the studio to turn it into a 75 minute movie. Apparently the film will start being distributed in Canada sometime soon, maybe even this month. I just look forward to anything that doesn't feature CGI rodents.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

It's Boxing Day so in the spirit of the season I present several cartoons with the literal theme of boxing.

First up it's the short lived I Am the Greatest: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali. The show ran from 1977 to 1978 on NBC.



A little Popeye the Sailor.



And finally we have Mickey Mouse managing a robot to fight a gorilla.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

With James Cameron's latest movie Avatar blowing away moviegoers at theatres with it's amazing 3D CGI and it's eco-friendly message - it occurred to me that there is another hero who communed with the jungles of Earth, bonded with the animals and had a respect all living things in the forest - unless something was trying to eat him, then it was a free for all.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan.

And back in the 1970's Filmation studios had brought Tarzan to life for 36 episodes in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. This was also one of the more faithful adaptations of Tarzan, like the original novels he is intelligent and well spoken. The show often explored many of the lost cities that the novels featured unlike the movie that had him grunting and running around New York city for laughs.

Saturday Morning 'Toon: Climate Change Edition

A little animation on how the climate tipping point works.

Friday Afternoon Kitty!

Simon's cat is the creation of British animator and cat lover Simon Tofield. Tofield's unbelievably funny shorts show a real understanding of how cats act like total jerks. But we all adore them anyway. Right?

You can see more Simon's Cat films here, at the Simon's Cat website. There appear to be products available as well. Buy stuff, support an animator!

They Shoot, They Score!

Received an e-mail from the National Film Board today saying that 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of Sheldon Cohen and Roch Carrier's classic piece of Canadiana The Sweater. Happy anniversary! (NFB)

Saturday Morning Cartoon

I was flipping through some back issue bins in the comic book store and I came across an old Gold Key comic featuring Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the 1960's. It was one of those spotlight comics that featured a variety of characters. And one of them was something called the Mighty Mightor. The picture that accompanied it was a drawing of a barbarian looking guy with a goofy looking horned hat. For whatever reason the name Mighty Mightor made me laugh - it's just lame.

A quick search of the internet and I discovered that the character was created by comic book legend Alex Toth and aired from 1967-1969 along with another cartoon called Moby Dick. It was the Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor show. Mightor was about a young caveman named Tor who helps an old man. The old man gives Tor a magic club that when held in the air transforms Tor into the Mighty Mightor! Classic! Now why does this super powered tranformation sound familiar? By the power of Grayskull - I just don't know. Oh, there is also a redheaded woman called Sheera in the show.

The second part of the show was about the adventures of a whale called Moby Dick that had nothing to do with Herman Melville's novel. Imagine all the disappointed kids when they started reading the book.

The End Is Neigh!

Giddy up.



Since we at prairie dog would never, ever look a gift horse in the mouth, a big hat tip goes to Miranda Hanus for this video.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

Wes Anderson's latest film is a stop motion animated version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox - which opens in wide release this week.

Way, way back in 1930, Wladyslaw Starewicz, the grand master of animation created what was the sixth full length animated feature length film Le roman de Renard (The Tale of the Fox). It would have been the fourth, but it wasn't released until 1937 because of soundtrack problems.

The film is based on the old story about Renard the Fox. The film is beautifully animated and clearly the style influenced Anderson's latest film.

Saturday Morning Cartoon

What great bit of vintage animation will the prairie dog feature this Saturday, you ask? Does the Three Robonic Stooges in Canada count?



No. I didn't think so.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

I know this isn't the kind of "cartoon" these Saturday morning posts are generally reserved for... but, holy crap, this is some of the most extraordinary animation I've ever seen.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

October wasn't a great month for science. It ended with the media, the pundits and even the officials organizing it declaring the UN's upcoming Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen a non-starter. The conference was supposed to lead to a treaty to follow up Kyoto but public and government support for any such agreement was effectively quelled by a very well funded anti-climate-science propaganda campaign. The prairie arm of that campaign came to Regina earlier in the month courtesy the Frontier Centre for Public Policy who gave us the bloviations of Christopher Monckton and a screening of the crockumentary, Not Evil Just Wrong. Meanwhile, the book SuperFreakonomics was released October 19 to great acclaim even though people who know a thing or two about climate science have pointed out that the authors, Levitt and Dubner, in their section on climate science reveal that they do not (know a thing or two about climate science).

So, while all the people working with evidence-based science are ringing alarm bells that the world could be in dire straits in the not-too-distant future thanks to global warming, those who are motivated by their own self-interest are sabotaging any effective action to deal with it.

Evidently, profit and ego are still guiding public policy. Science (especially under our current federal government) is relegated to the sidelines.

On a very different -- but very related -- topic, the H1N1 scare has lured the anti-vaccination kooks out into the limelight---- actually, you know what... let's not get started on that. We go there, next thing you know I'll be ranting about creationists and supply-side economics and I'll never get to the cartoon part of this Saturday morning post...

So, given that we're heading into a new Dark Age, I've been trying to cheer myself with They Might Be Giant's latest disc: Here Comes Science and consoling myself that maybe we can raise a generation to be less credulous. Yes, it's technically a kids album but I know a grown-up or 143 who would benefit from a listen. The cd is paired with a dvd of animated music videos many of which are being released online as podcasts --- and the animation on these things is really stellar. Here's the first video, "Science is Real", directed by David Cowles and Andy Kenney.



Back in the early nineties, I was a huge TMBG fan based mainly on the strength of the album Flood. I kind of lost track of them in the intervening years but whenever I'd check in they were still making strange, catchy pop. But their later stuff never really held my attention the way tunes like "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Ana Ng" did. I chalked it up to the "not being able to go back" factor.

Well, they're back in constant rotation at my house. Here Comes Science is a pop masterpiece -- seriously. And I'm not just saying that because I'm a parent now and seeking out not-suck for my daughter to listen to. This isn't just great kid's music. It's just great. And like I say, the animators they have creating the visuals to go with the music are all fantastic. Check out this piece of awesome, directed by Tiny Inventions....



A hunt for They Might Be Giants on YouTube will call up pretty much everything released online from the Here Comes Science album and I recommend checking it all out. Other highlights: "The Elements", "I Am A Paleontologist" and the diptych, "Why Does the Sun Shine" and "Why Does the Sun Really Shine".

Saturday Morning Cartoon: Halloween Edition

Today's special Saturday Morning Cartoon is the 1953 Oscar nominated short cartoon The Tell-Tale Heart. The cartoon is narrated by James Mason and directed by Ted Parmelee who directed several Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons.

This is a faithful and creepy adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's classic short story. There is limited animation but surreal backgrounds and the point of view look to the film work excellently to create a unique style for the cartoon.