Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who plans to celebrate the holiday today.
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Bugs Bunny is a quick-thinking, fast-talking, wascally force of nature, and a preternaturally gifted physical comedian, too.
But unlike such lasting greats as Charlie Chapin and Buster Keaton, it took him a while to find his iconic look.
His first appearance, as “Happy Rabbit” in the 1938 black and white theatrical short, Porky’s Hare Hunt, might remind you of those yearbook photos of celebrities before they were famous.
In a video essay considering how Bugs Bunny’s look has evolved over his eight-decade career, animation fan Dave Lee of the popular YouTube series Dave Lee Down Under breaks down some early characteristics, from an undefined, small body and oval-shaped head to white fur and a fluffy cotton ball of a tail.
His voice was also a work in progress, more Woody Woodpecker than the hybrid Brooklyn-Bronx patois that would make him, and voice actor Mel Blanc, famous.
The following year, the rabbit who would become Bugs Bunny returned in Prest-o Change-o, a Merry Melodies Technicolor short directed by Chuck Jones.
A few months later character designer (and former Disney animator) Charlie Thorson subjected him to a pretty noticeable makeover for Hare-um Scare-um, another rabbit hunting-themed romp.
The two-toned grey and white coat, oval muzzle, and mischievous buck-toothed grin are much more aligned with the Bugs most of us grew up watching.
His pear-shaped bod’, long neck, high-rumped stance, and pontoon feet allowed for a much greater range of motion.
A notation on the model sheet alluding to director Ben Hardaway’s nickname – “Bugs” – gives some hint as to how the world’s most popular cartoon character came by his stage name.
For 1940’s Elmer’s Candid Camera, the pink-muzzled Bugs dropped the yellow gloves Thorsen had given him and affected some black ear tips.
Tex Avery, who was in line to direct the pair in the Academy Award-nominated short A Wild Hare, found this look objectionably cute.
He tasked animator Bob Givens with giving the rabbit, now officially known as Bugs Bunny, an edgier appearance.
In the Givens design, Bugs was no longer defined by Thorson’s tangle of curves. His head was now oval, rather than round. In that respect, Bugs recalled the white rabbit in Porky’s Hare Hunt, but Givens’s design preserved so many of Thorson’s refinements—whiskers, a more naturalistic nose—and introduced so many others—cheek ruffs, less prominent teeth—that there was very little similarity between the new version of Bugs and the Hare Hunt rabbit.
Barrier also details a number of similarities between the titular rabbit character from Disney’s 1935 Silly Symphonies short,The Tortoise and the Hare, and former Disney employee Givens’ design.
While Avery boasted to cartoon historian Milt Gray in 1977 that “the construction was almost identical”, adding, “It’s a wonder I wasn’t sued,” Givens insisted in an interview with the Animation Guild’s oral history project that Bugs wasn’t a Max Hare rip off. ( “I was there. I ought to know.”)
Whatever parallels may exist between Givens’ Bugs and Disney’s Hare, YouTuber Lee sees A Wild Hare as the moment when Bugs Bunny’s character coalesced as “more of a lovable prankster than a malicious deviant,” nonchalantly chomping a carrot like Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, and turning a bit of regional Texas teen slang – “What’s up, Doc?”- into one of the most immortal catch phrases in entertainment history.
A star was born, so much so that four directors – Jones, Avery, Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett – were enlisted to keep up with the demand for Bugs Bunny vehicles.
This multi-pronged approach led to some visual inconsistencies, that were eventually checked by the creation of definitive model sheets, drawn by Bob McKimson, who animated the Clampett-directed shorts.
Historian Barrier takes stock:
Bugs’s cheeks were broader, his chin stronger, his teeth a little more prominent, his eyes larger and slanted a little outward instead of in. The most expressive elements of the rabbit’s face had all been strengthened …but because the triangular shape of Bugs’s head had been subtly accentuated, Bugs was, if anything, futher removed from cuteness than ever before. McKimson’s model sheet must be given some of the credit for the marked improvement in Bugs’s looks in all the directors’ cartoons starting in 1943. Not that everyone drew Bugs to match the model sheet, but the awkwardness and uncertainty of the early forties were gone; it was if everyone had suddenly figured out what Bugs really looked like.
Now one of the most recognizable stars on earth, Bugs remained unmistakably himself while spoofing Charles Dickens, Alfred Hitchcock and Wagner; held his own in live action appearances with such heavy hitters as Doris Day and Michael Jordan; and had a memorable cameo in the 1988 feature Who Framed RogerRabbit, after producers agreed to a deal that guaranteed him the same amount of screen time as his far squarer rival, Mickey Mouse.
This millennium got off to a rockier start, owing to an over-reliance on low budget, simplified flash animation, and the truly execrable trend of shows that reimagine classic characters as cloying toddlers.
In 2011, on the strength of her 2-minute animated short I Like Pandas, an initially reluctant 24-year-old Jessica Borutski was asked to “freshen up” Bugs’ look for The Looney Tunes Show,a series of longer format cartoons which required its cast to perform such 21st-century activities as texting:
I made their heads a bit bigger because I didn’t like [how] in the ’60s, ’70s Bugs Bunny’s head started to get really small and his body really long. He started to look like a weird guy in a bunny suit.
Lee’s Evolution of Bugs Bunny- 80 Years Explained was released in 2019.
In a push led by Looney Tunes Cartoons’ Alex Kirwan—who spearheads the franchise’s current slate of shorts on HBO Max—the beloved animation icons will soon expand into even more content. There’s the upcoming Tiny Toons Loooniversityrevival, a Halloween special, Cartoonito’s Bugs Bunny Builders for kids, and two feature-length animated movies on the way—and we have a feeling that’s not all, folks!
Behold a crowdsourced, collaborative art project where more than 130 animators and filmmakers from 11 different countries joined together and remade a full episode of Frasier. (It’s the finale of Season 1, “My Coffee with Niles.”) The project’s mastermind, Jacob Reed, asked individual artists to animate different scenes, each with a different style, and then he stitched them all together. Above, you can see how everything hangs together.
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Author David Foster Wallace titled his famous address to Kenyon College’s Class of 2005 “This is Water,” a reference to its opening joke – self-mockingly framed as a “didactic little parable-ish story” that is “a standard requirement of US commencement speeches:”
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Mark Wooding, founder of After Skool, a YouTube channel “committed to finding the most powerful content and delivering it in the most engaging way possible” gave his whiteboard animation of the speech a different title: “Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master.”
It’s the “old cliche” Wallace invoked midway through, noting that “like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, (it) actually expresses a great and terrible truth:”
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
Wallace himself died by suicide a little more than three years after delivering the speech, prompting author Tom Bissell to write in an essay for the New York Times that “the terrible master eventually defeated David Foster Wallace, which makes it easy to forget that none of the cloudlessly sane and true things he had to say about life in 2005 are any less sane or true today, however tragic the truth now seems:”
This Is Water does nothing to lessen the pain of Wallace’s defeat. What it does is remind us of his strength and goodness and decency — the parts of him the terrible master could never defeat, and never will.
We braced a bit wondering how Wooding would handle this portion of the speech.
It would have been a good time for one of his more abstract flights of fancy.
In truth, sometimes Wooding’s dry erase drawings cluttered our headspace unnecessarily, distracting from Wallace’s message. Isn’t that ironic? A large part of the speech deals with choosing what to pay attention to, and how to pay attention to it.
In an attempt to follow Wallace’s advice and push back against the “basic self-centeredness …that is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth”, we’ll concede that Wooding’s animation may help the speech land with those who’d give a pass on listening to an audio recording or reading a transcript.
As Wooding told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Some people are visual learners, some learn by hearing things, some have to do it… what I’ve tried to do with After Skool is combine every style of learning to make the ideas as accessible as possible, to take ideas that are kind of complex and make it so that an eighth-grader can understand it.”
The wicket grows a bit stickier when Wooding delves into the long passages wherein Wallace unleashes a torrent of grouchy self-serving thoughts born of boredom, routine and petty frustration… as an “example of how NOT to think”, he says in an aside.
Wallace presented this unvarnished ugliness as a set up, something to throttle back from – an illustration of how our lizard brains’ snap judgments need not get the final word:
… if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness…If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.
We wish Wooding had leaned out rather than in when Wallace’s bad mood makes him view the people suffering through traffic jams, crowded aisles, and long checkout lines with him as “repulsive”, “stupid”, “cow-like”, and “dead-eyed”.
Knowing that Wallace was winding up to reveal these knee jerk assessments as the fabrications of a testy, self-absorbed mind operating on autopilot, the illustrations might have better served the message had they been a step or two ahead of the messenger. Doodles depicting these people as far more neutral looking than the deliberately vitriolic portrait Wallace was painting could have added some dimension.
It’s important to remember that these visuals aren’t animated in the traditional sense. They’re manipulated time lapse drawings. Unless Wooding breaks out the eraser and doubles back to make modifications, they’re fixed on the whiteboard and in our minds.
This may explain in part why the fed up mom in the check out line appears to get a fairer shake in The Glossary’s live action adaptation of excerpts from the same speech, below.
If you’d rather not gild the lily with whiteboard animation, you can listen to Wallace’s speech and read the transcript here.
The Boy and the Heron, the latest feature from master animator Hayao Miyazaki, opened in Japan this past summer. In that it marks his latest emergence from his supposed “retirement,” we could label it not just as late Miyazaki, but perhaps even “post-late” Miyazaki. But the film nevertheless shares significant qualities with his earlier work, not least a score composed by Joe Hisaishi. Since Nausicaä of the Valley of theWind — which opened in 1984, even before the foundation of Studio Ghibli — Hisaishi’s music has done nearly as much to establish the sensibility of Miyazaki’s films as their lavish, imaginative animation, and you can stream hundreds of hours of it with this Youtube playlist.
Each of the playlist’s 121 two-hour videos offers musical selections from a mix of Ghibli movies, including Miyazaki favorites like My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, and Spirited Away, and also the works of other directors: Yoshifumi Kondō’s Whisper of the Heart, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Arrietty, Gorō Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill.
If you’ve seen those pictures, these quiet, often minimal renditions of their music will surely bring their animated fantasies right back to mind. Even if you haven’t, they can still fulfill the function promised by the videos’ titles of setting a mood conducive to study, work, or simple relaxation.
So beloved are Hisaishi’s scores, for Miyazaki and others (most notably comedian-auteur Takeshi Kitano), that it’s possible to know the music long before you’ve seen the movies. And even in performances considerably different from the versions heard on the actual soundtracks, they always sound immediately recognizable as Hisaishi’s work. Shaped by an eclectic set of influences (born Mamoru Fujisawa, he took on his professional name as an homage to Quincy Jones), he developed a compositional style neither strictly Eastern nor Western. The same can be said about Ghibli movies themselves, which often possess both fairy-tale European settings and Japanese philosophical underpinnings. Wherever you place yourself on the cultural map, you’d do well to make their music the soundtrack of your own life.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Humanity has few fascinations as enduring as that with apocalypse. We’ve been telling ourselves stories of civilization’s destruction as long as we’ve had civilization to destroy. But those stories haven’t all been the same: each era envisions the end of the world in a way that reflects its own immediate preoccupations. In the mid nineteen-eighties, nothing inspired preoccupations quite so immediate as the prospect of sudden nuclear holocaust. The mounting public anxiety brought large audiences to such major aftermath-dramatizing “television events” as The Day After in the United States and the even more harrowing Threads in the United Kingdom.
“As a youngster growing up in the nineteen-eighties in a tiny village in the heart of the Cotswolds, I can attest to the fact that no part of the country, however remote and bucolic, was impervious to the threat of the Cold War escalating into a full-blown nuclear conflict,” writes Neil Mitchell at the British Film Institute.
“Popular culture was awash with nuclear war-themed films, comic strips, songs and novels.” This torrent included the artist-writer Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, a graphic novel about an elderly rural couple who survive a catastrophic strike on England. Jim and Hilda’s optimism and willingness to follow government instructions prove to be no match for nuclear winter, and however inexorable their fate, they manage not to see it right up until the end comes.
In 1986, When the Wind Blows was adapted into a feature film, directed by American animator Jimmy Murakami. Among its distinctive aesthetic choices is the combination of traditional cel animation for the characters with photographed miniatures for the backgrounds, as well as the commissioning of soundtrack music from the likes of Roger Waters, David Bowie, and Genesis — proper English rockers for a proper English production. If the adaptation of When the Wind Blows is less widely known today than other nuclear-apocalypse movies, that may owe to its sheer cultural specificity. It would be difficult to pick the movie’s most English scene, but a particularly strong contender is the one in which Hilda reminisces about how “it was nice in the war, really: the shelters, the blackout, the cups of tea.”
“The couple are fruitlessly nostalgic for the Blitz spirit of the Second World War, convinced the government-issued Protect and Survive pamphlets are worth the paper they’re printed on, and blindly under the assumption that there can be a winner in a nuclear war,” writes Mitchell. “These sweet, unassuming retirees represent an ailing, rose-tinted worldview and way of life that’s woefully unprepared for the magnitude of devastation wrought by the bomb.” You can see further analysis of the film’s art and worldview in the video at the top of the post from animation-focused Youtube channel Steve Reviews. In the event, humanity survived the long showdown of the Cold War, losing none of our penchant for apocalyptic fantasy as a result. However compulsively we imagine the end of the world today, will any of our visions prove as memorable as When the Wind Blows?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. (Watch them perform it here.) Before he died in 2012, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard. Once you watch the performance above, you’ll know why.
According to The Guardian, The Sachal Studios Orchestra was created by Izzat Majeed, a philanthropist based in London. When Pakistan fell under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq during the 1980s, Pakistan’s classical music scene fell on hard times. Many musicians were forced into professions they had never imagined — selling clothes, electrical parts, vegetables, etc. Whatever was necessary to get by. Today, many of these musicians have come together in a 60-person orchestra that plays in a state-of-the-art studio, designed partly by Abbey Road sound engineers.
All of us have, at one time or another, been accused of not seeing what’s right in front of us. But as a close examination of our biological visual system reveals, none of us can see what’s right in front of us. “Our eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve blocks part of the retina,” says the narrator of the new animated TED-Ed video above. “When the visual cortex processes light into coherent images, it fills in these blind spots with information from the surrounding area. Occasionally we might notice a glitch, but most of the time, we’re none the wiser.” This absence of genuine information in the very center of our vision has long circulated in the standard set of fascinating facts.
What’s less well known is that these same neurological processes have made the blind see — or rather, they’ve induced in the blind an experience subjectively indistinguishable from seeing. It’s just that the things they “see” don’t exist in reality.
Take the case of an elderly woman named Rosalie, with which the video opens. On one otherwise normal day at the nursing home, “her room suddenly burst to life with twirling fabrics. Through the elaborate drapings, she could make out animals, children, and costumed characters,” even though she’d lost her sight long before. “Rosalie had developed a condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which patients with either impaired vision or total blindness suddenly hallucinate whole scenes in vivid color.”
This leads us to the counterintuitive finding that you don’t need sight to experience visual hallucinations. (You do need to have once had sight, which gives the brain visual memories on which to draw later.) But “even in people with completely unimpaired senses, the brain constructs the world we perceive from incomplete information.” Take that gap in the middle of our visual field, which the brain fills with, in effect, a hallucination, albeit not one of the elaborate, sometimes overwhelming kinds induced by “recreational and therapeutic drugs, conditions like epilepsy and narcolepsy, and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia.” At the end of the lesson, the narrator suggests that interested viewers seek out the work of neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks, which deals extensively with what opens gaps between reality and our perceptions — and which we here at Open Culture are alwayspreparedtorecommend.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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