When asked for their favorite Sesame Street segment, many children of the 70s and 80s point to Pinball Number Count. Psychedelic animation, the Pointer Sisters, odd time signatures—what’s not to love? But for the serious Sesame Street buff, the “Jazz Numbers” series above deserves the silver medal. It’s got free jazz, Yellow Submarine-style surrealistic animation, and a vocal from Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. How many young parents recognized her distinctive voice, I wonder?
Also known as “Jazzy Spies,” this 1969 series of animations was devoted to the numbers 2 through 10 (there was no film for “one” as it is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do), and was an essential element in Sesame Street’s first season. Highlights include the dream-like elevator door sequence of “2,” the Jackson 5 reference in “5,” and the racing fans in “10.”
Slick got involved through her first husband, Jerry Slick, who produced the segments for San Francisco-based animation studio Imagination, Inc. Headed by animator Jeff Hale, the company also produced the Pinball segments, as well as the famous anamorphic “Typewriter Guy,” the Ringmaster, and the Detective Man. Hale, by the way, has a cameo as Augie “Ben” Doggie in the well-loved Lucas parody Hardware Wars.)
The delirious music was composed and performed by Columbia jazz artist Denny Zeitlin, who would go on to score the 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Zeitlin plays both piano and clavinet; accompanying him is Bobby Natanson on drums and Mel Graves on bass. According to Zeitlin, Grace Slick overdubbed her vocals later.
This wasn’t Slick’s first encounter with Jim Henson. In 1968, she and other members of Jefferson Airplane were part of a counterculture documentary called Youth ’68, the trailer for which you can groove on here.
Sesame Street, with all its primary colors, plastic merchandise, and Elmo infestation, may have lost its edge, but these early works show its revolutionary foundations.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, or The Adventures of Prince Achmed, lays fair claim to being the earliest animated feature film in existence. If we do grant it that title, it beats the next contender by more than a decade. While PrinceAchmed came out a century ago, in 1926, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose production was presided over by a certain Walt Disney, didn’t reach theaters until 1937. The latter picture holds great distinction in the history of cinema, of course, not least that of being the first feature made with cel animation: the dominant technique throughout most of the twentieth century, and one whose digital replacement has been lamented by classic animation enthusiasts. But the quivering silhouettes of Prince Achmed show an alternative.
The making of Snow White was, by the standards of the day, a vast undertaking, requiring Disney to marshal artistic and industrial resources at a scale then unknown in animation. Prince Achmed, by contrast, owes its existence mostly to the work of one woman: Lotte Reiniger, who first learned the craft of scherenschnitte silhouette-making as a little girl in Berlin.
Scherenschnitte was inspired by what was thought to be ancient Chinese arts of paper-cutting and puppetry, but when watched today, Prince Achmed or the other animations Reiniger created bring more readily to mind traditional Javanese wayangkulit shadow puppet theater: an aesthetic that, in a sense, suits the source material ideally.
The episodes that constitute Prince Achmed’s narrative are drawn in large part from One Thousand and One Nights, a text whose centuries-long evolution bears the marks of not just many distinct cultures across Asia and the Middle East, but also those of more dramatic transformation through its folktales’ cultural transposition into French, then other European languages. What Reiniger brings to enchanting handmade life isn’t any particular place at any particular time, but rather an elegant, mysterious, quite literally arabesque realm that never really existed. In other words, Prince Achmed takes place in what can only be called the Orient — which, now that the film has fallen into the public domain, we can all visit whenever we like. And if such visits happen to inspire a new generation of Lotte Reinigers in this world of market-researched mega-budget animation, so much the better.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
You may have seen every single one of Studio Ghibli’s animated films, going well beyond the Hayao Miyazaki-directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Kiki’s Delivery Service to the less widely known but also charmingly crafted likes of Ocean Waves, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and The Cat Returns. Even so, the question remains: have you really seen them all? Experiencing them in the theater or on home video is only the first stage of the process. Ideally, each element of a Ghibli movie should subsequently be appreciated in isolation and at length: by listening to the music, for example, hundreds of hours of which, available to stream, we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.
Still, no matter how captivating Joe Hisaishi’s scores may sound on their own, Ghibli’s work is ultimately made to be seen. Given that 24 frames of their movies go by each second, it can be difficult to pick up all the details their animators include in each and every one of them.
Hence the value of the free archive of stills that the studio first made available online a few years ago, and that has steadily expanded ever since. Though only available in Japanese, it doesn’t present a great challenge even to fans with no knowledge of the language to click on the poster of their Ghibli film of choice, then to browse the variety of downloadable images associated with it.
Many of these stills are drawn from highly memorable moments across the Ghibli filmography: the children’s party on the hero of Porco Rosso’s beloved airplane; the emergence of the kodama in Princess Mononoke; the defeat of the colossal Giant Warrior in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (which predates the studio’s foundation, but in any case now seems to count honorarily among its productions); the sentient flame cooking a skillet of bacon and eggs in Howl’s Moving Castle. Some of them have even been turned into wallpaper for video calls, downloadable from a page of their own. There we have another way to add a touch of Studio Ghibli’s distinctive vision to our everyday lives — and another source of inspiration to watch through the movies themselves one more time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
You might know Winsor McCay (1867? ‑1934) for the gorgeously surreal Little Nemo comic strip or for his early animated short Gertie the Dinosaur(1914). But did you know that he also created some of the earliest examples of animated propaganda ever?
On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was just off the coast of Ireland, heading towards its destination of Liverpool, when a German U‑boat attacked the ship without warning. Eighteen minutes after two torpedoes slammed into the ship, it was under water. 1,198 died. The furor over the incident eventually led to the United States entering WWI.
At the time of the sinking, McCay was employed by William Randolph Hearst as an editorial cartoonist. Though McCay was incensed by the attack, Hearst was an isolationist and demanded that he draw anti-war cartoons. This grated on the artist more and more until finally he decided to follow up on his hugely successful Gertie the Dinosaur by making The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), which you can see above.
The movie took two years of painstaking effort to make and consisted of over 25,000 drawings—all done by hand and most done by McCay himself during his free time after work.
Compared to other animation done around this time, the film is both stark and serious, lending it the air of a documentary. The piece, which isn’t much shorter than the actual time it took for the Lusitania to sink, gives a blow-by-blow account of the attack. Though the incident is depicted largely from afar, as if from a camera on another ship, McCay doesn’t shy away from showing some really gut-wrenching moments of the tragedy up close. At one point, there is a shot of a desperate mother trying to keep her baby above the waves. At another point, dozens of people are seen bobbing in the choppy seas like driftwood.
And, just in case you haven’t quite grasped the thrust of the film, McCay includes some intertitles, which are, even by the standards of war propaganda, pretty heavy-handed.
The babe that clung to his mother’s breast cried out to the world – TO AVENGE the most violent cruelty that was ever perpetrated upon an unsuspecting and innocent people.
And
The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser! – AND YET THEY TELL US NOT TO HATE THE HUN.
The curious thing about the movie, considering its subject matter, is how beautiful it is. Just look at the stylized lines of the ocean, the baroque arabesques of the smoke coming off the ship’s smokestacks, the elegant use of negative space. Each and every cel of the movie is worthy of getting framed. How many war propaganda movies can you say that about?
I’ve just started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbitto my daughter. While much of the nuance and the references to Tolkienian deep time are lost on her, she easily grasps the distinctive charms of the characters, the nature of their journey, and the perils, wonders, and Elven friends they have met along the way so far. She is familiar with fairy tale dwarfs and mythic wizards, though not with the typology of insular, middle-class, adventure-averse country gentry, thus Hobbits themselves took a bit of explaining.
While reading and discussing the book with her, I’ve wondered to myself about a possible historical relationship between Tolkien’s fairy tale figures and those of the Walt Disney company which appeared around the same time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hobbit might possibly share a common ancestor with Snow White’s dwarfs—in the German fairy tale the Brothers Grimm first published in 1812. But here is where any similarity between Tolkien and Disney begins and ends.
In fact, Tolkien mostly hated Disney’s creations, and he made these feelings very clear. Snow White debuted only months after The Hobbit’s publication in 1937. As it happened, Tolkien went to see the film with literary friend and sometime rival C.S. Lewis. Neither liked it very much. In a 1939 letter, Lewis granted that “the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving.” But he also called Disney a “poor boob” and lamented “What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?”
Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscura, “found Snow White lovely, but otherwise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as precious”—the concept, that is, of fairy stories. Some might brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert puts it, “I think it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”
“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Greydanus at the National Catholic Register, “it would be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the word), also have funny names (derived, however, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to separate his dwarves from the common run of children’s story dwarfs.
Tolkien would later express his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” in which he attempts to define the genre, parsing its differences from other types of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they had been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for young people, but he did not write it as a “children’s book.” Nothing in the book panders, not the language, nor the complex characterization, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the other hand, represented to Tolkien a cheapening of ancient cultural artifacts, and he seemed to think that Disney’s approach to films for children was especially condescending and cynical.
He described Disney’s work on the whole as “vulgar” and the man himself, in a 1964 letter, as “simply a cheat,” who is “hopelessly corrupted” by profit-seeking (though he admits he is “not innocent of the profit-motive” himself).
…I recognize his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…
This explication of Tolkien’s dislike for Disney goes beyond mere gossip to an important practical upshot: Tolkien would not allow any of his works to be given the Walt Disney treatment. While his publisher approached the studios about a Lord of the Rings adaptation (they were turned down at the time), most scholars think this happened without the author’s knowledge, which seems a safe assumption to say the least.
Tolkien’s long history of expressing negative opinions about Disney led to his later forbidding, “as long as it was possible,” any of his works to be produced “by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).” Astute readers of Tolkien know his serious intent in even the most comic of his characters and situations. Or as Vintage News’ Martin Chalakoski writes, “there is not a speck of Disney in any of those pages.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
You could argue that, of all rock bands, that Pink Floyd had the least need for visual accompaniment. Sonically rich and evocatively structured, their albums evolved to offer listening experiences that verge on the cinematic in themselves. Yet from fairly early in the Floyd’s history, their artistic ambitions extended to that which could not be heard. Can you really understand their enterprise, it’s fair to ask, if you remain merely one of their listeners, never entering the visual dimension — not just their album covers, reproductions of which still grace many a dorm room wall, but also their elaborate stage shows, music videos (which they were making before that form had a name), and films? One man had more responsibility for the development of the Floyd’s visual style than any other: Ian Emes.
In 1972, Emes took it upon himself to animate their song “One of These Days” from the previous year’s album Meddle. When the finished work, “French Windows,” aired on the BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, it caught the eye of the Floyd’s keyboard player Rick Wright. The group then got in touch with Emes, asking to use “French Windows” as a projection behind their concerts.
They went on to commission further work from him, for songs like “Speak to Me,” Time,” and “On the Run” from The Dark Side of the Moon. This professional connection endured for decades. When Roger Waters put on his own performances of The Wall — including the enormously scaled show in Berlin in 1990 — he had Emes direct its animated sequences. The post-Waters version of Pink Floyd even called up Emes in 2015 to ask him to make a film to accompany their final album The Endless River.
It was, in a way, the completion of a circle: “One of These Days” is a mostly instrumental song, and The Endless River is a mostly instrumental album; “French Windows” uses rotoscoping, which involves tracing over live action footage to make more realistically smooth animation, and the Endless River film presents its own live action footage in a manner that sometimes verges on the abstract. Both works create their own visual environments, which dovetails with what Emes, who died two years ago, once described as the appeal for him of the Floyd: “They went to architecture college and so I think their music creates spaces. It creates environments of sound and I was so stimulated that my mind would soar, and so I would see images that were stimulated by the music.” Their music takes a different form before the mind’s eye of each fan, but it was Emes who made his visions a part of their legacy.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
While reporting on the Eurovision Song Contest, the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane “asked a man named Seppo, from the seven-hundred-strong Eurovision Fan Club of Norway, what he loved about Eurovision. ‘Brotherhood of man,’ he said — a slightly ambiguous answer, because that was the name of a British group that entered, and won, the contest in 1976.” And the concept has a longer history in European music than that: Friedrich Schiller claimed to be celebrating it when he wrote his poem “An die Freude,” or “To Joy,” which Ludwig van Beethoven adapted a few decades thereafter into the final movement of his Symphony No. 9. Later still, in 1972, that piece of music was adopted by the Council of Europe as the continent’s anthem; in 1985, the European Union made it official as well.
In a sense, “Ode to Joy” is a natural choice for a musical representation of Europe, not just for its explicit themes, but also for the obvious ambition of the symphony that includes it to capture an entire civilization in musical form.
Its complexity and contradiction may be easier to appreciate through these videos, which constitute a visualization by Stephen Malinowski, creator of the Music Animation Machine, previously featured here on Open Culture for his animated scores of everything from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 to Debussy’s Clair de lune. As one of the most frequently performed symphonies in the world, Beethoven’s 9th comes to us laden with a fair amount of cultural baggage, but Malinowski’s sparely elegant rendering lets us listen while keeping our mind on the essentials of its structure.
That structure, as the viewing experience emphasizes, is not a particularly simple one. Though already deaf, Beethoven nevertheless composed this final complete symphony with layer after ever-changing yet interlocking layer, drawing from a variety of musical traditions as well as pieces he’d already written for other purposes. At its 1824 premiere in Vienna, Symphony No. 9 received no fewer than five standing ovations, though over the centuries since, even certain of its appreciators question whether the final movement really fits in with the rest. Indeed, some even regard “Ode to Joy” as kitschy, an exercise unbecoming of the symphony as a whole, to say nothing of the man who composed it. But then, it’s undeniable that European culture has since achieved heights of kitsch unimaginable in Beethoven’s day.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Difficult as it may be to remember now, there was a time when Meryl Streep was not yet synonymous with silver-screen stardom — a time, in fact, when she had yet to appear on the silver screen at all. Half a century ago, she was just another young stage actress in New York, albeit one rapidly ascending the rungs of theatrical prestige, doing three Shakespeare plays and then starring in Weill, Hauptmann, and Brecht’s Happy End on Broadway. The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, Out of Africa, Postcards from the Edge, The Bridges of Madison County: all this lay in her future in 1976, the year of her feature debut.
Erikson conceived of each age of man as a struggle for resolution between two opposing forces: in infancy, for example, trust versus mistrust; in adolescence, identity versus role confusion; and so on.
The young Meryl Streep, or rather her voice, appears in the sixth stage, early adulthood, whose theme is love. She acts out that age’s contest of intimacy and isolation with Charles Levin, another up-and-comer who would go on to achieve wide recognition on television shows like Alice, Hill Street Blues, and (just once, but memorably) Seinfeld. In character as a young couple unsteadily feeling their way through their relationship, the two engage in a remarkably naturalistic conversation, all animated in a seventies watercolor style in the vision of director John Hubley. A prolific animator who’d worked on Disney’s Fantasia, Hubley was known as the creator of Mr. Magoo: a man who provided us all with an example of how to navigate late adulthood’s path between ego integrity and despair, however myopically.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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