Cartoons and Cartoonists

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      George Newall, a Creator of ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ Dies at 88

      by

      He was the last surviving member of the team that produced the educational cartoon for ABC-TV that informed Generation X.George R. Newall, an advertising executive who was the last surviving creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated musical snippets that taught young Generation X television viewers grammar, math, civics and science for a few moments during otherwise vacuous Saturday-morning commercial programming, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his wife, Lisa Maxwell, said.“Schoolhouse Rock,” series, which ran from 1973 to 1984 and was revived in the 1990s, used quirky cartoons and upbeat music to furtively transform rote learning into euphonious fun during regular programming and before the government, in the 1990s, mandated that stations broadcast a modicum of educational and informative fare.The show won four Emmy Awards.The series spawned books, recordings, live singalong shows and a nostalgia cult that will mark the show’s 50th anniversary next year when the Walt Disney Company presents a prime-time television special; rereleases “The Official Schoolhouse Rock Guide,” written by Mr. Newall and Tom Yohe; and publishes an adult coloring book featuring all of the program’s characters.Among the show’s perennial favorite songs were “Three Is a Magic Number,” celebrating tripods, triangles and even a couple producing a baby; “Interjection!” which depicts a cartoon character getting stuck in the posterior with a big needle; and Mr. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives.”“Schoolhouse Rock” originated in the early 1970s when David McCall, president of the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, complained to Mr. Newall, a creative director there, that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”Could Mr. Newall put the multiplication tables to music? he asked. Mr. Newall’s search for a quirky musician who might help led him to Ben Tucker, who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, which Mr. Newall frequented regularly.“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’” Mr. Newall told The New York Times Magazine in 2018.‘He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’” Mr. Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”The song inspired Mr. Yohe, the agency’s art director and a cartoonist, to start doodling. What was originally conceived as an educational phonograph record morphed into a series of three-minute films that the creative team presented to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, a client of the agency.Mr. Eisner happened to be meeting with Chuck Jones, the immortal Warner Bros. animator.“After we played the song and Tom showed them the storyboards, Eisner looked at Jones and said, ‘What do you think?’” Mr. Newall told The Times in 1994. “And Jones said, ‘I think you should buy it right away.’ It was probably the quickest deal in television history.”The first season was followed with themed series on grammar, government (to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration), science and computer technology.In 1976, Carol Rinzler wrote in The Times, “The ‘ABC Schoolhouse Rock’ animated bits, which teach math and reading concepts and, this year, American history, are a joy. It’s worth sitting in front of your TV all morning to catch the one in which the Constitution is set to music.”Three-minute “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons like “Conjunction Junction” tried to teach children grammar, math, civics and science.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Eisner later became chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired “Schoolhouse Rock” in 1996 (including new segments produced in the 1990s with J.J. Sedelmaier Productions) when it bought Capital Cities/ABC.Mr. Newall and Mr. Yohe were the executive producers and creative directors of the original episodes and worked with other collaborators. Mr. Newall composed 10 of the songs.In 1996, Atlantic Records released an album featuring alternative musicians like Moby (who croons a brassy version of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening”), and in 2002 the Disney Company issued a DVD of all the “Schoolhouse Rock” episodes and a timely lyrical explication by Mr. Newall of why some states in a presidential election are more equal than others.In 2013, Mr. Newall spoke about the show and Mr. Dorough performed “Schoolhouse Rock” songs at a free concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Yohe died in 2000, Mr. Dorough in 2018.George Robert Newall Jr. was born on June 17, 1934, in Lakewood, N.J. His father was a builder. His mother, Louise (DeNyse) Newall, worked for the school board in Brick Township.After attending Point Pleasant Beach High School and serving in the Army’s 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mr. Newall graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1960. He moved to New York City, where, starting in a mailroom at $50 a week, he worked for a number of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.At McCaffrey & McCall, he conjured up the Hai Karate brand of men’s toiletries for Pfizer with an advertising campaign that parodied the industry’s customary romanticized appeal to raw sexual passion by including self-defense instructions to fend off libidinous women.In 1978, he and Mr. Yohe started a company to produce animated educational programming. They won another Emmy for “Drawing Power,” an animated series for NBC, and awards for cartoons that promoted nutrition, cartoons that urged young viewers to read (“When You Turn Off Your Set, Turn On a Book”) and cartoons that were praised for being neither sexist nor racist.In the 1980s, Mr. Newall joined Wells Rich Greene, where he produced TV commercials in which Alan Alda pitched Atari computers.Mr. Newall is survived by his wife, the artist and singer Lisa (Chapman) Maxwell; a stepson, Lake Wolosker; and his sisters, Jessie Newall Bissey, Kathy Newall Hogan and Anne Newall Kimmel. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Jules Bass, Co-Producer of TV Holiday Staples, Is Dead at 87

      by

      The animation company he ran with Arthur Rankin Jr. gave the world “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and much more.Jules Bass, who created an animation empire with his business partner, Arthur Rankin Jr., that produced perennial Christmastime television favorites like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman,” died on Tuesday in Rye, N.Y. He was 87.His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Jennifer Ruff, whose mother was Mr. Bass’s first wife.The Rankin/Bass studio was a major force in animated programming, mostly on television, from the early 1960s to the late ’80s. Some of its TV shows and movies used traditional hand-drawn cel animation, but it carved out a separate specialty in the stop-motion puppet animation familiar to viewers since “Gumby” in the 1950s.Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion specials included “Rudolph” (1964), featuring the voice of the folk singer Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman;“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1970), with Fred Astaire as the narrator and Mickey Rooney as the voice of Kris Kringle; and “Jack Frost” (1979), with Robert Morse voicing the title role.“Frosty” (1969), narrated by Jimmy Durante, used traditional animation.To create the stop-motion effect, animators in Japan painstakingly shot thousands of pictures of the tiniest movements and gestures of inches-tall puppets. When run at 24 frames a second, the images generated a whimsical sort of herky-jerky animation that became the Rankin/Bass signature.“When I saw their cartoons, they left a great impression on me because they had dimensionality versus drawn animation,” said Tom Gasek, a professor in the school of film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology who was inspired by Rankin/Bass’s work to become a stop-motion animator. “They were not high quality by any means, but they were charming and their designs were very smart.”Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin were often credited as the directors of their work and offered input on scripts and storyboards. But they played different roles at the company, said Rick Goldschmidt, the studio’s official historian.Mr. Bass composed much of the music. He hired and worked closely with the musical supervisor, Maury Laws, and ran the company’s business in Manhattan while Mr. Rankin was in Japan supervising the animation.“Where Jules is really the star of Rankin/Bass is as a songwriter and his partnership with Maury,” Mr. Goldschmidt said in a phone interview.Mr. Rankin, who was the studio’s chief executive, also sold the shows to TV networks and made sure they were delivered on time.“After a while, we were never seen together — I’d be doing production in Tokyo and he’d be recording a soundtrack in New York,” Mr. Rankin said in an interview in 2003 with the Museum of Television and Radio, now the Paley Center for Media. “If we were together, one of us wasn’t necessary.”Mr. Bass was rarely quoted publicly, and little is known about his private life. But the two partners spoke during a joint interview with The New York Times in 1982 when their animated theatrical feature, “The Last Unicorn,” was released.When they were asked who did most of the directing — the movie credits both of them — they initially said they did it together.“Anything he can do, I can do better,” Mr. Rankin said.Mr. Bass countered: “He never worked a day on the film. I did everything.”Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the screenplay for “The Last Unicorn” and the novel it was based on, recalled in a phone interview that his dealings with Mr. Bass “were very professional.” But, he added, “he was very private, and I never had a true sense of what was going on deepest in his head.”He added, “I’m grateful that the film came out pretty much as I wrote it.”Arthur Rankin Jr., left, and Mr. Bass in 1965. Both men were credited as producers and directors of their TV specials, but Mr. Bass was more involved with the music and Mr. Rankin with the animation.Miser Bros. Press/Rick Goldschmidt ArchivesJulius Bass was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1935. His father, Max, was a wholesale beer salesman, and his mother, Bernice (Palat) Bass, was a homemaker.He attended New York University, where he studied marketing from 1952 to 1954, but he did not graduate. He was hired by Gardner Advertising in Manhattan, where he met Mr. Rankin, who was making TV commercials under the banner of his company, Videocraft International.Mr. Bass joined Videocraft in the mid-1950s, and the two men produced commercials, occasionally using animation, for agencies that represented clients including General Electric and the A.&P. supermarket chain. They wearied of commercial production and shifted to animation in 1960 with a TV series, “The New Adventures of Pinocchio,” which used the stop-motion technique Mr. Bass had discovered in Japan.The company eventually changed its name to Rankin/Bass, and its work toggled between stop-motion and traditional cel animation.Although Rankin/Bass was best known for its Christmas programs, it also made TV movies like “The Ballad of Smokey the Bear” (1966), which was narrated by James Cagney,; “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971); and “The Hobbit” (1977), which earned a Peabody Award. They also produced animated TV series like “King Kong” (1966), “The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show” (1970), the “Jackson 5ive” (1971),“TigerSharks” (1985) and “Thundercats” (1987).Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin ended their partnership in the late 1980s after their company was acquired by Lorimar-Telepictures, which was subsequently bought by Warner Communications, which is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Mr. Rankin died in 2014.Mr. Bass later wrote three children’s books. “Herb the Vegetarian Dragon” and “Cooking With Herb the Vegetarian Dragon,” illustrated by Debbie Harter, were both published in 1999. “The Mythomaniacs” (2013), with illustrations by Lawrence Christmas, is about a teenage magician who sends a group of readers of his father’s fairy tales into the books as characters.He also wrote an adult novel, “Headhunters” (2001), about four women from New Jersey who go to Monte Carlo and pretend to be among the world’s wealthiest women. It was adapted into a 2011 film, “Monte Carlo,” starring Selena Gomez.Mr. Bass leaves no immediate survivors. His daughter, Jean Nicole Bass, died this year. His marriages to Renee Fisherman and Sylvia Bass ended in divorce.The power of two of Rankin/Bass’s best-known productions has reverberated for decades since they were released: Both “Rudolph” and “Frosty” remain highly rated cornerstones of CBS’s pre-Christmas programming.In 2014, CBS promoted “Rudolph” on its 50th anniversary with ads that used stop motion to show the renowned reindeer and Sam the Snowman walking around the network’s backlot, meeting the stars of some of its other shows, including Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory” and Michael Weatherly of “NCIS.”“They’re the fabric of our Christmas hearth, the wood in the Christmas fire,” George Schweitzer, CBS’s former president of marketing, said in a phone interview. “You knew Christmas was coming when Rudolph and Frosty showed up on CBS.” More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      Harvey Awards to Induct New Hall of Fame Members

      by

      Neil Gaiman, Marjorie Henderson Buell, Gilbert Shelton and Roy Thomas will be honored for their comic book work at New York Comic Con on Oct. 7.The Harvey Awards, which honors exemplary comic book work, will be adding members to its Hall of Fame at New York Comic Con in October. The new inductees are Neil Gaiman, whose best-selling series The Sandman was recently adapted for Netflix, the underground cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, and Roy Thomas, a prolific writer and editor for DC Comics and Marvel Comics.Marjorie Henderson Buell, who died in 1993 and was the creator of Little Lulu, will be inducted posthumously. Little Lulu debuted in 1935 as a single-panel cartoon in The Saturday Evening Post. The character proved popular and Buell, who was known as Marge and who controlled the rights to Little Lulu, spun her into a syndicated newspaper strip and later, comics, cartoons and all manner of merchandise.“We’re thrilled to return to New York Comic Con for our first in-person Harvey Awards ceremony since 2019 and to induct four legendary creators into our Harvey Awards Hall of Fame,” said John Lind, a chairman of the Harvey Awards steering committee. The awards began in 1988 and were named after Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who created and founded Mad magazine, who died in 1993.The Harvey Awards honor comic book work in six categories, including book of the year, best manga, and best adaptation. The nominees are determined via a survey of about 200 industry professionals, librarians, educators and creators who submit candidates for each of the categories. The selections are tallied and pulled into a ballot, which is then open to a vote by all industry professionals, creators and librarians.Looking back, Gaiman shared some fond memories of his Harvey experiences. “The first time I was given a Harvey award, it was 1991, 31 years ago, I had a whole career or two ahead of me and Harvey Kurtzman was still alive. It was the award that bore his name, and was thus the most important award I had ever received,” he said in a statement. “Now, with over three decades of comics career behind me, it’s just as thrilling to hear that I get to join a Hall of Fame named for Harvey. He was one of the greats, and so many of the people who have been inducted already have been people I looked up to over the years. So this is an unalloyed delight for me.” More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      ‘Bluey’ Is About Everything, Especially Music

      by

      “Ladies and gentlemen! I will now play for you the ‘Rondo alla Turca.’”From the first scene of “Bluey,” the hit Australian canine cartoon that amusingly, frankly and ever-so-understandingly takes the hands of children and parents through the escapades of the Heeler family of heelers, classical music is as much a part of playtime as the toys scattered around their suburban Brisbane home.Bandit, the stay-at-home, try-to-work father who, with Chilli, his wife, has become the idol and the envy of parents everywhere for his willingness to entertain his children anywhere, anytime, anyhow, is on the floor, with his 6-year-old daughter, Bluey, draped over his knees. He cracks his knuckles, takes on airs and tickles her mercilessly to the tune of the Mozart sonata. Bluey’s adorable 4-year-old sister, Bingo, watches, begging to be the piano herself.“Magic Xylophone,” the first seven-minute installment of the three seasons currently streaming on Disney+, is notionally about the importance of taking turns. But like most episodes of “Bluey,” it’s also about far more than the immediate lessons it teaches through the Heelers’ antics, at least in the giggly way that the show is “about” everything from family and friendship to marriage and mortality.Amid the slapstick, “Magic Xylophone” is about the power of music to transform us. Bingo finds a xylophone in a toy box, one with the make-believe ability to freeze people in place. Once stuck, they can be subjected to all manner of embarrassments — such as when the girls’ target is their father — or pleaded with to share, as when Bingo ensnares Bluey. All the while, we learn that “Bluey” is going to be no ordinary children’s show in another way, too: This is a show that repays listening, as well as watching.As the girls have their fun, the Mozart sticks around, becoming the basis for a strikingly well-crafted score that stays enchantingly true to the spirit of the original material even as it deviates wildly while the girls argue with their mother, or suffers from comical wrong notes when Bluey and Bingo fight. By the end, Mozart’s rondo has found its way to major-key joy, and the girls have, too, sitting arm in arm as their father sprays himself in the face with a hose.“BLUEY” DID NOT NEED to have music this good. “Peppa Pig,” for instance, its predecessor in fickle toddlers’ hearts, sometimes plinks and plonks to make a point, but its music usually does little more than start and end another episode in its endless cacophony of oinks.But the producers of “Bluey” intend its episodes to be thought about as short films instead of televisual fodder, and the scoring has a cinematic quality that helps make it the kind of show that parents might want to actually watch rather than curse from a distance.“I always knew that music was going to be almost half the show,” Joe Brumm, its creator, said in an interview, explaining his admiration for the role of sound in films like “True Romance,” “The Truman Show” and “The Thin Red Line.”“I didn’t want the usual kids’ TV scoring,” he continued. “Some shows just use one track for an entire season, or a variation of it. I’d worked on ‘Charlie and Lola’ years ago, and they had a couple of musicians who played multiple instruments, and every episode had its own score. So that was the norm for me; it’s definitely not the norm for a lot of shows.”The music of “Bluey” is a collaborative endeavor, but it is primarily the task of its composer, Joff Bush. Bush, 37, switched from jazz piano to composition as a student at the Queensland Conservatorium, and he later attended the Australian Film Television and Radio School. He leads weekly, hourslong Wednesday sessions, at which Brumm and others talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode while he improvises at the piano, before later writing a score. It’s work that Brumm is so proud of that he has given Bush his own character in tribute, a musician called Busker.Far from every episode of “Bluey” uses classical music, and Bush’s tastes are eclectic. Some of its more than a hundred shows take inspiration from folk, jazz or rock, and almost all of them are then filtered through what Brumm calls the distinctively “jangly” sound that comes from Bush’s collection of old guitars and his habit of ignoring his mistakes. Even when Bush does color with the classical canon, there is a charmingly offbeat oddness to his work, something that helpfully reminds you that no real family could possibly be as agreeable, as forgiving or as functional as the Heelers, however much your children might reason otherwise.“There’s a humanness to it, I hope,” Bush said.THERE IS A LONG HISTORY entwining classical music with animation, one that dates back well beyond Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit!” to strains of Wagner in “What’s Opera, Doc?” “If cartoons have become associated over time with any one musical genre, it is classical music,” the musicologist Daniel Goldmark writes in his book “Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.”But the Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s to the ’50s used classical music as an “endless source of jokes at the expense of concert hall culture,” Goldmark writes. When concert music and opera were more prominent than they are now, many viewers had certain expectations about Romantic-era music — Wagner most of all — that could easily be subverted, and puncturing its pretensions with a cartoon rabbit was anyway inherently funny.“We do actually steal that approach, sometimes,” Bush said, “taking these grand things and messing with them.”Sometimes Bush does that with glee: A squabble in “Ice Cream” gets sprinkled with absurd grace when Bluey and Bingo waltz, tongues wagging, to Tchaikovsky; their divalike cousin Muffin has become associated with music from “Carmen”; even Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” gets trotted out in “Escape” as the girls dream of chasing down parents who dare venture out for a night. Sometimes the nods are less obvious, as when Elgar drifts in to accompany a crowning ceremony in the backyard paradise of “Rug Island.”Bush is certainly interested in breaking down elitist ideas of what classical music should be — in showing, as he puts it, “that these are great pieces of music, and they don’t have to be heard in a concert hall where we’re all sitting quiet. They can be for everybody.”But Bush — unlike the composers of the Warner Bros. era, and at a time when classical music is less widely known if still set high on its lonely pedestal — tends to do this less through satire or mockery than by remaining somewhat faithful to the composers themselves, whether to the cheekiness of Mozart or to the intricacy of Bach.And there is a lot of Bach in “Bluey”: a Brandenburg Concerto’s counterpoint as a girl-gang’s game of nail salon on a tree stump intertwines with their fathers’ manly-man efforts to chop it up in “Stumpfest,” for example, or a prelude from “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” its already disjointed theme broken up by Bush and made to flow only when the girls successfully deliver a love letter that resolves a parental fight about the trash in “Postman.”There are also episodes that reward thought, like “Bingo.” Bluey goes out for the day, leaving Bingo to struggle by herself while Chilli endures her own traumas trying to fix a toilet. Bush chose a solo piece to illustrate solo play, Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” for piano. “The melody is this little loop,” he said, “it’s this idea of Bingo starting again and getting stuck.”There’s a deeper message in that choice of music. The Mozart looks so simple on the page — and sounds like it, too — that it’s easy to forget that it can be devilishly hard to get right. So too is playtime, for children on their own. Or plumbing.“Any pre-Romantic music, you’ve got free rein,” Bush said. “So much of that is about the beauty of the music itself, rather than ‘This is a sad piece; be sad.’” You can really mess with the music a lot more, without hitting on any meanings.”“THERE’S NOTHING WORTHY going on,” Brumm insists when asked whether this is all part of a grand plan to educate children in music appreciation, à la Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” even if as an occasional classical listener he sees nothing wrong with getting them interested in it. Bach is available to use without a licensing fee, after all, and the composer isn’t around to protest a misuse.During weekly sessions where the show’s creators talk through the philosophy and the psychology of an episode, Bush improvises at the piano, before later writing a score.Natalie Grono for The New York TimesBush feels likewise, as much as he revels in seeding slivers of Saint-Saëns across an episode so that he can drop the big entry from that composer’s “Organ” Symphony at the climactic moment in “Calypso.”“I don’t think we ever approach it from the place of getting kids into classical music, or anything like that,” he said. “It’s always about the story, about what feels right and fits.”Nowhere is that narrative honesty more brutally effective than in “Sleepytime,” Bush’s balletic masterpiece, which turns the nightly nightmare of getting a family some sleep into an outer-space emotional epic to the sounds of Gustav Holst.Using “Jupiter” from Holst’s “The Planets” for “Sleepytime” was Brumm’s idea, but Bush’s execution is sublime. Carefully, he teases the intervals of its famous theme whenever we glimpse parental affection, giving it an ethereality when cuddles are involved, or an impudence when Bluey pops up to ask for a glass of water then inevitably needs Bandit’s help as she goes to pee.Only when Bingo finally keeps her promise of sleeping in her own bed — “I’m a big girl now,” she tells the sun, a symbol of Chilli’s comforting embrace in a dream inspired by a book about the solar system — does Bush unfurl Holst’s melody in its full splendor, marking the glow, the nobility, the certainty of a mother’s love.“There’s a time in a child’s life when they are starting to build their own identity, and their own independence,” Bush said. “The idea that they are going alone but their parents’ love will always be there is such a powerful one. It needed to be something like ‘Jupiter’ that is bigger than what it is.”You know what’s coming, and when it does, it lands with the devastation of an asteroid strike; the domestic turns into something sublime. Good luck not crying. More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Josep’ Review: Escaping a Civil War

      by

      The French cartoonist known as Aurel animates the life of the Catalan illustrator Josep Bartolí, who lived in French internment camps and loved Frida Kahlo.After Barcelona, Spain, fell to Gen. Francisco Franco’s forces in 1939, nearly half a million Spaniards fled to France in what is known as “La Retirada,” or the retreat. The Catalan illustrator and trade unionist Josep Bartolí was one of those who left.His experiences and sketches during his detainment in a series of French internment camps fuel the rough grace of “Josep,” a hand-drawn film that is the debut feature of the French cartoonist known as Aurel.A humane camp guard, Serge (voiced by Bruno Solo), throws Bartolí a lifeline, and their bond gives “Josep” its contemporary anchor: An elderly Serge recounts his memories to his grandson. Bartolí (Sergi López) endures the hunger of camp life and the abuse of its villainous gendarmes — one guard’s face morphs into a pig’s snout — but he rallies his spirits with other defiant, bohemian exiles. In a desperate episode, Serge even looks for Bartolí’s missing fiancée, who is feared dead.Aurel renders the barren, dun-colored camp sequences largely through still drawings that are given slightly shimmering contours, rather than extended animated action. More vibrant colors bloom after Bartolí — bearing psychological scars — escapes, ending up in Mexico and New York, and gets to vibe with the artist Frida Kahlo (mellifluously voiced by the singer Sílvia Pérez Cruz).The 74-minute film leaps among time frames without much warning. Occasionally, the screen erupts into crackling black-and-white images drawn directly from Bartolí’s work — as if torn from the very pages of his sketchbooks. That kind of impressionistic outlook might be the best lens for understanding the compressed storytelling of this timely tribute from one cartoonist to another.JosepNot rated. In French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Watch on Ovid. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Television

      'The Proud Family' Returns, Now Even Louder and Prouder

      by

      “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder,” on Disney+, revives a beloved animated series for a new generation.When “The Proud Family” debuted on the Disney Channel on Sept. 15, 2001, it introduced one of TV’s first animated African American families.Over 52 episodes and a TV movie, the series offered a lighthearted depiction of a Black suburban family going about their everyday lives. The headstrong middle-schooler Penny Proud (voiced by Kyla Pratt) took the lead, with her strict but loving parents Oscar and Trudy (Tommy Davidson and Paula Jai Parker), feisty grandmother Suga Mama (Jo Marie Payton) and precocious infant twin siblings BeBe and CeCe rounding out the rest of the clan.They bickered, supported one another, threw shade and showed love — all of the things that typical on-screen families do. But before The Prouds, TV audiences rarely got to see a Black cartoon family doing those run-of-the-mill things, too.Now the groundbreaking brood is back with “The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder,” a 10-episode revival scheduled to air weekly on Disney+ starting Wednesday.During the show’s original run, from 2001 to 2005, Penny went through the paces of early adolescence — goofing around with her multicultural crew of friends, pouting about chores, dodging school bullies and testing parental boundaries. While many of the show’s themes were universal, they were delivered in a way that was uniquely and intentionally rooted in Black culture.The Proud grandmother, Suga Mama (Jo Marie Payton), is also back. Like the original, the new show includes sight gags that appeal to grade-schoolers and more subtle punch lines for grown-ups.Disney+The dialogue was studded with the kinds of colloquialisms and vernacular that can be heard in many Black households. The children’s playground banter employed of-the-moment slang, often pulled from rap lyrics. There were personal jabs about being “ashy” and class warfare was waged whenever the working-class branch of the family butted heads with their “bougie” in-laws.Even the body language and nonverbal cues — a wary side-eye, an indignant up-and-down glare — were embedded as nods to Black viewers. The humor worked on multiple levels, with silly sight gags that appeal to grade-schoolers and more subtle punch lines to keep grown-ups engaged.“A lot of what we’d do was like, ‘Wink, wink. You know what we’re saying, right?’” said Bruce W. Smith, the show’s creator. “We were hiding a lot of innuendo and, frankly, family business under the guise of what our characters were saying and going through. Where the show shines is in all of its cultural references.”Smith is a veteran animator who spent much of the ’90s working on feature films like “Space Jam” and Disney’s “Tarzan” and “The Emperor’s New Groove.” By the end of that decade, he set his sights on serialized television, aiming to fill a void in the small screen’s animated offerings.“‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Family Guy,’ ‘King of the Hill,’ all these animated sitcoms became the rage,” he said. “I was just looking at them like: OK, we’re not in this. We’re not involved somehow, and we should be.”At the time, live-action sitcoms like “Moesha” and “Sister, Sister” had proven that Black teenage girls could both carry a series and draw a dedicated audience. Smith set out to create a cartoon sitcom in the vein of “Moesha” — one that centered a Black girl’s life and experiences.His first step was teaming up with Ralph Farquhar, a creator of “Moesha,” as well as its spinoff, “The Parkers,” and the short-lived Black family dramedy “South Central.” Together, they oversaw “The Proud Family” and its subsequent 2005 TV movie, with Smith also directing several episodes.Penny is now solidly into her teens and her peer group has expanded to include her gender-fluid friend Michael, second from right, voiced by EJ Johnson.Disney+“The fact that there was no one else doing it was sad,” Farquhar said, in a joint video interview with Smith. “But for us, it was this opportunity. We wanted to tell our stories in a way that we understand. In that nuanced way that only comes from living it.”Smith added: “The great thing about it was there was nothing before us. There was no bar set. For us, that was exciting because then we could set the bar.”In addition to commonplace domestic scenes — kitchen table spats, curfew breaches, babysitting snafus — there was a smattering of more educational story lines. These included a poignant Kwanzaa celebration and a Black History Month tribute to oft-overlooked luminaries like the pioneering aviator Bessie Coleman and Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.“That’s what I loved about the original: We talked about things that other people shied away from,” said Pratt, who took on the role of Penny at age 14. “And we’re doing the same thing this time around.”The revival, which is also overseen by Smith and Farquhar, retains much of the original’s flavor, but it has been updated for the 2020s. Instead of pagers, the kids use smartphones. Dated phrases like “off the heezy fo’ sheezy” are out; “woke” and “Black girl magic” are now in.The original featured guest appearances by popular early ’00s performers like Lil’ Romeo, Mos Def and Mariah Carey. “Louder and Prouder” is similarly star-studded, with cameos by the likes of Lil Nas X, Chance the Rapper and Lizzo. The heartwarming theme song, performed by Solange Knowles and Destiny’s Child, also got a makeover — the 2022 version is sung by the newcomer Joyce Wrice.Penny and her friends are now solidly into their teens, with all of the body changes, heightened hormones and social minefields that entails. And a few new players have joined the returning core cast.The former reality TV star EJ Johnson voices Penny’s gender-fluid friend Michael. (The recurring character Wizard Kelly is a sly allusion to Johnson’s father, the N.B.A. legend Magic Johnson.) And a same-sex couple, Barry and Randall Leibowitz-Jenkins (Zachary Quinto and Billy Porter), have moved into the neighborhood with their adopted teenagers: son Francis (Artist Dubose, better known as the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie) and daughter Maya (Keke Palmer), a fiery activist who serves as Penny’s new foil.Pratt said she continued to hear from fans long after “The Proud Family” ended. “People were talking to me literally every other day of my life, trying to get the show back on,” she said. Disney+Palmer, whose breakthrough came in the 2006 film “Akeelah and the Bee,” credits Farquhar with discovering her a few years earlier, when she was 10. (He cast her in a Disney Channel pilot that didn’t get picked up.) He asked her to join “Louder and Prouder” because he knew she’d been a longtime fan of the original.“I saw a family that reminded me of my own — I even had boy-girl twins in my family,” Palmer said. “That was a show that represented what my Black American culture looked like. I thought they got it right!”Nevertheless, Disney chose not to renew “The Proud Family” when the original production run ended in 2005. (Disney declined to comment on the end of the original show.) In the interview, Smith and Farquhar said they have never known why the show wasn’t allowed to continue, but they made clear that they always hoped to bring it back in some form.“From the moment we stopped doing the original version, we had been campaigning to bring it back,” Farquhar said. “We weren’t quite sure why we ever even stopped.”They weren’t alone. “The Proud Family” has been a steady source of millennial nostalgia online, with fans sharing art and cosplay photos inspired by the show on social media, and revisiting beloved episodes in blog posts. Pratt said overzealous fans have frequently reached out to her in real life, too.“People were talking to me literally every other day of my life, trying to get the show back on,” she said.Farquhar and Smith said they noticed a new outpouring from “Proud” fans after Disney+ began streaming the original on Jan. 1, 2020. Disney apparently noticed, too. The company approached the men about a revival, and then publicly announced it on Feb. 27, 2020.Farquhar and Smith have since signed a multiyear overall deal with Disney to produce animated and live-action series and movies and to develop projects for emerging and diverse talent. Smith boasted that the “Louder and Prouder” staff, from the directors to layout artists to animators, “looks like the show.” (Like most of the entertainment industry, animation has historically offered far fewer opportunities to women and people of color than to white men.)Smith has wanted to expand Black people’s presence and influence in animation since he started working in the industry in the early 1980s, he said, a mission informed by his own experiences as a young cartoon fan.“When I was growing up, I loved shows like ‘The Flintstones’ and ‘The Jetsons,’” he said. But together they painted an unwelcoming picture: “I didn’t exist in the beginning of time, and I don’t think they’re looking for me to exist when spaceships start flying off this planet.”“I gotta do something about that,” he continued. “Because I love this medium and I want to see myself in this.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Peter Robbins, Original Voice of Charlie Brown, Dies at 65

      by

      Mr. Robbins, who first gave voice to the “Peanuts” character in a 1965 Christmas special, had struggled with mental illness and addiction in recent years.Peter Robbins, whose voice brought the “Peanuts” character Charlie Brown to life on television in the 1960s but who struggled with mental illness and served prison time later in his life, died on Jan. 18 in Oceanside, Calif. He was 65.The cause of death was suicide, according to the San Diego County Medical Examiner.A list of his survivors was not immediately available.At age 9, Mr. Robbins achieved a breakthrough when the producers of the 1965 TV movie “A Charlie Brown Christmas” cast him as the voice of the hapless but endearing central character.Introduced in Charles M. Schulz’s popular comic strip “Peanuts,” Charlie Brown would become a sentimental presence on the screen with his catchphrase, “Good grief!,” familiar yellow shirt and frequent teasing by his friend Lucy.Mr. Robbins, who was born Louis G. Nanasi, would share in the franchise’s success, narrating at least six other television and movie productions, including “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” in 1966 and “You’re in Love, Charlie Brown” a year later.During his career, Mr. Robbins appeared in episodes of the television shows “Rawhide,” “The Munsters,” “Get Smart” and “My Three Sons,” according to IMDb.In the decades after his work as the voice of Charlie Brown, Mr. Robbins was unable to sustain his early success and publicly grappled with mental illness and substance abuse.In a 2019 interview with KSWB-TV, a Fox station in San Diego, he said that he had bipolar disorder. The station spoke to Mr. Robbins after his release from prison, where he had served 80 percent of a nearly five-year sentence for threatening several people, including the San Diego County sheriff and the property manager of a mobile home park near San Diego.In 2013, Mr. Robbins pleaded guilty to threatening his onetime girlfriend and stalking a doctor who performed breast-enhancement surgery on her, the station reported.He was arrested again in 2015 for violating the terms of this probation, according to the station, which reported that Mr. Robbins had made criminal threats toward a judge and written letters from jail offering to pay $50,000 to have William D. Gore, the San Diego County sheriff, killed.“I went on a manic phase where I bought a motor home, a mobile home, two German sports cars and a pitbull named Snoopy,” Mr. Robbins told the station in 2019.The actor said he regretted not getting help sooner for his mental illness.“I would recommend to anybody that has bipolar disorder to take it seriously,” he said, “because your life can turn around in a span of a month like it did to me.”If you are having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.Susan Campbell Beachy More