| Tuesday, March 8, 2005 |
17:39 - Ouch
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/05/0305/030805.html
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Yeah, it hurts...
...And yet I have to admit, sheepishly, that I have something of a soft spot for these early Harman-Ising outings. Never mind that Foxy and Roxy were such blatant ripoffs of Disney's stars (and everyone knew it) as to reverberate through animation history, probably inspiring Simpsons episodes decades later and setting the tone for an animation industry rife with me-too-ism and mediocrity. Never mind the ridiculously inept mouth movements that can't even charitably be given the benefit of the doubt due a craft in its infancy. Never mind the near-unintelligibility of the sound and the bad lip-sync that belied the studio's self-aggrandizing name and its implied claims of sonic superiority. Never mind that the animation itself was asymmetrical and clumsy, a far cry from Disney or even the oft-underrated Fleischer.
Never mind all that. Because beneath all the mediocrity and cheapness, there was a certain spark of energy that Disney lacked: whereas Mickey and Minnie were squeaky-clean from the get-go, in the very title of "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile", the public got an earful of the smirking irreverent devilry lurking just beneath the surface of the medium, always ready to break forth if audiences ever showed themselves receptive to cartoons that weren't simply kids' pap. The early H-I spots may have sucked, and in ripping off even Disney's series name ("Silly Symphonies") to create "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" and "Happy Harmonies", they set a standard for plagiarism and unimaginativeness that enmires Hollywood into focus-group-tested terror of new ideas even to the present day. But their shorts did manage to lay the groundwork for a Warner Brothers that always delighted in breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries, in deriving humor from topicality and satire rather than homegrown stories in traditional formats. Small wonder that whereas when Disney reinvented itself in the '80s and '90s with their "Disney Afternoon" shows, they did so with adventurous reimaginings of their old properties, Warner Brothers did the same thing by buying Hanna-Barbera and then developing an entire revolutionary industry phenomenon around making fun of it. It's somehow right in character for them.
I've enjoyed the idea of cartoons like "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile" ever since that song—with its teeth-clenched grin and its studious denial of the Depression and its firm and raucous dismissal of the tame bucolic themes Disney entertained in the same era—rose in chorus from all the assembled animated throngs at the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Somehow nothing else would have been appropriate to that movie's weird hybridization of the disparate branches of Hollywood animation and their respective senses of humor, nothing more capable of recalling the past while tapping into the wry and ironic and yet wistful emotions with which we look back at the age when sound was new and color was science fiction.
Yes, everyone else did it better. But just by being their mediocre, dull selves, Harman-Ising somehow managed to found what has possibly become the healthiest and most self-sustaining philosophy in all of animation.
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Brian Tiemann
