Toons Around The World: Stop-Motion Marvels

Stop-motion animation, from Cohl to Bowers to O'Brien to Starewicz to Pal to Harryhausen to the Quay brothers, has been on this movie buff's mind of late. Charley Bowers remains a favorite!



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George Pal always pleases.





For stop-motion animation genius, the Dutch Vintage Animation website is quite a treasure trove.



Quite a few terrific stop-motion films of Joop Geesink can be found here and on the stop-motion master's You Tube channel.







Have posted several commercials from Joop Geesink's Dollywood studio on this blog before. They are excellent and in the tradition of George Pal's animated mini-musicals for Philips and experimental animator Oskar Fischinger's Murrati Cigarette ads.





The Dollywood studio's commercial for White Horse Whisky ranks atop the list of most amazing, beautifully designed and imaginative ads. Do not show at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting - that would be a very bad idea, as even the most prim teetotaler would be amenable to downing a couple of shots after watching it.



Rather amazed that the Kinex studio's stop-motion films entirely escaped me for decades, at least until the release of a couple of Kinex short subjects, starring Chip the Wooden Man, on the now out-of-print 2010 Stop-Motion Marvels DVD collection.







Recently reading Kinex in HD: “The Land of Wiz” and “The Land of the Wooden Soldiers has whetted my appetite to see more of the studio's films starring The Doodlebugs, Chip the Wooden Man and Snap the Gingerbread Man.







Hear there shall be a Stop Motion Marvels 2 later this year from Thunderbean, so hopefully a few more discoveries from Kinex (and stop-motion animator John Burton) will be available then.



Until that Blu-ray release brings further discoveries, here is an indescribable 1933 short subject created by New Zealand filmmaker/painter/animator/sculptor Len Lye and on the first Stop Motion Marvels collection. It features a song well known by the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog from a 1933 Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon and melodious renditions by Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt. Lye's love of music, paramount in his subsequent GPO experimental films A Colour Box, Rainbow Dance and Trade Tattoo, combines with way-out imagery here.



Acknowledgements and many thanks to the Cartoon Research website and its Thunderbean Thursdays feature for links in this post that didn't come from the Dutch Vintage Animation page. Also extend a respectful tip of the Jimmie Hatlo hat to a YouTube channel which, among hundreds of 1920's, 1930's and 1940's animated films, includes a playlist of Charley Bowers.