Toys with Poise
The classic fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen are wistful… touching… timeless… what else? Oh, that’s right … DEPRESSING! And I’m not sure the crazy folks at Ub Iwerks would have been my first choice to bring that masochistic masterpiece, “The Brave Tin Soldier” to screen (their characters usually looked like they were made of ring bologna.) But, what the heck! The studio gives it their all in this 1934 release that features some graceful animation by Shamus Culhane, among others. We also get plenty of peppy music and a happy heavenly finale to distract us from the fact that at the end of the story, the hero and heroine are, you know… dead.
For cryin’ out loud, it’s Heart Tug Week at ReFrederator.
For your free subscription to ReFrederator, click
here, or visit iTunes!
![[large][black] FReDERATOR badge](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3502/3317571331_e33068a3c8_m.jpg)
»
On October 10th, 2006 at 12:00 am
There’s this holdover from the silent cartoons of having radial lines emerge from a character’s head to indicate a reaction. And when the king left the palace gates, there was a fanfare from two trumpeters with squiggly lines coming from the trumpets. Would the viewer not associate the fanfare with the trumpets without the squiggly lines?
On October 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
That’s the way sound really looks when it leaves an instrument….squiggly lines….didn’t you know that?
Yer probably surrounded with squiggly lines right now, and don’t even know it.
The squiggly line are everywhere, man.
On October 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Iwerks does seem to have been the studio where old comic strip cliches went to die. I like the bit they used when charcters sleeping have logs being sawed appear over their heads — but no snoring is heard on the soundtrack!