Marco (1973)

Another failed attempt at extending their success to the big screen, musical fantasy Marco was produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., beloved for their stop-motion Christmas specials of the ’60s and ’70s. Marco offers a weird riff on the lore of 12th-century explorer Marco Polo, played here lifelessly by Desi Arnaz Jr. The picture opens in the court of Mongol king Kublai Khan (Zero Mostel), and the central premise is that Marco’s father asks Khan to punish Marco for being irresponsible. Khan mischievously tasks Marco with spending a day in the king’s court, all the while begging Marco to marry one of Khan’s many daughters. Eventually Marco and his would-be betrothed venture beyond the castle to search for whale oil in a desert. Even setting aside the bizarre and episodic plot, Marco is tough to endure. Arnaz is terrible, Mostel screams most of his dialogue, and leading lady Cie Cie Win, as the butch Princess Aigarn, is charmless. (Totally wasted is the great comic actor Jack Weston, who plays Marco’s uncle and sings a dumb song about inventing spaghetti.) The production values of castle scenes are okay, but for no discernible reason, one fantasy scene is presented in the familiar Rankin-Bass style of cutesy puppets and stop-motion animation. And then there’s the issue of the songs—the awful, grating, stupid songs. Some are sickly-sweet, some are offensive with regard to gender and race, and all are interminable. Strangest of them is Aigarn’s recurring theme, “By Damn,” repurposed every time she articulates a strong emotion. Especially when she performs the song while stripping off her clothes to protest Khan’s insistence that she dress in a more feminine manner, “By Damn” does not belong in a G-rated kiddie flick. And for those who might argue that Aigarn’s characterization as a willful warrior woman is the movie’s most interesting and progressive element, watch out for the cringe-inducing way her storyline resolves. Like everything else in Marco, it’s just wrong.

Marco: LAME

The Mouse and His Child (1977)

          The gulf between good and bad children’s entertainment is wide, but generally speaking, the bad stuff reflects cynicism (as if putting any old cutesy slop in front of kids is sufficient for making a buck) whereas the good stuff reflects the higher calling of exposing children to noble values. The preceding is a prosaic way of saying that even though animated feature The Mouse and His Child is not nearly as delightful as its makers presumably hoped it would be, the movie represents an attempt to do all the right things. It’s clever and fantastical and sweet, using the sugar of bright colors and lively music and wild characters to coat the pill of worthy themes. Whenever the picture falls short, it’s not for lack of trying.

          Based on a novel by Russell Hoban, the movie begins in a toy shop, where the conjoined wind-up toys of an adult mouse (voiced by Alan Barzman) and his offspring (voiced by Marcy Swenson) achieve consciousness for the first time. The idea seems to be that they were recently created by the store’s owner, thus becoming sentient. Through convoluted circumstances, the mice leave the store for the outside world, beginning a long adventure during which they’re exploited by a sewer-dwelling rodent crook, Manny the Rat (Peter Ustinov), and befriended by various other creatures. There’s an existential quality to the toys’ journey, since they seek to become “self-winding,” a concept pregnant with metaphorical implications. At its deepest/trippiest, The Mouse and His Child features a scene of the mice, underwater, becoming hypnotized by an infinity painting that adorns the label of a dog-food can. Similarly, the mice encounter a philosophical turtle whose dialogue is so rarified he mentions “works cited.”

          It’s all a bit formless and meandering, but none would ever accuse the folks behind this picture of condescending to youthful viewers. The animation is relatively detailed, not quite to the Disney standard but fairly lush, and the voice cast features several familiar names. (Besides Ustinov, participants include Neville Brand, John Carradine, Andy Devine, Sally Kellerman, and Cloris Leachman,) A handful of unmemorable songs decorate the soundtrack, as well. All things considered, it’s not difficult to imagine that The Mouse and His Child means something to people who saw it back in the day, and perhaps even to some who discovered it later. If not actually special, it is at the very least a respectable effort.

The Mouse and His Child: FUNKY

Winds of Change (1979)

          Technically, the following remarks pertain not just to the 1979 release Winds of Change, but also to the 1978 release Metamorphoses, as they are two different versions of the same film. An American/Japanese coproduction, this obscure animated picture was first issued, under the title Metamorphoses, as a rock & roll head trip featuring tunes by Joan Baez and Mick Jagger, plus limited narration by familiar Hollywood voice actor Paul Frees. Accompanying the music are dramatizations of myths extrapolated from the writings of Ovid. By all reports, the original version had long nonverbal passages with magical creatures doing sparkly things. Think Fantasia (1940) for the stoner crowd. Metamorphoses tanked, so the picture was recut and the soundtrack was replaced. Out went Frees and the rockers, in came narration by Peter Ustinov and disco tunes, plus the new moniker Winds of Change.

          In Winds of Change, every little detail is explained to death, and Ustinov provides silly character voices for moments with implied synchronized dialogue. To get a sense of the weird tone this creates, consider the moment when a young adventurer stumbles upon the goddess Diana, then ogles her shapely naked backside while she bathes in a waterfall with help from flittering faeries. Upon discovering her unwanted visitor, Diana turns toward the camera and scowls while Ustinov says, “Hell hath no fury like a goddess being peeked at!” And that’s one of the more coherent moments. Later in the same scene, Ustinov voices Diana while she issues the following command: “Restless vegetation, turn into dragons!” All to the accompaniment of sexy guitars, thumping drumbeats, and relentless hi-hat snaps.

          If you buy into the vibe during early scenes, Winds of Change is pleasant enough to watch. Director Takashi, who also contributed to the script, gives the animation a relatively lush look, so while the images aren’t nearly as resplendent as those in classic Disney features, they’re certainly richer than, say, the average Hanna-Barbera product of the same period. The score has dancefloor snap, and some of the songs get cosmic (sample title: “Wandering Starchild”). As for the underlying material, stories about Medusa and Perseus and the like have endured with good reason, even if this treatment falls somewhere between infantilized and respectful. It’s also worth noting that the narration was written by radio legend Norman Corwin, so the language is not without virtue. Does it all add up to anything special? Not really. Nonetheless, Winds of Change is harmless and, given its foundation in the classics, mildly edifying.

Winds of Change: FUNKY

The World of Hans Christian Andersen (1971)

          One of many foreign animated films retooled for US release during the ’70s, a period when original feature-length cartoons were a rarity for American movie companies, The World of Hans Christian Andersen betrays surprisingly few trades of its Japanese roots. Only the big doe eyes of the animals and children are obvious giveaways. Otherwise, the picture feels European, seeing as how the storyline is set in Andersen’s native Copenhagen. The picture’s fantastical imagery stems from stories Andersen wrote in the 19th century. Featured concepts include the Little Match Girl and Thumbelina, though the dominant magical character is Uncle Oley, who serves as a sort of ambassador to the land of imagination. Andersen himself is featured as a character, though he’s depicted as a young boy experiencing wondrous events that will inspire the stories he tells in later life. As for the plot, it’s mostly a trifle used to bind sentimental episodes. Embedded within the material is a certain grimness, given that young Hans and the girl next door, Elisa, both watch their impoverished parents and/or guardians receive economic abuse from wealthy people.

          As for the overall mawkishness, singling out The World of Hans Christian Andersen for special criticism isn’t really fair, because there was a lot of awful children’s entertainment in the ’70s. What’s more, most repurposed foreign cartoons of the period reflect the worst instincts of Hollywood storytellers. Better, therefore, to say that The World of Hans Christian Andersen is generically shabby—most contemporary adults would find the movie intolerable, and it’s a fair bet many contemporary kids would, as well. It’s all just too cutesy and dull and familiar. A magical savior flying into town using an umbrella for a parachute? Shades of Julie Andrews. A cat causing a ruckus at a formal event by chasing mischievous mice? Yawn. And those gee-whiz line readings by Chuck McCann, who codirected the American version in addition to voicing Uncle Oley? One line of dialogue, cooed to the Andersen character, should give you an idea of what to expect: “Let the children fly on your wonderful wings of happiness!” Nonetheless, it’s hard to get too upset about a project that, on some level, means well. The World of Hans Christian Andersen celebrates imagination and expresses kindhearted principles. So let’s leave it at that.

The World of Hans Christian Andersen: FUNKY

Tubby the Tuba (1975)

Based on source material held in some esteem (more on that later), Tubby the Tuba is among the lesser animated features released during the ’70s, so even though the story is a harmless morality tale extolling worthy virtues, the experience of watching the picture is quite tedious. Dick Van Dyke provides the voice for the title character, an overweight brass instrument depressed that all he does is provide repetitive “oompah-oompah” rhythms. One day, he breaks from his orchestra in search of a melody to play. Yet Tubby gets sidetracked when he takes a job at a circus, delivering pails of water to thirsty elephants. One of the pachyderms, Mrs. Elephant (Pearl Bailey), asks for a demonstration of Tubby’s musical skills and rejoices in what she hears. (“That oompah turns me on!”) This leads to Tubby becoming a star attraction at the circus, which in turn causes Tubby to become an insufferable diva. Will our hero regain his humility? Will he find a melody to play? As Tubby the Tuba follows the blandest possible children’s-entertainment patterns, the answers to these questions should be painfully obvious. Tubby’s story originated as a narrated classical-music piece in the 1940s, and it was first animated, via stop-motion, for an Oscar-nominated 1947 short film. The expansion of the piece to feature length did not serve poor Tubby well. Even with Van Dyke valiantly striving to inject his characterization with pathos, the narrative is enervated and predictable and stupid, with the material added to flesh out the running time coming across as pure filler. By the time Tubby meets an underappreciated singing frog, the filmmakers seem absolutely desperate to compensate for the limitations of their one-dimensional leading character. Putting this sort of thing over requires magic, but Tubby the Tuba is never more than mundane. One might even say it’s oompathetic.

Tubby the Tuba: LAME

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

The product of a weirdly fraught production cycle, with creative differences leading to firings and recriminations, this tedious cartoon (with a few live-action sequences) has too much cutesiness and not enough heart. Based on Johnny Greulle’s famous stories about a pair of rag dolls with sweet personalities, Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure bombards viewers with cloying voice performances, saccharine songs, and a huge number of uninteresting supporting characters. Beginning in a child’s room and then extending to various fantastical realms, the picture suggests what The Wizard of Oz (1939) might have been like had the filmmakers failed to imbue Dorothy Gale’s journey with meaning. Whereas in that film each new development advances the plot, in this movie, each new development underscores the forgettable nature of the protagonists. If Raggedy Ann and Andy have distinctive qualities in Greulle’s books, those qualities did not reach the screen intact. The gist of the piece is that seven-year-old Marcella (Claude Williams) gets a new doll for her birthday, a ornate French number called Babette. When Marcella leaves her playroom, a pirate toy called the Captain becomes aroused by Babette, breaks free from his snow-globe prison, and kidnaps the French doll. Raggedy Ann and Andy, the leaders of the toy community, make chase, eventually enlisting the aid of a sea monster that uses tickling as a combat technique. Also woven into the narrative are an obnoxious king and a redneck camel. As for the songs, they’re atrocious, with all due respect to composer Joe Raposo, who did lots of wonderful work for the Children’s Television Workship. (His credits include “Bein’ Green” and the Seseme Street theme song.) The tunes in Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure run the unpleasant gamut from brash vaudeville-type numbers to sugary ballads. The nonmusical scenes are just as bad. The film’s design style is lifeless, and Didi Conn gives a nails-on-chalkboard vocal performance as Raggedy Ann, each line delivery more sickeningly sweet than the preceding.

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure: LAME

Dirty Duck (1974)

Two years after Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat became the first X-rated cartoon, Dirty Duck—sometimes known as Down and Dirty Duck or Cheap—arrived to test the public’s appetite for even more counterculture weirdness involving anthropomorphized animals. Like the iffy sequel The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, also released in 1974, Dirty Duck proved that X-rated animal pictures were not a growth industry. Crude on every level, Charles Swanson’s Dirty Duck pairs ugly, low-budget animation with tiresome content. Made in collaboration with eccentric rock duo Flo & Eddie, better known as Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, formerly of the Turtles, Dirty Duck features numerous original Flo & Eddie songs, and Volman and Kaylan play the leading voice roles. Kaylan portrays an insurance-company drone named Willard, who dreams of not only escaping his demeaning professional life but also of scoring with women. Thanks to convoluted circumstances involving a suicidal madam, Willard becomes the guardian of a talking duck, who is voiced by Volman. Despite the title, most of the screen time is devoted to Willard and his sexual fantasies. (In one bit, Willard’s penis magically assumes the size and shape of a bullet train as it pummels the nether regions of a compliant female.) Nothing in Dirty Duck is amusing or titillating, since Swanson conveys something like a teenaged boy’s snickering attitude toward sex, and the filmmakers often try so hard for boundary-pushing hipness that they stumble into pointless vulgarity; a song praising sexual experimentation suggests that viable lovemaking partners might include a tree or a corpse. Even the self-referential music jokes are disposable, notably an image of Frank Zappa (whom Flo & Eddie occasionally supported) and a snippet of “My Sweet Duck” to the tune of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Ultimately little more than a hardcore Water Mitty rendered with grungy visuals, Dirty Duck deserves its obscurity.

Dirty Duck: LAME

Heavy Traffic (1973)

          Inspired by the street life and the African-American culture to which animator Ralph Bakshi was exposed during his childhood and adolescence, the X-rated cartoon Heavy Traffic offers a statement of sorts. It’s personal and unique, but it’s also disjointed, excessive, loud, and vulgar, a phantasmagoria set in the gutter. Bakshi threads a semiautobiographical narrative through the picture, tracking the adventures of a 22-year-old cartoonist encountering the world of sex for the first time, while subplots touch on miscegenation, racism, and violence. Yet for much of its running time, Heavy Traffic is as freeform as a jazz solo, jumping and diving and grooving through a bizarre amalgam of brash sounds and provocative imagery. One gets the sense of Bakshi sawing open his head and pouring the contents onto the screen.

          There’s something unquestionably thrilling about watching a gifted artist speak this directly and openly to his audience. Alas, there’s also something to be said for restraint and structure, two things this film almost completely lacks. Because it’s such an individualistic statement, Heavy Traffic can’t rightly be described as a mess; better to say that Bakshi felt compelled to make certain things accessible to viewers and did not feel so compelled to translate other things out of his own private language. In sum, make of Heavy Traffic what you will.

          The core storyline follows Michael Corleone—yes, the same name as the protagonist of The Godfather (1971)—as he trudges through the brutality and grime of a New York City that seems to exist out of time. Some signifiers suggest the ’50s of Bakshi’s youth, while others seem pulled from the ’70s. Michael lives with his oppressive Jewish mother and his philandering Italian father, who constantly fight with weapons as well as words. (In one scene, Mom throws a cleaver at Dad’s crotch.) Through circumstance, Michael becomes involved with Carole, an African-American bartender in a dive bar, so Michael’s father goes mad over the thought of his son bedding a black woman. The father even tries to order a Mob hit on his own son. Meanwhile, Carole and Michael hatch a scheme to leave New York for California so he can pursue his dream of becoming an animator.

          Dancing around this linear narrative are myriad running gags and visual tropes, including live-action shots of an actor playing Michael while he operates a pinball machine. (Close-ups of balls bouncing around inside the machines serve as a recurring metaphor representing, one assumes, the vagaries of fate.) If the preceding description makes Heavy Traffic sound straightforward, rest assured it is not. Bakshi takes most scenes into risqué territory by explicitly animating sex and violence. Heavy Traffic may well contain more cartoon penises than any other film, and other startling images include slow-motion gore (e.g., a bullet exploding a character’s skull), as well as various excretory functions. One scene features a drunken stud making out with a dancing girl until exclaiming, “This broad’s got a hard-on!” The stud reacts to his discovery by pummeling his transvestite playmate nearly to death. Other noteworthy moments include the requisite offensive religious scene, with a bloody Christ stepping off the cross, and a black-and-white cartoon-within-a-cartoon depicting a character beating people with his phallus, which is as large as his entire torso.

          Clearly, Bakshi worked through some stuff while making Heavy Traffic, which he began developing well before his breakout hit, Fritz the Cat (1972), and then returned to after the success of Fritz the Cat gave him cachet.

Heavy Traffic: FREAKY

Fantastic Planet (1973)

          An animated science-fiction saga made in France, Fantastic Planet applies a novelistic approach to a cinematic genre that often devolves into predictable action/adventure formulas. The weird narrative of Fantastic Planet sprawls over decades of time, includes a vast number of bizarre concepts, and resolves into an allegorical statement about the need for beings to overcome differences. There’s a hero of sorts, but the protagonist of Fantastic Planet is more of a window through which viewers can observe the strange world in which the story takes place. Although there are action scenes, the real focus of Fantastic Planet is the trippy stuff about astral projection, the behavior of godlike aliens, and the savagery of primitive human cultures. That all of this material gets crammed into a scant 72-minute running time reveals one of the picture’s key problems—characterization is largely an afterthought. Ideas rule in Fantastic Planet, placing the film squarely within the sphere of overly cerebral fantasy fiction. If you want a movie that makes you ponder unusual notions, this one fits the bill. But if you want a movie that touches you emotionally, expect to be disappointed or at least frustrated.

          Briefly, the picture takes place on a distant planet where giant aliens called Traags keep humans as pets—a fully grown man is no bigger than a Traags’ hand. One particular human, Terr, is adopted by a Traag child while Terr is an infant. The Traag child outfits Terr with a slave collar that restricts Terr’s movements. Because of a malfunction, the slave collar allows Terr to understand Traag language, making Terr more intelligent and sophisticated than the other humans on the planet. Once he reaches adulthood, Terr flees Traag society and encounters wild humans, assuming a leadership role and leading a rebellion. Other elements percolate in the story, notably a trope of Traags exiting their corporeal forms while meditating, but that’s the overall gist.

          Fantastic Planet has a peculiar look, because the filmmakers created stop motion from elaborate line drawings—somewhat in the vein of Terry Gilliam’s old Monty Python animations. This inevitably limits expressiveness, since there’s virtually no facial movement. Furthermore, some of the imagery is so odd as to be silly, like the bit during which two humans duel by strapping lizards to their chests and letting the lizards have at each other. Huh? Some of the concepts in Fantastic Planet are interesting, though many are trite staples of the sci-fi genre, and the story concludes in a fairly satisfactory manner. Nonetheless, one suspects it was the combination of the funk/lounge score and the wild visual aesthetic that earned Fantastic Planet a U.S. release, rather than the virtues of the storyline. Interestingly, the U.S. version has subtitles, even though replacing the voice cast with English-speaking actors would have a fairly easy task, seeing as how the dialogue isn’t synchronized to lip movements.

Fantastic Planet: FUNKY

The Hobbit (1977)

          Produced around the same time as animator Ralph Bakshi’s doomed theatrical adaptation The Lord of the Rings (1978), this made-for-TV cartoon presents a truncated version of author J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, a prequel to his Rings book trilogy. Wrought by Rankin/Bass Productions, best known for their stop-motion Christmas specials of the 1960s and beyond (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc.), this take on The Hobbit has a beguiling visual aesthetic but suffers from problems of storytelling and style. In terms of storytelling, the filmmakers condense and/or omit so many events that the narrative becomes choppy, and in terms of style, the filmmakers use songs so prominently that The Hobbit is an outright musical. While it’s true that Tolkein’s book features songs as a recurring device, the melodies exist only in the reader’s mind, and the lyrical passages are balanced with other elements. In the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, musicality dominates to the point of distraction. Given all of these problems, The Hobbit feels frivolous, rushed, and unfocused, which is a shame.

          For those unfamiliar with the source material, The Hobbit begins when the wizard Gandalf informs diminutive and friendly hobbit Bilbo Baggins that he’s to accompany a group of dwarves on a treasure hunt through dangerous terrain, with the ultimate destination being the lair of Smaug, a horrible dragon hoarding gold that was stolen generations ago from dwarf royalty. The Rankin/Bass script, penned by Romeo Muller, treats nearly every part of Bilbo’s adventure as a fleeting vignette, lingering at great length only on two colorful episodes—Bilbo’s creepy encounter with the cave-dwelling creature Gollum, and Bilbo’s riddle-filled conversation with the dragon Smaug. To be fair, these are exciting and offbeat scenes, both worthy of close attention, and the ornate illustrations permeating this production nearly compensate for the hiccups in dramaturgy.

          The film’s dwarves, elves, goblins, spiders, and such are drawn beautifully, with expressive lines and meticulous details; even though the animation is a bit rudimentary, characterization and texture come across well. The voice cast is mostly adequate, with Orson Bean giving Bilbo warmth, John Huston lending grandeur to Ganadalf, and New York eccentric Brother Theodore providing the requisite perversity for Gollum. (Richard Boone’s flat American tones seem wrong for Smaug, though these things are of course highly subjective.) Given the strengths of this production, one wishes Rankin/Bass had felt compelled to try for a theatrical release, thereby emboldening them to add a half-hour of screen time and let the story breathe. (Though the songs would have been just as irksome.) But then again, thanks to Peter Jackson’s critically drubbed Hobbit trilogy of the 2010s, we’ve seen that too much Hobbit is not necessarily an improvement over too little Hobbit.

The Hobbit: FUNKY

Treasure Island (1973) & Oliver Twist (1974)

          Beyond subjecting the world to decades of iffy TV cartoon series (from The New Adventures of Superman in the 1960s to BraveStarr in the 1980s), as well as occasionally producing live-action programs (raise your hand if you wasted more than a few Saturdays watching The Shazam!/Isis Hour in the ’70s), Filmation Associates made a brief foray into the realm of adapting classic literature for the big screen. Filmation’s take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was followed by a version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and both were released by Warner Bros., which wisely ended the deal before any more mediocrity was unleashed.

          Shamelessly copying the Disney formula of blending comedy with high adventure and songs, Treasure Island is passable at best. The narrative is basically faithful to the source material, and new wrinkles—such as a pirate who wheezes musical notes because of the harmonica that’s visibly lodged in his throat—don’t exactly add value. Worse, the songs are pathetic and unmemorable, and it’s hard to understand why Filmation hired Davy Jones, of the Monkees, to play the leading role seeing as how his character sings just one number. Anyway, intrepid young Englishman Jim Hawkins (Jones) stumbles into possession of a treasure map, which makes him the center of intrigue involving dueling pirate factions. An eventful sea voyage and a surprising trip to a mysterious island ensue. So do silly antics involving a mouse with a taste for liquor, as well as innumerable renditions of the traditional tune “Dead Man’s Chest,” whose “yo-ho-ho” refrain probably should have been retired from other uses once it became a staple of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disney’s theme parks. The uninteresting voice cast of Treasure Island also features tiresome TV funnymen Richard Dawson and Larry Storch, and Filmation’s signature “limited animation” style ensures anemic visuals. In sum, Treasure Island is colorful, inoffensive, and altogether mindless—more “yo-ho-hum” than “yo-ho-ho.”

          Yet Oliver Twist makes the preceding film seem inspired by comparison. (To say nothing of redundant—the Oscar-winning live-action musical Oliver!, culled from the same source material, was released just a few years previous, in 1968, and Hanna-Barbera made an animated version for television, called Oliver and the Artful Dodger, in 1972.) Repeating a stylistic misstep from Treasure Island, Filmation modified Oliver Twist by adding animal characters, as if the original narrative was insufficient to command attention. Hence "Squeaky," the nervous frog that long-suffering protagonist Oliver carries around in his pocket throughout most of the movie, and the trio of creepy birds who lurk around the villain's lair and perform evil errands. Whatever. The power of Dickens' story isn't entirely lost, thanks to grim episodes of Oliver being mistreated by various "friends" and guardians along the way to escaping poverty once he finds a wealthy surrogate family. Yet the combination of flat animation and weak vocal performances is toxic. (The cast includes some of the same folks who participated in Treasure Island, notably Davy Jones and Larry Storch.) As for the original songs, they barely merit a mention. Some are generic. Some are insipid. Some are saccharine. All are forgettable. That said, a cursory review of online commentary indicates that Filmation’s Oliver Twist has actual fans, mostly folks who saw the picture at a young age and now retain nostalgia for the escapist pleasures of their childhood. With all due respect to those with fond memories of Squeaky, it's a good thing the Filmation/Warner Bros. union was terminated after just two films.

Treasure Island: FUNKY

Oliver Twist: LAME

Allegro non troppo (1976)

          As did nearly every other cinematic genre, animation ventured into trippy dimensions during the ’60s and ’70s, producing movies that seem somewhat befuddling when viewed outside of their original contexts. The Italian animation/live-action hybrid Allegro non troppo is one such picture. Although made with tremendous craftsmanship and imagination, the picture is a bit of a drug-era relic. Even though it’s self-admittedly styled after the Walt Disney cult classic Fantasia (1940), Allegro non troppo doesn’t have an obvious raison d’etre the way the previous film does. Whereas Fantasia represented Disney’s bold attempt to fuse animation with classical music in order to create a new form of expression, Allegro non troppo is as much of a parody as it is a serious endeavor. That being the case, what are comedy fans to make of long sequences that lack humor, and what are thinking viewers to make of slapstick vignettes? Plus, it’s not as if filmmaker Bruno Bozzetto can claim that his movie is unique, given the Fantasia connection.

          The phantasmagoric picture begins with a black-and-white scene of a presenter/host (Maurizio Michell) introducing a performance by an orchestra conductor (Néstor Garay) and an animator (Maurizio Nichetti). As the conductor leads musicians in recitations of pieces by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and other iconic composers, the animator draws scenes that spring to two-dimensional life. After each animated sequence ends, the movie returns to the black-and-white setting, with the action in the theater eventually becoming silly chaos thanks to the involvement of a pretty cleaning lady (Maurialuisa Giovannini) and, for no particular reason, a dude running around in a cheap gorilla suit.
          Some of the animated sequences are quite beautiful, notably a vision of evolution set to Ravel’s “Boléro” (one of two bits directly modeled after Fantasia). The animation is creative and fluid, with objects morphing into other objects in surprising ways, and the use of shadows to create dimensionality adds nuance. The style of the animated sequences varies wildly, because some scenes are fairly linear and literal, while others are impressionistic and surreal. All in all, it’s not hard to imagine ’70s stoners merrily responding to Allegro non troppo the same way they did to, say, blacklight posters. Nonetheless, by the time the movie concludes with a live-action sequence involving a mummy—during which two flesh-and-blood characters become animated characters before flying away—the inevitable and unanswerable question becomes, “What the hell was that about?” Some wierd ’70s movies are indulgent and some are provocative, but Allegro non troppo is merely whimsical, which means that it’s also disposable, despite being entertaining in fits and starts.

Allegro non troppo: FUNKY

Snoopy Come Home (1972) & Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977)

          Introduced in 1950, Charles M. Schulz’s newspaper strip Peanuts was a beloved institution by the time the franchise expanded to include animated TV specials in the ’60s. The brand grew further with the release of A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), the first in a series of animated theatrical features that ran in tandem with the ongoing TV specials. The second feature, Snoopy Come Home, is noteworthy in that it forefronts the canine character Snoopy, known to millions as the intelligent and resourceful companion to kindhearted but long-suffering franchise protagonist Charlie Brown. Despite suffering from a questionable musical score—more on that later—Snoopy Come Home epitomizes many of the best qualities in Schulz’s fictional universe.

          Directed by Bill Meléndez, who helmed most of the classics Peanuts specials, Snoopy Come Home begins with vignettes juxtaposing the misadventures of the Peanuts gang with scenes in which Snoopy gets the sense that he’s no longer needed. The beagle is particularly incensed by the intrusion of “No Dogs Allowed” signs throughout his community, provoking Snoopy to whip out his familiar typewriter and pen irate letters to local officials. Later, Snoopy receives word that his former owner, a young girl named Lila, has been hospitalized and wants to see her old pal. Snoopy announces his plans to leave Charlie Brown’s home, which occasions a tear-filled going-away party—easily one of the saddest scenes ever presented in a Peanuts movie or special. Will Snoopy come home? Even if the answer to that question is never in doubt, the movie is full of teachable and tender moments, as well as the gentle humor for which Peanuts is justly famous. In fact, had this storyline been employed for a TV special, Snoopy Come Home could have become a classic. Stretched to feature length, the piece has a hit-and-miss feel.

          For every sweet scene depicting the interaction between Snoopy and humans, there’s a dreary montage set to one of the many songs composed for the film by Richard and Robert Sherman, the songwriting duo famous for Mary Poppins (1964) and other Disney musicals. Gifted as they are at crafting catchy lyrics and melodies, the Shermans often can’t resist maudlin extremes. (Actual lyric: “Happy laughter is contagious!”) There’s a huge gulf between the juvenile quality of the Shermans’ songs and the sophistication of Schulz’s script. (While playing Monopoly, the formidable Lucy Van Pelt proclaims, “I’m going to destroy you economically, Charlie Brown!”) Ultimately, the good stuff in Snoopy Come Home outweighs the dubious stuff, especially because the movie perfectly captures what melancholy feels like.

          The next Peanuts feature, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, lacks the emotional high points of its predecessor. A lighthearted adventure romp filled with character-driven humor, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown features the Peanuts gang attending a summer camp and participating in a lengthy rafting race. Once the race begins, the Peanuts boys occupy one raft, the Peanuts girls pilot another one, a gang of grade-school bullies rides in a third raft, and Snoopy and his avian pal, Woodstock, man the final raft. Once again written by Schulz and directed by Meléndez, the picture has sensitivity and warmth, portraying bullies as losers whose cravenness will ultimately lead to their undoing, and the story is told from a kids’-eye-view perspective. The vignettes with Snoopy sharing wilderness adventures with Woodstock are particularly droll—at one point, Woodstock climbs atop a sleeping, snow-covered Snoopy’s nose and builds a ski resort before Snoopy wakes. Similarly, the running gag about iron-willed Peppermint Patty ruling the Peanuts ladies by faux democracy (“All right, Marcy, time for the secret ballots!”) is quite sly. Yet the storyline is predictable and the villains are simplistic, so even though Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown is slicker, Snoopy Come Home has more impact.

          After the 1980 feature Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) completed the original Schulz/Meléndez theatrical cycle, the franchise soldiered on with decades of TV specials, and then a brand-new theatrical feature, the CGI-rendered The Peanuts Movie, debuted in 2015.

Snoopy Come Home: GROOVY

Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown: FUNKY

Coonskin (1975)

          Featuring an outrageous barrage of images, themes, and words about race, the animation/live-action hybrid Coonskin is among the most incendiary products of the blaxploitation era. A casual viewer stumbling onto any part of the film would probably find the material shockingly racist, and the reaction would be compounded by the discovery that Coonskin was written and directed by a white man. Taken in context, however, Coonskin is a deeply complicated piece of work. Part satire and part tragedy, it’s a sexualized and violent phantasmagoria about the cancerous reach of racism. The question of whether filmmaker Ralph Bakshi justifies his extremes by placing his work into a sociopolitical framework is one that each individual viewer must explore, because the content of Coonskin is deliberately offensive. By presenting grotesque caricatures of African-Americans, gays, Italians, Jews, rednecks, women, and so on, Bakski tries to confront small-minded attitudes. Yet in so doing, he unavoidably perpetuates stereotypes. Some influencers in the African-American community have embraced the movie over the years, while many others have vilified the piece as the cinematic equivalent of a hate crime.

           Coonsin opens with a series of vignettes. First, two animated characters, both African-American dudes dressed like pimps, appear over a live-action background to deliver a volley of angry humor. (The first line of dialogue is “Fuck you!”) Next, actor/singer Scatman Crothers appears onscreen to perform a jive-talkin’ ditty about the troubles of being a “nigger man” while the opening credits appear. Finally, the story proper begins, with two black convicts, Pappy (Crothers) and Randy (Philip Michael Thomas), prepping for a prison break in a live-action sequence. While the inmates hide from guards, Pappy tells Randy a fable that Bakshi illustrates with animated sequences. The fable involves three black men—Brother Bear (voiced by Barry White), Brother Rabbit (voiced by Thomas), and Preacher Fox (Charles Gordone)—getting into hassles with the law down south. Soon, the group heads for Harlem, where Brother Rabbit kills a high-powered gangster and takes over the criminal’s operation. As Brother Rabbit rises to power, he and his friends get into hassles with corrupt cops, manipulative prostitutes, and vengeful mobsters, among others. Lots of animated bloodshed and sex ensues.

          Many scenes blend cartoons and live-action images within the same frame—Bakshi recruited ace Hollywood cinematographer William A. Fraker to shoot the live-action material, and Fraker provides an appropriately gritty look. Long stretches of Coonskin are surrealistic, with Bakshi embarking on flights of artistic fancy. A woman turns into a butterfly. A deceased fat man gets buried, but his body parts keep popping up through the dirt of the grave, as if the earth can’t contain his girth. A voluptuous streetwalker wearing an American-flag costume blows away a horny guy by using the cannon hidden in her crotch. Concurrently, the race-themed dialogue goes as far over the top as the animation does. “I’m tired of trying to segregate, integrate, and masturbate!” “I sees you, Lord, and you fuckin’ well better see me!” “Killin’ crackers, I guess that’s cool!” Even the religious material is inflammatory. A 300-pound preacher calling himself “Black Jesus” performs in front of his flock while nude, his junk flailing to and fro, and another preacher uses the gospel as a come-on to lure a man into a brothel. When Bakshi opens fire with his satirical machine gun, no one escapes unharmed.

          In many ways, Coonskin is deeply alive, with creativity and indignation and passion powering every frame. And yet the movie is also a mess, with herky-jerky storytelling, potshots at easy targets, and underdeveloped characters. It’s more of an experience than a proper movie. Is the experience worthwhile? For some viewers, the answer to that question will be a resounding yes, because Coonskin gives it to bigots with both barrels. However, the disjointed, grotesque, and juvenile aspects of the movie are big turnoffs for those who expect their sociopolitical discussions to unfold on a higher plane. By any regard, Coonskin is Bakshi’s boldest movie, which is saying a lot seeing as how he made the world’s first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat (1972).

Coonskin: FREAKY

The Naked Ape (1973)

          Based on a nonfiction book about the development of human behavior as compared to that of other primates, this wildly uneven pastiche uses animated vignettes, dream sequences, narrative scenes, and supposedly comedic sketches to illustrate the absurdity and beauty of the human experience. In particular, the movie is preoccupied with sexuality, which should come as no surprise seeing as how Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Films produced the picture. Yet the promise of naughty content is slightly misleading. Although both of the leading actors display their bodies and participate in sex scenes, the movie also gets heavily into war. Additionally, much of the sex stuff is conveyed via cartoons or dialogue, so The Naked Ape is a relatively serious-minded endeavor that simply contains a few discreetly filmed physical encounters. Alas, the picture’s half-hearted approach to sex is indicative of other problems. One gets the sense that writer-director Donald Driver wanted The Naked Ape to be about something important and meaningful. Because he failed to shape a distinctive aesthetic, however, he simply made a freeform mess reflecting hip counterculture attitudes—with nothing of substance behind the posturing.

          The movie opens in a silly way. Wearing a business suit, Lee (Johnny Crawford) walks through a museum exhibit looking at cases that contain life-sized figures representing the different stages of man’s evolution. Upon reaching the last case, which is empty, Lee strips off his closes and enters the case, thereby representing modern man. The camera then studies his body in detail while credits are superimposed over the images. This scene has a certain perversity to it because leading man Crawford initially found fame as a child actor on the 1958-1963 TV series The Rifleman. Publicity for The Naked Ape made a big fuss over the fact that this young man showed his rifle, as it were. Similarly, leading lady Victoria Principal, who plays Lee’s girlfriend, did a nude layout in Playboy to promote the movie—another indicator of the low intentions dragging the piece down.

          Even though it’s only 85 minutes, The Naked Ape feels much longer, since it’s episodic and uneven. One animated sequence about the evolution of clothes has Gilliam-esque style and wit, but most of the ’toons are tepid, and the live-action scenes aren’t much better. Occasionally, Driver simply runs out of gas, as when he burns several minutes on pointless footage of gymnasts giving an exhibition. While Crawford and Principal are both attractive specimens, neither contributes anything memorable in terms of performance. And although the behind-the-scenes participation of the great songwriter Jimmy Webb is noteworthy, since he’s only composed scores for a handful of films, he doesn’t excel here, either, though the music he contributes to a war montage is powerful.

The Naked Ape: LAME

Shinbone Alley (1971)

          What was it about the ’70s that made filmmakers think audiences wanted to see adult-oriented cartoons about felines? Two years before the release of the X-rated Fritz the Cat, moviegoers were subjected to the strangeness of the PG-rated musical Shinbone Alley. Parts of the movie are too grown-up for the kiddies who normally enjoy animated features, and other parts of the movie are too juvenile for the adults capable of understanding the sexualized subject matter. In fact, it’s hard to imagine what target audience the makers of Shinbone Alley had in mind, seeing as how the narrative includes a human poet who commits suicide and is reincarnated as a cockroach, an unrequited-love story involving creatures from different species, a slutty heroine who contemplates drowning her children because they’re inconvenient, a proposed insect revolution against humanity, and Shakespeare performed as beat poetry.

          Making matters worse, the film’s tunes are croaked and screeched by performers with ghastly singing voices, including Eddie Bracken, John Carradine, and the insufferable Carol Channing. It says a lot about Shinebone Alley that the most entertaining singing comes from Alan Reed, best known as the voice of Fred Flinstone.

          Shinbone Alley has a peculiar pedigree. The main characters, cockroach Archy and alley cat Mehitabel, first appeared in whimsical newspaper columns written by Don Marquis beginning in 1916. Bracken and Channing entered the picture in 1954, performing on a comedy/musical concept album titled archy and mehitabel. The album was then adapted into a 1957 Broadway musical, titled Shinbone Alley, with Bracken and, replacing Channing, Eartha Kitt. Mel Brooks contributed new material when the album was adapted for stage presentation. Bits of all of the versions were merged into this animated feature, which reunited Bracken and Channing.

          The style of the feature is strange, because the raggedy background drawings and sketchy figure renderings are a long way from the sleek textures of Disney ’toons. Yet the edgy graphics and the subversive storytelling don’t mesh with the obnoxious music. On one level, Shinbone Alley is a loud attempt at a crowd-pleaser complete with wannabe show-stopping numbers. On nearly every other level, the piece is just bizarre. Some scenes are dark, while others are trippy. The language and themes exist way over the heads of children (sample dialogue: “Your predilection for tomcats is the scandal of the neighborhood”), and the narrative wanders through episodes that have little connection to each other.

          In Carradine’s big sequence, his character tries to seduce Channing’s character by browbeating her into becoming an actress, resulting in a hideous scene of the two frog-voiced actors brutalizing lines from Romeo and Juliet while scatting them to a jazz beat. And in another dissonant bit, Bracken’s character has a sex dream about Channing’s character that’s illustrated by still photographs with cat heads superimposed over the bodies of human women. Adding to the bewildering nature of the movie, the big takeaway seems to be that that the hero should be content basking in the glow of the heroine, even though she plans to continue her promiscuous ways and has no interest in romance with her most devoted admirer. But at least viewers know that Archy can always attend to his carnal needs with a set of characters described as “Ladybugs of the Evening.”

Shinbone Alley: FREAKY