Things start out reasonably enough, with the declaration from the elder pig Old Major (inspired by some combination of Marx and Lenin) that “all animals are equal,” but upon his death, another pig named Napoleon (a thinly veiled version of Joseph Stalin) takes the reigns of command and soon adjusts the declaration to include a caveat: “But some animals are more equal than others.” This is definitely not a film for the kiddies. The nutshell summary involves a barnyard’s worth of animals that get fed up with the drunken farmer who ostensibly cares for their well-being, and decide to run him out and take control of the farm. But the uninitiated might be shocked at the way Orwell’s political allegory has been transformed by British animators into a blend of Disney-esque animation and moments of legitimate horror, the latter aided immeasurably by Matyas Seiber’s score. Anyone who read the original source material – George Orwell’s 1945 book of the same name – will already know what horrors they’re embarking upon. Wanna make your toddler grow up real quick? Set the little dickens down in front of the television and put “Animal Farm” in the DVD player. It has fallen into the public domain and is available on several different DVD editions and even for free, legal downloads. These days, “Gulliver’s Travels” gets mixed reviews from animation fans, but at least it’s not hard to see. 9, 1941 - two days after Pearl Harbor was attacked. A follow-up film, the fanciful musical bug fable, “Hoppity Goes to Town” might have done as well. When the film was released at Christmas, critics were unimpressed, but the Fleischer shop’s visual invention and broad comedy was enough to make the film a hit animated features were still very much a novelty and Paramount’s gamble actually paid off. While no gunplay resulted from the cartoony clash, it didn’t help the final result. (If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, rotoscoping was an animation process invented by Max Fleischer that involved tracing over filmed images.) The rushed production was marked by innumerable problems, including a bitter feud between west coast and east coast animators. Instead, they went with a conventionally heroic characterization, relying on timesaving rotoscopes of actor Sam Parker. Turning to Irish satirist Jonathan Swift’s fantasy classic - which, strangely enough, had already been transformed into a pro-Communist parable by stop-motion animators in the Soviet Union - Max and brother Dave Fleischer discarded their original concept of using Popeye as their Gulliver.
The bad news was the studio wanted it in less than a year, and “Snow White” had taken three years to complete. Not that there’s anything wrong with those guys, but, c’mon, they’re not exactly in the same realm as a film about an elderly couple dying of radiation poisoning after surviving a nuclear attack, now, are they?Īfter Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” became the top grossing picture of 1938, Paramount Pictures turned to Disney’s best known competitor, Max Fleischer (animator of the hugely popular Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons) for an animated feature of its own. That’s because, while some of these films can be aptly described with that term, it feels as though we’re doing others a disservice by lumping them into a category generally used to describe works by Bugs Bunny or Donald Duck. You may note that we’ve surrounded the word “cartoon” with quotation marks. Bullz-Eye decided to take a look back at a few of our favorite full-length animated features that haven’t gotten as much love in recent years as perhaps they should have…and just to be fair, we even managed to slip an underrated Disney film into the bunch as well.
To do so, however, is to sell short quite a few other motion pictures that have emerged over the years. That’s neither surprising nor wholly inappropriate, given how many full-fledged animation classics have come forth from Disney’s studios.
Generally, when you think “animated film,” you think of one name: Walt Disney. Don't miss our list of the All-Time Best Cartoon Characters!