Screening DR. STRANGELOVE

My favorite (if rather inaccurate) foreign poster.

Some films never seem to become outdated. Unfortunately - one might add considering the fact that what keeps DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) still fresh is the current revitalization of the policy of deterrence in some parts of the world. Fortunately however, even 50 years later the film itself remains compelling and dead-on.

I am currently preparing an introductory lecture focussing on dialogue and acting for a theatrical screening on June 13, 2013 in Zug (Switzerland). As usual, I cannot possibly incorporate every detail that I find into my lecture. So after a short summary of what I intend to center on, I will have a look at two rigid compositions that caught my eye.

Stanley Kubrick's third film about the absurdity of war and his last black and white picture was also the beginning of his trademark style of ambiguous narrators (just think of Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, 1971). While he exposed a seemingly omniscient third-person narrator as slightly unreliable in THE KILLING (1956) and a literary first-person narrator as delusional in LOLITA (1962) he not only opens DR. STRANGELOVE with a Brechtian news-reel narrator but presents us with three self-proclaimed first-person narrators who each impose their perspective on an isolated group of people.

Capt. Mandrake - Gen. Ripper - Dr. Strangelove - Maj. Kong - Gen. Turgidson - President Muffley

As embodied by Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and Slim Pickens, these three characters are distinguished by contrasting voices and ways of speaking. The same goes for all the secondary characters played by Peter Sellers. In fact, it is the acting and Kubrick's dissection of military and diplomatic euphemisms that turns a dead serious thriller (Peter George's "Red Alert") into a biting satire. 

Disordered Communication and Framed Isolation
There are certain shots that fans and scholars have come to identify as Kubrickian: the low angle shot of a staring face, highly symmetrical long shots and the neverending tracking shot. A former photographer who often drove his DOP crazy or even operated the camera himself, Kubrick relied on meticulously composed images in almost every shot, though. This may be one of the reasons why his filmic worlds seem so inescapable and claustrophobic at times.

It is amazing in how many ways he is able to exploit Ken Adam's stylized James-Bond-type "war room" set, for example. When President Merkin Muffley talks to Premier Kissoff on the phone, a black bar in the background visually separates him from the Russian Ambassador, emphasizing the rift between the two and the film's major theme of communication between isolated spaces. Furthermore, this black bar looks like the splitscreen indicator common in movie and comic phone conversations. However, in this film, the phone seems to complicate communication - it separates the characters rather than bringing them closer together.

Ambassor and president in isolated spaces within the same frame.

SPOILER AHEAD: When General Jack D. Ripper tries to persuade RAF Capt. Lionel Mandrake of his fluoridation conspiracy theory, Ripper's head is narrowly framed by a doorframe. Soon after, we learn that this is the door to a bathroom in which Ripper's story finally comes to an end. And like arrows in a graphic representation, the guns at the wall all point to the characters' head like a visual reminder that their office is surrounded by attacking soldiers. But these guns may also foreshadow Ripper's bathroom scene.

In both of these shots, only one character looks at the other, there is no eye-contact. In the Ripper scene, Mandrake (left) is nervously messing around with a chewing gum, one of the few recurring props in the film that is not a communication device.

Bob Clampett: Black Cats in Technicolor (1/3)

100 YEARS OF BOB CLAMPETT!

 According to most sources Robert Emerson Clampett was born May 8, 1913. In honor of his 100th birthday I will look at the colors in three of his most beloved cartoons involving black cats. The first of these (THE HEP CAT, 1942) is a good example how to apply contrast of hue, value and saturation in favor of a nicely structured color scheme.

You may have noticed that most of my Clampett posts so far have been about some rather particular traits of his films. Since I am aware that there is already a plethora of articles about Clampett's overall style available online (not in print, unfortunately), I try to focus on specific subjects that haven't been analyzed in detail yet.

Limited color palette in THE HEP CAT.

For readers looking for some background information on Bob Clampett, I recommend the once controversial 1969 interview by Michael Barrier and Milt Gray,  this recent interview with Clampett's daughter Ruth by Chris Lukather as well as Adrian Danks' article "It can happen here! The world of Bob Clampett". There is a wealth of further information on michaelbarrier.com.

Colorful Clampett
I used to say that Clampett didn't really know what to do with color when he was finally able to leave the black and white Porky cartoons behind. That is not true, however. More accurately, I should have said that Clampett wasn't too subtle or sophisticated in his use of color as a storytelling device.
But then, with Clampett nothing is ever subtle or sophisticated in the conventional sense of these words. Everything has to be extreme, even outrageous.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, though. His first few cartoons with Avery's color unit work within a strong and beautiful but limited color palette, very unlike the garish and muddled colors of his later masterpieces like BABY BOTTLENECK (1946). I have already mentioned the candy color scheme of HORTON HATCHES THE EGG (1942). In THE HEP CAT and TALE OF TWO KITTIES (1942) his color/background person (most likely Johnny Johnsen) made expert use of a very limited color palette.

John Kricfalusi has already attempted to write about these backgrounds here but soon digresses into other aspects of the cartoon.

Muted Background, Strong Foreground
Harsh contrasts dominate the opining of the cartoon: a black cat is strolling in front of a pale beige moon surrounded by dark blue night:

a typical Clampett character: ambling hind and fore legs look identical.

A-D: background colors; E-H: character colors.

The same basic hues are used for background and character (the feet (E) might have been less pink on the cel). The whole image is based on a duotone scheme of near-complementary colors pale beige and dark blue. The cat's colors are more saturated (H and F) than the corresponding hues in the background (A and D). This is a good example for contrast of saturation.

Characters and background are not only separated by saturation but also by stronger values. As you can see in the following desaturated images, the background is in the middle range overall whereas the characters are near the extremes of black and white:

This difference in contrast of value was quite common - necessary, in fact - in black and white cartoons in order to achieve readable silhouettes. In color cartoons however, we are used to more subtle dark colors than this pitch black cat (Sylvester and Daffy remained pitch-black until today, though). Seen in color, the saturation of the skin colored facial parts stands out more clearly. The strongest elements however are the spots of red that mark the mouths and the femme fatale's slender neck.

More saturated colors are not restricted to characters alone but are also used for foreground objects such as Rosebud's doghouse (why did Clampett include so many out-of-place CITIZEN KANE allusion into his cartoons?).

A-D: doghouse colors; E-H: most saturated versions of red - green scheme.

Brown lies inbetween green and red.

While the backgrounds are basically built around cold and warm grays rooted in pale yellow and blue, the foreground colors are built around the red - green complementary contrast. This makes for a brilliant contrast of hue.

Although most of the night time backgrounds look rather earthy, there is a wealth of different colors. This variety of hues does not distract from the characters because saturation is low and the values are all very close:

upper row: moonlit planks; lower row: planks in shadow.

It is the same with these bricks: since the dog's color is so much lighter and more saturated we don't even notice at first sight that every brick has a different color.

The character colors in Clampett's cartoons are often stereotyped. Cats are pitch-black and dogs and wolves are brown. It is interesting to see that when the cat turns into the proverbial wolf when aroused by the cool female the colors also change to the dog/wolf scheme.

The cat and dog character however differ in almost every instance: even their hand and seemingly white muzzle are colored differently. Since we only have a digitally restored NTSC version of a Technicolor cartoon at hand, it is impossible to say if the dog's muzzle already looked slightly violet. But what we can see is the relation of these colors (which could be digitally tampered as well, of course) and they work well so that we intuitively know even in strange drawings which body part belongs to what character.

However, the downside of keeping the cat completely black like in a monochrome cartoon is that its silhouette can hardly be read in front of backgrounds that are not based on high or middle values (below left). In static camera setups, the layout/background person is able to contrast the visual void that is the cat's body with a slight pool of light.

As we have already seen in the example with the black and white cats above, pure red as a spot of color is a recurring theme within in this cartoon. In fact, it looks like only red is used as a "spot color" which makes for an unusually restrained color scheme (by Clampett standards at least).

The commenting bird is small and seldom on screen. But because it is red and saturated, our eyes are involuntarily drawn to it. The same with the brick: with such a high saturation it contrasts with every other color in the picture and therefore reads very easily.

And as we have seen, the female - and her puppet imitation - is all white with spots of red. The same can be said of the fake love letter attributed to her.

Color Harmony and Drama
After focussing so much on contrast, one should not forget that at the same time color harmony is important to the success of any color design. In the second part of the cartoon, orange and warm yellow become more important.

If you look closely, you can see that there are two different shades of orange.

Although we usually think of orange as a hue in between red and yellow, one could also argue that it is a brightly saturated shade of the same hue as the brown fur of the dog. Therefore, these two colors go very well together, they are part of the same family.

Now that the dog has successfully lulled the cat into believing that his hand puppet (an early reference to Cecil the sea serpent?) was a hot girl, the characters proceed into a less deserted area. While the fences have almost exclusively been illuminated by moonlight until now, artificial light sources start to turn up next to the houses.

The more saturated yellow/orange light of these windows and streetlamps increases the sense of drama.

Beyond the wooden fence a warm light source illuminating a tower building is visible.

The more dramatic lighting becomes obvious when comparing the two silhouette shots in the cartoon: early on, when the cat is wooing the the girl and is given the cold shoulder, the shadows are the product of pale moonlight.

When the dog is chasing the fooled cat, however, the lighting is more yellow, far stronger and more dramatic. This chase culminates in a high angle shot of the fire ladder of the harshly lit tower building the two are about to climb.

While the main impression in this picture (above right) is one of strong contrasts (bright yellow vs. dark purple), the pieces of laundry do not draw our attention away from the staircase because they are all painted in closely related harmonious tones.

Yet, none of these colors (above) are reused when the characters actually hit the clothes line. Here we have green, yellow and orange - colors that are closely related to the dog's brown fur:

Since black goes with virtually anything, the cat fits into any color environment.

Left: laundry colors; right: dog colors.

Limited Cel Colors
I believe that if we looked at actual cels of this cartoon, the two tones of orange (above left) would be identical to the two versions of orange flowers. This observation is very typical of colors in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. While the Disney model department used a vast variety of cel paints, the Schlesinger Studio (later Warner Bros. Cartoons) cartoons usually display a very limited range of character colors.* They also tend to favor purer colors - more saturated and closer to primaries and secondaries - than Disney or MGM.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons why so many of these characters are either completely pitch-black, grey or brown. After all, these non-colors go with almost any background. Even when there was no time to avoid black characters in front of dark backgrounds, most of these characters (except for Daffy) have white hands so that their gestures are still comprehensible without seeing most of the silhouette.

But the limitation to colors that are close to "nameable" hues like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and the lack of subtler shades may explain why many Warner Cartoons look a lot less impressive than their more expensive contemporaries when it comes to color. Of course, a strong artist like Maurice Noble, Phil DeGuard or Hawley Pratt could turn these limitations into assets. And whoever was responsible for the color design of this cartoon did a great job integrating the few cel colors with the infinitely available background colors.

As we will see in Clampett's next cartoon, TALE OF TWO KITTIES, a similar color scheme is structured even more clearly around two black cats in pursuit of a naked bird with a characteristic speech impediment. 

* At least, due to the production process, the colors change slighty from shot to shot. Just think of how sterile these cartoons would look, if they were colored by a computer!

Bob Clampett: Breathing Life Into Inanimate Objects

Breathing life into inanimate objects proves very popular among animators from early cartoons to features like THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER (1987) or CARS (2006). One does not have to look far to see that especially Bob Clampett's early black and white cartoons are full of such literally "animated" objects. As usual, most often it is not the corny gag itself but the way Clampett and his crew put it on.

While Walt Disney was fascinated in his early years by hand-drawn mechanical machines that imitated animals, most other cartoonists - especially those from Termite Terrace - indulged in providing everyday objects with life and personality as can be seen in the following pictures of an aircraft factory that is "humming" in MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY.

MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY (1941)

Animal Objects

Bob Clampett's black and white Porky cartoon POLAR PALS seems to be mainly built around variations of this basic idea. The film starts with an alarm clock coming to life next to Porky lying under a pile of bearskins. These allegedly dead blankets then come to life and we discover that these bears were just sleeping.

POLAR PALS (1939)

But when half-way into the picture the villainous fur trapper I. Killem is introduced, the theme of "animating" dead objects is reversed. First he is only imagining sea lions as fur coats...

...then he blows his prey to kingdom come:

Justice is restored in the end, when an animal finally gets back at I. Killem. First the trapper's ship is sunken and at the last minute comes alive. This, in a way, prepares the final gag.

Meanwhile the villain escapes in a kayak. In opposition to all the earlier "coming-alive" gags of this cartoon, it is not the kayak that actually assumes animal or human shape and behavior. It has simply been mistaken for a kayak and is an angry pot whale, in fact.

Rubber Guns

POLAR PALS (1939)

Guns and cannons have to be stiff and sturdy by definition or else you couldn't shoot straight. But in animation, strong forces are often expressed through violent movement. The stronger the distortion of an otherwise stable form, the more powerful a force is felt. Often the impact of a movement is measured by the amount of anticipation. It's no surprise then, that the trapper's gun is reacting like a living being to Killem's pulling of the trigger rope. What is unusual about Clampett's treatment of the action is not that we see an anticipation and an exaggerated recoil. The unusual part is the way this anticipation is animated: the cannon bends back like the arm of a shot-putter and then spits the cannonball out:
While his contemporaries most often defined physically rigid objects by animating them with almost no squash and stretch in contrast to the materiality of highly flexible human/animal bodies, Clampett even squashed anvils (as can be seen in A TALE OF TWO KITTIES, 1942), if it helped translate energy to the screen.

The way Clampett made the distortion of stable objects part of his gags can be seen in a comparison of his first cartoon PORKY'S BADTIME STORY (1937) (which unfortunately is only available on youtube in a colorized version) and Frank Tashlin's PORKY'S RAIL ROAD which was made around the same time. Animator and historian Milt Gray has written about this in a post about Clampett's use of expressive animation on John Kricfalusi's blog.

A CORNY CONCERTO (1943)

Likewise, when the faux-Disney squirrel in A CORNY CONCERTO shoots back at Bugs, Porky and the dog, the gun feels very rubbery for a moment. Since this is a direct spoof of FANTASIA (1940), the large arcs of the histrionic gestures are probably as slow and conspicuous to expose Disney's excessive use of squash and stretch. Then, the anticipation and recoil are straight in the line of shooting. Since the squashing recoil is happening very fast (just before the cut the victims), it doesn't seem as outrageous as the distortions at the beginning of the clip.

Spitting Images

While the villain's cannon may have looked like a blowtube, Porky's gun is literally spitting bullets out by the dozen. The muzzle is literally transformed into a mouth with lips and tongue:

POLAR PALS (1939)

These weird "hole-to-mouth" gags had probably started with Clampett's INJUN TROUBLE (1938, not available on disc or online anymore) which he later remade as WAGON HEELS. So technically POLAR PALS already re-uses an animation sequence from an earlier cartoon which was then re-used in a later color cartoon.

WAGON HEELS (1945)

Between the two "western" films however, "the tube mouth" as I like to call it evolved into a Clampett trademark. At the beginning of PILGRIM PORKY an anchor is sucked in by a porthole-mouth with the mouth characteristics emphasized by lips and a large tongue. This short piece of animation stands out to me because of how the animator made unexpected use of the tongue to push in the anchor.

PILGRIM PORKY (1940)

Whenever this mouth tranformation happens to an inanimate object, we can clearly see the tongue. In the lackluster army cartoon MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY the spitting gun is turned into an airplane called "spitfire":

MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY (1941)

Later on, the narrator talks about a most potent cannon. Immediately before, two soldiers are forgetting to shoot because they are comparing sticks with the words "mine is longer". It comes as no surprise that the cannon is shooting stiffly and only flags after shooting several loads off.

MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY (1941)

It is only then that the exhausted tube turns into a mouth with its tongue panting like that of a dog. This panting is re-used in a more obvious environment in CRAZY CRUISE: a carnivorous plant is portrayed as a mouth that encloses a bumblebee. The insect is so determined to resist its fate that the plant is getting exhausted, spits it out and resign breathing heavily.

CRAZY CRUISE (1942)

Transfer of Function
Unlike all the objects we have seen so far, Horton already has a mouth. But since the water is finally rising above his head, the mouth's function to deliver dialogue is transferred to Horton's trunk which then continues to rhyme in accurate lip-sync.

HORTON HATCHES THE EGG (1942)

A few years later, Porky's dialogue is enunciated by a tea kettle tat is stuck on his head. Since delivering dialogue is rather exhausting for a kettle that is not used to it, the shot ends with the now familiar tongue action.

KITTY KORNERED (1946)

Bob Clampett has often been accused of completely arbitrary gags and stories. And even though he did not care if a joke was trite or even tasteless, all of his (later) films seem to come from a surprisingly coherent world that simply followed its own set of rules. Sacrificing materiality references to express strong forces and equipping rigid tubes with mouths were only two of them.