This video clip comes from Rock and Rule (1983), a kind of follow-up to 1981’s legendary animated sci-fi anthology movie Heavy Metal directed by Gerald Potterton. Both movies were Canadian, but there appears to be no official connection between them.

As with Heavy Metal, Rock and Rule was able to cobble together a very impressive musical lineup, including Reed, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Cheap Trick, and Earth, Wind, & Fire. Mok, who is an ageing rock musician who in search of a particular voice that can unleash a fearsome demon from a different dimension, was voiced by Don Francks (who also did voice work in Heavy Metal), but his visual look was clearly inspired by Iggy Pop, even if his song was sung by Lou Reed. It’s all a little reminiscent of a certain T-shirt we heard about recently.
 

 
Thank you Wilder Selzer!

 
Alt comics’ goth heroine Emily the Strange has formed her own band. Emily—who’s been a 13-year-old for twenty years now—and the Strangers are releasing their first single “Calling All Guitars” in time for Halloween, on October 29, 2013. The song and clip will be downloadable through iTunes, with a limited edition 7” 45rpm etched vinyl single available at the Emily the Strange online store.

The song and video were supported by a Kickstarter campaign that raised almost $65,000 from over 700 Emily the Strange fans. The people you see in the audience shots are folks who donated over $250.

“Calling All Guitars” was written by her creator Rob Reger, “Dust Brother” John King (Beastie Boys, Beck), Money Mark, and Morningwood’s Chantel Claret. Speaking of guitars, Emily is the only non-human to have her very own custom Epiphone guitar.

An Emily the Strange feature film is currently in development at Universal Pictures with Chloe Grace Moretz attached to star as the outcast icon. Rob Reger promises an eventual Emily album and even a live show, where Emily would be a hologram. How massive of a hit would that be? Both the movie—Chloe Grace Moretz would be perfect casting—and the live show, I mean. Kids would love them, it would be like printing money.
 

 
Thank you kindly Susan von Seggern!

 
Incroyable! Hosting the legendary French pop show Dim Dam Dom in 1965, Sandie Shaw introduces the first installment of “Marie Mathématique,” an animated short made by “Barbarella” creator Jean-Claude Forest. Serge Gainsbourg wrote the music and sang André Ruellan’s lyrics.

On Halloween, several dozens of Gainsbourg-related items—including nail clippers and cigarette butts—will be auctioned off in Paris.
 

 
In total, there were six installments of “Marie Mathématique,” the rest follow after the jump…

Not just a potato twice the height of the Rock of Gibralter… a sexy potato twice the height of the Rock of Gibralter

You may be familiar with Disney’s most famous World War Two propaganda, Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which Donald Duck dreams of an alternate life under Nazi rule. It’s weird, but not nearly as weird as Food Will Win the War. During both World War One and Two, the slogan, “Food will win the war,” was bandied about to both discourage food waste and encourage an increase in agricultural yields; the idea was that the U.S. needed to remain war-ready with a food surplus. In the film, however, the slogan is invoked more as a morale booster, and the result is a confusing mish-mash of messaging.

Instead of telling farmers to produce more and families to waste less, the narrator emphasizes our current glut of food, which is really counterintuitive to a message of prudence and industriousness. It’s as if the writers got so carried away with nationalist boasting, that they forgot the actual purpose of the film. Even more strangely, they demonstrate our surfeit of food by means of very strange scale comparisons.

For instance, did you know that if we had made all our wheat from 1942 into flour, we could bury every German tank in it? And if we had made it into spaghetti, we could weave from it a fashionably nationalistic sweater-vest to clothe the entire Earth! Why would you aspire to do such a thing, you ask? Why would we knit a celestial spaghetti sweater?!? Who cares! We’re America, fuck yeah!
 

 
This is quite incredible: every single day of the Second World War in Europe as mapped out by YouTube user EmporerTigerstar.

Starting with the German invasion of Poland (1 September, 1939), the invasions of Norway (April 9, 1940), France (May 10, 1940), Yugoslavia and Greece (April 6, 1941), to the invasion of the Soviet Union (June 22, 1941), through to the Battle of Moscow (November 25, 1941), the Battle of El Alamein (October 23, 1942), the German surrender at Stalingrad (January 31, 1943), the Allies capture of Rome (June 4, 1944), the Normandy Landings (6 June, 1944), the liberation of Paris (August 25, 1944), the Soviets enter Berlin (April 23, 1945), and Victory Europe Day (8 May, 1945).

EmporerTigerstar has previously mapped the First World War, and is planning to create a map for the Second World War including all the battles.
 

 
Via i09

 
Marc Campbell’s post yesterday on the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary—he was even more effusive in his praise of the film on the phone—reminded me of something that I wanted to post here:

Before their collaboration on the classic 1973 animated sci-fi feature, Fantastic Planet, René Laloux and Roland Topor made “Les Escargots,” (“The Snails”) an exquisite stop-frame animated short in 1965. (If the Jodorowsky link isn’t clear, in the early 1960s, Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor and Jodorowsky mounted entrail-covered Hermann Nitsch-like theatrical performance art happenings as “the Panic Movement” in Paris.)

Here’s how IMDB describes this little-known mini-masterpiece:

A gardener tries his best to make his salad plants grow. It is only when he cries that his tears finally water the field and the salads grow huge. The incredible size attracts a multitude of snails that quickly become giant too, causing disasters and panic in the nearby city.

I think that about says it all… The film’s message is a bit ambiguous, as you’ll see. “Les Escargots” won Special Jury Prize at the Cracow Film Festival.

Fun facts: Roland Topor wrote the novel of the same title that Roman Polanski’s creepy as fuck psychological thriller, The Tenant was based on and he played the role of “Renfield” in Werner Herzog’s movie Nosferatu the Vampyre.
 

 
The year before “Les Escargots,” René Laloux and Roland Topor collaborated on “Les Temps Morts” (“Dead Times”) an anti-war meditation on what it means to be human.
 

 
You learn something new every damned day. My TIL? Remember “The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast,” that great cartoon many of you reading this—perhaps the majority, even, since it’s had such a very long shelf-life—will recall from when you were a kid? Why that’s Mister Ronnie James Dio hisself who was doing the frog’s singing.

Good god! (or “Hail Satan!” if you prefer) Imagine if the Christian Right would had known this at the time: The evil genius heavy metal master many say was personally responsible for introducing the “devil horns” salute into the culture was worming his evil way into the ears of millions upon millions of kids from 1976 onwards! What kind of backwards-masked Satanic subliminal messages were inserted into this childhood classic?

What will Alex Jones say when he hears about this???
 

 
Yesterday when I was posting about the CIA-funded animated Animal Farm, I did a search on the couple, John Halas and Joy Batchelor (”Halas and Batchelor” was the name of their revered production company) who made it, to see what else they had produced (short answer = tons of stuff) and I took particular note of one of them: The almost psychedelic animated short they made to accompany “Love is All,” a track from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, an ambitious rock opera by Deep Purple’s Roger Glover and some of his famous friends. (When the show was staged—and filmed—for a one-off 1975 performance, the cast included members of Deep Purple, Twiggy, the guy who later played “Sgt. Apone” in Aliens and it was narrated by Vincent Price.)

The short film, part of what was intended to be a full-length project, was widely seen on television the world over for over fifteen years. In America, we saw it on The Electric Company and Nickelodeon from the 1970s well into the 1990s, and it was frequently seen in France, Australia, New Zealand, and especially in the Netherlands, where the song went to #1 and evokes such strong childhood associations that the Christian Democrats used the cheerful ditty for their 2006 general campaign ads.

It was directed by Lee Mishkin and based on the work of famed illustrator Alan Aldridge, who had previously put out his own 1973 book (based on the famous poem by William Roscoe, one of history’s first abolitionists) that served as the inspiration for Glover’s project.
 

 
Until videotapes replaced 16mm film projectors in the classroom in the mid-1980s, there was a very good chance that if you were British or American, that at least once, if not twice or more, you were going to see the animated 1954 version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm during your education. I can vividly recall being absolutely incredulous during a post-film discussion in high school, that the teacher we had seemed to have no idea, as in none at all, that Animal Farm was quite specifically a satire of the Russian revolution and the rise of Joseph Stalin. After I raised my hand to object and explained, no doubt with the cocky annoyance of a teenaged autodidact, that “Old Major” was a Karl Marx/Lenin figure, that “Napoleon” was Stalin, “Snowball” was Trotsky and so forth, she blithely dismissed what I said (she clearly had no idea of what I was talking about and so therefore had nothing to add) and remarked that “it could be one theory.”

No my dear, that would be the only fuckin’ theory. If you think American public schools are bad now, I put it to you that they’ve always been pretty shitty…

Animal Farm was directed by the husband and wife animation team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor. It is considered one of the greatest British films, something akin to a “serious” work from Disney. The film does not follow the events of the book very closely, especially the “hopeful” ending that Halas felt necessary to tack on. Orwell’s book ends with the animals numbly resigned to their exploitation by the porcine politburo in cahoots with the humans. This was considered too bleak and Halas wanted an upbeat ending. “You cannot send home millions in the audience being puzzled,” he said about the film in 1980.

But there is an interesting back story of how Animal Farm came to be made that most people are probably unaware of: The most famous British animated film ever made was in fact financed by the American CIA in an effort to encourage a negative view of the Soviet Union.

In 1951, using American taxpayer dollars, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination carried out obtaining the rights to the book from Sonia Orwell, the author’s widow, in an operation run by future Watergate criminal E. Howard Hunt. Two members of the Psychological Warfare Workshop staff who were working in undercover in Hollywood made the arrangements. To thank Mrs. Orwell, the CIA arranged for her to meet actor Clark Gable.

Hunt chose as the film’s producer, Louis De Rochemont, the creator of the famed “March of Time” newsreel journalism films and De Rochemont had final say over all creative matters (Hunt worked for De Rochemont when he was younger). Over 80 animators worked on the film, including three Disney animators who were not credited, probably because they didn’t want to piss off Uncle Walt. Two of them went on to work on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down.

Vivien Halas, the daughter of the film’s directors, believes that her parents were innocent of knowing that the CIA was involved with the project:

“I don’t believe that my parents were aware of any CIA involvement at the time. Frances reminded me that, in the early 1950s, the CIA was not regarded with the same scorn as today. My father dismissed the idea, but my mother felt annoyed.” John Halas and Joy Batchelor would go on to do the Jackson 5ive and The Osmonds cartoons. Louis De Rochemont became paranoid about the CIA bugging him late in his life.

The film was completed in 1954 and distributed worldwide the following year, the first British animated feature ever to be so widely seen. Prints were made for schools and libraries the world over by the United States Information Agency (USIA). If you are over the age of 35 and saw the film in school, there is a very high likelihood that US taxpayer’s dollars paid for the print you saw. The animated Animal Farm, due to the whole “pigs are unclean” thing, was also thought to be effective anti-Soviet propaganda in the Middle East.

On the flip-side, the Soviet spin on Orwell’s 1984 is that the book’s nightmarish depiction of constant state surveillance was about everyday life in America.

This is all so Orwellian, it’s making my head spin…

Read the full story in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm

The cartoon that came in from the cold (The Guardian)

How Big Brothers used Orwell to fight the cold war (The Guardian)

Cheburashka toy

Cubans in their forties and fifties may not have vintage Disney toys from the 1960’s and 1970’s or boxed sets of every Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, but chances are they may still have a Bolek and Lolek toy or book somewhere. And they’re probably downloading hours worth of other old cartoons from the Soviet era.

Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959 state television ran cartoons from Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland (Bolek and Lolek), Hungary (Gustavus), and the Soviet Union (Mashinka and the Bear, Ny, pogodi!) . A lot of these cartoons did not have dialogue, preventing the need for dubbed audio. 

Following the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 Warsaw Pact cartoons were no longer shown in Cuba, but there was a generation of young adults with fond memories of them.

A graphic designer, Darwin Fornes, started a small business in Havana this year, which he called Chamakovich, and printed up 300 T-shirts featuring his favorite cartoon characters from his ‘80s childhood. Despite the dire Cuban economy, his first run sold out almost immediately. Darwin told La Jiribilla that he used grayscale for the images of Bolek and Lolek for added authenticity: most Cubans had black-and-white televisions well into the ‘90s.

Here is a selection of the quirky and adorable cartoons that inspired Fornes’ T-shirts:

Bolek and Lolek (Poland):

Mashenka (Little Masha) and the Bear (U.S.S.R.):

More Soviet-era cartoons after the jump…

 
You grew up watching Donald Duck cartoons, maybe. But do you know the name Carl Barks? A great many cartoonists know and revere him today, but it took many years for his talents to become properly celebrated—for years he was called just “the Duck Man” or, even more tellingly, “the Good Duck Artist.” 

How great a cartoonist was Carl Barks? The Eisner Awards are the “Oscars” of cartooning, and they include the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. When they kickstarted that category, they chose three cartoonists, of all the cartoonists of the world, to define greatness in cartooning. One of the cartoonists they chose was (duh) Will Eisner. One of them was Jack Kirby. And one of them was Carl Barks.

That’s how great of a cartoonist Carl Barks was.

Barks was the artist who did the most with Donald Duck, but he actually created Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Donald and Scrooge and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are a bigger deal in Europe than in the United States. When Barks died American newspapers barely took any notice, but in Europe they understood that a master had passed.
 

 
Praise of Barks’ work isn’t hard to come by, but here are a couple of quotes, chosen almost at random.

Just a couple months ago, Mark Squirek wrote in the New York Journal of Books:

Mr. Barks distills pure comedy down to its simplest form. ... Carl Barks was a true artist who could show us our own world while at the same time making us laugh uncontrollably at the image of a duck walking into a castle or calmly sitting on top of a horse ten times his size.

Try not smiling at Carl Barks’ work. It’s impossible.

Here’s another one. This time it’s Rich Clabaugh in The Christian Science Monitor:

Barks, the artist, is a master cartoonist, drawing lively, expressive characters with a graceful sense of movement. His beautiful, detailed backgrounds plant the ducks in a fully realized world that adds weight to his storytelling. ... But besides the entertaining plots, Barks’ appeal is in his characters. He gives his ducks many human frailties and while they usually try to do the right thing, they make mistakes, get angry, frustrated, and even fail.

 
In 1994 Danish TV conducted a substantial interview with Barks. The interviewer compares Barks to Shakespeare—really.