on 8/22/2021, 8:46 am
BTW, the cartoons referenced in Mike post were combined into a single two-hour presentation and are still available on YouTube at the link below. Only drawback of this presentation is that the titles have been removed, and the poster did not see fit to provide them as part of the introductory text. For that info, you'll need to buy a DVD package...but you are cautioned to avoid the blu-ray version, as a perusal of the Amazon reviews will further elaborate.
Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943
Posted by Solomon on 3/8/2018, 3:47 pm
These are available on YouTube.
I enjoy these a great deal, and they quite often have noir shadowing. The stories are stories of jeopardy. IMHO, these cartoons are very early in using noir graphics. Some earlier Disney cartoons might turn up similar effects. Certainly the 1940 Fantasia may have a segment that qualifies, the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Parts of that may have inspired Fleischer's Mechanical Monsters, which in any event may have inspired some of The Empire Strikes Back.
Dan Hodges may wish to take note. Some of the episodes are directly in the spy mode. Others have other sorts of enemies that stand in for the enemies faced by the country at that time.
The many superhero neo-noirs from 1980 onwards are often heavy, long-winded affairs that simply cannot and do not capture the agility of a comic book. These cartoons are able to do it, and they succeed at it.
When we see Superman in the opening shot, arms on hips, most of his face is in darkness and so is his torso. He's "lit" from the side and where there is no light, the background is a dark shade of blue. The first shot of the city and Daily Planet It is as if from an aerial view, and it's at night. The music is foreboding. The chief sits at a desk lit by one overhead bulb shaded, casting a sharp shadow effect.
The anime neo-noirs of late are much better at capturing the spirit of the superhero noir than those big movies.
Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943
Posted by Dan Hodges on 3/10/2018, 11:05 am, in reply to "Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943"
I appreciate the heads-up to "take note," but these cartoons were such a discovery when I first saw them in the 1950's that I don't need a reminder; but I'm grateful to learn that I can watch them again.
As my essay about spy noirs emphasizes, these years, especially 1942, were the bleakest in US history. The cartoons reflect this.
Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943
Posted by Don Malcolm on 3/11/2018, 1:35 pm, in reply to "Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943"
With all due respect, Dan, those folk who lived through the years 1930-33 might want to dispute your assessment. And the pre-Code films capture that in a way that is both similar and different to film noir.
That isn't to say that 1941-43 wasn't filled with homefront trauma, displacement, disillusion, despair and upheaval. And the manifestation of this is not restricted to spy noirs, as Val Lewton's films and other startling products of the time frame (THE OX-BOW INCIDENT promptly comes to mind) also demonstrate. The fine art of the period, as I wrote about in a hard-to-find essay left out of the NC ANNUAL, was also littered with various forms of visual unease.
And this isn't to dispute the power of these cartoons--easily the darkest made in America.
Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943
Posted by Dan Hodges on 3/11/2018, 9:24 pm, in reply to "Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943"
It's not a matter of whether contemporaries of the Depression would disagree with me; what matters is what historians/media at the time said. And in the body of my essay I quote James Reston, and in footnote #60 I quote Time magazine. In other words, I source my viewpoint; I don't speculate about what the man and woman on the street might have felt.
Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943
Posted by Don Malcolm on 3/13/2018, 8:11 am, in reply to "Re: Fleischer's Superman cartoons 1941-1943"
Such a stance merely attempts to suppress other historical speculation, it doesn't refute it. It ultimately becomes a chicken-or-egg dilemma--is the "darkest" moment when an economic system fails so suddenly and utterly that the fabric of society threatens to collapse? Or is it the moment when a sleeping nation is rudely awakened to the fact that it has failed to recognize a looming totalitarian threat until its momentum is at its peak? To me they are part/parcel of the same myopic historical process, one with which we are still struggling.
Reston's book was meant as part of a wake-up call to those who'd buried their heads in the sand--much as England had slept (to borrow the title of young JFK's monograph). It fits in with the type of realization that filmmakers such as Frank Capra had when they viewed the hyper-aggressive militarization of the Axis powers. As Mark Harris notes in FIVE CAME BACK, it took a lot of work to shake Americans out of their lethargy--particularly since they were just beginning to feel that they'd survived the longest economic crisis in the nation's history.
Reston uses a 40s version of "shock and awe" to bring this into play and help motivate ordinary Americans. It was especially needed in the early days of WWII, when the USA was struggling to get a credible war effort underway. It is a dark moment, to be sure--but there is ample room for disagreement, with or without footnotes, as to whether it represents the lowest ebbing of the American spirit. If anything, it is a cry of dismay for the fact that America had kept its head in the sand for so long regarding the worldwide totalitarian menace.
And it is reflected in the gloom, grief, dread that begins to surface significantly in films during 1942--parallel to but mostly independent from a similar foreshadowing, an analogous mingling of treachery, oppression, betrayal, and double-dealing that we see in the exotic spy noirs in France from 1936-39. These, alongside the poetic realist films, which often use exotic locations, all score high in terms of a resignation to one's fate, a sense that forces outside one's control (the rise of totalitarianism) will soon overpower and obliterate life as it had been known.
This all happens in tandem with or ahead of the Anglo-American films; the anticipation of dread, the lingering sense of impending disaster, is something that originates in mid-to-late 30's French cinema. What we have in France is a different form of denial as manifested by the media, which didn't want to heed the warnings that Duvivier, Renoir and Carné implanted in their films.
For America, which had been preoccupied with its own ongoing economic sluggishness even in the midst of the New Deal, isolationism was an easy way to sweep aside the troubling events elsewhere. As Nazi aggression accelerated in 1937-38, Hollywood finally began to shake off those shackles and began to address the situation--but even then, isolationism (the origination point of that dubious slogan "America First") remained stubbornly implanted in the minds of most Americans. Once the war was finally thrust upon it, the USA began with a kind of whimper, and this is reflected in the sense of being enveloped by forces beyond one's control that permeate the early Lewton films.
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