Thursday 27 February 2014

The Swallowing Skull

The nightmare imagery in Swing You Sinners doesn’t stop until the cartoon’s over. It ends with Bimbo flipping over in space, his head being cut off by a skeleton hand, then swallowed by a skull that zooms into the camera lens. The skull forms from a ghostly swirl, accompanied by popping circles.



A brilliant cartoon that could only have been made by the Fleischers in the early ‘30s. Ted Sears and Willard Bowsky get animation credits.

1 comment:

  1. Shamus Culhane's back story on this cartoon in his autobiography is pretty amazing, in that the work was pretty much done on the fly just after Max lost several of his key animators, with Sears and Grim Natwick guiding the 'new group' just promoted from in-betweening (Bowsky, Culhane, Kneitel) though the work. Whether or not the uncertainty may have helped enhance the bizarreness of "Swing You Sinners", there was really a ton of animation talent that worked on this short.

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