One cartoon where you’ll find this and doesn’t quite hit the mark is The Birth of Jazz, a 1932 Krazy Kat cartoon from the Mintz studio with the story by Manny Gould and animation by Allen Rose and Jack Carr.
Jazz is born when a long-beaked stork, to the strains of “The Poet and Peasant Overture,” drops a bag down a chimney and when it lands, out pops Krazy Kat with bent top hat, Ted Lewis-style, and the classical musical heard on the soundtrack is now replaced with a pepped up version of W.C. Sweatman’s “Down Home Rag.”
We get to some fun little scenes where Krazy is blowing a sax and little saxophones jump out and do a dance, shaking their butts at the camera.
Cut to Krazy blowing a row of clarinets. The clarinets grow mouths and laugh in unison.
Although we get a neat scene of musical instruments extending from a global version of the Earth, most of the second half of this Columbia cartoon features instruments playing themselves. Manny Gould needed to vary the gags just a bit more.
No director is credited.
As you might guess, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is heard, played on a piano by the ghost of Franz Liszt.
The Samba Pictures TV credits are way off the mark on this one. For the 1931-32 season, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould helmed Krazy Kat cartoons separately, with Harrison making four while Gould directed the balance. The Cumulative Copyright Catalog listing for this one records the "By Ben Harrison" credit and musical score credit for Joe de Nat, and indeed in style and sensibility it's Harrison all the way down. No animation credit was recorded, and that might not be a mistake: there's pretty much no visible sign of the other animators' styles herein (Gould only animated on the ones he directed); the animation instead reflects Harrison's drawing style and likely is mostly his own, albeit perhaps especially polished by assistant work (the background animation in the penultimate scene of Krazy marching down a street was reused from "Lambs Will Gamble".) In any case, this cartoon is Harrison's artistic expression through and through and although I could be biased to some degree in favor of films this personal, I've always thought highly of it.
ReplyDeleteZachary, thanks for your expert eye. I gather from interviews with Art Davis that they both got credits on each other's cartoons but he didn't animate on Gould's cartoons.
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