Category Archives: TV & Movies

Minnie the Moocher

Have eight minutes? Watch Minnie the Moocher and learn a truckload of awesome stuff!

There’s so much going on with this film, I hardly know where to begin. So, let’s just start with the basics, and technical stuff, and go from there. First, this is a traditional hand-drawn animated film by Fleischer Studios, released in 1932. If you’ve ever made a sticky-pad flip book, you know how this works. In this case, though, the animation is done on “cells” or sheets of clear plastic, and photographed over painted backgrounds that show through, with each photograph exposing one frame of the film.

A neat thing to notice (and it’s easier if you re-watch it with the sound muted) is that the studio uses cycles of repeated cell sequences to make some parts cheaper to animate. Look for repeated motions in the animation – either the animation is reused outright, or short bits of repeated motions that can be traced are simply copied to new cells. Examples include Betty and Bimbo running out of town (in the case of just reusing the same sequence of cells), and the cork in the jar on the table hopping onto the table and back in the very beginning (for just a part of the animation being traced to new cells). Once you know that animation frequently does this, you’ll know what to look for, and you’ll be able to spot this technique in lots of other animated movies and series. Used with finesse, it adds a sense of rhythm and pacing.

Another cool animation technique on display is rotoscoping. You don’t have to re-use or trace other animation cells, you can actually trace live action footage, too. This is especially useful for capturing complex movements that maybe your artists don’t have a mental reference for already. The famous dancing walrus ghost (what, surprised? watch the film, seriously, it’s worth it) is actually traced over live-action footage of Cab Calloway dancing. So, not only did Cab Calloway provide the walrus ghost vocals, he’s also the reference for the walrus ghost’s slick dance moves. Kind of like modern motion capture, but without the aid of computers, and entirely by hand.

About that walrus ghost. Did I mention the style of the film? It’s seriously creepy and weird. Since everything in an animated film is drawn by hand, if you can draw it, you can animate it, limited only by your skill and your imagination. Scary, grim, and with a tacked-on last-minute wholesome ending, Minnie the Moocher was for general audiences, not just kids. The song’s about Minnie, who gets drawn into a life of poverty, crime, and drug use because she falls in love with an addict. Ghosts get electrocuted, and skeletons drink themselves to death. The implication, of course, is that this is where teen runaway Betty’s life is headed, if she doesn’t go back home to her first-gen immigrant parents who have a hard time relating to their Americanized daughter and insist she eat her hasenpfeffer.

Content-wise this short film doesn’t pull any punches, despite the superficially cartoony style. Even the idea that a cartoon would be kid stuff is very recent. There’s a huge difference between early Betty Boop – where she’s a rebellious teen flapper – and later Betty Boop – where she becomes a much more demure housewife type. The reason for this is the Hays Code. Movies didn’t have ratings for different audiences based on content. Instead, the Hays Code dictated what was allowed to be in Hollywood movies and what wasn’t. This kind of industry-run censorship is actually pretty common, historically. (Note that although the Hays Code came out in 1930, it wasn’t really enforced until later. So, Minnie the Moocher gleefully ignores the code, even though it was technically produced under it in 1932.) Compare the slightly-later Comics Code, for another example.

That’s a lot of technical, heavy, historical stuff for a film that’s less than ten minutes long, and we’ve barely scratched the surface, too.

Animecon 2018 Is Coming!

Animecon is Friday, August 10th at the Main Library from 9:30am – 4pm at the Main Library. Join your fellow fans for anime viewing and discussion, cosplay, our annual Ramen noodle eating competition, and much more!

Teens (12-19) can sign up online in advance by visiting  http://www.lfpl.org/tickets/animecon-registration.asp. And don’t forget to look for the full schedule (coming soon) on the LFPL website!

High Concept and Low Concept

Sometimes, if you’re discussing books that you read, games that you play, shows that you watch, music you listen to – basically any media you consume – you need some specialized ideas and terms to help you describe and discuss it. “It was great” or “It was bad” or “I thought it was OK” are all very well and good, but it’s so much more satisfying if you can also talk about WHY you liked/disliked something. If you want to win arguments and impress your friends, remember your ABCs – Always Backup Criticism.

Have examples, of course, of things you like or don’t and why. But, sometimes, you need some special vocabulary and ideas in order to help you with your critique. That means it’s time to add another idea to your toolbox: high vs low concept. This is all about how much concept a work of art contains, not how good the concept is. Think of it as a matter of the amount the concept itself contributes to the total content of the work.

Jane Austen’s novels are generally low concept. The idea of the novels – that people in various economic circumstances need to get paired up (or not paired up, or not paired up the way they thought) – is nowhere near as important to the books as the interactions between the characters, which is why people read them. Here’s an example pie chart, based on a very precise and academic guesstimate:

There’s also works that split it pretty much right down the middle, generating interest in equal parts from the idea that drives them, as well as the execution of the plot and characters:

On the far end of the scale, there’s also works that are high concept – that get their interest mostly from the ideas that drive them. I can think of no better example than 18 Days, which breaks down about like this:

As I’ve probably mentioned before, the library has the concept art book, if you want a look at the idea, but, sadly, they didn’t get full funding for the series as it was originally conceived. Instead, you can watch it in a few different languages on the Graphic India YouTube channel. Still pretty awesome, though.

Whatever the level of concept in your media, now you have a new way to talk about the things you love: is it high concept, low concept, or a balance of the two?

Automation Meditations

So, I’m a dorkosaurus. Raaawwrrrrrr. An enormous shock, I’m sure. I’ve been bingewatching the series Edwardian Farm, which first ran on the BBC. Of course our library has it.

Picture of the cover of Edwardian Farm, the DVD.

The show you never knew you needed to watch. It’s fascinating, and sometimes gross.

It’s a reality-TV-ish series about making historians live on an Edwardian Era farm, as in, technology, food, clothes, and everything from the first years of the 20th Century. Yikes. One thing that I find really striking though is the way this show illustrates how the massive changes to the economy wrought by mechanization and automation started earlier than we usually think. (Or at least earlier than panicky articles about the coming Skynet-style Robot War due to cute self-driving cars would have you believe. But look at it! It’s just so roly-poly and cute! Who could hate that?*)

A 3/4 photograph of the google driverless car. Designed to be cute, actually, like a little face.

PANIC! IT’S COMING FOR YOUR JOB! IT MURDERS KANGAROOS! IT RUNS ON HUMAN BLOOD! SOON THEY WILL FARM US LIKE CATTLE! By Grendelkhan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

But first: some definitions!

Mechanization – the process of adopting machines to do work.

Automation – machines operating without a human operator.

Our age has a lot of anxiety about machines taking over. We write entire movie series about the idea. It permeates our pop-culture consciousness. But, over 100 years ago, the process of mechanization was well underway, and even automation was on the horizon. Technological forces have always shaped our economy, from the dawn of recorded history, even.

Cover of the DVD of the movie Terminator, with robo-Schwarzenegger crouching in some fog.

A vital entry in the cultural canon of techno-anxiety.

Cover of The Matrix DVD.

Seriously, I had a whole coffee-rant one morning this September, about how science fiction doesn’t get enough credit for tackling massive intellectual issues like technology. I still think the rest of the Matrix Trilogy makes more sense if (spoilers spoil! Click and drag between brackets to reveal!) [you think of Zion and the resistance and everything as yet another illusion to bottle up the troublesome humans who think they made it out. That’s why the other machines were so helpful, and how Neo can still have superpowers on the “outside” – he never made it out. Nobody ever does. Of course, this way, it’s way, WAY, more depressing. Less plot holes, though…]

Anyway, let’s return from these horrifying futures to the past, and the ways in which machines were already dominating the economy a century ago. This is how you till a field, by hand. This is with a horse and a plough. By the early 20th Century, you could plow more than one furrow at once, with a riding plow, in the same amount of time. Watch these different models of ploughs. Less time to do the work of a farm means that less people have to be involved to cultivate even more food than ever before. (More horses, though, until the tractor. Today, as you can see, there’s as many people ploughing that huge field as was needed to deal with a just a single large hitch of horses, 100 years ago. The mechanization process was there all along, and reducing human labor all along, but it’s gotten so much further these days. This is a huge factor in why people moved to cities from the countryside. Shrinking employment pool for farmers, all along.)

Another great example is knitting machines. Today, textiles with a knit pattern are made on computerized automatic knitting machines. For an example, look at your t-shirt. But hand-cranked machines made knitting tricky socks much easier, starting in the late 19th Century. Time-saving devices like this made it possible to free up more time and effort for other things, and even earn extra money on the side.

As much as we read panicked articles about automation eating jobs, machines have been supplanting, supplementing, and creating jobs for generations, at least. There are no wind farms without wind turbine repair technicians. Entire jobs have opened up that did not exist before, if you get the training and the education to do them: wind turbine repair requires about a two year professional degree and a good head for heights. If you like rock climbing, this could be a good fit.

*But maybe, that’s what they want you to think: a lot of work goes into designing cars. The creators of the project knew how nervous a self-driving car could make people, and wanted to subconsciously ease anxiety by designing it to look cute. You can’t really help it, because cuteness DOES literally hack your brain’s love circuitry. Mammal parenting hormones at their best. Oxytocin is a heck of a drug. DUN DUN DUUUNNNNN!!