Random 90's Animation: "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" (1989...ish)

I have had an inordinate fondness for "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" ever since I found it by chance back in college.  Granted, the story is kind of dumb and predictable, the songs aren't that great, and while none of the characters are particularly interesting, Nemo himself is essentially a non-entity.  But the visuals kept me coming back.  Seriously, look at this:



I was a little familiar with the works of Windsor McCay since obviously he gets a mention in every history of animation book (his "Little Nemo" was essentially a lavishly illustrated story released chapter-by-chapter as a feature in the Sunday newspaper comics and in his spare time he recruited the characters from the strip so he could invent the animated film as we know it) and my school's library had a decent book collection of the strips.  Scenes like the above blew me away with how vividly they recreated McCay's insanely detailed style and "whatever, this is a kid's dream" attitude. And so, for years, I assumed that this was a tribute to McCay made by a random animation studio that was quietly released in the early 90's to stunning indifference, and that I had the good luck to discover like a lost treasure hiding in the Children and Family aisle of the local Blockbuster.

Boy, did I ever not know the half of it.

The unassuming "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" has one of the most truly astonishing histories of any feature film, animated or otherwise.  Here's a brief list of people who were involved at one time or other during the at least ten years this film was in production: Ray Bradbury, John Canemaker, the Sherman brothers, Ken Anderson, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Jean Giraud - better known as Moebius, and Brian Froud.  The contributions of the latter two are most obvious (although I couldn't help but notice this time out that King Morpheus shares Ollie Johnston's great affection for trains).  The overall look of Slumberland as we fly over it is very reminiscent of Moebius' art, and at one point our main characters are joined by a crowd of extremely Froud-ian amorphous goblins who appear to have walked right off the set of "Labyrinth", and who contribute very little to the story - but I don't care because whoever animated their various transformations was going for broke.  (Meanwhile, note how Nemo is Bland Anime Boy Protagonist Model 3.)


Oh, and Hiyao Miyazaki and fellow Ghiblian Isao Takahata were involved very early on.  Aside from an overall Ghibli-pretty look to the final film, their influence isn't really felt and allegedly they hated every minute of the production they were there for.  It turns out that part of the reason "Nemo" was in production for ten years is because there were two production companies working on this film, one in Japan and one in America.  The animation was primarily done by TMS in Japan, and the end result is therefore essentially an Anime that is occasionally -and very conspicuously- interrupted by things that studios think people want out of a western animated feature (loads of songs, written by the Shermans on one of their off days so they're still hideous earworms, and note Nemo's highly marketable pet squirrel in the above screenshot.)  The production was so troubled that the film was finished in the late 80's (the closest thing I could find to an official release date was, in fact, 1989...ish), but wasn't released in America until well after it's own video game adaptation.  This has had the odd effect of many fans of "Little Nemo: Dream Master" (known as "Doki Doki Panic" in Japan*) having no idea that the game is more directly based on a movie than the Windsor McCay comic. 

With all this in mind, I am sad to report that the DVD version of "Nemo" has, like, nothing for special features (reportedly the BluRay fixes this a little).  However, the film itself is very different from the version I watched years and years ago.  It turns out that the original American distribution company cut many scenes out of their release of the film, reportedly to secure a G-rating.  These are all reinstated in the DVD version.  In hindsight the only edit from the American theatrical/VHS version that even kind of makes sense is the shuffling of the opening credits to the back-end of the movie.  None of the reinstated scenes are scary (if they do frighten your child, then depending on how old they are, you may have to let your child get out more) or offensive (the film does a very good job of avoiding the... "it was a different time"-y elements of the comic that you may have noticed/winced at in the original McCay animated short).  I'd suppose that they were cut for time, but most of the cuts are only seconds long, and some of the longer scenes (and by "longer", I mean they average a minute or so) actually help certain parts of the movie make a little more sense.  One of the very weirdest cuts is a seconds-long scene where Nemo rides an elevator that is controlled by a "Spirited Away"-looking caterpillar thing, which finally explains Tress MacNeille's mysterious "Elevator Creature" credit in the edited version's cast list.

All in all, "Nemo" is a strange being indeed, but I highly recommend it and not just for Ghibli completists.  For more in this series, click this link or the "Random 90's Animation Month" tag below.

* - I'm joking!  The real original title is the even sillier "Pajama Hero Nemo".

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Sketch of the Day! I'd like to wish everyone a very happy holiday season free from creepy surveillance elves.

Some Thoughts After Watching 29 Episodes of "Gummi Bears"

There is a wonderful, crazy rumor about "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears" that's worth recounting before we get rolling bouncing here.  The origin of "Gummi Bears" supposedly involves Michael Eisner in one of his most deeply Michael Eisnery moments.  He is said to have pitched one of the two first television animated series ever produced by Disney thus: "Hey, my son really loves those Gummy Bear candies.  Make a show about that!"

It is a testament to how awesome Disney can be in a pinch when the animators heard that command, looked at each other, said "okay" to Eisner, and came up with this.*

As I said in the previous post (which you should pause and read right now if you missed it), Disney had entered the wilderness of animated television cartoons with two series produced for the autumn of 1985, "The Wuzzles" and "Adventures of the Gummi Bears".  And in America, and I mention this again because I cannot emphasize how astonishing this fact is and how unthinkable this would be now, these two series aired on two different channels in the exact same time slot. "Gummi Bears" was much more successful and went on to become one of Disney's longest-running animated television series ever, surviving even into the early '90s.

Full confession: I wasn't really into this series as a child.  Remember, I was watching "The Wuzzles" on a competing network; I had no idea what I was missing.  And it turns out that I was missing something really special.

The thing that struck me the most about "Gummi Bears" is how much more care obviously went into it compared to "The Wuzzles".  Yes, it's a series with cute colorful funny animal characters living in a magical tree in an enchanted forest.  But the writers made an effort to give them fairly complex personalities and a well-established world to live in.  And, on top of all that and most impressive of all, a fairly elaborate mythology.

The idea is that we're seeing the final remnants of an ancient advanced civilization, one that is just starting to rediscover its heritage, magical powers, and lost technology.  (As far as the aforementioned lost technology goes, the Bears rediscover such items as what is basically a mech suit and a long-distance communication device/laser canon, neither of which I expected to see in a show like this and my goodness is it ever all the more awesome for it.)  Up until the end of the first season, the residents of Gummi Glen have no idea that they are not the last of their kind.  There's an underlying poignancy here that you aren't going to get in "The Wuzzles".

The setting of "Gummi Bears" is developed enough that I could do yet another parody of the "Game of Thrones" opening with its various locations if I had a penchant for stop-motion animation (and any desire to send yet another damn "Game of Thrones" opening sequence parody out into the world).  The visual design appears to take some influence from "The Sword in the Stone", especially in Dunwyn Castle and its residents.  But I detected an even stronger visual similarity to "The Black Cauldron", especially in the forests, Castle Drekmore, and the Quick Tunnels (a very cool device in their own right and I suddenly long for a dark ride based upon them).  I want to buy a round of pints for whatever layout artists designed Gummi Glen itself because it is just wonderful; you want to walk around inside it and explore every corner.

But the characters really drew me into the series.  There is not a single dud character in the main cast.  I could gush about them all day but I'll keep this quick: the characters are awesome.  Even the human characters are awesome.  Hell, even the younger characters are reasonably awesome!  (For the most part.  There aren't a lot of episodes centered on Sunni and Cubbi, and thankfully those are mostly okay.  Even so, by the end of the DVD set, I still wasn't completely sold on their voices or designs.  Dig Sunni's 80's hair.)

There is a noticeable bit of a dip in quality in the third season.  The writers focused less often on the high concepts introduced in the first two seasons.  They also break out in chronic new characters, including a very obnoxious "LOL, aren't artists random?!?" type. That said, the show is still, if you'll pardon the phrase, leaps and bounds over much of what it was competing with at the time.  I am very happy that I gave it a try.

So what does Calla have to do to be part of the Princess line already?

* - There is another crazy-awesome rumor about "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears" that links it with another Disney animated television series with a slightly larger fanbase.  Very early on in "Gummi Bears", there is an episode where an evil gargoyle who wants to hurt people comes to life at night and makes mischief in the castle.  The rumor insists that this episode may have inspired a later series about good gargoyles who want to help people and who come to life at night to protect the castle.  Yes, "Gargoyles" supposedly started life as a "Gummi Bears" spin-off.  If that's true, especially when you consider how many spin-offs they had in mind for "Gargoyles", then that is amazing.

Addendum: The wonderful Total Media Bridge agrees with me here, and goes into a little more detail regarding the history of the show and it's subsequent seasons.

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Sketch of the Day! This was a pretty big hit on Twitter, if I do say so myself:

Some Thoughts After Watching All Thirteen Episodes of "The Wuzzles"

It's been a while since I shared something from my "Watch Later" YouTube queue, hasn't it?  Well, strap yourselves in, kids, cause this one is a doozie.  It's a playlist that preserves the complete series of Disney Television Animation's very first effort, "The Wuzzles".

Watching "The Wuzzles" for the very first time since 1985 was an experience, let me tell you.



Okay, it honestly stuns me that I haven't written anything at length about "The Wuzzles" since way, way back in 2006.  (That essay is reposted here.  Forgive the early blog format.)  This wasn't my favorite show from when I was a child, but it's the first show I ever remember really liking and watching -- or, rather, the first show I remember making a conscious choice to watch.

You see, back in the early 80's, the landscape of children's cartoons was really f-ing bleak.  If you want a good idea of just how really f-ing bleak it was, take a look at these two recent AV Club Inventories.  Have a strong drink at the ready.

Into this (I can't emphasize this enough) really f-ing bleak environment came two Saturday morning cartoons from what was then considered an unlikely source: Disney.  In those days, and this is totally understandable (read those Inventories again), television cartoons were considered the lowest rung on the animated ladder.  That Disney would wish to enter that arena was shocking.  However, as stated in this article from the time, Disney Television Animation wished to bring some sophistication to Saturday morning.  So, we have to thank Michael Eisner for making television a safe place for quality animation, at least indirectly.

Now here's where things get strange.  Disney produced two series for the autumn of 1985, "The Wuzzles" and "Adventures of the Gummi Bears".  And this would be absolutely unthinkable today, but these two first experiments in television animation from Disney aired on different networks in America.  At the same time.  Like literally they aired on different channels in the same time slot.  "Gummi Bears" was much more successful and went on to become one of Disney's longest-running animated television series ever, surviving even into the early '90s.  Meanwhile "Wuzzles" lasted for just one season of -and this blew my mind to smithereens when I found out- only thirteen episodes.

Thirteen episodes!  Sweet unlikely hybrids with inexplicable fairy wings, thirteen episodes!  How is that even possible?  As I said, this was the first Saturday morning cartoon I ever really liked, and it's shadow looms absurdly large over my childhood; the way I drew, the stories I wrote, the characters I invented.  Hell, who am I kidding?  You can still see some influence from the show on me to this day!  "The Wuzzles" meant an awful lot to me for a very long time, and it did it with only thirteen episodes.  It's like the "Firefly" of Disney animation, though I hasten to clarify after refreshing my memory that I mean that in a ratio of "amount of nostalgia" to "actual shockingly low number of episodes" sense, nothing more.

Before we get into that, let's talk about what I liked about "The Wuzzles" while watching it for the first time since childhood.  This show is, especially for it's time, lush.  The animation is stellar for a television cartoon from the 80's; roughly on-par with the much later "Animaniacs" (both series as well as "Gummi Bears" featured the work of the studio TMS Entertainment).  The characters are always on-model, the backgrounds are gorgeous, and the voice acting is generally very good.  I wasn't really sold on Stan Frieberg's narration at first, but then I realized that it was starting to feel like he was struggling to describe a vivid fever dream, which made the proceedings much more entertaining as an adult.

I'm especially fond of two things that, happily, turned out to be just as good as I remembered from childhood: the score and the set design.  The synth-heavy score is very definitely of its time, but is pretty sophisticated for electronic background music in an 80's cartoon.  By the set design, I mean take a look at the houses in the neighborhood where the main characters live.  Each one is distinct, tells you everything you need to know about its resident, and sports a crazy amount of detail even objectively better cartoons don't bother with.

So there's the good thing about revisiting "The Wuzzles" as an adult; it is at least pleasant to look at and to listen to.  Now here comes the upsetting part: other than that, "The Wuzzles" is not as good as I remembered.  This is almost maddening because, see, I remembered almost every key moment from every episode.  But watching these episodes as an adult... they weren't *horrible*, mind you, they just didn't seem to deserve the huge place they occupy in my earliest animation-related memories.  That's pretty heavy stuff, if you think about it.

And speaking of heavy, I have to warn people who are going to be watching this 1985 cartoon for children by Disney for the first time ever in the year 2013 about the one thing that surprised and honestly really upset me the most about "The Wuzzles": this show just straight-up HATES overweight women.  It really does.  Take a drink whenever poor Hoppopotamus is the victim of a fat joke.  Ugh.

Speaking of the characters, it was also a pretty big blow to see my favorite character, Moosel, for the first time in forever.  Yes, this was my favorite character as a child.  For the life of me I could not tell you why.  With all due respect to the late Bill Scott, Moosel's voice is very obnoxious.  He's also the most boring character of the lot, personality-wise.  But what made me cringe most of all is his character design and animation.  He's just unpleasant to look at now, especially with those weird floppy walk-cycles they gave him.  What kills me is that I loved this character enough to base some of my early character designs on him!  I don't know anything about anything anymore!?!

Overall, what disappointed me the most about "The Wuzzles" is the writing.  The stories told in these thirteen episodes aren't all that interesting to be honest.  The best episodes take a boring plot and put a weirder spin on it, and they're the ones most worth watching.  (My favorites are "The Terrified Forest" and "Class Dismissed."  I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Ghostrustlers" because it manages to be insane even by the standards of both "The Wuzzles" and Required-By-Law 80's Cartoon Episodes Set in the Old West.)  What surprised me this time out was that this is a series that in the course of only thirteen episodes manages to have THREE episodes ("In The Money", "Elaroo's Wishday", and "What's Up, Stox?") where the lesson is, "be careful what you wish for".  And it hit me like a brick as an adult that each and every one of those episodes might as well have sat their young audience down and said, "Those grapes are SO sour, kids, you wouldn't believe it."

So here I am, wiser, disillusioned, with fresher, less rose-tinted memories of a very important part of my early childhood dancing in my head and haunting my dreams.  I do plan on watching and reviewing "Gummi Bears" next week, having already tackled other early efforts from Walt Disney Television Animation like this one.  But I also hope to quickly wash this one off with something else that I thankfully already know holds up...

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Sketch of the Day!  Ooh, they got originality...