Disney/Pixar In General

That's the book all right. It was apparently a favorite of Mrs. Roosevelt.

The former.

Walt's concerns about likability are rather out of place considering this is a book about naughty children who get what's coming to them in creative, disturbing ways.

(Perhaps Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz would have been more Walt's speed, and easier to adapt.)

edited 26th Nov '16 4:49:42 PM by Aldo930

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

That actually makes me think of an Edward Gorey book, the one where he did the Alphabet in little macabre rhymes about children (not especially naughty ones, as far as we're given to know) who all met strange ends "A is for Albert, who fell down a hole, B is for Betty, eaten by moles," that kind of thing.

Wasn't Max and Moritz the basis for The Katzenjammer Kids? I thought I remembered reading that the creator of the The Katzenjammer Kids (or maybe his editor) had read Max and Moritz as a kid and was thus inspired to create his own similar comic strip.

edited 26th Nov '16 5:02:55 PM by Robbery

The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a classic of its genre, but what the book really reminds me of is Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - another book involving naughty children who meet creative, disturbing fates, with rhymed poetry about them as well...

Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids, was originally from Germany, so undoubtedly he knew of Max and Moritz and used them as inspiration for Hans and Fritz.

edited 26th Nov '16 5:07:28 PM by Aldo930

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

Oh, thank God. With that kind of premises, the latter wouldn't have surprised me.

edited 26th Nov '16 5:05:11 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

For those of you wondering what happened to this idea for a Silly Symphony - the story eventually developed into a Donald Duck cartoon, 1938's "Donald's Better Self".

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

Somehow that completely escaped my mind.

I WAS thinking of a more swords and sorcery type of thing but Coraline is a good example nonetheless.

Der Struwwelpeter is really the last book I would expect Disney to adapt...it is one of the oldest German children books, and it shows. All the stories are basically about children getting punished "by fate" for misbehaving...and those punishments include dying of hunger (for a child which refused to eat his soup), getting the thumbs cut off and getting burned alive!!!!!

Max and Moritz would be a nearly impossible challenge, too, because the whole point is that the protagonists are "bad boys" so to speak....and the end is very gruesome, too, with them getting caught by the Miller who does with them what he would usually do to corn...the last picture of the book is of their outlines lying on the ground made out of corn and some geese starting to eat what is left of them. The book is great, but what makes it great are the pictures and the wording of the rhymes, not necessarily the stories in itself.

See, you say, that, but "Why Should I Worry?" gets stuck in my head all the time, even is right now.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

Come to think about it, maybe The Simpsons could adapt it somehow. The Halloween Specials have shown far worse, even happening to children.

I'd watch it.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

Well, to be fair, it wasn't Disney's own idea to adapt Der Struwwelpeter, he was attempting it at the request of Eleanor Roosevelt and, even so, ultimately decided it wasn't something he could make work.

As to mainstream animated dark fantasy (or dark high fantasy, swords and sorcery, what have you) there is the previously mentioned The Last Unicorn, though there really isn't a ton of action or sword play in that. There's also Ralph Bakshi's Wizards and Fire and Ice, though whether those can be considered "mainstream" is, I suppose, debatable, even though both were released by 20th Century Fox, As a side note, and straying into live-action, didn't Disney co-produce Dragonslayer?

One of the things that I find interesting and frustrating about the work of Don Bluth is that he frequently has some unique and compelling elements of dark fantasy in his work but he never just goes all the way and rings the bell on it. The Secret of Nimh has it's unexplained and utterly non-textual magical amulet; there's the villain from Rock-a-Doodle who wants to banish the sun. The uneven We're Back (okay, not from Don Bluth) has a villain who is dogged by a flock of ravens (or crows possibly) and is ultimately picked apart by them. There's even Rasputin in Anastasia. These are little bits and pieces of dark fascination that unfortunately go nowhere and are thus ultimately unsatisfying. I'll be interested to see what he comes up with if his plans to do a Dragon's Lair feature come to fruition.

Anyone ever see the Faeries animated tv special, based on the Brian Froud book of the same name? It's on Youtube if you haven't.

edited 27th Nov '16 10:39:59 AM by Robbery

It was indeed - a coproduction between Walt Disney and Paramount. The same was also true of the 1980 Robert Altman Popeye film.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

I actually really enjoyed Popeye. I saw it the first time when I was very young, and it's hard for me to view it through anything other than nostalgia goggles. Still, I thought Robin Williams was an inspired choice to play Popeye, and Jules Feiffer's (another good choice) script is peppered with references to seldom seen Thimble Theatre characters (like Olive's extended family).

edited 27th Nov '16 9:16:11 PM by Robbery

The film may have its flaws, but you have to applaud a film that has George W. Geezil and Rough House and the rest of the Oyl family...

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

With a lot of those live action adaptations the issue is not the movie itself, it lies in the source itself. Let's be frank, the majority of cartoons is stupid, repetitive and simply not made for a feature length movie, especially not one made in live-action, since it makes some of the more questionable aspects way more obvious.

I know that's been the difficulty in WB's attempt to adapt the Looney Tunes characters to the big screen; they work much better in gag-driven shorts. Contrarily, I've always felt that Mickey Mouse in particular lent himself better to storytelling rather than gag cartoons, at least as he evolved. I always felt that, for instance, "The Brave Little Tailor" was one of his best cartoons. This is not to say he couldn't work well in a gag cartoon ("Symphony Hour," for instance) only that I think he found his groove in story shorts.

You should read the Mouse Comics. Mickey's practically an adventure hero.

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Why no one at Disney ever thought of making a TV show adapted from the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey comics is beyond me.

It would have done for those what Duck Tales did for Carl Barks.

edited 28th Nov '16 5:31:53 PM by Aldo930

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

I think Disney should start getting a brain trust together to have a feature length Mickey Mouse move ready for November 18th 2028, one hundred years to the day from the release of Steamboat Willie.

edited 28th Nov '16 7:57:09 PM by BigMadDraco

For some time I've been wondering, why does Disney hire two directors for most of their movies?

Because that s pretty much normal in animation. There is so much work to do for a director that it is hard to do all of it alone. Sure a lot of movies have one big name director attached to it, but once you look closer you realize that there is always at least a second one who is responsible for some aspects of the movie....kind of like a second unit.

I always liked the Mickey Detective Stories...it is kind of odd that they were never made into a series.

Oh, I've read the Mouse comics. I was speaking in terms of how he was treated in the animated shorts.

I agree entirely that a Mickey show based on the Gottfreidson strip would be excellent. Mickey as weirdness magnet and adventurer would be something I'd line up to see. By the end of his career in the classic shorts (before Mickey's Christmas Carol, Prince and the Pauper, Runaway Brain, etc) he'd kind of turned into a 50's sitcom bachelor, or a supporting player in Pluto shorts (where he tended to come off badly).

It boggles my mind a little (perhaps it shouldn't) that when the Disney folks realized that Mickey was no longer as effective in gag cartoons, had in fact been surpassed in this regard by Goofy and Donald, they didn't think to just try him in something other than gag cartoons.

edited 29th Nov '16 1:43:01 PM by Robbery

You wouldn't be surprised at how many obvious ideas that would make companies money have simply never been thought of by executives - and would probably be rejected if they were.

The approach they're taking with Mickey nowadays is apparently doing fine by them, but I still think we ought to have a show based on the Gottfredson comics.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."

Yeah, I've really enjoyed the recent Mickey Mouse shorts. But you do have to laugh a bit when you read where Disney folks have claimed Mickey is hard to use or build cartoons around, when all you have to do is look at 70+ years of Mickey comics to see that there have been loads of people who know just fine how to make use of him.