Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time

In 1994, Jerry Beck edited the book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, which challenged experts to create a ranking of the best short, cel animated cartoons ever made. To no one’s surprise, the experts chose 10 Warner Bros. animations crafted by Chuck Jones. They also gave a nod to Fleischer Studios’ original Superman cartoon, Disney’s first animation with Mickey Mouse (1928’s “Steamboat Willie”), and the Donald Duck-starring WWII propaganda film,“Der Fuehrer’s Face.”

Yes, the big animation studios (Warner Bros., Disney, etc.) dominate the list. But a few “indies” manage to squeak in there. Take for example Winsor Mccay’s seminal 1914 creation “Gertie the Dinosaur.” Or Bambi Meets Godzilla. A student film created by Marv Newland in 1969, Bambi Meets Godzilla (above) runs only 90 seconds. Of which, 48 seconds are devoted to the opening credits, and 27 seconds to the closing credits, leaving only 12 seconds of “action,” which is mostly stillness. The timing is the funny.

The short film circulated in theaters across the U.S., shown before screenings of Philippe de Broca’s feature film King of Hearts. Over the years the publicly-available versions of Bambi Meets Godzilla became worn and faded. So, in 2013, Coda Gardner produced a frame-for-frame HD re-creation. You can watch it below.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

The National Film Board of Canada hosts more recent films by Newland, including 2005’s “Tête à Tête à Tête” and 2011’s “CMYK.”

via @joycecaroloates

Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!

Watch a Surreal 1933 Animation of Snow White, Featuring Cab Calloway & Betty Boop: It’s Ranked as the 19th Greatest Cartoon of All Time

Watch the Oscar-Winning “Gerald McBoing-Boing” (1950): It’s Ranked as the 9th Greatest Cartoon of All Time

from Open Culture https://www.openculture.com/2022/02/flannery-oconnor-friends-dont-let-friends-read-ayn-rand.html
via Ilumina

Comments

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...

Arts and Culture

Search This Blog