Max and Dave Fleischer’s ill-starred second feature was originally released, as Mr. Bug Goes To Town, two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Not surprisingly, it was a massive failure, worsening the already strained relations between the Fleischers and Paramount and leading to the takeover of their fledgling production company. But the movie survives as a minor classic of animated filmmaking, and evidence of a possible world where Walt Disney didn’t achieve complete domination over the cartoon feature. In contrast to the gentle whimsy of Disney’s Silly Symphonies and the heartless anything-for-a-laugh anarchy of Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes, the Fleischers had always excelled at racy, “realistic” material like Betty Boop. Thus Hoppity, while basically following the sentimental template established by 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is a bit coarser and scrappier than Disney’s contemporaneous output, playing to the New York-based Fleischers’ strengths by including strong doses of ethnic humor, social satire and slapstick to cut the fairy-tale treacle. It also has a broadly populist scenario (which may not have helped its chances in post-Depression America), playing out the evils of big business on two levels: a corrupt capitalist beetle (helped by two Italian-sounding rude mechanicals) plots the ruin a community of hardworking proletarian insects, at the same time as a new high-rise development threatens them all. Visually it’s less controlled than a Disney film; there’s a looseness, even a loucheness, to the Fleischer house style that gives a weird kick to scenes like Hoppity’s trip to a hot jazz nightclub, where he gets electrocuted into doing the jitterbug. The nearest reference point is less anything animated than comic strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat or Walt Kelly’s Pogo. (To put a finer point on it: Snow White looks like a picture book; Hoppity looks like the funny pages.) The stabs at high drama are less successful: the Fleischers’ background artists weren’t a patch on Disney’s, and the original plot lacks the mythic depth of the Grimm stories their competitors had to work with. But there’s plenty of incidental detail and invention along the way to make you wish they could have tried again.
While we’re on the subject, though, what about this microgenre of bugs-in-the-big-city stories? Apparently it took urban blight to make insects into sympathetic protagonists: a short list would also have to include Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel newspaper stories (which eventually engendered the 1971 animated flop Shinbone Alley) and George Selden’s 1960 novel The Cricket in Times Square, both of which play on the same “imperiled pastoral in the heart of the modern” feeling that Hoppity does. (Pixar’s 1998 A Bug’s Tale, by contrast, shifts the action to the safety of the suburbs, thereby reducing the pathos somewhat. I haven’t seen Antz.) All of these, probably, can be traced back to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” perhaps the first work of fiction to draw the connection between city dweller and vermin. An unlikely source for themes in children’s entertainment, but you take your masterstrokes where you can.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
02 Jan 2009 11:12 PM | Submit Comment
