cartoon | Dogpatch Press

June 27, 2015

The Wild Piano, by Fred – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Wild Piano, by Fred. [Translated by Richard Kutner.]
NYC, Candlewick Press/TOON Books, May 2015, hardcover $16.95 (45 [+ 1] pages).

The Wild Piano (Le Piano Sauvage) is Book 2 in the Philémon series by Fred (Frédéric Othon Théodore Aristidès, 1931-2013), serialized in the classic French comics magazine Pilote. The weekly strip was collected into 15 books between 1972 and 1987. Fred retired leaving Philémon’s adventures uncompleted, until he wrote/drew a 16^th volume to finish the series just before his death.

Book 1, Cast Away on the Letter A, was reviewed here in January. I won’t repeat the gushing praise that I lavished upon it, but briefly: Philémon was/is a surrealistic cartoon strip in the tradition of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Philémon is a teenage farmboy in the French countryside of the 1960s-‘70s who falls down a well and has psychedelic adventures on the literal letters ATLANTIC of the Atlantic Ocean of a parallel world. Philémon, and Fred’s other works, were instant hits in France, reprinted so often that Fred was able to retire and live off his royalties. It is a sad commentary on the lack of interest in non-American cartoon art in America that the Philémon books are only now being published here after 40+ years. A Philémon live-action movie full of VFX, French-produced but in English, was announced as in pre-production in 2013.

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April 29, 2015

Wolfy, the Incredible Secret – movie review by Fred Patten

by kiwiztiger

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Wolfy, the Incredible Secret. Directed by Eric Omond. 82 minutes. December 18, 2013 in France; March 17, 2015 in the U.S. (DVD).

Loulou, l’Incroyable Secret was the winner of France’s César Award – “the French Oscars” — in 2014 for the Best Animated Feature shown in France during 2013; not just the best French-produced animated feature of 2013. It competed against the American animated features shown in France during 2013, which was probably all of them. It was also shown at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Berlinale’s Crystal Bear, selected by a Children’s Jury as the Best Children’s Film entered in the Festival, animation or live-action.

Loulou, l’Incroyable Secret is based upon the French children’s book series by Grégoire Solotareff, with hand-drawn animation in Solotareff’s art style. Solotareff, born as Gregory El Kayem in Alexandria, Egypt in 1953 of Lebanese parents, has lived in France since 1960 and been an artist of children’s books since 1985. He has written & drawn over 150 children’s books to date, winning ten awards. He began the Loulou books in 1989, about the friendship between Loulou (Wolfy), an orphaned wolf cub, and Tom, a young rabbit, in the Land of the Rabbits. The series has been favorably reviewed for promoting friendship amidst nonconformity. It was first animated in March 2003 as Loulou et Autres Loups … (Wolfy and Other Wolves …), a 29-minute featurette directed by Serge Elissade. Loulou, l’Incroyable Secret is an original story, not based upon a book, with the screenplay, dialogue, and art design by Solotareff (and others).

Wolfy the easygoing wolf cub and Tom the pessimistic rabbit are now adolescents in the Land of Rabbits, with Wolfy adopted into Tom’s family. Cornelia, a mysterious gypsy (the audience sees that she is more than just passing through) tells Wolfy that he is not an orphan as he has always believed! His mother is a princess in Wolfenberg, the Land of Wolves. Wolfy insists on going there to find her. Tom goes along, despite his misgivings. They arrive at the height of Wolfenberg’s Carnifest/Meat-Eaters’ Festival, where everyone assumes that Wolfy has brought the teenaged rabbit to be added to the menu. Read the rest of this entry »

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April 23, 2015

French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 4 – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Series: Part 1 – Part 2 – and Part 3. This is the last of four parts. Continuing from where we left off …

Blackie & Kanuto (Black to the Moon 3D), directed by Francis Nielsen. 81 minutes. April 17, 2013.

Blackie (or Blacky) is a black sheep who goes out of her way to be “different”. Kanuto is an exasperated sheepdog who is in love with her. When Blackie decides to travel to the Moon, Kanuto reluctantly joins her. Other characters include Blackie’s loyal followers, Pepe (horse) and Marvin (duck); Fancy, Cloe, and Victoria, the sheep fashionistas who are jealous of Blackie; Theodora, the motherly operatic cow who thinks that Blackie should be a ballerina; Karl Wolf, the haughty lupine fashion designer; Hu Flung Pu, the martial artist spider and his illegal spider seamstresses; the three Patrino Russian canine cosmonauts who have a rocket ship; Rainbow (Grumbo), the macho U.S. Army dog and rival sheepdog who acts more like Rambo; two Bulgarian birds from a singing TV reality show contest; and Pinkie, the sheep who is experimented upon and becomes as large (also as unfriendly) as Godzilla.

Blackie & Kanuto was a CGI Spanish-French-Italian animated feature premiered at the May 2012 Cannes Film Festival, and first released in Spain on February 15, 2013. It was shown in different countries (it was extremely popular in Russia) in different edits. Other titles included Head Over Hooves and Pup. Read the rest of this entry »

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April 7, 2015

French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 3 – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Series: French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 1 and Part 2. There will be four parts.

Continuing from where we left off …

Les As de la Jungle – Operation Banquise, directed by David Alaux and Éric Tosti. 58 minutes. December 31, 2011.

When a band of walruses terrorizes the South Pole, stealing the penguins’ eggs, the penguin brother and sister Ping (Tommy) and Pong travel to the jungle where “the Great Tiger Warrior” lives, to ask him to rescue them. The Great Tiger Warrior is Maurice, a penguin raised and striped like a tiger who believes he is one. Maurice agrees, and summons the rest of the Jungle Aces (the Jungle Bunch): Miguel the poetic tap-dancing gorilla, Fred the singing warthog, Gilbert the tiny paranoid tarsier (the brains of the team), Al & Bob, the two frogs of unknown talents, and last but by no means least, Junior the little tiger fish, Maurice’s adopted son (he travels with Maurice in a fishbowl) and kung-fu expert. On their way to Antarctica, they meet and add Batricia, a bat, to the Aces. Each fights the walruses with his or her own specialty, until the grand finale free-for-all. A children’s feature, for the 6+ age group.

Les As de la Jungle – Operation Banquise (The Jungle Aces – Operation Ice), also titled Les As de la Jungle – le Film, was an original CGI feature following David Alaux & Éric Tosti’s Toulouse-based TAT Productions’ Les As de la Jungle TV series of October 23 – November 4, 2011; 26 1½-minute episodes. It was shown as a TV movie on New Year’s Eve 2012, and released theatrically on April 10, 2013. Les As de la Jungle has been popular enough to return as Les As de la Jungle – A la Rescousse (The Jungle Bunch – To the Rescue) in 11-minute TV episodes from December 29, 2013. The movie has been sold as a theatrical or DVD feature to over 150 countries. In the U.S., the feature is a DVD as The Jungle Bunch: The Movie, with John Lithgow voicing Maurice. The movie won the Procirep French TV producers’ award in the animation category; the Audience Awards at the 7^th Animpact Max (November 28 – December 2) in Seoul, South Korea and the LUCAS International Children’s Film Festival in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; and the 2013 Kidscreen Award in New York; and was nominated for a 2014 Emmy.

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April 2, 2015

Jungle Shuffle – CGI Feature announcement by Fred Patten.

by kiwiztiger

Tip: Courtesy of Ace Eldritch.

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Jungle Shuffle Mystery

We get questions. Patch said, “Someone has just asked me about this…” and sent me a YouTube link to a trailer for Jungle Shuffle. It’s an animated feature full of anthro – red pandas? “Nope. It’s news to me. Let me look into it.”

Okay. Jungle Shuffle, or The Jungle Shuffle, is a 85-minute computer generated imagery (CGI) animated feature, with coatimundis, not red pandas. It was a South Korean and Mexican co-production, directed by Taedong Park and Mauricio de la Orta.

The plot: in 1960 in the dense Lacedon jungle in southern Mexico (the Mayan area), Manu (boy) and Sacha (girl) are two coatimundis in a village tribe led by Sacha’s father. Manu is a typical loner, barely tolerated by anyone but Sacha. Manu’s rival for Sacha’s paw is Artex, a smarmy wise guy who is really trying to become the chief’s successor. Artex persuades the chief to have a big protective totem made to scare off the humans who are starting to invade the jungle. Manu accidentally destroys the totem, and is banished from the coati’s village to live alone in the jungle. When Sacha is captured by the human hunters of Profesor Loco (who is conducting experiments with captured local animals to develop a super-chicken), Manu tries to rescue her; but he runs into Balaam the jaguar, whose mate Kim has also been captured. Manu and Balaam get in each others’ way, resulting in Manu making another enemy. But Manu does mange to rescue a monkey, Chuy (a comic-relief wannabe kung-fu fighter). Together the two manage to rescue both Sacha and Kim, and Manu becomes everyone’s hero.

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March 26, 2015

Housepets! Don’t Criticize Your Lovelife – comic review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Housepets! Don’t Criticize Your Lovelife (Book 5), by Rick Griffin
North Charleston, SC, CreateSpace, November 2014, trade paperback $13.95 (52 pages).

Does Book 5 have a real title page? After five volumes!? (Gasp! Choke!)

Yes, Book 5 has a real title page! However – well, my reviews of the first four books have all recommended that unless you have them all, you should start with an earlier volume to get to know the cast. That is particularly true of Book 5. It begins with the dogs and cats of Babylon Gardens “imaginating” their own version of Guys and Dolls by Loesser, Swerling & Burrows. If you’re familiar with the Broadway musical and with Peanut, Grape, Tarot, Max, Sabrina, and the other housepets of Housepets!, fine. If not, Book 5 is a really confusing one to start with.

Fortunately, practically all readers of Dogpatch Press already follow Housepets! regularly – don’t you? Housepets! is an online Monday-Wednesday-Friday comic strip that began on June 2, 2008. It has won the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip for every year since 2009. The four previous collections are Housepets! Are Naked All the Time, Housepets! Hope They Don’t Get Eaten, Housepets! Can Be Real Ladykillers, and Housepets! Are Gonna Sniff Everybody; all previously reviewed on Flayrah. Housepets! Don’t Criticize Your Lovelife (Book 5) starts with the online strip from June 6, 2012 and ends with that from June 3, 2013. These are the story-arcs #56, “Let’s Imaginate Guys and Dolls” to #69, “The King and I”, plus one-off gag strips between those.

Housepets! is the story of the dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits, and other pets of Babylon Gardens, a typical residential suburban neighborhood – in an alternate universe. The animals are larger than in our universe (but not human-sized), can talk, are usually bipedal, and address their human owners as “Mom” and “Dad”. Their status is somewhere between pets and children. Points established over the years are that humans can bequeath their belongings to their pets, who do not need a human guardian; human storekeepers are not allowed to sell catnip to cats; human police forces have an auxiliary of Police Dogs who are not all police dogs; the pets comment sardonically on how they can go naked in public but their human “parents” can’t; and – lots of other stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

March 9, 2015

French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 2 – by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Previously: French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, Part 1. There will be four parts.

Continuing from where we left off …

Le Château des Singes (The Castle of Monkeys), directed by Jean-François Laguionie. 76 minutes. June 2, 1999.

Kom, a brash young monkey, is a member of the Woonko tribe which lives in the treetops, believing that the earth below them is inhabited by demons. Kom scoffs at this, and generally makes himself unpopular. One day he accidentally falls to the ground, where he meets the Lankoo tribe; monkeys like himself. He falls in love with Gina and is adopted into the Lankoos, although Gina is repelled by his boastfulness. But Kom and Gina become enmeshed in Lankoo politics when they discover that Sebastian the Chancellor is plotting to kill the king, poison Princess Ida, and rule with Ida’s evil governess. They are too late to save the king, but they expose the plotters and save Ida, who becomes the new queen. Kom brings Gina back to the Woonkos, where they will work to unify the two monkey tribes

Laguionie is an international award-winning animation director whose previous shorts and feature did not include any anthro animals. His second feature (international title: A Monkey’s Tale) won the Best Animated Feature Film award at the 5th Kecskemét (Hungary) Animation Film Festival, and was the first to bring him international attention.

A Monkey’s Tale website – Full movie:

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February 23, 2015

The Hero of Color City – animated movie review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Hero of Color City, directed by Frank Gladstone. 77 minutes. October 3, 2014.

Since I have already reviewed The Nut Job and Thunder and the House of Magic, I may as well review the third similar animated feature here: October 2014’s The Hero of Color City. I am reviewing it primarily to let you know about it, in case you want to see it. You’ve seen the Transformers movies, about anthropomorphized whatever-they-are’s. Now here are anthropomorphized crayons! You won’t get many opportunities to see anthropomorphized crayons.

I criticized most of the reviews of The Nut Job and Thunder and the House of Magic, which were very negative, as irrelevant because they judged the movie as an adult theatrical feature, whereas it was a children’s film. The Hero of Color City is for even younger children – preschoolers – and the reviews tend to be of two types. Those that do review it as kidnergarteners’ fare are generally positive. Those that review it for the parents who will accompany those kindergarteners are really negative. And I can’t say that I disagree with them.

Here is the plot synopsis from the review from Variety, October 2, 2014, by Geoff Berkshire:

“Lacking any of the visual sophistication customary in contemporary bigscreen toons, The Hero of Color City more closely resembles the by-the-numbers smallscreen product churned out overseas to fill time on countless tyke-oriented cable channels. The youngest members of the film’s target audience aren’t likely to care much about the lack of craft here, but grown-ups will immediately spot a generic rip-off and tune out accordingly. They won’t be missing much.

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January 23, 2015

French Anthropomorphic Animal Animated Features, part 1 – by Fred Patten

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer. There will be four parts.

French (meaning French-language, whether produced in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, or the French-speaking part of Switzerland) anthro theatrical features have been in the news since the subtitled 2013 U.S. release (English-language dub in 2014) of the 2012 Belgian Ernest & Célestine, about the forbidden friendship between a mouse and a bear in a civilization of both. Right now, there is also Yellowbird.

French-language anthro theatrical features are older than most Americans think. Here is a chronological annotated list.

First, some rules. This list consists of those French-language theatrical features (no shorts or TV animation like the 1987 Moi Renart) that feature anthropomorphic animals as the only or majority of the cast. It does not include those featuring mostly humans with only one or two anthro animals, such as the Lucky Luke Westerns with Jolly Jumper, Luke’s talking horse; even when the animal(s) is the main star, such as the 2008 Fly Me to the Moon (three housefly astronauts meet Buzz Aldrin; ho ho) or the 2009 La Véritable Histoire du Chat Botté (The True Story of Puss in Boots) or the 2012 Sur la Piste du Marsupilami (On the Trail of the Marsupilami). It does not include any movies about living toys, fairies, gremlins, elves, or Smurfs.

Le Roman de Renard (The Story of the Fox), directed by Ladislas Starevich. 65 minutes. April 10, 1941.

This is a dubious “French” film with a dubious release date. Starevich (or Starewicz) began making stop-motion films in Russia in 1911. He emigrated to escape the Russian Revolution, and only happened to be in Paris during 1929 and 1930 when he and his wife Irene animated Le Roman de Renard. The animation turned out to be easier than the sound track, which was finally funded in Germany and premiered in Berlin as Reinicke Fuchs on April 10, 1937. The French edit, which is the best-known today, was released exactly four years later on April 10, 1941.

The film is presented as “the oldest and most beautiful story known to us animals”, as narrated by an elderly monkey dressed as a Medieval scholar. The scenario is credited to Irène Starevich, but it is essentially Le Roman de Renart as finalized in literary form by the Renaissance, especially in Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1794 Reineke Fuchs epic poem. By the 1920s almost every standard edition of Goethe’s poem had the 1840s illustrations by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, and the Starevich’s stop-motion models look very similar to these. If you know the 12^th-century animal folk tale about Baron Renard the Fox at the court of King Lion, you know the plot of the movie.

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December 24, 2014

YELLOWBIRD is Flying Your Way: animated movie news from Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer, tells me:

A brand-new French animated very anthropomorphic movie, Yellowbird, that I’ve never heard of, is going to be shown in the USA. According to information mostly from Jerry Beck’s Animation Scoop website, Yellowbird is directed by Christian De Vita and produced by the TeamTO Studio in Paris. It won’t even be released in France until February 18, 2015. Wreckin Hill Entertainment, an American distributor, has bought the American rights and will give it a brief theatrical release in December, with a DVD release in April 2015. From the poster and the trailer, the American voice dub has already been completed. The Cartoon Brew says that the announced American release is in only five theaters in the Detroit area, and that the only American review so far says that it’s only for 4 to 7 year olds — which the trailer does not imply.

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