Drawing Account (in the Ephemeral section of Open Video Project. Also, film #458 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Industrial]

This goofy Jam Handy film features a cartoon animator who meets a Chevrolet mechanical engineer on an airplane that totally lacks seatbelts. The animator manages to talk the engineer into helping make a cartoon in which a bunch of gremlins run a car engine. The engineer helpfully provides a cutaway engine model for the guys in the animation studio to look at. This results in a baffling scene in which the kooky animators brainstorm about the gremlins while the engineer gives boring lectures about how the car engine works, sneaking in sales messages about how great Chevrolet engines are while he’s at it. One animator, who looks like a Radford Baines wanna-be gets way too excited about making one of the imps into a Roman chariot driver: “We’ll make him a big, muscular guy with a whip!” he crows. Then we get to see a really interesting sequence on how cartoons are made, including how sound synchronization is done, something that was new to me. Then, of course, we get to see the finished cartoon, which is pretty silly. This is one of the goofiest industrial films I’ve ever seen, which makes it a great piece of ephemra. Termite Terrace these guys definitely ain’t!

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *****. Weirdness: *****. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: *****.

No comments:

Better Reading

Better Reading . Teenager Harold Wilson has a problem—he can’t read for (expletive deleted). So he has to spend all his free time studying ...