Warner Bros. cartoons are still amazingly enjoyable, especially considering they all had the same basic plot: Wile E. Coyote chases Road Runner. Sylvester chases Tweety Bird. And Elmer Fudd hunts for his ultimate prey: the uncatchable Bugs Bunny. Obviously, the scenario changed up a bit from time to time, but never so successfully as in Chuck Jones’ 1957 faux opera, “What’s Opera, Doc?”
A new article on animation website The Dot And Line tells the story of the cartoon that 1,000 animators rated the greatest of all time in 1994. Dot And Line calls it “a laughably loose adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre; Jones took the operatic pomp of Norse mythology and superimposed it onto the classically cartoonish circumstance of Elmer Fudd attempting to kill Bugs Bunny.” Valuable perspective comes from Stephen Fossati, director Chuck Jones’ last protégé. For his masterpiece, as well as his final ...
A new article on animation website The Dot And Line tells the story of the cartoon that 1,000 animators rated the greatest of all time in 1994. Dot And Line calls it “a laughably loose adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre; Jones took the operatic pomp of Norse mythology and superimposed it onto the classically cartoonish circumstance of Elmer Fudd attempting to kill Bugs Bunny.” Valuable perspective comes from Stephen Fossati, director Chuck Jones’ last protégé. For his masterpiece, as well as his final ...
- 8/15/2017
- by Gwen Ihnat
- avclub.com
Sometimes, even when bodies are splattering, brows are furrowing, and explosions are flattening entire downtowns, you just can’t be sure a Hollywood villain is truly villainous. Fortunately, screenwriters and music supervisors have a foolproof mechanism for underscoring a bad guy’s evil genius: classical music. Often, it’s a few well-placed bars of “O fortuna” from Carl Orff’s manically apocalyptic choral cantata Carmina Burana laid over juicy, deranged onscreen mayhem (never mind that the text is actually a thirteenth-century Latin whine about the vagaries of fate — a depressive medieval monk’s version of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight”). Sometimes it’s the old Wagner chestnut “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre, better known as the helicopter attack music in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But usually it’s Beethoven. Malcolm McDowell and his droogs turn Symphony No. 9 into "Ode to Rape" in A Clockwork Orange. Gary Oldman...
- 6/28/2013
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
Writers often worry about the dangers of outside influence, but what about the non-literary inspirations they are far more comfortable admitting to? Andrew O'Hagan talks to six novelists about their passion for a second artform
The divine counsels decided, once upon a time, that influence is bad and that too much agency is the enemy of invention. Harold Bloom can't be blamed for that: he certainly pointed to the danse macabre of influence and anxiety, but to him the association was perfectly creative. Elsewhere, writers have always been blamed for being too much like other writers, or too much like themselves, and even now, in the crisis of late postmodernism, we find it hard to believe that writers might live happily in a state of influence and cross-reference. Yet anybody who knows anything about writers knows that they love their sweet influences.
What I've noticed, though, is that the influences...
The divine counsels decided, once upon a time, that influence is bad and that too much agency is the enemy of invention. Harold Bloom can't be blamed for that: he certainly pointed to the danse macabre of influence and anxiety, but to him the association was perfectly creative. Elsewhere, writers have always been blamed for being too much like other writers, or too much like themselves, and even now, in the crisis of late postmodernism, we find it hard to believe that writers might live happily in a state of influence and cross-reference. Yet anybody who knows anything about writers knows that they love their sweet influences.
What I've noticed, though, is that the influences...
- 4/27/2013
- by Andrew O'Hagan, Lavinia Greenlaw, John Lanchester, Alan Warner, Sarah Hall, Colm Tóibín
- The Guardian - Film News
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