Return of the Swing Animations! This great short opens with an orchestral rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home”, immediately setting the scene in the rural South of blackface minstrelsy, and is about the arrival of a girl from Harlem that sets Lazytown from indolence to swing. Nothing like the infectious rhythms of Swing to get things… well, a-swingin…
Categories: Animation
This Merrie Melodies cartoon by Bob Clampett was a banned 1943 cartoon by Bob Clampett after it was released to theatres on January 16, 1943 by Warner Bros. Pictures and The Vitaphone Corporation. The film is notable for being an all-black parody of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Snow-White, known to its audience from the popular 1937 Walt Disney animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The ban was effected because of the politically incorrect blackface.
However, the music in the cartoon swings so hard (including references to “Blues in the Night”, and one is of course reminded of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”), and I cannot help but think of “After Seben” with Shorty George in it (see entry http://jazzinc.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/the-beginnings-of-lindy-hop/). The sequence where they first dance of course shows how the music changes the style of dancing, and that swing dancing does much to the European dances that came before.
Enjoy!
Categories: Animation
To continue with the revival of the swing/jazz animations, here’s a clip that was banned back in the day – “Tin Pan Alley Cats” - where a Fats Waller caricature that lets the jazz carry him from all that is familiar to a Dali-esque dreamscape… A great clip!
Categories: Animation
