Murphy!

February 15, 2022 7:53 PM

'Flat Hatting'

A 1946 Naval Aviator cartoon on the dangers of flying to low.

posted by clavdivs (16 comments total)

bonus: Dilbert Groundloop

"Do you know how engineering whipping boy Dilbert came to be called by that name?"

double trouble
posted by clavdivs at 8:03 PM on February 15, 2022

That was surprisingly insightful and informative. They really roasted that guy. I wonder how many incidents like this actually happened or did this film get its point across to all of them.
I also really liked the Art Deco-ish rendering of the San Francisco Bay. Everyone did a really good job on this.
posted by bleep at 8:33 PM on February 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Flyboys were usually the most privileged sons of gentry. They very much needed to hear this message.
posted by sjswitzer at 11:27 PM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love the warp and stretch in the animation. A classic style, it feels like the animators choose to preserve volume

I love how colorful the black and white is. Brilliant use of shades and textures

I love the background settings and figures. The artists were probably trying to create a cartoon of modern life, but now I see the open-sided trolleys
posted by rebent at 5:13 AM on February 16, 2022

"Now this young man isn't psychopathic, so why does he act that way?"

Seems like quite contemporary commentary.
posted by sammyo at 5:23 AM on February 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

ahh, memories of being shown a chunk of olive-drab carbon fibre wedged in a cracked wind turbine blade ... the RAF were very nice about it, despite initial denials.
posted by scruss at 6:06 AM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Directed by John Hubley, whose career in animation was pretty much entirely dedicated to kicking back against the Disney “illusion of life” with experimentation in form, abstraction, and the use of limited animation as a deliberate stylistic device rather than simply a way to save budget.

Further viewing can start with Rooty Toot Toot. Digging into the work of his peers at UPA is worthwhile too; you’ll find some gorgeous work made by seasoned veterans of the industry delighting in a chance to throw off the shackles of having a new, realistic drawing every frame. I don’t know if younger animators are still discovering this stuff but for the GenX cohort I was part of, seeing this kind of work was often a religious experience, especially given the environment of endless shitty Filmation Saturday morning work we’d grown up on. It breaks a thousand rules you didn’t even know everything else was laboring under, and shows that animation can really embrace its nature as moving drawings.
posted by egypturnash at 7:31 AM on February 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

(Annoyingly, while it’s a ton easier to find this stuff than when I was a kid, so many copies of it you’ll find on Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and whatnot have their audio out of sync by a couple of frames. Which is not a big deal for live video or high frame rate animation, but really hurts stuff with highly stylized timing! Maybe it’s less annoying if you haven’t trained yourself to see it, I can’t unsee it.)
posted by egypturnash at 7:35 AM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

One thing that I always find striking about the 30s and 40s in America is that there was a huge willingness to invest in art as a means of communicating important information efficiently to a lot of people at the same time. That was seen as important, they spent money on it, they did it right, and the work got done. As we've seen recently that doesn't just happen unless you really invest in it, and they did. I wish we could bring this back somehow.
posted by bleep at 7:42 AM on February 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

It's not just the visuals. The soundtrack, too, is way better than it has any need to be. There's some lovely subtle orchestration, even the jokingly "childlike" Twinkle Twinkle citation is all gussied up with fancy counterpoint, credible pastiche of a handful of popular styles, and of course a killer studio orchestra who probably sight-read the damn thing cold. There's an embarassment of talent and time that went into this thing. What a time to work in that industry.
posted by dr. boludo at 7:50 AM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

→ Digging into the work of [Hubley's] peers at UPA is worthwhile too

yes: see Cartoon Modern, a kind of UPA style guide (previously)
posted by scruss at 11:02 AM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

That was really fantastic- I especially love the mix of drawing styles scattered through it. The sheep!
posted by Mchelly at 4:18 AM on February 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

That drive towards self assertion... oh is that what it's called? Not assholes gonna asshole?

I'm not exactly sure why I have no empathy or forgiveness towards folks who need reminding to act right even without witnesses.
posted by travertina at 7:42 AM on February 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

That drive towards self assertion
posted by clavdivs at 11:16 AM on February 17, 2022

I loved the "wait, that's San Francisco!" moments I had towards the end. (My grandfather was in the Navy stationed out of SF during WWII, and my grandmother moved there, with my mother (a baby at the time), to work in some kind of Naval spouse-support program.
posted by Lexica at 5:04 PM on February 17, 2022

It's 1944 and you haven't written Bullwinkle yet. Ronald Reagan's your boss and he's ordered you to make a short film to stop pilots from flying too low. You've been reading a lot of Freud.
posted by Richard Saunders at 7:04 AM on February 18, 2022 [4 favorites]