Life in Death

My Animated Films 1976-2020

Dennis Tupicoff

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032058870
• eBook ISBN: 9781000574425
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Computer Science

Death—the very word is resonant with emotion, imagery, and meaning. It is the ultimate life-event that all living things will eventually experience; as such, it comes as no surprise that death is often a popular theme of literature, art, games, cinema, music, and even animation. Dennis Tupicoff, world-renowned animator, writer, and producer, is an expert on the narrative application of death in animation. Take a journey with Tupicoff as he goes in-depth into the many themes, associations, and practices found in film and especially animation. Life in Death: My Animated Films 1976–2020 explores death as it relates to experience, storytelling, theory, and narrative. The examples in the very readable text are organized into three broad categories: cartoon, documentary, and hybrids of various types.

KEY FEATURES

• Explores death as a narrative theme within cinema and animation
• Biographical insight into Dennis Tupicoff's works and how the subject of death impacted these completed award-winning films
• Special online access to Dennis Tupicoff's animated works
• In-depth exploration into ten of Dennis Tupicoff's most influential animations

CHAPTER 1 Cartoons of Life and Death

DOI: 10.1201/9781003199663-1

“What’s up Doc?”

—BUGS BUNNY (1940)¹

Like photography and like film itself, animation was made possible by new technology. But it also inherited the whole history of human artistic expression. Despite—or because of—its various pre-cinema forebears in the dramatic, visual, and plastic arts, animation took time to find its various forms and keeps discovering new ones. But, even with its leaning towards caricature and humour, the dark side of the cartoon sensibility is never far away.

In a Dream of The Rarebit Fiend cartoon strip from 1905—thus preceding his animated films—Winsor McCay (as “Silas”) starts with a seven-panel sequence showing a burial from the point of view of the corpse in the grave, complete with mordant comments from the officiating clergyman: “Death in this case was a blessing not only to his wife but to the whole community. He was absolutely no good”.² With its clear visual point of view, dialogue, and action timing it is, like many of the “Rarebit” strips, virtually a storyboard for an animated film never made. In the seventh panel, black clods of earth start to close the oval-framed view of daylight from the bottom of the grave. Only in the eighth and final panel does the “deceased” wake up from his nightmare, in bed with his wife: “I ate a cheese pie last night. Oh, oh, what a dream!” Later, in The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), McCay was to use animation to document the killing of 1,200 people at sea during World War I. And by 1929 Walt Disney was working in the graveyard with The Skeleton Dance, a celebration of animated synchronous sound and a film about death that was, ironically, the very first of his Silly Symphonies.

Please Don’t Bury Me (1976), the first of three cartoon films discussed here, was triggered by the lyrics of a John Prine song (see Chapter 2). “John” wakes up at the start of the film and then dies in his pyjamas. His body goes through various fantasy adventures concocted by me as a novice and self-taught director/animator: armless herself, Venus de Milo uses John’s cartoon arms to fire a machine gun; he saws off the feet of his own corpse in the back of a moving hearse; he is eaten by the Hollywood angels at a cartoon banquet in cinematic Heaven.

Unconcerned, John just walks away from the frenzied feast and goes back to sleep in the Void; he might well wake up, alive, in the morning.

The other two cartoons offer little such hope. In Dance of Death (1983), a skeleton presides over a television universe of entertainment with only one End in mind.

In The Heat, the Humidity (1999), inexorable fate is demonstrated in the rapid shrinkage and final dissolution of a determined but hapless cartoon bank robber who is only too vulnerable to the tropical weather.

These three films are all fiction—often absurd and without documentary reality—yet they also comment on real human life, culture, and language. They are all about death, and they all have humorous intent.

In Preston Sturges’ brilliant farce Sullivan’s Travels (1941), the eponymous hero has his great moment of realization watching a Disney cartoon. The famous Hollywood director Sullivan finds himself in prison, alone and unknown. As a black choir sings, he files into church with the other criminals and sees Playful Pluto (Gillett, 1932). All around him the other prisoners laugh uproariously at the antics of Pluto as he tries to escape a piece of flypaper. Puzzled at first, Sullivan finally joins them in laughter, and it changes his life. This same animation sequence has been widely recognized as a landmark in animation history.³ The animator Norm “Fergy” Ferguson, a self-taught former camera operator who discovered his gift for drawn animation almost by accident, brings a new level of self-consciousness to drawn comic performance:

From the time he accidentally sits on a sheet of the stick flypaper, Pluto’s problems seem to become ever worse as he tries to extricate himself. Through it all, his reaction to his predicament and his thoughts of what to try next are shared with the audience. It was the first time a character seemed to be thinking on the screen, and though it lasted only 65 seconds, it opened the way for animation of real characters with real problems.⁴

Sullivan himself has the last line in Sullivan’s Travels, followed by a montage of laughing faces from the Pluto scene and elsewhere: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan. Boy!”

Ferguson’s skill gives the convicts a hilarious and revelatory view of something outside human experience. Pluto’s “real” discomfort is the animator’s gift: mere drawings that show frustration without cause or consequences, anguish without pain, sheer joy from a cartoon dog’s comic encounter with a piece of flypaper. But there are other stories to tell, other territory for “this cockeyed caravan” of life and death. And the animated cartoon can go there too.

NOTES

1. Avery, Tex. A Wild Hare. Warner Bros, 1940.
2. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Abbeville Publishers, 1987. 70.
3. Klein, Norman. Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. London, New York: Verso, 1993. 51.
4. Thomas, Frank and Ollie Johnston. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. New York: Abbeville Press, 1981. 100.

CHAPTER 2 Please Don’t Bury Me (1976)

DOI: 10.1201/9781003199663-2

Woke up this morning

Put on my slippers

Walked in the kitchen

And died.

“PLEASE DON’T BURY ME”—JOHN PRINE¹

In fact, I woke up this (Saturday) morning in the spring of 1974, in Christchurch, New Zealand. I walked into the city centre and paid $5.95 for Sweet Revenge, a vinyl album that changed the course of my life.

A year before, my brother Ross had died after a motor bike accident. Other friends had already died on the roads; I was riding bikes myself and training to be a teacher. A year before that, in London, I had read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.² On assignment for Fortune magazine, James Agee and Walker Evans had brought their skills in writing and photography to Alabama in the summer of 1936. The article was not published, but 5 years later they produced this strange book that records, in Agee’s words and Evans’ pictures, the lives of three white tenant farmer families: their poverty and hopes, squalor and beauty, meanness and grace.

A year before that, in 1971, I was a graduate assistant/researcher at the State Archives in Brisbane, right next to Boggo Road jail. While working there I discovered that my grandfather Nicholas Tupicoff, a young Russian immigrant, had been charged with murder, and acquitted, in 1914. In the small brown paper parcel with the pink ribbon, along with the depositions of witnesses and other records of the case, was a list of his few possessions when he was arrested. While awaiting trial, at the same age as me when I read the file, he had been held in Boggo Road. Only later, after being wounded and gassed in World War I, would he become a poor farmer on one of the hopelessly small and uneconomic “soldier settler” blocks where my father was born, where the family struggled and failed. But the six Tupicoff children were not trapped in poverty like the Alabama tenant farmers; they were all educated and found trades or white-collar jobs. Still, I was the first of my family to go to university. At the end of my first year there, in 1968, I drove a tractor for 5 weeks in the wheat fields of western Queensland. At night I was reading Patrick White’s The Tree of Man; the elderly couple who owned “Paloma” could have been the novel’s Stan and Amy Parker (see Chapter 13).³

And here I was in New Zealand, in 1974, after a week’s manual work in a door factory, with few possessions or prospects after a short and unhappy teaching career. The stylus hit the grooves of John Prine’s Sweet Revenge; it was certainly someone else’s record player.

And oh, what a feeling!

When my soul

Went through the ceiling

And on up into heaven I did ride.

When I got there, they did say

“John, it happened this-a-wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author
• Preface
• Introduction: Animation: A Matter of Life and Death
• Chapter 1 ▪ Cartoons of Life and Death
• Chapter 2 ▪ Please Don’t Bury Me (1976)
• Chapter 3 ▪ Dance of Death (1983)
• Chapter 4 ▪ The Heat, The Humidity (1999)
• Chapter 5 ▪ Documentaries of Life and Death
• Chapter 6 ▪ The Darra Dogs (1993)
• Chapter 7 ▪ His Mother’s Voice (1997)
• Chapter 8 ▪ Hybrids of Life and Death
• Chapter 9 ▪ Into the Dark (2001)
• Chapter 10 ▪ Chainsaw (2007)
• Chapter 11 ▪ A Photo of Me (2017)
• Chapter 12 ▪ Still Alive (2018)
• Chapter 13 ▪ The River (2020)
• Chapter 14 ▪ The End of the Matter
• Appendix 1: Ten Animated Films by Dennis Tupicoff 1976–2020
• Appendix 2: Other Films by Dennis Tupicoff (Writer/Director/Producer/Co-Producer)
• Bibliography
• Index