This chapter takes a look at what happens when the constraints of the censors are lifted and animators run amok in cartoonland. The discussion covers a wide range of issues, including how critics, distributors, theater owners, school librarians, bureaucrats, foreign censors, and other people view these works and sometimes prevent them from being seen. It is also about material recently shown in theaters that could not have been shown in the United States during the reign of the Hays Office. Many of the films discussed still cannot be shown on television in this country.
In 1968 the Hays Office was eliminated and Hollywood adopted a rating system that was designed to alert moviegoers to the presence of violence, vulgarity, sexuality or other forms of objectionable material in films. The system permitted the production of R-rated and X-rated films, but it did not guarantee there would be financial backing or distribution for a work that was given an R or X rating.
Since these changes were made there have been several attempts to create animated features and shorts for mature audiences. Several approaches have been taken, from showing the raw street life of New York in the early features of Ralph Bakshi to adding a few risque touches to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988, rated PG), an otherwise family-oriented comedy. Recently animated features from Japan have developed a small following; some offer graphic violence and sex not seen in American-made animated features and television shows. Another recent development is theatrical programs of "sick and twisted" cartoons for audiences anxious to see something too gross, weird or outrageous to be shown on television.
With no Hays Office to advise them, directors have sometimes gotten into serious trouble with the public. The Lenny Bruce cartoon Thank You Mask Man (1968) may be a cult classic, but it never broke even as many exhibitors were afraid to show it. Bakshi's Coonskin created a disturbance when it was previewed in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art. The disturbance helped kill the film's chance of being a box-office success. Even family films from Disney have been shunned by certain conservative Christian groups. These and other controversies surrounding recent animated films are discussed in this chapter, along with a number of hoaxes that deal with issues of truth and censorship.
The chapter also looks at the problems that independent animators and students from the United States, Canada and Europe experience in trying to get their work shown. A few of the cases cover basic issues, including what happens when a work contains a nude image. Other cases are downright bizarre, including a fist fight breaking out after the Los Angeles Animation Celebration showed Mary Newland's Pink Komkommer in 1991; a graduate student from UCLA being sued by a parent who claimed the student's film was responsible for her son attempting to poke his eye out; and a Danish animator having to flee from Egypt after angry Muslim fundamentalists became offended by his film.
John Magnuson, a film producer and close friend of Lenny Bruce, completed Thank You Mask Man in 1968. The animated short was made by Imagination, Inc., in San Francisco and directed by Jeff Hale, who had previously worked for the National Film Board of Canada.1
The film's soundtrack is a recording of Lenny Bruce delivering a routine before a live audience. The piece is about the "Mask Man" never staying around long enough for people to thank him for what he has done. In the routine he is finally talked into staying so they can thank him and ask what kind of gift he would like from the community. When the Mask Man asks for Tonto the Indian and a horse so he can perform an unnatural act, the crowd becomes disgusted and calls him "fag man." One person says, "I bet you've got mascary under that mask." The Mask Man explains he is not a homosexual, but he has heard about it and he wants to try it once, to see how bad it is. He goes on to say, "I like what they do with fags ... Throw them in jail with a lot of men ... hmmm ... very clever." Eventually, after a display of homophobic reactions from the crowd, the Mask Man rides off with Tonto and the horse into the sunset.
John Magnuson said part of the public's problem with accepting the film is that the meaning is obscure. Bruce wanted people to think about homophobia and other issues raised by his comedy routine, and he tried to break down barriers. Magnuson said that at first the gay community hated the film and thought it was "fag bashing." Now it is a classic shown at gay film festivals. Indeed, the film is not anti-gay. Actually, it bashes rednecks.
Larry Jordan, an animator who teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute, says the film still makes an impact on his students when he shows it in class. He says it is a great film to stimulate discussion. He reports that in the past he has had students "freak out when it was shown in class ... One turned white with embarrassment."2
"The Masked Fagman.... I bet you got mascary under that mask." From Thank You Mask Man (1968).
Magnuson had more than his share of disappointments with the film. It was to premiere on opening night with the feature Z (1969) by Costa-Gavras at the San Francisco Film Festival. Magnuson bought lots of tickets, and some of his friends flew in from around the country for the screening. Although the publicity for the opening said the film was to be shown, no short was shown that night. Magnuson was outraged. A former staff member of the festival says Magnuson ran up the aisle and shouted things like, "They crucified Lenny when he was alive and now that he is dead they are screwing him again!" The festival's director told Magnuson that the producer of Z did not want any short shown that night. The producer was afraid a short might interfere with the triumphant premiere of his film. An alternate reason why the film was pulled is strictly a rumor. Supposedly the wife of one of the major financial supporters of the festival hated Lenny Bruce so much that she threatened to withdraw her husband's money if the short was shown.
Jeff Hale, the director of the short, said he still gets angry at the festival's attitude. He had no idea his premiere was not going to happen, and he still has no idea why they did not have the courtesy to tell people in advance about the change in the show.3
Another story Magnuson tells is why the film did not win an Oscar. Animator Bill Melendez was chairman for the Academy Award nominations in animation, and he invited Magnuson to submit the film for consideration. Melendez told Magnuson he loved the film and was sure it would be nominated. Magnuson filled out the forms, arranged to have the film shown in Los Angeles and did everything else that was required for the film to qualify. When the film was not nominated, Melendez asked Magnuson why he did not submit it for consideration. The film was never shown to the screening committee. Magnuson believes somebody at the Academy who hated Lenny Bruce hid his entry form so the film would not qualify. Jeff Hale guesses that "the projectionist took it upon himself to act as a censor."
Magnuson remembers getting some bookings and then getting cancellations for unknown reasons. A few art houses, who were showing shorts with features, did show it. Thank You Mask Man played with King of Hearts (1966) in several cities when the film was revised in the 1970s.
One of the few honors Magnuson received for making the short was an in-person screening with Blazing Saddles (1974) in Seattle. Mary Newland, the creator of Bambi Meets Godzilla (1962), was also honored that night. Magnuson said they both spoke and answered questions.
Showing this short can be bad for one's career. George Evelyn, who has worked for many years as one of the top animators at Colossal Pictures in San Francisco, was a film programmer at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, in the 1970s. He booked Thank You Mask Man without seeing it because, he says, the rental catalog made it sound interesting. His commanding officer got several complaints about the film, and Evelyn was fired.4
Thank You Mask Man was the first of many films to demonstrate that the open market of film exhibition has its limitations. Self-censorship of programs by exhibitors has prevented many parts of the country from seeing this work. In the 1980s Magnuson said his income from the film had yet to pay for his production costs and he never expected to break even.
Ralph Bakshi wasn't always one of animation's bad boys. He learned his trade at Terrytoons in New York, where he spent about ten years working on theatrical cartoon shorts and animation made for television. He got his job at Terrytoons after graduating from the High School for Art and Design in New York, where he majored in cartooning (not animation).5
At Terrytoons Bakshi gained a reputation as a hot young talent, and he was known for his willingness to try new approaches when he became a director. Eventually he became the creative head of the studio. At age 29 he was hired to head Paramount's Famous Studios as both a producer and a director. The year was 1967, and everything looked great until Paramount decided to close the studio at the end of the year.
Bakshi's next move was to team up with producer Steve Krantz. They did a few television commercials and some limited animation for television using Marvel comic book heroes before they obtained the rights to R. Crumb's underground comic character Fritz the Cat. Fritz the Cat had appeared in a short story in Snatch comics, a book that had been busted in Berkeley, California, in November 1969. The district attorney had called it obscene, filth and garbage, but the court disagreed and found the defendants not guilty of obscenity. At first they planned to use Fritz in a short or possibly a series of shorts. Eventually Fritz was turned into a feature. They paid Crumb a $7,000 advance, raised about a million dollars and eventually put about 50 animators to work. The film was made in New York and Los Angeles.6
Crumb later sued the filmmakers, asking that they cease production. Rumor has it that he succeeded in getting his name removed from the credits; however, the credits immediately following the main title say, "Characters created by Robert Crumb." His loyal fans spread the news that Crumb had problems with the film, so they hated it because it did not stay true to Crumb's original story. Bakshi simply used Crumb's character as the starting point for his work.
Bakshi told the press he loved Crumb's work and considered him a "total genius." He said he decided to use Fritz because he was bored doing kids' stuff. Fritz would be his chance to make the kind of film he envisioned adults would like, and it would be the antithesis of a Disney animated feature.7
Fritz was to break a lot of new ground by being the first X-rated animated feature successfully released in the United States. Jim Davis, creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip Garfield, was an animator on Fritz. He told Ramparts magazine in 1972 that "the purpose of this film is to lampoon our phony values. And I think we have a lot of phony values."8
The film opens with construction workers on a high-rise having lunch. One stands up and urinates. The liquid lands on a long-haired hippie. Next we meet Fritz, who has just dropped out of New York University and has decided to live life to the fullest. For Fritz, this means sexual experimentation (sex with all kinds of animals, including group sex in a bathtub), smoking pot, and adventures with bikers, anarchists, Black Power advocates and other radicals. The film is full of bare-breasted females of various species, foul language, cops with pig heads and outrageous images of softcore sex (no insertion shots). The film is a product of the radical politics of the period. Bakshi's depiction of Fritz's life is colorful, funny, sexist, raw, violent and outrageous.
Fritz the Cat was honored with a special sneak preview screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When the film opened around the country in the spring of 1972, Vincent Canby in the New York Times was delighted by this "low, bawdy cartoon feature that hasn't forgotten that there still can be something uniquely funny in animated films that exaggerate human actions and emotions ... constantly funny ... something to offend just about everyone ."9
Other publications were less amused by Fritz. The Wall Street Journal said the film "opened to near unanimous acclaim from the older generation," but the reviewer was not amused and gave it a mixed review. Cue said it contained some laughs, but more tedium. Paul Sargent Clark in the Hollywood Reporter called it "powerful and audacious ... seldom is it really shocking or offensive and at no time is it sexually arousing." He went on to say, "Certainly much of it is vulgar ... it's just wickedly funny." Newsweek called it "a harmless, mindless, pro-youth saga calculated to shake up only the box office."10
Part of the attraction of Fritz was the novelty of a cartoon with an X rating, but being X-rated was not the only reason people went to see it. Dr. Tezuka had already released a feature in Japan called Cleopatra (1970) that included graphic sex, but when the feature was shown in the United States it did not do well at the box office. It opened in New York as Cleopatra, Queen of Sex just as Fritz the Cat was being released. Howard Thompson in the New York Times said "the humor is blue corn and tired corn at that, minus a smidgen of wit ... more infantile than offensive..." He said it was "mostly a voluptuously drawn Cleopatra and a bevy of cuties that trot around bare breasted." He did like the lavish backgrounds and noted that "some of the color and imagery is downright beautiful." Variety gave Cleopatra a mixed review, too, calling it "partly sophomoric ... emphasis on vulgar low comedy ... good animation and color." The reviewer thought the distributor's self-imposed X rating was there to bolster the box office and that the distributor was trying to cash in on the success of Fritz the Cat. But Fritz had something Cleopatra did not. It had a fine script about subcultures that were in the news all the time, along with great visuals and a lot of solid humor. The love life of Cleopatra was a bit esoteric for the public.11
In 1972 the Hollywood Reporter said that Fritz paid for its costs in four months. A year later the same paper said that the film had grossed $30 million worldwide and was made with a production budget of $1.3 million. In 1993 Ralph Bakshi said, "Fritz the Cat, to me, was an enormous budget — at $850,000 — compared to my Terrytoon budgets...." In an interview published in 1980 he said, "We made the film for $700,000. Complete."12
Having an X rating was both a curse and a blessing. It certainly attracted the curious to the box office, but Krantz told the Hollywood Reporter that the film lost playdates due to the rating. Not every theater was interested in showing an X-rated film even though it was animated and had a following.
Another problem was that in some cities newspapers had a policy of not running ads for X-rated features. Krantz told the Hollywood Reporter that 30 United States newspapers rejected display ads for the film or refused to give it editorial publicity due to the X rating. He called this a form of discrimination. In May 1972, Variety reported that Krantz had appealed the X rating, saying, "Animals having sex isn't pornography." The Motion Picture Association of America refused to hear the appea1.13
Yet another problem for Bakshi and Krantz was finding solid distribution. Warner Bros. was involved with the production until the studio executives saw the first scenes of the film. Eventually Cinemation, a small distributor without a great track record or strong financial backing, took on the project. Their main products to that date had been X-rated features.
The next Bakshi-Krantz production was Heavy Traffic. At first the trades said the film was going to be based on the book Last Exit to Brooklyn, but that deal fell through. Heavy Traffic became a film based loosely on Bakshi's autobiography.14
The film was given an X rating and distributed by American International, a company larger than Cinemation. Heavy Traffic had human characters instead of talking animals, but like Fritz, it had something in it to offend almost everyone.
Animator Mark Kausler worked on the film and says Steve Krantz was so nervous about showing too much nudity and sexual activities that he had several versions of some scenes animated. Kausler says he did the scene where the viewer sees "the key in the ignition metamorphose into a penis entering Maybelline's vagina." He goes on:
I covered this scene with another one of the key changing into the fat black guy, and the ignition slot turning into Maybelline. I covered a lot more cartoony foreplay scenes with a simple close-up of the fat black man's face with his hand covering his eyes. You can get a sense of how many scenes had to be altered, by how many times this close-up drawing was used. It got used a lot! At one point the original version "A" of Maybelline existed. Ralph had a print of it, but I have not seen it since I worked on it. We did versions "A," "B" and "C," with "C" being the tamest and that is what got into the so-called "X" version of Heavy Traffic. Another scene I can recall doing multiple versions of was the guy in the racing cap, pissing on the fat black guy's ass. This was completely eliminated, causing a jump in the action.15
The feature was honored with a special sneak preview at the Museum of Modern Art. When it was released in the summer of 1973 the reviews were similar to those for Fritz. Newsweek said it contained "black humor, powerful grotesquerie and peculiar raw beauty. Episodes of violence and sexuality are both explicit and parodies of flesh-and-blood porn ... a celebration of urban decay."16 Charles Champlin wrote in the New York Times that the film was "furious energy, uncomfortable to watch as often as it is hilarious." The Hollywood Reporter called it "shocking, outrageous, offensive, sometimes incoherent, occasionally unintelligent. However, it is also an authentic work of movie art and Bakshi is certainly the most creative American animator since Disney."17
Coming on the heels of Fritz the Cat, with a well-established distributor handling it, Heavy Traffic encountered fewer problems being shown. Having an X rating did mean fewer reviews, and again some papers would not carry display ads for it. Variety reported that it was banned by the film censorship board in the province of Alberta, Canada 18
A GREAT DEAL OF CONTROVERSY HAS BEEN CREATED BY THE FILM COONSKIN. THE FILM HAS BEEN LABELED AS ANTI-BLACK, ANTI-WHITE, ANTI-GAY, ANTI-ITALIAN, ANTI-JEWISH, ANTI-RELIGIOUS, ETC.
IN RESPONSE TO THIS CONTROVERSY, WRITER-DIRECTOR RALPH BAKSHI SAYS: "COONSKIN IS ONLY ANTI-BULLSHIT!"
A BRYANSTON RELEASE—OPENS AUGUST 20, 1975 IN NEW YORK CITY19
The problems of Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic are minor compared to the reception Bakshi's third feature received. Paramount was planning to release Coonskin during the 1974 Christmas season, but the film was attacked by civil rights groups before it was released. The problems for the film began when it was announced that the Museum of Modern Art in New York was going to honor Bakshi with a sneak preview of the feature on November 12, 1974. A "seminar" discussion with the director was scheduled after the screening. Before the event, CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, demanded and got a few seats for the screening. What happened next depends upon whose report of the event one believes most accurate.
In a 1980 interview, Bakshi said:
The museum had seen the film and loved it, a breakthrough in animation. They set up a very special night to screen it for film people....It was quite surprising — I would have thought any group would have waited until they'd seen the film. But it was attacked almost from the titles. The room was filled, although there weren't many protesters from CORE there, eight or nine. Screaming, "You can't watch this film!" People pulling people out of their seats. It was that kind of night. The audience was very frightened. They were being attacked verbally throughout the movie. People kept running up and down the aisles in pitch blackness....20
Bakshi added some more details in a 1982 interview:
I had finished the film on a Friday, I screened it in California for the museum on a Monday, and on Wednesday when I came to New York to screen it there were pickets there. I brought the film on the plane with me, and no one had seen it but my animators and two guys from the museum. But there were pickets there, shouting that the film was racist. I never saw anything so set up in my life, but the press never picked up on that.21
Gregg Kilday of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Larry Kardish, a museum staff member, about the event about eight months after the screening. Kardish recalled:
About halfway into the film about 10 members of CORE showed up. They walked up and down the aisles and were very belligerent. In my estimation they were determined not to like the film. Apparently some of their friends had read the script of the movie and in their belief it was detrimental to the image of blacks.... The question-and-answer session with Bakshi that followed quickly collapsed into the chaos of a shouting match.22
Animation historian Jerry Beck was at the event and says he does not recall any disturbance during the screening, but he acknowledges that there were racist catcalls during the question-and-answer session. "It wasn't much of a madhouse, but it was kind of wild for the Museum of Modern Art," he says, adding that Bakshi's talk was cut short.23
The Hollywood Reporter presented two more versions in the form of statements by Bakshi and Albert Ruddy, the producer of Coonskin (as well as The Godfather). Four months after the incident, both denied that a riot erupted. Bakshi said, "There were five people who were very angry at me and were very vocal. There were 200 people sitting in their seats that applauded the film tremendously. It's always the five people in a room that want to scream, and those are the ones that are going to be heard. That's what really happened. I laughed at the controversy."24
Ruddy said he had been told that "there were about 400 people there. I think 10 or 15 blacks took objection to some of the things, and they had somewhat of a scream-out with Ralph at the end.... It was also for the board of the museum. They loved it. They thought it was a classic."
These two statements were made in 1975, at a time when Bakshi and Ruddy were fighting to protect the film's reputation. Barry Diller, chairman of Paramount's board, had announced that the studio was going to drop its plans to distribute the $1.6 million feature. Diller refused to discuss the reasons for dropping the film and claimed Paramount would back Bakshi and Ruddy's next film, The American Chronicles, which was to start production in August. The article also said Ruddy was already negotiating with Bryanston to take over the film's release.
What the article did not say is that Barry Diller had been present at the museum screening. That information appeared a few months later in the Los Angeles Times article that included an interview with a museum staff member.
Also, Paramount was no doubt aware that Elaine Parker, chairman of the Harlem CORE, had spoken out against the film again in January 1975. She told Variety that CORE was still "adamantly opposed to Coonskin." She said, "It depicts us as slaves, hustlers and whores. It's a racist film to me, and very insulting.... If it is released, there's no telling what we might do." The CORE chapter in Los Angeles also demanded that Paramount not release the film as it was "highly objectionable to the Black community."25
Eventually Ruddy, Paramount and Bryanston drew up an agreement that would allow Paramount to recoup its million-dollar investment in the film. Bryanston was confident that they could lavish the special attention needed to make Coonskin a modest hit. They had previously handled several offbeat hits including Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, The Return of the Dragon and The Texas Chainsaw Murders. The film was set to open in mid-August.26
In May 1975 the Hollywood Reporter ran a short item stating that Ben Gage had been hired to redo the voice track of Barry White and to remove racist references and vulgarity. Phrases like "mother fuckers" would be cut from the film.27
Coonskin opened August 20, 1975, in New York. Two weeks later, Bryanston went bankrupt. Details about the reception to the film differ, but there were pickets at one or more theaters in New York or at Paramount's Gulf + Western headquarters in New York. According to the Village Voice some years later, "Coonskin was driven out of theaters by a misguided minority, most of whom had never seen the film. CORE’s pickets at Paramount's Gulf + Western headquarters and, later, a few smoke bombs lobbed into packed Broadway theaters were enough; theater owners were intimidated, and the auxiliary distributor, Bryanston, couldn't book the film. Bye-Bye Coonskin."28
Reviews that opened by discussing CORE's reaction to the film did not help the film build an audience. Angry letters to the editor did not help either. Eventually positive reviews appeared in the New York Times, the Hollywood Reporter, the Amsterdam News (an African-American paper), and elsewhere, along with favorable letters to the editor. Unfortunately the damage had already been done, and the film died at the box office. People who went to the film said that CORE was wrong and had overreacted, but they spoke up too late.29
The Village Voice's comments about the film during its opening-week run in New York suggest how successful CORE was at managing the media. They wrote, "The problem here was to get someone to review this film.... The consensus was 'worthless junk.' The cartoon work appears to be the product of a crippled hand and a paralyzed mind."30
The press that saw Bakshi's new R-rated feature was more open-minded. Richard Eder in the New York Times said, "It could be his masterpiece ... a shattering successful effort to use an uncommon form — cartoons and live action combined — to convey the hallucinatory violence and frustration of American city life, specifically black city life ... lyrically violent, yet in no way (does it) exploit violence." He went on to discuss how Bakshi had updated the Uncle Remus legend of the Tar Baby and how Bakshi's characters had depth to them and were not simple stereotypes. Next he discussed CORE: "It is ironic that such a film should be attacked not by Italians or policemen or rednecks, but by a black organization. CORE has campaigned against Coonskin for nearly a year, delaying its opening and pressuring Paramount to withdraw as its distributor." Finally, he concluded, "Coonskin is clearly savage, and a cartoon is clearly a caricature. But it seems stupid and blind not to see that Bakshi is making a most serious and difficult kind of artistic commitment in trying to capture black Harlem's human condition by heightening rather than softening its miseries."31
Arthur Knight in his Hollywood Reporter review dismissed CORE by noting their "representatives couldn't possibly have seen the movie before they started picketing," and he felt Paramount "was unwilling to underwrite again the hassles that helped gain attention for their overwhelmingly successful Godfathers.... Despite CORE, Coonskin is not anti-black. Nor is it anti-Jewish, anti-Italian, or anti-American, all of whom fall prey to Bakshi's wicked caricaturist's pen as intensely as any of the blacks in his movie. What Bakshi is against, as this film makes abundantly clear, is the cheats, the rip-off artists, the hypocrites, the phonies, the con men and the organized criminals of this world, regardless of race, color or creed."32
He went on to give the film a mixed review. He liked some moments so much that he called them extraordinary, but he found the story more complicated than needed. He concluded Coonskin is "filled with good intentions, some of them brilliantly realized, some of them irritatingly tangential. Above all, however, it must be recognized that Ralph Bakshi is a genuine artist in film — an original who places his head, his heart, his talent and his money on the line every time he makes a picture. And we just don't have enough like that around any more."
The Wall Street Journal called the film "Bakshi's richest most mature work.... Bakshi creates a mood much more suggestive of sympathy than hatred."33
Some critics avoided the issues raised by CORE and simply gave the film short negative reviews. Playboy said, "Bakshi seems to throw in a little of everything and he can't quite pull it together." Arthur Cooper in Newsweek said Bakshi has no point of view and not much of a sense of humor. He "doesn't have much affection for man or woman kind — black or white." Variety called it a "brutal satire from the streets. Not for all tastes ... not avantgarde," and suggested, "The target audience is youth who read comics in the undergrounds."34
Apparently the film opened and closed quickly around the country. In Los Angeles the Herald Examiner gave it a very long review that mentioned CORE would be at the film's openings at the Egyptian and UA Cinema Center in Westwood with their picket signs. In closing, the reviewer said, "Certainly, it will outrage some and indeed it's not Disney. I liked it. The dialogue it has obviously generated — if not the box office obstacles — seems joltingly healthy."35 Mark Kausler, who worked as an animator on the feature, said the film opened August 20, 1975, at the Egyptian in Hollywood, played a week, and was not shown again in the area for several years.
Variety reported that for the screening in Buffalo they changed the title of the film to Bustin' Out. Again the film did not do well at the box office.36
Coonskin quietly disappeared. It has shown up on rare occasions, including a 1987 screening at the second Los Angeles Animation Celebration. That same year it was renamed Streetfight and released on home video by Academy Entertainment. Ironically, the film was made under the working title of Harlem Nights. One can speculate that if it had been released under that name the controversy with CORE might not have happened and Bakshi might have continued doing films based on his personal experiences growing up in New York.
The reception to Coonskin was a personal disaster for Bakshi. It nearly put an end to his studio. Hey, Good Lookin', his next work, had been completed by the time Coonskin was released. It was made for Warner Bros., who played it safe and kept the film on the shelf for many years.
Bakshi's first three films had clearly redefined what an animated feature could be, but in order to survive Bakshi had to make something safe and acceptable that would find an audience. His next picture was Wizards (1977), a sword-and-sorcery film for kids that carried a PG rating. That was followed by Lord of the Rings (1979) and American Pop (1981). At his distributor's request he refrained from including any black characters in these films.
In 1982 The Village Voice, which could not find anybody to review Coonskin in 1975, ran an article by Carol Cooper called "Coroner's Inquest into the Killing of Coonskin." Hey, Good Lookin' was about to receive a sneak preview at the Museum of Modern Art. (It was released later that year.) Cooper's article included the depressing information that other films had been shelved by the industry after Coonskin's negative reception. Several films by blacks were considered too sophisticated or obscure for mass distribution so their exhibition plans were canceled. Cooper also noted that Bakshi had trained about ten black animators to work on Coonskin and Hey, Good Lookin' at a time when there were no black animators working at Disney. Apparently there never had been any at Disney, and there were very few elsewhere in the animation industry. Unfortunately, Bakshi's animators had to be laid off after Hey, Good Lookin' was shelved. However, when he made Wizards he hired Brenda Banks, "for a time the only black female animator working in Hollywood."37
Dirty Duck is "a zero rated feature, it doesn't rate at all" says Charles Swenson, who wrote, directed and animated it. It was never submitted to the MPAA for a rating, so it was released unrated by New World Pictures in July 1974. Publicity said it was a comedy by the Oscar-winning Murakami-Wolf Production Company, but when Swenson talked about the film in the early 1980s he said he did almost all of the animation himself. He was paid directly by New World to do it, and the entire production budget was $110,000. Swenson says New World did not spend very much on advertising, so he assumes that between the brief theatrical run and video sales the film has made some money for New World. It was called Cheap! at one point.38
The uncensored film proved that there is not necessarily a large audience for an animated work that shows a lot of sex and demonstrates free speech by starring a nice-looking, foul-mouthed fowl. Swenson says, "it didn't have a big following ... but it is still in video stores." He says he was never informed of any censorship problems with the work, but he was not in close contact with New World once he was paid for his work.
When the film came out the distributor did not promote it heavily, most reviewers disliked it and apparently audiences did not tell their friends to rush out to see it. It played about two weeks in New York. When Swenson showed it at an ASIFA–San Francisco event in the early 1980s, he got bored about halfway through the tape and asked if anybody needed to see it to the end. He then went on to discuss other things he had worked on, including his directing John Korty's Twice Upon a Time. (Other credits include The Point—the first American-made animated television feature — as well as American Tale II, Rugrats and AAAHH!!! Real Monsters.)
Jerry Beck wrote a short review of Dirty Duck in Mindrot that called it raunchier than Bakshi. He went on to say:
The animation and humor of the film is good, but the design and drawing is downright awful. It seems to be sort of a cross between Jules Feiffer and Gahan Wilson, if that can be imagined. The main plot concerns a human insurance investigator, with wild sexual fantasies, who meets this duck and they trek around the country looking for the meaning of life. It's very similar to R. Crumb's Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont. There is no reason that the duck should be a duck. Every character in the film is human and he just seems to be a duck just to give the film a catchy title. There are some highly imaginative animated ideas here, but the film's entertainment value is at a minimum.39
Playboy noted that the ad for the film said, "This film has no socially redeeming value." The reviewer agreed: "Well that's dead right, yet this movie has some value as a promising X-rated cartoon in the tradition of Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat."40
Variety called it a "crudely constructed entry, obviously aimed for an adult trade easily satisfied.... has little to recommend."41
Charles Solomon in the L.A. Times called it "a sprawling, undisciplined piece of sniggering vulgarity that resembles nothing so much as animated bathroom graffiti." He also called it "degrading to women, blacks, Chicanos, gays, cops, lesbians, and anyone with an IQ of more than 45."42
The New York Times said, "Rather zany, lively, uninhibited, sexual odyssey that manages to mix a bit of Walter Mitty and a touch of Woody Allen with some of the innocence of Walt Disney, the urban smarts of Ralph Bakshi...."43
The Village Voice called it "a free-association trip — leanly drawn lines and a cluster of unrelated vignettes.... If you don't haunt the underground bookstores for the latest comix, then Dirty Duck is not your film."44
Not so long ago it was illegal to import books, films and other works of art that did not meet the approval of United States Customs. Sinderella, an animated short made in England by David Hamilton Grant, was banned from entry into the United States in 1972. The 6½ minute short was seized as obscene material by the United States government, and Sherpix, the American distributor, lost both its court case and an appeal in 1974. The case was called "US v. One Reel of 35mm Color Motion Picture Film Entitled Sinderella."45
The film was also banned twice by the British Board of Film Censors. In one of the British cases a Bow Street magistrate banned it from his jurisdiction, but the film could be shown elsewhere in England.
Variety mentioned the film in 1972, noting that it includes depictions of intercourse with Sinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss'n Boots, the Three Bears, Goldilocks and Prince Charming. The distributor may have been singled out for prosecution as the San Francisco-based corporation distributed XXX-rated features and ran a chain of porno theaters. They were under federal investigation for several years in the 1970s, and this is just one of the cases they had to fight in the courts.46
The first foreign-animated film that received both an X rating and wide distribution in the United States was Tarzoon, Shame of the Jungle. Stuart S. Shapiro, the American distributor of Tarzoon, does not recall any problems bringing the film into the country. He told customs the film was a work in progress and that it would be edited to be suitable for theatrical release in this country.
The film began as a French-Belgian production directed by Picha, a Belgian artist, and Boris Szuizinger. Variety reported that in a 15-minute pilot was shown at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and that the film was finished by September 1975. The following year the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs sued the producer of Tarzoon and 20th Century–Fox, the film's distributor in France, for alleged plagiarism. The estate lost the case after the French court determined the film was a legitimate parody. About 1978 Tarzoon was imported into the United States by International Harmony and an English soundtrack was made using the voices of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., and other actors. The MPAA gave the film an X rating, but Daily Variety reported in March 1979 that Harmony made changes in the film that persuaded the MPAA to change its rating to an R.47
The film's United States premiere took place in San Francisco in 1979. The publicity was handled by a man whose business card reads, "Edwin Heaven writes like hell." Heaven says he showed the X-rated version, and his first problem with it was finding a good theater willing to show it. Local radio stations censored his ads, eventually letting him use the phrase, "You're going to laugh your X off." Local papers were not interested in running his display ads, so he ended up papering the town with giant posters. Thanks to Heaven's creative advertising the film made money in San Francisco, but he says "the X killed it" in other towns.48
Stuart S. Shapiro says the X hurt the film, but making an R-rated version out of the film meant "lots of cuts [that] took the bite out of the film. It lost its outrageousness." Worse, a new lawsuit from the Burroughs estate demanded that the name of the film be changed. They could not sue the film again over the plagiarism vs. parody issue, but their lawyer found a New York State statute covering disillusion of trademark. They argued that Tarzan was a wholesome trademark and that the current product degraded the name of Tarzan. A judge agreed. Shapiro says the same argument has been used several times since then with the case against Tarzoon as precedent.
Shapiro remembers that the suit was filed about three weeks into the New York run and that it killed the film. Shapiro continued to distribute it under the name Shame of the Jungle, but after the film's name was changed it did not do as well at the box office. People were attracted to the film by the name Tarzoon, and the new title did not have the same appeal.
The court also ruled that the name Tarzoon had to be removed from the soundtrack. Shapiro guesses the Burroughs estate expected this ruling to end distribution once and for all, since the name appeared over 100 times in the film and rerecording the soundtrack would be prohibitively expensive. But Shapiro figured out a solution that let him continue to handle the product. He took his original soundtrack negative, and every time the name Tarzoon appeared, he cut it out and spliced it back into the soundtrack upside down. He says the new prints made from the doctored negative sounded weird, but "it sort of worked.... Now the name sounds like Newsrat." He is proud that he found a solution to the soundtrack problem in an "independent manner."
When the R-rated prints were screened in New York, the film got lousy reviews. Vincent Canby of the New York Times said it was an "unsuccessful attempt to parody the life and adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan." He noted Tarzoon was ineffective making love to Jane and that the voices included John Belushi as the Perfect Master and Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., as the voice of Tarzoon.49
Tam Allen in the Village Voice called the film "an uncomfortably accurate reflection of that civic eyesore known as toilet art." She said it lacked the social commentary of Fritz the Cat and the free-speech posturing of Dirty Duck.50
Playboy reviewed the film in May 1979. They praised the artwork, but said the film became "monotonous after a good start — still, in the off-the-wall category, the most literate, prurient and amusing challenge to community standards since Fritz the Cat."
When asked about the reviews Shapiro laughs and says the reviewers worked hard to express their hatred of the film. He thinks he got the worst review of all times from somebody in a small city in Pennsylvania. That person wrote, "The director, producer and distributor should all be thrown into a snake pit."
Tarzoon, Shame of the Jungle was banned by the New Zealand Board of Censors in 1980. It was called "gratuitous to the degree of prurient exploitation." The board ruled it could not be shown in festivals or in general distribution.51
Stuart S. Shapiro went on to discover Tim Allen, giving him a part in his film Comedy's Dirtiest Dozen (1989). Shapiro's other credits as a producer include Only the Strong (1995), Mondo New York (1988), Tunnel Vision (1976) and credit as producer and director of NightFlight on the USA Network (1980–1986).
The oldest known censorship problems confronting independent animators (artists who create their own visions outside of the studio system) date back to the 1930s in Europe. A French film called L'Idée (The Idea) by Berthold Bartosch (1931) was banned from public screenings in France. Its idealistic concept of a better life for factory workers and other laborers was considered too radical to be shown to the public. When the film was imported into England the text at the beginning was censored because it was believed to be Socialist propaganda, according to Dr. William Moritz of CAL Arts. He says the British distributor added a new, rather abstract text to the film to get it approved for public screenings. In Germany, L'Idée and Lotte Reiniger's Adventures of Prince Achmed, a silent animated feature made using her silhouette animation techniques, were among the films banned by the Nazi government for being decadent.52
Elfrede Fischinger, the wife of the German abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, says her husband was invited to enter his film Composition in Blue (1935) in the Venice Film Festival. The director of the festival was so anxious to show the work he traveled to Berlin to pick up the print. The film won a special jury prize. When the German government found out that a "decadent" artist had won honors abroad, they sent Oskar Fischinger a threatening letter telling him to submit his work to the proper government officials in the future. Elfrede says that at that point Oskar was calling his work "decorative" so it might be overlooked by the bureaucrats who were banning work by modern artists. She says that getting the letter scared them and influenced their decision to leave Germany for the United States.53
Elfrede adds that when they came to America, the State Department made Oskar Fischinger sign a form that he was not receiving any income from the sale or rental of his films in Nazi Germany. Considering his abstract work represented ideas about art that had been banned, he could honestly say his work was not producing income for him in Germany.
Dr. Moritz adds a few details to the history of Composition in Blue. In an essay on Fischinger, Moritz notes the film won the Grand Prix in Venice and was then requested for the Brussels Film Festival "where Fischinger had not even entered his films in competition." The film received a special prize, which "further enraged the German censors."54
Norman McLaren, the great Canadian animator, had two films that presented censorship problems. Born in Scotland, McLaren worked for the British government's General Post Office film unit in London before emigrating to the New World. His first hand-painted abstract short, Love on the Wing (1938), was censored by the British because parts of it contained images with sexual overtones, including phallic shapes. Maynard Collins wrote in 1976, "The Postmaster-General of Great Britain was not pleased with the lack of dignity of this film especially McLaren's forceful (and often hilarious) use of Freudian and erotic symbolism."55
McLaren's Oscar-winning Neighbors (1952) has been censored in the United States by the film's educational distributor. Most 16mm prints in distribution have a scene missing at the end. In the film, two men are fighting over who owns a flower. First they rip each other to shreds, then they destroy each other's houses. As they knock over the cardboard or plywood sheets representing the houses they reveal that behind each building is a mother and child. Each man symbolically kills the other man's wife and child and tosses them out. The women and children do not appear in prints found in most United States film libraries. The film is a cry for world peace and ends with the phrase "Love Your Neighbor" on the screen in several languages.56
During the cold war a great deal of censorship took place behind the Iron Curtain. Klaus Wishnewski, director of the Leipzig International Film Festival, says that West Germany forbade the screening of films made in East Germany and that for many years they also forbade stage performances of Bertolt Brecht.57
In most or all Iron Curtain countries bureaucrats controlled the production of animated and live-action films. Ideas for projects had to be approved by these officials before the government would fund a project and provide film and processing. Film projects that did not glorify communism or the state in some way were rarely funded.
Gene Deitch, who has lived in Prague for many years, says, "Censorship here existed in subtle ways for the animators during the communist era. Sometimes there was outright shelving or rejection of scripts, but mostly people censored themselves, knowing full well what could or couldn't go. The funniest was when the word went out that no cartoons could be made featuring large bears, which might be interpreted as a slur against Russia!"58
Jan Svankmajer is a remarkable animator who was banned from working in film for many years by Czech bureaucrats. He is a militant surrealist who belongs to a circle of artists in Prague that adhere to a surrealist manifesto written in 1934. The group was formed that year when Andre Breton visited the city. They have been meeting on a regular basis since then despite being discouraged by bureaucrats of Hitler, Stalin and others.
Although Svankmajer created 15 short films between 1964 and 1973 and won international prizes and critical acclaim, the Czech bureaucrats decided they could do without his talents for a few years. Part of the reason is that in 1973 a Czech critic called his work "pessimistic" and "individualistic." Apparently that meant his work was not good communist propaganda. From 1974 he was banned from the studios, so he put filmmaking aside and continued his career in puppet theater and as a painter and creator of collages.
In 1982 Svankmajer produced the film Dimensions of Dialogue, almost unnoticed by the system. The 12-minute short won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival. When the award was announced, the Czech government demanded that the film be returned. The Berlin Festival defied their demand and sent the print on to Annecy, where it won that festival's top prize. For a second time the Czech film studios made it clear that Svankmajer's "pessimism" would not be tolerated. Since all Czech film studios were then owned by the state and all processing labs were run by the studios, the bureaucracy again assumed that Svankmajer had been pressured to go "gardening."
During Svankmajer's second period of being banned, Michale Havas, a New Zealander living in Germany who had studied at the Prague Film Academy, introduced the Brothers Quay and their producer Keith Griffith to Svankmajer and his work. Svankmajer told them that he long dreamed of directing a version of Alice in Wonderland, which would be his first feature. Griffith and Havas teamed up to find financial backing that would allow Svankmajer to create his unique vision with a great deal of creative freedom. Money for the 35mm color feature came from England's Channel Four (the Quays' chief sponsor at that time), a television station in Frankfurt, Germany; from a private investor; and from Condor Features in Switzerland.
Next the producers had to find a way for him to work underground on the two-year project without interference. Money and film stock were channeled to him and his small freelance crew through a multimedia firm licensed by the Czech government. Officially, they were paying the firm to produce a program titled Demystification of Time and Space, directed by Svankmajer. Somehow the project evolved into Alice.
Keith Griffith says Czech bureaucrats found out about the project when a screening room was rented to project the feature for German and English backers. Somebody at the projection facility tipped the government off, which resulted in a heated meeting between irate officials and Svankmajer. Griffith said that "despite being somewhat annoyed that Alice had not been produced through 'normal channels,' they recognized the changing economic climate of Eastern Europe. They swallowed hard and accepted the valuable foreign currency and more positively they helped promote the film at the Berlin Film Festival."59
Alice was completed at the time of Perestroika. Since that time, life has been much easier for Jan Svankmajer. When Griffith was interviewed a year after our first talk, he said, "Some of the bureaucrats who made it difficult for Svankmajer to work have been replaced, but others are still in their old positions. The head of Czech TV has been changed four times since November and most of the TV department heads have been changed twice."60
Svankmajer's Alice includes personal, hidden references to the political atmosphere of his country. Griffith says the trial over the stolen tarts resembles the Stalinist trials of the 1950s when innocent people were forced to confess to made-up crimes and to read their absurd confessions to the newsreel cameras. Svankmajer sees the tea party in the film as the absurdity of life in Eastern Europe, or anywhere that a bureaucracy gives people the run-around. Griffith says Eastern Europeans are more likely than Westerners to catch Svankmajer's hidden meanings, but an audience will not be confused by the film if they are not aware of these personal references.
With the completion of Alice (which premiered in the United States in 1988) and the change of political conditions in his country, Svankmajer made The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990). The film could not have been made during the communist era as it shows the destruction of sacred images of communist leaders. It even shows animal parts from the stockyard coming out of Stalin's head. It is hard to miss the symbolic spirit of the work.
Symbolism may be important to Svankmajer, but not to Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini, who made La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1974). This film, which combines splendid visuals with the music of Gioacchino Antonio Rossini, won an Oscar nomination and an award at the international animation festival in Annecy.
A curious problem arose for this short. It did not have any symbolic meaning in Italy, but when it was imported to the United States some people saw symbolism that was not intended by the artists. Prescott Wright, who distributed the Tournée of Animation for many years, says that the film did not sell well in the educational market in the United States because the birds who steal things are black. Had the thieves been any other color the film would probably have been purchased by more media libraries.
Another film that has had a hard time with some of the public is Paul Vester's Sunbeam (1980, Great Britain). It is a beautiful visual experience set to a delightful bouncy tune that reminds some people of the music of the Andrews Sisters. Unfortunately some people only see that the film includes images that are based on racial stereotypes of African-Americans in the 1930s and 1940s.
Vester's film has a subtext that most people never notice. He started working on Sunbeam while he was living in Venice, California, in the early 1970s. As a struggling artist he was somewhat disillusioned by what he saw. Venice had and still has a large black population living in poverty. Vester saw thousands of people trying to be "discovered." In the film people of all colors work hard and somehow hope they will be taken to the top of the mythical sunbeam. The film ends with a close-up of a closed metal gate, which to Vester was symbolic of the more realistic dead end most people find when they pursue the myths of Hollywood.61
Dr. Terry Lindvall, president of Regent University, writes that the film is "a fine and magnificently subtle parable (and it is the nature of a parable to be subtle, hidden, and incomprehensible to those who do not have eyes to see or ears to hear) indicting the injustice of an era that held out so many illusory promises to ethnic and social outcasts."62
Irene Kotlarz, a British film scholar, festival director and film producer, says that one of the issues Sunbeam raises is how people should react when confronted with stereotypes, be they ancient or contemporary. Too many individuals simply try to avoid exposure to stereotypes and feel films that contain them should never be seen. This approach does nothing to develop understanding and knowledge and keeps films like Sunbeam from trying to convey serious content.
She feels that instead of silencing debate, people should try to understand the context in which the images are used. She suggests that those who try to avoid controversy are preventing animators from engaging the problems of society and from sticking their necks out to speak about these problems.
Another issue Kotlarz mentions is a debate among women animators. "Some feminists, some not, have never reached a consensus for instance on the way female characters should be represented. Can they ever be shown nude, can they have breasts? There are those who think they shouldn't."63
While there are no specific cases where Sunbeam was censored, there are festivals and other venues that have probably rejected showing it due to the film's reference to stereotypes. The film has provoked strong discussions when it has been shown, including a screening that Dr. Lindvall attended at the Bristol Animation Festival in England in 1987. A student in a college class once blurted out, "You can't show that, it's racist." That was the beginning of a very meaningful discussion.
From Paul Vester's Sunbeam (1980).
Animated films have run into problems for a host of other reasons. Dan McLaughlin, who heads the UCLA animation workshop, made the film God Is Dog Spelled Backwards in 1966. The film shows brief images of paintings and drawings from the history of art including famous nudes. The first problem McLaughlin had with the film was not over the nudes, but over the title. When the film was shown on the Smothers Brothers Summer Show on ABC in 1970, the show's producer refused to show the title of the film.64
The title also presented problems for Pyramid, the film's distributor. Somebody at the company did not like the title and changed it to Art. McLaughlin says Pyramid had other problems with the film, so they made their own version of it and stopped selling prints of his film. Possibly the nude paintings were a problem, though none is shown for more than a fraction of a second.
Nudes in films are a serious liability for educational distributors. Their main customers for independently produced films are school libraries. Back in the days when there were large budgets for film acquisitions, distributors sold experimental animation and other works as educational films. They developed teaching guides to show instructors how to get a discussion going about the hidden meaning of the films or how to discuss the techniques used by the artist. The school systems supported film artists, but sales dropped when a nude appeared in a work. In some cases distributors or librarians made cuts. Some prints of Chuck Jones's The Dot and the Line (MGM, an Oscar winner in 1965) have had the image of a nude female statue cut from them, and prints of Ernest Pintoff's The Critic (Oscar winner in 1963) have had a naughty word cut out. Pintoff, for one, says he never authorized any such change. Since the cut was made in the preprint material it was made by the non-theatrical distributor or their film lab.
One of the strangest stories about nudes concerns an experimental film made by Ben Van Meeder in the 1960s. It showed animated dots and a zeppelin being projected over the breasts of a woman. The film lab Van Meeder took his film to sent the processed film to the FBI instead of returning it to the artist. Apparently they were concerned the footage was pornographic. Van Meeder eventually got his film back. He later went on national television and told Art Linkletter and thousands of viewers about the incident. They joked that his work of art could not be shown on television. He has a kinescope of the interview, and he shows it when he is invited to show his work in person to the public. As for the lab, they went out of business in the early 1970s.
A National Film Board of Canada (NFB) producer once explained that if one of their award winning films has any nudity in it they can expect sales of the work in the United States to be considerably less than for an NFB film that is free of nude images. One of their films that suffered from this fear of flesh was John Weldon's Oscar-winning Special Delivery (1978). Many schools used to buy National Film Board award winners without hesitation, but a lot did not buy this classic when they found out it had a brief scene in which the mailman is imagined to have gotten drunk, taken off his clothes and passed out. Some film buyers also had problems with the soundtrack saying the mailman had once had an affair with the woman in the film. The film sold well in Canada and was shown several times on Canadian television. In the United States the film had little or no television exposure according to the NFB producer.
Animated images showing nipples can be a problem on United States television. Director Sybil Del Gaudio and producer Patty Wineapple ran into difficulties with their Animated Women, four half-hour documentaries on four women animators. The series was funded by ITVS, and the program first aired on KQED-TV in San Francisco in January 1995. The episode on Canadian animator Lynn Smith won an Emmy, but the episode on New York animator Ruth Peyser was censored at least twice.65
The series was shown by 30 to 40 public television stations (PBS). When the Peyser episode was shown on WNYC in New York City at 9:30 P.M. the station scrambled images of nipples. They placed large digital boxes over the offending anatomy, just as stations distort images of people who want to talk to reporters on news shows but do not want to be recognized. They put the digital distortion over two other scenes. One shows an animated woman putting her hand in her panties. Del Gaudio says the censoring of this image called attention to it and implied there was something crude being cut. Actually nothing happens other than the innocent movement of the hand under the elastic of the underwear in Peyser's short Another Great Day. In Peyser's Go to Hell another image was censored. The image shows a woman's buttocks and her urinating out a window onto a man who is urinating on the apartment building she lives in. The station also bleeped out what they felt was offensive language in the soundtrack.
When Del Gaudio spoke with the station manager he admitted ordering the censorship for fear he could lose his job if there was a complaint about showing nipples. He did not think it was necessary to ask ITVS, who paid for the show, or the producers, who lived in the same city, for permission to censor their work.
When the same episode was shown on KMPT-TV (channel 32) in San Francisco after 10:00 P.M., the station cut the program before it was over, running a station ID for several minutes to avoid showing the remaining two or three minutes of the documentary. The program was cut when a crowd that has gathered applauds after the woman urinates on the man. Apparently the station had not previewed the show as there was nothing left in the program that would have offended anyone.
Del Gaudio found that most stations ran the series later in the evening when PBS stations run shows with mature subject matter. Only the Peyser program presented potential censorship problems for station programmers, but apparently some stations decided not to show the series in prime time due to that one show. PBS ran the program in Philadelphia during prime time without censoring anything.
Del Guadio raises an interesting question about censorship when she points out that there are about 150 affiliate stations in the PBS network and that the show was free for all of them to use as many times as they wished (it is distributed free by satellite). She is trying to understand why only 30 or 40 affiliates bothered to run her free series. What does the decision not to run the series mean? Most PBS stations decided not to put documentaries about Faith Hubley, Joanna Priestley, Ruth Peyser and Lynn Smith on the air. Is this a statement about the country's cultural values? Del Guadio also noted that none of the stations that showed the series ran it a second time, even after one episode won an Emmy.
Joanna Priestley, one of the four women honored in the Animated Women television series, says that soon after she was given a grant by ITVS to make the short that is included in the program about her, she was asked not to talk to the press about the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts by Congress. She resented being asked to remain quiet as she was upset that Senator Jesse Helms and his supporters were attacking artistic freedom. At that point she decided to make her funded film "spicier as a protest to what he [Helms] was doing."66
Probably the spiciest film made in the last few years is Mary Newland's Pink Komkommer. He asked eight other world-famous animators (Paul Driessen, Alison Snowden, David Fine, Craig Bartlett, Chris Hinton, Janet Perlman, Sara Petty and Stoyan Dukov) to create their own visual interpretations of what a press release called the "same erotic, yet sleazy soundtrack." Seven created "lurid dreams" and the eighth person created non-erotic visuals. The results are delightful and sometimes humorous.
Newland wanted the film to be so raunchy that no festival would show it. Instead, it inspired five festivals to give retrospectives of Newland's commercial and independent work, and several other events around the world invited him to show the film.
This author witnessed a small riot the film caused, when it was shown in 1991 at the Los Angeles Animation Celebration. A woman upset by the work of Newland and his friends kept sharing her thoughts with people sitting around her. When the lights came on the man sitting next to her tried to talk to her about her behavior. Their discussion got really loud, and at last the woman threw the ice from her soda cup into the man's face. It's not clear who threw the first punch, but fists were unquestionably swinging when ushers or members of the audience pulled the two apart. They were escorted separately to the lobby, but they ran into each other again near the popcorn machine and exchanged a few more blows before this violent disturbance over Pink Komkommer ended.
Newland says he has never had a censorship problem that involved an actual cut. He says television stations in Europe have purchased Pink Komkommer and have shown it without cutting footage. In the United States, television film buyers simply will not buy a film like Pink Komkommer.
Censorship resulted in a horrible legal experience for one artist. A former UCLA student who does not wish to be identified made a film in the late 1980s about losing her vision after a car accident. The film was shown at a festival in Ann Arbor, and a showing was then invited at a festival in Sacramento.
In the Sacramento audience was a teen with a history of emotional problems. A few days after the event he started to act strangely and tried to poke out his eye with a fork. A psychologist said his actions were based on his subconscious. The teenager claimed a cartoon in a film show had upset him. He could not recall anything about the cartoon, but his lawyer decided that it was probably shown at the program in Sacramento. Since there were only two animated works in the show and one was on architecture, the UCLA film was singled out as the probable cause of his problems.
The teenager's mother sued the film student for "causing" her son's problems, even though he had previously tried to attach his hand to a table by sticking a knife through it. The mother obtained a court order banning future showings of the film. The animator had to decline invitations to show her film in several programs that might have been important to her career.
Eventually a judge ruled that the mother's suit was without merit and the injunction was lifted. The judge, however, had taken a dislike to the film student because, being unable to drive, she had trouble getting to hearings on time. (The court was in Sacramento and the woman lived several hundred miles away in Los Angeles.) She had also missed at least one hearing. The judge called her a scofflaw and ordered her to pay the court costs, which amounted to thousands of dollars. As for the film, it has not been shown since; the artist was too intimidated by the legal action.
From Mary Newland's Pink Komkommer (1991).
Another animator who had an upsetting experience is Turkish-born Ayhan Unlu, who was living in Denmark when he was invited to show his first film at the Ismailia Festival in Egypt in 1993. That film, The One Thousand and First Night Fairytale, is about a shoemaker who makes magic shoes for women. When a woman wears the shoes, she becomes filled (for one night only) with an irresistible erotic desire for the craftsman. Each day the man sells a pair of shoes to a different woman, and each night that woman returns to be with him.
On the one thousand and first night, a woman who has just bought a pair of the shoes is attacked by a gang of men on the way home. She tosses one of the shoes at a man and hits him on the head. That night the man visits the shoemaker, and from that time on the shoemaker creates only men's shoes.
Islamic fundamentalists in the audience saw the film as an insult to Muslims. The film was set in an Arab country, so the fundamentalists claimed it showed Muslim women as cheap whores. Apparently they were also offended by the homosexual ending. After the film was shown, arguments developed among the fundamentalists and liberals in the audience. The animator was accused of being insensitive to other people's traditions and religion. The event was reported in a daily newspaper by a journalist whose preposterous account suggests he probably was not at the event.
From Ayhan Unlu's The One Thousand and First Night Fairytale (1993).
The next day the festival scheduled two special screenings of the film. The quarrel started over again, and a rumor circulated that the Egyptian Minister of Culture was going to ban the work. While the crowd shouted at each other, Unlu made his way to the airport without his film and headed for home.67
Today Ayhan Unlu teaches at the Animation Workshop in Viborg and is working on an abstract film about time. Though he claims he wasn't scared, he says that the uproar in Egypt was quite disturbing and that he remained upset by the event for some time afterwards.
One of the great cultural assets for the world of animated film is the work of Prescott Wright, who for 16 years compiled and distributed the Tournée of Animation. The Tournée was founded in Los Angeles in 1965 by Les Goldman, Bill Littlejohn and others as a way for members of ASIFA-Hollywood to see exceptional animation from around the world. The first show was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and for many years the museum continued to premiere the annual event. When animator David Hilberman, who had founded the animation program at San Francisco State, asked to show the program to his students about 1967, the idea for a traveling package was born. In 1970 Prescott Wright took over the management of the annual program and expanded both the quality of the series and the number of museums and theaters around the United States that exhibited each show. In 1986 rights to the Tournée were sold to Expanded Cinema, who turned the show from a 16mm package to a 35mm program so it could be shown in a larger number of commercial theaters each year.
The Tournée inspired others to exhibit packages of animated films. The first shows in the late '60s were titled Fantastic Animation Festival, Kinetic Art Series and Film Genesis. They were short-lived and focused on animation as a fine art. When Expanded Cinema took over the Tournée in 1986, the company decided to put together other programs so it could show films that did not fit into the Tournée. Expanded's first non-Tournée packages included the First Animation Celebration and the Festival of Claymation. These were followed by Outrageous Animation in 1988.
Outrageous Animation was a new departure for the company, which advertised the package as "the wildest cartoons ever." The program stated that the films were for adults only and said they had been "called everything from scandalous and shocking to hilarious and unbelievable." Many of the works in the show were professional-looking and were produced by artists who seemed to be enjoying a departure from their regular type of work. Several of the artists in the program had careers doing television commercials or educational shorts or teaching animation.
One favorite in the show was Bob Godfrey's Instant Sex. Godfrey teaches animation in England, and his humor is in the style of a sophisticated British humor magazine. In Instant Sex an older and slightly embarrassed man buys cans of Instant Sex in the supermarket. He goes to his room and shuts the door. All we see is the outside of the door to his room, but we hear a can being opened, followed by wild music, sound effects and lighting effects. The man keeps buying more cans, so when we finally see inside his room, he has a stack of cans that reaches to the ceiling. When he is about to open a can in our presence, something happens that causes the pile of cans to collapse. The man is killed, and the can that was in his hand rolls towards the camera. It comes to rest so the side of the can fills the screen, showing a government warning label that reads, "Too much sex can damage your health."
Several other shorts in the program were done by animators who also appreciated starting with a well-developed script. In Michel Ocelot's Four Wishes (from France), a couple is covered with multiple copies of their sex organs as the result of an injudicious wish. When they use up another wish asking for the organs to go away, they are left with no genitals at all. Their final wish is for their bodies to return to the way they were before they started wishing. The film ends with Saint Martin, who granted them the wishes, saying, "Next time, ask for brains."
Another well-made short in the show is The Haploid Affair by Dorothy Kaminski and Ken Lidster (from Canada). In it a flock of sperm meet up with a cute egg. After a few penetrate her, she starts to avoid the others and spits out the intruders. The egg says, "Screw that crap, I'm going to have a career," and swims off.
Looking back at this show, it was not really too outrageous, except for Danny Antonucci's Lupo the Butcher from Canada. Lupo is first seen cutting beef ribs; then he begins to cut off his appendages. He swears with an Italian accent. The final image is his severed head, dripping blood and swearing. On paper it sounds simply gross, but audiences find the character of Lupo quite funny. In the mid-1990s he was cleaned up for a Converse Tennis Shoe commercial in which he chops up a shoe and hits himself in the face with his meat cleaver.
Reviews of the Outrageous Animation program were mixed. Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle hated the whole show except for Bill Plympton's One of Those Days (made right after his Oscar nominated Your Face). He called the rest of the show "childish cynicism and poo-poo-kaka humor. There's no Elmer Fudd joie de vivre. No yabba-dabba-do."68 On the other hand, David Armstrong in the San Francisco Examiner gave the show a three-star review and said it had "some of the rude vitality of the great old Warner Bros. cartoons – and a good deal of the sexual explicitness denied those old favorites from a more cautious age."69
The importance of Outrageous Animation is that it opened the doors to a new kind of film packaging that could be shown in theaters. The show grossed over a million dollars theatrically and did well in the videotape market. In 1994 Expanded released a second show called Too Outrageous Animation. The show encouraged others to see if they could come up with an even wilder program.
Expanded's biggest competitor, Mellow Manor Productions, was founded in 1978 by Craig "Spike" Decker and Mike Gribble. The partners were living in Riverside, California, where they promoted local rock concerts and midnight movie shows. Spike and Mike's first showings of their festival were in La Jolla, Riverside and elsewhere in Southern California. Today their programs are shown in most of the major cities in the United States and Canada.70
What has separated Mellow Manor from Expanded is the promotion and presentation of shows. Instead of spending most of their advertising budget on newspaper ads, Spike and Mike used to hit the streets and hand out thousands of handbills. Mike, who unfortunately died in 1994, became known for his outrageous clothing, hair colors and unusual beards, as well as his unique emcee style. The partners discovered they could warm up their audiences by tossing out large balloons and other inflatables for the crowd to hit into the air. In the early 1990s Spike discovered that his dog, Scotty, loved to pop and destroy the inflatables. Scotty took to the stage and became Scotty, the Shredding Wonder Dog, dealing death to balloons, love dolls, and inflatable sheep.
From Bill Plympton's One of Those Days (1988).
The competition between Mellow Manor and Expanded has made both companies hungry for quality product. The happy result for audiences is that between them, the two companies make most or all of each year's Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning shorts available, along with other fine work from around the world.
In 1990 Spike and Mike decided to do Saturday midnight shows. Although they advertised "extra twisted films," most of the program came from their regular show. They added whatever they could find that was offbeat or outrageous. They included Danny Antonucci's Lupo the Butcher, Miles Thompson's scatological cartoon called Dog Pile, Bill Plympton's One of Those Days and a few other unusual shorts. It was not a great show, but it was a start.
In 1991 they put together their first All Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. The program promised "some wild and zany films that could never be shown to our 'normal' audience." They promoted Mike Grimshaw's Quiet Please as "the sickest short film ever made," and Spike wrote on the back cover, "Let's face it. It's a sick and twisted society in which we live."
The first All Sick and Twisted Festival included a few old classics such as Mary Newland's Bambi Meets Godzilla (1962) and John Magnuson's Thank You Mask Man (1968). The highlights of the show included Lupo the Butcher and the theatrical premiere of Mary Newland's Pink Komkommer. Mike Grimshaw's Quiet Please was indeed a sick film, shocking and disgusting. (The grotesque star of the short kills a screaming baby and then shoves it up under its mother's dress.) For laughs the show included Dog Pile and One of Those Days. There were also several outstanding shorts that could have been in the regular family show including Christoph Simon's Hello Dad I'm in Jail, David Anderson's Deadsey (about a person who changes sex) and Nick Park's first Oscar winner, Creature Comforts.
A film that was easy to overlook in the show was Mike Judge's In Bred Jed's Cartoon. Spike and Mike saw something of value in Judge's early work. They produced In Bred Jed's Cartoon and his next two shorts. His Frog Baseball, featured in the 1992 midnight show of Sick and Twisted, stars two boys with a bat and a frog; the boys are named Beavis and Butt-Head. Spike and Mike's third production with Judge was Peace, Love and Understanding. It premiered in the 1993 Sick and Twisted show, and it, too, stars Beavis and Butt-Head. Spike is listed in the credits for "idea."
When MTV showed an interest in Judge's work, Spike and Mike held on to the theatrical rights and let Judge and MTV have all other rights. When they gave up their financial interest in the characters, they had no idea that Beavis and Butt-Head would produce millions of dollars worth of income for Judge and MTV.
Since Spike and Mike founded the sick and twisted genre, they have supported several animators by commissioning works. When they began these shows not many people were making shorts that fit the needs of the program. Now several works are made each year by college students from around the country. Most are made as graduation projects, then sold to Spike and Mike.
Most of the scatological works that have been purchased for their Sick and Twisted festivals have been amateurish. If the overall quality of the work does not improve, there may come a time when the novelty wears itself out and the shows are replaced by another novelty. At present, however, thousands of people look forward to each year's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. They are anxious to see if the new works are as delightfully awful as some of the hits of recent shows including Art School for the Criminally Insane, Hospital Hell with Rick the Dick, Hut Sluts, Lloyd Loses His Lunch, Mutilator, Cocks, and Wrong Hole.
In case you are wondering, showing sick and twisted films has been a very lucrative business. While people with the company do not talk about box office figures, it is obvious from the packed houses that the grosses (so to speak) are good. The company does not say much about the quality of the show either, but it is worth noting that patrons receive free barf bags as they enter the theater.
The show is rarely reviewed as critics generally have a rough time watching these programs. Charles Solomon reviewed the 1991 program in the Los Angeles Times and summarized it as "gags about raised middle fingers, urine, feces, blood, other bodily fluids, sex, sexual organs, cadavers, wheelchairs and violence. Unfortunately none is funny." He related the show to high school locker room jokes and found the works by Judge and Grimshaw "juvenile and lame."71
Better judges of the show may be college students. Reviewing a Sick and Twisted Festival for a term paper assignment, students of animation history at San Francisco State have offered some insight into people's enjoyment of these programs. One person said, "People like to test their tolerances.... It promises to be wild and raunchy. These are cheap thrills and good thrills." Several students said they liked to be shocked. They wanted a change from their daily life and a chance to see something they could not see on television or even in movies. Comments about the show included, "I see the show every time it comes around." "I expected worse." "Boring, very low quality animation." "After a while ... it lost its shock value." A woman observed that the program was for people "who burp and fart in public without saying 'excuse me.'" Another woman wrote, "Not too long ago, the nation's young people would gather together to celebrate life, love and free sex.... (Now they) are gathering together to celebrate death, hate and necropolis.... Why?"
Mellow Manor has not had censorship problems with the Sick and Twisted program as the company avoids playing cities where trouble might be expected. For example, the program does not play in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the police arrested the director of the city's art museum for showing photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mellow Manor hires uniformed security people and makes an effort to police the crowd for problems, including would-be attenders who are under 18. Nevertheless, kids who look 18 or have fake IDs do get in. The company also avoids problems with newspaper advertising by steering clear of outrageous graphics that might attract undue attention to the show. The promoters know that once the young audience hears the show is coming to town, word will spread quickly through the community.
Not every theater wants to show programs like Sick and Twisted Animation. In 1995 a show of animated classics by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett was banned from the Riverside Community College campus in Riverside, California, evidently because someone found its title, Cartoon Sex and Violence, offensive. When flyers were put up a few days before the program, there were protests, according to the booker of the show. A dean decided to cancel the show rather than risk trouble.
One of the more exciting things to happen in animation in recent years is the development of new kinds of animated features in Japan. Many appear to be the work of directors uninhibited by concerns about censorship. More importantly, a few are by intellectually brilliant individuals who make outstanding works based on contemporary and classic Japanese literature. Unfortunately these works have a difficult time finding an audience in the United States among teens and adults who prefer the stereotyped action-adventure Japanese animation features full of sex and violence.
The Japanese feature is a descendent of the animated films and comics of Dr. Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989). His Phoenix 2772 (1980) is an impressive science fiction feature with a plea for world peace. His best known works in the United States are the television series Astro Boy, which began in 1962, and Kimba the White Lion (aka Jungle Emperor and Jungle Taitei), which began in 1965. His early features dealt with mature erotic themes. They include One Thousand and One Nights (1969), Cleopatra (1970) and other titles.
Dr. Tezuka and other pioneers of Japanese animation showed the next generation of producers and directors that there was an alternative to the Disney approach. The new directors and producers turned to Japanese comics, classic literature and contemporary science fiction for inspiration. They are working in a culture that appears to have few if any restrictions on what can be shown in theaters. The Japanese have developed an audience for a wide range of animated features, from films with cute animals like Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro (opened in New York in 1993) to works intended for mature audiences interested in seeing intense action, violence and sex. While some of the animated product from Japan is acceptable to people of all ages, there are dozens of films shown in the United States that would have been heavily censored or banned if the Hays Office was still in business.
Among the better films from Japan that may be of interest to mature adults is Twilight of the Cockroaches by Hiroaki Yoshida (1987, released in the United States in 1990). It is a morality story that suckers the viewer into becoming fond of the animated cockroaches in the first half of the film. These bugs live a good life in an apartment, unaware of the dangers of the world. The main stars have charming personalities, and we enjoy discovering the secrets of their lives. Then the owner of the apartment gets a girlfriend who hates bugs. The total annihilation of our animated bug friends by the live-action human enemy is a powerful experience. The images of death are quite disturbing and call to mind many instances of human genocide. This is not a film that could have been shown during the reign of the Hays Office, and it is unlikely a film like this could be made in the United States today as it does not have any songs, happy endings or characters that would make nice toys to give away at fast food restaurants. Unfortunately, Twilight of the Cockroaches did not make a lot of money in the United States despite excellent reviews.
Another fine work with a noble purpose is Barefoot Gen (1983). The film confronts the atomic attacks on Japan by following the nightmarish experiences of Gen and his pregnant mother. It is a powerful story of humans trying to survive before and after the bomb was dropped. The concerns are hunger, shelter and medical attention, not patriotism and heroism. Some of the images are gory because Keiji Nakazawa, the author, wants to remind people of the truth about what atomic weapons do. The film is based on his actual experiences. He began telling his tale in a serialized comic in 1973, and eventually the story ran about 2,000 pages long. Fans who know both the comic and the film say the comic book is gorier and more dramatic.72
A totally different kind of adventure is found in the well-written The Order to Stop Construction (1987, written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo). This short film, which is included in the compilation feature Neo Tokyo, is a science fiction story about a bureaucrat sent to stop construction on a giant project in a far-off jungle. He is the only human in a world of robots that are programmed to let nothing interfere with their tasks. The film is an excellent psychological adventure as the man struggles to disable the machines.
Otomo, the director of The Order to Stop Construction, is also the director of Akira (1989). Akira is a remarkable work of art set in a violent Tokyo of the future. It ends with the city of Tokyo being destroyed in an atomic explosion. It is the most popular Japanese animation to date in terms of box office and sales of videotape units.
The Sensualist (1990, directed by Yukio Abe) is a breathtakingly beautiful work of art based on a seventeenth-century story by Saikaku Ihara. The story is about sexual abandon, debauchery, a beautiful courtesan, a wealthy merchant and a foolish tailor. It is erotic, sensitive and unfortunately still unreleased in the United States. The film was shown at the fourth Los Angeles Animation Celebration in 1991, but United States distribution rights proved prohibitively expensive.
Sex in The Sensualist and other animated films from Japan is often quite graphic. Many of the films go far beyond the kiss followed by a fade-out. Female breasts are frequently shown, often being touched by men, and discrete images of couples having intercourse are common. Less common are actual images of the penis (especially erect) and graphic depictions of insertion.
In some of the films popular with the young adult fans of Japanese animation, sex scenes may include strange surprises. In Wicked City (1992, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri) a domineering woman seduces a man, then turns into a spider and attempts to devour him.
Among the better-made films popular with the fans is The Professional: Golgo 13 (1983, opened in New York in 1992, directed by Osamu Dezaki). The film is a cat-and-mouse chase with lots of twists. The cold-blooded hired killer in the film becomes the target of an industrialist who wants him destroyed. The film is almost as much fun as a James Bond adventure, but the visuals of violence and sex are too graphic for American television or the average American film fan.
The depiction of violence in many of the Japanese features includes bodily fluids, ripped flesh, angry fights, cold-blooded killing, and dramatic explosions. Not all violence in these films is between a hero and an enemy. The Running Man (1987, by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, another short film included in Neo Tokyo) takes place on a twenty-first-century auto raceway. It is an intense race in which the winners and losers drive themselves into oblivion. We see the winner slowly self-destruct. It is a vivid sequence that includes exploding veins and liquefying skin. In Japanese animated features the endings are not always happy and the level of the drama can be intense. Heroes do not always win, and some may be killed during the film.
A disturbing form of violence that prevents many Americans from becoming fans of these films is sexual violence against women, including ugly rape scenes. Most of the imports popular with the young adult fans exhibit sexist attitudes. Women may be shown as Amazons and killers, but they are also shown as sex objects. News stories in 1996 about sexual harassment at a Japanese auto manufacturing plant in the United States claim sexual harassment of women by their bosses is tolerated in Japan. One news report on the case mentioned that men going to and from work on trains often read "adult pornographic comic books" in mixed company. The subservient image of women and the violence against them in the animated films stems from this traditional view of women in Japanese society. But not all American audiences reject this image. For example, Carl Macek of Streamline Pictures says the sexual content of The Professionals has been criticized by reviewers, but he did not feel the comments hurt the film's box office.73
Guy Cables of Tara Releasing has been booking Japanese animated features for several years, and he has found that several newspapers will not review or carry advertising for these films. He says part of the problem is that reviewers and editors think all Japanese films are beneath them and are just for kids. Actually, says Cables, the present audience for Japanese animation is mainly young male adults who enjoy the action-adventure films that contain lots of sex and violence. These are the films that do the best box office. When he goes to conventions for fans of Japanese animation, he says, about 80 percent of the people there are young males. (Another friend said that when the fans have parties and dress up the young women often wear sexy low-cut outfits as if they were Playboy bunnies.)74
Another problem in booking Japanese features is that some papers refuse to review or advertise films not rated by the MPAA. The newspapers want to see the rating so they can be assured they are not promoting something that might offend some of their readers. On the other hand, the art houses, theaters and college film groups that book the films find their audiences are attracted to works not approved by the Hollywood system. To these audiences, the lack of an MPAA rating that means they are going to see something not available on television or at mainstream movie houses.
Cables points out that when an independent distribution company like Tara goes to sell a feature to a video distributor they sometimes have to have the film rated by the MPAA. The distributor needs the rating as an all-clear signal for stores that do not carry X and NC-17 rated tapes. Thus the theatrical distributor may have to makes cuts in the film when it is being prepared for the video release. Cables says it is worth making the cuts and having the film rated, since thousands of stores in the United States do not carry X-rated material. Nevertheless, a distributor who has gone through the rating process warns it can be a real pain. There is a lot of paperwork and there may be a difficult fight to get the desired rating if the product is a borderline R/NC-17. Furthermore, the service costs a lot, although the charge is on a sliding scale: A small independent company may pay only around $1,000, while a large independent may pay upwards of $5,000, and a major studio will pay even more.
Although the best of the Japanese animated features represent an entertaining and exciting new type of film, the audience for them is still quite small. When Carl Macek distributed Akira to theaters, it had more bookings than any other animated film ever imported from Japan. Macek says about 90 theaters in the United States were interested in booking it, and the film played two or three times at most of them. All together Akira had about 215 playdates and grossed just under a million dollars. (In comparison, Pixar's 1995 film Toy Story grossed about a million dollars a day in the United States for the first six months of its release.) In video sales, however, Akira made a real profit in the United States, selling over 100,000 tapes.
Some animators love practical jokes. One form is hiding something personal in a commercial work. One woman who worked on Gumby in the 1980s told this author that she once spelled out the names of her nephews and nieces in toy blocks. Another hid the phrase "Paul is dead" in a television commercial that had a jumble of words flashed on the screen.
It turns out that when the laser disc edition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) came out in 1994, people who went through the disc with the single-frame button found three naughty little touches that theater audiences never noticed. The first is near the beginning of the film, when Roger Rabbit is having some trouble on the set of a Baby Herman cartoon. As Baby Herman storms off the set in disgust, he walks under a woman's dress. In the home video or laser disc version, we can see that his hand goes up under the dress as he passes. When he emerges, a finger is extended as he brings his hand down. He has a wicked smile on his face, and his tongue hangs out, suggesting the dirty old baby is quite pleased with himself. A friend who worked on the film says there was never any thought of cutting this sequence as it was one of director Robert Zemeckis's favorite moments.
In the scene where Bob Hoskins walks into an out-of-order bathroom in Toontown there is a lot of graffiti on the wall. One inscription reads, "For a good time call Allyson Wonderland," which according to Variety is a reference to a brothel that was in business at the time the film was made.75 A friend who worked on the feature says Allyson was not the name of a brothel, but of a production secretary at the studio who got teased a lot. A phone number on the same wall belonged to the head of the Disney Studio, Jeffrey Katzenberg.
The biggest surprise in the film comes in the scene where Jessica Rabbit is tossed out of a car as it crashes. She spins around, and for three or four frames her legs are apart and we can see up her dress. On the tape of the feature all we see is a dark area, but on the laser disc some detail of the female anatomy can be seen. The press found out about this shot from the Variety article and did their part to promote sales of the disc. They also wondered who put the image there, and how it had escaped notice. Disney refused to comment.
There is a simple reason why nobody at Disney could explain how the image got into the film. This part of Roger Rabbit was animated in England, and the naughty animator was British. Years later he was working in the United States for a well-known production company when he was interviewed for this book. (He asked not to be identified.) He explained that he drew the images of Jessica's anatomy as a joke. He thought "ink and paint would simplify" the art. He says the fuss over the laser disc caught him by surprise as he had looked at his video copy of the film and could not see anything. ("I can't see the loving detail I put into it!" he lamented.) He then forgot about the scene until it became a news item in 1994.
For connoisseurs of censored images, the laser disc of Who Framed Roger Rabbit includes a scene cut from the video release of the film, showing a frame of Betty Boop with bare breasts. The sequence was shown in theaters when the film was released and apparently the public never noticed the one frame containing nudity. It is important to note that the film was intended for an adult audience, so a touch of adult humor was acceptable to Touchstone Pictures, the Disney-owned distributor. The film was produced by Steven Spielberg, and the animation director was Richard Williams.
In Trail Mix-Up, the last Roger Rabbit short (available on a laser disc containing all the Roger Rabbit shorts), a poster appears briefly in the background. People who freeze-frame laser disc images discovered the poster of a sexy woman in a bikini sitting with a chainsaw between her legs. The poster advertises "Rigid Tools." There was talk of recalling the disc and cutting out the image, but since thousands of discs were already in stores, it was too late for a recall.
Someone who works at Disney says that he expects the secret naughty gags like those found in Roger Rabbit films will "probably not be possible in the future." People who go through films frame-by-frame are making too much of an issue out of these images, he says. As a result, the practice of adding unauthorized jokes and waiting to see if the ink-and-paint department removes them will probably come to an end.
We find it curious that a group that claims to espouse family values would vote to boycott the world's largest producer of wholesome family entertainment. We question any group that demands that we deprive people of health benefits and we know of no tourist destination in the world that denies admission to people as the Baptists are insisting we do.
—An excerpt from a statement issued by Disney's public relations department, June 199676
Trouble at Disney always makes exciting copy, and pressure groups who are aware of this fact have taken advantage of the media's interest in unusual stories about the company. In 1993, for example, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee garnered some media attention when it protested racial slurs in Aladdin (1992). When American Indians objected to their depiction in Pocahontas (1995), the press was there.
While the objections to Aladdin and Pocahontas did not receive extensive media coverage, protests against Disney by conservative religious groups were treated as a major news story in 1996. That was the year the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott Disney. Actually, the Florida Southern Baptist Convention had voted for a Disney boycott in 1995, but that vote did not get national press coverage, so the church voted on the issue again at a larger convention and made sure the press was informed. Somebody did an impressive job of getting the word out, and the story was covered by most papers as well as the national radio and television networks.77
Before the Baptists' first vote the American Family Association (AFA) had been bashing Disney in its AFA Journal. The association carried stories about the protests against Aladdin and Pocahontas, and complained about images "hidden" in Disney animated films, including a tower on the videotape box of Little Mermaid (1989) that resembles a phallus. Slightly less phallic-looking spires are on the Aladdin video package cover. The AFA claimed that The Lion King (1994) has the word "sex" written in the sands of the desert somewhere in the film, and that The Little Mermaid shows a priest becoming noticeably aroused while presiding over a wedding. The association also got upset that in Pocahontas "Disney censored out the historical fact that the heroine in the story converted from paganism to Christianity." Of course, Disney publicity never claimed the movie was historically accurate.
The AFA's search for naughty things hidden in Disney animated films resulted in the announcement of a major find on January 12, 1996. The headline on the press release reads, "Disney Blasted for Using the 'F' Word in Donald Duck Cartoon." Anybody who can understand anything Donald Duck says is a formidable linguist, but the Reverend Donald Wildmon, president of the AFA, says the offending word is in Clock Cleaners. He notes that he did not believe the story until he listened to the duck's dialogue in the short. Wildmon claims that Donald says, "Fuck you" to the clock when it comes to life and begins to taunt him. Wildmon calls this discovery "the latest in a growing list of anti-family incidents by the company that has long been a stalwart of family entertainment." The press release does not bother to note that the cartoon was made in 1937 and for almost 60 years nobody reported hearing the f-word in the film.
The anti-Disney literature has uncovered a few interesting facts about the animated films, but mixed in with these amusing little stories is the real reason for the boycott: homophobia. The Christian right is upset that Disney established a company policy extending insurance benefits to the live-in partners of homosexual employees. Disney has also allowed "homosexual celebrations" in the theme parks, which means they allow gay groups to hold events in the park just as they allow other social, religious, and civic groups to do.
As further evidence that Disney is pro-homosexual, the AFA claims that two animal characters in The Lion King are gay. The September 1994 issue of the AFA Journal announced, "Two actors who spoke for the characters Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King claim their characters were the first homosexual Disney characters ever to come to the screen." The January 1995 AFA Journal announced that the two homosexual characters would be included in the Lion King television cartoon series.
The list of complaints against Disney also includes charges that its publishing arm, Hyperion Press, has published books about gay culture; that Disney has taken out ads in homosexual publications; that Michael Eisner is quoted as saying he thinks 40 percent of Disney's 63,000 employees are homosexual; that Disney hired a convicted child molester to direct the movie Powder; and that Disney ended a 17-year-old traditional Christian Christmas display and replaced it with a secular "tropical Santa" display. The list of complaints also includes the broadcast of objectionable shows on Disney-owned ABC-TV (Dana Carvey is at the top of that list); the hiring of Martin Scorsese to direct films (he directed The Last Temptation of Christ, a film several religious groups boycotted); and the fact that a Disney-owned company made the "anti-Catholic" movie Priest. The AFA also called Kids, a film distributed by a Disney-owned company, "nihilistic pornography," and complained that Jefferson in Paris, distributed by a Disney-owned company, is reported to "speculate that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by a 13-year-old slave." It has even been claimed that the phone number Tim Allen gets from his wife in The Santa Clause is actually the number of a phone sex service!
A man who works in the public relations department at Disney says, "People lie in wait for us." He suggests that there are too many people who have nothing better to do with their lives than to study Disney films with the hopes of finding something that they can use to embarrass the company.
The AFA has built a strong organization, and its followers not only give generously but apparently are quite active in following the AFA's instructions to write letters of complaint. The AFA has attacked several national chains that retail magazines the association considers pornographic (such as Playboy and Penthouse). It has threatened boycotts of sponsors who advertise on television shows the AFA finds objectionable. The shows are reviewed in the AFA Journal, and the names and addresses of sponsors are on the pages that feature the reviews. Research shows that the AFA has won some of its battles and lost others.78
The Southern Baptists and the AFA are not the only groups critical of Disney at the present. An example of true extremism is the viewpoint of Joseph R. Chambers, who writes for The End Times (published by Paw Creek Ministries in Charlotte, North Carolina). According to Chambers, The Lion King and the toys relating to the film are part of a conspiracy to brainwash the youth of America into believing in voodoo. He describes the feature as "a picture of a pagan society ... acted out in the panorama of idolatry and pagan bondages. The struggle between good and bad is a classic occultic picture of black and white magic. Even the relationship of the king and his evil brother draws attention to the pagan suggestion that Jesus and Satan were brothers...." Chambers cites the appearance of a baboon shaman who uses the methods of witchdoctors and the references to the worship of a sun god as further proof for his thesis. He does not suggest a boycott of Disney, but he does warn that "almost every toy, television series, comic books [sic] or items [sic] targeted for the young generation is steeped in occultic practices and psychic phenomenon [sic]." For people wanting more information, Chambers offers a booklet called "Rebuilding the Foundation of Your Home," which "exposes the dangers of The Lion King, Barney, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers."79
In February 1996 a student informed this author that there was an organized boycott of Toy Story (1995) by the AFA because Woody, the name of the film's star, is a slang term for the penis, and Buzz, the name of the co-star, is a drug term. She ran back to her dorm and brought to class the weekly newspaper that had printed the story. The author of the article reported that the information had come from a gay weekly, which had taken it from the Internet.
Although the student believed that there was a real boycott of Toy Story, a quick call to Pixar revealed the story was a hoax that somebody had started with a letter published on the Internet. The American Family Association had issued a memo denying that it had written the letter or that it had ever called for a boycott of the film.
The hoax letter, dated December 5, 1995, claims to be from Donald Wildmon of the AFA. It calls Toy Story "obscene pornography disguised as 'family entertainment.'" The letter mentions that the names of the film's stars are a sexual and a drug reference and that the film includes "a sex-obsessed talking potato, a sex-obsessed Bo Peep doll who cannot keep her hands (or lips) off ‘Woody,’ and an Etch-a-Sketch whose 'knobs' must be 'adjusted' to produce results." Finally, the letter asks people to boycott the film.
The AFA memo says there are several errors in the letter. First, it gives the wrong website address for the AFA. It mentions an article about Toy Story in the December issue of the AFA Journal, but there was no December issue and the November/December combined issue did not discuss Toy Story. Other errors are pointed out, and the memo states the AFA never called for a boycott of Toy Story.
In fact, the AFA has said positive things about the feature. The July 1996 AFA Journal has an article about people going to good films at the box office, and it lists Toy Story as one of several films that "brought a broad audience of moral Americans back to local theaters."
Nobody knows where the hoax letter came from. A man with Disney's publicity department says the hoax was probably created "by people on the Internet with too much time on their hands."
The trouble with hoaxes is that many people believe them. Some are funny and harmless, while others can do damage to the reputations of the parties mentioned. The Toy Story hoax did not do much damage to Disney as the film grossed about a million a day for the first six months of release, both at home and abroad, making it one of the most successful animated features of all time. A questionable biography that has damaged the reputation of the late Walt Disney is Marc Eliot's book Walt Disney, Hollywood's Dark Prince. Millions of people now believe Disney was an FBI spy, and the fabrications in this book may be believed by people in future centuries. Eliot falsely reported the content of FBI documents to weave his yarn about Disney and the FBI. For example a newspaper article in Disney's FBI file dated November 10, 1940, states that Disney was in Washington, D.C., for a two-day visit to see the sights. Eliot reports:
On November 10, 1940, Disney apparently struck the following deal with the Bureau. It appears that in exchange for its continuing assistance in his personal search to find out the truth of his parentage, Walt agreed to assist Hoover's crusade against the spread of communism in Hollywood by becoming an official informant of the FBI.
Nothing in the FBI file suggests that any of this information is true.
Eliot claims to know for certain of two tasks Disney undertook as a spy: to fly to New York City in 1943 and 1944 to attend left-wing cultural events. Eliot says Disney then returned to Los Angeles each time and wrote reports on the events for the FBI. While it was clear Disney donated money to the events and was listed as a "sponsor," nowhere in the file, which includes news clip-pings, advertisements and two FBI reports about the events in New York, does it say Disney attended either event. The FBI reports were filed in New York, not in Los Angeles, and the authors' names are blacked out so we do not know who filed them. It would not have made sense for Disney to attend the events, as he would not have recognized who was in the audience. The FBI had more than enough people available in New York to spy on the crowds.
Another distortion of the truth in Eliot's book is his statement that Disney traveled to an event in Reno and gave an "impassioned" speech. The FBI file says Mary Pickford read a telegram sent by Disney to the Reno event. Eliot quotes what he claims to be part of the speech, but actually he quotes the entire telegram!
On January 12, 1955, the FBI made Walt Disney a Special Agent in Charge-Contact (SAC-Contact), which means he was recognized as an unpaid reference person that they could trust and call upon for information. Eliot calls the position a promotion for Disney and claims (but offers no proof or examples) that other spies reported to Disney once he became an SAC-Contact. As a friend of the FBI he did meet with the organization on a few occasions. He made a four-part newsreel about the FBI for the Mickey Mouse Club, and he once discussed making a film with their help about child molesters. He probably provided them information from his company's employment records, probably answered general questions about subjects that he was an expert on and possibly suggested where they might go to find information about questions he could not answer. There is no reason to believe Walt Disney ever knew he was called an SAC-Contact. It was simply an in-house designation that the FBI used to designate trusted friends, according to news stories that came out after Eliot's book was published.80
Can a hoax be good, clean, honest fun and not something that is damaging? In 1987 Re/Search published a book called Pranks! that covers various mischievous acts by artists and other assorted characters including Timothy Leary, Paul Krassner, Jello Biafra, John Waters, John Cale and dozens of other individuals. One group in San Francisco that has been inspired by the book is the Cacophony Society, a fun-loving group that does unusual things like dressing up in formal attire for an unauthorized guided tour of storm sewers, or celebrating somebody's birthday on the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1991 they held an organizational meeting and developed a secret plan for a prank that might fool the press and the public.
In June 1991, the media received a press release from C.A.F.E., the Coalition Against Fantasia's Exhibition. It announced "a protest demonstration outside the Castro Theater in San Francisco on Sunday, July 7, at around 3:30 P.M." The press release gave the names of the groups joining in the protest and attached was the front page of SPASM Bulletin #5 dated Summer 1991. The bulletin explained that SPASM stands for Sensitive Parents Against Scary Movies, and the front page included an article on the upcoming protest. Both pages listed Dwayne Newtron as the person to call for more information.81
On Wednesday, July 3, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the demonstration was planned for Sunday and that Dwayne Newtron was a 32-year old paralegal, who "became outraged about the film when he took his 6-year-old daughter to see it not long ago." The Chronicle went on:
The kid was terrified by the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence, and Newtron was mighty offended himself. He found people who objected to almost everything in the movie: references to dancing mushrooms and opium poppies upset foes of drugs; a group called Dieters United were furious at the dancing hippos and elephant ballerinas; naked Cupids angered fundamentalists, who also didn't like a sequence on evolution and supposed satanic glorification. Minority, feminist and gay and lesbian groups were said to be angry at "the color-coordinated, stereotypical heterosexual centaurs" in one sequence.
On Monday, July 8, Martin Snapp in the Oakland Tribute called the event the "Politically Correct Demonstration of the Year." He reported how each group that showed up had had an ax to grind. He mentioned that the Bay Area Drought Relief Alliance Party (B.A.D.R.A.P) "objects to Mickey Mouse wasting water in the 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' sequence...." Also mentioned were The Bay Area Say No to Drugs Committee, Dieters United and Sensitive Parents Against Scary Movies. Actually, all these groups were created by the Cacophony Society, but Snapp was apparently taken in. "Are these people serious?" he wrote. "Well, yes and no. I checked them out, and these are all bona fide groups. But they're not above using a little political theater to make a serious point. 'None of you people in the media gave me the time of day when I played it straight' says Gardenia Gorlick of Dieters United. 'If this is what it takes to get your attention, I'll do it.’”
While the Cacophony members were satisfied with what they had accomplished, they were not ready for what happened next. The August 12, 1991, issue of Time reported, "In San Francisco last month, a motley flock turned out to picket the classic Disney movie Fantasia. One man complained that the spooky Night on Bald Mountain scene had terrified his child.... Only Fantasia conductor Leopold Stokowski escaped chastisement, perhaps because he was dead." Each group in the demonstration was mentioned in Time.82
The article in Time resulted in more articles about the protest. A column on the subject by David Grimes noted that California was "on the cutting edge of the censorship fad." That column was carried by the New York Times wire service and appeared in newspapers across the United States and even in The News, published in Mexico City.83
On April Fool's Day, 1992, the Wall Street Journal ran "They'll Ask the Humane Society to Picket Beauty and the Beast" by Carrie Doland. She wrote, "Many protest groups in this city claim the media don't take them seriously. But one group is gloating over its widespread credibility...." She then explained how no more than fifteen protesters and as few as six had organized the protests against Fantasia and how "the protests were politically correct so a number of papers gave them coverage." She told how Peter Doty, "assistant janitor" for an acting company, explained how he had created the prank. She quotes him as saying, "We were talking ridiculous arguments and making them appear legitimate. It was fun."
Doland contacted the newspaper writers who had been taken in by the protest. She later told Doty that a reporter for the Washington Post had responded, "All I know is what I read in Time." A San Francisco Examiner writer told his readers on April 1, 1992, that he had fallen for a hoax, and he explained what had happened.
When Doty was interviewed about his prank for this book, he said he targeted Disney because the studio is easy prey for groups seeking publicity. He said he and his friends had actually tried four times to get publicity for their causes and that only one demonstration was really successful. They had picketed the Castro twice; it was on the second time that they got local television and newspaper coverage. Doty adds that when the media were present the crowd got angry at the "protestors" and shouted pro-Disney comments. The group also picketed a Blockbuster store later in the year for selling tapes of Fantasia, as well as the U.C. Theater in Berkeley for showing the feature one night.
Doty said one of the big surprises to him was seeing the Time article as he had assumed Time believed in accurate journalism and always checked their facts. He had sent them a press release with his phone number on it, but they never bothered to call him.