Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood




Mother Goose Goes Hollywood is one of the last Disney Silly Symphonies. It was released in December of 1938.
Wikipedia says: "The film parodies several Mother Goose nursery rhymes using caricatures of popular film stars of the 1930s."
This 7 minute long short film remains controversial today because of its stereotypical depiction of African American entertainers.
Animation critic Charles Solomon noted in his book, Enchanted Drawings: History of Animation, the caricatures of Fats Waller and Cab Calloway don't poke fun at their race and are treated just as good or bad like the other caricatured celebrities spoofed in this cartoon.

I am just in love with the 
quality of the animation. It is fluid and rich in personality. Kind of a crazy thing, the animators satirizing acting styles of silver screen stars from that time. 
Imagine an animated short today poking fun at Merrill Streep, Tom Hanks and others. What a challenging and fun assignment this would be. 

Animators included Jack Campbell, Ward Kimball and Grim Natwick, to name a few.
In today's world animator Eric Goldberg would supervise a project like this one. 

As I said, incredible animation, go study it!!! And check out the colors on those three cels above. It doesn't get any better.

Here is a Photoplay magazine article from 1939.







5 comments:

  1. Thank you very much indeed Andreas for your wonderful blog which I read every week! I would enjoy seeing some animation art of the splendid Jenny Wren Mae West caricature from Who Killed Cock Robin! Thank you in anticipation!

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  2. This is one of those few Golden Era shorts in which Disney appeared to go more in the satirical direction that was the Warner Bros. shorts' trademark.

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  3. I hear so often about Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.
    Thank you for sharing the article and the picture with us! :-)...

    I watched the film...

    The problem is that I cannot really recognize Cab Collaway and Fats Waller.*
    This is much more easier with the caricatures of the white artists...

    Most of all I like Katherine Hepburn! :-D


    *(Potraits of Cab. and Waller in the way Al Hirschfeld draw seems for me the better choice. But in the end we cannot turn back time. We have only the chance to learn from the past)

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    1. Maybe Al Hirschfeld could've style the short instead of T. Hee, the man who created the caricatures for this short

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  4. Andreas I was wondering if you could tell us what kind of pencils you use, so many animators it seems use different kinds from colored pencils to lead to Chinese markers or European and American style but did you heard about rumors on the Internet that Disney is going to do a Live-Action Remakes of LILO AND STITCH, I don't like that because Lillo and Stitch are your work and Chris Williams too back in 2000 we he made a drawing of "Lilo holding a Fish" you and Chris did a amazing job in 2002 before The Platinum Edition of Beauty and the Beast, I realized that Lilo and Stitch is a great story beacuse its about the "family", and it's a true art form.

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