| Issue #35, November 24, 2006 |
Stop-Motion Magic
It’s time again you see. Time to watch the specials that are the favorites of you and me. Those stop-motion classics, new and old, are quite something to behold. Characters who sing and play in rhymed loops of loopy delight can even give you quite a fright. But it wouldn’t be Christmas, not Christmas at all, if we missed those stop-motion animated classics that follow fall.
As soon as you hear Burl Ives’ sonorous voice narrating the story of Rudolph as Sam the Snowman (no relation to Frosty), you know it’s Christmastime. Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass are the production team behind some of the best-loved holiday TV specials of the past forty years. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) is their best-known and most widely seen work. It is the longest running and highest rated special in television history. The special tells the untold back-story of Rudolph and his friends that you never knew from the famous song, sort of a Behind the Music without the booze and drugs. Although there is a bouncing Bumble and an Island of Misfit Toys, and something makes Rudolph fly. This Christmas you can give actual misfit toys as presents. There is a wide array of models and toys based on the special that you can actually buy. Feel secure in the knowledge that you are saving an abandoned toy.
Less well known is 1970’s Santa Claus is Coming to Town which features the voice of Andy Rooney as Kris Kringle, the familiar stop-motion production, and some dated, but nonetheless groovy flower power-era visual touches. Rankin and Bass also produced The Little Drummer Boy in 1968, perhaps the least entertaining of all their work. The 23-minute made-for-TV special retells the fable of the Little Drummer Boy, and is a sign that the Rankin/ Bass production team was pushing the formula too far.
Could VH1 produce a Behind the Claymation special? Drummer Boy is flat and dull compared with the other holiday specials they produced, which most likely accounts for how rarely it’s shown. In 1979, Rankin and Bass added Jack Frost to their stop-motion pantheon of Holiday favorites. With the voice of Buddy Hackett, Jack Frost isn’t necessarily a Holiday tale, but definitely one for a snowy night.
Astute viewers might have caught the Burl Ives’ Sam the Snowman-inspired Leon The Snowman (voiced by Leon Redbone, of course) in the recent Will Ferrell vehicle Elf. In the movie, scenes that take place in the North Pole are clearly an inspired homage (or rip-off; whatever you like) to the old Rankin/Bass specials. It’s a good choice, because in our collective imaginations that herky-jerky, spray-foam-snow-looking world is what Christmas looks like. Increasingly (almost exclusively, actually) though, filmmakers are turning to digital effects in their animation. Even the old Rankin/ Bass Rudolph was computer-generated in his 2001 comeback special, Rudolph and Island of Misfit Toys (avoid this if at all possible).
Stop-motion animation might soon be a thing of the past. Its history extends back to the very early days of film, when filmmakers first discovered what sort of tricks could be played by making motion pictures one frame at a time. To produce a stop-motion sequence the camera is stopped between each frame, everything on the set that needs to appear to move is adjusted by a tiny increment and the exposure taken. Repeat for a few weeks or months, depending on complexity, and you have yourself a sequence. The process is painstakingly slow and arduous. Studios will not want to spend time and money on an animation process whose look they think can be faked with computer animation. By producing animated characters (horrifyingly, sometimes with the voice of Ray Romano), they will be missing the textured and lavish look that artful stop-motion achieves, as well as the cheeky fun that not-so artful stop-motion provides. Because the articulated figures or models used in stop-motion animation are photographed three-dimensional objects they create a sort of imposed reality that cannot be achieved with any other method.
Stop-motion technique is responsible for everything from the original King Kong’s ambling to Jason and the Argonaut’s clacking march to the Armies of Darkness in Evil Dead 3. Davey and Goliath and their bizarro world, less Christian (yet non-Mountain Dew pitching) doppelgangers, Wallace and Gromit, are well-known Claymation characters, as is Gumby. Since so few stop-motion productions were around at the time, the low-tech The New Gumby revival show in 1988 actually served as a training ground for many of the animators who worked on Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. Nightmare could well be the last great stop-motion classic.
Nightmare Before Christmas owes a heavy debt to the old Rankin/ Bass specials that served as its inspiration. In Nightmare, Christmastown has something of the look of Rudolph, with just a little bit of Dr. Caligari thrown in. Holloweentown, on the other hand, is an unadulterated German Expressionist’s madness. Jack Skellington and his cohorts’ Christmas exploits might be the pinnacle of the stop-motion art, and serve as a fitting elegy.
To mark its tenth anniversary, Nightmare has been re-released in 3-D, which has made for some stunning visuals becoming all the more eye-popping (though nothing has been done to stop the film from slowing down during a few of the more lackluster musical numbers). In addition, a special edition soundtrack was released with covers of songs from the movie by the likes of Marilyn Manson, Fiona Apple and She Wants Revenge (whose cover of “Kidnap the Sandy Claws” sounds like every other one of their songs – somehow even the lyrics don’t strike you as anything that might not have been on their first album). The film was back in theatres this October and is still playing on select screens in Manhattan (perhaps “When In Manhattan” might cover the more choice venues where the film can be seen this season), but the October release really dredges up an old debate among the film’s fans – is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie? We’d like to offer a Sykes-Picot-like compromise: Since the movie shares equal elements of both All Hallow’s Eve and Christmastime, it falls pretty squarely in the middle. Henceforth Nightmare Before Christmas will be considered a Thanksgiving movie. Trust me, this makes about as much sense as anything in the Sykes-Picot agreement.
– John Capone
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