THE HUMAN PRODUCT: ANIMATION AND ANTHROPOMORPHISM Sunday, January 9 at 2:00 p.m. Animated characters have a way of engaging our affections, sometimes insidiously, and advertisers have long used this ingratiating quality to lend human characteristics to their products. This program introduces characters like "Coily," "Reckless Rudolph and Sensible Sam" and "Tommy the Telephone," and shows how advertising films blended the real and the imaginary. WE DRIVERS Produced by Jam Handy Organization for General Motors Corporation, Public Relations Staff. Released June 20, 1936; remade in 1947, 1955, and 1962. 10 min., Technicolor and black-and-white, 35mm. Shown in the General Motors Building at the New York World's Fair, 1939-40. Though safety films are perhaps the category of ephemeral films best remembered by the general public, few realize their deeper character. On the one hand, the majority of safety films rest on a dishonest premise -- that individuals are solely responsible for industrial, home and traffic accidents. On the other, due in part to their corporate and official parentage, these often dramatic films seek to locate the cause of most mishaps within the scope of human decisions, and sometimes even within the human mind, while deflecting responsibility from employers, government agencies and manufacturers of unsafe equipment. (See a later program in this series, FILMS OF MENACE AND JEOPARDY, for further clarification of this idea.) We Drivers was a pioneering film released by General Motors Public Relations, remade at least three more times to update the look of the cars we see in every scene. This is the first and best incarnation, shown in 7,000 theaters over ten months in 1936-37 and also seen by 24 million people in schools, institutions and community groups. Produced as part of a industry-wide safety campaign, We Drivers dramatizes the struggle for good and evil within the mind of the all-too-human driver. In eight sequences, the animated characters "Reckless Rudolph" and "Sensible Sam" fight to outdo each other, interacting in the same frame as their human host. The one-reeler ends with a boxing match: Sam K.O.'s Rudy, and the referee's long count becomes a recitation of short and sweet maxims, ending with an admonition to "Obey all laws!" Like the print advertising of the 1930s, often tending towards tabloid-type headlines and copy designed to grab readers who were defecting to the radio, this film filters its complex message through ten patronizing slogans. In the end this entertaining film, on the surface designed to teach self-control, becomes an instance of mind control. DOWN THE GASOLINE TRAIL Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet, 1935. 8 min., 35mm. Who cares about the birth, life and death of a drop of gasoline? You will, after you see this film. Mixing smart animation, a bit of live action and an original musical score, Jam Handy's unknown animation wizards crafted a film that manages to engage the viewer in a process we might otherwise take for granted. A CASE OF SPRING FEVER Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet, 1940. 8 min., 35mm. Combining "an animated spring sprite" with live action, A Case of Spring Fever relates the story of one Gilbert Willoughby, who when entangled with an old boxspring wishes for an end to springs. "Coily" (the sprite) grants his wish, laughing hellishly as Gilbert encounters doors that won't close and telephone dials that won't turn. Humiliated at every juncture, Gilbert finally capitulated on the golf course, is forced to apologize to Coily and expresses appreciation for the comfort and value of springs in everyday life, particularly the springs in the Chevrolet motorcar. This film combines two features familiar to fans of industrial films: the product personified as a being with human characteristics, and the "what would we ever do without ---" syndrome. It runs short, sweet, and not too preachy; a welcome trend as Coily is one of the most obnoxious and irritating animated characters ever created. A COACH FOR CINDERELLA Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet, 1937. Technicolor, 9 min., 35mm. Chevrolet's "Direct Mass Selling" films, produced by the Jam Handy Organization from 1935 to the outbreak of World War II, presented demonstrations and explanations of science, technology and invention in an entertaining manner. Like many of the best industrial films, they contained no explicit advertising, and were therefore considered suitable to be shown in classrooms and on the handful of TV stations that broadcast before the war. So as to achieve a suitable degree of anonymity, Handy worked the Chevrolet name or model profile into the pictures in novel ways. Of 110 films in the Direct Mass Selling series, half a dozen were Technicolor cartoons produced to resemble the studio product of the day. We don't yet know who the animators were, but it's clear they were drawn from the best of the Hollywood cartoon cadre. A Coach for Cinderella, the first industrial film produced in Technicolor, was the best of these Jam Handy animations, and has been a favorite of animation collectors and historians for years. A Coach for Cinderella contains a few pictorial and musical resemblances to European advertising films (especially the early work of George Pal for the Dutch electrical conglomerate Philips); one of several indications in the Handy oeuvre that exiled European animators may have relocated to its Detroit studios. (The stop-motion animation in films such as Auto-Lite on Parade and Precisely So, similar to Oskar Fischinger's German work of the early Thirties, is another clue.) But Cinderella also set a standard for quality to which other American advertising animation would aspire, and it is said that its scene in which the birds wrap Cinderella's gown around the wooden dummy was appropriated by Walt Disney for his own Cinderella. DRAWING ACCOUNT Jam Handy Organization for Chevrolet, 1941. 9 min., 35mm. Drawing Account, a late film in the Direct Mass Selling series, shows the materials, process and organization of cel animation, but it's included in this program because it reveals something of the way in which industrial film producers and clients interacted and did business together. Further, it exemplifies the ethic of Jamison Handy, an avant-gardist at heart even as he presented himself in conservative blue suits -- to use film technique to reveal what would otherwise be invisible and to peel away the skin of familiarity that acts as a barrier to the understanding of processes. JUST IMAGINE Jam Handy Organization for the Bell System, 1947. 10 min., 16mm. Director (of animation sequences): Frank Goldman. For years Bell Telephone print advertising boasted of the complex technology embodied in the ubiquitous home telephone. This is the film version of all these ads. Just Imagine boasts of the huge number of parts inside a telephone, and the vast number of different raw materials represented therein. In this age of simplified, black-box technology, can you imagine a manufacturer boasting in the same way? Like other Bell System films, Just Imagine somehow gives the impression of having been passed on and approved by a variety of executive committees, each of whom removed a layer of soul and humanity. The final product is user- friendly enough, but a bit impersonal and anonymous, like a long-distance operator, and I always find myself waiting for some kind of warmer ending that doesn't happen. Nevertheless, the stop-motion animation is just great, especially the assembly of the hundreds of telephone dial parts, and the "Tommy Telephone" character is engaging enough. See also the Bell System film Once Upon a Honeymoon in THE RAINBOW IS YOURS program. THE ADVENTURES OF JUNIOR RAINDROP Produced by Forest Service Film Unit, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1948, 8 min., Kodachrome, 16mm. Director: Carl Oaney. Cinematography: George Ortlieb. Animation: Seymour Pagne and Rudolph Winddin. Script: Ethel Kamm. This surprisingly slick government film was made by our government's pioneer film production unit at the Department of Agriculture. Although the blend of live action and animation within one film seems a bit off (one would hope for a fully animated film) the realization of the archetypal characters (Mother Earth, Father Sun and the delinquent Junior Raindrop) is quite amusing. There's a vast body of Federal government films (hundreds, maybe even thousands) relating to conservation and the environment, some of which date back to the 'teens. An enterprising scholar might well return to some of these films and look at how they "naturalize" things that we have tended to invest with mysticism and spirituality, such as trees, the soil and water. A IS FOR ATOM Produced by John Sutherland Productions for General Electric Co., 1953, Technicolor, 14 min., 16mm. Script: True Boardman. Director: Carl Urbano. Art direction: Gerald Nevius, Lew Keller. Production design: Tony Rivera. Animators: Arnold Gillespie, Emery Hawkins. Score: Eugene Poddany. Although the "Atoms for Peace" campaign was formally launched in 1957, peaceful use of atomic energy was part of corporate America's agenda as early as the first few months after Hiroshima. A Is For Atom, an artifact of this expanding initiative, takes this highly loaded and threatening issue straight to the public in an attempt to "humanize" the figure of the atom. Other Sutherland films (Make Mine Freedom and Destination Earth) are featured in the MAKE MINE FREEDOM: PATRIOTISM AND PUBLIC LIFE program. Meet King Joe is excerpted on the To New Horizons: Ephemeral Films 1931-1945 CD-ROM. GOOD WRINKLES: THE STORY OF A REMARKABLE FRUIT All-Scope Pictures for Sunsweet (a trademark of California Prune and Apricot Growers Association), 1951. 21 min., Technicolor, 16mm. A Hugh Harman-Rudolf Ising Production. An extremely engaging film by the noted Harman-Ising animation team, featuring characters that might be called the uncles of the California Raisins. .