Silent movies survived most consistently in animation, with entire wordless series like Coyote Roadrunner and Pink Panther. BULLY FOR PINK is a particularly good entry with the world's most relatable grumpy rabbit.
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Your review of Shaun the Sheep pushed me to get around to watching it, and damn, it makes for a great intro to silents. Dialogue is completely unnecessary to the film, and explains itself without bogging down once.
When I grew up, it was very common indeed to find a central/eastern European cartoon sandwiched between Play School and Jackanory on BBC1, as they were usually dialogue-free – indeed, this was deliberate, as it made them more exportable, and animation was a big source of film-related hard currency.
In fact, the first foreign word that I consciously remember learning was "Konec", or the Czech for "The End". I wouldn't know how to pronounce it for a good couple of decades ("konets", not "konek"), but I can recall onscreen examples vividly as I saw them so often.
Remember the Tom and Jerry movie where their first course of action was to reveal that they could talk all along and making them downright chatty? And it was so weird?
Yeah, that's what the talkies were probably like in the 1920s too.
I will say, when Wile E. Coyote had a rare speaking appearance, I rather enjoyed the sleazy, faux posh tones Mel Blanc adopted but we're talking about a master here.
Tom of Tom and Jerry was funny when he sang but his speaking was never as good.
That's the rich, plummy voice I wanted the Gungan Commander to have. "Ah! I see you've met poor Jar-Jar! Sterling fellow, of course-- heart of gold-- but, you know, he's never been the same since The Incident."
random Tom and Jerry question: was the dog (who eventually became Spike) initially silent as well? I feel like the dog talked way more than Tom and Jerry ever did in the original cartoons
I love this observation. Possibly my favorite Looney Tunes is “One Froggy Evening,” which of course is a *sound* film – music is central – but its aesthetic is silent, and wordless.
Also, just because you picked a cartoon with a corrida, I have to plug this wordless marvel from 1963 https://35mm.online/vod/animacja/czerwone-i-czarne . The author turns 98 tomorrow, by the way, and is still at it.
I adore Witold Giersz's films – he's one of Poland's most distinctive animators, and given the contribution that Poland has made to animation over the decades that's no mean achievement.
He is also a lovely person, not an arrogant or braggardly bone in his body despite being possibly the most accomplished Polish animator and worldwide renowned filmmaker. My fave of his works is Little Western :D
Sadly, I never met him but in my experience animators often are lovely people – I suspect it very much goes with the territory. You can't really imagine a cigar-chewing megaphone-barking Cecil B DeMille type adapting well to the painstaking precision that animation demands!
Honestly? I've met some who are real jerks. Also one who was quite nice but would yell horrible swearwords at puppets when they wouldn't cooperate :D But a great deal of them are wonderful and unassuming.
Well, puppets need a certain amount of tough love. And admittedly I tended to meet them when I was closely involved with massively bigging up their work.
Not sure about today but 20 years ago there was still a strong tendency to teach animation as an artform best done without words, student directors being constantly accosted with "but does it really need dialogue?". I'm somewhat partial to this approach too, especially for short forms...
It's definitely good to learn how to tell a story without words to supplement the metaphors in the imagery- animation has more power there than live action. And the films are also more universal that way, no language barriers.
I'm hearing-impaired, and those "silent" cartoons (leaving aside music and sound effects, of course) were a tremendous boon to me. Believe it or not, I was even able to make basic sense of giant-mecha anime when I saw it for the first time as a tweenage military dependent living on Okinawa...
And captioning access has always been low priority, I remember having trouble finding things my friend and I could watch together when we were kids. Silent movies were perfect for us!
Yes, most authentic rabbit, they are sour little creatures
A word here for Cruiser, the sweetest rabbit. My friend would take him out into the yard and he'd do the happiness hop all around us, and when I skritched between his ears, he purred.
House bunnies' grumpy, often arrogant nature (my Panda, who's been with me for nearly 8 yrs now, tends to treat me as her food- & treat-bearing lackey, often taking it as lese-majeste if I offer to pet her) is IMO what keeps them from crossing the line from "adorable" to "syrupy & saccharine".
I got my first closed-caption decoder - those box thingies Sears sold - when I was in high school. When I was in college, the deaf students/sign-language club would have regular get-togethers where one of the features was showing an open-caption film (a pretty limited selection)...
...and I well remember that a LOT of hearing-impaired people became big foreign-language film fans almost involuntarily due to many of them being subtitled.
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Yeah, that's what the talkies were probably like in the 1920s too.
Tom of Tom and Jerry was funny when he sang but his speaking was never as good.
Also, real-world house rabbits - as I can testify firsthand, being human parent to two - are grouchy and disapproving by default nature.
Yes, most authentic rabbit, they are sour little creatures