Animation Double-Feature: Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town

Feature-length animated films are so ubiquitous now, we rarely stop to wonder where the concept came from. From the dawn of animation in the late 1800s until Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, this art form was considered far too time-consuming and labor-intensive to extend beyond short one-reelers, shown as the opening act to live action movies. Disney changed all that. And aside from the bright anomaly of Don Bluth Studios, Walt Disney Studios utterly dominated the field right up until the 21st century.

But what is less well-known is that, in the beginning, Disney faced serious competition from another animation group: Fleischer Studios. Brothers Max and Dave Fleischer developed their own distinctive style of animation and storytelling, one that was (at least at first) heavily influenced by a gritter, more urban humor and exciting jazz sensibility than Disney's rather tame offerings. And when Disney achieved success with its first animated feature films, Fleischer Studios rose to the challenge, and produced two amazing - and sadly, mostly forgotten - cartoons: Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town.  

So, the background: Fleischer Studios was formed by Max and Dave Fleischer. Max was the inventor and the director, the artistic vision; Dave was the money man and the leader. Today, the siblings are best known for their Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons; in the media junkyard of YouTube, you'll often see these animations appear as "BANNNED Pre-Code Cartoons!", held up as examples of shockingly salacious and/or racist cartoons from a barbaric past. The Fleischers' early work was certainly rough

Miz Boop and a herd of admirers in "Snow White (1933)"

around the edges, reveling in jazz and hallucinatory imagery; the ostensibly "innocent" flapper sex-kitten Betty Boop was often pursued aggressively by shapeshifting, singing apparitions, accompanied by her "nice-guy" boyfriend Bimbo (the dog) panting along beside her. While certainly exploitative of black culture and engaging in plenty of stereotypes, these cartoons made no effort to hide their affinity for, and perhaps sympathy with, the emerging art and lifestyle of Jazz: fun, drug-fueled, sexy, and more than a little dangerous. Something was certainly lost artistically when the Hays Code went into effect, making Betty Boop almost schoolmarmish and the cartoons much duller and whiter.

   

Max Fleischer's Rotoscope
patent diagram

But what is mostly forgotten are Max and Dave Fleischer's technical contributions to animation. Max Fleischer himself invented the process of Rotoscoping, in which animation cels are traced over projected live-action frames. While better-known as the lumpy, jittery style of Ralph Bakshi's work - most norotiously in Lord of the Rings (1979) - in Fleischer Studios' hands it lent animation a naturalness of movement and vitality unknown in the animation of the time, especially for human characters. Likewise their dynamic backgrounds were composed of 3-D models set on a turntable, allowing their animations to travel through landscapes with a great amount of depth and character. While Disney ultimately won out and became the dominant force in American animation, Fleischer Studios was a major technical innovator in the field.

   

  Gulliver's Travels (1939) was Fleischer Studios' first full-length animation feature film, and only the second to be released in the United States. After the immense success of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the Fleischer's parent company, Paramount ordered a fairytale cartoon movie of their own, to be delivered in 18 months (Snow White had over three years of development). It was a monumental undertaking. Over 800 animators were added, and the picture still went over budget and missed deadlines; it barely made the Christmas theatrical release. It was a box office success, but Paramount levied a $350,000 penalty for going over budget; furthermore, Dave and Max Fleischer were no longer on speaking terms. The seeds of the Studio's downfall had been sown.

    The plot of Gulliver's Travels is a stripped-down fairytale version of "Guliver in Lilliput", the first voyage depicted in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels...no sharp Swiftian satire here. Essentially Gulliver washes up on an island where the kings of Lilliput and Blefuscu are about to go to ware over what song will be played at their childrens' wedding. Gulliver - when he wakes up - is recruited by Lilliput, much to the chagrin of warlike Blefuscu.

    I'll start of with the bad first, since Gulliver's Travels is frontloaded that way. The first quarter of the movie is a lot of faffing about. There's an extended sequence where the two kings argue, and while it does establish the asinine reason for the war, it's also pretty uninteresting. Princess Glory and Prince David are little more than poorly-animated cutouts, singing stiltedly at one another - they don't even merit a closeup. Even after Gulliver wakes up (halfway through the film!) all he utters is, "My, my" in a way that makes him seem distracted and slightly dense. If all this seems like nitpicking, it's because the film seems more interested in cluttering up the runtime with tired cartoon gags than actually moving the plot forward. All in all the first half blunders along, perfectly charming for a 30's cartoon perhaps, but nonetheless slow and disorganized. Its one saving grace is the absolutely marvelous extended engineering sequence, both imaginative and technically brilliant, where the Lilliputian townsfolk construct a gantry to haul Gulliver to the castle; his progress through town flaps signboards and ruffles the citizens in a way that makes the town seem vibrant and alive, much more than a watercolor backdrop.

And those crowd scenes! One of my pet peeves with animated crowd sequences is the use of static characters and/or repetitive motion. But here, it seems like each and every individual is painstakingly animated with a life of their own, yet functioning as a cohesive unit. Maybe it's something only an artist (or maybe just me) would care about, yet to me it shows the amount of love the animators had for their craft.

"What the hell keeps biting me...?" Gulliver and a hapless
Lilliputian. This cel is a good example of hybrid Rotoscope/
freehand animation; Gulliver is traced from footage of the
actor, while Gabby is traditionally animated. Note the
lush watercolor backgrounds.

Gulliver's Travels finally finds its legs during a celebratory musical number, a swing session that feels like a return to Fleischer's old strength. While not groundbreaking, it injects life and joy into an otherwise trite story. After this we start to see characters come into their own. Even Gulliver's "My, my" takes on a cheeky tone, and he mischievously becomes complicit in Glory and Davids's romance. King Little is a hoot, as a tiny-voiced but insistent coward, as are Blefuscu's nefarious spies, all eyes and noses and black cloaks. They even make the story harrowing as they concoct a way to kill Gulliver; somehow his chortling, "what larks" confidence makes the danger all the more suspenseful. But of course he's saved at the last minute, and the movie wraps on a very touching note of peace and brotherhood. And nobody dies!

    After the success of Guliver's Travels, Paramount ordered a second full-length animated feature, slated for a 1941 release. This film would originally be titled Mr. Bug Goes to Town...then re-released as Hoppity Goes to Town...then re-re-released as Bugville. The confusion of names gives you an idea of the tragedy of what is one of the best, but also least-kown, animated feature films ever made.

    But more on that later. The plot concerns a community of bugs under threat from the encroachment of "The Human Ones", who unknowingly trample and destroy their homes. Hoppity, a sweet but gormless grasshopper, has just returned to seek the hand of his sweetheart, Honey, from her father Mr. Bumble. Unbeknownst to him, the opportunistic "property magnate", C. Bagley Beetle, also has designs on Honey and the town itself. Beetle sends his henchmen Swat and Smack to assassinate Hoppity, while Hoppity and Honey set out to find a new home for the bugs.

Honey and Hoppity.

 There's a lot to love here. The backgrounds and characters are lovingly rendered, and each of the bugs has a real personality and identity. C. Bageley Beetle is a top-notch villain, pompous and scheming and continuously frustrated in rather hilarious ways. Swat and Smack might be goons, but they have a snarky back-and-forth patter, and ridiculous Brooklyn accents to match. There was a sequence toward the beginning where Hoppity gets electrocuted while dancing (what else?) the Jitterbug that made me say "wow". The Human Ones, with the exception of two key characters, never speak, nor do we see their faces; they are rotoscoped as huge, brutal, relentless forces of nature, rushing about in a terrifying way; the climactic construction sequence is harrowing in a way I've never quite seen in an animation. The plot itself is surprisingly sophisticated, and shows that gentrification is not just a contemporary problem, or even a strictly human problem - even bugs have scheming rent-raisers and neighborhood-busters. And finally, there are those tiny touches: for instance, I realized with some delight that Honey's face is shaped like a stylized bee! Does it move the plot forward? Does it put asses in seats? No, it was done purely for the love of the design.

    There are a couple of tired "product of its time" moments in this movie. The first has Hoppity in "Ash Face" as an excuse for a Blackface gag. Because of the explosion, you see. And later, Swat does an Asian impression because he's holding rice. There's a couple of American Indian gags that are slightly less egregious...As always there's little point to any of this, except that pretty much every animation studio was doing it in the late 30's and early 40's (Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes especially). Who was actually laughing at this? Would audiences guffaw at these run-down tropes? Unfortunately, I think the answer is "yes" - these were decades when racist humor was the lowest common denominator among audiences.

Ultimately it's up to you whether these small incidences ruin your experience. Mr. Bug Goes to Town is otherwise one of the best animated movies I've ever seen, made with loving attention to detail and strong artistic and technical skill.

Mr. Bug Goes to Town was released on December 5th, 1941. Two days later Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and with it any chance of Mr. Bug's box office success - such was the effect of the disaster that even Disney's Pinocchio lost money and had to be re-issued. Fleischer Studios had no such staying power. Paramount had already put the feuding Max and Dave Fleischer on notice, and after their film flopped, both were forced to resign. Their studio was reorganized and renamed Famous Studios. Never again would they make a product as beautiful and ambitious as Gulliver's Travels or Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Mr. Bug lingered in lost-film purgatory, being tepidly re-released by Paramount as Hoppity Goes to Town, then showing up in the 70's and 80's on home video, then being re-re-released on DVD as Bugville.

It's impossible not to think about what might have been, had the Pearl Harbor attack not happened (or happened later). Could the Fleischers have continued to challenge Disney for dominance in the field of animated feature films? While it's exciting to imagine, I don't think it could've continued; Fleischer Studios was already struggling financially, and Max and Dave's feud would have only made matters worse. Walt Disney already had too much momentum, his animation department too large and organized, his leadership too ironclad. Walt Disney Studios was already becoming the juggernaut that we know today, and no other animation studio could quite catch up. Fleischer Studios would fade into obscurity, remembered mostly for their racy early work, their craft appreciated by animation aficionados but otherwise unremembered.

Fleischer Studios' entire library is now available for free on YouTube - track down these cartoons and give them a watch.