Humpty Bumpty the camel should've gotten an Oscar for this amazing breakdown from the 1938 Looney Tune PORKY IN EGYPT.
My favorite cartoon freakout is Daffy Duck completely losing it in DUCK! RABBIT! DUCK! So much pent-up frustration from years of getting his beak shot off.
Rare example of Bugs Bunny losing his cool and flipping his lid in 1943's TORTOISE WINS BY A HARE. Beautiful distorted animation by Rod Scribner in this.
Mel Blanc is at his absolute best in this really affecting scene from BIRDS ANONYMOUS where Sylvester finally can't take it anymore.
I love this scene where Tom finally goes ballistic and gets his revenge on Jerry (from MILLION DOLLAR CAT).
Amazing cartoon flipout from the Tex Avery classic DROOPY'S DOUBLE TROUBLE. This is how I want to go out.
You have to love Donald Duck going ballistic in this horrifying clip from MICKEY AND THE BEANSTALK.
And let us never forget Donald Duck’s greatest flipout, from the masterful 1943 anti-Hitler cartoon DER FUEHRER’S FACE, where Donald is driven bonkers by Nazi oppression and lunges into hallucinatory madness.
Great scene of Daisy Duck going mental / suicidal / cannibalistic (from DONALD'S DILEMMA).
More incredible cartoon freakouts: Woody Woodpecker going demented while shaving this guy in THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. There's murder in Woody's eyes here.
Popeye's convulsions in HOSPITALIKY are genius.
Lucy going crazy on Schroeder's piano (from BE MY VALENTINE, CHARLIE BROWN) is one of the great Peanuts scenes. Full of raw pain, typical of Schulz.
Some of the best cartoon freak-outs of all time are from Ren & Stimpy. This sequence from SPACE MADNESS is gloriously twisted.
The most hilariously disturbing moment in TV history. (From SVEN HOEK.)
Great Ren & Stimpy flipout from MAN'S BEST FRIEND, the episode that got banned. Some great emotional voicework by @TheBillyWest in this.
@TheBillyWest Few things are funnier than Homer Simpson trying to kill his family in TREEHOUSE OF HORROR V.
@TheBillyWest A favorite underrated bit from childhood: Ickis getting consumed by greed and paranoia in the Aaahh!!! Real Monsters episode COLD HARD TOENAILS. The voicework by @charlie_adler is deliciously impassioned and energetic.
@TheBillyWest@charlie_adler Speaking of @charlie_adler, any moment from Cow & Chicken would qualify as an A+ cartoon freakout, but this is a particularly hyperactive sequence from STAY AWAKE.
THREAD: In 1937, the Nazis exhibited art they deemed “Degenerate” in order to mock it. I was looking through a list of these amazing artists the Nazis hated, and I was ashamed at how many of them I didn’t know, so let’s look at their work together! Here’s Alexej von Jawlensky.
All of these artists were targeted by the Nazis because they were "modernist." In other words, they were pushing boundaries and making experimental work that went beyond straight realism. These boldly colorful works by Arnold Topp are a good example.
César Klein's work is so cool. He was a German Expressionist painter, and designer of silent movies like GENUINE (1920).
I couldn't pick my favorite films from 2023, so instead, here are my favorites from 100 years ago!
Best movie of 1923: SAFETY LAST. Harold Lloyd's masterpiece is just as funny and thrilling as it was a century ago.
Best Animated Short of 1923: BEDTIME. These Ko-Ko the Clown cartoons from the Fleischer studio blow my mind whenever I watch them. So much creativity popping out all over the place. This print comes from @cartoonsonfilm.
Best Stop-Motion Short of 1923: VOICE OF THE NIGHTINGALE by Ladislas Starevich. The early use of color gives the short a dreamlike atmosphere. Incredible stuff.
THREAD: Anybody have a favorite bit of water animation?
The best for me might be Disney’s PINOCCHIO from back in 1940. Amazing mix of stunning realism and painterly abstraction. You could only get a look like this in animation.
Aleksandr Petrov’s paint-on-glass water in THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA is absolutely gorgeous.
Studio Ghibli is always good at water. I love those fish waves in PONYO.
THREAD: One of my favorite movie periods is the Pre-Code Era (1929-1934), the racy period before the Hays Code kept movies of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s under strict moral guidelines. Here are some of my favorite Pre-Code lines, like this one from 1933's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM.
One of the harshest of all movie insults, delivered by Joan Blondell in the great 1933 musical FOOTLIGHT PARADE.
Another ace line reading from Joan Blondell, also from FOOTLIGHT PARADE.
THREAD: What’s the most bizarre entry in your favorite cartoon series? I thought I’d highlight shorts with popular characters that stand out as particularly weird.
For Bugs Bunny, it’s 1946’s THE BIG SNOOZE, where Bugs hops into Elmer Fudd's head to give him a surreal nightmare.
For Daffy Duck, it’s hard to get more nuts than this early entry - 1938’s THE DAFFY DOC - where Daffy goes ballistic at a hospital and chases Porky with a saw to perform surgery. The dialogue that doesn’t match with the mouth movements only strengthens the oddness.
Porky Pig starred in one of the wildest cartoons ever - 1938's PORKY IN WACKYLAND - where he chases a reality-bending do-do bird. This is director Bob Clampett at his most dizzyingly bonkers, and it was even preserved by the National Film Registry.