Research Agenda
Sep. 14th, 2011 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beamjockeyFrom last week's episode of Futurama, "Reincarnation:"
The episode consisted of three stories, each animated in a style radically different from Futurama's usual style.
I particularly liked the first, a black-and-white outing resembling 1930s cartoons, particularly those of the Fleischer Studios (home of Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and Popeye). Pie-cut pupils, check. Everybody bouncing up and down on spindly arms and legs, check. White four-fingered gloves, check. (But Bender, a robot with only three fingers on the ends of his arms, wore three-fingered gloves.) All these might be expected.
What wowed me was a very brief shot where Fry is hopping across the surface of a comet. The background and foreground of the landscape revolve past (with the help of computer-generated imagery, I'm sure) just as though they were three-dimensional objects... and exactly as though they had been created with the "stereo-optical" process Max Fleischer invented to combine animation cels with 3-D miniature sets. (See U. S. Patent 2,054,414 here.) This process was seen in such films as Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves and Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor.
The folks at Futurama know their animation history.
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Why are the laws of physics what thay are, instead of some other laws? To find out, we'd have to re-create the conditions before the Big Bang-- it would take decades of work by thousands of scientists, and a particle accelerator powered by dump trucks of flaming grant money-- of course, there'd be no guarantee of success, and in any case, I'd never live to see it!
LEELA: I'm surprised you lived through that sentence!
The episode consisted of three stories, each animated in a style radically different from Futurama's usual style.
I particularly liked the first, a black-and-white outing resembling 1930s cartoons, particularly those of the Fleischer Studios (home of Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and Popeye). Pie-cut pupils, check. Everybody bouncing up and down on spindly arms and legs, check. White four-fingered gloves, check. (But Bender, a robot with only three fingers on the ends of his arms, wore three-fingered gloves.) All these might be expected.
What wowed me was a very brief shot where Fry is hopping across the surface of a comet. The background and foreground of the landscape revolve past (with the help of computer-generated imagery, I'm sure) just as though they were three-dimensional objects... and exactly as though they had been created with the "stereo-optical" process Max Fleischer invented to combine animation cels with 3-D miniature sets. (See U. S. Patent 2,054,414 here.) This process was seen in such films as Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves and Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor.
The folks at Futurama know their animation history.
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Date: 2011-09-14 03:18 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sxFyu_U2go
Directed by a couple of guys from "The Simpsons," apparently. The Cabbin' around bit at the beginning goes on a trifle long, and after that everything is just right. The Fleischer riffs, general and specific, fly hard and fast, and the wall of faces near the end is (imo) a tribute to the non-repeating background they panned over in the "St. James Infirmary Blues" part of "Snow-White."