Where The Simpsons Began: Discover the Original Shorts That Appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–1989)

When it first went on air in the late nine­teen-eight­ies, Fox had to prove itself capa­ble of play­ing in a tele­vi­su­al league with the likes of NBC, CBS, and ABC. To that end, it began build­ing its prime-time line­up with two orig­i­nal pro­grams more the­mat­i­cal­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly dar­ing than any­thing on those staid net­works: the sit­com Mar­ried… with Chil­dren and the sketch com­e­dy series The Tracey Ull­man Show. Before and after com­mer­cial breaks, the lat­ter treat­ed its ear­ly view­ers to a series of irrev­er­ent ani­mat­ed shorts cre­at­ed by an acclaimed car­toon­ist and fea­tur­ing the vocal tal­ents of Dan Castel­lan­e­ta, Julie Kavn­er, and Nan­cy Cartwright. I speak, of course, of Dr. N!Godatu.

On an alter­nate time­line, per­haps the per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al adven­tures of that near-unflap­pable psy­chother­a­pist were spun off into their own hit series that broke every record for prime-time ani­ma­tion and is now in its 36th sea­son.

Here in our real­i­ty, how­ev­er, that’s been the des­tiny of The Simp­sons, which also began as The Tracey Ull­man Show’s bumper enter­tain­ment. Dr. N!Godatu van­ished after a few weeks, nev­er to be seen again, but the Simp­son fam­i­ly remained for two full years, mak­ing their final short-from appear­ance in May of 1989. Sev­en months lat­er, The Simp­sons made its Christ­mas-spe­cial debut — an event that, if you don’t remem­ber watch­ing, I can’t count you as a mem­ber of my gen­er­a­tion.

Not that, giv­en my young age, I’d ever actu­al­ly seen The Tracey Ull­man Show at the time. But the hard pro­mo­tion­al push lead­ing up to that first real Simp­sons offered glimpses into an ani­mat­ed world that looked and felt com­plete­ly nov­el. (Hav­ing grown accus­tomed over gen­er­a­tions to the show’s aes­thet­ic, we eas­i­ly for­get how bizarre its yel­low-skinned, uni­ver­sal­ly over­bite-afflict­ed char­ac­ters once looked.) Many who tuned in would­n’t have been aware that that look and feel had­n’t been cre­at­ed out of whole cloth, but rather had emerged through the evo­lu­tion­ary process you can wit­ness in the 48 orig­i­nal Simp­sons shorts col­lect­ed in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post (and the hour-long con­sol­i­dat­ed video here).

To even a casu­al Simp­sons view­er, every­thing in these shorts will seem at once famil­iar and “off” in myr­i­ad ways. The design of the char­ac­ters looks both harsh­er and loos­er than it would lat­er become, and cer­tain of their voic­es, espe­cial­ly Castel­lan­e­ta’s Wal­ter Matthau-esque Homer, have yet to reflect the per­son­al­i­ties they would lat­er devel­op. The con­ven­tion­al­ly “car­toony” ani­ma­tion also dis­torts bod­ies and faces in ways that have long since been pro­hib­it­ed by the show’s offi­cial style guide­lines. Even so, there are occa­sion­al jokes and even haunt­ing moments of the kind we know from the first cou­ple of sea­sons, if noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar to fore­shad­ow The Simp­sons’ nine­teen-nineties gold­en age — or the three decades’ worth of episodes that have fol­lowed it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Rise and Fall of The Simp­sons: An In-Depth Video Essay Explores What Made the Show Great, and When It All Came to an End

Before The Simp­sons: Homer Groen­ing Directs a 1969 Short Film, The Sto­ry, Star­ring His Kids Mag­gie, Lisa & Matt

27 Movies Ref­er­ences in The Simp­sons Put Side-by-Side with the Movie Scenes They Paid Trib­ute To

Before The Simp­sons, Matt Groen­ing Illus­trat­ed a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Com­put­ers (1989)

The Simp­sons Reimag­ined as a Russ­ian Art Film

Thomas Pyn­chon Edits His Lines on The Simp­sons: “Homer is my role mod­el and I can’t speak ill of him.”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Story Of Menstruation: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

From 1945 to 1951, Dis­ney pro­duced a series of edu­ca­tion­al films to be shown in Amer­i­can schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t dri­ve fast. Dis­ney cov­ered these sub­jects in its edu­ca­tion­al shorts, and then even­tu­al­ly got to the touchy sub­ject of biol­o­gy and sex­u­al­i­ty. If there was ever a com­pa­ny suit­ed to talk about “vagi­nas” in the 1940s in a fam­i­ly-friend­ly way, it was Dis­ney. Hence The Sto­ry of Men­stru­a­tion.

The film runs 10 min­utes, com­bin­ing sci­en­tif­ic facts with hygiene tips, and it was actu­al­ly com­mis­sioned by the Inter­na­tion­al Cel­lo-Cot­ton Com­pa­ny, the fore­run­ner of Kim­ber­ly-Clark, the mak­er of Kotex prod­ucts. An esti­mat­ed 105 mil­lion stu­dents watched the film in sex-ed class­es across the US. And, accord­ing to Tin­ker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny from the Inside Out, the film remained a main­stay in schools until the 1960s. It’s now in the pub­lic domain. When you’re done, you’ll also want to watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

No Women Need Apply: A Dis­heart­en­ing 1938 Rejec­tion Let­ter from Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion

Your Body Dur­ing Ado­les­cence: A Naked­ly Unashamed Sex Ed Film from 1955

Watch Dat­ing Dos and Don’ts: An Old-School Instruc­tion­al Guide to Teenage Romance (1949)

Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney

At a time when much of ani­ma­tion was con­sumed with lit­tle anthro­po­mor­phized ani­mals sport­ing white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. His work is all about danc­ing geo­met­ric shapes and abstract forms spin­ning around a flat fea­ture­less back­ground. Think of a Mon­dri­an or Male­vich paint­ing that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mes­mer­iz­ing ele­gance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Opti­cal Poem above. Cir­cles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hun­gar­i­an Rhap­sody. This is, of course, well before the days of dig­i­tal. While it might be rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple to manip­u­late a shape in a com­put­er, Fischinger’s tech­nique was decid­ed­ly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fish­ing line, he indi­vid­u­al­ly pho­tographed each frame, some­how doing it all in sync with Liszt’s com­po­si­tion. Think of the hours of mind-numb­ing work that must have entailed.

(Note: The copy of the film above has become fad­ed, dis­tort­ing some of the orig­i­nal vibrant col­ors used in Fischinger’s films. Nonethe­less it gives you a taste of his cre­ative work–of how he mix­es ani­ma­tion with music. The clips below give you a more accu­rate sense of Fischinger’s orig­i­nal col­ors.)

Born in 1900 near Frank­furt, Fischinger trained as a musi­cian and an archi­tect before dis­cov­er­ing film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and start­ed pro­duc­ing more and more abstract ani­ma­tions that ran before fea­ture films. They proved to be pop­u­lar too, at least until the Nation­al Social­ists came to pow­er. The Nazis were some of the most fanat­i­cal art crit­ics of the 20th Cen­tu­ry, and they hat­ed any­thing non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokosch­ka and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky among oth­ers were writ­ten off as “degen­er­ate.” (By stark con­trast, the CIA report­ed­ly loved Abstract Expres­sion­ism, but that’s a dif­fer­ent sto­ry.) Fischinger fled Ger­many in 1936 for the sun and glam­our of Hol­ly­wood.

The prob­lem was that Hol­ly­wood was real­ly not ready for Fischinger. Pro­duc­ers saw the obvi­ous tal­ent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audi­ences. “[Fischinger] was going in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion than any oth­er ani­ma­tor at the time,” said famed graph­ic design­er Chip Kidd in an inter­view with NPR. “He was real­ly explor­ing abstract pat­terns, but with a pur­pose to them — pio­neer­ing what tech­ni­cal­ly is the music video.”

Fischinger’s most wide­ly seen Amer­i­can work was his short con­tri­bu­tion to Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia. Fischinger cre­at­ed con­cept draw­ings for Fan­ta­sia, but most were not used, and only one short scene fea­tures his actu­al draw­ings. “The film is not real­ly my work,” he lat­er recalled. “Rather, it is the most inartis­tic prod­uct of a fac­to­ry. …One thing I def­i­nite­ly found out: that no true work of art can be made with that pro­ce­dure used in the Dis­ney stu­dio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Dis­ney again and instead retreat­ed into the art world.

There he found admir­ers who were recep­tive to his vision. John Cage, for one, con­sid­ered the Ger­man animator’s exper­i­ments to be a major influ­ence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meet­ing with Fischinger in an inter­view with Daniel Charles in 1968.

One day I was intro­duced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite pre­cise­ly artic­u­lat­ed on pieces of tra­di­tion­al music. When I was intro­duced to him, he began to talk with me about the spir­it, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to lib­er­ate that spir­it is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to per­cus­sion.

You can find excerpts of oth­er Fischinger films over at Vimeo.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Sep­tem­ber, 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Avant-Garde Ani­mat­ed Films of Wal­ter Ruttmann, Still Strik­ing­ly Fresh a Cen­tu­ry Lat­er (1921–1925)

Night on Bald Moun­tain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pin­screen Ani­ma­tion Based on Mussorgsky’s Mas­ter­piece (1933)

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. 

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See Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Visualized in Colorfully Animated Scores

Music is often described as the most abstract of all the arts, and arguably the least visu­al as well. But these qual­i­ties, which seem so basic to the nature of the form, have been chal­lenged for at least three cen­turies, not least by com­posers them­selves. Take Anto­nio Vival­di, whose Le quat­tro sta­gioni, or The Four Sea­sons, of 1718–1720 evoke not just broad impres­sions of the epony­mous parts of the year, but a vari­ety of nat­ur­al and human ele­ments char­ac­ter­is­tic to them. In the course of less than an hour, its lis­ten­ers — whether of the ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry or the ear­ly twen­ty-first — “see” spring, sum­mer, autumn, and win­ter unfold vivid­ly before their mind’s eye.

Now, com­pos­er Stephen Mali­nows­ki has visu­al­ized The Four Sea­sons in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent way. As pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, he uses his Music Ani­ma­tion Machine to cre­ate what we might call graph­i­cal scores, which abstract­ly rep­re­sent the instru­men­tal parts that make up wide­ly loved clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions in time with the music itself.

On this page, you can watch four videos, with each one visu­al­iz­ing one of the piece’s con­cer­ti. Fans of the Music Ani­ma­tion Machine will notice that its for­mer­ly sim­ple visu­als have tak­en a big step for­ward, though what can look at first like a psy­che­del­ic light show also has a clear and leg­i­ble order.

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For “Spring” and “Autumn,” Mali­nows­ki ani­mates per­for­mances by vio­lin­ist Shunske Sato and musi­cians of the Nether­lands Bach Soci­ety; for “Sum­mer” and “Win­ter,” per­for­mances by Cyn­thia Miller Freivo­gel and ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here for their ren­di­tions of Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos and “Air on the G String,” Pachel­bel’s Canon, and indeed The Four Sea­sons). Gen­er­al­ly under­stand­able at a glance — and in many ways, more illu­mi­nat­ing than actu­al­ly see­ing the musi­cians play their instru­ments — these scores also use a sys­tem called “har­mon­ic col­or­ing,” which Malinkows­ki explains here. This may add up to a com­plete audio­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence, but if you’d also like a lit­er­ary ele­ment, why not pull up The Four Sea­sonsaccom­pa­ny­ing son­nets while you’re at it?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why We Love Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons: An Ani­mat­ed Music Les­son

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons Per­formed on Orig­i­nal Baroque Instru­ments

Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons Brought to Life in Sand Ani­ma­tions by the Hun­gar­i­an Artist Fer­enc Cakó

Yes’ Rick Wake­man Explores Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons, and Why It Was the First Con­cept Album

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Come to Life in Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Scores: Stravin­sky, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation (1911–1914)

“Con­sid­er­ing that, in a car­toon, any­thing can hap­pen that the mind can imag­ine, the comics have gen­er­al­ly depict­ed pret­ty mun­dane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes cre­ator Bill Wat­ter­son. “Sure, there have been talk­ing ani­mals, a few space­ships and what­not, but the comics have rarely shown us any­thing tru­ly bizarre. Lit­tle Nemo’s dream imagery, how­ev­er, is as mind-bend­ing today as ever, and Win­sor McCay remains one of the great­est inno­va­tors and manip­u­la­tors of the com­ic strip medi­um.” And Lit­tle Nemo, which sprawled across entire news­pa­per pages in the ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, pushed artis­tic bound­aries not just as a com­ic, but also as a film.

When first seen in 1911, the twelve-minute short Lit­tle Nemo was titled Win­sor McCay, the Famous Car­toon­ist of the N.Y. Her­ald and His Mov­ing Comics. A mix­ture of live action and ani­ma­tion, it dra­ma­tizes McCay mak­ing a gen­tle­man’s wager with his col­leagues that he can draw fig­ures that move — an idea that might have come with a cer­tain plau­si­bil­i­ty, giv­en that speed-draw­ing was already a suc­cess­ful part of his vaude­ville act. Meet­ing this chal­lenge entails draw­ing 4,000 pic­tures, a task as demand­ing for McCay the char­ac­ter as it was for McCay the real artist. This labor adds up to the four min­utes that end the film, which con­tains moments of still-impres­sive flu­id­i­ty, tech­nique, and humor.

Clear­ly pos­sessed of a sense of ani­ma­tion’s poten­tial as an art form, McCay went on to make nine more films, and ulti­mate­ly con­sid­ered them his proud­est work. Like the Lit­tle Nemo movie, he used his sec­ond such effort, Ger­tie the Dinosaur, in his vaude­ville act, per­form­ing along­side the pro­jec­tion to cre­ate the effect of his giv­ing the tit­u­lar pre­his­toric crea­ture com­mands. “In some ways, McCay was the fore­run­ner of Walt Dis­ney in terms of Amer­i­can ani­ma­tion,” writes Lucas O. Seastrom at The Walt Dis­ney Fam­i­ly Muse­um. “In order to cre­ate a lov­able dinosaur and accom­plish these seem­ing­ly mag­i­cal feats, McCay used math­e­mat­i­cal pre­ci­sion and ground­break­ing tech­niques, such as the process of inbe­tween­ing, which lat­er became a Dis­ney stan­dard.”

More than once, McCay the ani­ma­tor drew inspi­ra­tion from the work of McCay the news­pa­per artist: in 1921, he made a cou­ple of motion pic­tures out of his pre-Lit­tle Nemo sleep-themed com­ic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But for his most ambi­tious ani­mat­ed work, he turned toward his­to­ry — and, at the time, rather recent his­to­ry — to re-cre­ate the sink­ing of the RMS Lusi­ta­nia, an event that his employ­er, the news­pa­per mag­nate William Ran­dolph Hearst, had insist­ed on down­play­ing at the time due to his stance against the U.S.’ join­ing the Great War. Decades there­after, Looney Tunes ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones said that “the two most impor­tant peo­ple in ani­ma­tion are Win­sor McCay and Walt Dis­ney, and I’m not sure which should go first.” Watch these and McCay’s oth­er sur­viv­ing films on this Youtube playlist, and you can decide for your­self.

H/T Izzy

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Ani­ma­tion, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistis­cope to Pixar

Vis­it the World of Lit­tle Nemo Artist Win­sor McCay: Three Clas­sic Ani­ma­tions

Watch Fan­tas­magorie, the World’s First Ani­mat­ed Car­toon (1908)

Win­sor McCay Ani­mates the Sink­ing of the Lusi­ta­nia in the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film (1918)

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions (1917 to 1931)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929)

The July 17, 1929 issue of Vari­ety car­ried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skele­tons hoof and frol­ic,” the peak of whose hilar­i­ty “is reached when one skele­ton plays the spine of anoth­er in xylo­phone fash­ion, using a pair of thigh bones as ham­mers.” The final lines of this strong rec­om­men­da­tion add that “all takes place in a grave­yard. Don’t bring your chil­dren.” The review amus­ing­ly reflects shifts in pub­lic taste over the past near-cen­tu­ry — unless the sight of skele­tons play­ing each oth­er like xylo­phones is more com­i­cal­ly endur­ing than I imag­ine — but those final words add a note of breath­tak­ing irony, for the short under review is The Skele­ton Dance, pro­duced and direct­ed by Walt Dis­ney.

Despite the pow­er of Dis­ney’s name, this par­tic­u­lar film is bet­ter under­stood as the work of Ub Iwerks, who ani­mat­ed most of it by him­self in about six weeks. He and Dis­ney had been work­ing togeth­er since at least the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties, when they launched the short-lived Laugh-O-Gram Stu­dio in Kansas City.

It was Iwerks, in fact, who refined a rough sketch by Dis­ney into the fig­ure we now know as Mick­ey Mouse — but whom audi­ences in the twen­ties first came to know as Steam­boat Willie, whose epony­mous car­toon debut entered the pub­lic domain last year. The Skele­ton Dance, the first of Dis­ney’s “Sil­ly Sym­phonies,” was sim­i­lar­ly lib­er­at­ed from copy­right on this year’s Pub­lic Domain Day, along with a vari­ety of oth­er 1929 Dis­ney shorts (many of them fea­tur­ing Mick­ey Mouse).

The great tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion on dis­play isn’t syn­chro­nized sound itself, which had been used even before Steam­boat Willie, but the rela­tion­ship between the images and the sound. Accord­ing to ani­ma­tion his­to­ri­an Charles Solomon, “hav­ing to under­score the action in the first Mick­ey Mouse pic­ture,” com­pos­er Carl Stalling “sug­gest­ed that the reverse could be done: adding ani­mat­ed action to a musi­cal score,” per­haps fea­tur­ing skele­tons, trees, and such­like mov­ing around in rhythm. There we have the gen­e­sis of this car­toon danse macabre, which was a leap for­ward in the ever-clos­er union of ani­ma­tion and music as well as a rev­e­la­tion to its audi­ences, who would­n’t have expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it before. Even today, the most nat­ur­al response to a suf­fi­cient­ly mirac­u­lous-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is, per­haps, laugh­ter.

The Skele­ton Dance was vot­ed the 18th best car­toon of all time by 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als in a 1994 book called The 50 Great­est Car­toons. Find a copy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ear­ly Hitch­cock Films, Tintin and Pop­eye Car­toons & More

The Evo­lu­tion of Ani­ma­tion, 1833–2017: From the Phenakistis­cope to Pixar

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made: 1939 Doc­u­men­tary Gives an Inside Look

Cel­e­brate The Day of the Dead with The Clas­sic Skele­ton Art of José Guadalupe Posa­da

An Ear­ly Ver­sion of Mick­ey Mouse Enters the Pub­lic Domain on Jan­u­ary 1, 2024

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

The Sovi­et Union’s repres­sive state cen­sor­ship went to absurd lengths to con­trol what its cit­i­zens read, viewed, and lis­tened to, such as the almost com­i­cal removal of purged for­mer com­rades from pho­tographs dur­ing Stalin’s reign. When it came to aes­thet­ics, Stal­in­ism most­ly purged more avant-garde ten­den­cies from the arts and lit­er­a­ture in favor of didac­tic Social­ist Real­ism. Even dur­ing the rel­a­tive­ly loose peri­od of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Thaw in the 60s, sev­er­al artists were sub­ject to “severe cen­sor­ship” by the Par­ty, writes Keti Chukhrov at Red Thread, for their “’abuse’ of mod­ernist, abstract and for­mal­ist meth­ods.”

But one oft-exper­i­men­tal art form thrived through­out the exis­tence of the Sovi­et Union and its vary­ing degrees of state con­trol: ani­ma­tion. “Despite cen­sor­ship and pres­sure from the Com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment to adhere to cer­tain Social­ist ideals,” writes Pol­ly Dela Rosa in a short his­to­ry, “Russ­ian ani­ma­tion is incred­i­bly diverse and elo­quent.”

Many ani­mat­ed Sovi­et films were express­ly made for pro­pa­gan­da purposes—such as the very first Sovi­et ani­ma­tion, Dzi­ga Vertov’s Sovi­et Toys, below, from 1924. But even these dis­play a range of tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty com­bined with dar­ing styl­is­tic exper­i­ments, as you can see in this io9 com­pi­la­tion. Ani­mat­ed films also served “as a pow­er­ful tool for enter­tain­ment,” notes film schol­ar Bir­git Beumers, with ani­ma­tors, “large­ly trained as design­ers and illus­tra­tors… drawn upon to com­pete with the Dis­ney out­put.”

Through­out the 20th cen­tu­ry, a wide range of films made it past the cen­sors and reached large audi­ences on cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion screens, includ­ing many based on West­ern lit­er­a­ture. All of them did so, in fact, but one, the only ani­mat­ed film in Sovi­et his­to­ry to face a ban: Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Har­mon­i­ca, at the top, a 1968 “satire on bureau­cra­cy.” At the time of its release, the Thaw had encour­aged “a cre­ative renais­sance” in Russ­ian ani­ma­tion, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, and the film’s sur­re­al­ist aesthetic—drawn from the paint­ings of De Chiri­co, Magritte, Grosz, Bruegel, and Bosch (and reach­ing “pro­to-Python-esque heights towards the end”)—testifies to that.

At first glance, one would think The Glass Har­mon­i­ca would fit right into the long tra­di­tion of Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da films begun by Ver­tov. As the open­ing titles state, it aims to show the “bound­less greed, police ter­ror, [and] the iso­la­tion and bru­tal­iza­tion of humans in mod­ern bour­geois soci­ety.” And yet, the film offend­ed cen­sors due to what the Euro­pean Film Phil­har­mon­ic Insti­tute calls “its con­tro­ver­sial por­tray­al of the rela­tion­ship between gov­ern­men­tal author­i­ty and the artist.” There’s more than a lit­tle irony in the fact that the only ful­ly cen­sored Sovi­et ani­ma­tion is a film itself about cen­sor­ship.

The cen­tral char­ac­ter is a musi­cian who incurs the dis­plea­sure of an expres­sion­less man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addi­tion to its “col­lage of var­i­ous styles and a trib­ute to Euro­pean painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnit­tke “push­es sound to dis­turb­ing lim­its, demand­ing extreme range and tech­nique from the instru­ments.” (Fans of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion may be remind­ed of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fan­tas­tic Plan­et.) Although Khrzhanovsky’s film rep­re­sents the effec­tive begin­ning and end of sur­re­al­ist ani­ma­tion in the Sovi­et Union, only released after per­e­stroi­ka, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a bril­liant­ly real­ized exam­ple of the form.

The Glass Har­mon­i­ca will be added to our list of Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry Too

Sovi­et Ani­ma­tions of Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Come Soft Rain’

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Watch Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time (1969)

In 1994, Jer­ry Beck edit­ed the book, The 50 Great­est Car­toons: As Select­ed by 1,000 Ani­ma­tion Pro­fes­sion­als, which chal­lenged experts to cre­ate a rank­ing of the best short, cel ani­mat­ed car­toons ever made. To no one’s sur­prise, the experts chose 10 Warn­er Bros. ani­ma­tions craft­ed by Chuck Jones. They also gave a nod to Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios’ orig­i­nal Super­man car­toonDis­ney’s first ani­ma­tion with Mick­ey Mouse (1928’s “Steam­boat Willie”), and the Don­ald Duck-star­ring WWII pro­pa­gan­da film,“Der Fuehrer’s Face.”

Yes, the big ani­ma­tion stu­dios (Warn­er Bros., Dis­ney, etc.) dom­i­nate the list. But a few “indies” man­age to squeak in there. Take for exam­ple Win­sor McCay’s sem­i­nal 1914 cre­ation “Ger­tie the Dinosaur.” Or Bam­bi Meets Godzil­la. A stu­dent film cre­at­ed by Marv New­land in 1969, Bam­bi Meets Godzil­la (above) runs only 90 sec­onds. Of which, 48 sec­onds are devot­ed to the open­ing cred­its, and 27 sec­onds to the clos­ing cred­its, leav­ing only 12 sec­onds of “action,” which is most­ly still­ness. The tim­ing is the fun­ny.

The short film cir­cu­lat­ed in the­aters across the U.S., shown before screen­ings of Philippe de Bro­ca’s fea­ture film King of Hearts. Over the years the pub­licly-avail­able ver­sions of Bam­bi Meets Godzil­la became worn and fad­ed. So, in 2013, Coda Gard­ner pro­duced a frame-for-frame HD re-cre­ation. You can watch it below.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Trip­py 1970s Ani­mat­ed Film Qua­si at the Quack­adero: Vot­ed One of the 50 Great­est Car­toons of All Time

The Dis­ney Car­toon That Intro­duced Mick­ey Mouse & Ani­ma­tion with Sound (1928)

Watch a Sur­re­al 1933 Ani­ma­tion of Snow White, Fea­tur­ing Cab Cal­loway & Bet­ty Boop: It’s Ranked as the 19th Great­est Car­toon of All Time

Watch the Oscar-Win­ning “Ger­ald McBo­ing-Boing” (1950): It’s Ranked as the 9th Great­est Car­toon of All Time

Don­ald Duck & Friends Star in World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons

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