Smith and Foulkes

My friend Shirleyann, who was in my film It's About My Brother, appears in this charming commercial that Smith and Foulkes directed for Comcast. It's a good excuse to link to their reel (just click on Smith and Foulkes). I love these guys' work... they use different techniques, but always there's great sense of timing, lovely design and a wry wit. The Coca-Cola spot they made in a video game style is probably my favorite. Also, it's not there, but the MasterCard girl-and-piggy-at-the-hotel spot is theirs too. Smith and Foulkes missed out on the Best Animated Short Oscar this year, but they probably are the premier commercial directors of animation these days. Bravo to them.

Pinnochio On DVD

Pinnochio has recently been released on DVD. It had been the only one of the Disney classics that I hadn't seen as an adult -- the company has an annoying practice of locking away their animated films for years at a time so that the reissue can be an event. I suppose it works... I'm writing a blog post about it, aren't I?

According to Michael Barrier's bio of Walt Disney, Pinnochio was a troubled production from the start. Disney was distracted by other projects, indecisive, and ambivalent about the story: he wanted to warm up the character of Pinnochio, but when he did he made him passive and bland.

Even though I'm not familiar with the source material, I can see that. My own take is that the storytelling isn't as sure-footed as Snow White and the animation is not as good as Jungle Book or other later projects. Yet it's definitely worth watching. The story starts as a small, earthy fable and morphs into something more mythical and strange. I'm more fond of that second half: the scene inside the belly of the whale* is haunting, and the Pleasure Island sequence is really quite scary.

* Lest we forget, one of the chapter headings in Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces was "Inside the Belly of the Whale." The image is sort of a mythological road sign and appears in different variations in many stories of many civilizations.