Word: comically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...clumsiness that is not feigned? Between the early and the late '70s the scope of his vision and the resonance of his images deepened steadily; those phalanxes of knobby knees and boots like Uccello horseshoes, those bloodshot cyclopean eyes and gut piles of pink carcasses acquired, despite their comic-strip mannerisms of drawing, a degree of pessimism that verged on the tragic. Guston's Head and Bottle, 1975, with its profile of a face (a self-portrait?) violently compressed into an eye and a chin prickled with a bum's gray stubble, is absurd in a sense...
...witness to Don Juan's exploits, and a teeming flagon of comic relief, is his servant Sganarelle (Roy Brocksmith). He makes cowardice an art form. Brocksmith has some of the elephantine grace of Zero Mostel. Seitz's Don Juan is a triumph of stylized scorn. He scuttles about the stage crab-fashion. He gazes into a mirror as if to blot out the scum of the earth. Even in wooing, he masks any show of passion. He is, for certain, a radical Don Juan...
...what is now referred to as body language. They understood that, on the screen, action is character, that in the exaggerated twitch of one of their little anthropomorph's bottoms, the stretch of his back or the lift of his ever-scampering feet they could, with fine comic efficiency, show the state of his emotions. The history of animation from the Mouse's introduction in 1928's Steamboat Willie to the apotheosis of the high Disney style in such features as Snow White and Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi, roughly a decade later, can be seen...
...critics have argued that what the burst of creativity achieved was instant decadence. They see in the primitive purity of Ub Iwerks, Disney's first great collaborator and the man who designed the immortal Mouse, a whirlwind comic force, simple and unsentimental, that for high, mean spirits was never matched. It is true that in Iwerks' rubbery stick figures and bare backgrounds there was an elemental anarchy that is still delightful. But one has only to look at Norm Ferguson's roughs for Playful Pluto, in which he caused his pup to be caught in flypaper...
...features when the forces of evil and nature conspired to wrench strong new emotions out of toddlers and brooding concern from their parents. The Fox and the Hound lacks the craftsmanship and concise wit that brought a dozen or more characters to idiosyncratic life in the earlier films. The comic relief is perfunctory at best, the five songs are just barely hummable, and the picture takes a while to get started. But if there is no magic here, there is something almost as rare: a moral weight that gives Daniel...