Ice-Peter

The trouble with doing a personal film is they can take forever to do.  Real work and real life have a way of eating time and energy from projects that you may want to do, and this short film is one I never thought would be stretched out over years.  The short was fraught with troubles which made it easier to shelf and neglect.  But technology progressed and I was able to solve some of the problems I couldn’t when I first started.  One I’ve never quite fixed is the narration which was completely unusable.  I tried rerecording many times and never could match the inflections and feel of the first tracks.  After filtering the heck out of them, this is the end result.

I’ve always loved Wilhelm Busch and his quirky style.  He reminds me of Edward Gorey to some degree but Busch pioneered some visual jokes which have become cliché standards in cartoons from the golden age of animation.  I wrote about them in this earlier post:  http://joelbrinkerhoff.blogspot.com/2006/08/cartoon-inspiration.html    

Here is my faithful adaptation of Wilhelm Busch’s Ice-Peter.

Cartoon Inspiration

I've no way of proving it but I’m pretty sure Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) inspired cartoon directors to put in motion a lot of visual gags he had worked out years before in print. The posting I’m showing isn’t very good, you may want to click on the image to enlarge it, but you can clearly see gags that are now considered cliché. There is the steamroller gag where a character is pan caked into a silhouette, an eye pop ‘take’, multiple limbs and digits, enlarged body parts and a morph into one large eye to show surprise. Busch is already recognized as the inspiration for the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” but I suspect he inspired the Avery’s and the Clampetts as well.