Moving Pictures

When I was about ten years old, I was listening to the Beatles' song "Hello, Goodbye" on a jukebox in an Italian restaurant. As was my custom in my youth, I took a pen and started drawing on the extra napkins at our table as my parents finished their after-dinner cocktail. In my mind I was constructing an animated film to accompany the song. Heavily influenced by the "All You Need Is Love" sequence in "Yellow Submarine," I was keenly distracted as my mother sipped her Creme de Menthe and my father polished off his Wild Turkey. I dozed a little in the back seat on the way home, and in my dreams my little movie came alive.
That moment stayed with me for years, but the film never got made. The fundamentals of animation were impressed on me at an early age, and my patience and temperament were not suited for such a tedious process. I made a few feeble attempts. I drew a dozen separate drawings for a short about a cat chasing a mouse, then snapped off a few feet of film. When I saw the result, it took me another ten years to try it again.
In college, I took a film making class, and one of the assignments was a stop-motion piece. I used clay, and spent the better part of a day shooting a very arty thing about a sphere trying to seduce a cube. Or something like that. It was very clever, and it was in black and white. I got a "B."
Years flew by. Last night I watched "The Phantom Tollbooth" with my family. The last time I had seen it was around the same time I was experimenting with my dad's Super-8 movie camera. It was Chuck Jones. My memory of the film was far better than what I saw on the screen. In my mind, it was tied much closer to the illustrations by Jules Pfeiffer. Instead, I felt duty-bound to sit still for the whole thing while my son did the same. The story held up under the weight of some obvious budget shortfalls and some unnecessary songs, but in the end, it became clear why MGM never became an animation powerhouse.
Then again, neither did I.