Don't Always Disagree

              By the time of this cartoon Christmas animated television specials had been a part of mainstream culture for over 25 years.   If anything, the idea of standalone specials unconnected to larger properties was on its way out.   If you were lucky you’d get a special Christmas adaptation of something that already existed or a Christmas pilot setting up a longer set of episodes.   That’s what happened with ‘Christmas in Tattertown.’   In 1988 Nickelodeon commissioned ‘Tattertown’ as its first piece of original animation.   Previously they had licensed cartoons and other programs from within the MTV network ecosystem or, for it’s Nick at Nick block, whoever owned the rights to the various classic sitcoms it aired.   They approached Ralph Bakshi, who at the time was overseeing ‘Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures’ for CBS, to develop something for them and he revisited an idea he’d been ...

                William Dean Howells was a writer who lived from 1837 to 1920.   He started his career at the Ohio State journal where he wrote poems and short stories.   He was also editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881.   He became a novelist in 1872, his best-known work being The Rise of Silas Lapham .   He was a proponent of artistic Realism, a movement that arose in opposition to Romanticism.   As the name implied this was an emphasis on realistic, naturalistic portrayals of people and their lives without extreme artifice or dramatization.   This has some obvious political implications in drawing attention to existing societal ills, but it gradually grew calcified in its structures and forms, became closely identified with bourgeois interests, and eventually gave rise to Modernism in opposition.   In the works of Howells this realism included railing against what he s...

              I genuinely want to invent time travel so I can take a copy of this back to 1979 and force Bill Keane to watch this over and over until he collapses to the floor in a crying heap and admits he doesn’t know the first thing about turning a daily comic into a holiday special.               There’s a subgenre of film called ‘slow cinema.’   As the name implies it actively rejects what it considers the overly dramatic and narrative-focused typical Hollywood style to focus on more contemplative, observational works.   It places an emphasis on the everyday, the mundane, finding meaning in lives and actions less frequently recorded.   Some prominent examples include ‘Au Hasard Balthazar,’ ‘Memoria,’ and the one that recently topped the Sight and Sound top 100 list and got everyone talking, as was the entire point, ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 ...