That Noisy Woodpecker Had an Animated SecretLOS ANGELES — Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, “The Loose Nut,” when he started seeing things.
Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall.
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“What was that?” Mr. Klein, now an animation professor at Loyola Marymount University, recalled thinking. Only later, after years of scholarly detective work, did he decide that he had been looking at genuine art that was cleverly concealed by an ambitious and slightly frustrated animation director named Shamus Culhane. Mr. Culhane died in 1996, a pioneer whose six decades in animation included the sequence of the dwarfs marching and singing “Heigh Ho” in the 1937 film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
In the March issue of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Mr. Klein relates an intriguing theory. He says that Mr. Culhane broke the boundaries of his craft when he worked on the Woody Woodpecker cartoons in the 1940s, going well beyond the kind of commonplace puckishness that supposedly led later animators to stitch frames of a panty-less diva into “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Mr. Culhane’s stunts, Mr. Klein posits, were of a higher order. He worked ultra-brief experimental art films into a handful of Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
“Culhane essentially ‘hid’ his artful excursions in plain sight, letting them rush past too rapidly for the notice of most of his audience,” Mr. Klein writes in the 15-page article, titled “Woody Abstracted: Film Experiments in the Cartoons of Shamus Culhane.”
In the article Mr. Klein describes Mr. Culhane, who was credited in his work then as James Culhane, as a devotee of the avant-garde. He was influenced by the writings of Russian theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mr. Klein writes, and spent evenings at the American Contemporary Gallery in Hollywood. There, he watched films by Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir, might have seen paintings by Oskar Fischinger and definitely “was inclined to wear a beret.”
In an interview in his office at Loyola’s School of Film and Television, Mr. Klein described Mr. Culhane as having had art training but no college degree; as being a sophisticated reader who painted in his off hours. He said the experimental minifilms “were really a journey of the man” who directed them.
Mr. Klein writes that one of those experiments was a two-second piece of an explosion in “Woody Dines Out,” from 1945. He finds the frames “improvised like visual music” in what Mr. Culhane acknowledged in his autobiography, “Talking Animals and Other People,” was an Eisenstein-inspired moment.
The longest such experimental sequence was in the seven-second steamroller smash-up in “The Loose Nut,” also from 1945. And, later in that cartoon, Woody is blown into an abstract configuration that Mr. Klein, in his article, calls “the convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”
According to the obituary of Mr. Culhane in The New York Times, Mr. Culhane’s family moved to Manhattan from Massachusetts when he was a small child, and later a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired his career as an artist. He first worked with Mr. Lantz when Mr. Lantz got him a job as an office boy at the studio of J. R. Bray, where Mr. Lantz was head of animation. Mr. Culhane animated his first scene there in 1925. It was of a monkey with a hot towel.
Throughout the mid-1940s Mr. Culhane made cartoons, briefly at Warner Brothers, then at Mr. Lantz’s studio, where he was a director of some shorts that are remembered for more than their surface humor. In 1944 he collaborated with the layout artist Art Heinemann on “The Greatest Man in Siam.” In it the king of Siam bolts past doorways that are distinctly phallic in shape and peers at another that mimics a vagina.
“We were just trying to put one over on them,” Mr. Culhane years later told Mr. Klein, who had asked him about the bawdy imagery in the course of a visit and correspondence shortly before Mr. Culhane died.
Visual pranks have been common in the animation world, where artists often find ways — occasionally, in frames that pass without actually being seen — to plant jokes on bosses and a largely unsuspecting audience. A favorite trick has been to hide caricatures of real people in crowd scenes, like those in the Walt Disney films “Aladdin” and “The Princess and the Frog,” which contain images of their directors, John Musker and Ron Clements, according to Charles Solomon, an animation critic and historian.
“Even I appear in a crowd,” said Mr. Solomon, whose hidden image, he said, is tucked in the “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence of “Fantasia/2000.”
It was clues in “Talking Animals and Other People” and in letters Mr. Culhane wrote to Mr. Klein — who had become a Woody Woodpecker expert through his archival work for Universal Studios, which distributed the cartoons — that pointed Mr. Klein toward something more. In one letter Mr. Culhane, talking of his fascination with Russian film theory, said nothing he picked up from his studies ever caused trouble with Mr. Lantz, who was known for giving his directors a free hand.
As for much of the contemporary audience, Mr. Klein said, “Maybe they were seeing their first glimpse of modern art.”
Shamus Culhane in a photograph from about 1932.
The following is from - Shamus Culhane, a Pioneer In Film Animation, Dies at 87 By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER for the New York TimesPublished: February 4, 1996
Mr. Culhane's career in animation, which began before movies could talk and was accelerated in the sound era by his talent for synchronizing facial movements with dialogue, spanned more than 60 years beginning in 1925.
Mr. Culhane was born in Ware, Mass., on Nov. 12, 1908. When he was a small child, the family moved to Manhattan. His father, James, worked for the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. His mother, the former Alma LaPierre, was a housewife. When Mr. Culhane was 6, his father took him to a vaudeville house where the boy saw Winsor McCay, one of the earliest film cartoonists, show his animated film "Gertie the Dinosaur."
Mr. Culhane began drawing as a child, winning medals for his work while a student at Public School 82 in Yorkville and at Boy's High School in Harlem, then the only city high school to offer commercial art courses. After a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he decided to become an artist.
When his father abandoned the family, the 16-year old Mr. Culhane, the eldest of three children, quit school to support them. Walter Lantz, his best friend's brother, was then the head of animation for J. R. Bray, the first person to make theatrically distributed cartoons, and Mr. Lantz got Mr. Culhane a job as office boy.
In 1925, covering for a drunken animator, Mr. Culhane animated his first scene -- a monkey with a hot towel. In the next 62 years, working for 18 different cartoon studios, including his own, Shamus Culhane would become one of the world's foremost character animators.
He was the only animator who worked on all of the first four animated feature cartoons -- Disney's "Snow White" (1937) and "Pinocchio" (1940), for which Mr. Culhane animated the fox and cat selling Pinocchio to the Pleasure Island coachman; Max Fleischer's "Gulliver's Travels" (1939) and Dave Fleischer's "Mr. Bug Goes to Town" (1941), with its Hoagy Carmichael-Frank Loesser score.
Mr. Culhane also animated such characters as Krazy Kat, Betty Boop, Popeye, Pluto ("the essence of dog," Mr. Culhane called him), and Woody Woodpecker, whose surreal personality Mr. Culhane helped develop in a series of shorts he directed for Mr. Lantz in the 1940's.
In "The 50 Greatest Cartoons as Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals," a book published in 1994 by Turner Broadcasting, Mr. Culhane was represented as the director of "The Barber of Seville" (1944), in which Woody shaves a construction worker while singing "Largo al factotum" from Rossini's "Barber of Seville," matching the language's large proportion of vowels to consonants with an agility of movement possible only in animation.
In the realm of commercials, Mr. Culhane produced, directed, wrote and often animated commercials, including the Ajax cleanser elves moving to music and the words, "Use Ajax -- boom boom -- the foaming cleanser"; and the classic Muriel cigar spot, with Edie Adams delivering its Mae West parody line, "Why don't you come up and smoke me some time?"
Mr. Culhane tended to view the world through an animator's eyes. As he once watched another significant world figure, Richard M. Nixon, during the Watergate scandal, he said, "Nixon always moves as if he's three frames out of sync."
At Expo 67, the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal, the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome that was the site of the American pavilion contained artifacts of two great American achievements: the space program and film.
The film retrospective included excerpts from movie classics like "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "On the Waterfront" and "Gone With the Wind," but the sole example of animation in the film retrospective was Mr. Culhane's sequence of the Seven Dwarfs marching and singing "Heigh Ho."
The "Heigh Ho" sequence was also part of Mr. Culhane's first retrospective, "The Golden Jubilee of a Master Animator" at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in 1974; "The Golden Age of Animation," the Whitney Museum's show of Disney films, drawings and backgrounds in 1981, and Mr. Culhane's 83d birthday retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991.
As the head of the Paramount cartoon studio in 1966 and 1967, Mr. Culhane produced the Mighty Thor cartoons for television. In the late 1970's, he ran against the cost-cutting style of so-called limited animation by producing, directing and co-writing (with a cousin, John Culhane) a series of fully animated ABC prime-time television specials: "Noah's Animals" (1976), the story of Noah from the animals' point of view; and two sequels, "King of the Beasts" and "Last of the Red-Hot Dragons."
Mr. Culhane was the author of an autobiography, "Talking Animals and Other People," published by St. Martin's Press in 1986, and "Animation From Script to Screen," an explanation of animation technique published by St. Martin's in 1988.
He concluded "Talking Animals" by writing: "I was a link with the primitive past, before sound, color or tape. I had been permitted to live long enough to see and use the greatest tools for artists that were ever invented. I am convinced that computer animation will produce beautiful works of art -- beautiful beyond our most fantastic dreams."
Mr. Culhane lived to see the beginning of the realization of that dream when hand-drawn animation of his early career was combined with computer animation in Disney films like "Aladdin," "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas."
With his beret, goatee and horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Mr. Culhane looked more like a 1950's be-bop musician than what he was: an Irish-American high school dropout from an impoverished background who made himself an artist.
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