सोमवार बंद

To clear the record and correct you all. Bob Gardiner wrote, directed, and made Closed Mondays and California Raisons. Vinton claimed both films along with many others that Gardiner made. Vinton in no small way contributed to Gardiner's decline in later years and helped to cut down one of the greatest minds in the history of stop motion animation. Vinton was a partner in these projects, but its Gardiner's vision and execution that gave the world these films. Please, if you are to discuss these films further, give Bob Gardiner the credit he deserves and thank him, not Vinton, for Closed Mondays. Thank you for time and enjoy this great piece of stop motion animation.

This claymation short film starts with an old man, jolly off wine, coming into an empty art gallery and being quick to dismiss much of what he sees as rubbish. However as he walks around, the static images and works do more than remain this way and instead start to speak to him in different ways.

There is a point in this short film about the power of art to be alive and speak to the viewer and I mostly liked the idea behind this short where the various words come alive to the way that they are either silly, moving or everything in between. The idea is good and at points so is the short film – particularly in the sudden poignancy of the conclusion, however for me I found myself more appreciating the film and the idea than I did really enjoying it. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly the animation. I appreciate it is now over 40 years old, but it is rather ugly in the delivery – in some cases it works (for example the transforming robot) but in others I found it as a barrier to watch – I know this is superficial and unfair to the content, but for me it was as such. The second thing that gave me pause was that some of the examples of the art coming alive didn't work – and again I use the transforming robot as an example, it seemed too silly and out of nowhere. Had all the examples had something to bring to the table it would have been better but again this robot example stuck with me as being out of place considering the good ending it was building to.

This won the Oscar for the year and in a way I do not begrudge it because I like the idea and aspects of the delivery, but I would be lying to say I did not struggle with some of the animation and the content at the same time. I appreciated it as a whole, but I did not necessarily enjoy it as such.

It's the one-woman show of "Celia Crazelsnuk" that our visitor has come to view. It's supposed to be closed on Mondays, but armed with his bottle and a very limited knowledge of art - in he goes! There are paintings and there are sculptures - and when they start to come alive it gives him (and us) an opportunity to see some vibrant and quite emotional animations. These work well offering quite a wide variety of subject matter and even a very talkative robot, but it's the stop-motion of the man himself that's most impressive. The facial expressions and muscle definition is worthy or Ray Harryhausen himself. I loved the ending, too!

Let's be blunt. The 1960s and 70s were terrible times for good animation. The excellent artwork of Looney Tunes and MGM were history and Disney was a sleeping giant which wouldn't really come back to life until "The Little Mermaid". In the meantime, third-rate animation studios like Hanna-Barbera churned out crap---cartoons with very low cel-counts (making the characters move like robots) and terrible stories (think "Speed Buggy", "The Harlem Globetrotters" and "Scrappy Do"). As a child and teen during this period, I pretty much watched the old classics in reruns and lost interest in the newer stuff. Thank goodness for the resurgence of animation!! Fortunatley, despite the nadir of the 60s-70s, occasionally a really great cartoon was produced against the odds. In other words, if bad and cheap animation paid, how could you expect anyone to bother with the good? Well, in the case of "Closed Mondays", you do get an exceptional short--even back in 1974.

"Closed Mondays" is an early animation of the Will Vinton Studios--the same folks who wore out their welcome in the 1980s with those annoying dancing raisins. It wasn't that the raisins were badly made--they were GREAT claymation characters. But, they were shown to death--with tons of commercials and even a kids cartoon series!! Talk about overkill....though I can't blame Vinton and the rest, as it did pay handsomely. But, they were capable of far more interesting stuff back in the 70s--such as "Mountain Music" and this short. These were terrifically animated using lumps of various colored clay--and very active imaginations.

The short begins with a wonderfully awful old guy wandering about an art museum. He seems to hate everything--which made me laugh. Even when the artwork comes to life, he seems unimpressed. And, in the end, it all makes a bit more sense. As I said, the quality of the work was very nice, the story was lovely AND it made me happy. Apparently the Academy also was impressed and they awarded the film the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1975. See this one.

I've always preferred traditional animation to stop-motion/claymation. Whether it's Wilfred Jackson's 'The Old Mill (1937)' or Chuck Jones' 'What's Opera, Doc?,' classic animation indefinitely retains its timelessness and the ability to transport the viewer into a visual dimension entirely different from our own. When done correctly, claymation can, of course, be equally effective, but I didn't find this to be the case in 'Closed Mondays (1974),' an Oscar-winning short directed by Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton. When I looked at the old man in the art gallery, I wasn't transported into the film's world, but, rather, I recognised the character as a mass of shifting clay – several inches in height – and grimaced wryly as he shuffled across the floor in a completely awkward and unrealistic gait. The film contains some interesting ideas, but the animation is accomplished so clumsily that I was barred from entering its world; if films like 'A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989)' and 'Harvie Krumpet (2004)' were able to avoid these complications, then I'm less willing to cut this one some slack.

Nevertheless, I was certainly impressed with what 'Close Mondays' had to say about the nature of art. To consider each picture frame as a window into another world, filled with animate people and objects, is to add a new dimension to how one critically evaluates art. A masterpiece should possess the ability to make itself come to life before our eyes, and it is up to the viewer to contemplate the meaning of what we are seeing, and the events that might have led towards the image depicted in a painting. The frame of the lonely maid, forever condemned to solemnly scrub the cold stone floor, is almost heartbreaking in its poignancy; if only the remainder of the artworks were just as meaningful {I'm still trying to decide what that metamorphic super-computer was all about}. And, of course, I enjoyed the ending, confirming that behind every piece of art there is considerably more than initially meets the eye, an entire story just waiting to be told… even if nobody is watching.