Rooty Toot Toot

Rooty Toot Toot is one of the best of a very good run of cartoons from the UPA studios. A stylized take on Frankie and Johnny, it has a great jazz score and uses its limited animation to great effect. Excellent blend of music and visuals, it clearly had influence on at least one Disney short, Toot, Plunk, Whistle, Boom. The cartoon isn't the best UPA did (Unicorn In the Garden was) but it's real close. You can find it on one of the Columbia Classics series of tapes. Highly recommended.

This film is commonly misunderstood and disliked these days, but thats only because people don't know why it is the way it is. Rooty Toot Toot, and most of UPA's work, was created with the intent to break from traditional animation and create something more relatable as fine or modern art. Something I think was highly successful. A film only appreciated by those willing to disregard the standards of loony toons and Disney.

The animation is zany and bizarre, the designs are fantastically simplistic. Watch for how the backgrounds only depict the minimum of what is necessary to visually represent what's going on. There's no need for full blown cell coloring here. I think the style matches the jazz perfectly.

That is a masterful work of animation. A mixture of film genders (noir, musical, comedy, judgment) and a narrative with different versions of the same crime (like Rashomon by Kurosawa). Finally i would like to call attention for the strong reference to sexuality almost banned from the mainstream cartoons. The traces of the cartoon are superb too! They are a trademark of UPA style. They are just essential and not full of empty virtuosity in the Disney style. Free from the repetition of the characters based series as Maggoo, the work of studio is much more interesting. The strategy of the lines being sung by the characters preview such works as Les Parapluies de Cherbourgh (1964) by Jacques Demy. Although the work of UPA would be associate mostly with social commentary about middle class American values it was far from be restricted just to it. I recommend it.

It's a long time since UPA's cartoons shocked regular movie goers - an unprecedented break with the Disney tradition, bringing the departures we'd seen in newspaper cartoons, advertising art and strip comics to film. Some of their work looks like thin effort, now that we've seen the limited animation technique they pioneered used and abused in TV.

The seventies London NFT audience already had a short memory and booed the Mr. McGoos an American programmer included.

However ROOTY ROOT TOOT is not just a nostalgia trip. With it's delicate Hubley figures and unreal use of colour and backgrounds this is one of the most stylish things done in cartooning. Throw in clever gags and a great track - who are the vocalists? The dancing lawyer, the "Sordid Bar" sign and the leafy line on white setting for Frankie's back story are still evidence of an imagination which would prove capable of bringing us on going delight.

So we know that "Frankie" has done for "Johnny" and so she ends up in court dressed as if she were about to dance a Flamenco! Her lawyer calls the barkeep, a rather dour fella - who regales us with the tale of the deceased's infidelities with "Nelly Bligh". Next, the sultry "Nelly" takes the stand with her own version but claims that they only tickling going on was on the ivories! It looks a clear cut case. Can the debonaire lawyer save her bacon? He portrays a completely different summation of the events. Which version will the jury buy? The narration is delivered via a lively and witty lyric with a great jazzy soundtrack and the sharp, almost stark, nature of the animation works well delivering a story with more than an hint of menace, the odd Freudian slip and... It's good fun this and stay tuned for the twist at the end!