Episode 29 - Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941)
Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Chris and Alex return to the work of the Fleischer studios for Episode 29, following up their discussion of Gulliver’s Travels with Mr. Bug Goes to Town (Dave Fleischer, 1941), similar in concept and design to its predecessor and loosely inspired by Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck's book The Life of the Bee (1901). The second (and final) cel-animated feature film produced by the Fleischers, Mr. Bug Goes to Town negotiates the conflict between an insect community and the threatening human world, all framed by an environmental narrative of modernisation, redevelopment and urban sprawl. Expect turns to the layered organisation of fantasy spaces and geographies of diverse scales; the film's connection to traditions of ecocritical cinema and contemporary computer-animated filmmaking; the depiction of rapid urbanisation and the metonymic forces of capitalism (and the role of cigars!); and animation’s representational history of blackface and racial coding.
Suggested Readings
Barker, Martin. 2000. From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis. London: Pluto Press.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1983. A Rhetoric of the Unreal Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Murray, Robin L. and Joseph K. Heumann. 2011. “‘Bambi’ and ‘Mr. Bug Goes to Town’: Nature with or without Us.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18, no. 4 (Autumn): 779-800.
Sammond, Nicholas. 2015. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Vettel Tom, Patricia. 1996. “Felix the Cat as Modern Trickster.” American Art 10, no. 1 (Spring): 64–87.