Butterflies, Flowers Volume 4

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By Yuki Yoshihara. Released in Japan as “Chou Yo Hana Yo” by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Petit Comic. Released in North America by Viz.

In looking at my review of Volume 3, I noted that one of the things I enjoyed most about this series was seeing Masayuki’s over the top sexual harassment towards his lover Choko, and hoped to see more ludicrousness. Oddly enough, I don’t get that here in Volume 4. And yet this volume pleased me more than the previous ones. Why is that?

I’m tempted to say Gundam, though that’s not exactly correct. What makes this volume work is that the over the top humor that had mostly been confined to Masayuki’s advances in previous volumes expands to cover a much larger array of ridiculousness. Thus you get the ‘elevator’ to the president’s office that looks like the passage to the secret base you see in 70s giant robot shows, or Masayuki bitching about how he and the president are TOTALLY DIFFERENT, as Masayuki prefers 80s robot stuff to 70s. Half the time these jokes read like complete throwaways, which actually makes them funnier. (My favorite was the Saikano reference.)

More importantly is the development of Masayuki. I’d mentioned that there was less of his leering sexual harassment this volume. That actually starts off halfway through the volume, and is noted immediately by Choko, who actually misses the attention a little bit. Understandable, as this was the easiest way to tell his affection towards her. I kept waiting for the punchline, expecting him to be holding off as he’s trying to get into her pants for some special reason. But no, it may just be that he’s actually trying to be a better boyfriend to her. He does, in the end, ask her to move in with him, which might be part of why he was holding back, but I still think it’s a good sign of growth.

As for Choko, she’s still not as strong as I expected her to be from her kickass scene in Book 1, but she does OK. She spends a lot of the first half of this book ‘imprisoned’ in the president’s palatial estate, but at least is strong enough to say no to the president to his face, and also smacks Masayuki the one time he DOES go too far. I’m hoping that Masayuki’s attempts to be a better person allow her to grow as well, and that the two can finally show affection for each other without the passive aggressive behavior we’ve seen to date.

This series can be frustrating at times, but it’s no Hot Gimmick. The main reason for that is there’s a playful tone to the whole thing, both in-universe with Masayuki’s ‘courtship’ and in real life, as Yoshihara knows when to pile on the gags and when to show the hot sex scenes. There’s still a bit of guilt to this pleasure, but this volume in particular was a lot of fun.

Walter Lantz Cartoons Part 9: The Greatest Man in Siam, The Barber of Seville, Fish Fry, Abou Ben Boogie, The Beach Nut

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It’s 1944, and Shamus Culhane has settled in at Lantz. Which is terrific, as it gives us a run of cartoons that’s the best so far, including one cartoon scholars call the best Woody Woodpecker cartoon ever.

In the first of two Middle Eastern Swing Symphonies for this post, we get The Greatest Man in Siam, a Swing Symphony with lots of hot jazz. The plot has the King announcing that he’ll give his daughter’s hand in marriage to the greatest man, as you’d expect. We get lots of gags about people who say they have various attributes – the smartest man, the richest man, etc. The daughter is a gorgeous harem girl, and one of the reasons these cartoons are rarely seen on TV – she’s almost drawn too sexily, with semi-transparent harem clothes showing off all of the legs and a great deal of the rest of her. In the end, the ‘hottest’ man in Siam comes by and wows everyone with his playing and dancing, and he wins the contest by getting everyone to dance.

And now we get Culhane’s first Woody Woodpecker cartoon. There’s a few differences to note. Woody has another new voice, that if writer Ben Hardaway, and this one would stick with him for the rest of the 40s. As a voice artist, Hardaway is a great writer, but hey, Woody cartoons aren’t known for their snappy dialogue at this point anyway. He was also redesigned to be a bit shorter and cuter, though he’s still pretty wild compared to the 50s version. As for the cartoon itself, it’s been voted one of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time. It usually even gets more votes than Warners’ Rabbit of Seville, which is impressive. Woody goes to a barber to get a haircut, only to find the barber’s been drafted. Woody decides to cut his own hair, only to be beset by customers, so he quickly pretends to be the barber. His first victim is a cliched Red Indian, who Woody gives the hot towels treatment to, then eventually tosses across the street to be a cigar store Indian. Then a construction worker comes in and asks for “the whooooooole works”. He quickly regrets this, as Woody whips out the lather and razor and starts singing Largo El Factotum from Rossini’s opera. He also goes even more nuts than we usually see from Woody. He’s positively terrifying in this, whipping around a noticeably chipper straight razor, and generally being almost homicidal. The worker escapes, but returns to toss Woody into a wall and throw the barber pole at him. Words don’t do this justice, you really need to see it.

Remember Andy Panda? He’s still been cruising along with the occasional cartoon. He’s grown up now, mostly, and has lost his father’s presence, but he’s still very much a ‘Porky Pig’ type character, in that he does not actually drive the action. In Fish Fry, he decides to buy a pet goldfish and take it home. Unfortunately, he quickly runs into a mangy-looking cat who wants the fish for dinner. What follows will not surprise anyone who’s watched the average Tom & Jerry or Tweety & Sylvester cartoon, though this cat is a lot more urban than either of those two. Fish Fry does boast a tremendously bizarre ending where, after attempting to run away from a bulldog about 3 times, the cat simply goes insane, leaping about into the distance laughing. It makes no sense in the context of the rest of the cartoon, but is certainly startling, I’ll grant you.

Back in Swing Symphony land, we’re still in the Middle East, and it’s time for Abou Ben Boogie. This one has less plot than the Greatest Man in Siam, but has a lot more hot harem girls wearing next to nothing. My guess is that the first cartoon drew rave reviews from the dads in the audience. At an opium den (another reason this cartoon isn’t seen very often on TV), the entertainment is there to tell us about Abou Ben Boogie, who is known for his hot dancing. He shows up about halfway through, but his attempts to romance the girl seem to be met more often than not with him kissing a camel. In fact, the camel gets more screen time than the girl, and shows that its dancing is pretty hot as well. Another great cartoon, showing that Lantz’s folks had become experts at timing jazz licks to intense animation.

Meanwhile, Woody may be cuter and smaller, but he’s even more of a horrible screwball pest. And now he finally has an ongoing nemesis in Wally Walrus, who is voiced in a heavy Swedish accent by Hans Conried (best known to cartoon fans as Snidely Whiplash). The cartoon opens with a bunch of beachgoers on the boardwalk watching Wally beat the crap out of Woody. He stops to explain how things got this way. Knowing Woody as we do, I think we could have guessed. Wally is trying to relax at the beach, but Woody runs over him, smashes into him, steals his food, soaks him, and then cons him by playing a phony swami. Sadly, in the end Wally does himself in, as his attempts to tie Woody to an anchor and drown him just succeed in destroying the entire boardwalk.

Now that Woody has a new look, new director and a regular adversary, he’s improving by leaps and bounds. And even Andy Panda’s cartoons have gotten interesting, if not Andy himself. Great stuff. Next time, we’ll look at some 1945 cartoons.

The Winter’s Tale

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By William Shakespeare. First published in Britain in 1623 by Edward Blount, William Jaggard, and Isaac Jaggard. Review copy from ‘The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series’, edited by John Pitcher.

I have to say, the more I read about Shakespeare’s stuff, the more impressed I get. And we’re talking about possibly the most famous writer in history here. The notion of ‘tragicomedy’ was not new when Shakespeare wrote this play in 1610 or so, but the Jacobean audiences were still having trouble with it. John Fletcher had written a tragicomedy 2 years earlier that had bombed, and was apparently bitching about how the audiences were philistines. So Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale, which basically is also sort of a tragicomedy, but divides it almost exactly in half. The first three acts are a tragedy, then the last 2 comedic and pastoral. Blending? What is that?

Oddly enough, the dividing point seems to be the bear. The Winter’s Tale certainly contains Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction in all his plays: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” It’s suspected that there may have been a performing troupe in London at the time, whose trained bear Shakespeare wanted to use. He had to know, however, that if this was going to be put on again, they would not have handy access to a bear every time. And, be it special effects or just a guy in a bear suit, the bear is almost impossible to pull off and not have it be ludicrous. So why not play that up, and make the appearance of the bear a big laugh? After all the drama of the first three acts, giggling at the bear (even as it does kill off one of the characters) lets the audience lighten up for the country dancing and foolish trickery that follows.

Speaking of the country scenes, this play is also unusual in that the lead romantic heroine does NOT dress up as a boy to disguise herself. Admittedly, there is a matter of mistaken identity here, as she’s a missing princess masquerading as a shepherdess, but she’s been raised there, so knows nothing of her magical heritage. It’s odd seeing Shakespeare, who in his later plays loved to have callbacks to his earlier ones, not use the old girl dressed as a boy (played by a boy dressed as a girl dressed as a boy), but there’s a surprisingly limited amount of cross-dressing here.

The play can be hard to perform, like almost all Shakespeare, because of his habit of using unlikeable characters in major lead roles, and not having them get what they deserve. King Leontes in this play may be the only jealous husband we’ve seen who manages to give himself brain fever through sheer force of will. His ludicrous accusations of adultery get worse and worse as the early acts go on, and it requires an actual Godly Oracle to tell him he’s an idiot. Even then, he still doesn’t believe the Oracle, so his wife and son die just to show him the error of his ways.

As I said, the first half reads very much like a tragedy. Leontes has some similarities to both Othello and Lear, but lacks the innate nobility of both of them. It’s very frustrating seeing him create infidelity out of basically nothing at all. Some productions try to make Hermione a genuine flirt and tease to give him some motivation, but I think this not only does her character wrong, but misses the idea that he doesn’t need motivation. The problem with this, of course, is that in the end he gets his happy ever after. His daughter returns, his wife is resurrected, and all is well. Many people think he didn’t suffer enough. Well, he did grieve for 16 years, but we’re not shown that much.

Oh yes, the resurrection. The other reason this play is so well known is Hermione’s appearance as a statue come to life. It’s been suggested that this was Shakespeare trying to apologize for Lear, which had in the end a dying Lear babble that Cordelia was coming back to life, and certainly it’s not the only time he would do this – Pericles, which was written only 2 years earlier, has a very similar plot where the lead’s wife is not really dead. The difference here is that we SEE the statue come to life. The Winter’s Tale is at a period in Shakespeare’s life where he was very fond of fantastic elements – after this he’d write The Tempest, which goes even further – but a lot of people can’t suspend disbelief quite that much.

Tragicomedy, pastoral, romance. Whatever. It’s one of three genre-blending plays Shakespeare wrote in a row (along with Cymbeline and The Tempest), and generally regarded to day as one of his better plays, if not necessarily in the top echelon. I’m not sure I’d be able to stage it well (the festival scene, which runs to about 45 minutes, can be punishing with all the dances and songs), and there’s the Leontes problem, but certainly this is a lot easier to put on stage today than Shrew or Merchant of Venice. Check it out if you get a chance.

Oh yes, and the ‘shores of Bohemia’ thing? That was totally a joke. Shakespeare knew where Bohemia was. He was laughing up his sleeve as he wrote that. Plus it helped add to the sense of unreality.