Frank Tashlin had achieved recognition as a children's writer when he entered the film industry to work in the animation units at Disney and Warner Bros. Both of these early careers would have decisive import for the major films that Tashlin would direct in the 1950s. This early experience allowed Tashlin to see everyday life as a visually surreal experience, as a kind of cartoon itself, and gave him a faith in the potential for natural experience to resist the increased mechanization of everyday life. Tashlin's films of the 1950s are great displays of cinematic technique, particularly as it developed in a TV-fearing Hollywood. They featured a wide-screen sensibility, radiant color, frenetic editing, and a deliberate recognition of film as film. Tashlin's films often resemble live versions of the Warners cartoons.
As we said a while back, Mr. Tashlin was an artist ahead of his time. He was the first main-stream director who brought a cartoon sensibility to live-action films. It's a commonplace thing today, but Frank T. was pretty much the man who pioneered the trend.
And, as Sito says in the link above, he was pro-labor, believing in the usefulness of guilds and unions
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1 comments:
That's a very interesting book and I may have to check it out!
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