• Welcome to the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

Old Cartoons

 
 
 
Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby

 
Yea, there are some gems. All done without CGI.
 
There is an old cartoon I've been looking for most of my life.
I saw it only once on a black & white TV as a little kid.
All I remember is the main character in a prison cell. A row of cells with a strip of paper (canvas?) on the back wall, running through all the cells, like a conveyor belt.
Each prisoner adding paint to the canvas, like an assembly line, producing a portrait of The Leader. After a few, the main character started making deliberate mistakes to the portrait, which made me laugh. Given the time, late 50s, The Leader probably represented Hitler or Mussolini.

I think I would understand/enjoy it better as an adult. But I never saw it again.
I don't remember enough to identify it. character, art style, studio? I just don't remember.
I'm sure that if it was from a major studio, I would have seen it again.
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
 
unapologetic said:
There is an old cartoon I've been looking for most of my life.
I saw it only once on a black & white TV as a little kid.
All I remember is the main character in a prison cell. A row of cells with a strip of paper (canvas?) on the back wall, running through all the cells, like a conveyor belt.
Each prisoner adding paint to the canvas, like an assembly line, producing a portrait of The Leader. After a few, the main character started making deliberate mistakes to the portrait, which made me laugh. Given the time, late 50s, The Leader probably represented Hitler or Mussolini.

I think I would understand/enjoy it better as an adult. But I never saw it again.
I don't remember enough to identify it. character, art style, studio? I just don't remember.
I'm sure that if it was from a major studio, I would have seen it again.
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
Click to expand...
This is the kind of thing that LLMs are actually fairly good at answering.

I pasted your first paragraph into Perplexity, and it came up with:

The strongest match is probably “Cellbound” (1955), an MGM cartoon directed by Tex Avery and Michael Lah. It features Spike as a prisoner in Sing Song Prison, and its setting is largely a row of prison cells—close to your memory of a black-and-white TV cartoon.
However, the specific assembly-line portrait of a dictator does not appear in the available plot descriptions of Cellbound, which focus on Spike’s decades-long tunnel escape and his attempt to hide aboard a train. So this may be either a remembered scene from another short or two cartoons whose images have blended together.

Other plausible candidates
• “Der Führer’s Face” (1942): Donald is forced to work under the Nazi regime, surrounded by repeated portraits of Hitler and required to salute them. It contains the right political imagery, but not, as far as the documented plot indicates, prisoners collectively painting one portrait.
• “Education for Death” (1943): a serious Disney anti-Nazi short in which portraits of Hitler, Goebbels and Göring appear in an authoritarian setting, though it is not a prison-cell comedy.
• “Bars and Stripes Forever” (1939): a Warner Bros. prison cartoon involving rows of cells and prisoners, but the prisoners are dogs and the known plot concerns escape attempts rather than painting.
• “The Ducktators” (1942) or “Russian Rhapsody” (1944): both are wartime Warner cartoons satirising dictatorships and Hitler, but neither obvious synopsis matches the painting-production line.
Click to expand...
 
AI Overview

You are thinking of a highly memorable and biting satirical animated short film called The Box (La Kutija), which was released in 1967.
While it has the distinct, bleak, and deeply political look often associated with mid-century Czechoslovakian or Eastern Bloc animation, it was actually produced by the famous Zagreb Film studio in Yugoslavia (directed by Zlatko Grgić).

Plot Summary
    • The Assembly Line Cells: The film takes place in a series of tightly packed, identical prison boxes (cells) aligned horizontally.
    • The Continuous Canvas: A long continuous strip of paper feeds through the back walls of all the cells like a factory conveyor belt.
    • Manufacturing "The Leader": Each prisoner has a specific, monotonous task to add one detail to the canvas as it moves past them (one draws the ears, one paints the hair, etc.) to mass-produce uniform propaganda portraits of a stern dictator.
    • The Defiant Main Character: When the conveyor belt reaches the main character, he begins subtly defying the system. He paints funny, deliberate mistakes onto the dictator's face—adding an absurd mustache, cross-eyes, or silly details. Each time his altered portrait moves to the next cell, it briefly disrupts the grim reality of the factory prison.
Can't find the film on the net.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom