The penultimate Animaland short, Ginger Nutt's Christmas Circus is a bit of an oddity. By now the squirrel Ginger Nutt was cemented as the series star, and so he gets title billing here, but he actually plays a very small role. Instead, the short brings back the various other animals which appeared across the series, originally created for one-off shorts.
The star of the short is actually the parrot who previously appeared in The Lion. As I mentioned before, in voice and personality he is the same character as Corny Crow, the antagonist from the Ginger Nutt cartoons - which would explain why Corny is reduced to a non-speaking cameo here.
Bill Hopper told me that this was a rather hastily prepared entry, rushed through in order to be ready for Christmas, with animators being taken off their current assignments to work on it. (He animated the Platypuses and most scenes of Ginger Nutt. The rather perfunctory cycles of the Platypuses juggling probably reflected the need to get the scene out quickly - Bill didn't care much for mechanical actions.)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the information - I'm not surprised to hear that the film was a rush job, as something definitely seemed to be missing. While taking the photographs, it struck me just how empty so many of the compositions are...
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