#Willard Bowsky

[clemsfilmdiary]

Sally Swing (1938, Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky)

Betty Boop #82

3/27/23

[tootern2345]

The dancing fools. Done around July

Cartoon: 1930’s Wise Flies. Directed by Dave Fleischer (Willard Bowsky is the animation director/lead animator) for Fleischer Studios, Inc

Song: 1927’s Moten Stomp by Bennie Moten and his Orchestra

[thebarroomortheboy]

In behalf of the peoples of Blefuscu and Lilliput, with eternal gratitude and love in our hearts, we christen thee, Gulliver!

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (1939) | dir. Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky and Orestes Calpini

[mi4011mariaperera]

Animator no. 7 - Willard Bowsky

Although 'Popeye: the Sailor man' is one of the oldest animated series in the history of animation I remember watching it as a kid and being entertained by every second of it. So of course, I should do some research on at least one of the animators to show my respect and appreciation for this cartoon.

Willard Bowsky

(Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clearer picture of him on Google)

Art Style

Willard Bowsky is a motion picture animator best known for his contributions to the 'Popeye the Sailor' cartoons of the 1930s.

He was born on September 26th, 1907, in New York City.

He joined the 'Fleischer Studio' in the last 1920s and quickly became one of its star artists, winning promotions to animator at the age of 23.

His drawing skills and instinctive feel for jazz rhythms made him an asset in creating early cartoons of 'Betty Boop'. His work was quite stylish in its fluid movement and well-chosen compositions.

He became a supervising animator in 1933 and had his own team where he could handle staging for films credited to 'Dave Fleischer'.

He was the animation director for over 30 Popeye cartoons from 1933-1941.

When Paramount pictures reorganized the Fleischer company and famous studios in 1942, Bowsky left for World War 2 service.

On November 27, 1944, Bowsky was killed in a nighttime firefight with German forces east of Paris, France.

He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.

He is buried at the American Cemetery and Memorial in Saint-Avold, France.

Below is the link to one of the Betty Boop episodes animated by Bowsky

[ffssinternship]

Pre-Researching Some More

Last week, I submitted my biographies to the other editors. With the semester coming to a close, everyone has been extremely busy. I returned to pre-researching veterans for future classes this week. I really enjoy pre-researching. There is something to invigorating looking up the veterans and relatives and piecing together their early lives. While the students will go more in depth and likely find more information, getting a glimpse into multiple veterans is so fascinating. One of the last veterans I researched this week was Willard Bowsky. Native to New York, he moved to Miami, FL in the late 1930s to work at a new cartoon studio. Numerous newspaper articles discuss the parties he attended, the projects he worked on, and the positions he held. Prior to his life in Florida, he worked as an artist in New York and a few newspapers discussed him entertaining at parties. His family appears to be an affluent one, with one census record recording multiple servants living in the household when the family lived with his mother’s parents. His parents moved with him and lived out the rest of their lives in Miami. Bowsky was drafted for the war and was on the older side. He went on to become a lieutenant. However, one of the obituaries written about him explained he was only overseas for three weeks before passing away. He received a medal for his efforts posthumously. The newspaper article explained he selflessly put himself in the line of fire so his platoon could escape safely. Whoever gets the opportunity to work on this biography might have too much information to write about.

On the flip side, a few veterans I researched had limited information. When it comes to more common names, deciphering which name goes to which person becomes confusing. Originally, I started pre-researching James Dodson because I thought he had a common but not too common name. However, multiple James Dodsons resided in the same area as him, causing confusion. I did my best and found a decent amount of information, such as census records and information on his parents. I also ran into the issue of spelling. Different documents sometimes recorded the name as Dotson. The biggest challenge arose with newspaper articles. I struggled to find an obituary and only found a few mentions of him when announcements for those who passed during the war. While the biography is not undoable, it would be challenging for a student to complete. The likelihood of intermingling family stories is high. This is why the pre-research is so important. Had a student begun researching Dodson and not realized there were multiple Dodsons, their time would be wasted and we would be left to figure it out. On the flip side, some students might think there is so much information that they will stop researching after a certain point and might miss some important documents or articles. Compiling some basic research beforehand really sets the project up for success.

[dashes-and-letters]

[popsixsquishcicerolipschitz]

POPEYE THE SAILOR MAN: Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) (Remastered) (HD 1080p) | Jack Mercer

8thManDVD.com™ Cartoon Channel

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor is a two-reel animated cartoon short subject in the Popeye Color Feature series, produced in Technicolor and released to theatres on November 27, 1936 by Paramount Pictures. It was produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios, Inc. and directed by Dave Fleischer, with musical supervision by Sammy Timberg. The voice of Popeye is performed by Jack Mercer, with Mae Questel as Olive Oyl and Gus Wickie as Sindbad the Sailor. Directors: Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky (uncredited) Stars: Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, Lou Fleischer

[mudwerks]

Dizzy Divers Popeye and Olive Oyl Animation Drawing (Max Fleischer, 1935) 

This short, released on July 26, 1935, was the 24th produced in the long-lived series. Dave Fleischer directs and Willard Bowsky and Harold Walker provided animation. Popeye and Olive are depicted together here on 10 field 3-peghole animation paper. Both are rendered in graphite and colored pencil.

[clemsfilmdiary]

We Aim to Please (1934, Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky)

Popeye the Sailor #17

3/16/23

[dweemeister]

Shiver Me Timbers! (1934 short)

As animated short films emerged from the silent film era, the major Hollywood studios acquired or partnered with animation studios to quickly produce shorts that could be shown before or in between movies. One of the most important names in American animation in the 1930s was Fleischer Studios – co-founded by brothers Max and Dave Fleischer – partnering with Paramount. The Fleischer shorts, unlike their competitors across town, usually concentrated on human characters – their filmography more commercial than artistic for art’s sake. Due to messy rights issues and modern-day corporations not seeing the value in the older movies they have acquired, much of the Fleischer filmography is unknown to audiences. That includes the films of Betty Boop, whom younger generations have a superficial knowledge about (the upstart company Olive Films has recently remastered some of the non-public domain Betty Boop shorts for home media), and the seventeen Superman shorts released from 1941-1943.

Surviving this mélange of media acquisitions, mergers, and dismissive attitudes to older media is Popeye the Sailor. Popeye, introduced in a comic strip in 1929 and first appearing in cinemas in 1933, has outlasted in the public imagination anything else that Fleischer Studios ever released. The visibility of the muscular, spinach-loving, pipe-smoking sailor has been kept intact because of the character’s rights belonging to Turner Entertainment (whose properties include Cartoon Network – which used to air Popeye regularly – and Turner Classic Movies, TCM) by way of Warner Bros. With Halloween nearing, the subject of this write-up is the twelfth of 108 Popeye shorts released by Fleischer Studios from 1933-1942 (Fleischer’s successor, Famous Studios, increased that total to 230 through 1957), Shiver Me Timbers! The film is credited to Dave Fleischer as a director, but research has shown his duties were closer to being a producer and creative supervisor. Most of the directorial work probably fell to credited animators Willard Bowsky and William Sturm.

Released in midsummer 1934, this is an early Popeye piece: in black-and-white, well within the era of rubber hose animation, the sound mix imperfect. After presumably being out in the ocean, Popeye (voiced by William Costello), Olive Oyl (Mae Questel; if you are unfamiliar with the Popeye series, Olive is Popeye’s longtime love interest of varying ambiguous relationship statuses... Questel is also an underrated voice actress), and Wimpy (Lou Fleischer) stumble upon a ruined, beached ship – its sails tattered, its wooden planks falling apart. Popeye immediately recognizes this to be a ghost ship and decides to investigate – against Olive’s better judgements. This film would not be interesting if they decided against climbing onboard, so of course they climb up the ladder that magically unfurls itself onto the ship’s deck! The ship moves itself off the beach, out to sea, and the spooks haunting the ship start toying with the too-curious mortals.

What makes the Fleischer animated shorts so difficult to judge compared to their peers from Walt Disney Animation Studios (partnered with Columbia, United Artists, and RKO at separate times across the 1930s; Disney did not become a major studio until the 1990s) and Warner Bros. (their animation arm an in-house body of the studio) is that they are largely formulaic. Popeye might be the most formulaic of all the Fleischer series, especially the later years under the Famous Studios moniker. The narrative usually follows this order: Popeye finds himself chasing or with the love of his life in Olive Oyl; arch-nemesis Bluto enters the scene and proceeds to abduct or, with dishonorable intentions, flirt with Olive; Olive winds up in trouble; Bluto beats the living daylights out of Popeye in ways that would otherwise kill any normal person; near unconsciousness or death, Popeye eats his spinach and proceeds to give Bluto (and his minions, if applicable) a walloping outdoing anything Bluto did to him; Popeye gets what he wants; and he sings the following or a variation of it: “I’m strong to the finich/finish, ‘cause I eats my spinach, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!”. Toot, toot!

Shiver Me Timbers! is a refreshing take because Bluto is not here to bluster his way through the plot. Instead, the film revolves around a bunch of ghosts having their way with Popeye, Olive, and Wimpy – playing with the characters’ personalities that Bluto might exploit for nakedly nefarious purposes. Separating this Popeye entry from many others in this decade is the time given to the supporting characters. Though it criss-crosses between Popeye, Olive, and Wimpy, the film always feels cohesive, with all of its jokes landing. For Olive, some of the early Fleischer Popeye shorts show her as very capable of physically holding her own against those who might want to harm her (one of my favorite gags including her is near the end of 1933′s Blow Me Down! – where she is closing her eyes, calling out for Popeye’s help, not realizing she has hammered Bluto senseless with a wooden club, saving herself). At one point in Shiver Me Timbers!, Olive is abducted by the ghosts, but their form of “torture” is the funniest moment in the film. The gluttonous J. Wellington Wimpy (better known as just “Wimpy”; his role in the comic strip downsized in cinematic adaptations of Popeye), in a rare development, actually has lines to deliver – completely fitting in with his cowardly character. The tricks played on Wimpy are tailored to his weakness for food. It is utterly ridiculous with flourishes of physical absurdity often found in 1930s animation and that would be less emphasized in later decades.

No, Shiver Me Timbers! will not scare anyone, but one still would not want to experience what Popeye and his friends go through on this boat ride from hell. Well, the funnier side of hell, even down to Sammy Timberg’s musical direction (Timberg worked for many of the Fleischer short films, but also contributed songs to their features: 1939′s Gulliver’s Travels and 1941′s Mr. Bug Goes to Town). From an animation standpoint, Bowsky and Sturm make use of glass plates and miniature sets to make their animation look less flat – this process was a relatively new feature in 1934, and gave their backgrounds dimension. This technological accomplishment would be perfected by the Fleischers’ primary rival, Walt Disney, in 1937 with the introduction of the multiplane camera.

The film is one of the best from Popeye’s early days at Fleischer because of its willingness to defy the typical Popeye narrative (if just for a few minutes). The ridiculous situation and the inventive animation – a moment with skeletons might have been inspired by The Skeleton Dance (1929) from Disney – results in several minutes of ghostly chaos and entertainment one wants from an animated short like this. Animated characters exploring haunted locations has long been a staple in animated films and television, with Shiver Me Timbers! one of the best early entrants to that venerable tradition.

My rating: 8.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

[ryanmoody]

The Dance Contest (1934) Directors Dave Fleischer & Willard Bowsky

[cinemasniffers]

CSS EXTRA CREDIT / Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor

Dave Fleischer and Willard Bowsky, 1936 (watch)

[fromthedust]

                                                  “How'm I doin'?” 

                                                     “HEY! HEY!"

I HEARD - 1933

Cast & Crew Mae Questel as Betty Boop ( performing "How'm I Doin'?") Bonnie Poe Claude Reese as Bimbo Max Fleischer (Producer) Dave Fleischer (Director) Willard Bowsky (Animator) Myron Waldman (Animator) Don Redman (Music)

[animationresources]

Soon after Grim Natwick arrived at the Fleischer Studios, Disney raided the studio for talent and took Ted Sears and several other key animators to the West coast. Grim was left with a skeleton crew of very young artists (Willard Bowsky was in his teens!) to finish a cartoon that had been started before Ted Sears left. Grim trained them on the job and created one of the most incredible cartoons in the history of animation... "Swing You Sinners". You can view this cartoon on the Animation Resources site if you CLICK on the link... https://animationresources.org/cartoons-preserving-swing-you-sinners/ Animation Resources opens your mind to the possibilities inherent in the medium that you never even imagined. That is the best way for you to move forward as a film maker yourself. But the daily article links are just the tip of the iceberg. Members get a treasure trove of carefully curated material every other month. JOIN TODAY! https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/