The Shark Film Office

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with my animation blog,  Cinema 4: Cel Bloc , about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.] The Wreck of the Hesperus  (1944) Dir.: Mannie Davis TC4P Rating: 6/9 Species: cartoon sharks, a small but very hungry pack of them. Sharks versus Mighty Mouse? Say it IS so! It is! The 1944 short,  The Wreck of the Hesperus , was the eighth Mighty Mouse short churned out by the Terrytoons studio from October of 1942 through December of 1961. When I say "churned out," I mean it; they knocked out eighty of these babies in that span. [OK, technically, the first 77 were released theatrically through 1954, and the final three were completed later in the decade for television, but that means they crammed even more Mighty Mouse into a still smaller time frame. That can be eith...

Just for a taste of what will hopefully be coming up in the relative near future (and what was supposed to be here already) on The Shark Film Office...  This is the full length trailer for USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage : USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is directed by Mario Van Peebles, and stars Nicolas Cage and Tom Sizemore. Yes, it is the same true story that Captain Quint spins his monologue around in one of the most memorable of many famous scenes in Jaws:  the tragic fate of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II. Shortly after delivering parts of the atomic bomb that would eventually level Hiroshima, the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sent to the bottom of the Pacific along with 300 of its crewmen. Around 900 more U.S. men were left stranded for five days in the open ocean, and among the varied reasons that another 600 or so men died before a little over 300 were ultimately rescued, the one that plays best in a widescreen movie thea...

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with another of my websites,  Cinema 4: Cel Bloc , about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.] Codfish Balls  (1930) Dir.: Frank Moser TC4P Rating: 5/9 Species: cartoon sharks, a gang of them with stunted bodies and sawblade-like dorsal fins. Sharks in the early days of animation came in a wide variety of styles. I suppose that if one were to use the argument that if there are over 500 identified species of sharks in the world, why shouldn't there be that many species too in the animated shark world, only in a more fanciful sense. I guess that I would have to somewhat agree with such a musing. Why not indeed? In cartoons, mice, ducks, and cats and all other manner of animals speak like us, drive cars, fly planes, have dogs for pets, captain boats, wear clothe...