Hello, I have a lot of questions about the beginnings of the frog, so I'll ask them here.
Firstly, I'd like to know if Ub Iwerks really created the character of Flip at the same time as Mickey when he and Disney were looking for a new character to replace Oswald. I've read this information on the internet but I haven't been able to find any sources that could confirm it.
Secondly, I've also read that Ub Iwerks wanted Flip to become Mickey's sidekick in his cartoons but that Walt Disney refused for some unknown reason and this would be the main reason why Ub Iwerks parted company with Disney. However, Iwerks seems to have used a prototype of Flip in the Springtime cartoon (1929), and this somewhat calls into question this earlier assertion.
The most interesting fact to note is that Flip The Frog's initial design was much closer to that of a real frog, and that his first cartoons were set in a completely different environment from that of any other cartoon character of the time, a setting that also closely resembled the Silly Symphonies. Unfortunately, by his third cartoon, Flip seems to want to conform and adopts a much more generic design with pants, gloves and shoes, and his squirrel girlfriend disappears in favor of a female Flip clone. Worse still, from his fifth cartoon onwards, Flip's world becomes totally urban, and Flip himself is transformed into an imitation of Mickey Mouse.
How to explain this complete turnaround on the part of Ub Iwerks?
Is there any particular reason you hate Disney so much? It's obvious you've never actually watched the Disney films, because you just echo the stereotypes about them.
You view them not by their value but rather by the axiom "They ain't that funny", as if that were the only way to judge a cartoon. Are Disnry cartoons the funniest? No. Are they still fantastic? Yes.
Flip cartoons are good but there's nothing going on underneath, like at Disney or WB.
You're wrong, humor is in fact the main criterion for rating the quality of a cartoon. A cartoon that contains beautiful visuals but isn't funny will be much less appreciated than one that contains a lot of humor, and for this reason, Tex Avery's MGM-produced cartoons and those of WB will remain infinitely more popular than Disney's.
I say this with respect:
The point of animation is to bring to life what cannot be shown in live-action. Using the logic that cartoons should only be funny (as if Disney's films aren't funny, which I could name many off the top of my head that are hysterical) is essentially the same as saying all movies should be comedies. And there would be none of these studios' styles without him.
I used to think that his films were wimpy and girlish, not funny, etc because John K and the Clampett Cult said so. After watching them myself I was angry that I had been lied to, and amazed at how good they were. Have you actually watched them--at least closely?
You're forgetting that the history of cartoons is completely different from the history of films, because unlike films, the main raison d'être of cartoons has always been to be comedies, and this was established right from the start with the achievements of pioneers Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay, and absolutely no one could argue with that in the years that followed (including Walt Disney in those early cartoons).
Unfortunately, in the early thirties, Walt Disney decided that humor would no longer be the priority for cartoons; instead, Walt decreed that visuals would be the priority. For this reason, Disney's productions are undoubtedly the blandest of the era, and Mickey is the most insipid character who ever existed. All the cartoons produced by their competitors were much funnier and featured characters far more engaging than Mickey. Harman-Ising, for example, while often described as mere Disney imitators, actually produced far better cartoons than the latter, and Bosko had far more personality than Mickey. Even Van Beuren's cartoons, which you claim to despise and constantly seek to denigrate, are much funnier than Disney's.
And John Kricfalusi is absolutely right in his criticism of the Disney studios, particularly when he says that Disney has completely destroyed the medium of animation by suffocating it under the weight of rules. In fact, during the first decades of animation history, animators enjoyed a great deal of freedom, which enabled cartoons of that era to reach high levels of creativity and surrealism, particularly in the early thirties. Unfortunately, the Disney steamroller put a definitive end to this incredible period of inventiveness and experimentation, and cartoons that were once hilarious became soft and boring with a horribly realistic drawing style. All cartoons were more or less infected by Walt's rot until one man had the courage to speak out against Disney: Tex Avery.
Avery managed to save the creativity and humor in cartoons from being completely annihilated by Disney's silliness, and I'm sincerely indebted to him for that, even if he unfortunately didn't manage to break Disney's influence completely.