Closed Mondays

It's the one-woman show of "Celia Crazelsnuk" that our visitor has come to view. It's supposed to be closed on Mondays, but armed with his bottle and a very limited knowledge of art - in he goes! There are paintings and there are sculptures - and when they start to come alive it gives him (and us) an opportunity to see some vibrant and quite emotional animations. These work well offering quite a wide variety of subject matter and even a very talkative robot, but it's the stop-motion of the man himself that's most impressive. The facial expressions and muscle definition is worthy or Ray Harryhausen himself. I loved the ending, too!

A drunk finds an open door at an art gallery which is usually - for apparently very good reasons - CLOSED MONDAYS.

With this ingenious little cartoon, Will Vinton and his talented artists announced that they had entered the animation world in a big way. Their Claymation magic was able to ring the subtlest changes of emotion and bring out nuances of character remarkable for three dimensional props. As here, where the old inebriate finds himself drawn into the secret life of the various exhibits, so the viewers find themselves falling into a suspension of disbelief both rational & expectant.

Winner of the 1974 Oscar for Best Animated Short.

The 1974 winner of Best Animated Short depicts a man looking at artwork that appears to come to life. I especially liked the malfunctioning computer. One might interpret Will Vinton's "Closed Mondays" as a look at the relationship between humanity and the art that we produce. There's even the question of how to define art. I wouldn't call this my favorite Will Vinton cartoon, but I enjoyed it. Personally I don't think that enough people get to see the nominated animated shorts. They tend to be far more interesting than the features voiced by the celebrities of the moment.

Anyway, this one is worth seeing. It's too bad that Phil Knight took over Will Vinton's studio and fired Vinton from it.

It's been 25 years since Closed Mondays was released, and at least 20 since I've seen it... so my fond memories of this short are a testament to it's lasting impact. I too lament it's unavailability on video. I just saw the Wallace and Gromit series, and would love to see Closed Mondays again to remember all the little details.

Let's be blunt. The 1960s and 70s were terrible times for good animation. The excellent artwork of Looney Tunes and MGM were history and Disney was a sleeping giant which wouldn't really come back to life until "The Little Mermaid". In the meantime, third-rate animation studios like Hanna-Barbera churned out crap---cartoons with very low cel-counts (making the characters move like robots) and terrible stories (think "Speed Buggy", "The Harlem Globetrotters" and "Scrappy Do"). As a child and teen during this period, I pretty much watched the old classics in reruns and lost interest in the newer stuff. Thank goodness for the resurgence of animation!! Fortunatley, despite the nadir of the 60s-70s, occasionally a really great cartoon was produced against the odds. In other words, if bad and cheap animation paid, how could you expect anyone to bother with the good? Well, in the case of "Closed Mondays", you do get an exceptional short--even back in 1974.

"Closed Mondays" is an early animation of the Will Vinton Studios--the same folks who wore out their welcome in the 1980s with those annoying dancing raisins. It wasn't that the raisins were badly made--they were GREAT claymation characters. But, they were shown to death--with tons of commercials and even a kids cartoon series!! Talk about overkill....though I can't blame Vinton and the rest, as it did pay handsomely. But, they were capable of far more interesting stuff back in the 70s--such as "Mountain Music" and this short. These were terrifically animated using lumps of various colored clay--and very active imaginations.

The short begins with a wonderfully awful old guy wandering about an art museum. He seems to hate everything--which made me laugh. Even when the artwork comes to life, he seems unimpressed. And, in the end, it all makes a bit more sense. As I said, the quality of the work was very nice, the story was lovely AND it made me happy. Apparently the Academy also was impressed and they awarded the film the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1975. See this one.