Gene Deitch: The road shall go on

Shardul Bhardwaj

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One of the best-known animators of all time, Gene Deitch passed away in Prague on April 16 at the age of 95. He was best known for his direction of Tom and Jerry (1961-62) and Popeye (1960-63). He was nominated for the Academy awards several times and won it for Munro (1960) and was awarded the Winsor McCay Award for his work in animation. Here ends the recitation of the list of achievements generally meant to start an article about a master of his craft, a routine which the artist if he looks down now shall detest. Especially Gene Deitch, who in his own ways was a big one for breaking comfortable tradition.

A lot of discussion concerning Deitch seems to be centred on how the 13 Tom and Jerry shorts he directed were ‘bad’ as compared to the Hannah-Barbara era and the Chuck Jones era. One of the reasons offered is that he changed Tom’s characterisation to the one who always loses and gets flogged the most. Another reason given is Deitch’s use of different music as compared to the Hannah-Barbara which critics consider improper only because Hannah-Barbara or Chuck Jones never used it. In fact, Deitch got a few mails issuing him death threats after the shorts were aired.

Deitch pointed out while talking about the creation of Nudnik: “Like most animators, I was inspired by those great cinema clowns, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin.” A tender-hearted, simpleton Nudnik would only be met with contempt and difficult situations. Deitch’s Jerry, the mouse, has to be seen as an extension of both the great cinema clowns and Nudnik, the enjoyment derived by audiences in looking at Chaplin’s tramp and Jerry are quite similar. We marvel at how the simple underdog gets stuck in impossible situations due to his gullibility and then struggles to get out, also a classic clowning theme. The audiences go back to these classics to relive that moment when the underdog beats the unbeatable. Deitch merely amped up the physical comedy of this small mouse giving it back to old Tom. Deitch clearly did not agree with the idea that Tom and Jerry shall get over all their differences in the end. The second argument about music seems to be a thorn because of discontinuance of an earlier smooth Hannah-Barbara feel. This point can be hotly debated but one has to say the quality of music cannot be ‘bad’ only because it refuses to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor.

The screen was not the only place where Deitch decided to break away from the norm, it was his private life too. In 1959, on a 10-day visit to former Czechoslovakia, he fell in love with his second wife and decided to stay on in the country, where he also set up his animation studio. He called himself “the only free American living and working in Prague during 30 years of Communist Party dictatorship”. It was atypical at the time for a leading personality of American show business to be living in a Communist dictatorship and be working for leading Hollywood studios like Paramount and Rembrandt Films.

The list of other gems carved out by Deitch like The Hobbit and Alice of Wonderland in Paris will not suffice in detailing his marvellous career. Eduardo Galeano in a parabelesque short named Road Goes On writes: “Among the Indians of upper Orinoco, he who dies loses his name. His ashes are stirred into the plantain soup or corn wine and everybody eats … the dead one, now living in other bodies, called by other names, wanders, desires, speaks.” It’s highly unlikely that Deitch’s name shall be forgotten, he shall continue to wander into the minds of younger generation rediscovering this master, he shall desire and speak through all the others who at some point or the other have had childhoods filled with the cat and mouse chase and the spinach-eating Popeye, the sailor man.