According to Giannalberto Bendazzi, the author of a colossal monograph on the world history of animated film, one of the distinctive features of Hungarian animation is that artistic and entertainment-oriented trends coexist perfectly within it, a claim that can be especially well substantiated by the animated output of the legendary Pannónia Film Studio.[1] The work of certain directors represents primarily the artistic, experimental tendencies of animated film, consciously renouncing appeal to a mass audience (such as the oeuvres of György Kovásznai and Sándor Reisenbüchler); others achieved a fortunate synthesis of the two approaches, as in the case of Marcell Jankovics; while further creators committed themselves to popular aesthetics. Béla Ternovszky unquestionably belongs to the latter group. Although it is difficult to identify an immediately recognizable “Ternovszky signature,” and it would be equally hard to point to a theme, technique, or style unmistakably individualized by the creator, it can nevertheless be stated that Béla Ternovszky made a significant contribution to the shaping of twentieth-century Hungarian mass culture. His name is associated with such widely known and still frequently cited series as Mézga Aladár különös kalandjai (The Strange Adventures of Aladár Mézga), Kérem a következőt! (Next, Please!), or Gusztáv; and he also directed one of the greatest successes in Hungarian film history – not only in animation – the cult classic Macskafogó (Cat City).
Béla Ternovszky’s oeuvre – not least because of its confident alternation among different production types – is undoubtedly versatile, yet a fundamental tendency can be identified that may be regarded as exemplary across almost the entire body of work. If we define the two major currents of popular animation as fairy-tale-like classical animation on the one hand, and caricatural animation centered on humorous – or ironic, satirical, parodic, etc. – elements on the other, it is evident that Ternovszky’s oeuvre is tied to the latter tradition.[2] (The only substantial excursion toward classical fairy-tale animation may be considered Egérút (Slip Away), which, through its characters, nevertheless also shows continuity with Ternovszky’s caricatural cartoon style.) The artistic renewal of Hungarian animation in the early 1960s can be attributed to the emergence of caricatural drawn animation,[3] and Ternovszky joined this newly forming trend with Modern edzésmódszerek (Modern Training Methods): this short film already foreshadowed and laid the foundations for the principal guidelines of the entire oeuvre.
Within Ternovszky’s caricatural cartoon tradition, two distinct systems of relations can be identified. One group consists of works that tailor animated gags to human figures and thus offer the most direct connection to the genre of burlesque. The other group includes works that may appear, at least superficially, to be close to the world of fairy tales, since they are built around a figure type that is also fundamental to fairy tales – the anthropomorphic animal character – yet they approach it through the toolkit of caricatural drawn animation. In what follows, I will present these two groups of films in detail.
The Limits of the Animated Gag: Ternovszky’s Animations Featuring Human Figures
Within caricatural animation, Modern Training Methods – one of the director’s most award-winning works – continues the path laid down by films by József Nepp, most notably Öt perc gyilkosság (Five Minutes to Kill, 1966). While Five Minutes to Kill, offering an extreme form of grotesque humor, is clearly rethought in certain respects, Modern Training Methods also diverges from it in others. In its use of serial narration, Ternovszky’s film follows Five Minutes to Kill: the characteristic narrative type of gag-based cartoons does not construct a continuous plot but rather a chain of scenes or episodes, whose coherence is not established by spatio-temporal relations or causal links, but by an overarching theme or conceptual framework. In the framing situation of Modern Training Methods, a thoroughly unscrupulous coach attempts to squeeze the best possible performance out of an athlete by the most drastic means imaginable. In the episode-or rather training-sequence structured according to different sports, we witness absurd, often grotesque physical injuries inflicted on the athlete: from a shark biting off the swimmer’s lower body, through the explosion of a hand grenade bounced instead of a tennis ball, to eyeballs popping out during weightlifting. Much like Five Minutes to Kill, Ternovszky’s film also catalogues methods of destroying cartoon figures pushed to the point of absurdity, and it does so in a minimalist visual style closely related to Nepp’s film, one that presents only the most essential elements of the fictional world. There is, however, a crucial difference: whereas Five Minutes to Kill applies its execution methods to a wide range of characters, Modern Training Methods stages its tortures and bodily mutilations on a single figure. As a result, the film’s connection to the burlesque tradition of American cartoons infused with sadistic elements becomes far more pronounced. Most emblematically, the cartoon “sado-burlesque” represented by the Tom & Jerry series is based on the principle that no matter what injury a drawn character suffers – whether its body is torn apart or blown to pieces – it always returns intact in the next scene [4]. This is precisely what happens in the sequence of scenes in Modern Training Methods as well. The film also offers striking examples of another gag type particularly favored by both live-action and animated burlesque: the literal interpretation of figurative expressions. [5] In his brilliant essay on animated gags, Elemér Hankiss cites some of these examples: “the long jumper does not ‘jump as if he had stepped on a nail’, but ‘jumps because he has stepped on a nail’ (since his coach, as encouragement, has placed a nail-studded plank on the take-off board), and the runner does not ‘run as if the ground were burning under his feet’, but ‘runs fast because the ground is burning under his feet’ (as his coach, in the interest of better performance, has doused the track with gasoline and set it alight just behind the runner’s heels).” [6]
Ternovszky’s later short animated films further develop different aspects of Modern Training Methods. Tartsunk kutyát! (Let’s Keep a Dog!) lines up eleven “arguments” in favor of why it is worth becoming a dog owner, using a serial mode of narration. The reason these can be placed in quotation marks is that the relationships between humans and dogs, as well as the animals’ characteristic traits, are presented through a distinctly ironic approach: Let’s Keep a Dog! draws attention both to the relativity of the owner / pet and loyal companion positions (or, in other words, to the question of who is whose companion) and to the fundamental differences between the behavioral strategies of humans and four-legged animals (for example, in courtship rituals).
There Is a Limit to Everything also employs serial narration, but here the individual units are not introduced by intertitles, as they were in the earlier short films. There Is a Limit to Everything continues the sadistic-burlesque line of Modern Training Methods with such emphasis that it can even be regarded as a thesis film on the relationship between the animated gag and destruction. The humming little hero of the plot – the most radically simplified human character in Ternovszky’s short films – remains indestructible as long as he travels through land, water, and air as a cartoon figure. He is struck by lightning, squeezed by an octopus, swallowed by an elephant, walled in – and so on – yet after every atrocity he regenerates successfully. Once, however, the cartoon character develops the desire to become a flesh-and-blood human being and crosses over into the “live-action world” (a desire triggered, not incidentally, by the sight of an attractive young woman on the street), a single car is enough to make the disaster final: the run-over young man lies dead in the closing shot of the film. There Is a Limit to Everything can thus be understood both as a reflection on the “modes of existence” of animated and live-action film and as an exemplary instance of gag-centered burlesque animation. A later stage of the director’s interest in crossing the boundary between animated and live-action worlds can be seen in Pumukli-sorozat (Meister Eder and His Pumuckl), which employs gags far more harmless than the morbid-grotesque humor of There Is a Limit to Everything in depicting the pranks of the “thieving goblin” who moves into the carpenter’s workshop.
The Gustav series – which satirizes everyday human faults and failings and is built around the stumbling, bumbling “little man” – was launched in the 1960s by József Nepp, Attila Dargay and Marcell Jankovics; Ternovszky joined the series as a director when it continued in the 1970s. Although many directors worked on the series, Gustav consists of episodes with a unified tone due to the primacy of satirical humour, and its fundamental stylistic characteristics are likewise homogeneous. For this reason, it would be difficult to determine how any particular director individualized the character (none of them did so in a conspicuous or “intrusive” way). What can be stated, however, is that the gag-centeredness and the inclination toward burlesque in Ternovszky’s short films proved highly transferable to the world of the series. Gustav – in Ternovszky’s episodes just as in those of other directors – appears in different living situations from one episode to another. The title character, whose identity is never fixed, possesses only a few basic traits that consistently serve as sources of comedy, above all his problematic adaptability and his self-assertion driven by self-interest. In the most varied circumstances, Gustav appears primarily as a pariah, a dupe, or even a clown – indeed, in the episode Gusztáv munkát keres (Gustav Looks for a Job) directed by Ternovszky, the character finds his vocation precisely in the latter role.
Several of the Gusztáv (Gustav) episodes directed by Ternovszky rank among the most strongly burlesque entries in the entire series. Gusztáv fűrészel (Gustav Saws) is a miniature masterpiece of burlesque humor built on one-man stumbling and bumbling, varying the evergreen burlesque themes of struggling with objects and irrationally operated mechanisms. In Gusztáv mázol (Gustav Paints), based on an inversion of the “the coat for the button” principle, the escalation of painting activity intensifies to the point of absurdity; and in Gusztáv és a téli örömök (Gustav and the Joys of Winter) – where a parallel with Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) is not unjustified – the two-left-footed character disrupts the peace of a snow-covered resort. These selected episodes illustrate well that the meeting of Ternovszky’s directorial temperament with the figure of Gustav resulted in a felicitous “collaboration under a lucky star” – and in an interview, the artist himself named Gustav as his favourite among the animated characters he worked with.[7]
Among the two Mézga series co-created by Ternovszky, Vakáción a Mézga család (The Mézga Family on Holiday) is clearly the one closest to the works discussed above and to caricature-style animation itself. As in the first series, Vakáción a Mézga család (The Mézga Family on Holiday) also features the entire family in each episode’s plot, and – for the first time in the Mézga series, as well as in animated series more generally – the episodes form a continuous narrative, presenting a single overarching story divided into thirteen parts. The Mézga Family on Holiday, in sharp contrast with the character of Gustav, builds its humour on characters endowed with stable identities, making central use of the consistently exploited situational comedy that arises when decidedly petty figures are forced to cope with globe-trotting adventures, international intrigues, and crime-story complications. The plot spanning several continents accumulates crime- and adventure-genre situations, from being stranded on a desert island to mafia conspiracies, terrorist threats, and even an aircraft hijacking – motifs introduced in Ternovszky and Nepp’s collaboration that already anticipate Cat City. [8] In striking contrast with this caricatured adventure series, the episodes of Mézga Aladár különös kalandjai (The Unusual Adventures of Aladár Mézga), although not devoid of humor, operate in entirely different dimensions – sometimes quite literally. The title character, who embarks on nocturnal space travel and interplanetary reconnaissance, and his loyal companion Blöki the dog, become explorers of possible – and even more so of explicitly impossible – worlds. In this series, caricature gives precedence to a philosophical attitude, while humor aligns with the intellectual ambitions of science-fictional fantasy. And although The Unusual Adventures of Aladár Mézga assumes the genre traits of sci-fi, it would be just as reasonable to regard it as a fairy tale – in which sense it is closer to the Ternovszky works that dispense with human characters and instead build their plots and worlds around anthropomorphic animals.
From the Forest Service to the Cat Syndicate: Anthropomorphic Animal Characters in Ternovszky’s Animated Films
The series Kérem a következőt! (Next, Please!) – created jointly with Nepp and József Romhányi – introduces into Ternovszky’s oeuvre those works that place at their center anthropomorphic animal figures endowed with human traits, which are of exceptional importance to the imaginative world of the fairy tale as well. Apart from the short-lived initiative Macskamesék (Cat Tales), among Ternovszky’s series only Next, Please! favours this character type, which later dominates all of the director’s feature-length animations. Alongside Gustav and the Mézga family, the protagonists of Next, Please! are likely the best-known characters in Hungarian animated series: Dr. Bubó, the owl physician; his assistant, Nurse Ursula the bear; the head of the Forest Service, Sergeant Hawk; and Ernő the Tortoise, who trudges along as a messenger. In addition to these recurring characters, each episode features a different animal species in the spotlight – Next, Please! boasts perhaps the richest character repertoire in Hungarian animation. Not only do the animal figures parodying human roles provoke laughter, but so do the costumes and makeup imposed on them. Ternovszky and his collaborators made the series memorable even through its mildly bizarre figures: in a spirit of “recalling the past,” they dressed their characters in turn-of-the-century costumes, [9] and shaped their faces in a deliberately mask-like fashion (with beaks resembling prosthetic noses, heart-shaped rosy cheeks, etc.). The excellent opening episode, Most kezdődik a bál (Let the Ball Begin), is practically a program piece for this stylization that blends human and animal features.
The series connects to the literary tradition of fables in a parodistic manner: just as in the animal tales of Aesop, La Fontaine or Gáspár Heltai, here too it is animal characters endowed with human qualities that help articulate a moral lesson or a piece of wisdom – though in this case the intent is decidedly mocking. At the end of each episode, Dr. Bubó’s closing words serve chiefly to disguise the failed therapies as successes, or they function as sarcastic aphorisms presented as confirmations of some “scientific” observation. Next, Please! uses the tools of satirical humour to map out a society in poor health: in the animal world, small and large, herbivore and predator, reptile and mammal alike suffer from ailments that are mostly psychological in origin. The series develops the portrait of a society in which the figures officially responsible for its operation (the doctor and the policeman) are more counterproductive than effective, while its members tend to weaken rather than strengthen social cohesion.
It is indisputable that behind the surface of Next, Please!, populated by anthropomorphic animal characters, there lies a layer of social criticism – something not entirely foreign to Ternovszky’s feature-length films either, even if in those works such content is far less explicitly articulated and was not necessarily an intended focus of the creators. Yet this interpretive angle cannot be avoided in the case of Cat City either. Although Ternovszky’s masterwork does not explicitly prompt such a reading, it certainly does not preclude the interpretation that the gigantic cat–mouse conflict can be understood as a satirical version of the bipolar world order, with the cats representing “the declining West” and the mice “the emerging socialism”. [10] Moreover – in a narrower sense – the story based on the clash of two “superpowers” can also be read as a caustic reflection on the era of the “Second Cold War” (1976–85), the intensifying arms race, and the response to Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative; from this perspective, even the opening text evoking Star Wars is not merely a parody of George Lucas’s film. There is no doubt that in Cat City the system-critical edge and the possibilities for contemporary political interpretation are not as emphatic as in Next, Please! or in Nepp’s Hófehér (Snow White) (1983). Yet – however marginally – the film still intersects with the “Aesopian mode” of Hungarian animation, which in various works allowed creators to encode veiled critiques of the political system, and enabled viewers to decode them. [11]
Cat City naturally did not become a cult film because of its latent political meanings. Its success can be explained much more by the fact that, on the one hand, it is an openly declared and boldly assumed parody of popular film genres, making it an almost unprecedented initiative in Hungarian film culture; and on the other hand, it is such a tour de force of character-centered animation that it alone elevates it to a distinguished place in the history of Hungarian animation. These two aspects inevitably intertwine, since the mere succession of parodistic elements would not necessarily create a coherent whole – but the characters who accompany the film throughout its running time, and the ironic, grotesque, and satirical humour that manifests through them and by means of them, fully complete Cat City in both narrative and atmospheric terms.
Ternovszky described the film as a genre parody in the following way: “In Cat City, the source of humour largely lies in the fact that, alongside its own storytelling, it is also a parody of other successful films. One can recognize elements of sci-fi […], horror, as well as details that recall the James Bond films, while others evoke disaster and action films. Yet throughout this process of parody, our attitude remains perceptible – much like Mikszáth felt about the gentry: deep in our hearts we are drawn to them.”[12] The global cat–mouse conflict introduces the plot as a war film, but it soon shifts its focus to spy-film adventures through the storyline of the super-agent Grabowski. The scenes centred on Lazy Dick first evoke the disaster film through an airplane-hijacking situation, later the exotic adventure film through jungle wandering, and finally the vampire film. In the cats’ experiments and in the deployment of the robot dog sent to rescue the mice, one can also detect motifs of science fiction. The musical segments receive strong emphasis in the film – not least because the original American version of the “4 Gangsters” song (The Manhattan Transfer: Four Brothers) was the seed from which the film’s concept grew. Nepp developed Cat City based on the clip he imagined for the music. Among the musical moments, the clip introduces the rat characters into the story; the trumpet solo that turns into a group performance saves Lazy Dick’s life and initiates him as an honorary member of the vampire society; and at the cat celebration, the purple cat lady performs a flirtatious song full of erotic innuendo. Even the genres mentioned above do not fully cover the range parodied in Cat City, since certain moments also play with the literary genre of the epic – from the in medias res beginning, through the troop review that precedes the armed clash between cats and mice, to the vampire squad led by Lazy Dick arriving as a deus ex machina. It is important to note that this kind of genre-stacking was not a common device in feature-length animation at the time Cat City was made: the condensation and interweaving of elements from mass culture anticipates the audience-attracting strategies of the most successful American animations that appeared after the turn of the millennium, such as those produced by Pixar and DreamWorks. In this sense, Cat City was ahead of its time.
The tongue-in-cheek treatment of genres, as I have mentioned, is completed by the strengths of the character design: Cat City is one of those feature-length Hungarian animated films that is among the richest not only in the number of characters it presents, but also in their diversity and individuality – whether in the elaboration of their movement and gesture systems, the “wardrobe” designed for them, or the brilliant performances of the voice actors. Although the basic situation restricts the film’s character set to cats and mice, within these boundaries it is striking how many different figures appear throughout the running time. Even those who appear only for the briefest moments are individualized characters – such as the clownishly giggling cat scientist or the young mouse selling newspapers – and some secondary characters are developed almost as thoroughly as the main ones (Grabowski, Mr. Teufel, Safranek, Lazy Dick), most notably the rats who introduce themselves as the “four Gangsters.”
In Cat City, the accumulation of parodies of popular film genres converged with characteristically East-European humour and top-tier animation craftsmanship – and the result is an animated masterpiece that has remained endlessly rewatchable for thirty years and continues to offer an equally enjoyable experience to every generation. Ternovszky and his collaborators were unable to repeat this bull’s-eye success, although Slip Away and Macskafogó 2 – A Sátán macskája (Catcher: Cat City 2) are both connected to the original work. The connection is – naturally – closer and more direct in the case of Cat City 2, since, as a sequel to the original film, it attempts both to continue the familiar story of the cats and mice and, by introducing new characters (led by the hell-spawned cat phantom and his jungle-recruited henchmen), to play with motifs not previously seen. The professional animation of Cat City 2 only moderately counterbalances the fact that this time the parodic jokes and the various plot threads do not coalesce into a coherent whole: the humour becomes dominated by puns that relate only loosely – or not at all – to the situations, the new (otherwise exciting) characters are not given enough space, and the burnt-out doubles of the old characters mostly linger as background figures. At the same time, Cat City 2 can be praised as a technically convincing example of combining digital animation with traditional hand-drawn animation – as demonstrated by the spectacular crowd scenes and the grand-scale clashes of the finale.
Slip Away, old-fashioned in every possible respect, stands farthest in Ternovszky’s oeuvre from the caricaturistic tendency; this film truly places the anthropomorphic animal figures – also used in the caricaturistic cartoons – into a genuinely fairy-tale-like narrative. The rodent protagonist of Slip Away is Csipisz, the circus mouse who, tired of the “entertainment industry,” saws his way out of his cage one winter night and sets off into the unknown. In the forest he nearly freezes to death, and a lonely, gruff elf saves him: Csiperke temporarily takes in the scatterbrained, constantly chattering little mouse. Slip Away unfolds Csiperke’s heartwarming emotional development in the snow-covered forest: the elf’s coldness softens, he grows fond of the mouse – and even helps in rescuing him when the forest’s “evil fairy,” Minnie, abducts the little rodent. Interestingly, despite its charming fairy-tale plot and its lack of direct contemporary political allusions, Slip Away – like Cat City – can also be interpreted from a social-historical perspective. According to Klára Muhi’s thought-provoking suggestion, Csipisz’s story may be seen as a reflection on the post-regime-change position and predicament of artists and intellectuals, raising the question of “what is better: the soft, comfortable, well-established state of captivity, or the freedom studded with a thousand mortal dangers.”[13] This interpretation may be supported by factors such as the court trial aiming to free the mouse (a moment that conspicuously disrupts the fairy-tale tone) and the identity of the intriguer – a “hysterical, female insect burdened with diva mannerisms,” essentially “a creature fit for the talk shows of commercial television.”[14]
It is not far-fetched to say that through Minnie’s character, Ternovszky and Nepp seem to foreshadow the intellectual mass destruction that commercial television and tabloid media have since carried out with staggering unscrupulousness. And the joke that the intriguer insists on being called an “evil fairy” on the basis of an official agreement, even though “witch” would obviously be the right designation for everyone else, likely pokes fun at the “newspeak” of political correctness. Of course, even less emphasis is placed on such interpretive possibilities in Slip Away than in Cat City – but the mere fact that they can still be discovered makes this seemingly tradition-following fairy-tale cartoon all the more intriguing.
[2016]
[1] Bendazzi, Giannalberto: Cartoons. One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. London: John Libbey, 1994. p. 347.
[2] In my forthcoming book, I deal in detail with the caricaturistic tendency of Hungarian animation Varga Zoltán: A magyar animációs film: intézmény- és formatörténeti közelítések(Hungarian Animated Film: Institutional and Format-Historical Approaches), Szeged: Pompeji, 2016.
[3] See Julianna P. Szűcs, A karikatúra-látásmód és a magyar animáció (The caricatural vision and Hungarian animation), Filmkultúra 1981/5. pp. 68-75.
[4] See Blackledge, Olga: Erőszak, hajsza és a test konstrukciója az amerikai és szovjet animációs sorozatokban. (Violence, chase and the construction of the body in American and Soviet animated series), Aperture Summer 2012. http://apertura.hu/2012/nyar/blackledge-eroszak-hajsza-es-a-test-konstrukcioja-az-amerikai-es-szovjet-animacios-sorozatokban.
[5] See Zoltán Varga: Elvitte a cica a nyelved? A burleszk öröksége az animációs filmben: 4. Vizuális szójátékok (Has the cat got your tongue? The heritage of burlesque in animated film: 4. Visual puns. Filmed online), http://www.filmtett.ro/cikk/3232/elvitte-a-cica-a-nyelved-a-burleszk-oroksege-az-animacios-filmben-4-vizualis-szojatekok
[6] Elemér Hankiss: A „poén" szerkezetéről és funkciójáról (On the Structure and Function of the Gag). In: Horányi Özséb – Matolcsy György (szerk.): Tanulmányok a magyar animációs filmről.. Hungarian Film Institute and Film Archive, 1975. p. 290.
[7] Aranykor (Golden Age): Dóra Prokopp in conversation with Béla Ternovszky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvD7GIYkkXE
[8] For an interpretation (including an ideological reading) of The Mézga Family on Holiday see Zsolt K. Horváth: This Side of Paradise. A társadalmi képzelet kronotoposzai a Mézga családban. (The chronotopes of the social imagination in the Mézga family), Korunk 2010/9. pp. 75-79.
[9] See Zoltán Kiricsi: Sorozatklasszikusok: Dr. Bubó (Series Classics: Dr. Bubó), http://comment.blog.hu/2009/11/15/sorozatklasszikusok_dr_bubo
[10] Viktor Kubiszyn writes: "There is also an interpretation that considers Cat City to be the pinnacle of socialist people-blinding. According to this interpretation, the film would be a didactic doctrine: the life and death struggle of the mice building communism with the exploiting, imperialist cats [...], and then, thanks to the joint work of the dedicated, the utopia is realized on the Earth [...]. This interpretation may hold in any parallel universe where Socratic irony is unknown and where no one has ever uttered the words: ‘you’re our last hope, Grabowski.’ I mean – can anyone say that seriously in any language?!” Kubiszyn Viktor: Macskafogó. In: Kubiszyn Viktor: Filmflesskönyv. (Film-flash-book) Budapest: Underground Kiadó, 2013. pp. 378-379.
[11] Zoltán Varga: : Vörössel festett láncok. Ezópuszi beszédmód a magyar animációban (Chains painted in red. Ezopusian idiom in Hungarian animation), Filmvilág 2014/6. pp. 38-40.
[12] Ternovsky quoted in Filmévkönyv (Film Yearbook) 1986. Hungarian Film Institute, 1987. p. 109.
[13] Muhi Klára: Nesze neked szabadság! Egérút. (Here you go, freedom! Slip away, Filmvilág 1999/12. p. 55.
[14] Ibid.