The Comic World of Flip the Frog

 

    Long recognized as one of the greatest animators of American film during a time when movie theaters typically showed a program including cartoon, newsreel, and perhaps other short subjects as well as one or two feature films, Ub Iwerks created a marvelous comic world within the conventions of his form.  Doubtless best-known for his work with Disney – they had worked together since both were teenagers -- he was the first artist to draw Mickey Mouse and went on to make significant contributions to many Disney cartoons, as well as drawing for Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Columbia’s Screen Gems. [1]  Yet he resented Disney’s dominance and for a time headed his own studio making Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper features among others in which he was able to develop his own vision during an era when animated shorts were made to appeal not to children alone, but to audiences of all ages.

     Flip the Frog first appeared in Fiddlesticks (1930), the first color animation with sound.  The sound is significant as many cartoons of the period foregrounded music while neglecting plot.  The Disney studio had produced a number of Silly Symphonies shorts providing fanciful visual accompaniment to pieces of music and for this series, Iwerks produced Autumn and Springtime. [1]

     Flip appears on the initial title holding a single-stringed instrument, a buoyant troubadour with a huge smile.  On the soundtrack one hears Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, to become familiar to many several decades later as the theme music for the Alfred Hitchcock television show.   The sinister tone of this melody may seem discordant, its solemnity and melancholy the opposite pole of the vivacious frog.  In fact, the macabre occupies a significant space in the cartoons of the era, those by Ub Iwerks among them, yet it is always a comic, fundamentally joyous fear like that evoked in celebrations for Hallowe’en and the Day of the Dead as well as in the devils and death figures that often feature in Carnival celebrations. 

     More froglike than he will become in later cartoons in spite of four-fingered cartoon white gloves, a smart bowtie, and a few buttons on his ventral side, Flip leaps from one sylvan lily pad to another and then begins dancing like a trouper with theatrical high spirits.  He grins and faces the audience; his ebullience becomes the viewer’s.  He punctuates his movements with an odd squawk, more like a duck than a frog, eventually dancing atop the shell of an annoyed turtle who ejects him into the water.   

     Temporarily shaken, he soon resumes his merry dance until he comes upon a scene to rival Breughel’s peasant festivals: a group of small animals, mostly insects, but including mice and other creatures, several of whom are drinking while many play musical instruments.  There is, in fact, a sort of symphony orchestra in these woods which Flip enthusiastically joins.  They play the local version, one can only assume, of the music of the spheres, the dance of earthly life.   Upon his arrival, Flip seizes center stage on a stump and bows with every ego’s vainglory, then dancing with abandon until a second hint of the sinister aspect of life appears.    Ready for anything, Flip climbs a line that suddenly appears next to him only to discover that it descends from the web of a threatening spider from whom he retreats in fear and, a moment later, resumes his vaudeville-style dance.  The music varies, but the frog is always euphoric, sometimes closing his eyes in bliss.  When he takes a bow, all the animals, including the once malevolent-looking spider, unite in appreciative applause. 

     A piano has now appeared on the stump-stage and Flip begins to play along with a mouse violinist (who resembles the earliest Mickeys).  They play for a time in harmony but before long Flip has taken a direction of his own, picking out “Ach du Lieber Augustine” until the mouse bops him with his violin.  Though briefly interrupted by a tobacco spitting bird above, they resume playing to such effect that not only they but the piano and itself bench as well are soon capering in a chorus line.  The music takes a sad turn and before long all are weeping at the tragic spectacle of life which had earlier seemed so worthy of exuberant affirmation.  

     Flip loses himself in delicious melancholy, miming violin movements until the annoyed piano kicks him.  This drives the frog into a Jerry Lee Lewis-style performance aggressively banging the piano keys with fists and feet until the instrument explodes into the air and a rain of ivories descends on the bemused frog. 

     The film then depicts a harmonious world in which all sentient beings are united in celebration to the rhythms of time.  This melodious affirmation is punctuated by reminders of aggression and suffering.  The turtle’s hostility, the spider’s predatory threat, the mouse’s rivalry, even the piano’s frustration provide the counterweight to the choral singing, producing a tense energetic dialectic of disorder and order.  The collapsed piano of the conclusion represents the dissolution of familiar reality into chaos.  This bipolar opposition structures the life of Flip the Frog and the lives of his viewers as well.

     While all of Iwerks cartoons are meant to be funny, the malevolent aspect of life is foregrounded in many as well as in those from other studios. [2]  The embrace of life and flight from death are both reflected as clearly as in the pairs of benevolent and malevolent aspects of deity in Hinduism.  Indeed, in  the fifth Flip the Frog cartoon, The Cuckoo Murder Case, the cat is out of the bag and mortality itself is Flip’s antagonist. 

     For the opening credits sequence Flip has acquired a pair of shorts as well as white gloves and plays a kind of ragtime piano behind the title card.  Though his tune is sprightly, this story highlights the mixture of comedy and horror that characterizes so many cartoons of the period.  A sleepy cuckoo occupies a clock in a shabby home.  The bird is humanized; it is so sleepy it must be repeatedly poked by the clock to call out the hour.  Death itself enters as a robed skeleton and shoots the cuckoo bird whereupon Flip as a private detective is summoned by the clock itself to investigate. [3]

     Once more, the entire world is animated, acting as a great orchestral company cooperating in producing the grand pageant of phenomenal events.  Flip’s car pauses to tiptoe through a puddle.  Storm clouds and lightning flashes are playing portentous games in the sky.  The very house grimaces menacingly as the frog approaches, but, when he tries to retreat, an irresistible karmic wind drives him back toward it.  A crew of police arrives as well while Flip is sneaking about the house.  Eventually Flip comes upon the robed skeleton representing mortality studying the book of life on a table with an hourglass.  He stamps “out” on a page bearing the cuckoo’s name, then turns the page to reveal that Flip is next on his list.  Flip makes a mad dash to escape, overturning furniture and finally dives through a set of double doors into what looks like a great abyss.  Surely he has made his appointment in Samarra, though he is resurrected for a good many later features. 

      In Spooks (1932) Iwerks avoided that sort of conclusive denouement.  During a storm a less frog-like Flip approaches a remote house occupied by sinister skeletal characters similar to the one in The Cuckoo Murder Case.  A band of such figures then plays a danse macabre like those depicted in art as well as enacted in village rituals and court masques from the fifteenth century on. [4]  Oblivious to his danger, Flip happily dances in the arms of a female skeleton until she falls to pieces, signifying the transience of love.  At this point his host assumes a wicked expression and clearly plots to add a frog skeleton  to his collection.  The cuckoo even reappears in skeletal form.  When it is time to go to bed, Flip asks for the bathroom and is directed to a dark space where he is ambushed.  He next appears tied to a table as his host sharpens a knife.  Flip manages to take off, smashing his antagonists’ bones on every side until he lands out of doors on the back of his trusty horse.  He apparently makes his escape but, just when he feels he is in the clear, his mount suddenly turns to bones at which point he leaps off and dashes into the distance.  For the moment, he has successfully dodged death, but the viewer knows that his victory is only temporary.

     Flip lives in a world that pulses with life.  All creatures enthusiastically participate in the rhythmic celebration of their own existence, so brimming with the elemental joy of life that they sing and sway.  Flip’s irrepressible optimism is temporarily jolted by conflicts arising from appetite and ego, but he rapidly recovers.  Like his viewers, he is pursued by death, but he reacts as though engaged in a playful game until either a sudden descent when he is swallowed by darkness or a narrow escape.  Just as the makers of medieval cathedrals designed them to emphasize the supernal promise of salvation yet included frightening representations of death and of demons, sometimes including actual bones in the crypt, the movie audience, basically there for a good time, is not allowed to forget conflict, aggression, and the ultimate dissolution of the flesh.  In fact, by playing with the fearful recognition of frailty and in the end of mortality, though it may amount to whistling in the dark, the doughty frog may be a role model for his viewers, whose specters are formed not by the cartoonist’s pen, but by pain, suffering, illness, and violence. 

 

 

 1.      The film was simultaneously released with King of Jazz, a musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, which included a Walter Lantz cartoon depicting how Paul Whiteman, the music director of the film, "became the King of Jazz."

2.      Notable examples include Iwerks’ film for Disney The Skeleton Dance (1929) and the Fleischer Studio’s I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You 1932 in which Betty Boop appears with Louis Armstrong.

3.      An indication of the adult audience for such cartoons is the telephone’s frustrated "damn!" in the detective office says when it fails to wake up Flip.  In later films he tries to peep on a showering young woman and then to run out on a hotel bill (in Room Runners 1932), while in A Chinaman's Chance (1933), Flip smokes opium. 

4.      Similarly jocular presentations of death not only influence practices for Mardi Gras and All Souls Day, but also countless comedy horror movies.  Many critics think Whale’s sequel Bride of Frankenstein superior to the original film primarily because added considerable humor.

The Elasticity of Myth in “La Llorona”

The texts of “La Llorona” in versions sung by Chavela Vargas and Angela Anguilar follow the essay.


     In Guadalalajara a week ago, enjoying the Day of the Dead festivities which included numerous stages in the plazas with a variety of musical, dance, and theatrical productions, often featuring local amateurs, I halted my promenade at the sound of a young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, with a big voice, singing a powerful and passionate version of the classic “La Llorona.” Dressed casually, without makeup of either the glamour or skull-face variety, she captured her audience with the power of the old familiar song.
     The ranchera “La Llorona” is extremely popular in Mexico. It has been recorded many times by popular singers and continues to circulate in folk performance. Also widely known in the American Southwest, its soulful tune is as well perhaps the Spanish-language song most familiar to English speakers after “La Cucaracha” and “Cielito Lindo.” Those innocent of its language may have heard the tune in Julie Taymor’s popular film Frida and their children will remember it from the Disney studio’s Coco.
     A dramatic performance enacting La Llorona is annually presented on Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco in a production that advertises itself with the line “our nation was born from the tears of La Llorona.” [1] In Paz’s seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude La Llorona is an intermediate figure between the perfection of Mary, the immaculate mater dolorosa, and the treachery of la Malinche, Cortés’ Aztec mistress and translator. In the first identity she is the “long-suffering” Mexican mother celebrated on Mother’s Day, while in the second she is not so much wicked as chingata, “screwed.” Paz declares that all Mexicans are “hijos de la Chingada,” adding “when we shout this cry on the fifteenth of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front of, against and in spite of the ‘others.’”
     The story of La Ilorona appears in many forms and with widely varying implications. Its roots in pre-Columbian legend and its parallels around the world are extensive and significant, but not the present focus. The plot elements most commonly included may be briefly summarized. La Llorona is fundamentally the woman who has had the worst experience imaginable. Her lover, with whom she has borne children, is unfaithful to her. Often the two are racially distinguishable, with the woman an india or mestiza and the man whiter. In fury, the woman drowns her children and then, falling into despair at this act, she compounds her sin by committing suicide. She has lost salvation as well as romantic and maternal love. For her monstrous crimes, she is condemned to weep and search for her children, often snatching those who are not her own. If she is a bogeyman to the little ones, she is said also to be a siren who exacts her insatiable revenge against men by luring them to destruction through her beauty and pitiable cries.
     Even that basic narrative, which is subject to a great deal of variation in the songs, stories, poems, plays, and films of La LLorona, may generate a markedly broad range of thematic territory. A simple list of those most prominent tensions and conflicts her story evokes would have to include the following.


1. maternal love
2. male/female power relations in general
3. sexual love
4. fidelity to the church
5. racial inequality
6. national identity
7. the use of violence
8. fear of the female


     Other possibilities lurk within the same material. For instance in recent decades horror movies such as American Michael Chaves' The Curse of La Llorona have reduced La Llorona to a monster ultimately destroyed by the hero. [2] While the popular cinema represented one group of reactions to the story, scholarly journals produced another, often featuring feminist revisions. [3]
     Yet surely the context in which the story most belongs is neither the movie theater nor the university library, but within the family, either as a cautionary figure with which to frighten (and thrill) the young or in songs, either on recordings or performed by amateurs influenced by those same recordings. An examination of two versions of the song, one by senior diva Chavela Vargas, originally from Costa Rica, a longtime street singer and reputed lover of Frida Kahlo and the second by Angela Anguilar, a teenager born in Los Angeles, will suggest the elasticity of the La Llorona myth and a remarkable thematic elasticity born of underdetermination.
     As in most original texts bearing mythic material, “La Llorona” in both Vargas’ and Anguilar’s versions proceeds with oblique references rather than a linear narrative. Vargas opens by intensifying the complaint of betrayal by adding the issue of racial identity to that of gender. In a turn reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, [4] she says she is called “el negro,” while she herself adds “negro pero cariñoso,” thus projecting a suspicious or hostile social set [5] and asserting her own value. (The word “pero,” of course, acknowledges that a swarthy complexion is regarded as a deficiency.) With the liquid sounds of her name ringing in the background like the continuous soft wail of suffering humanity, La Llorona is pitched on the restless seas of love, her position imperiled by the envy of others and her vulnerable position as a woman and as a person (in some sense) of color.
     She lingers luxuriously, the listener may think, even seductively, on her appeal in the second verse in which a parallel self-description; she is “picante pero sabroso” “como el chile verde.” Here the woman draws on the archaic association of females with the vegetative earth, identifying herself with a favored New World food. The definitions of picante range from a simple “tasty,” through “hot spicy,” to “racy” and “naughty,” adding a note of adventure and danger, deepened as before, by the plangent word “Llorona,” breaking repeatedly on the shore of every verse.
     Verse three delivers on that promise of danger with an opening cri de coeur from the depths “ay de mí,” succeeded by the liquid sounds of the river water washing over a sinking object “llorona, llorona, llorona,” and then the chilling request, “lévame al río.” No longer offering herself as an exotic love object, she is consumed with sorrow and either seeking her drowned children in the river or wishing to end her own days there. On the other hand, though, she may, like the Sirens, a number of medieval faeries, or the faux-folk Lorelei be luring some man to his doom in the waters of dissolution.
     The speaker has turned suddenly from seduction to pathetic appeal. Her spectral cold intensifies her despair and devastation as she pitiably requests the favor of a blanket as though just a bit of warmth could relieve her. ”Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona,/ porque me muero de frío.” Having by her acts exiled herself from romantic, parental, and divine love, she can do little but wail.
     This touching plea is then reinforced by the central image of the song. The singer cannot say why, but the very flowers of the cemetery seem to be weeping with her as they sway in the breeze. The entire world is mourning.


No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando


     Following this poignant example of the pathetic fallacy which enwraps everything in the singer’s grief, Vargas then decrescendos with the repetition of the verses about the river and the rebozo. In the whole of the song the listener has heard nothing about any of the events of the story: the unfaithfulness of the lover, the death of the children, and the suicide of the mother. The emotion itself is foregrounded, naked of circumstance, yet traces remain, for those competent in the myth, of each of the themes inherent in the plot.
     A generation of two later Anguilar’s recording of “La Llorona” provides evidence of the song’s perennial popularity, and its words are largely, though not wholly, the same as Vargas’s. Her youthful voice, like that of the child I heard in the Guadalajara plaza, suggests that the harrowing experience of La Llorona is part of the prudential instruction that women must understand as they attain maturity. While Vargas’s version is, except for the repeated “llorona,” spoken by La Llorona herself, Anguilar’s assumes the voice of the man, admiring the lady as she leaves church. His appreciation for her beauty, amounting almost to the glory of the Virgin, is, with delicate taste, attributed to her huipil (the use of the indigenous term for the garment emphasizes the woman’s identity as an Indio). The association with the divine is reinforced by his confidence that “la virgen te creí,” (“the Virgin believes you”) and the need for the Virgin’s sympathy – the horrific murders of her children – is only heightened in drama for being unstated.
     With the heartfelt exclamation “ay de mí” Anguilar then evokes the weeping flowers, in her lyrics, not said to be in the churchyard, but rather “campo lirio” (“a field of lilies”) again recalling the Song of Songs. [6] In the tones of a Troubadour declaring the laws of love, the next verse equates love and suffering, paradoxically suggesting by the use of the term “martirio” (“martyrdom”) that her passion and pain have a penitential or redemptive quality.
     The description of the flowers which seem to weep as they are blown in the wind of fate and the request to go to the river and to be covered by a rebozo follow in very nearly the same words as in the earlier version of the song. Yet in a curious oscillation, since the persona had been the man from the start of Anguilar’s rendition, it seems now unclear who is suffering the cold and seeking as a last resort the waters of dissolution. The rebozo is, after all, a woman’s garment. Is the man villain or victim? Is the woman a traitor or the one betrayed? The formal dance of the figuration makes all of these possibilities available without insisting on any.
     More broadly, the performed versions support all the potential themes, and their signification is the more exact and precise for its economy. The mention of a few concrete specifics, when delivered with the power and depth of Vargas, Anguilar, or the anonymous young heiress of tradition I heard in Guadalajara, is sufficient to trigger access to profound emotion with psychological, religious, and political reverberations spreading ever outward.
     The glimpse of a woman’s garment, the swaying of flowers in a breeze, such details are here not atoms in the random drift of quotidian life, but rather the entry points into a mythic and visionary system built to order and interpret experience. On this framework are displayed and tested such axes of struggle as that between lovers or between an individual and the state. The story of La Llorona reflects the capacity for violence in humankind. But the most enduringly memorable sound of all is the sobbing of La Llorona, a lament at once for self, for family, for community, a complaint in the end at the all-but-impossible demands of simply being alive. We all weep together.



1. Though the phrase is quoted a good many times on the internet, I was unable to locate its source prior to the History Today article titled “The Wailing Woman” by Amy Fuller dated October 31, 2017.

2. This describes the treatment in the American film The Terror of La Llorona by Eric Elias Flores, released in 2019. Other film versions include Peón’s 1933 Mexican version La LLorona, the 1961 Mexican film The Curse of the Crying Woman by Rafael Baledón, and a Guatemalan La Llorona in 2019 by Jayro Bustamante.

3. One sample of such work is Jacqueline Doyle, “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1996), pp. 53-70.

4. “I am black, but comely.” Song of Songs I:5. In the thicket of Jewish and Christian commentary on this passage, the color is sometimes thought to suggest that the bride is Pharoah’s daughter or, alternatively and in contrast, that she has rustic origins. Symbolically the darkness has been associated with sin or physicality and with Israel’s condition in the wilderness.

5. Similar to Catullus 5 with the censure expected from the “senum severiorum” or Troubadour songs with their hostile and gossipy “jealous ones.”

6. Song of Songs, 2, 1–2. The plant in the second verse, is rendered as “lily” in many translations, including the King James, though the identification of the plant, which here seems to be red, has been disputed. Due to a close association with Mary, the white lily, the Lilium candidum has since the Middle Ages been popularly known as the Madonna lily.



Chavela Vargas 1961

Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso
Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso

Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso
Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío

No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío


Angela Anguilar 2018

Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.
Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.

Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.
Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.

El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.
El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.

No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.
No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.

Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.
Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.

Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.
Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.

Two Lyrics on Death from Central America

Macaws by the Gate of Copán 

In Copán trees macaws fly, scream, and groom, 

their scarlet feathers looking much like blood 

that flowed here long ago and recently. 

The feathers of their tails stream out behind. 

The passerby feels blest though he is not. 

Before his blood flows just like everyone’s, 

like that that flowed in grooves on altar-stones, 

and blood that flowed from army massacres, 

as long as flesh unruptured holds, 

he’ll make himself as busy as these birds. 

Día de los Muertos 

 On Dia de los Muertos some here choose 

to picnic with their loved ones by their graves, 

and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill 

mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood. 

Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt 

and dares the other men to come and fight. 

In corners of red eyes I see bright tears. 

Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth. 

Their glance explains -- there’s nothing more to say.