“A French Fantasia and Alice In Wonderland rolled into one!” That was the sell line for a show we just put on last Sunday here at my film series in Boulder for the French, animated film Johnny, The Giant Killer (Originally titled: Jeannot l’intrépide, released in1950, with a running time of 80 minutes, but later truncated to its current 58-minute running time). Other reviews of the film mention Tex Avery, Hanna-Barbera, and even Salvador Dali for comparison.

The screening was part of a larger event that featured a live musical accompaniment by the New York City-based jazz ensemble known as Gutbucket. The film was directed by the Hungarian-born Jean Image (birth name: Imre Hadju, 1910-1989). Charles Frank III is also given director’s credit on imdb.com – however: an article in Film threat by Phil Hall (09/28/07) suggests that when the film was later acquired by Lippert Pictures (“the worst possible distributor for this title”… “specializing in low-budget fare that could be packed into double features and dumped on undemanding Saturday matinee audiences”), they also assigned Mr. Frank “to create a new English-language screenplay, but Frank and his team didn’t appear to be paying much attention to his work” resulting in “some of the worst dubbing ever inflicted on a cinematic import” due to dialogue where “no one is supposed to be speaking” or just “odd verbiage.”

You’d think that with this savage indictment of Charles Frank’s “work” on the animated film of Jean Image that, maybe, Hass would be somewhat receptive to Gutbucket’s evisceration of Frank’s dialogue and replacement with an original, and live, soundtrack but, no. He dubs it “”completely inappropriate.” Not having seen the original film I am, sadly, unable to add my opinion to this matter. All I can say is that, if not for Gutbucket’s initiative in plying their trade via this particular public domain title, I probably would not have seen this film at all. And, although their kinetic performance did, at times, distract from the film, some of the songs dovetailed beautifully with the images on the screen and, overall, the crowd enjoyed the whole package.

Another reason the film is currently circulating with Gutbucket is addressed by Hall when he mentions how “Lippert also failed to correct one of Image’s main mistakes: no copyright was ever filed on either the French or American versions. Thus, ‘Johnny the Giant Killer’ was immediately a public domain title. After Lippert went out of business in 1955, the bootlegging began.”

A brief synopsis of the film:

Seven boy scouts walk into a forest, read about an ogre’s castle, and set off to find it. The ogre has a machine that shrinks animals and people, and all the boy scouts are made small enough to fit into a sandwich. Johnny escapes and wins favor with a queen bee, and she helps Johnny rescue his comrades. This brief summation does not do justice to many of the charms invoked by the animation, which won an award at the 1951 Venice Film Festival.

In my French Science Ficiton, Fantasy, Horror and Pulp Fiction “guide to Cinema, Television, Radio, Animation, Comic Books and Literature” by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, they note how “In the feature film arena, after Disney established its undisputed artistic and commercial domination, French animators found it virtually impossible to break through. Brave attempts were made by Jean Image, Paul Grimault and, later, by Rene Lalous and Jean-Paul Picha, but they proved, at best, only moderately successful.”

In this latter section, they do mention Jean Images’ Joe series, which was composed of three seasons of 13 five minute-long episodes from 1960-1963. The seasons were titled: Joe Among the Bees, Joe Among the Ants, and Joe in the Wonderful Kingdoms of the Flies. Once again, our protagonist is shrunk to the size of an insect and helped by bees, this time “a friendly bee named Bzz.” (In French the first episode is called either Joe chez les Abeilles or, as it was released on video, Joe Petit Boum Boum).

Appropriately enough, given these flights of fancy, Jean Image would later put his energy into an animated version of The Fabulous Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Les Fabuleases Aventures du Baron de Munchausen, 1979).