Long Live the Bull!
About Long Live the Bull!
In Joseph Sunn's clay short, a young man has to fight a bull to win the woman he wants.
Cast & crew
More about Long Live the Bull!
Sunn animated it in clay in 1926, in the same San Francisco group of mud films as The Penwiper and Green Pastures. Later writers place it among the earliest clay films that still exist. Clay animation itself was already being made by 1908.
Themes
Background
By 1926 most American cartoons were drawn on cels. Sunn was still moving clay one frame at a time in San Francisco.
Look
Stop-motion clay.
Preservation
A print survives. Accounts that call it the oldest surviving clay film overstate the case; clay films from 1908 are recorded, and this is one of the early ones still viewable.
Notes
- The fight and the courtship are both acted by clay figures.
- Helena Smith Dayton and Willie Hopkins had made clay films before 1926. This short is early, not the first.
- The series name attached to Sunn's mud films is Ralph Wolfe's Mud Stuff.
Scenes
- The clay suitor faces the bull.
Influenced by
- Helena Smith Dayton's clay films
- Willie Hopkins's clay films