Tiago's brain dump

After talking about  Chuck Jones ' excellent  What's Opera, Doc?  (1957), I felt compelled to rewatch plenty of cartoons revolving around Opera (and classical music in general) that I used to enjoy when I was a kid. As a consequence of the amazing time I had in doing that, it was impossible for me not to choose  Miloš Forman 's Mozart  biopic Amadeus as the next movie to comment on. It was Mozart's my first opera ever,  Le nozze di Figaro , which I had the pleasure to watch at the Sydney Opera House  when studying in Australia. Also, I will be watching his  Don Giovanni  in a couple of months, at the  New National Theatre  in Tokyo, which will then become my girlfriend's first opera ever. Wrapped by Mozart's sublime music, the movie is told from the point of view of an old Antonio Salieri ( F. Murray Abraham ). After a failed suicide attempt, Salieri is committed to an insane asylum, where he accuses himself of having murdered...

Remember when cartoons were made to entertain the whole family instead of selling stuff to kids? It was a time before the popularization of TVs in the 60s, when short animated movies were screened on theaters, mostly for free, being fun and entertaining as well as culturally rich and, every so often, even thought-provoking. As such, it is no wonder that, in 1994, when animation historian  Jerry Beck  published The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals , 90% of the picks for greatest cartoons of all time had been released prior to 1960. It is also not at all surprising that, out of those 50, nearly 20% were resulting of the amalgamation of the geniuses of  Chuck Jones  and  Michael Maltese , with three of such cartoons,  What's Opera, Doc? (1st place),  Duck Amuck (2nd place) and  One Froggy Evening (5th place) also being selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being...