Filmography: John Sutherland's Rhapsody of Steel

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.


Today we scanned a read-along storybook adaptation of John Sutherland's industrial film, Rhapsody of Steel (1959). Sutherland's studio was very influential in the mid-1950s, employing some of the best designers in the business. This film is no exception. Legendary stylists Eyvind Earle (Sleeping Beauty, Pigs is Pigs) and Maurice Noble (Duck Dodgers, How The Grinch Stole Christmas) collaborated on Rhapsody of Steel, and you can see evidence of both their hands everywhere in these pages. (Earle in the landscapes and textures, Noble in the bold primary and secondary colors...)

Time Magazine said of this film...

Rhapsody of Steel, a 23-minute animated cartoon that cost $300,000, is one of those rare industrial films with enough specific quality and general interest to play the commercial circuits. In the next few months it will be shown as an added attraction in several thousand U.S. movie houses. Made by former Disney Staffer John Sutherland, Rhapsody sets out to tell a sort of child's history of steel from the first meteor that ever hit the earth to the first manned rocket that leaves it, and most of the time Moviemaker Sutherland proves a slick entertainer and a painless pedagogue. Unhappily, the music of Oscar-Winning Dmitri Tiomkin, who is probably the world's loudest composer, bangs away on the sound track like a trip hammer. But the picture's pace is brisk, its tricks of animation are better than cute, and the plug, when the sponsor slips it in on the final frame, is modestly understated: "A presentation of U.S. Steel."

I have included a Quicktime of Rhapsody of Steel at the bottom of this post, and you can find many other John Sutherland fIlms at Archive.org. This book suffers from little tiny pictures and oceans of white space, so I've enlarged a bunch of the pictures so you can see them better.























Courtesy of Archive supporter, Kevin Kidney, here is a video of the film for you to view...

Rhapsody of Steel (Sutherland/1959)
(Quicktime 7 / 22 minutes / 50.5 megs)

PLEASE NOTE The text and media files on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog are not to be duplicated, redistributed or hosted on other websites without the prior written permission of the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood.

Here's a great post by Michael Sporn on Eyvind Earle.

If you found this article to be interesting, see also... Artzybasheff's Machinalia, The Alvin Show Pilot Storyboard, Jules Engel's Alvin Show Color Keys, UPA Done Right, Early 50s UPA Model Sheets, Herb Klynn The Shrimp, and Grim Natwick's Post UPA Commercials.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!