Animation Screening: Sweet Hearts (and Sour Flowers)

Join us for Sweet Hearts (and Sour Flowers), a specially curated screening of early animated cartoons featuring all sorts of fun and strange Cartoonland happenings. This program anticipates Valentine’s Day, and includes an even-keeled assortment of romantic and antiromantic scenarios. As you’ll see, not every lovey-dovey cartoon cloud has a silver lining—flirting, dating, courting, and marriage were often very rocky roads in classic animation!

All films date from the 1920s through the 1950s, and will be shown on real 16mm film, with a real projector. This is a unique opportunity to see generally unavailable and some previously ‘lost’ films.

Curated and presented by early animation historian, archivist, and preservationist, Tommy José Stathes.

The Stathes archives of early animated films has been nearly two decades in the making. Beginning as a casual effort to find and see early cartoons that were unavailable on home video, the collection has grown to become perhaps one of the largest of its kind. It includes many titles and ‘orphan films’ that are difficult or impossible to access elsewhere, amassed in rare archival 16mm and 35mm prints.