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96-555: After leaving Bray, Terry retained the character, making new shorts for Edison and Paramount over the few years following. Terry then used Farmer Al Falfa frequently during the 1920s for his Aesop's Film Fables series, the character's most prolific period. By this time, the Farmer had been redesigned to allow simplified animation, necessary as the Fables were released by Pathé on a weekly basis. The Farmer's head and arms could be drawn on

192-452: A New Dress: familiar fables in verse first appeared in 1807 and went through five steadily augmented editions until 1837. Jefferys Taylor's Aesop in Rhyme, with some originals , first published in 1820, was as popular and also went through several editions. The versions are lively but Taylor takes considerable liberties with the story line. Both authors were alive to the over serious nature of

288-521: A child ... yet afford useful reflection to a grown man. And if his memory retain them all his life after, he will not repent to find them there, amongst his manly thoughts and serious business. If his Aesop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much better, and encourage him to read when it carries the increase of knowledge with it. For such visible objects children hear talked of in vain, and without any satisfaction, whilst they have no ideas of them; those ideas being not to be had from sounds, but from

384-419: A chip on your shoulder and someone will knock your block off" or "Marriage is a good institution, but who wants to live in an institution?" The series proved to be enormously popular with the public during the 1920s. Walt Disney admitted that his earliest ambition was to produce cartoons of comparable quality to Paul Terry. With the popularity of Al Jolson 's part-talkie The Jazz Singer in 1927, as well as

480-540: A commentarial preface and moralising conclusion, and 205 woodcuts. Translations or versions based on Steinhöwel's book followed shortly in Italian (1479), French (1480), English (the Caxton edition of 1484) and Czech in about 1488. These were many times reprinted before the start of the 16th century. The Spanish version of 1489, La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas hystoriadas was equally successful and often reprinted in both

576-578: A compilation of Aesopic fables in Syriac , dating from the 9/11th centuries. Included there were several other tales of possibly West Asian origin. In Central Asia there was a 10th-century collection of the fables in Uighur . After the Middle Ages, fables largely deriving from Latin sources were passed on by Europeans as part of their colonial or missionary enterprises. 47 fables were translated into

672-683: A dozen tales in common, although often widely differing in detail. There is some debate over whether the Greeks learned these fables from Indian storytellers or the other way, or if the influences were mutual. Loeb editor Ben E. Perry took the extreme position in his book Babrius and Phaedrus (1965) that: in the entire Greek tradition there is not, so far as I can see, a single fable that can be said to come either directly or indirectly from an Indian source; but many fables or fable-motifs that first appear in Greek or Near Eastern literature are found later in

768-465: A few. Typically they might begin with a contextual introduction, followed by the story, often with the moral underlined at the end. Setting the context was often necessary as a guide to the story's interpretation, as in the case of the political meaning of The Frogs Who Desired a King and The Frogs and the Sun . Sometimes the titles given later to the fables have become proverbial, as in the case of killing

864-474: A grammar of Trinidadian French creole written by John Jacob Thomas . Then the start of the new century saw the publication of Georges Sylvain 's Cric? Crac! Fables de la Fontaine racontées par un montagnard haïtien et transcrites en vers créoles (La Fontaine's fables told by a Haiti highlander and written in creole verse, 1901). On the South American mainland, Alfred de Saint-Quentin published

960-418: A growing centralism and the encroachment of the language of the capital on what had until then been predominantly monoglot areas. Surveying its literary manifestations, commentators have noted that the point of departure of the individual tales is not as important as what they become in the process. Even in the hands of less skilled dialect adaptations, La Fontaine's polished versions of the fables are returned to

1056-692: A lean telling of the fable without drawing a moral. For many centuries the main transmission of Aesop's fables across Europe remained in Latin or else orally in various vernaculars, where they mixed with folk tales derived from other sources. This mixing is often apparent in early vernacular collections of fables in mediaeval times. The main impetus behind the translation of large collections of fables attributed to Aesop and translated into European languages came from an early printed publication in Germany. There had been many small selections in various languages during

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1152-484: A lengthy prose reflection; the third, 'Fables in Verse', includes fables from other sources in poems by several unnamed authors; in these the moral is incorporated into the body of the poem. In the early 19th century authors turned to writing verse specifically for children and included fables in their output. One of the most popular was the writer of nonsense verse, Richard Scrafton Sharpe (died 1852), whose Old Friends in

1248-512: A lion and another bird. When Joshua ben Hananiah told that fable to the Jews, to prevent their rebelling against Rome and once more putting their heads into the lion's jaws (Gen. R. lxiv.), he shows familiarity with some form derived from India. The first extensive translation of Aesop into Latin iambic trimeters was performed by Phaedrus , a freedman of Augustus in the 1st century CE, although at least one fable had already been translated by

1344-899: A literary medium. One of the earliest examples of these urban slang translations was the series of individual fables contained in a single folded sheet, appearing under the title of Les Fables de Gibbs in 1929. Others written during the period were eventually anthologised as Fables de La Fontaine en argot (Étoile sur Rhône, 1989). This followed the genre's growth in popularity after World War II. Two short selections of fables by Bernard Gelval about 1945 were succeeded by two selections of 15 fables each by 'Marcus' (Paris, 1947. Reprinted in 1958 and 2006), Api Condret's Recueil des fables en argot (Paris, 1951) and Géo Sandry (1897–1975) and Jean Kolb's Fables en argot (Paris, 1950/60). The majority of such printings were privately produced leaflets and pamphlets, often sold by entertainers at their performances, and are difficult to date. Some of these poems then entered

1440-691: A selection of fables freely adapted from La Fontaine into Guyanese creole in 1872. This was among a collection of poems and stories (with facing translations) in a book that also included a short history of the territory and an essay on creole grammar. On the other side of the Caribbean, Jules Choppin (1830–1914) was adapting La Fontaine to the Louisiana slave creole at the end of the 19th century in versions that are still appreciated. The New Orleans author Edgar Grima (1847–1939) also adapted La Fontaine into both standard French and into dialect. Versions in

1536-608: A separate cel while the rest of his body was drawn on another, a technique anticipating the limited animation of TV cartoons. When Terry made the transition to sound, so did the Farmer. The first publicly released sound cartoon, Dinner Time , featured Farmer Al Falfa as an irritable butcher who had to fend off a pack of hungry hounds. The short failed to grasp the public's interest like Walt Disney 's Steamboat Willie , released one month later. In 1929, Terry left his producer, Amadee J. Van Beuren to open his own studio, with distribution covered by Educational Pictures . The farmer

1632-505: A story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. Earlier still, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned in passing that "Aesop the fable writer" ( Αἰσώπου τοῦ λογοποιοῦ ; Aisṓpou toû logopoioû ) was a slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE. Among references in other writers, Aristophanes , in his comedy The Wasps , represented

1728-487: A strong medieval and clerical tinge. This interpretive tendency, and the inclusion of yet more non-Aesopic material, was to grow as versions in the various European vernaculars began to appear in the following centuries. With the revival of literary Latin during the Renaissance, authors began compiling collections of fables in which those traditionally by Aesop and those from other sources appeared side by side. One of

1824-615: A translation by Laura Gibbs titled Aesop's Fables was published by Oxford World's Classics. This book includes 359 and has selections from all the major Greek and Latin sources. Until the 18th century the fables were largely put to adult use by teachers, preachers, speech-makers and moralists. It was the philosopher John Locke who first seems to have advocated targeting children as a special audience in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Aesop's fables in his opinion are: apt to delight and entertain

1920-804: A transliterated translation in Shanghai dialect, Yisuopu yu yan (伊娑菩喻言, 1856). There have also been 20th century translations by Zhou Zuoren and others. Translations into the languages of South Asia began at the very start of the 19th century. The Oriental Fabulist (1803) contained roman script versions in Bengali , Hindi and Urdu . Adaptations followed in Marathi (1806) and Bengali (1816), and then complete collections in Hindi (1837), Kannada (1840), Urdu (1850), Tamil (1853) and Sindhi (1854). In Burma , which had its own ethical folk tradition based on

2016-799: Is a comparative list of these on the Jewish Encyclopedia website of which twelve resemble those that are common to both Greek and Indian sources, six are parallel to those only in Indian sources, and six others in Greek only. Where similar fables exist in Greece, India, and in the Talmud, the Talmudic form approaches more nearly the Indian. Thus, the fable " The Wolf and the Crane " is told in India of

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2112-400: Is recorded as having said about Aesop: like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing

2208-678: Is that he lived in the 1st century CE. The version of 55 fables in choliambic tetrameters by the 9th-century Ignatius the Deacon is also worth mentioning for its early attribution of tales from Oriental sources to Aesop. Further light is thrown on the entry of Oriental stories into the Aesopic canon by their appearance in Jewish sources such as the Talmud and in Midrashic literature. There

2304-447: Is the first cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack ever released to the public. Terry was inspired to make the series by young actor-turned-writer Howard Estabrook , who suggested making a series of cartoons based on Aesop's Fables . Although Terry later claimed he had never heard of Aesop , he said that Estabrook's idea was worthwhile. Terry immediately began to set up a new studio called Fables Studios, Inc. and received backing from

2400-544: The Keith-Albee Theatre circuit. The series launched on June 19, 1921, with The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs . On that same day, Van Beuren announced that the pictures would be distributed exclusively by Pathe . Only the earliest films are loose adaptations of the actual fables and later entries usually revolve around cats, mice, and the disgruntled Farmer Al Falfa . Terry had developed Farmer Al in

2496-746: The Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri , where he and Ub Iwerks co-created the Laugh-O-Grams and the Alice Comedies . Even into 1930, Disney wanted his cartoons to be funny as the series. Aesop%27s Fables Aesop's Fables , or the Aesopica , is a collection of fables credited to Aesop , a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE . Of varied and unclear origins,

2592-626: The Nahuatl language in the late 16th century under the title In zazanilli in Esopo . The work of a native translator, it adapted the stories to fit the Mexican environment, incorporating Aztec concepts and rituals and making them rhetorically more subtle than their Latin source. Portuguese missionaries arriving in Japan at the end of the 16th century introduced Japan to the fables when a Latin edition

2688-514: The Occitan Limousin dialect , originally with 39 fables, and Fables et contes en vers patois by August Tandon , also published in the first decade of the 19th century in the neighbouring dialect of Montpellier . The last of these were very free recreations, with the occasional appeal directly to the original Maistre Ézôpa . A later commentator noted that while the author could sometimes embroider his theme, at others he concentrated

2784-470: The Renaissance onwards were particularly used for the education of children. Their ethical dimension was reinforced in the adult world through depiction in sculpture, painting and other illustrative means, as well as adaptation to drama and song. In addition, there have been reinterpretations of the meaning of fables and changes in emphasis over time. Apollonius of Tyana , a 1st-century CE philosopher,

2880-462: The Seychelles dialect around 1900 by Rodolphine Young (1860–1932) but these remained unpublished until 1983. Jean-Louis Robert's recent translation of Babrius into Réunion creole (2007) adds a further motive for such adaptation. Fables began as an expression of the slave culture and their background is in the simplicity of agrarian life. Creole transmits this experience with greater purity than

2976-501: The 18th century collections and tried to remedy this. Sharpe in particular discussed the dilemma they presented and recommended a way round it, tilting at the same time at the format in Croxall's fable collection: It has been the accustomed method in printing fables to divide the moral from the subject; and children, whose minds are alive to the entertainment of an amusing story, too often turn from one fable to another, rather than peruse

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3072-492: The 1980s. In the early 1950s, the character was unofficially rechristened "Farmer Gray", probably by Fred Sayles, the host of a children's program called Junior Frolics on station WATV in Newark , New Jersey. Sayles certainly named some of the subsidiary characters (presumably previously nameless), such as "Bumpy" the donkey, "Casper" and "Bad Mike", the cats, and "Marty" and "Millie", the mice. In mid-1950s Terrytoons comics,

3168-498: The 19th century. The first translations of Aesop's Fables into the Chinese languages were made at the start of the 17th century, the first substantial collection being of 38 conveyed orally by a Jesuit missionary named Nicolas Trigault and written down by a Chinese academic named Zhang Geng (Chinese: 張賡; pinyin : Zhāng Gēng ) in 1625. This was followed two centuries later by Yishi Yuyan 《意拾喻言》 ( Esop's Fables: written in Chinese by

3264-780: The 20th century there were also translations into regional dialects of English. These include the few examples in Addison Hibbard's Aesop in Negro Dialect ( American Speech , 1926) and the 26 in Robert Stephen's Fables of Aesop in Scots Verse (Peterhead, Scotland, 1987), translated into the Aberdeenshire dialect. Glasgow University has also been responsible for R.W. Smith's modernised dialect translation of Robert Henryson's The Morall Fabillis of Esope

3360-720: The Buddhist Jataka Tales , the joint Pali and Burmese language translation of Aesop's fables was published in 1880 from Rangoon by the American Missionary Press. Outside the British Raj , Jagat Sundar Malla 's translation into the Newar language of Nepal was published in 1915. Further to the west, the Afghani academic Hafiz Sahar 's translation of some 250 of Aesop's Fables into Persian

3456-576: The Fox (60) in a language other than Greek. Another voluminous collection of fables in Latin verse was Anthony Alsop 's Fabularum Aesopicarum Delectus (Oxford 1698). The bulk of the 237 fables there are prefaced by the text in Greek, while there are also a handful in Hebrew and in Arabic; the final fables, only attested from Latin sources, are without other versions. For the most part the poems are confined to

3552-653: The French creole of the islands in the Indian Ocean began somewhat earlier than in the Caribbean. Louis Héry  [ fr ] (1801–1856) emigrated from Brittany to Réunion in 1820. Having become a schoolmaster, he adapted some of La Fontaine's fables into the local dialect in Fables créoles dédiées aux dames de l'île Bourbon (Creole fables for island women). This was published in 1829 and went through three editions. In addition 49 fables of La Fontaine were adapted to

3648-629: The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs or the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse . In fact some fables, such as The Young Man and the Swallow , appear to have been invented as illustrations of already existing proverbs. One theorist, indeed, went so far as to define fables as extended proverbs. In this they have an aetiological function, the explaining of origins such as, in another context, why

3744-576: The Grasshopper is adapted as "The Gnat and the Bee" (94) with the difference that the gnat offers to teach music to the bee's children. There are also Mediaeval tales such as The Mice in Council (195) and stories created to support popular proverbs such as ' Still Waters Run Deep ' (5) and 'A woman, an ass and a walnut tree' (65), where the latter refers back to Aesop's fable of The Walnut Tree . Most of

3840-498: The Learned Mun Mooy Seen-Shang, and compiled in their present form with a free and a literal translation ) in 1840 by Robert Thom and apparently based on the version by Roger L'Estrange . This work was initially very popular until someone realised the fables were anti-authoritarian and the book was banned for a while. A little later, however, in the foreign concession in Shanghai, A. B. Cabaniss brought out

3936-650: The Manger (67). Then in 1604 the Austrian Pantaleon Weiss, known as Pantaleon Candidus , published Centum et Quinquaginta Fabulae . The 152 poems there were grouped by subject, with sometimes more than one devoted to the same fable, although presenting alternative versions of it, as in the case of The Hawk and the Nightingale (133–5). It also includes the earliest instance of The Lion, the Bear and

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4032-419: The Middle Ages but the first attempt at an exhaustive edition was made by Heinrich Steinhőwel in his Esopus , published c.  1476 . This contained both Latin versions and German translations and also included a translation of Rinuccio da Castiglione (or d'Arezzo)'s version from the Greek of a life of Aesop (1448). Some 156 fables appear, collected from Romulus, Avianus and other sources, accompanied by

4128-552: The Nîmes dialect between 1881 and 1891. Alsatian dialect versions of La Fontaine appeared in 1879 after the region was ceded away following the Franco-Prussian War . At the end of the following century, Brother Denis-Joseph Sibler (1920–2002) published a collection of adaptations (first recorded in 1983) that has gone through several impressions since 1995. The use of Corsican came later. Natale Rochicchioli (1911–2002)

4224-506: The Old and New World through three centuries. Some fables were later treated creatively in collections of their own by authors in such a way that they became associated with their names rather than Aesop's. The most celebrated were La Fontaine's Fables , published in French during the later 17th century. Inspired by the brevity and simplicity of Aesop's, those in the first six books were heavily dependent on traditional Aesopic material; fables in

4320-585: The Panchatantra and other Indian story-books, including the Buddhist Jatakas. Although Aesop and the Buddha were near contemporaries, the stories of neither were recorded in writing until some centuries after their death. Few disinterested scholars would now be prepared to make so absolute a stand as Perry about their origin in view of the conflicting and still emerging evidence. When and how

4416-476: The Phrygian (1999, see above). The University of Illinois likewise included dialect translations by Norman Shapiro in its Creole echoes: the francophone poetry of nineteenth-century Louisiana (2004, see below). Such adaptations to Caribbean French-based creole languages from the middle of the 19th century onward – initially as part of the colonialist project but later as an assertion of love for and pride in

4512-562: The Romance area made use of versions adapted particularly from La Fontaine's recreations of ancient material. One of the earliest publications in France was the anonymous Fables Causides en Bers Gascouns (Selected fables in Gascon verse , Bayonne, 1776), which contained 106. Also in the vanguard was Jean-Baptiste Foucaud 's Quelques fables choisies de La Fontaine en patois limousin (109) in

4608-512: The ant is a mean, thieving creature or how the tortoise got its shell . Other fables, also verging on this function, are outright jokes, as in the case of The Old Woman and the Doctor , aimed at greedy practitioners of medicine. The contradictions between fables already mentioned and alternative versions of much the same fable, as in the case of The Woodcutter and the Trees , are best explained by

4704-418: The arrival of printing, collections of Aesop's fables were among the earliest books in a variety of languages. Through the means of later collections, and translations or adaptations of them, Aesop's reputation as a fabulist was transmitted throughout the world. Initially the fables were addressed to adults and covered religious, social and political themes. They were also put to use as ethical guides and from

4800-608: The ascription to Aesop of all examples of the genre. Some are demonstrably of West Asian origin, others have analogues further to the East. Modern scholarship reveals fables and proverbs of Aesopic form existing in both ancient Sumer and Akkad , as early as the third millennium BCE . Aesop's fables and the Indian tradition, as represented by the Buddhist Jataka tales and the Hindu Panchatantra , share about

4896-516: The character could not be obtained in time. Aesop%27s Film Fables Aesop's Fables (previously titled Aesop's Film Fables and Aesop's Sound Fables ) is a series of animated short subjects, created by American cartoonist Paul Terry . Produced from 1921 to 1934, the series includes The Window Washers (1925), Scrambled Eggs (1926), Small Town Sheriff (1927), Dinner Time (1928), and Gypped in Egypt (1930). Dinner Time

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4992-557: The character was also briefly rechristened "Farmer Gray", presumably in an effort to capitalize on "Junior Frolics", but the renaming in comics did not last. It was done inconsistently (sometimes changing from month to month), and by the late 1950s, the character's original name was back permanently. Farmer Al Falfa was going to have a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit , alongside other Terrytoons characters such as Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and others, but rights to

5088-572: The character was established as his own property, not Van Beuren's; the farmer stopped appearing in Van Beuren's films. As Terry's studio began to grow and develop, Farmer Al Falfa wore out his welcome and was subsequently all but retired. The Farmer never entirely disappeared, though; he was featured as a supporting player in the first two Heckle and Jeckle cartoons, released in 1946, and starred in Uranium Blues (1956) ten years later. In

5184-534: The dialect. A version of La Fontaine's fables in the dialect of Martinique was made by François-Achille Marbot (1817–1866) in Les Bambous, Fables de la Fontaine travesties en patois créole (Port Royal, 1846) which had lasting success. As well as two later editions in Martinique, there were two more published in France in 1870 and 1885 and others in the 20th century. Later dialect fables by Paul Baudot (1801–1870) from neighbouring Guadeloupe owed nothing to La Fontaine, but in 1869 some translated examples did appear in

5280-453: The dominant language of instruction, they lose something of their essence. A strategy for reclaiming them is therefore to exploit the gap between the written and the spoken language. One of those who did this in English was Sir Roger L'Estrange , who translated the fables into the racy urban slang of his day and further underlined their purpose by including in his collection many of the subversive Latin fables of Laurentius Abstemius . In France

5376-415: The earliest was by Lorenzo Bevilaqua, also known as Laurentius Abstemius , who wrote 197 fables, the first hundred of which were published as Hecatomythium in 1495. Little by Aesop was included. At the most, some traditional fables are adapted and reinterpreted: The Lion and the Mouse is continued and given a new ending (fable 52); The Oak and the Reed becomes "The Elm and the Willow" (53); The Ant and

5472-406: The fable tradition had already been renewed in the 17th century by La Fontaine's influential reinterpretations of Aesop and others. In the centuries that followed there were further reinterpretations through the medium of regional languages, which to those at the centre were regarded as little better than slang. Eventually, however, the demotic tongue of the cities themselves began to be appreciated as

5568-441: The fables arrived in and travelled from ancient Greece remains uncertain. Some cannot be dated any earlier than Babrius and Phaedrus , several centuries after Aesop, and yet others even later. The earliest mentioned collection was by Demetrius of Phalerum , an Athenian orator and statesman of the 4th century BCE, who compiled the fables into a set of ten books for the use of orators. A follower of Aristotle, he simply catalogued all

5664-410: The fables in Hecatomythium were later translated in the second half of Roger L'Estrange 's Fables of Aesop and other eminent mythologists (1692); some also appeared among the 102 in H. Clarke's Latin reader, Select fables of Aesop: with an English translation (1787), of which there were both English and American editions. There were later three notable collections of fables in verse, among which

5760-409: The fables that earlier Greek writers had used in isolation as exempla, putting them into prose. At least it was evidence of what was attributed to Aesop by others; but this may have included any ascription to him from the oral tradition in the way of animal fables, fictitious anecdotes, etiological or satirical myths, possibly even any proverb or joke, that these writers transmitted. It is more a proof of

5856-439: The fall of 1958, the white-bearded protagonist starred in the syndicated television program Farmer Al Falfa and his Terrytoon Pals , a compilation of the earlier black and white Terry shorts. Though no longer for sale in the mainstream television market, most of the early cartoons, the silents in particular, have surfaced on public domain compilations including, most notably, Video Yesteryear's Cartoonal Knowledge VHS series from

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5952-504: The first six of which incorporated a section of fables specifically aimed at children. In this the fables of La Fontaine were rewritten to fit popular airs of the day and arranged for simple performance. The preface to this work comments that 'we consider ourselves happy if, in giving them an attraction to useful lessons which are suited to their age, we have given them an aversion to the profane songs which are often put into their mouths and which only serve to corrupt their innocence.' The work

6048-400: The first three books of Romulus in elegiac verse, possibly made around the 12th century, was one of the most highly influential texts in medieval Europe. Referred to variously (among other titles) as the verse Romulus or elegiac Romulus, and ascribed to Gualterus Anglicus , it was a common Latin teaching text and was popular well into the Renaissance. Another version of Romulus in Latin elegiacs

6144-493: The folkloristic roots by which they often came to him in the first places. But many of the gifted regional authors were well aware of what they were doing in their work. In fitting the narration of the story to their local idiom, in appealing to the folk proverbs derived from such tales, and in adapting the story to local conditions and circumstances, the fables were so transposed as to go beyond bare equivalence, becoming independent works in their own right. Thus Emile Ruben claimed of

6240-426: The huge success of the first all-talkie Lights of New York in 1928, producer Amadee J. Van Beuren realized the potential of sound films and bought Fables Studios to produce sound animation films. Van Beuren, now owner of the newly-named Van Beuren Studios , urged Terry to add the innovation to his films. Terry argued that adding sound would only complicate the production process, but ended up doing so anyway, and

6336-410: The linguistic transmutations in Jean Foucaud's collection of fables that, "not content with translating, he has created a new work". In a similar way, the critic Maurice Piron described the Walloon versions of François Bailleux as "masterpieces of original imitation", and this is echoed in the claim that in Natale Rocchiccioli's free Corsican versions too there is "more creation than adaptation". In

6432-541: The modern view is that Aesop was not the originator of all those fables attributed to him. Instead, any fable tended to be ascribed to the name of Aesop if there was no known alternative literary source. In Classical times there were various theorists who tried to differentiate these fables from other kinds of narration. They had to be short and unaffected; in addition, they are fictitious, useful to life and true to nature. In them could be found talking animals and plants, although humans interacting only with humans figure in

6528-422: The moral of the tale, but also to practise style and the rules of grammar by making new versions of their own. A little later the poet Ausonius handed down some of these fables in verse, which the writer Julianus Titianus translated into prose, and in the early 5th century Avianus put 42 of these fables into Latin elegiacs . The largest, oldest known and most influential of the prose versions of Phaedrus bears

6624-487: The most influential was Gabriele Faerno 's Centum Fabulae (1564). The majority of the hundred fables there are Aesop's but there are also humorous tales such as The drowned woman and her husband (41) and The miller, his son and the donkey (100). In the same year that Faerno was published in Italy, Hieronymus Osius brought out a collection of 294 fables titled Fabulae Aesopi carmine elegiaco redditae in Germany. This too contained some from elsewhere, such as The Dog in

6720-489: The name of an otherwise unknown fabulist named Romulus . It contains 83 fables, dates from the 10th century and seems to have been based on an earlier prose version which, under the name of "Aesop" and addressed to one Rufus, may have been written in the Carolingian period or even earlier. The collection became the source from which, during the second half of the Middle Ages, almost all the collections of Latin fables in prose and verse were wholly or partially drawn. A version of

6816-418: The next six were more diffuse and diverse in origin. At the start of the 19th century, some of the fables were adapted into Russian , and often reinterpreted, by the fabulist Ivan Krylov . In most cases, but not all, these were dependent on La Fontaine's versions. Translations into Asian languages at a very early date derive originally from Greek sources. These include the so-called Fables of Syntipas ,

6912-459: The poet Ennius two centuries before, and others are referred to in the work of Horace . The rhetorician Aphthonius of Antioch wrote a technical treatise on, and converted into Latin prose, some forty of these fables in 315. It is notable as illustrating contemporary and later usage of fables in rhetorical practice. Teachers of philosophy and rhetoric often set the fables of Aesop as an exercise for their scholars, inviting them not only to discuss

7008-440: The power of Aesop's name to attract such stories to it than evidence of his actual authorship. In any case, although the work of Demetrius was mentioned frequently for the next twelve centuries, and was considered the official Aesop, no copy now survives. Present-day collections evolved from the later Greek version of Babrius , of which there now exists an incomplete manuscript of some 160 fables in choliambic verse. Current opinion

7104-399: The previous decade, and this series would be his most prolific appearance. Each short concludes with a moral that usually has nothing to do with the actual cartoon itself. Terry staffer Mannie Davis once remarked that the morals were even "funnier than the whole picture itself" and Terry said "the fact that they're ambiguous is the thing that made 'em funny". Morals include "Go around with

7200-524: The protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his time in prison turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses. Nonetheless, for two main reasons – because numerous morals within Aesop's attributed fables contradict each other, and because ancient accounts of Aesop's life contradict each other –

7296-531: The quality of his woodcuts. The first of those under his name was the Select Fables in Three Parts published in 1784. This was followed in 1818 by The Fables of Aesop and Others . The work is divided into three sections: the first has some of Dodsley's fables prefaced by a short prose moral; the second has 'Fables with Reflections', in which each story is followed by a prose and a verse moral and then

7392-618: The repertoire of noted performers such as Boby Forest and Yves Deniaud , of which recordings were made. In the south of France, Georges Goudon published numerous folded sheets of fables in the post-war period. Described as monologues, they use Lyon slang and the Mediterranean Lingua Franca known as Sabir. Slang versions by others continue to be produced in various parts of France, both in printed and recorded form. The first printed version of Aesop's Fables in English

7488-1275: The sense to an Aesopean brevity. Many translations were made into languages contiguous to or within the French borders. Ipui onak (1805) was the first translation of 50 fables of Aesop by the writer Bizenta Mogel Elgezabal into the Basque language spoken on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. It was followed in mid-century by two translations on the French side: 50 fables in J-B. Archu's Choix de Fables de La Fontaine, traduites en vers basques (1848) and 150 in Fableac edo aleguiac Lafontenetaric berechiz hartuac (Bayonne, 1852) by Abbé Martin Goyhetche (1791–1859). Versions in Breton were written by Pierre Désiré de Goësbriand (1784–1853) in 1836 and Yves Louis Marie Combeau (1799–1870) between 1836 and 1838. The turn of Provençal came in 1859 with Li Boutoun de guèto, poésies patoises by Antoine Bigot (1825–1897), followed by several other collections of fables in

7584-399: The series of hydraulic statues representing 38 chosen fables in the labyrinth of Versailles in the 1670s. In this he had been advised by Charles Perrault , who was later to translate Faerno's widely published Latin poems into French verse and so bring them to a wider audience. Then in the 1730s appeared the eight volumes of Nouvelles Poésies Spirituelles et Morales sur les plus beaux airs ,

7680-574: The series under the Van Beuren Corporation , formerly Fable Studios, Inc. The series finally came to a close in 1933. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists 447 titles from 1920 to 1929 under the production company name of Aesop Fables Studio, and 198 titles under Van Beuren Studios from 1928 to 1934. 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 Aesop's Fables provided inspiration to Walt Disney to found

7776-999: The series would now be renamed Aesop's Sound Fables . Released in October 1928, Dinner Time is the first cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack ever released to the public, but the film was overshadowed by the release of Disney's Steamboat Willie on November 18 of the same year. Fables Studios did not cease production of silent cartoons until the release of Presto-Chango on April 14, 1929. The series also includes The Window Washers (1925), Scrambled Eggs (1926), Small Town Sheriff (1927), A Close Call (1929), The Iron Man (1930), Good Old Schooldays (1930), Dixie Days (1930), Western Whoopee (1930), Laundry Blues (1930), Circus Capers (1930), Gypped in Egypt (1930), College Capers (1931), Cinderella Blues (1931), The Wild Goose Chase (1932), and Silvery Moon (1933). In 1929 Terry quit, starting his own TerryToons Studios , and John Foster took over

7872-437: The stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media. The fables were part of oral tradition and were not collected until about three centuries after Aesop's death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material

7968-422: The team of Jean-Joseph Dehin  [ wa ] and François Bailleux , who between them covered all of La Fontaine's books I–VI, ( Fåves da Lafontaine mettowes è ligeois , 1850–56). Adaptations into other regional dialects were made by Charles Letellier (Mons, 1842) and Charles Wérotte (Namur, 1844); much later, Léon Bernus published some hundred imitations of La Fontaine in the dialect of Charleroi (1872); he

8064-585: The things themselves, or their pictures. That young people are a special target for the fables was not a particularly new idea and a number of ingenious schemes for catering to that audience had already been put into practice in Europe. The Centum Fabulae of Gabriele Faerno was commissioned by Pope Pius IV in the 16th century 'so that children might learn, at the same time and from the same book, both moral and linguistic purity'. When King Louis XIV of France wanted to instruct his six-year-old son, he incorporated

8160-421: The urbane language of the slave-owner. More recently still there has been Ezop Pou Zanfan Lekol (2017), free adaptations of 125 fables into Mauritian Creole by Dev Virahsawmy , accompanied by English texts drawn from The Aesop for Children (1919). Fables belong essentially to the oral tradition; they survive by being remembered and then retold in one's own words. When they are written down, particularly in

8256-537: Was continually reprinted into the second half of the 19th century. Another popular collection was John Newbery 's Fables in Verse for the Improvement of the Young and the Old , facetiously attributed to Abraham Aesop Esquire, which was to see ten editions after its first publication in 1757. Robert Dodsley 's three-volume Select Fables of Esop and other Fabulists is distinguished for several reasons. First that it

8352-501: Was first published in 1972 under the name Luqman Hakim . The South African writer Sibusiso Nyembezi translated some of Aesop's fables into Zulu in a series of books he prepared for school students in the 1960s. However, with the aim of preserving Zulu cultural heritage, he substituted animals better known in their areas in some of these fables. The 18th to 19th centuries saw a vast quantity of fables in verse being written in all European languages. Regional languages and dialects in

8448-529: Was followed during the 1880s by Joseph Dufrane  [ fr ] , writing in the Borinage dialect under the pen-name Bosquètia. In the 20th century there has been a selection of fifty fables in the Condroz dialect by Joseph Houziaux (1946), to mention only the most prolific in an ongoing surge of adaptation. The motive behind the later activity across these areas was to assert regional specificity against

8544-746: Was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors. Manuscripts in Latin and Greek were important avenues of transmissions, although poetical treatments in European vernaculars eventually formed another. On

8640-494: Was made by Alexander Neckam , born at St Albans in 1157. Interpretive "translations" of the elegiac Romulus were very common in Europe in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest was one in the 11th century by Ademar of Chabannes , which includes some new material. This was followed by a prose collection of parables by the Cistercian preacher Odo of Cheriton around 1200 where the fables (many of which are not Aesopic) are given

8736-488: Was particularly well known for his very free adaptations of La Fontaine, of which he made recordings as well as publishing his Favule di Natale in the 1970s. During the 19th century renaissance of Belgian dialect literature in Walloon , several authors adapted versions of the fables to the racy speech (and subject matter) of Liège. They included Charles Duvivier  [ wa ] (in 1842); Joseph Lamaye (1845); and

8832-479: Was popular and reprinted into the following century. In Great Britain various authors began to develop this new market in the 18th century, giving a brief outline of the story and what was usually a longer commentary on its moral and practical meaning. The first of such works is Reverend Samuel Croxall 's Fables of Aesop and Others, newly done into English with an Application to each Fable . First published in 1722, with engravings for each fable by Elisha Kirkall , it

8928-629: Was printed in Birmingham by John Baskerville in 1761; second that it appealed to children by having the animals speak in character, the Lion in regal style, the Owl with 'pomp of phrase'; thirdly because it gathers into three sections fables from ancient sources, those that are more recent (including some borrowed from Jean de la Fontaine ), and new stories of his own invention. Thomas Bewick 's editions from Newcastle upon Tyne are equally distinguished for

9024-562: Was published on 26 March 1484, by William Caxton . Many others, in prose and verse, followed over the centuries. In the 20th century Ben E. Perry edited the Aesopic fables of Babrius and Phaedrus for the Loeb Classical Library and compiled a numbered index by type in 1952. Olivia and Robert Temple 's Penguin edition is titled The Complete Fables by Aesop (1998) but in fact many from Babrius, Phaedrus and other major ancient sources have been omitted. More recently, in 2002

9120-463: Was revived in 1930, beginning with French Fried , and continuing until 1937, after which the character would appear only irregularly until 1955. For roughly a year, the farmer continued to appear in Van Beuren's cartoons, now being made by former Terry associates John Foster and Mannie Davis (both of whom would rejoin Terry a few years later). Terry threatened legal action against his former producer, as

9216-511: Was translated into romanized Japanese. The title was Esopo no Fabulas and dates to 1593. It was soon followed by a fuller translation into a three-volume kanazōshi entitled Isopo Monogatari ( 伊曾保 物語 ) . This was the sole Western work to survive in later publication after the expulsion of Westerners from Japan , since by that time the figure of Aesop had been acculturated and presented as if he were Japanese. Coloured woodblock editions of individual fables were made by Kawanabe Kyosai in

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