BREWMASTERS NOTE: This week Cartoon Brew takes a closer look at each of the five Academy Award nominated animated shorts. Each day at 10am EST/7am PST we will post an exclusive interview with the director(s) of one of the films. Today, we begin with The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore:

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is the first film from William Joyce’s Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana. Co-directors William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg spoke with Cartoon Brew on January 25th.

Jerry: First things first. Your studio is in Shreveport, Louisana. Why there?

Bill Joyce: That’s where I grew up, it’s a great little Southern Shangri-la. Not that far from Dallas, about 2-3 hrs away. Brandon was working at Reel EFX and started contacting me about working together, and then Lampton (Enochs, co-partner in Moonbot) moved out here after Hurricane Katrina. The movie industry is actually pretty big in Louisiana. In this weird way, Shreveport has become this film making mecca. (laughter) That sounds too kind of ludicrous to say, but it’s sort of true.

Jerry: It IS true, you can make movies anywhere, everywhere today. Now, I’m a little fuzzy on the whole origin of this project. I’m under the impression that it started as an app, or designed to be something else other than a film?

Bill: It started out as a book that I wrote a few years ago in response to my mentor at Harper Collins. His name was Bill Morris and he had been there since they were called Harper Brothers, since 1949. He was just a great old publishing titan, and a real gentleman… but he was dying and I was really bummed out about it. One of the ways I deal with the good things and the crummy things in my life is I write a story. I was flying up to see him and on the way this title just kind of tumbled into my head, called “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore.” It was a play on both Bill’s name and his actual physical stature… he was a diminutive guy, though a giant in the industry. And he loved books and everything about publishing. So I got to read him the story which was really sweet. He was a kind of crusty old guy but he would respond to outreaches of emotion in his crusty old way. I was going to make it into a book but then Brandon and I started working together in animation, and we wanted to create a short film around same time I was working on the book. It was then Lamptin suggested we form a company.

Jerry: I love how the film combines CG with hand drawn and miniatures…

Bill: Well, we kind of decided early on we wanted to play with all different kinds of animation, and it seemed that just to think of it in terms of computer animation seemed too limiting. Brandon and I were just so stoked about building miniatures and having CG characters, and doing 2D for some of it, and just doing everything we loved. It just seemed to apply to the story.

Brandon Oldenburg: And we love those old Popeyes, man. You know, we just wanted to just see if it would work. We had gotten a taste of building sets back in 1998 on a test film that we did called The Man In The Moon, where we built miniatures and took them down to New Orleans to an old vaudevillian theater that had been converted into a sound stage. And you know, that short test piece actually evolved into the upcoming Dreamworks project, The Rise of the Guardians.

Jerry: It seems you really put what you wanted into this film and you weren’t aiming for it being a 6 minute short, a 12 minute film, or a 22 minute TV special.

Bill: Going in, we were all “OK. We can’t afford anything over 7 minutes. We have to make this work for 7 minutes.” (laughter) And then we made an animatic completely disregarding time frame. “OK, how long does it time out? Oh! Oh crap! It’s 16 minutes!” So it’s like, OK, we’ve got to figure out how to cut this down. “Let’s cut it down to 7!” We cut it down to 7 and we watched it and we were like—

Brandon: It was horrible!

(Laughter)

Bill: It lost all of the emotional impact. So then we worked it and massaged it to where it ended up. And you know, you’re right, it goes back to the love and making sure we did justice to the story and we didn’t cheat it, and we just had to stay true to the emotion it needed. It needed time. So many shots needed to flow slowly.

Jerry: Well, I think getting nominated made it worthwhile. I want to ask about one thing that delighted me and a lot of us who love the old 2D animation, of course, that is the little Humpty Dumpty character in the book. That’s such a great idea. I’d never even seen anything like that and I thought that was so cool. What can you tell us about you wanting to do that, or where it came from?

Bill: I’m really glad that you like that part of it because it really was our favorite thing in a way. I’ve been doing picture books for a long time. And I started working in animation at John Lasseter’s invitation on Toy Story. So I’ve been in both these worlds for such a long time, and we thought “it’s going to cost so much to make 3D rigs for these guys, but you know, they’re 2D when they’re on a piece of paper.’ So to save money and actually be purer to the concept, we should see if it’ll work if we can mix these 2D guys in there. So it was a weird mix of something that worked for the story and actually made it economically possible for us to finish this thing. I mean, there’s a lot to be said sometime for monetary constraints. It makes you think creatively.

Brandon: One of the happy accidents, though, was the fact that when our animators showed up, the first day on the job, we did not have computers for them to work on.

Bill: (laughter) They hadn’t come in yet.

Brandon: We only had a few, and the few that we had were prepping rigs on just Morris. So, we knew that we had this 2D character and we said ”you know, remember in your third year of college? That 2D animation course?”

(Laughter)

Brandon: (laughter) ‘Let’s go back to pencil and paper guys. It’s gonna be exciting.’ And so we’ve got this Humpty character, we need to do these scenes, we already have an animatic, we know what we need to do. So they jumped head first into that, and it was a great use of their time. It worked.

Jerry: This is the year of The Artist, Hugo, and even Midnight In Paris, with films that evoke the past…. and your film has the same spirit. You have a silent character here who’s been clearly inspired by Buster Keaton. Would you speak to that and the character animation involved?

Bill: We have all this dramatic, chaotic stuff going on in this short. And we felt like we needed a calm center to anchor it. But then it even got weirder, and cooler, because when we were telling the animators what we were going for, we started showing them Buster Keaton films as well as some Winsor McCay material. Then Brandon and I realized that Keaton and McCay were contemporaries. They had to have influenced each other. McCay’s animation was coming out when Keaton was in vaudeville, and he was still doing the strip when Keaton began making movies. You look at McCay’s drawings and the poses and they look like key frames. They seem like they had to have influenced Keaton. He seems to strike the same poses and have the same look.

Brandon: And the crazy thing is, Walt Disney is quoted in saying that he wanted Mickey to invoke Buster Keaton, which is hilarious. Come on, Buster is a human being. He shouldn’t be able to pull off the physical things that a cartoon character struggles to do. But it’s true. Most cartoons struggle to create performances with such strong sillouetted poses, but [Buster] was then and is now, just as great a resource and reference for this action.

Bill : More than Chaplin, even.

Brandon: We had all these young animators who were so eager to just animate their asses off, and we’re going, ‘it’s all reductive. Look at Buster. It’s about precision and “not doing”. (laughter) We were saying in this story, this character needed to be unflappable in a situation where…

Bill : …where he’s being flapped.

Brandon: (laughter) Yeah.

Brandon Oldenburg standing, William Joyce in center & Lampton Enochs in foreground. Photo by Lora Fairchild.

Yesterday, the BAFTAs—the British equivalent of the Academy Awards—were handed out, and the winners of the Animated Feature and Shorts categories were Gore Verbinski’s Rango and Grant Orchard’s A Morning Stroll. The production design nod went to Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo for their work on Hugo, and “special visual effects” was awarded to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (Tim Burke, John Richardson, Greg Butler and David Vickery).

Both Rango and A Morning Stroll are Oscar nominees as well, but it’s difficult to judge what a BAFTA win means for their Oscar chances. That’s because besides these two films, the BAFTA nominees in both categories were completely different from the Oscar nominees. Interestingly, the other nominees in the BAFTA animated feature category were The Adventures of Tintin and Arthur Christmas, two films that many said should have also received Oscar nods.

Far be it from me to urge you to see this weekend’s number 3 film, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island – but it is accompanied by the four-minute 3D animated short Daffy’s Rhapsody. Based on the 1953 Mel Blanc recording (written by original Looney Tunes scribes Michael Maltese and Warren Foster), this is director Matthew O’Callaghan’s latest (and in my opinion, greatest) attempt to properly reposition the Looney Tunes in contemporary guise. Inspired by Blanc’s manic vocal track, the artists create a satisfying scenario and the appropriately zany visuals to match it.

But that’s my opinion. What’s yours? Unlike other talkback posts, I’ll allow any intelligent thoughts about the entire series of Looney Tunes 3D theatrical shorts in the comments below.

A Romanian feature-length animated documentary Crulic – The Path to Beyond will make its US debut at MoMA’s New Directors/New Films Festival (March 21-April 1). Filmmaker Anca Damian’s feature tells the life story of Claudiu Crulic, a 33 year old Romanian who died in a Polish prison while on hunger strike. The trailer (below) reveals a strong visual style, combining hand drawn, collage, stop-motion and cut-out animation techniques. Let’s hope this film gets wider international exposure.

(Thanks, Fabrica De Desene)

I ran into animator Michel Gagné at the Annie Awards last week (where he picked up an Annie for Best Video Game, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet) and asked him about his next project. Turns out Gagne had been toiling on a labor of love (literally) that has just gone on sale this week. Says Gagné:

“I have a new book that just came out. I’ve always had a very particular vision of how books reprinting old comics should be restored and presented, so a few years ago, I decided to put my own historical collection together covering a subject that had never really been documented before. I worked on the project for many years and last year it was picked up by Fantagraphics. The book was released last week.“

That book, Young Romance: the Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics, is not the usual thing we endorse here at Cartoon Brew – but as a life-long Jack Kirby fan and oddball comic book buff, this project is right up my alley. Gagne writes more about why he wanted to do this project, and how he did the restorations on his website. I’ve ordered my copy and highly recommend it, sight unseen. Thanks, Michel!

Fresh of the the festival circuit, where it was projected in super wide-screen, Kiss is what I’d safely classify as an art film. It was co-directed by Joseph Hodgson and Franck Aubry through Oslo, Norway graphic design studio Racecar. Hodgson writes:

“As Paul Auster once said “The sun is the past, the earth is the present and the moon is the future.” “Kiss” is a no-budget, independent film, undertaken to examine a simple idea: We set out to explore the consequence of something as innocent as a kiss. We believe that every solar eclipse is the moon’s attempt to reach the sun. Our idea is personified through the sun and the moon as seen from earth… a love story plain and simple.“

For more information and art, visit the Kiss website.

Brazillian animator Fernanda Ribeiro just graduated from the Vancouver Film School’s Classical Animation course. This is her Flash short, Cup of Tea, which features a nice sense of design and a fine sense of humor.

Think Brilliance by Diego De la Rocha (Canada): “This is my animation final project from Vancouver Film School. Shot #1 (Head Title Sequence—Stop Motion / Cloth, strings, cardboards & maple leaves); Shot #2 (CG Lightbulb—Maya 2011/ Zbrush/ Photoshop/ Nuke/ Premiere Pro)”

Futile Devices—Kickers by Nicolas Ménard (Canada): “A series of 6 five seconds kickers made in Denis Dulude’s class at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal)”

God and Money by Philip Vose (US): “Finished in just under five days for my church as an intro to a short series topic of God and money.”

Embroidered Dog Animation—Front and Back by Aubrey Longley-Cook (US)

(NSFW) Twenty Four Hour Woman by Scott Lenhardt (US): “Celebrating the women who make the world go around.”

PHONO – a Sound Creature by Lucas Zanotto (Italy/Germany): “Sound creatures are imaginary beings, a collection started and maintained by composer & sound designer David Kamp in the name of science.”

(Futile Devices via Drawn)