If you are in Hollywood on Thursday night - and are looking for things to do - I highly recommend you spend an evening with Janet Klein And Her Parlor Boys. I’ll be there with my “opening act”: several 1930s musical shorts and cartoons in 16mm, preceeding a wonderful evening of live 1920s/early 1930s jazz, rag-time, blues and novelty songs. The fun starts at 8pm Thursday night May 5th at the Steve Allen Theatre in the Los Feliz area, 4773 Hollywood Blvd., (West of Vermont, across from Barnsdall Park). We do this the first Thursday of every month. Please check Janet’s website (under “Showtime”) for more details.

There’s a great post about the classic Ward Kimball short TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953) at the appropriately named Ward-O-Matic, the blog of Atlanta-based animation director Ward Jenkins. The entry includes dozens of frame grabs, which are inspiring to look at even if you’ve already seen the film countless times, as most readers of the Brew surely have. In these stills, one can admire the amazing character design work of Tom Oreb and color styling of Eyvind Earle, but the film is equally impressive to watch in motion (which is not always the case with highly styled animation). The inventive graphic movement created by Kimball, Art Stevens, Julius Svendsen and Marc Davis adds the perfect complement to the contemporary designs of Oreb and Earle. I can’t say enough great things about this cartoon, but don’t take my word — just check out all the visual goodness at Ward’s site.

I’m happy to report our Saturday afternoon screening of rare Scrappy cartoons was a success - but I’d rather let co-host Harry McCracken and Asifa’s Larry Loc (scroll down) tell you about it with their own pictures and comments on their respective blogs.If you missed this once-in-a lifetime event, Asifa-Hollywood is hosting a fuller tribute to Dick Huemer with rare cartoons and special guests on June 9th at the Glendale Central Library. Ray Pointer is organizing this and it looks to be a very special evening.

Robert “Bobe” Cannon (1909-1964) is somebody we don’t talk about nearly often enough on Cartoon Brew. I write about Cannon in greater depth in my upcoming book on 50s animation design, but here’s something I noticed about his work the other day. The image on the left is from a scene that Bobe Cannon animated in Tex Avery’s LITTLE RURAL RIDING HOOD (1949). The image on right is a layout drawing by Cannon from the first Columbia theatrical he directed at UPA, THE MINER’S DAUGHTER (1950). So much is made of Cannon’s dislike for Avery-style humor, but this is an interesting visual example that shows even while working with Avery’s characters and gags, he found opportunities to pursue his own unique graphic style of drawing and movement. On a sidenote, it’s worth mentioning that Italian animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi has been working on an in-depth biography of Bobe Cannon. I don’t think there’s any release date set for his book, but it promises to shed a lot of light on the life and career of this great animator-director.

A couple brief notes:

> Leonard Maltin recommends my book THE ART OF ROBOTS on his WEBSITE. He writes: “The end result on screen is overwhelming at times; I’m glad to have a book that allows me to admire the artwork one image at a time.” His recommendation is about two-thirds of the page down. Thanks, Leonard!

> The surest way to get a link on Cartoon Brew? Create a post on your blog titled “All Hail Amid Amidi” and draw a caricature of me surrounded by beaver clouds and other monstrous creations.

The surest way to scare the hell out of me? Create a post on your blog titled “All Hail Amid Amidi” and draw a caricature of me surrounded by beaver clouds and other monstrous creations.

So, guess what Lev Polyakov (a talented and quite young animator out of NY) did?

Veteran feature animator Raul Garcia (ALADDIN, THE LION KING, POCAHONTAS and many others) has finished his personal short film, THE TELL-TALE HEART, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic short story. It’s a film that Raul had wanted to make for many years, but the impetus to finally produce it came when he stumbled across a late-1940s recording of Bela Lugosi reading Poe’s story. “It was from around 1947, when Lugosi was doing a one man show, touring the US and looking to expand his career into television,” explains Garcia. “As far as I know, it is the only copy still in existence.”

Of course, the animation world has already seen one other version of THE TELL-TALE HEART, the now-classic 1953 UPA short directed by Ted Parmelee. Raul is not only familiar with the earlier film, but he was telling me at Annecy last year that that was one of the films which inspired him to get into animation and which opened his eyes to the incredible potential of the animated art form. Garcia’s vision for the Poe tale shares little in common though with Paul Julian’s painterly approach in the UPA short. The stark black-and-white styling in Raul’s film takes its inspiration from the work of Argentinean illustrator Alberto Breccia. He says the film is also an “homage to all the artists who influenced me when I was growing up — Lugosi, Breccia, Hitchcock…the world of Milton Canniff and the horror magazines CREEPY and EERIE — in a sense they’re all there, represented in the film.”

The film made a smashing debut last month at the 12th International Festival of Young Filmmakers in Granada, Spain where it won top honors for Best Spanish Short Film and Best Director. It’ll continue to play at other festivals in the coming months. A website about the film will arrive shortly at TheTellTaleHeart-TheShort.com.

Check out Dave Wasson’s reel at the Acme Filmworks website. There’s a lot of good stuff on it, but best of all, the final item on the reel is his short film MAX AND HIS SPECIAL PROBLEM. He produced the 1998 short for Nick’s OH YEAH! CARTOONS and it’s quite unlike anything else produced for that series. I hadn’t seen the film in a few years and was pleasantly surprised to see how well it holds up — it’s worth watching even at thumbnail size. Everything about this short works: a simple well-executed set-up, beautiful drawing and layout, funny gags made even funnier by superb timing (Bob Jaques timed on it) and elegant background styling (courtesy of THE INCREDIBLES’ Lou Romano). To find out more about the film, read this REVIEW written by fellow Brewer Jerry Beck back in ‘98.