Masaaki Yuasa and his animated feature MIND GAME swept the Fantasia International Genre Film Festival in Montreal, which wrapped up this past Monday. The film beat out dozens of live-action films and took awards for Best Director, Best Film, Best Script and Special Award - Visual Accomplishment. Complete list of winners HERE. (via In-Betweens)

Previous Brew items about MIND GAME: film review and interview with director Masaaki Yuasa.

65 years ago on this day, Warner Bros. released a Merrie Melodies short called A Wild Hare. The zany wise-guy personality that the studio was slowly developing was finally nailed in this film by Tex Avery. A Wild Hare was recognized with an Academy Award nomination, launched a long running series of classic cartoons and created a beloved animation super star.Happy Birthday Bugs!

I love these images from the UPA industrial film LOOK WHO’S DRIVING (1954). The design is spare, yet artful. More importantly, it’s a lot of fun to look at. There’s an easy-going quality to the design which one rarely finds in designed animation nowadays. The shapes and colors are inviting and none of the visual elements feel forced or contrived. The film doesn’t employ this white-background technique for its entire length, but there is terrific design and layout throughout, and the added bonus is that it moves beautifully too. The film’s design credit went to Bob Dranko, with color styling by Dranko and Michi Kataoka, and direction by Bill Hurtz. (Judging from the way Hurtz worked on other films, he likely collaborated with Dranko on the layout and overall visual direction of this film.) Hurtz was also one of the designers on GERALD MCBOING BOING (1950), the quintessential example of a UPA film that reduced its backgrounds to the bare essentials. LOOK WHO’S DRIVING perhaps doesn’t reach the classic status of GERALD — it is, after all, a driving safety film commissioned by Aetna Casualty and Surety Company — but it is no less entertaining and has much to recommend. Unfortunately, it’s also quite impossible to see nowadays, unless you happen to own a print of the film. Documenting obscure animated projects from the 1950s, like LOOK WHO’S DRIVING, was one of the goals for my upcoming book on 1950s animation design. So many stellar cartoons from that period are all but forgotten today, and I’m hopeful this book will play a small role in reintroducing some of the great “lost” cartoons of that era.

The Center For Jewish History in New York City is presenting A Tribute to the Fleischer Brothers, a screening and lecture by animation historian Mark Langer, on Monday August 29th at 7pm (Admission: $10/$5 for students and seniors). The Center is at 15 West 16th Street. Langer, a Professor of Film History at Carleton University in Ottawa, has been writing the definitive Fleischer history for years. His insight into Fleischer’s work and several surreal Fleischer films should add up to quite a rewarding evening.

Reader Adam Koford brings this to our attention:

I don’t know if you have caught the History Detectives on PBS yet, but a recent episode had a segment you may be interested in. It was about a “Micky” Mouse toy patented in 1926, before Walt’s Mickey officially came along.

In case you missed it, here’s a PDF of the episode transcript.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has just scheduled another classic animation event. On Friday August 19th at 7:30pm, in conjunction with their current exhibition of animation movie posters, they will screen 18 Academy Award winning cartoon shorts. The program, OSCAR WINNING ANIMATION: “Make ‘Em Laugh”, will contain 35mm prints of:

The Three Little Pigs (1932/33), Ferdinand the Bull (1938), Lend a Paw (1941), Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), Tweetie Pie (1947), For Scent-imental Reasons (1949), Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953, pictured above), Knighty Knight Bugs (1958), Ersatz (1961), The Critic (1963), The Pink Phink (1964), The Crunch Bird (1971), Closed Mondays (1974), The Fly (1980), Sundae in New York (1983), Creature Comforts (1990), Bunny (1998) and For the Birds (2001)

General admission is $5.00, the location is the best screening room in L.A. - the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theatre. See www.oscars.org for more information.

Leonard Maltin’s Movie Crazy is not only a great website, but also a wonderful quarterly 16 page hard copy newsletter. The latest issue (#12, Spring 2005) features a nice interview with both Betty Kimball (Ward’s wife) and Marie Johnston (Ollie’s spouse). Both ladies were ink & paint gals at Disney in the 1930s (Marie left Disney to paint cels at Warner Bros. in the 1940s). This issue, and the previous eleven, feature interviews, rare movie material and original research not available on the web (or anywhere else), and are highly recommended.

This saddens me. TV GUIDE announced yesterday that it will cease to be a digest sized publication as of the Oct. 17 issue and be a regular sized slick color magazine with 25 percent listings and 75 percent stories (versus the 75 percent listings and 25 percent stories it has now).I think I learned to read by studying issues of TV GUIDE (as well as Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, but I digress). I’ve come to use TV Guide as a valuable resource in researching classic TV cartoons. Like Loonatics and New Coke, this decision seems like a mistake to me. TV GUIDE has dropped the ball and I somehow believe someone else will start a new magazine to take its place. I hope so.

Speaking of fps magazine, they just did an interview with the director of MIND GAME, Masaaki Yuasa, who was in Montreal last week for the Canadian premiere of the film. I’m dying to see MIND GAME, and hopefully on the big screen, though I have no idea when or where that’ll happen. It’s surprising that none of the major animation festivals, including Annecy and Ottawa, have taken any interest in screening this film. (See Joshua Smith’s review of MIND GAME posted earlier on the Brew)

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