Among the cool things to see at the Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibit opening this week at MoMA is a giant 19th century-style zoetrope with TOY STORY characters in it. But unlike the traditional zoetrope which uses flat animation on paper, these zoetropes have three-dimensional models inside of them. Charles Solomon wrote about it in last weekend’s NY TIMES (reg. req’d, bugmenot.com). Says MONSTERS INC. director Pete Docter of the zoetropes, “When it’s working, you’d swear you can reach out and shake hands with these guys who are coming to life right in front of you.”
(via Michael Sporn’s Splog)

The opening titles for the live-action film MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS are a stunning, eclectic ’30s pastiche’ created with hand-drawn and CG animation. The sequence is by London’s Foreign Office.
(via naked)

There is no question that Miramax has earned its reputation as a producer of classy live-action films, but when it comes to animation, the Weinstein brothers have proven time and again that they are utterly clueless. Their animation releases throughout the years have included clunkers like FREDDY AS F.R.O.7., TOM AND JERRY: THE MOVIE, ARABIAN NIGHT, POKEMON 4-EVER and POKEMON HEROES. (They do have PRINCESS MONONOKE to their credit, though that film was foisted upon them by Disney and, by all accounts, not a project on which they took the initiative.) Now that they’ve split from Disney and formed The Weinstein Company, the brothers appear intent on maintaining their streak of animated incompetence with HOODWINKED, which opens in wide release on January 13. Fear not, the Weinsteins understand that in this day and age, crappy hand-drawn animated films won’t cut it anymore; today’s audiences demand crappy computer animation, and HOODWINKED promises to deliver plenty of that.

This Reuters article offers some background on the film and says that HOODWINKED’s budget was $15-20 million. To put that into perspective, the Weinsteins could have produced two amazing animated films for $20mil — THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE and MIND GAME — with spare change left over. The reason we don’t see more films like BELLEVILLE and MIND GAME is not that they cost too much or that there aren’t enough talented animation directors who can create such films; it’s that Hollywood’s live-action establishment doesn’t understand (and remains willfully ignorant about) the animated art form. As long as these people continue to call the shots, the great possibilities of feature animation will remain untapped, and the development of the art form painfully stunted. And we’ll continue to see directors like Zemeckis blow fortunes on “uncanny valley” quasi-animated films like POLAR EXPRESS, studios spend tens of millions to produce Saturday morning-quality fare like CURIOUS GEORGE, and producers like the Weinsteins invest in torturously bad projects like HOODWINKED.

The new hand-drawn animation music video for the band They Might Be Giants is well worth checking out. “Bastard Wants to Hit Me” was released as a ‘bonus video’ in early November on the band’s VENUE SONGS dvd and has just been posted online. The video was co-directed by Aaron Sorenson (animation direction) and Courtney Booker (art direction) at LAIKA’s commercial division, LAIKA/house. There’s some strong expressive animation in it with cartoony facial expressions and funny, exaggerated mouth shapes. The video is nominated for an Annie Award in the TV commercial category.
(Thanks, Andrew Tisher)

A voice we all grew up with has been silenced. Gilbert Mack passed away December 5th at age 93. Mack was the U.S. voice of “Mr. Pompus” on the original Astro Boy (1963) and was a member of the New York troup of voice actors who dubbed everything from Gigantor to Godzilla in the 1960s. Mack was also heard as Hawkman on the original 1960s Filmation Superman/Aquaman Hour and recorded numerous Little Golden Records as various Hanna Barbera characters. Prior to his cartoon work, Mack was a vaudevillian and a character actor on radio and early televsion - with numerous appearances on such classic shows as Dick Tracy and The Inner Sanctum.(Thanks, Anthony Tollin)

Take note the name of the photographer on these comic pages! Milton Knight sent us these intriguing panels he found in OUR KID SISTER, a back-up story drawn by Bob Wickersham in COOKIE #16 (ACG, 1948). Milton thinks it might have been written by Hubie Karp.

Ya’know, I was thinking recently how we don’t post many pictures of ye brewmasters on this blog. Here’s one snapped of me tonight at the Animation Guild’s Holiday Party at the Pickwick Center in Burbank. Hundreds of Los Angeles based animators showed up, including veterans Willie Ito, Art Leonardi, and Lou Scheimer. Animation Nation’s Charles Zembillas snapped a bunch of pictures and posted them on his Animation Nation forum. As you can see, good time was had by all!

I’m still working on my Chronicle book CARTOON MODERN, which is all about 1950s animation design. Right now, my editor, the design folks at Chronicle, the book designers and I are all working diligently to figure out a cool cover design. I’ve posted a bunch of the cover concepts on the CARTOON MODERN blog and I want to hear what everybody thinks. There’s a lot of options and your comments will help us forge a direction for what the final cover will look like. The more opinions, the merrier, so please participate.