This should be fun. Gallery 1988 in Hollywood (7020 Melrose Ave. - near LaBrea) is hosting a reception next Friday (7-10pm) for their new exhibit REMIXING THE MAGIC (Feb. 17th through March 10th). This exhibit features the work of 50 contemporary artists reinterpreting Disney classic characters, scenes and magic moments. Artists include Tim Biskup, Amanda Visell, Gabe Swarr, Katie Rice, Jim Mahfood, Alex Kirwan, Jorge Gutierrez and 43 others.

Chuck Oberleitner interviewed several guests at the 2005 Annie Awards last week (including Brad Bird, Tom Kenny and Nick Park) and has posted a podcast here.

Our friend Harry McCracken has a list of questions about the Oswald/Al Michaels trade. The questions are more light-hearted than the set of questions Harry had about the Disney-Pixar merger, but they’re the type of thoughts that all hardcore cartoon buffs are wondering right now, like:

Who owns Floyd and Lloyd, Oswald’s sons? Are they now orphaned? Will Disney need to trade two more sportcasters to NBC to get them?

MEDIA ALERT: Brewmaster Jerry Beck will be making an appearence on MOVIE TALK, a radio show on New Orleans BizRadio 990am Saturday February 11th at 12 noon Central time. Listen live or pull up the show on the station’s archive for a discussion on current cartoon topics, including the revival of Oswald Rabbit and the Pink Panther; Pixar & Disney; and the future of animated features.

Scott Morse, long-time art director/story artist with Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Universal, Disney, and presently, with Pixar (as well as an Eisner Award-winning comic book artist on PLASTIC MAN, with Kyle Baker), has a new book of interest coming out this month, NOBLE BOY. Says Scott:

It’s a strange sort of project for me, a sort of children’s book for adults, about my mentor, animation design legend Maurice Noble. I think it may enlighten some of Maurice’s long-time fans, and might even make him some new ones. The book itself is offered as a hardcover “board-book”, a sort of children’s book for adults, all in rhyme, fully painted and told by me. It covers Maurice’s life and career in a playful manner, something I think he would have gotten a kick out of.

It’s 32 pages and will retail for $12.95. The initial print run is 2500 books, but it’s being offered primarily through comic book shops. Original art from the book will be made available through Scott’s website, and at San Diego Comic-Con this year.

Fans of THE INCREDIBLES will want to check out the new Golden Book, JACK-JACK ATTACK, based on the Pixar short of the same name. The book is illustrated by the great Tony Fucile, character designer and supervising animator on THE INCREDIBLES. His drawings are loose and expressive, displaying the effortless charm and sense of immediacy that can only come from years of animating. For $3, this is as affordable as inspiration gets.

Here’s the best thing I’ve found online this week: a three-part video interview from 2001 with all-star cartoonists living in Carmel, California. The participants include magazine cartoonist Eldon Dedini, GORDO creator Gus Arriola, and DENNIS THE MENACE creator Hank Ketcham. All three of them started in animation before finding success as print cartoonists, and sadly, following Dedini’s passing last month, only Arriola is still with us.

To summarize the videos, the following are things that these master cartoonists dislike nowadays: Magazine cartoons, especially THE NEW YORKER (”a lot of times you don’t need the picture”); daily newspaper comics; cartooning skills of artists currently working in both animation and print; ditto their writing skills; contemporary animation that focuses on techique at the expense of character development and humor; and CG animation (in the words of Arriola, it’s so slick “even garbage is pretty.”)

And here are the things they like: Pixar. Yep, that’s pretty much the only bit of modern cartooning that gets some love in this interview. Ketcham says about Pixar, “They do the whole thing in drawing first. They draw their cartoons before they put the technology overlap…that kind of thing may work out fine.”

Also recommended on the same site is an interview with Wah Ming Chang (1917-2003). Chang worked on PINOCCHIO and BAMBI in the Effects and Model Department, and later created stop motion animation for George Pal’s THE TIME MACHINE and THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF BROTHERS GRIMM, as well as designing costumes for THE KING AND I, creating masks for THE PLANET OF THE APES and designing creatures for the TV series THE OUTER LIMITS and STAR TREK. This interview only scratches the surface of Chang’s career, but it’s worth a view.

That’s sportcaster Al Michael’s famous call during the 1980 Winter Olympics, but it might as well apply to today’s events. The Associated press has two stories - HERE and HERE - with more details on the incredibly shrewd business deal that the Disney Co. has engineered: today Disney traded sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC in return for, among other things, the 1920s character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It’s hard to even wrap my head around how cool this deal is; Disney is using their ESPN division as leverage to further their cartoon holdings. For a company that has shown so little regard and appreciation in recent years for its primary business - animation - this is a particularly meaningful gesture. From one of the AP articles comes this quote from Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller: “When Bob [Iger] was named CEO, he told me he wanted to bring Oswald back to Disney, and I appreciate that he is a man of his word. Having Oswald around again is going to be a lot of fun.”

Despite the fact that Oswald has been a largely forgotten character here in the US for many decades, there is currently a lot of appealing Oswald merchandise coming out of Japan. Combine the merchandising potential of the character along with the old Oswald shorts likely coming out on dvd and other ways that Disney will exploit the character, and I think in a couple years NBC Universal will be kicking themselves that they gave away a valuable animation character to Disney…for Al Michaels.