Classic bit of British comedy: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore spoof Gerry & Sylvia Anderson’s F.A.B. 1960s Supermarionation TV shows.

(Thanks, Jim Engel)

Rarely screened historic medical cartoons will be featured in a film series this fall at the National Academies in Washington DC. The Cartoon Medicine Show: Animated Cartoons from the Collection of the National Library of Medicine, curated by Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), will feature a good sampling of rarely screened animated medical cartoons from the 1920s to the 1960s. The films will be presented in a two-day series, Oct. 25 - 26, at the National Academy of Sciences Auditorium, each night at 6pm. Films scheduled include Disney’s silent-era Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (1922) and Clara Cleans Her Teeth (1926), Hugh Harman’s Winky The Watchman (1945), Cleaning Mess Gear (1945, U.S. Navy) and Use Your Head (1945, U.S. Navy) and UPA’s A Few Quick Facts: Fear (Private Snafu, 1945, Zack Schwartz), Swab Your Choppers (1946, U.S. Navy) and Man Alive (1952, American Cancer Society).Also on the program are two Bell Science films: Hemo the Magnificent (1956, Shamus Culhane) and Gateway to the Mind (1958, Chuck Jones) and well as several Private Snafu cartoons: Gripes (1943, Friz Freleng), Private Snafu Versus Malaria Mike (1944, Chuck Jones), and It’s Murder She Says (1945, Chuck Jones). Other wartime films include Strictly Personal (1945, Army Signal Corps), The Inside Story (1944, Paramount Pictures for the U.S. Coast Guard), Criminal at Large (1943, Office of Malaria Control, United States Public Health Service). Post war films include: The Appraisal of Competency (1956, Nebraska Psychiatric Institute), Fluoridation Story (1951, Public Health Service, Division of Dental Public Health) and a set of TV spots (1955-1959) for the American Dental Association.Animation historian Donald Crafton (Before Mickey) and medical historians Michael Sappol and David Cantor will provide commentary.National Academy of Sciences
2100 C St., N.W., Auditorium
Washington, D.C.
Admission: free. Seating is limited. RSVP to arts@nas.edu or 202-334-2436(Thanks, Karl Cohen)

We recently signed on with John Battelle’s Federated Media to represent us for online advertising. Federated is a boutique ad rep representing only a limited number of blogs with strong author-driven voices, including sites such as BoingBoing, MetaFilter and Digg. We’re proud to be associated with them. To help us gain a more accurate sense of who’s reading Cartoon Brew and so that Federated can get us ads geared to stuff that we like, please take a moment to fill out this SURVEY here. The survey is completely anonymous and takes only a few minutes to fill out. We’re going to run it for a couple weeks, and if there’s any interest afterwards, we’ll share the compiled statistics with everybody.

Old but funny…

Thad Komorowski has posted three examples of animation acting - one each from Disney, WB and MGM - all created without the aid of rotoscoping or performance capture. The foolishness of commentaries by critics like Mick LaSalle and James Lipton becomes only more evident when they are presented with actual examples of the animation medium’s expressive potential. LaSalle believes that the animated film has never “had the ability to show the human face. There was never any point to a close-up in an animated film — there was never really anything to see.” Really, Mr. LaSalle? I think Rod Scribner and Bob McKimson proved you wrong about sixty years ago, as evidenced in the clip from TORTOISE WINS BY A HARE. James Lipton thinks that Robert Downey rotoscoped is a better performance than anything an animator could create. Perhaps he should look at Ken Muse’s anguished animation of Tom in HEAVENLY PUSS. We haven’t even begun to examine all the stellar animation in feature films, but even in these short films, the inanity of LaSalle and Lipton’s opinions are exposed.

I didn’t think of doing this but somebody found Mick LaSalle’s review of THE POLAR EXPRESS. An excerpt is below. If anything can be said to his credit, LaSalle is consistent…well, consistently blind.

It’s also an enchanting, beautiful and brilliantly imagined film that constitutes a technological breakthrough. The one profound limitation of animation — the rigid faces that don’t allow for emotional nuance — is overcome through a new process that allows actors to record their performances digitally onto a computer. These performances — the gestures, the subtleties of facial expression — are then used as the template for the computer-animation process.

It reminds me of Ward Jenkins’s classic blog post about POLAR EXPRESS and how it could have been improved.

It looks like the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE’s Mick LaSalle isn’t alone when it comes to film critics who make uninformed sweeping generalizations about the animation art form. Take for example this recent comment (found on Shannon Tindle’s blog) by INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO host James Lipton regarding the use of rotoscope in A SCANNER DARKLY:

In theory, if you rotoscope a really good performance by a really good actor, it ought to be much more effective than an animated performance that’s been drawn or computer generated to match a voice.”

Lipton’s comment reveals a very obvious bias: he believes that an animator is incapable of creating a performance that can compete with a live-action performance. Ironically, Lipton asserts that the only way to achieve a great performance in animation is to have it performed by a live-action actor and then rotoscoped, or in other words, remove the animator as the person who gives life to the character. Comments like Lipton’s and LaSalle’s only serve to illustrate the uphill battle that the art form still faces; with so many stellar examples of animation created over the years, there are still plenty of critics out there who maintain their petty prejudices about the art and remain largely oblivious to animation’s unique and powerful qualities as a communication medium.

UPDATE: Animator Kevan Shorey offers his thoughts on Lipton’s quote and the frustation of working in a medium that is so poorly understood by the mainstream.

Tomorrow evening, July 28, illustrator/toy designer James Jarvis will be having an art show/book signing at Meltdown Comics (7522 Sunset Blvd., LA, CA 90046) from 6-10pm. On display will be numerous pages of development and prepatory drawings (example below) from his recent book project VORTIGERN’S MACHINE AND THE GREAT SAGE OF WISDOM. Reportedly, there’s interest right now in transferring Jarvis’s work to animation. His drawings and toys definitely lend themselves to CG design, and I can imagine his stuff working well if it was animated properly. For more info about the show, visit MeltComics.com or call 323/851.7223.

One of my last-second purchases on Sunday, just before I left the San Diego Comic Con, was snagging this copy of the November 1936 issue (at right) of POPULAR SCIENCE magazine. I love old magazines. This one was in a stack of several PS issues, but it had an article that totally justified the $15 price tag: two pages describing the mechanics of Max Fleischer’s patented three dimensional Stereo-Optical Process.Fleischer Studios isn’t even mentioned in the piece, albeit Max is refered to in the last sentence. But among the great graphics and interesting tidbits, the article reveals:

“Several sets can be prepared on the rotating table at the same time. As soon as the filming of one set is completed, the table can be swung to the next.”

The level of detail in these sets has always amazed me. The shots usually last only several seconds - but always ignite gasps of awe from audiences, even today. In fact, there’s nothing in computer graphics today that can compare to the magic in those Fleischer three dimensional sequences. I’ve scanned the article for you to read, below. Excuse the moray pattern which causes parallel lines to appear over the pictures. Click on each page for a larger image.

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