The Japan Media Arts Festival has announced the winners of it’s 10th annual competition and have set up a very nice website offering video of the honored films. Check out the diversity of animation techniques — particularly Alexander Petrov’s moving painting, My Love; the fun designs of Bloomed Words; and whatever-the-technique of Lightning Doodle Project’s Pika Pika.

If you happen to be in Japan between February 24th anad March 3rd, check out the free exhibits, panels and screenings at the Tokyo Metropolitan Photography Museum.

Here’s Mickey Mouse as you’ve never seen him before. The 1955 Disney-produced Nash car commercial posted below is as modern as the mouse ever looked. The redesign came courtesy of Tom Oreb, whose original Mickey model sheet is above. Victor Haboush, who did background design on the commercial, told me what happened after the commercial aired:

There was a little kid that used to write Walt telling him to stay away from modern art because it’s Communisitc. So when the commercial came on, he got a letter from this kid, a little malcontent sitting somewhere, and he wrote, “I’m disappointed Walt. I never though you’d succumb. What happened to you?” and Walt went crazy. He stormed down there and outlawed us against using any of the Disney characters in the commercials. I remember at the time everbody was incensed that we couldn’t use them, and it basically spelled the end of the unit. [Companies] were coming for the celebrity; to be able to use Disney characters in their commercials.

(via Disney History)

Cartoonist David King has posted on his blog several interesting pages from a 1950 book, The Complete Guide to Professional Cartooning. How Animated Cartoons Are Made by Fred Quimby (!) is an illustrated behind-the-scenes article, with photos of the staff, including Tex Avery and Scott Bradley, Hanna, Barbera and many other artists, working primarily on Old Rockin’ Chair Tom (1948). Very cool.

In case you missed it this morning, here’s the segment on Brad Bird from ABC News. Lots of nice clips from Ratatouille. Also, after the segment on Bird, there is an interview with production designer Rick Heinrichs (Frankenweenie, Vincent, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure).

This is going to be a plug for ASIFA-Hollywood.

But first we need to inform all filmmakers that one of the best (and longest running) animation competitions in the U.S.—the ASIFA-East Animation Festival—is accepting entries for its 2007 contrest. This festival celebrates the independent animator, but all animation (student, sponsored, commercial, etc.) is gladly accepted. The entry form is now available online. ASIFA-East members will be voting next month, and the Festival itself is one of the big nights for the New York animation community each year. The winning films tour the country, and screen for the various ASIFA chapters around the world.

That brings me back to ASIFA-Hollywood. Tomorrow night, February 21st, the Hollywood chapter is screening last year’s ASIFA-East Festival award winners. If you want to check it out, the screening is at Dreamworks Animation Studios in Glendale. You must RSVP today—email your full name, guest name, and daytime phone number to publicity (at) asifa-hollywood.org. The screening begins at 7pm and photo ID is required for entry onto the DreamWorks lot.

I was bummed when animation artist Chris Ishii passed away in 2001 because I’d had his phone number on my desktop for quite a while and had been meaning to call him for an interview. Ishii was born in Fresno, California in 1919 and had attended Chouinard Art Institute before being hired at Disney in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was among the tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to internment camps. (Scooby-Doo designer Iwao Takamoto, who recently passed away, was also among those interned. He described his experiences in this interview I did with him.) Ishii was sent to the Granada internment camp in Amache, Colorado.

After nearly a year of being in the camp, Ishii was accepted into the US Army in December 1942 (photo of his enlistment here). His IMDB bio says that he “served in the Military Intelligence Service as an illustrator for the Office of War Information, assigned to the India/China/Burma theater of war. He met and married his wife, Ada Suffiad in Shanghai, bringing her to the U.S. with him at demobilization.” In the 1950s, Ishii moved to the East Coast and worked at a number of NY commercial studios including Tempo and Shamus Culhane Productions. He joined UPA-NY around 1954 as a designer and layout artist. Afer Gene Deitch left the studio, Ishii (along with Jack Goodfood) assumed the role of UPA-NY’s artistic supervisor. He continued working in commercial animation during the 1960s and ’70s, partnering to form his own studio, Focus Productions, and directing the animated sequence in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, among many other projects.

The reason I bring all this up is that I recently found online some examples of Ishii’s “Lil’ Neebo” comic strip. He created the character—a Japanese-American boy who is interned—for the Granada camp’s newspaper Granada Pioneer. The character was also drawn for the paper by other interned artists, as well as used in puppet shows at the camps. The drawing in these strips is relatively crude as it was still early in Ishii’s artistic career, but the Disney influence is certainly evident, and the unfortunate circumstances under which they were created gives them plenty of historical significance.

(Thanks to Carol Coates for finding the Ishii photo. Click on the images below for bigger versions.)

Looney Tunes fans rejoice! Jon Cooke and Matthew Hunter have joined forces to start a new blog to collect and showcase Warner Bros. cartoon odds and ends, trivia and minutia. Initial offerings include a rare Mel Blanc Tweety and Sylvester test recording, an ABC promo for The Bugs Bunny Show, a Bugs Bunny Kool-Aid commercial and a comic book page that explains what the “E” in Wile E. Coyote stands for. If you love Warner cartoons, you’ll love this stuff! Visit Misce-Looney-ous!

The third trailer for The Simpsons Movie has been released, this time with lots more animation from the film. Watch it here.

(Thank, Steve Wojcik)