French illustrator, designer and 2D animator Quentin Tavernier (aka Kant-1) has a cool new website worth checking out. It’s as much fun to navigate as his drawings and animations are to look at. He’s also a guitarist for a rock band, Ace Out. Good stuff.

The “Unholy Marriage of Art and Comics” is back!

Craig Yoe has redesigned his Arf Lovers blog with new features like an rss feed, perma-links, comments and lots of new links. Yoe’s posts are often hilarious and eye opening - and certainly of interest to Brew readers. Yoe’s new Arf book, Arf Forum is now at the printer and can be pre-ordered at a discount price on Amazon. Based on his previous two Arf collections we highly recommend the latest edition sight unseen.

Craig is also compiling a book full of Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings, raunchy comics and cartoons by cartoonists known for their
mainstream wholesome stuff (Milton Caniff, Rube Goldberg, Will Eisner, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Mort Walker, Dr. Seuss, etc.). Previews of this book and Arf Forum will be posted regularly on Yoe’s blog.

The Hays office, and Hollywood cartoon producers, were just as mindful of young audiences back in the Golden Age of animation as broadcast standards and practices are today. This article, from Look magazine (January 17, 1939), produced with the full cooperation of Leon Schlesinger Productions, illustrates how the Hays Code operates in regards to animated cartoons.

Note the use of actual stills from classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies like Clean Pastures, Robin Hood Makes Good, Case of The Stuttering Pig, Speaking of the Weather, along with several cel set-ups created especially for this piece, to illustrate specific points like nudity, “the razzberry”, cow udders, etc. I can think of a half-dozen cartoons released around this time with all of the above. And note the line, “Neither may cartoons show men who appear too effeminate”. Clearly Egghead’s days were numbered.

Click on thumbnails below to read full size page.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an interview with John Lasseter and some interesting bits can be gleaned from the article. One thing I found quite telling is the fact that 60% of Disney’s upcoming Meet the Robinsons has been scrapped and redone in the past year. Most animated features are reworked heavily nowadays, but the extent to which this film has been revamped is a clear sign of how poorly managed the old Disney Feature Animation was; judging from the way Disney has barely been promoting the film, you get the feeling that they would have scrapped the entire film had it not already been so deep into production.

Another piece of info is that WDFA is planning to move out of their semi-iconic (and architecturally dysfunctional) hat building and into brand-new headquarters in Glendale. At first, I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a huge and unnecessary expenditure to build another studio, even if the current studio does leave a lot to be desired.” But after giving it more thought, I realized what Lasseter and Ed Catmull were doing. What’s notable is not that they’re building a better animation studio, but that they’re moving the whole animation operation off the Burbank lot, far away from the studio’s acrid corporate culture, and creating a separate campus that will hopefully be dominated by passionate artists and storytellers. Looking at it from that perspective, it’s a daring and excellent business decision.

While Meet the Robinsons has a better-than-average chance of falling flat on its face at the box office, and Lasseter himself has raised eyebrows in recent months with some of his decisions, such as the dismissal of American Dog’s Chris Sanders, in general, I feel Lasseter is making smart decisions. I still have high hopes that Disney Feature Animation can be turned around under his stewardship.

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From Collier’s magazine (January 16, 1943), an interesting article on George Pal and hisPuppetoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. Click on pages below to read at full size.

Fred Seibert has posted a group of publicity postcards created to promote his new series, Random Cartoons. Thirty-nine animated shorts were produced by the likes of Bill Plympton, John Dilworth, Doug TenNapel, Pat Ventura, Jun Falkenstein and yours truly. Nickelodeon is scheduled to air the series sometime this year, but no one knows when. In the meantime, these images should keep you intrigued.

Brew reader Charles Brubaker wrote in to tell me that Mel Brooks Academy Award winning animated 1963 short, The Critic, had popped up on You Tube. I always forget how funny this film is. I did some searching around and found a better version on brettratner.com. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or not at all, here it is. Created and narrated by Mel Brooks. Produced and Directed by Ernest Pintoff: The Critic.

Enjoy!

Continuing our Japanese theme today, David Gerstein led me to a Japanese website offering some very cool new Mickey Mouse and Disney Oswald vinyl collectible dolls and Kubrick mini-figures. I have no idea if these will offered in the U.S. but I know I want them.