After animation director Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch) was unceremoniously booted off of Disney’s American Dog, it was obvious that some major studio would scoop him up. Quite unsurprisingly that studio has turned out to be DreamWorks Animation. Ben Fritz reports in a Variety Web exclusive that Chris Sanders has signed on with DreamWorks and “will direct Crood Awakening, a project that DreamWorks had been developing with Aardman but took inhouse after its partnership with the British claymation house recently ended…Crood Awakenings, which is about a culture clash between cavemen, has a script by Brit comedy icon John Cleese and Krik De Micco (Racing Stripes). Sanders is rethinking the project, however, and will likely end up doing a significant rewrite.” More details can be found in the Variety article.

I didn’t really know the late Tim Onosko personally, but I always admired his writings. We’d corresponded a few times throughout the years and thus I was saddend to hear today of his passing.

I first became aware of Onosko with his transcription of a Bob Clampett Q&A in The Velvet Light Trap (Bob Clampett: Cartoonist, No. 15, Fall 1975), a piece that desparately needs to be reprinted or posted on the web. He went on to write articles about the future, the past, about film and amusement parks, so it was no wonder he’d end up working at Disney in various capacities, including in the development of Epcot, and designing Disney Adventures magazine.

Onosko later worked for Universal Studios and most recently produced a documentary, Lost Vegas: The Lounge Era.

He was one of us–and he’ll be missed.

The Ottawa 2007 International Animation Festival, planned for September 19-23, has announced its slate of special screenings and retrospectives. Among the highlights: a 4-part tribute to UPA, the mid-century design geniuses responsible for Gerald McBoingBoing, The Tell-Tale Heart, Rooty Toot Toot, and the Mr. Magoo shorts; retrospectives devoted to Joanna Quinn and Janet Perlman; a program called “Poetry in Motion,” featuring animation inspired by classic poetry; “Saul Steinberg and Animation,” a showcase of films influenced by the famed New Yorker cartoonist; and a memorial tribute to animator Helen Hill, who was tragically killed earlier this year in New Orleans.

The festival has also put out a call for entries. There’s no entry fee and deadline to enter films is June 1, 2007. Entry forms and submission details are available here. Festival artistic director Chris Robinson notes that, “This year we’re putting some emphasis on reaching out to the gaming, mobile, wireless and interactive world. With more and more animation being made for non-traditional distribution platforms, it’s important that the OIAF celebrate the work being done in these new forms, so we’ve expanded our New Media Competition to include mobile content and interactive educational and gaming animation as well as shorts made for the Internet.â€?

2007 festival poster by Oscar Grillo

Joe Campana, a film editor who works in animation, recently started a blog called Animation — Who and Where, and it has already become an indispensable daily read for me. Joe has done an incredible amount of detective work when it comes to biographical research on artists and their families, and now he’s sharing that info with everybody. Right now, he’s writing about the lives of artists who would have been celebrating their 100th birthdays this month if they were still alive. They include Johnny Cannon, Tom McKimson, Tom Johnson and Disney composer Leigh Harline. He also promises to identify the Disney animation artists playing softball in the footage recenly included on the “More Silly Symphoniesâ€? dvd. I can’t wait!

On a sidenote, wouldn’t it be amazing to have this biographical info available someday on a wiki, and to have it cross-referenced with a list of scenes and cartoons that the artists worked on, similar to what Alberto Becattini has started here. There are dozens of people out there, myself included, who have compiled plenty of original research, and if we pooled it together, it would amount to an unprecedented animation reference.

(website found via Hans Perk’s A. Film LA)

While it looks like animation fans in the United States definitely won’t be getting the “Once Upon a Time Walt Disney” exhibition that was in Paris last year and is currently displaying in Montreal, there is some exciting news to report. Colin Stewart, a columnist for the OC Register, did some research about the potential of a US exhibit and shares his findings at his Arts of Innovation blog.

Speaking to Lella Smith, director of the Walt Disney Co.’s Animation Research Library, Stewart found out that fifteen other museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), attempted to the get the exhibition, and because of that enthusiasm, there’s a “good possibility” of a similar show. In fact, the curator of the current exhibit, Bruno Girveau, is headed to LA in April to discuss the possibility of a show with LACMA. (Apparently, the reason that they can’t just bring this exhibit to the US is that the fine art pieces by Albrecht Durer, William Blake and Gustave Moreau were lent by the Louvre on condition that they only be displayed in two locations, a precautionary measure designed to limit possible damage to the pieces.)

Today we are very proud to add a new title to the CartoonBrewFilms library. Mark Kausler’s engaging and heartfelt homage to 1930s Hollywood-style cartoons, It’s The Cat (2004).

Mark is not only one of the best animators in the business (Beauty & The Beast, Roger Rabbit, The Lion King, etc.), but one of its greatest historians. With this film he combined two great passions to create one remarkably entertaining film. We asked Mark himself to introduce the film. Here’s what he has to say:

You are invited to see and hear a miracle! A little film that took 15 years to complete, which was given up for dead quite a few times, but eventually decided to exist: It’s The Cat!

I love listening to dance band records of the 1920s, and when I heard the Harry Reser’s Syncopators’ 1927 recording, “The Cat,â€? it triggered a vision. A vision of a cat, not just any cat, but a feline spirit, wild, raucous, mischievous, yet sweet. The music literally wrote the story, not a note or a beat of the original recording was altered. Scenes sometimes had to be started, then torn up and re-done because they didn’t quite “syncâ€? right. Sometimes I would re-do a scene because the concept wasn’t funny enough, or the layout was wrong. I wound up doing all the drawings because there was no money to pay anyone else, and I was the only animator who really understood this cartoon. It’s doubly hard to do all the drawings in a scene yourself, then when the test is shot, step OUTSIDE yourself and become a tough director.

Greg Ford was the “Cat�’s angel, taking on the difficult task of inking and painting the cartoon. Greg worked hard to be invisible along with Kim Miskoe, color director, Rose Eng and “Igor�, two of the last cel inkers in the USA, artists both, and so many others. So step into my little world, the world of 1920s pop, and the free interpretation of it as seen by my “third eye.� It’s a dance band “fantasia,� made with nothing but love!

Mark and his producer Greg Ford have provided an extra incentive for viewers: anybody who purchases It’s the Cat through April 30 will automatically be entered into a drawing to win an original production cel from the film. We’ll keep you posted on that. In the meantime, take a look at It’s The Cat, a work of pure cartoon joy.

An independent director (who asked to remain nameless, but often works for Disney), did these sequences a few years ago for an overseas theme park project. The show was an homage to classic movies, tied together by a running gag of a stray balloon that gets loose. The director added the balloon using After Effects and did an amazing job matching each film’s cinematic style. The balloon subplot was eliminated from the project, but the director has now posted a bunch of his test clips on YouTube.

Balloon Part 1 (Safety Last)

Balloon Part 2 (Casablanca 1)

Balloon Part 3 (Butch Cassidy)

Balloon Part 4 (North By Northwest)

Balloon Part 5 (Star Wars)

Balloon Part 6 (Casablanca 2)

Balloon Part 7 (La Femme Nikita)

Balloon Part 8 (Singin’ In The Rain)

Balloon Part 9 (Wizard of Oz)

Balloon Part 10 (French Connection)

Balloon Part 11 (Mary Poppins)

Balloon Part 19 (Lord of the Rings)

About the film project they were from, the director himself says:

“The main through line was a romance between a guy in the audience and a woman in the movie. The “every man” goes into the movie (right through the screen) and meets a beautiful woman there. There is a spark of romance. He is then chased by villains out of her movie and stumbles through many other classic films, lost and alone. The woman leaves her movie to go on a quest to find him.

“So — now you’re probably wondering where the balloon shots come in. Well they don’t. Not in the final show. However, just before we committed to film the project, we decided to go through a kind of wild card period. Float some totally different ideas. I thought it might be fun to do a nod to “The Red Balloon”. I did a few of these balloon shots at home and took them into the studio. Everybody enjoyed them. So we explored a possible version centered on that idea. I did more and more shots, took them in, hunkered down with the editor and stitched together a draft. We all got a kick out of it, but utimately decided that we missed the romantic comedy of Plan A. So after the diversion, we returned to our original course.

“So I had all these shots at home that I’d done on spec. I figured that since I did them and they contain no material from the studio, and I don’t reference the context we used when toying with them, they’re safe to post.”

UPDATE: For all you Balloonaholics, here is an 18-part, six and a half minute compilation of the Balloon Movies:

Helium and Celluloid

This isn’t a review or critique of Meet The Robinsons, but I saw the film today at a screening at the El Capitan, in 3-D.

In a nutshell, it’s a very likeable film with eye-popping visuals, gorgeous art direction and pleasing character designs. The 3-D is great. The Streamline Moderne future is pretty cool, though the architecture reminded me more of Music Land (the 1935 Silly Symphony) than Tomorrowland. The story is a bit disjointed—shifting from heartwarming reality one moment to off-the-wall zaniness the next. In Disney terms, think if Pollyanna were grafted into Babes In Toyland. But it does hang together pretty well.

The film ends with a great quote from Walt Disney himself:

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
–Walt Disney

This quote perfectly caps the theme of the movie, but even moreso, it sends a subtle message about Lasseter’s commitment to Disney heritage—and possibly states a new direction for the beleaguered animation studio. Or at least I’d like to think so.

Am I reading too much into this? All I know is the quote was a nice touch, and I left the theater feeling pretty optimistic about the future—of Disney.