Good Grief! Some drawn characters just shouldn’t be rendered in 3-D.

A German telecommunications company, Combots, is selling animated icons based on popular animation and comics characters. These Peanuts ones are pretty hideous.

However, there are some characters that could (and do) work. I suppose it’s all based on design. Check out some of the others, particularly these Spongebob icons, which look pretty good. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle the Looney Tunes characters, which they’ve apparently licensed.

UPDATE: Little wonder the Spongebob icons look so good. They were done by the talented crew at Studio Soi. Soi also created the Zodies series and the “Tom and Lily” site tutorials (click on ‘trailer’ on the homepage to watch the six episodes).

A ‘heads up’ on some Disney Programs at the upcoming 16th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival, April 5th through 18th.

Friday, April 6 • 6:45 • Prince Music Theater • Tickets $10.00
Fantasia (1940) — A screening of the landmark film with an ensemble of Philadelphia Orchestra musicians, performing onstage preceding the screening.

Saturday, April 7 • 2:30 • Prince Music Theater • Tickets $8.00
The Disney Cartoon: Nine Decades of Magic — A screening of Disney shorts spanning nine decades of the company’s history. Shorts will include Pixar’s Red’s Dream, Roger Rabbit’s Roller Coaster Rabbit and the Salvador Dali-designed Destino.

Saturday, April 7 • 7:15 • Prince Music Theater • Tickets $10.00
A Salute To Roy Disney, an on-stage interview with Leonard Maltin. (Maltin will also be hosting a screening of rare Our Gang shorts on April 7th at 4:30pm)

Sunday, April 8 • 2:15 • Prince Music Theater •Tickets $8.00
Disney Cartoon Rarities - 35mm prints of Disney shorts including Hell’s Bells, Egyptian Melodies, Music Land, The Whoopee Party, Hawaiian Holiday, The Band Concert, as well as examples of Alice in Cartoonland and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Non-Disney animation at the Philly Fest will include a screening of the forthcoming anime feature Paprika and a program of contemporary animated shorts.

“Woody Woodpecker” is a new track from electro-experimental musician Dan Deacon. Deacon is on tour through May, when his new album, Spiderman of the Rings, will be released. Listening to Deacon is relatively tame compared to watching him perform live, like the video below.

Dear AOL/MSN/Yahoo/NBC-Universal and News Corp.,

Congratulations on the news of your new company to compete with YouTube.

The announcement of of this new partnership has me very excited. You say you are going to use your vault assets to create a new venue for programming—a “video-rich site… with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips, representing premium content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios.”

One of my favorite quotes in your press release is the one from Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel, who says, “We are excited to be a part of this landmark partnership that connects people to the content they care about…”, promising users “unprecedented access to their favorite shows”.

Allowing us access to the riches in your combined movie/TV libraries will be a great thing for our culture and will add to our collective knowledge of film history. It might even help thwart Internet piracy.

My only concern is that you might overlook the thousands of classic animation titles in your massive holdings. AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, holds the popular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, the MGM Happy Harmonies, Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery masterpieces and the incredible Max Fleischer/Paramount Popeye cartoon; News Corp owns Crusader Rabbit, the historic first TV cartoon series; NBC-Universal has the wonderful Walter Lantz library of vintage Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy, and Oswald Rabbit. I’m not even mentioning all the TV cartoons and animated features contained therein, everything from Marine Boy to Wizards, all awaiting a chance to find—and entertain—a new audience.

And I’ll let you in on a secret. Your home video divisions have only released a fraction of the material you own.

Making them all available—the entire library, at minimal cost—will certainly connect your content to people who really care about it, namely our readers. There’s tons of money to be made from this proposition. This illegally posted 1940s Tom & Jerry short on YouTube has over 400,000 views. That’s more views than most of the modern animation posted there.

This is a watershed moment, the begining of a new age, with no rules, no ratings, no demographics to tell you people don’t want this or that. One thing we’ve learned from DVD is that people do want complete runs of great material. One thing we’ve learned from YouTube is that people are interested in esoteric material.

So release your old cartoons. Make them available for purchase. Believe it or not, people really want to see them. And I promise to be the first person in line to support the effort.

Best of luck,

Jerry Beck
CartoonBrew.com

Pioneering Estonian animator Elbert Tuganov has passed away at age 87. Chris Robinson, author of Estonian Animation: Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy, writes in with some details about Tuganov’s life and work:

Elbert Tuganov, the father of Estonian animation, died on Thursday, March 22, 2007. He was 87. Tuganov was actually born in Baku, Azerbaijan and began his animation career in Germany. When Hitler took power, Tuganov returned to Estonia. He joined Estonia’s state film studio, Tallinnfilm in 1946. For eleven years, Tuganov shot, drew, and painted titles and credit sequences. During this time Tuganov built an animation stand that would allow the studio to do frame by frame shooting. A visiting Moscow official was impressed by the new apparatus and suggested that Tuganov make animation films.

Tuganov immediately set out to find scripts and landed a Danish story called Palle Alone in the World. This became the basis for the first Nukufilm (the name of the puppet animation division of Tallinnfilm) production, Little Peter’s Dream (1957). For the next four years, Tuganov and his small crew of six people worked on films alongside artists from the Estonian puppet theatre. After his fourth film, Mina and Murri (1961), animation production received a budgetary blessing from Tallinnfilm. The division’s staff grew to twenty and it was decided that the puppets would then be fashioned in the studio.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Tuganov made a number of innovative puppet and cutout films for both adults and children including the satires, Park (1966) and Bloody John (1974); the astonishing time-lapse film Inspiration (1975), a document of the famous Estonian song festival; and what may be the world’s first stereoscopic puppet animation films Souvenir (1977). In total, Tuganov made 38 animated films and received numerous international awards. He remained at Nukufilm until his retirement in 1982 and later wrote an autobiography, Walking Through the Century, that detailed his failed attempt to flee the Soviet Union in 1982.

Tuganov’s passing comes as Estonia celebrates Nukufilm’s 50th anniversary this year. In November, an international puppet animation symposium is being held in Tallinn to commemorate Nukufilm’s anniversary.

A complete list of his works can be found on the Nukufilm website.

“The Ancient Book of Myth and War” opens at Gallery Nucleus (30 West Main St., Alhambra, CA) this Saturday, March 24, from 7-11pm. The show of paintings, illustrations and prints based on classic myths and legends features work by four exceptionally talented animation development artists currently working at Pixar: Don Shank, Scott Morse, Lou Romano and Nate Wragg.

With their already crazed animation dayjobs, I have no idea how they find the time to create so much amazing art, but if the show isn’t enough, the work is also being collected into an 80-page hardcover book. A limited number of copies will premiere at the show this Saturday and the book can currently be pre-ordered on Amazon. This Sunday afternoon, there’s also an (almost sold-out) four-hour workshop/painting demo with the quartet. Details for that event are available here.

Stay tuned to the Brew for more details about the book and a contest you won’t want to miss.

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s El Tigre review: the show’s supervising director Dave Thomas also has a blog where he’s posting many examples of his beatboards. Thomas would do between 30-60 pages of these beatboards before the episodes were handed out to the board artists, so he could visually describe how he wanted the action handled. It’s an immense amount of work that most TV directors don’t do, but it’s a good way for the director to take more control over the vagaries of the TV animation process. And the resulting quality speaks for itself. Dave also has an excellent post about his conversion from traditional pencil drawing to an all-digital paperless production using the Cintiq. Personally, I’m waiting for Dave to tell the story of his biggest accomplishment: how he came up with the 99 Cent Super Value Menu.

We don’t usually report on anime releases (we leave that to others more qualified like Anime News Network and the like), but this one is worth noting—not for the film itself, but the manner of its U.S. presentation.

Naruto, the Viz manga series-turned-anime hit series (on Cartoon Network in the U.S.), about the trials of a young ninja, is one of the most popular Japanese series now playing. Three theatrical films have been spun off and released in Japan. The first of these Daikatsugeki! Yukihime Ninpocho Dattebayo!! (English Translated Title: Snow Princess’ Book of Ninja Arts) is being theatrically released in the U.S. this year, on Wednesday June 6th at 7:00pm.

It is being shown on that day and time only, in selected theaters in cities including New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. NCM’s Fathom Events is handling this distribution plan. Fathom’s approach is somewhat unique. Taking advantage of digital distribution technology, they are creating a nationwide locked date event for this film. This forces all those interested in seeing the film to attend the one-time theatrical showing, practically assuring sold-out shows at each location.

This kind of “four-wall” event showing has been done before, but I don’t recall it being done on a national basis. As a former film distributor myself, and a student of trends in animated theatrical distribution, this strikes me as a great idea, a great way to get specialized film (particularly foreign animation) showcased.

The plain truth is that these films can’t make big money theatrically in the US. DVD, cable and Internet distribution have wiped out commercial theaters as a financially viable place to screen foreign animated films. The shame is that some of these films deserve the big screen experience.

National CineMedia (NCM), a partnership of AMC Theatres and Regal Theatres, was set up to explore alternative movie programming. They are experimenting with events centered around targeted audiences: Nascar films, faith-based movies, a Metropolitan Opera series… even a repertory screening of Dirty Dancing. Naruto the Movie (now subtitled Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow) is clearly test of the anime/animation fanbase.

I think this distribution scheme may work for them. It’ll certainly excite Naruto fans and build anticipation for the US DVD release (in September). I’ll certainly be keeping my eye on it and, if successful, NCM has the potential to become a new outlet for many international films unable to attain a US release. And that would be a good thing.