It’s all about marketing, I guess.

Bad enough that Cinderella III was hyped on those dividers at the checkout aisle, now we can take the Peter Pan hype home with us—on our produce! The Consumerist spotted this latest excercise in Disney corporate mind control.

(Thanks, Hiland Hall)

Nike Love is a new ad campaign that encourages fat kids to exercise. The website has three animated spots; they’re not particularly noteworthy pieces but a pleasant enough diversion.

I was rummaging through my stuff and found this ad I clipped from the October 30, 1980 issue of Rolling Stone.

Of Mice and Magic came out in Spring 1980 (I don’t recall the exact publication date), originally in hardcover from McGraw-Hill. It was issued as a trade paperback by NAL in October 1980, updated in 1987 and hasn’t been out of print since.

I still can’t believe the publisher took out an ad in Rolling Stone! Considering the state of animation back then, I can’t believe they advertised it at all.

It’s easy to knock Gumby…

He’s been mocked by Saturday Night Live, trivialized in junk merchandise, and mostly ignored by the younger generation. The thing is, the early Gumby cartoons are pretty cool and quite trippy. And, though recently displaced by Wallace and Gromit, Gumby and Pokey were the most famous clay animated characters ever created.

Gumby recently celebrated his 50th anniversary and Clokey Productions and Premavision Animation Studios (still producing Gumby and Davey & Goliath segments) have updated their websites. It’s worth a visit to Gumby World to check out its funky video section with several Gumby episodes and Art Clokey’s pioneering abstract GUMBASIA shorts from the 1950s.

Giannalberto Bendazzi sends word that Italian animator Osvaldo Cavandoli died in Milan on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007, of natural causes. He was 87. Bendazzi writes:

Osvaldo invented and animated La Linea, possibly the best known character Italian animation ever produced. A marvelous human being loved by everyone, he had been honored in June 2006 by the Annecy Museum and the Annecy International Animation Festival.

Go J.J.!

Animator J.J. Sedelmaier has written an editorial for latest edition of Create Magazine making the case for animation diversity. He raises many good points:

“It’s my opinion that animation thrives in an environment that creates an alternate reality, instead of trying to simply re-create it. You’d think a lesson or two would’ve been learned from all the Saturday morning cartoon disasters of 20 to 40 years ago. These were nothing more than radio scripts in tandem with drawn moving images—badly drawn and animated, at that…”

“There are two more important reasons for techniques other than CGI being valid crowd pleasers: 1. “Warmth of the Human Touch”. Styles that look like they were created, drawn and animated by human beings provide a lovely contrast to the hyper-real, machine made, formulaic approach…”

Read the whole piece here.

This post at Drawn! about Hank Ketcham’s comic work reminded me of an upcoming book that I can hardly wait for—Where’s Dennis?: The Magazine Cartoon Art of Hank Ketcham. The book, which is compiled by friends Alex Chun and Shane Glines, is slated for release by Fantagraphics in August.

What would happen if some Russians took a Dr. Seuss story and turned it into a paint-on-glass animated short? The results would be Welcome (1986), a gorgeous ten-minute cartoon directed by Alexei Karayev. It is based on Dr. Seuss’s 1948 book Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose. The film’s art director was a young Aleksandr Petrov, who today is the most famous proponent of the paint-on-glass animation technique with films like The Old Man and the Sea (1999). The three-dimensional rendering of the painted figures in Welcome is absolutely stunning; they manage to build on Seuss’s original line drawings while retaining the warmth and appeal of his characters, which is quite an accomplishment considering how easy it is to make Seuss’s characters cold and unappealing.

One more note: the film is in Russian, but the YouTube version below is translated into English. The translation was done by Brew reader ESN, who also sent me the link to this film. A big thank you for translating this and allowing all of us to enjoy the film.