David Mackenzie has gotten his hands on the hotly anticipated dvd set Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection, slated for release on May 15. This is big news as it’s the first time a set of Tex Avery’s MGM shorts have been released onto dvd. I was particularly anxious to hear how the set had turned out because…well…come on, it’s Droopy. David reports that there’s both good and bad news. He has a complete report on his blog but here’s the summary:

THE GOOD: Droopy’s Good Deed and Daredevil Droopy are both UNEDITED. Both shorts had politically-incorrect gags edited on an earlier laserdisc release. Also, some of the transfers, like the Ed Benedict-designed Dixieland Droopy, apparently look really nice color-wise. (More screenshots from the set are at the Classic Cartoons blog.)

THE BAD: Four out of the 24 cartoons on the set, or 16% of the shorts, are “DVNR disasters” according to David. He writes, “The affected shorts (termed “episodes” on the DVD, for some reason) are so badly eroded that the mangled lines are almost constant, not just in selected areas like on the Looney Tunes discs. Basically, if a character starts running, or the camera pans, you’ll see the artefacts. It’s pretty severe, severe enough to be spotted while fast forwarding.” Just look at the atrocious example below from Daredevil Droopy where both strings holding up Droopy’s swinging bar are completely gone.

DVNR, or digital noise reduction, has ruined countless classic animated shorts over the past couple decades. I wrote extensively about the technology in this article from 1998 which explains how the “restoration” process works and the effects its careless use can have on animation. During the course of research on that article, the common line I heard from telecine specialists was that it’s not the technology’s fault but rather the fault of the operators who set the machine’s levels too high. If that’s the case, then there’s got to be a hell of a lot of incompetent telecine operators in Hollywood because a huge (and growing) amount of classic animation has been rendered unwatchable by DVNR processing. The bottom line is most eloquently stated by David Mackenzie who writes on his blog, “Restoration, after all, is pointless if it ends up making the shorts look worse instead.”

Noureddin Zarrinkelk, one of Iran’s most celebrated animation figures and a fine art professor at Tehran University, was thrown out of his teaching job last week for “insulting the Islamic hijab.” The 70-year-old Zarrinkelk has directed over a dozen shorts and various long-form projects, written and illustrated numerous books, founded Iran’s first animation school in 1974, started the country’s ASIFA chapter, and most recently, served a term as the president of ASIFA International. According to an Iranian paper, the incident was sparked “during a classroom discussion over an image of a bald angel drawn by a student when [Zarrinkelk] asked the woman if she wore the full veil because she herself was bald.” The subtle undertone of his comment, as reported by the New York Times, was that Zarrinkelk was asking, “Why be afraid of the beauty of a woman’s hair?” He has currently been banned from teaching at any Iranian university. Zarrinkelk has an English website here.

A Hollywood production artist, part-time performer and animator, Paul Manchester, has inherited a cache of rare World War II animation artwork of great significance.

Manchester’s great uncle, Harold “Al” Curry, served as a storyboard artist under Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) during the war. Paul recounts his story:

Before my great uncle Al died he was cleaning out a bunch of old stuff in preparation for a move and he gave me a manilla packet of old stuff he didn’t really know what to do with. I was following in his footsteps as an illustrator who occassionally worked in animation. At the time I briefly looked through it but was more distracted by the old art books and art supplies he gave me at the same time. Ten years passed.

Last month the National Academy of Sciences presented PRIVATE SNAFU VS. MALARIA MIKE as part of their Cartoon Medicine Show exhibition. It rang kind of a bell in the back of my brain and I pulled out the old manilla envelope and right on top was a rough storyboard drawing from Malaria Mike. I found four painted cels- two with backgrounds attached and a whole stack of roughs from HOME FRONT, PAY DAY (and others).

But the cool thing was an entire storyboard from an animated short called A FEW QUICK FACTS: WEAPON OF WAR. It has been bound into a small book maybe 8″w x 4″h and is about 1 1/2 ” thick- it has the entire script copy printed on the left side of the page and the image on the right.

Paul has scanned and posted all this great artwork - he even created a video, shooting the entire 89 page storyboard from the Weapon of War, assembled it in iMovie and posted it on YouTube.

Paul has set up a webpage to showcase his find. Original 1940s wartime cartoon art like this is extremely hard to find, as most of it was destroyed as classified material. Thank you Paul for making these rare pieces accessible to all.

The most interesting writing and interviews about animation can no longer be found in any particular magazine; rather it’s spread out across the entire Web. Finding it is often the biggest challenge so I’m going to do my part and try to share more frequently the worthwhile pieces that I discover online. Here’s a few to start off with.

Animation director Mark Mayerson asks “Where’s Animation’s Brando? and then he expands on that thought. Director Michael Sporn offers his personal answer to the question. It’s a thought-provoking read from both.

This is a nice interview with artist Ree Treweek. She’s a member of the South African collective The Blackheart Gang, which produced the mesmerizing animated short The Tale of How.

One of my favorite cultural commentators, Momus, looks at the results of last week’s elections in Scotland and its implications for Scottish independence through the prism of the country’s most famous animation artist, Norman McLaren.

John K interviews can get kind of repetitive, especially when the interviewer asks the same old questions, but Aaron Simpson of the indispensable Cold Hard Flash manages to get some good stuff out of John in this recent interview. John’s ideas about his personal animation school curriculum are quite inspiring, if not quite fully developed, and point out just how much is missing from contemporary animation curriculums.

It’s too bad You Feets To Big had to be removed from You Tube. In it’s place we present, direct from the aforementioned Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park, the scariest music video we’ve ever seen. If you thought It’s A Small World was annoying…

(Thanks, Lev Polyakov)

File this under “Weird Things I’ve Accumulated Over the Years.” While cleaning out some boxes recently, I ran across photocopies of a complete 70-page storyboard from the short-lived TV series The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil (1988). It’s for the episode “The Courtship of Cecilia.” I’m pretty sure the boards are drawn by a pre-Batman Bruce Timm; any Brew readers that can confirm, please do.

I’ve posted six of the pages below. The storyboards are beautifully inked—the care that went into creating finished art for each panel makes it feel more like a comic book than the average animation storyboard. It’s not clear to me whether Timm always works this clean or if this was perhaps a one-off presentation board. It’s also worth mentioning that a few of the episodes from the revival are posted on YouTube, though unfortunately not this particular cartoon.

Update: In the comments section, Tom Minton provides a nice history on the use of inked boards in ’80s TV animation. I’m reprinting them up here so nobody misses his comments:

John Dorman’s storyboard unit at Ruby-Spears started brush inking their in-house storyboards in the early 1980’s (on the likes of stuff like “Dragon’s Lair� and “Turbo Teen�), so Bruce [Timm] didn’t invent the notion of inking production boards. The product that Bruce (and Doug McCarthy, who also inked the initial Tiny Toon Adventures boards, with a brush pen) worked on had the advantage of a lot more money going into the completed result.

Many industry veterans complained about the upstart practice of inking storyboards back in that day, arguing that it was misplaced effort to ink a board. It’s only a waste of talent when the best work gets left behind in the board phase, which routinely happened in television animation for many years, depending in varying degrees on the studio in question. It’s true that some very talented people ended up producing some beautiful work that the public never saw. At different times, Dan Riba, Alfredo Alcala and even Duncan Marjoribanks were my inkers at Ruby-Spears. Thom Enriquez and Jim Woodring inked some magnificent looking boards there, as well. Yet the finished shows done by that studio speak for themselves.

The primary point of drawing on storyboards remains communication, not stellar inking, so the act of such a degree of polish will probably continue to be debated for decades to come. Inking on boards generally owes more to having a serious comic book jones than a yen for onscreen graphic blandishment. The two disciplines are related but they’re a couple of different animals.

Update #2: Brew reader Ted has posted the short, “The Courtship of Cecilia,” onto YouTube. Watch Part 1 and Part 2. And another Brew reader has volunteered to scan in Bruce Timm’s entire storyboard for this cartoon so look for that soon.

click on pics for bigger versions

What a great way to start the week! Your Feet’s Too Big (1983) is a beautifully drawn short by animator/author/teacher Nancy Beiman, set to a vintage Fats Waller performance. Beiman created this short a few years after she graduated from CalArts. She holds the notable distinction of being the first woman to graduate from the school’s Character Animation Program. Nancy also blogs here and her personal website is BeimanAnimation.com.

UPDATE: Since the film was taken down off YouTube, we offer you an equally entertaining Fats Waller performance of the same song:

Conan O’Brien recently visited ILM where, among other things, he created some motion capture movement. It’s in the second half of the video below: