The Oregonian offers an interesting interview with Platform Animation Festival director Irene Kotlarz. She offers some bold thoughts in the discussion, including this comment about what sets Platform apart from other animation festivals:

It was decided early on that it would be a 21st-century festival, and that would make it different from the other animation festivals out there. They’re all based, in my view, on a premise that grew up around the time of the first animation festival, which was in Annecy, France, in 1960. That premise is really based on theatrical screenings of animated shorts and features and around the idea of animators as auteurs — real postwar European arthouse cinema with art with a capital “A.” The Cold War was a big influence back then, and there was this idea of animation as the universal language. So a big theme was man’s inhumanity to man, and you saw lots of what I call the “naked bald man film,” with arctic wind on the soundtrack. Most festivals are still pushing the idea of the single artist. But we’re trying to make a major departure from that kind of thinking. I’ve always taken the view that there’s a larger historical and cultural context to art, and the context now is totally different. Now we have the Web and video games; the computer revolution has finally happened. And I think that at a lot of festivals, Internet animation is a poor relation. But we’ve gone out of our way to see that they get the same status as traditional animators.

New York freeform radio station WFMU has one of the best blogs devoted to alternative pop culture and strange music. Today’s post by Kliph Nesteroff celebrates character actor Arnold Stang (voice of Top Cat, Herman Mouse, and numerous other cartoon characters). It’s an entertaining overview of Stang’s still-active career (he’s 81!) with lots of fun images and links.

Brad Bird at last night’s world premiere of Ratatouille at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

The best film of the summer will be released next week. Not best animated film - best film, period. The reviews are literally unanimous - 100% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes.

I saw the film and add my name to the chorus. It’s brilliant! But what really excites me is that once again Pixar, and Brad Bird, have pushed the envelope, progressing the art and storytelling potential that can be accomplished with computer graphics. And this is a film Bird took over and reworked — usually a recipe for disaster. Not this time.

The animation and art direction are superb. Every creative descision seems just perfect - from casting to design and through every plot twist and turn. The 2-D graphic end credits should be noted - once again the Pixar animators tease us with the possibility of what a traditionally hand drawn Pixar cartoon might feel like. And the final tagline in the end credits gave me the biggest smile of the night:

“Our Quality Assurance Guaratee: 100% Genuine Animation! No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film.”

Don’t miss it.

Another edition of Annecy has wrapped and the winners have been announced. The top short film prize, the Annecy Cristal, went to Suzie Templeton’s Peter and the Wolf (pictured above) which also won the Audience Award. Other deserving shorts which took home prizes include Andreas Hykade’s The Runt, Samuel Tourneux’s Même les pigeons vont au paradis and Luis Cook’s The Pearce Sisters. Tom Brown and Daniel Benjamin Gray’s t.o.m. won the highest honor for a student film while the feature prize went to Norway’s Free Jimmy directed by Christopher Nielsen. A complete list of winners is here. I’ll be writing more about many of these films over the coming months.

There’s much that I could write about the festival, but I thought I’d take a moment to just talk about why I think it’s so important to attend animation festivals like Annecy. Living in LA, as I do, it’s easy to become complacent and think that you know everybody in the animation world. But then you go to a festival like Annecy where you see thousands of animation artists, and not a single one of them is from LA or NY, and you begin wondering where the heck you’ve landed. It’s a humbling experience and a reminder that today’s animation world is far more vast and diverse than ever before.

There are talented artists producing animation in every corner of the globe and festivals create the ideal forum for an exchange of ideas and techniques (or drinks, as the case may be with most animation types). I had the opportunity to meet and mingle with many of the international animation set last week including Juan Pablo Zaramella and Silvina Cornillón from Argentina; Israeli Ariel Belinco, co-director of the prize-winning Annecy short Beton (watch it here), Australian James Calvert of The People’s Republic of Animation and Vijayakumar Arumugam from India.

Then there’s all the Europeans at the festival, all of the British and the Germans and the Dutch and the Danish and the French and so many more that creating a list of the people I hung out with would run pages long. Even the loft I was staying in housed a fascinating melting pot of animation folk including French animators like like Sebastien Dabadie, Sebastien Laudenbach and Claire Fouquet, and Saschka Unseld of Germany’s Studio Soi.

People come from many countries to attend festivals but everybody speaks the same language of animation. It’s a varied and nuanced language that becomes ever so evident at a place like Annecy. There’s nothing more refreshing than going to a place that shows you animation is not just George of the Jungle but also George Schwizgebel.

I’ve posted links below to other bloggers who have some pics and thoughts from the festival. Considering how many people were there, it’s surprising that so few people have written about it. If you have a blog post about Annecy, please share in the comments:

Uli Meyer

Boris Hiestand

Matt Jones

Elliot Cowan

Hans Perk - I and II

The Duffy twins

Felix Herzog presents a nice collection of sketches from artists who attended the festival

Yours truly with Lisa and Uli

This week on Cartoon Brew Films, we are happy to present another rare animated film long considered lost: The 3 Minnies: Sota, Tonka and Ha-Ha.

In 1949, Republic Pictures (best known for their B-Westerns and Saturday matinee serials) released a series of cartoons under the banner “Jerky Journeys”. These were low budget satires of travelogues, written by radio comedy writer Leonard Lewis Levinson, and narrated by Jack Benny Program regular Frank Nelson (”Yeeeeesss”). To keep costs down, Levinson wrote the films in such a way as to have as little animation as possible, and convinced Republic that this would be a perfect way to demonstrate the studio’s patented cut-rate “TruColor” (red & green) film process.

Financial restrictions, however, didn’t stop Levinson from hiring several of Hollywood’s best artists, including background painters and designers Art Heinemann, Pete Alvarado, Bob Gribbroek, Paul Julian and effects animator Miles Pike, to help bring these comedies to life. The resulting films are fascinating. An early example of what Chuck Jones might term “illustrated radio”, the “Jerky Journeys” give us a glimpse at a direction Hollywood animation did not go—or might have gone if UPA hadn’t come along. Like an animated version of an article from a ’50s issue of Mad Magazine, these are literate parodies of travel films familiar to audiences of the day.

Four Jerky Journeys were produced, but only two are known to exist and The 3 Minnies is the only surviving entry in color. Take a look at it here. I think you’ll agree this film is unique, original and in many ways, far ahead of its time.

I’m still recovering from Annecy but the Platform Festival is coming up in Portland in a few days and it promises to be another intense animation-heavy week. Jerry has already offered his appearance schedule for Platform so I thought I’d offer a list of programs I’m involved with up there. For those of you who prefer Jerry- and Amid-free animation events, you’ll be pleased to know there’s plenty of those as well, including promising presentations by Smith & Foulkes, James Jarvis, Scott McCloud, Henry Selick, and Aardman founders David Sproxton and Peter Lord. Here’s what I’ll be doing:

Tuesday, June 26, 4 pm – 5:30 pm
Northwest Film Center: Whitsell Auditorium / Portland Art Museum
Design Daze: Mid-Century Modern Design: A screening of rare Fifties animated shorts including the superb John Hubley/Bill Hurtz industrial More Than Meets the Eye, a 35mm print of Ward Kimball’s Melody and the Ronald Searle-designed Energetically Yours.

Wednesday, June 27, 4:30 pm – 6 pm
Winningstad Theatre
Tom Oreb, the Man of a Thousand Designs: An in-depth examination of Tom Oreb’s work as a designer. His designs will be examined from all angles—what his responsibilities were as a designer and character stylist, how his work was interpreted by the animation crew, and how character design fits into the broader context of a film’s production design.

Thursday, June 28
2:30 pm – 4 pm
Winningstad Theatre
“Work for Free! Getting Your Work Out There on the Web”: My name isn’t listed on the program but I think I’ll be participating on this panel. The panelist lineup would be quite solid even without my inclusion. It includes Megan O’Neill (Atom Entertainment), Sarah Phelps (eatPes.com), Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Archives), Fred Seibert (Frederator Studios/Channel Frederator) and Alex Williams (SplashCast).

Variety is reporting that the Michel Ocelot’s animated film Kirikou and the Sorceress is set to make the transition to a stage musical this fall. Ocelot has also written the musical’s libretto and additional lyrics. Playbill reports:

The French/Belgian film is a retelling of an African folk tale that centers on a young African boy who must save his village by ridding the world of an evil sorceress.

The animated version ignited controversy when distributors refused to release it in some areas because of the natural nudity depicted in the films – some went so far as to request airbrushing of male and female nudity. Ocelot maintained the nudity was an essential element in portraying African culture and refused to allow any changes to the film. There is no word on whether the stage adaptation will follow suit.

It’s a real shame that Ocelot’s amazing, literate, artistic animated features have never gotten proper (or any) distribution in the United States.

How many facists does it take to create a classic cartoon character?

A play we posted about earlier concerning a fictional meeting between Hitler and Disney is nothing compared to the recent revelation that Benito Mussolini may have inspired the creation of Dick Huemer’s Toby The Pup.

Harry McCracken has all the details.