The Brooklyn Academy of Music is hosting a series of three screenings starting tonight and continuing through the end of July. “Animation Around the World” highlights shorts from the Ottawa and Clermont-Ferrand festivals as well as NY’s own Animation Block Party. More details can be found at the BAMcinématek website. Here are the screenings:

Best of Ottawa
Mon, July 16 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Due to popular demand, the Ottawa International Animation Festival has once again produced The Best of Ottawa, a special program highlighting some of the outstanding animated works screened each year at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. This year’s program features an exciting array of award-winning animated work.

The World According to Shorts presents: Best of Clermont-Ferrand
Mon, July 23 at 6:50, 9:15pm
The World According to Shorts presents highlights from one of the world’s premier short film festivals, Clermont-Ferrand’s Festival du Court Métrage. Highlights include a Seussian anthropology of the “piranha bird” (Tale of How); a poetic rendering of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan; the utterly original Message for the Neighbors, in which a TV repairman is taken by an evangelical fervor; and a Brazilian take on Japanese anime (Yansan).

Animation Block Party
Mon, July 30 at 6:50, 9:15pm
From July 27-30 Animation Block Party will bounce around Brooklyn, exhibiting the world’s best animated shorts of all genres. The July 30th closing evening of ABP at BAM focuses on narrative independent, professional, and international works. Award winning filmmakers will be present for a pre-screening introduction. Last summer, over 1000 fans attended the Brooklyn-based film festival, which screened just under 60 animated films.

(Image at top is from The Runt by Andreas Hykade. The film is screening in both the Ottawa and Clermont-Ferrand programs.)

One of the many people I met at the Platform Festival in Portland two weeks ago (I’m just now getting around to unpacking my bags) was Suzanne Buchan of Britain’s Animation Research Centre, and editor of a new academic journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Hers is the second such publication to be regularly published. We already have a great one in Maureen Furniss’s Animation Journal which mainly draws from papers delivered at the Society of Animation Studies. For decades serious discussion of animation, its theories and critical writing have been generally ignored by academia. It’s wonderful that we finally have two such publications studying the subject.

As much as I love reading about animation, scholarly journals can be a tough haul for me and many others outside the academic world. However, it’s another point of view, beyond online forums and blogs, with which to analyze and explore the art form. Suzanne’s publication is currently offering the contents of a sample issue free online, with subjects ranging from the origins of anime, to examining Polar Express and the work of Yuri Norstein.

Brew reader Billie Towser found this old magazine ad on Flickr. (Click on thumbnail at left for an enlarged version).

Long before Cal Arts, there was “The First School in America exclusively devoted to Animated Cartoon Instruction.” No, not in New York or Hollywood… but in Washington DC - the Washington Studios of Animation. I wonder which Disney artist is the instructor. And remember their motto, “If you can draw a circle, we can teach you animated cartooning!”

Stop motion animator/historian, Ken Priebe, thinks he has found the creepiest puppet animation ever:

Heads up: University of Massachusetts Press has announced the publication of The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, by academic Christopher Lehman. The book, an adaptation of Lehman’s doctoral dissertation, features extensive quotes from his personal interviews of Berny Wolf, Bill Littlejohn, and Jack Zander. It will be released in October.

I’m still recovering from yesterday’s all-day shoot for CartoonBrewFilms first original podcast, Cartoon Dump. That’s comedianne Kathleen Roll, above seated, as Buff Badger (the rageaholic animation historian) awaiting her cues, while our director Scott Ingalls strategically places a garbage bag on the set. Last night we had a standing room only crowd at the Steve Allen Theatre for a public preview of the show. Reaction was very positive and we look forward to announcing the start of the series (which will be available online free) next month. Stay tuned…

I was out of town when this news emerged a couple weeks ago but I wanted to make mention of the passing of Disney animator and director Art Stevens. Stevens passed away on May 22 at age 92. His career was notable in that he worked at a single studio—Disney—for nearly four-and-a-half decades. There’s a solid obit at O-Meon.com which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about him.

In the Disney hierarchy, Stevens was not considered one of the star animators, but he made many important contributions to the studio. He was one of Ward Kimball’s two primary animators (the other being Julius Svendsen) during all of Kimball’s experimental projects (Toot Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the space specials, It’s Tough To Be a Bird and Dad, Can I Borrow the Car, among others). Also, The Saga of Windwagon Smith was largely his and Svendsen’s project although directing credit went to Charles Nichols.

I had the opportunity to interview Stevens on a few occasions because of my research on John Dunn and Fifties animation, and he was one of the friendliest and most cordial people you could imagine. It always struck me as interesting that though Stevens worked at Disney his entire career, he was the farthest thing from your typical idea of a Disney animator. Looking at his sketchbooks, a lot of them filled with cats, he obviously enjoyed cartooning, caricature and design far more than the academic drawing we associate with a lot of the classic Disney artists. Stevens’s first gig as a full-fledged animator was on Peter Pan where he was assigned a lot of the marching sequences with the Lost Boys. But just as he had achieved the highest peak in the Disney animation department, he jumped ship and accepted an invitation to join Kimball’s unit where he could do more stylized and cartoonier animation, like the hilarious ‘popping strings’ section that he did in Toot Whistle. It’s pretty clear that he preferred fun and experimentation over the traditional Disney product.

On a sadder note, for the past few years, I’d been trying to get ASIFA-Hollywood to honor Stevens with a Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contributions to the art of animation. Stevens never received the recognition from ASIFA-Hollywood despite my multiple attempts. I’m not privy to the politics or Stevens’s history that denied him this recognition, but I think it’s nothing short of disgraceful for an animation organization to ignore somebody like Stevens. With nearly everybody else who is deserving of that award now dead, it bothered me greatly to see somebody as qualified as Stevens not receive it year after year. It’s too late now to do anything about it, but perhaps we can take solace in the knowledge that despite his passing, Stevens’s contributions to the art form will continue to live on for many years to come, and an ultimately useless award from an even more useless organization won’t do anything to change that fact.

A couple model sheets by Art Stevens for the short Scrooge McDuck and Money (1967). Click for larger versions.

Tim Petros, a photographer who specializes in QuickTime VR, was hired to transform the Ratatouille backgrounds into VR movies with sound narration. The results are pretty fun and innovative. I’m surprised we don’t see more creative uses of existing CG assets for film promotions. Tim also makes QTVR movies of cartoon maquettes, like these movies of sculptures designed by Ruben Procopio.