"Daffy's Rhapsody" talkback
"The Snow Queen" trailer
"Arrietty" Will Be Ghibli's Biggest US Release Yet
Ricky Garduno, RIP
Just in time to clear the stench of that current 
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POSTS FOR “August, 2007“Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
August 13, 2007 12:10 pm
Yeeechhh! Take a look below. No, it’s not Leatherface – but a vintage cloth Halloween costume of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit now selling on ebay. The fabric mask would scare the bejesus out of anyone. Talk about being “off-model”!
18 Comments » posted in Classic 
August 13, 2007 8:15 am
Almost didn’t hear about this event it’s so under the radar. Indie animator Brent Green is doing a screening in LA of his works which combine filmed animation with live music performance. The event is at 9pm, this Wednesday, August 15, at the Silent Movie Theatre (611 N. Fairfax, LA, CA 90036). Tickets are $10 and available at the door or can be purchased online. Find out more about Brent at NervousFilms.com. Here’s a description of the program:
Below is Green’s intense and lovely stop-motion short Carlin shot with life-sized wooden characters and stuffed chickens in the farmhouse where he grew up. 5 Comments » posted in Events
August 12, 2007 9:15 am
Today’s must read: From Wall of Sound to Huckleberry Hound: The Vinyl Side of Hanna-Barbera by Kliph Nesteroff on the always informative and entertaining (i.e. info-taining?) WFMU’S Beware of the Blog. In addition to a bounty of obscure audio downloads by the likes of Cindy Bear, Hokey Wolf and Snuffles, rare cover records and unusual tracks by Paul Frees and Daws Butler, Nesteroff’s post tells of (and links to) other offbeat product released by Hanna Barbera Records – obscure garage bands, psychedelic rock groups, folk singers and B-movie soundtracks – during the company’s short-lived existence (1965-1967). It casts the later work of The Banana Splits and Catanooga Cats in a whole new light. 8 Comments » posted in Cartoon Culture
August 12, 2007 8:20 am
Whatever your feelings are towards the controversial Creation Museum in Petersberg Kentucky, I think we can agree this is a pretty nice TV spot: 95 Comments » posted in Advertising
August 11, 2007 10:44 am
Click here to see close-ups of (and get ordering information for) these cool vinyl figures of Underdog, Polly, Riff Raff, and Simon Bar Sinister. Like a breath of fresh air – these characters look great in three dimensions! 21 Comments » posted in Classic
August 10, 2007 3:16 pm
Here’s a couple of odds and ends that won’t be found on any Popeye DVD collection anytime soon… Sounds like Now, sing along with this… (below, in Arabic!) 17 Comments » posted in Cartoon Culture
August 10, 2007 6:30 am
The dvd single of Don Hertzfeldt’s latest (and in my opinion, strongest and most intensely cinematic) short Everything Will Be OK goes on pre-order sale today at noon (Pacific time). According to his Bitter Films website, “all pre-orders will receive a free ‘everything will be ok’ FILM STRIP, clipped from a 35mm print from Don Hertzfeldt’s collection.” Additionally, a limited number of signed art prints are also available this morning for people who pre-order the dvd. I’ll admit that when I first discovered Don’s films (around ‘98 or so), I wasn’t exactly his biggest fan. His early films like Ah L’Amour and Billy’s Balloon, though amusing, were too trivial to capture my interest. It wasn’t until Rejected that I really began to warm up to his work and get past the stick figure hurdle. Early on the difficulty I was having with his work is that it seemed like the stick-people might be the entire gimmick, that it wasn’t really about his stories, but the fact that stick figures were telling these stories. The exquisitely crafted Lily and Jim should have convinced me otherwise, but I’m slow sometimes. (Sidenote: Lily and Jim is all the more impressive when one realizes Don was only 20 years old when he made it). His new films, however, have completely erased any doubts about his capabilities as a filmmaker. While Don uses simple figures in his animation, he manages to evoke more with these frugal pencil marks than most animators do with their fully-articulated anatomy-laden characters. The real meat in Hertzfeldt’s work is his ability to use the film medium to tell engaging, funny and interesting stories, and while his drawing style is one of the more striking and obvious aspects of his work, it is only a minor component in the overall picture of his films. Don recently told an interviewer, “I’m not the kind of guy who’s gonna struggle for weeks getting someone’s ankle to look just right, you know? Actually I don’t even draw ankles. I animate to tell these stories…” While true, the comment belies the careful attention that Hertzfeldt invests into the visual side of his shorts. His characters are often crudely drawn, but the cinematic and visual potential of the animation medium is never ignored. The humor in Rejected is equally divided between the visual and verbal, The Meaning of Life is a largely visual narrative, with the dialogue in the film used more to add mood than anything else, and the in-camera optical effects and live photography in Everything Will Be OK create an unexpectedly rich and textured visual experience. With the graphic evolution and non-linear narrative experimentations of his previous three films — Rejected, The Meaning of Life and Everything Will Be OK — Don has clearly established himself as an animation original. If you’re familiar with Hertzfeldt’s work, you’re sure to enjoy his latest Everything Will Be OK, and if you’re not, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of the exhaustively complete Bitter Films Volume 1 dvd which contains all of his earlier shorts through The Meaning of Life. It’s a fine introduction to the work of a still-evolving filmmaker who easily ranks among the most exciting indie animators currently on the American scene. For all things Hertzfeldt, visit BitterFilms.com
18 Comments » posted in Animators, Shorts
August 10, 2007 1:33 am
With SIGGRAPH 2007 now wrapped up, I thought it might be appropriate to link to the video below about a CG animated short that debuted nearly twenty years ago at SIGGRAPH 88. The film, Pencil Test (watch it here), was created in-house at Apple Computer to display the capabilities of the Apple Macintosh II. The film below is the ‘making of’ that explains how they did it. Interestingly enough, Andrew Stanton (director of Finding Nemo and the upcoming Wall-E) receives a credit on the finished film as illustrator and storyteller, and John Lasseter has a credit as “coach.” And one more cool note: the applications engineer who appears in the short, Nancy Tague, is now Mrs. Nancy Lasseter. UPDATE: A Brew reader who prefers to remain anonymous writes, “The woman building the character is Galyn Susman, producer of Ratatouille. She’s really awesome, and has been at Pixar since before Toy Story.” (Thanks, John Karel) |
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