Brewmaster Jerry Beck will be broadcasting once again, live on Shokus Internet Radio today, Wednesday December 19th from 4pm to 6pm Pacific time (that’s 7pm to 9pm for you in the Eastern Time Zone).

Stu Shostak and I will be discussing Terrytoons and all other classic animation. If you have a specific question you want answered, call in during the broadcast toll free (888) 746-5875. If you miss the show, it’ll be rerun for the next seven days at the same time. Tune in!

Colin Sanders, a game development student at UOIT, was frustrated by the quality of instruction in his animation class. Below is the animated piece he created for his final using all of the techniques that were taught by his professor. He concludes the piece with a “Thanks for nothing” note in the credits.

(Thanks, Dai Kun)

Folks in Bristol, England are getting a spectacular large-scale animation show this week. The event, Light Up Bristol, which projects 400-feet wide pieces of animation across historic buildings, started yesterday and runs through this Friday. Bristol-based animator and illustrator Robin Davey, who has two pieces in this year’s line-up, explained to me what the event is all about:

“Now in its second year, Light Up Bristol is a week of festively-themed large scale video projections on to some of the UK city’s landmark buildings. All the work has been produced especially for the event by many of Bristol’s creative agencies and individuals, in a variety of media ranging from Flash and After Effects through to film, stop-motion, and shadow-puppetry. Everyone involved has volunteered their time and talents free of charge, and the event is free to all. It runs from Monday 17 to Friday 21 December in and around College Green. I’ve contributed two very different pieces to the line-up. You can see some stills on my blog here.”

Creative Review magazine has images from the animated pieces in this article. More photos from the event, including the one above by James Burniston, are posted on Flickr.

It is well known that, for a variety of reasons, legendary Disney director and animator Ward Kimball was demoted by Walt Disney from director back to animator in the early-1960s. In 1966, Kimball made his comeback into the director’s chair. Responsible for the shift was not only Walt’s softening stance towards Kimball but also the retirement of director Ham Luske, which opened a slot for Kimball’s return.

The subject of today’s post is Kimball’s first project upon his return to direction: the rarely seen episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color called “A Salute to Alaska,” which debuted on April 2, 1967. (A sidenote: this was the last episode of Wonderful World of Color that Walt Disney filmed an opening for before his death.) Kimball shares a co-direction credit with Luske on the show. According to Ward’s son, John Kimball, who worked on the animated segments, the animation in it is extremely limited, and some of the scenes are simply held cels that are slid across the screen. I’ve never seen it and am unable to comment on the animated segments that Kimball directed. If anybody has the animated segments from the special, feel free to post it onto YouTube.

Thanks to some recent digging around (more about this later), Kimball’s rough character models for the “Alaska” special have been discovered. These drawings offer a rare glimpse into Kimball’s personal design sensibilities and show a great designer at work. While Kimball is well known for his design-oriented films—Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and Mars and Beyond—those were designed, respectively, by Tom Oreb and John Dunn. Kimball collaborated closely with both artists, and his imprint can be felt throughout, but the primary visual styling belongs to other artists, as is indicated by the very different looks of each project. The drawings in this post, albeit more than a decade after those films, allow us a look at pure Kimball design.

A good starting point to compare these designs would be the project that Kimball had worked on immediately prior to this, the theatrical short Scrooge McDuck and Money (1967), which can be viewed on YouTube in two parts (Part 1 and Part 2). In that short, Kimball served only as animator and had no influence on the design. The incidental characters in that short were designed by animator Art Stevens. A while back, I posted Stevens’ designs from the short here.

The level of design in Stevens’ work and Kimball’s is night and day. While Stevens’ designs are cute, they lack the sophistication of shape and form that only a master draftsman like Kimball could bring to the table. Kimball’s designs feel solid and complete. Despite their high stylization, they have a quality of weight and power that make Stevens’ designs look flimsy and insubstantial by comparison.

Furthermore, Kimball’s drawings are incredibly funny to look at even without the benefit of movement. Around the time he made these drawings, Kimball was teaching at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and one of the tips he imparted to students was, “A cartoon character who is funny to look at before he is animated is going to be made funnier by the movement.” He certainly practiced what he preached.

This design of “Ivan the Fur Trapper” communicates textures in the fur cap and facial hair, while maintaining the integrity of the overall shapes and forms.

Another notable aspect of these drawings is that many of them are based on real-life figures, which allows us to observe Kimball’s gift for caricature. Ward hits hard with his caricatures of the aristocratic Russian businessmen who were running Alaskan affairs in the 1800s. I’ve managed to find online the engravings and illustrations that Kimball based his drawings on and have included them alongside Kimball’s roughs. He caricatures not only their likeness, but also their pompous poses and power-hungry, borderline maniacal, desires. Like the best caricaturists, Kimball tells us more than simply what these people look like, he tells us who they are.

His caricatures of other historical figures are broader and cartoonier, based on the style of the cartoon, but even the cartoony rendition of US Secretary of State William H. Seward (in Uncle Sam garb) is spot-on when compared to one of his photos.

After “A Salute to Alaska”, Kimball continued directing and producing full-time until his retirement in 1973. His final years at the studio are a mixed bag—they include his last great “edutainment” short It’s Tough To Be a Bird (1969), the occasionally brilliant Dad, Can I Borrow the Car? (1970), and other projects like the “The Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show” (1968) and the syndicated TV series The Mouse Factory (1971).

A few of the images above can be enlarged by clicking on them. The rest are as-is. Enjoy!

Have enough animation books already? Here are ten books from the past year which, while not necessarily about animation, are well worth adding to any cartoon and illustration book collection.

Miguel Covarrubias: 4 Visions

Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations

Betsy and Me collects the rare syndicated newspaper strip of Plastic Man creator Jack Cole.

Where’s Dennis?: The Magazine Cartoon Art of Hank Ketcham

The Completely MAD Don Martin

The Original Art of Basil Wolverton

The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch just might be the best absurdist comic since The Far Side.

The Longest Christmas List Ever, a fine children’s book written by Jibjab founders Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, and illustrated by two up-and-coming talents Brandon Scott and Ian Worrel.

Follow the Line, an amazing children’s book by Laura Ljungkvist. See interior pages here.

CG filmmaker David O’Reilly (RGBXYZ) has redone his website DavidOReilly.com and also posted an enticing trailer for his new short Serial Entoptics. What continues to impress me about O’Reilly’s work and what makes him one of the more exciting young CG animators working today are his efforts towards finding a true and honest graphic expression befitting the CG medium instead of trying to force traditional graphic concepts to fit a CG mold as most everybody else does.

In other words, his work is designed from the groundup for the digital world. It doesn’t look like anything that could be accomplished in a medium besides CG. Impressively, he’s uncovering this new visual terrain sans a bloated crew of hundreds or an overblown Pixar-sized budget; the only things necessary are creative aspiration and a clear sense of artistic purpose.

O’Reilly gave a talk last month at the Pictoplasma Animation Festival, which impressed cultural commentator Régine Debatty so much that she calls him a ‘genius’ in this discussion of O’Reilly’s work on her blog.

Previously on the Brew: Up-and-Coming: Miwa Matreyek & David O’Reilly

The photo above is from our Halloween show in October. Don’t ask me to explain.

Needless to say Cartoon Dump continues on every month at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood. Our Christmas show is next Tuesday December 18th at 8pm. Our special holiday guest comedian this month will be J. Elvis Weinstein (the original Tom Servo on MST3K and the proprietor of Stinkburger), and our cartoons will be the coal in your stocking.

We are also bringing the Dump to New York City starting next month! We will be at Comix on West 14th Street on January 8th at 8pm. Join us!

I’m currently reading Matthew Gale’s Dada & Surrealism, an entertaining and authoritative primer on two of the most important, yet frequently misunderstood, art movements of the early-20th century. The book does a fine job of evoking the passion that these artists had for their work. Creating art was not a 9-to-5 for any of these artists; they lived and breathed their art to an extent that is perhaps difficult to understand nowadays.

Both movements happened in a competitive creative climate: artists would intentionally provoke audiences to the point of physical riots, art critics would challenge artists to duels over stylistic disagreements, artists would publish magazines to deride the work of contemporaries. In this type of challenging environment, boundaries were inevitably shattered and creative breakthroughs made.

To bring this back to animation, the book notes that a few of the Dada artists, like Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, also moved into experimental animation. In the early-1920s, they were creating pioneering pieces of abstract animation in Germany alongside other artists like Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttman. The combined output of these artists would have a major influence on future abstract animators like Len Lye, Norman McLaren and beyond. This sentence in the book about Eggeling caught my attention in particular: “Despite the relative simplicity of the technology, the production of [Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra and Diagonal Symphony] was a financial and physical strain and led to Eggeling’s premature death in 1925.”

The thought of an animation artist dying for his art is a powerful beautiful sentiment. A quick search online turns up a website that says the cause of Eggeling’s death was septic angina, a type of food poisoning, so I’m not exactly sure where Gale’s information comes from, but reading about the dedication of various artists throughout the book, it’s not difficult to imagine that an artist like Eggeling could work himself to the point of death. It is indicative of the commitment that artists felt towards their work and how far they were willing to push themselves in pursuit of their artistic ideals.

The wonders of the Internet allow us instant access to the film that did Eggeling in, Diagonal Symphony, a silent abstract short that was completed in 1924, but didn’t debut in Berlin until 1925. Eggeling died six days after the film’s first public screening. The same site, UbuWeb, also offers examples of early abstract animation by Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman.