Last August Jerry wrote about one of the newest animation fads sweeping through Japan: a crude, borderline inept, series of animated pieces about the Bottom-Biting Bug. This article in Pingmag reveals that the creators are the husband-and-wife team UrumaDelvi. They are also responsible for the animated short A Long Day of Mr. Calpaccio, an entertaining little film that made the festival rounds a couple years back. In the Pingmag piece, the husband half of the team, Uruma, discusses the genesis of the Bottom-Biting Bug and speculates about why it has caught on with the Japanese public. A short clip of the animation is below, but if you really want to torture yourself, try watching this ten-minute spectacle.

Suzie Templeton’s contemporary stop motion retelling of Peter and the Wolf can be seen below in three parts. As we reported last week, the film is on the shortlist for possible nominees in this year’s Oscar race. Last year the film was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Short Animation Film and also won both the Annecy Cristal and Audience Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

(Thanks, Karl Cohen)

While Disney artists bring their imaginations to life through animation, Disney executives are living a lifestyle that animators can’t even begin to imagine. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Disney chief executive Bob Iger received a 7% pay increase in 2007 for a total financial compensation of $27.7 million. According to the company’s proxy statement, the breakdown is as follows: $2 million salary, which remained the same as 2006; a $13.7 million bonus, which was a decrease from his $15 million bonus in ‘06; stock awards totaling $7.9 million, and $740,000 for personal air travel, security and a car benefit. Other Disney execs who earned healthy sums were CFO Thomas Staggs ($9 million), General Counsel Alan Braverman ($7.9 million), executive vp of human resources Wesley Coleman ($2.7 million) and executive vp for corporate strategy Kevin Mayer ($2.6 million). With figures like these, there’s only four words these guys can be thinking right now: High School Musical 3. (PS: If you’re curious about what the average animation artist makes, download this PDF of the 2007 wage survey by the Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE.)

If I had a Sony PSP (or played video games for that matter), I’d be looking forward to the February release of Patapon, a visually striking rhythm-based fighting game. The game’s graphics are based on the work of French artist and toy designer Rolito, who also has a blog here. Here’s a few links that tell you all you need to know about this title:

Game trailer with plenty of animation

Interview with Patapon director/game designer Hiroyuki Kotani

Write-up on GameVortex.com about why Patapon is a unique game

(via Fous d’Anim)

A recently published panel cartoon by Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry.

(Thanks, Steve Segal)

Character actor Allan Melvin - the voice of Magilla Gorilla - has passed away at age 84.

He provided numerous voices for Hanna Barbera characters, including significant parts on The Banana Splits, Hong Kong Phooey and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. He was also the voice of Bluto on HB’s All New Popeye Hour and Popeye and Son. On camera, Melvin is best known as Sam The Butcher on The Brady Bunch and Cpl. Henshaw on The Phil Silvers Show. He died on Thursday January 17th of cancer.

Animator Dan Meth is hosting his second annual Drinking and Drawing event in both New York City and Portland Oregon next Wednesday (Amid and I participated in the first such event in Portland last year and it was a blast).

The sad truth is that alcohol was the vice of choice for many of our animation heroes of the 1930s, 40s and ’50s. And of course, drinking made its way into the cartoons themselves, dating back way before Prohibition was lifted. Scrappy, Buddy, Woody Woodpecker and Betty Boop (to name a few) all made cartoons with beer gags - or about making beer itself. Matthew Hunter recently compiled this clip reel of drinking gags from early 30s Warner Bros. cartoons:

Even the Flintstones did a special Busch Beer promotional episode. Perhaps it’s no surprise that there is a beer in Germany called “Animator” (Hacker-Pschorr Animator) — and there’s even a wine in Europe featuring Goofy on the label (label below)!

But honestly, I don’t think any character drank more than Magoo:

The Drinking and Drawing events commence January 23rd at 8PM. In New York it’s happening at the M1-5 Bar in lower Manhattan (52 Walker St. @ Church St.). To participate in NYC you need to RSVP: savemeaplace ( at ) frederator (dot) com. In Portland it’s being held at the Someday Lounge 125 NW 5 Avenue. RSVP to cascadesiggraph ( at ) gmail (dot) com by January 22nd at noon.

There are certain details of animation history that have always bothered me. For example, how did Tex Avery, arguably the greatest animation director of all-time, end his illustrious career? The answer is that he created a character called Kwicky Koala, who appeared in a 1981 Hanna-Barbera TV series of the crudest variety. Recently a bunch of Kwicky Koala shorts have found their way online and as expected, they are dreadful, though perhaps no more so than any other piece of Hanna-Barbera flotsam pulled from their vast sea of mediocrity. What makes these particular cartoons so painful to watch is the knowledge of who was making them. In what other art form could the creator of genius such as this, this, and this also have his name attached as the creator of these? Only in animation.

What’s troublesome is how the animation world has never bothered to make a distinction between its true auteurs and its workaday hacks, forcing each and every one to work on product of the most degrading sort. In live-action, by contrast, a Robert Altman or Eric Rohmer or Woody Allen can continue expressing themselves artistically right until the very end because there are enough people on the business end who recognize the value (financial though it may be) of supporting these artists.

While I was researching the life of writer and board artist John Dunn, I was granted access to his diaries and gained a good understanding of his feelings about working on the cheap animation of the Seventies and Eighties. Dunn, in fact, worked briefly with Avery at Hanna-Barbera on the “Dino and the Cavemouse” shorts, and he notes in his diary having conversations with Avery about the pitiful state of their industry. The studio veterans of that era certainly weren’t naive; they were aware of the hopelessly Sisyphean task of creating anything of quality or value. And yet artists like Avery and Dunn continued working up until the very end because they loved the art form so dearly. Avery, who passed away while working on Kwicky, was well past the age of retirement at the time—72-years-old.

It makes one wonder: If the animation world can so casually discard one of its most distinguished practitioners and relegate him to working in the trash heap of television, what hope is there for everybody else? It’s a blight on the collective art form and industry that it has never been able to provide decent creative outlets to its artists who truly deserve them. It happened then, and I see it happening with alarming frequency today. Granted, an artist always has the option of charting their own course as an independent, but the fact of the matter is that an industry which consistently fails to recognize the value of the people working within it is an unhealthy industry that cannot be expected to advance or prosper.

There is nothing more depressing than watching the credits of oldschool Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng and Filmation shows and seeing the names of Golden Age artists scroll by, one after the other, a rollcall of beat down artists who had no option but to submit to the thankless art they had chosen as their life’s calling. Is it any wonder that so many of them, Dunn and Avery included, drowned their sorrows in drink? (Occasionally, a sympathetic younger artist like Richard Williams would throw them a lifeline, such as when he recruited animators like Ken Harris, Grim Natwick and Art Babbitt to work on his feature The Thief and the Cobbler, and boy, did they shine when given the chance, but such opportunities were few and far between.)

So has animation learned from its past? Is our industry diverse enough today to support and utilize the wide range of talents working within it? Twenty years from now, will we be looking at the credits of Bee Movie, Open Season, and Chicken Little with a similarly sad lament? And more importantly, does anybody even know who Tex Avery is in 2008? Questions worth considering as we move forward.