I completely forgot to plug the “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury” exhibit which just closed at the Orange County Museum of Art last weekend. What reminds me to mention it now is that I recently saw the accompanying exhibition catalog, and even though I only managed to flip through it briefly, it looks to be a fetching and attractive coffeetable book.

Not having seen the exhibit, I’m curious to find out how they treated the “Cartoon Modern” look in the context of the larger West Coast contemporary art movement. I do know that the exhibit made some acknowledgment of midcentury animation by displaying shorts like Gerald McBoing Boing, Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, and a Road Runner cartoon by Chuck Jones.

If you didn’t see the show while it was in SoCal, the exhibition continues at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA (February 15-April 13, 2008). Then it’s on to the Oakland Museum of California (May 18-August 17, 2008) and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX (February 27-May 31, 2009).

GhibliWorld.com offers a superb in-depth interview with Pixar story artist Enrico Casarosa in which he talks about Hayao Miyazaki’s influence on his work. Of particular interest is the insightful passage in which Enrico contrasts the ways in which Pixar and Ghibli tell their stories. An excerpt:

“Well, as I was just saying, the process [at Pixar] is very much one of doing and redoing, making things better step by step. It involves a willingness to pick apart the movie and its themes. This constant editing and refining can be frustrating at times. The huge difference is that at Ghibli storyboards are done by the director and they are followed without exception. So you find a very different way of doing things there, the studio and its artists are following the leader’s vision without deliberation, editing or feedback necessary. Incidentally it sounds like Suzuki-san might be the only person at Ghibli able to have a discussion with Miyazaki-san regarding the story or characters of the movie they’re producing. In this setting though Miyazaki is free to go on his own journey finding the movie he wants to tell, bit by bit. The result are stories that are more fully personal and hold an authenticity and uniqueness which is close to impossible to achieve in the US, where a story, in the best case scenario, is well crafted by several gifted people while in the worse case scenario is made by committee. I think that’s what is great about many projects coming from Japan, with their own merits or faults, they possess an unwavering will to stick to their director’s vision. The stories are allowed to be more idiosyncratic that way and that is what I personally find inspiring and refreshing.”

Director Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch) has launched a new comic strip on his blog called Kiskaloo. He plans to offer a new strip every Monday. In what appears to be an “F.U.” to Disney, the title character of Sanders’s comic strip bears a striking resemblance to some of the development art he created for American Dog, a film he originated and then was unceremoniously fired removed from in December 2006.

This new commercial for Jeep, produced by Deli Pictures in Germany, incorporates children’s drawings into a CG environment. It’s an interesting experiment but the results are graphically disingenuous because the filmmakers made no attempt to reconcile the funky and whimsical world of children’s drawings with the perfect physics and mechanics of CG. The piece would have come off a lot better had they attempted to create styles of movement that were honest and appropriate to the children’s drawings, instead of simply texture-mapping kiddie artwork over a slickly produced piece of CG.

(via Feed)

Director Michael Sporn reports that Golden Age animator Lu Guarnier passed away on December 29, 2007. Guarnier started at Warner Bros. in the 1930s but animated for most of his career in New York at studios like UPA-NY and John and Faith Hubley’s Storyboard Productions. Michael Sporn offers memories of Guarnier on his blog.

In the past few years, it’s been encouraging to see so much creative student animation coming out of countries like South Korea and India, places that were previously known only for turning out production artists for Western service work. Most of the work I see in festivals doesn’t turn up online, but 22-year-old Rohit Iyer, a senior animation student at NID (National Institute of Design) in Ahmedabad India, sent in a recent example of work that he created for MTV India and Kamasutra condoms during an internship at MTV last year. The spot, titled “Rani Bonkeshwari,” can be viewed HERE. Iyer offers a few background notes on the production:

“The script was written by an MTV writer named K.M. Ayappa. I did all the animation myself, starting from the designs and rough storyboard to final composite. The process comprised of creating artwork in Adobe Photoshop which was then animated and composited in Adobe After Effects. The whole spot took about a month to animate. The commercial has become quite popular here in India. It’s currently on air on the MTV India network.”

We’ve been preparing for this event for months… weeks… days… at least several hours!

Cartoon Dump invades New York tonight at 8pm, live at Comix 353 W. 14th St. (Just east of 9th Ave.) NY, NY 10014.

Order Advance Tickets HERE or call the box office (212) 524-2500.

Pictured clockwise from above left: Kathleen Roll (Buf Badger), Jerry Beck (Producer), Frank Conniff (Moodsey the Clinically Depressed Owl) and Erica Doering (Compost Brite). Join us tonight!

Here’s a shout out to my friend Karl Cohen and all the volunteers at ASIFA-San Francisco, who have unveiled a redesigned website today. Now it’s even easier to find out about events and screenings in the Bay Area. And the eight pages of links are a great resource filmmakers and animation buffs.