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POSTS FOR “August, 2008“Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
August 25, 2008 12:05 am
I’ve really been enjoying the posts over at the LP Cover Lover blog. Matthew and Tony have been posting images of their incredible collection of obscure record albums, especially the odd, unusual and unintentionally hilarious. They have a category devoted to Animated Cartoon LP covers, most of which I’ve never seen before, all with terrific publicity artwork (a few samples below). Very inspirational stuff, well worth a bookmark.
22 Comments » posted in Cartoon Culture 
August 24, 2008 3:00 pm
I found this on You Tube. Someone took a public domain Popeye cartoon and created a anaglyph 3D version of it… or tried to. It’s not very good 3D. In fact, I screened it with my red/blue glasses and it looks awful. On second thought, it looks kinda cool without the glasses… 12 Comments » posted in Classic
August 24, 2008 12:05 am
(Thanks Matthew Gaastra) 31 Comments » posted in TV
August 22, 2008 10:40 pm
David O’Reilly has built a very cool animated walk cycle that takes advantage of the iPhone’s motion sensitivity. O’Reilly describes the effect on his blog:
There’s been some controversy online about whether O’Reilly’s animation is actually motion-sensitive or if all the animation was completed earlier and he’s simply moving the iPhone to match the onscreen action. Regardless, the reality is that there is amazing potential for interactive cartoons on the iPhone and other motion-sensitive devices. Let’s do a little blue-sky thinking and imagine the possibilities. Instead of simply watching a cartoon, viewers can now interact and control the actions of their favorite characters. A simple tilt of your iPhone could send a character walking in any direction. A quick shake could make your character turn away from another character. Don’t feel like watching an 11-minute cartoon today? Control the pace of short and make it a four-minute cartoon. New technologies will open up new narrative possibilities for animation artists. The linear cartoon is so 20th century. For a new generation of kids, watching a cartoon with only one ending (i.e. every cartoon today) will test the limits of their patience. It’ll be the equivalent of riding a horse-and-buggy after cars had been invented. Sure, Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese came up with a good ending for One Froggy Evening, but today’s cartoonists can come up with twenty different endings for their shorts, exploring all sorts of what-if scenarios. They can begin to understand their creations from a deeper, more psychologically complex perspective. As a viewer, if you like a particular ending, you can control your character’s actions to always achieve the same result. But every individual viewer can also change the outcome of the cartoons they watch with a simple tilt or turn of their screen. Viewers can become engaged in the universe of their favorite cartoons as never before, and it will become a much richer experience for both creator and viewer. All of this could happen, but it will take the combined efforts of programmers, animators and studios with the vision and desire to push their cartoon characters into the 21st century. Previous Brew posts about David O’Reilly HERE, HERE and HERE. 26 Comments » posted in CGI, Internet/Blogs
August 22, 2008 6:21 pm
Animators beware! There’s a new collaborative animation project called Mass Animation that is asking animation artists (both pros and amateurs) to come together via a Facebook application to produce a 5-minute CG animated short destined for theatrical release. The project hasn’t launched yet, but the details that are available on the official website and in this Intel press release aren’t encouraging. The program, which doesn’t compensate any of the animators who work on it, is being sponsored by Intel, Autodesk, Facebook, Aniboom and Reel FX. The film is being directed by former Sony Pictures Digital exec Yair Landau. He says, “Mass Animation combines original computer-generated animated storytelling with social networking in a powerful, new way…we will reach so many talented animators who might not otherwise have access to this community of imagination and artistry. This project is the future of creative collaboration.” Apparently Landau believes that the future of creative collaboration on the Internet means getting lots and lots of different people to create free work for deep-pocketed corporate sponsors so that they can release your work theatrically. Unlike earlier technologies, the Internet empowers artists so that they can avoid being taken advantage of in this manner. Companies that are trying to facilitate the exploitation of artists via the Internet are truly living in the past. Perhaps this contest started with benevolent intentions, but the press release makes it sound super-exploitative, and the fact that a Hollywood exec is directing the project simply adds to the ick-factor. I’ll make an effort to stay on top of this story and find out how it turns out. (Thanks to Chris Roman for bringing this to everybody’s attention on the Cartoon Brew Facebook group) 26 Comments » posted in Ideas/Commentary, Internet/Blogs
August 22, 2008 11:20 am
Today’s Los Angeles Times has a terrific page-one article on the quirks of Disney’s copyright of Mickey Mouse and explains how the images of the early Mickey may be available for public domain use. It’s not a news story, but an overview of the company’s 80 years of copyright enforcement, and a profile of several folks (including former Disney archivist Gregory Brown) who have attempted to expose the holes in Disney’s copyright claims. To quote the piece: “Welcome to the wonderful world of copyright law.” To read it online click here. Update: As addendum to the Times article read Lauren Van Pelt’s and Douglas A. Hedenkamp’s papers on Disney copyright. (Thanks, Aaron H. Bynum) 44 Comments » posted in Disney
August 21, 2008 11:41 pm
As the line between live-action and animation blurs, there are more and more controversies about what qualifies as animation. Is A Scanner Darkly animation? Is Beowulf animation? It’s all up for debate. Here’s an easy one though. Is Year of the Fish animation? Most definitely not. Year of the Fish is an indie film that opens next week in New York and San Francisco. I’m perplexed why the filmmakers are billing the film as an “animated feature film” when there is nothing remotely resembling animation in the trailer (watch it here). Movement that is created in real-time and then digitally-enhanced does not fit the definition of animation, which is generally acknowledged to be movement created frame-by-frame through the manipulation of static images. The confusion with films like A Scanner Darkly and Beowulf stems from the fact that there is possibly enough frame-by-frame enhancement and distortion of the recorded live-action footage to constitute animation. Year of the Fish, on the other hand, appears to have had minimal work done on it by animation artists. Here’s the description of the “animation process” from the film’s website:
The process described—which is setting a stylistic filter on one frame per scene and rendering out the rest of the scene with that filter setting—is not animation. The filmmaker does say he went back for frame-by-frame manipulation, but it’s evident from the trailer that they were enhancing the filter effects frame-by-frame, not creating or enhancing movement frame-by-frame. The number of digital crew (3) and amount of time it took to do the “animation” (6 months) also makes clear that this is more a case of digital processing than animation. In recent years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has qualified films like Waking Life and Beowulf for Oscar consideration in the animated feature category. It’s a slippery slope that has now opened the doors wide open for experimental live-action films like Year of the Fish to claim that they are animated. 68 Comments » posted in Feature Film, Ideas/Commentary
August 21, 2008 6:09 am
I saw an unexpectedly great live-action film last night—Tarsem’s The Fall (view the trailer here). The film’s production design is insanely gorgeous, with nearly every shot a lush and breathtaking tableau of color and composition. The landscapes in the movie are so exotic and magical that I automatically assumed they were all computer-generated like every other Hollywood film. Amazingly, though, it was all shot on-location. Tarsem’s background—directing commercials like the classic Levi’s “Swimmer” and music videos like R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”—means that he knows how to create stylish and imaginative imagery, but in The Fall he backs it up with a sweet and engaging story about a 5-year-old immigrant girl and a Hollywood stuntman who befriend one another while recovering from injuries in a 1910s LA hospital. The film premiered at festivals in 2006 but didn’t receive a theatrical release in the US until May of this year. The distribution difficulties of the film are reflected in the film’s production history: Tarsem financed the film almost entirely out of his own pocket using the millions of dollars he made as a commercial director. Its production was as unconventional as the final film. For example, Tarsem scouted locations for the fantasy sequences for seventeen years, he shot the film in over twenty countries, and a good deal of the film’s story structure was ad-libbed by the little girl protagonist. The reason I’m mentioning this film on the Brew is that it also features a brief yet highly effective stop-motion sequence conceived by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, the brothers who won an Oscar for their 1989 animated short Balance. I haven’t seen a new piece of work by them in a long time and was pleased to see their names pop up in the credits. Their website Lauenstein.TV indicates that they’re busy and still producing plenty of work. Tarsem’s The Fall is currently playing in only a handful of theaters. I highly recommend checking it out on the bigscreen if you can. It’s final New York screening is tonight at the Cinema Village 3. There’s also an interview with the director at the A.V. Club in which he discusses this film’s production at length.
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