United Airlines has unveiled five new animated spots for the Beijing Olympics. The commercial are elegant, visually-driven and beautiful to watch, just like the rest of the animated spots that the airline has produced in recent years. Pretentious to be sure, particularly for a carrier like United, but I still appreciate their attempts at fostering a more positive image by utilizing artistic animation. The ad agency responsible for these spots is the newly formed BDM, though two of its principals, Bob Barrie and Stuart D’Rozari, have been instrumental in United’s animation campaigns from the very beginning.

The real standout piece in this latest batch is “Sea Orchestra” (view hi-res version here) by Shy the Sun, the South African collective who also operates under the name The Blackheart Gang and who produced the short Tale of How. In this commercial, they combined hand-drawn textures and photographs into a brilliant and ornate CG package that is bursting at the seams with creativity. The commercial was produced in cinema resolution and I’m sure the visual effect of this on the bigscreen is overwhelming.

There are four other commericals in the series, including one by Ishu Patel. Click on each title below to watch a hi-res version:

“Two Worlds” — From the United press release: The commercial combines two different and distinctive animation styles created by directors SSSR, a Norwegian and Japanese team, who was responsible for the monochromatic world that was mostly computer-generated with a hand-crafted feel, and Gaelle Denis, a French director, who was responsible for the colorful fantasy world that uses using live action, computer generation and matte paintings, including textures such as Japanese rice paper.

“Heart” — From the press release: Using stop-motion animation and paper puppetry, California-based director Jamie Caliri and his team, place dimensional cardboard puppets in miniature sets that were shot frame by frame. The musical score for “Heart” is a piano duet of Rhapsody in Blue performed by Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, who recently performed “Rhapsody in Blue” together at the 2007 Grammy Awards.

“Moon Dust” — From the press release: Ishu Patel, an Indian-born and Canadian-based animator, used his world-renowned back-lit technique in which a thin layer of plastic modeling clay is applied to a glass plate that has a 1000-watt light positioned beneath it and an animation camera above it.

“Butterfly” — From the press release: Polish director Aleksandra Korejwo manipulated colored salt using shed condor bird feathers on a black canvas positioned under a downward-facing camera.

Kevin Kidney has posted a virtual gallery of rare images of original vintage publication art for Walt Disney’s Magazine, featuring art by animation folks Art Riley, Paul Hartley, Herb Ryman, Al Dempster, and others. The work is rarely ever seen - except by those who happen to own old copies of the magazine. The originals were sold off to the public in auction by Disney several years ago without much fanfare, but the imagery is very inspiring. Read more about this on Kevin’s blog.

Once again, I’ve dug out a few embarrassing photos of myself which I thought I’d post online for posterity. In 1982, Will Friedwald and myself took a trip to L.A. to visit a few friends - including our Warner Bros. cartoon heroes Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng.

Clampett was already a friend to us from previous trips and long distance phone calls, and he was delighted to pose with us and our newly printed Looney Tunes guide (the original Scarecrow Press edition). I think he’s reading a direct quote from Bosko’s Picture Show as the camera snapped. This photo is dated 8/25/82.

Freleng was at his office at Warner Bros. in Burbank two days later (8/27/82) when we met him. I recall him showing us storyboards from Daffy Duck’s Fantastic Island, which was well into production, during our tour of the studio. Note the Pvt. Snafu statue on his desk - It had been on his shelf and we asked to have it included in the photo. Freleng was great to us and I got to know him well in later years — and he was certainly nothing like the hot tempered Yosemite Sam he was known to have inspired. (Click on photos below for a larger image).

One of the newest, and most unexpected, outlets for original animation nowadays appears be newspaper websites. For the past year or so, the NY Times has been commissioning beautiful animated pieces by animators like Jeff Scher and Gary Leib, and now the Chicago Tribune is getting into the act with a new politically-oriented series Animated Chicago by illustrator and animator Joe Fournier. I’m not sure if they’re planning to do more of these, but the first episode can be viewed on the Tribune’s website.

FilmInFocus.com has a series of articles entitled “Adult Animation: A Look at How Cartoons Grew Up.” I wrote a piece for them about the upsurge of adult animated features in the US and abroad. The article covers a lot of ground but one of my goals was to show how animated features are on the verge of entering a renaissance period. From the indie features being made in the US by the likes of Nina Paley, Paul Fierlinger and Bill Plympton, to the mature and intelligent features being produced in all corners of the globe, the animated feature scene today is more vibrant than it’s ever been.

There’s also a piece by Sundance Film Festival programmer Mike Plante about how to create animation on a tight budget and Nick Dawson’s essay on the history of X-rated cartoons. It’s worth pointing out that FilmInFocus is run by Focus Features, the specialty film arm of Universal, that will be releasing two animated features of its own shortly: Coraline by Henry Selick and 9 by Shane Acker.

LA Weekly has two articles this week profiling Amy Winfrey and her animated webseries Making Fiends and Stefan Bucher’s Daily Monster video podcast. What do both of these creators have in common? Their ideas started out as independent self-financed Internet projects that gained a popular fan following and were ultimately given TV deals by major companies. Making Fiends is about to debut as an animated series on Nickelodeon, while Daily Monster was collected into book form this year and will also appear as a segment on PBS’s new Electric Company in 2009.

The paths that both of these properties have taken offer a view into how new TV animation ideas will be discovered in the future. The dysfunctional system of pitching and development in TV animation still exists, but it is on the wane and being dismantled by the Internet. As Winfrey and Bucher have demonstrated, creators are no longer beholden to clueless and sheltered development execs who don’t have the foggiest about what their audiences want to watch. Today an artist can create an uncompromised piece of animation independently, post it online, and attract a significant audience without any assistance from broadcasters. The cherry on top is that if your idea is successful, major companies will be knocking at your door to pay you money to produce more episodes.

(Published in The New Yorker August 4, 2008. Drawing by Michael Crawford.)

The LA Times is reporting that the ten-year-old Toon Disney cable channel will be rebranded next February as Disney XD. The new format will target tween boys with shows like Batman: The Animated Series and new live action series like Aaron Stone, a live-action show about “a video game virtuoso who leads a secret double life as a crime fighter.” The LA Times notes that this show “boils down to a male fantasy version of Hannah Montana“.