Bill Melendez, the Mexican-born American character animator, film director, and film producer, best known for his animation for Warner Bros, UPA and the Peanuts specials and feature films, has passed away.

In 1938, Melendez was hired by Walt Disney to work on animated short films and feature-length films such as Bambi, Fantasia and Dumbo. Three years later, he joined Leon Schlesinger’s team at Warner Bros. studios, where, as a member of the Bob Clampett and Art Davis units, he animated on a number of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck shorts. Among the classic Warner Bros. shorts he animated on are Book Revue, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Baby Bottleneck, and The Big Snooze. UPA put him on their payroll in 1948 to work on many television commercials, as well as the Gerald McBoing Boing and Madeline shorts.

After a decade working on commercial and industrial films at studios like John Sutherland Productions and Playhouse Pictures, Melendez founded his own production company in 1964. Bill Melendez Productions helped produce the annually broadcast Christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas, for which he won an Emmy Award and the George Foster Peabody Award despite having to work on short notice and with a tight budget.

Melendez has gone on to do over 75 half-hour Peanuts specials, including the 1989 miniseries, all with partner Lee Mendelson. In 1979, he directed a made-for-TV animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

(click on image for bigger version) Bill Melendez (far left) at UPA in 1953 during a story session for Ballet-Oop (1954). Other artists in photo from l. to r. are Jules Engel, Alan Zaslove, Frank Smith, T. Hee, C.L. Hartman and Bobe Cannon.

An 8-minute interview with Melendez posted on YouTube:

British department store Harvey Nichols has concocted a brilliant advertising campaign starring Wallace and Gromit. It heralds the company’s expansion into Bristol, England, the hometown of Aardman Animations. The typically casual Wallace now sports Alexander McQueen and Paul Smith suits, Dolce and Gabbana shirt and Giorgio Armani tie, while the undressed Gromit is decked out in a Paul Smith scarf and Ray-Bans. Wallace’s love interest, Lady Campanula Tottington, also appears in the print ads. The Daily Mail has an article including a nice “making of” video with Nick Park and company explaining how the ads were photographed.

Kudos to Aardman for understanding their characters, and making tasteful and witty choices about how they license their characters for advertising. Compare this to the utterly clueless dopes at Warner Bros. who recently licensed Bugs Bunny to advertise ketchup. The quizzical expression on Bugs’ face says it all.

Award-winning filmmaker Signe Baumane writes to tell me that yesterday somebody flagged her one-minute short The Very First Desire Now and Forever for having “objectionable content” and today the film was pulled from YouTube. What was so objectionable in this short, which we’ve plugged before on Cartoon Brew? A baby innocently squeezing milk from its mother’s breasts.

What happened to Signe’s film should serve as a warning to all filmmakers who choose to use a free corporate service like YouTube to host their film work. But the bigger issue is that YouTube should consider addressing the arbitrary policies they hold towards “objectionable content.” There are currently thousands of videos on their site displaying full-frontal male and female nudity in art, whether it be the work of Michelangelo or Matisse. It’s a slippery slope when YouTube begins passing judgment on what qualifies as art (painting and sculpture) and what doesn’t (animation). If the site’s policy is strictly no nudity, then it should be consistent about it across all forms of art. And if it’s the natural act of breastfeeding that YouTube deems so offensive, then a good first step would be to remove all of the live-action videos on their site featuring woman breastfeeding their children.

Last year Joe Dante (Looney Tunes Back In Action) established a terrific website called Trailers From Hell, featuring audio commentary by several top genre directors (including John Landis, Stuart Gordon, Eli Roth, etc.) over some of their favorite vintage guilty-pleasure horror, fantasy and science fiction film trailers. They’ve tackled animation only once before - Yellow Submarine (with comments by George Hickenlooper) which we linked to here back in April.

Dante produced one other animation trailer for the site, with director Mick Garris (Showtime’s Masters of Horror, HBO’s Tales From The Crypt) commenting on Chuck Swenson’s 1977 X-rated animated feature Dirty Duck (aka “Cheap”). This trailer proved a little to hot for Joe’s domain so he’s graciously allowed Cartoon Brew to exclusively post it. It’s perfect for our readership - Dirty Duck is one of the most overlooked animated features of the 1970s, a glorious experimental mess of a film, which, from today’s vantage point, looks incredibly creative and daring, and something current Hollywood studios would never attempt.

For more Trailers From Hell click here.

A major retrospective of work by underground cartoonist Kim Deitch opens at New York’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art on September 9th. There will be an opening reception on Friday September 12th from 6 – 9 pm. The exhibit will display original comics pages and other work covering the artist’s entire career to date, beginning with full-page comic strips drawn for the East Village Other in the sixties up to recent graphic novels including The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Alias the Cat, Shadowland, and Deitch’s Pictorama. The Museum will also host a series of talks and events related to the exhibit.

MoCCA is located at 594 Broadway, Suite 401, between Houston and Prince. It is open to the public Monday through Saturday from 12 – 5 pm, Sundays 12 – 3 pm. The opening reception is free and open to the public. For more information visit the MoCCA website. The Deitch exhibit will run through December 5th.

A 35-minute collection of classic Saul Bass film titles with narration and insights by Bass himself:

(via Smashing Telly)

The LA Times reports (with several errors) on the passing of Morris Sullivan, the man who financed the Don Bluth studio and produced An American Tail, Land Before Time, All Dogs Go To Heaven and Rock-A-Doodle.

Cinecon, the film buff convention I attended over Labor Day weekend, is not a place to do animation research, but from time to time I’ve found some nice pieces there to add to my files. For example, one dealer had a stack of Andrews Sisters photos — hundreds of them - which apparently came from the estate of one of the sisters. I shuffled through them and found this nice publicity shot of the gals in front of the boards from the Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet sequence in Make Mine Music. (Click on thumbnail below to see full image).

I found another foreign sheet that I couldn’t resist - a poster for The Man Called Flintstone in Spanish. Gotta love Fred and Barney with blue 5-o’clock-shadow! My prize find this year, stuck in a stack cartoon stills (mainly of Hanna Barbera TV shows) was this still/photostat of a “George” model sheet from Tex Avery’s Of Fox And Hounds. This piece has “property of Walker Edmiston” rubber stamped on the back (Edmiston, a voice actor, puppeteer and kids show host passed away last year). Click on thumbnail below to see full image. All in all, I had a great time at the show - and was glad I could find a few goodies to share with my friends.