I’m just back from Ottawa and hung over from a week of watching great animation. Tomorrow night is the antidote: Cartoon Dump, our monthly live comedy and cartoons showcase in Hollywood. We will have guest comedian John Fugelsang adding to the madness. Join Moodsy, Compost Brite, Officer Pete, Dumpster Diver Dan, Cue Card Goddess and me, Jerry Beck, Tuesday, September 23rd at 8 PM, for an evening of hilarious comedy, demented songs, and really, really crappy cartoons.

It’s again at the Steve Allen Theater, 4773 Hollywood Blvd. (two blocks west of Vermont). Map here, see you there!

I’ve been in Ottawa since Wednesday and it’s been wall-to-wall screenings, presentations and panels (not to mention parties, meetings and lots of walking). Today Eric Goldberg is giving a lecture, there’s one last competition screening, and tonight is the award ceremonies. One of the major highlights of this five day event was the John Canemaker interview with Richard Williams last night. Two hours was not enough. Williams and Canemaker could have gone on for four hours and I still would have wanted more. If you are in New York tomorrow night, do not miss the encore at MoMA (and I understand Williams will be touring the U.S. giving similar interviews to promote his 16-part DVD set The Animators Survival Kit Animated - more about this in a forthcoming post).

The competition has been pretty good, and I came away from each screening with at least one film (sometimes several) that blew me away with creativity and visual imagination. I’d like to note a few here that were particularly worthy of seeking out.

Skhizein, Jeremy Clapin’s 3D/2D tour-de-force about a man hit by a meteorite and finding himself existing 91 centimeters away from his body. The story was so unique and fun, I can see Hollywood remaking it, perhaps with someone like Michael Gondry, as a live action vehicle for a Ben Stiller or Steve Martin. Let’s hope not. This animated film is gloriously original and beautifully realized.

Berni’s Doll by Yann Jouette, about a lonely man who buys, builds and sexually abuses a female robot, is so well made and so funny you can forgive it’s politically incorrect attitudes towards women. Its an outstanding short, which arguably becomes pro-feminist in its climactic resolution.

I also really loved Camera Obscura, directed by Matthieu Buchalski, Jean-Michel Drechsler and Thierry Onillon, three students at Supinfocom, the computer graphic university in France. If Guy Maddin did animation, this is what he’d make. Luckily, I found an embed and can share it with you below:

Link:

I’m also wild about Nina Paley’s feature Sita Sings The Blues, which I’m seeing again, for a second time, today. More about this film, and other Ottawa highlights, in a forthcoming post.

Matthew Hunter and Jon Cooke have a terrific blog which I’ve linked to before, Miscel-Looney-ous, which regularly examines the odds and ends of Warner Bros. cartoons. Today they found a video on YouTube worthy of much wider exposure - someone took the 1952 Bugs Bunny cartoon Rabbit’s Kin (the one with Pete Puma, voiced by Stan Freberg), slowed down the dialogue of super-sped-up little Bunny so we can actually hear what Mel Blanc is saying. It’s well worth a listen and a real joy to hear some new Looney Tunes dialogue from Blanc.

They said it so I don’t have to: a surprisingly accurate ad for the Broadway version of Shrek.

Amid and I are still in Ottawa immersed in animation. One film we haven’t seen is Igor, which opened all over the U.S. and Canada this weekend. Did you see it? How was it?

Brew reader “George” has just informed me of the publication of a Presto! Little Golden Book. With art by Teddy Newton, George says “it’s obviously fantastic!” If it’s as good as all previous Pixar Little Golden Books, I’m sold. It’s available on amazon here.

If Lotte Reiniger made trip-hop music videos in the 21st century, they might look something like this striking mixed-media silhouette piece produced for the Hungarian group Beat Dis. All I know about its animator, Emil Goodman, is that Emil Goodmanhe’s a 24-year-old from Hungary. There’s more of his work on his YouTube page.

Eric at Warnerart.com just acquired this interesting find: a letter from Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger to an Air Force Colonel, hoping the use of Bugs Bunny as an insignia will inspire the troops and wishing him luck on “dropping an egg on Tokyo and Berlin”. Click on thumbnail below to see enlargement.