Animator Mark Christiansen has a serious thing for vintage Hanna Barbera.

I found a copy of his self-published children’s book, Sid Sirloin and his Friends, at House of Secrets this afternoon. It isn’t just a loving homage to early 60s HB, it’s so perfectly realized its practically from an alternate Saturday morning universe. The 32 page full color soft cover book was “printed in the U.S.A. at the Warner Bros. Copy Center” (so it says in the small print in the front of the book). I found it highly enjoyable. I’d love to tell you where you can buy it (other than at House of Secrets) or send you to Mark’s website — unfortunately the URL listed on the back cover doesn’t go anywhere.
UPDATE: Mark’s blog is now up and features a list of stores selling the book - or how you can order it directly from him.

The Brew gets political again, but this time it’s truly animation-history related.

(Thanks to Bradley Walker for bring this to my attention)

Pixar story artist Adrian Molina created this after-hours animated piece to inform California voters about Proposition 8, a ballot initiative designed to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.

(Thanks, Alex Hirsch)

This just in from Popeye fan and historian Leonard Kohl:

“A few weeks ago, I was asked to help “unveil” a statue of “Bluto the Terrible” in E.C. Segar’s hometown of Chester, Illinois during the annual POPEYE picnic, parade and POPEYE FANCLUB convention, which is always the weekend after Labor Day. I was asked to do this as I’ve played “Bluto” for 11 years annually for a POPEYE radio play presented live on a Chester, Illinois radio station. Knowing the old rivalry between Disney and Fleischer, I find it kind of ironic that the “Bluto” statue seems to be guarding the front entrance of the “Buena Vista” Bank!”

Click on thumbnail photos below, taken by Chuck Anders from The Official Popeye Fanclub, to see (left) Steve Stanchfield, Lenny Kohl and his wife, Dana Kohl in front of the statue from another angle and (below right) a close-up of the side of the statue - the tribute to Jackson Beck.

This eye-catching computer-generated animation by Glenn Marshall was created in the open-source programming language Processing. Marshall writes that after creating the application, “I just let the program run till the end of the music, I felt reluctant to interfere too much by trying to sculpt an ending, and just let the code run its own natural course.” Glenn offers more details about the process on his blog.

While the movement in the piece above was not created frame-by-frame, the results on the screen are controlled by the artist who designs the application and sets the variables that determine the look of the piece. In most digital animation (CG, Flash), allowing a computer to generate movement is a rote affair that comes in the form of tweening or other types of automation which are designed to make the movement easier to create, not more interesting to watch. Generative animation, however, allows the computer to be a creative partner alongside the artist with resulting movement that would be impossible for either an artist or computer to create by itself.

Readers, feel free to share other interesting examples of generative animation that you’ve run across recently.

(via Motion Design)

Once upon a time, in the early 1970s, The Walt Disney Company had a hard time distributing their films in the New York area.

Disney’s suburban comedies of the era (like Superdad) and rural adventures (The Bears and I) were caught in a time warp, with no relation to the youth movement and fashions of the times, nor the racial tensions and urban realities that gripped a major metropolitan area like The Big Apple. New York City of the 1970s was the one reflected in films like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver and Death Wish. Disney live action flicks like Herbie Rides Again and No Deposit No Return were as far away from that reality as was Neverland.

In 1973, the Film Society of Lincoln Center held a magnificent Disney Studio retrospective (Michael Sporn wrote about this on his blog) which was a huge success. All shows sold out and it proved there was indeed an audience for Disney fare in the NYC market. The subsequent publicity surrounding the Lincoln Center tribute reverberated for months - and this gave Buena Vista distribution execs a brainstorm.

For the next five years, Buena Vista eschewed the regular release pattern for their new features in the New York market and bunched them up for an annual Disney summer festival that would play in family friendly neighborhood theaters. This was how I, in a time before VHS tapes, DVDs and the Internet, could catch up on Disney’s latest releases and rewatch the classic animated features without having to wait seven years between studio reissues.

The cool thing was that my local theater (the Main Street, in Flushing) was virtually empty for the evening performances (they were mobbed with Moms and Kids during matinees), and was a great way for me to study the animated features undisturbed. And of course I was crazy enough to save the printed schedules. I just recently came across them in my files and thought they were worthy of a post. (Click on thumbnail below to see at full size). Anyone else from New York recall these Disney film festivals of the 1970s?