Brad Bird writes to say, “Just thought you’d like your readers to know that the latest issue of Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope All-Story magazine was guest art edited by Marjane Satrapi, who also did drawings and paintings for the issue.” Satrapi is, of course, the creator and co-director of the Oscar-nominated and Cannes Jury Prize-winning feature Persepolis. If you can’t find the issue in bookstores, it’s also available for online purchase on the Zoetrope website.

If you haven’t heard, filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt is currently in the midst of a nationwide tour of his films, including the debut of his latest tour de force I Am So Proud of You. The show has been a huge success and has sold out (or nearly sold-out) in every city the tour has hit. Hertzfeldt continues appearances in Allentown, Pennsylvania tonight and Rochester, New York on Saturday. Next Wednesday, November 19, he’s doing a couple shows in New York at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue). Both the early and late show have already sold out, but Don tells me that they’re planning to add a third, extra-late show. Stay tuned to this page for ticket info on the third show, which should go on sale soon.

If you’re feeling lucky, Cartoon Brew is giving away two tickets to the 9:15 show. Just enter your name on our Cartoon Brew group on Facebook by Saturday. I’ll be moderating the Q&A sessions with Don for the New York portion of the tour so get some good questions ready for us. More info about the tour on Don’s website BitterFilms.com. And while we’re at it, here’s a good recent interview with Don about his latest short.

“Inside a Boy” is a fresh-looking music video for the group My Brightest Diamond. It’s directed by Spanish artist Rafa Toro. He says that he made it “with a tight schedule (barely a month and a half) and low budget (I made every step of the production, including design, animation, editing, etc…).” The illustrations in this vid are a treat for the eyes and the real highlight of the piece. This is Toro’s first major freelance animation assignment and I hope it’s not the last.

I received a complimentary copy of the The Art of Bolt in the mail recently. I’m going to ignore the fact that it wasn’t intended for me since there was a note inside of the book that was addressed to the editor of a certain other animation-related print magazine which shall remain unnamed.

In terms of text, there’s little to discuss. The book, credited to Mark Cotta Vaz, is thin in the writing department, even relative to other ‘art of’ books in my collection. It makes me wonder why I invest so much effort when I’m hired to write similar ‘art of’ books. With the exception of a dozen or so pages of text, everything else is quotes, including deep bits of insights like the following from a couple of the animators: “Animating a dog is quite complicated. Instead of two legs you have four, and the overall motion is something the audience is very familiar with, so it has to look perfect for everyone to believe in it.”

Then again, it’s called The ART of Bolt for a reason. We buy these books for the artwork and there’s plenty of that on every page. At times, the book almost feels like it should be titled “The Art of Paul Felix.” It’s dominated by the digital paintings of Felix, who was art director on the movie. I’m not complaining. Felix’s work is skillful and has a certain charm. There are also plenty of other digital paintings by artists including Greg Miller, Jim Finn, Ric Sluiter, Kevin Nelson, Sean Samuels, as well as some graphite drawings (how quaint!) by Bill Perkins.

The buzzword for the art direction of this film is “painterly.” It’s repeated frequently in the book, and they cite a desire to recreate the “painterly” feel of Edward Hopper, George Bellows and the Ashcan School artists. It’ll be interesting to see how this painterly notion appears onscreen since the treatment of light and color has been a weak point in a lot of contemporary CGI (though it is improving). There are examples in the book of render tests, and what they illustrate is that in CGI, “painterly” translates to softer textures and a brushstroke feel, but at the end of the day, the backgrounds are still controlled by the perfect geometries of a computer-generated image. It is, at best, an approximation of a painter’s work. There is no abstraction of masses or compositional decisions that are based outside the realm of the digital model. That is not a fault of the artists so much as it is asking something of the technology that it is incapable of providing. But it’s also why I find it difficult to muster enthusiasm for page after page of Disney’s attempt to codify a “painterly” approach in their films (top image) without really ever approaching anything remotely as exciting as a true painter’s work (bottom image, by George Bellows).

One area in which CGI doesn’t have to play second-fiddle to the traditional arts is in the realm of characters, and there’s plenty of character design artwork in this book. The book offers solid and appealing designs by lead designer Joe Moshier, supported by work from Jin Kim and Chen-Yi Chang. Moshier comes from the Tom Oreb school of character design, and he does the super-graphic and elegant shapes and forms as well as anybody today. I think his designs excite me even more than Craig Kellman’s designs for Madagascar, which is another heavily Oreb-influenced production. My reservations are in the obviousness of the design choices. There’s never any real exploration of the graphic possibilities, such as what one saw in Teddy Newton’s inventive character exploration work on The Incredibles.

Another thing that I don’t see in the character designs is a unified vision of the universe, especially not in the way that was evident in the work of Chris Sanders on American Dog, the earlier incarnation of Bolt. Not only is the work of Sanders absent in this book, but his name has also been entirely omitted from the production history. As a historian, this type of revisionism raises my ire, but I don’t know the behind-the-scenes story that necessitated his name being omitted from the book. In the book, Vaz writes that Paul Felix started figuring out the look of the film in 2005. Did Felix and Sanders never speak to one another during Sanders’ tenure as director? Obviously a lot of stuff was figured out when Sanders was still aboard.

In a hint at why Sanders was let go, Lasseter writes in the foreword that in Bolt, “as innovative as the production design is, the artists made sure the style was always serving the story.” My only wish is that the style they ended up using wasn’t so safe and generic. The Disney studio has built a reliable animation brand that hews to the “Illusion of Life” philosophy, but I don’t believe for one second that to achieve that, they need to dumb down their design sensibilities and regress to blandness. As is evident in films like Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians and Lilo and Stitch, the Illusion of Life is not tied to any set Disney style. It’s a flexible idea that can accommodate more creativity and experimentation than the artwork that’s shown in this book. This ‘art of’ book may not have the most interesting or inspiring art, but let’s hope at the end of the day, at least it serves the story, as Lasseter believes it does.

Click here to buy the book on Amazon.

Emru (r.) with sister Tamu

Our friend and colleague Emru Townsend passed away last night after a brave battle with leukemia. Emru was the founder of the print and online magazine FPS Magazine and one of the sincerest, most passionate and articulate animation critics around.

He put up a valiant fight against his illness over the past year, and in doing so he brought awareness about the importance of bone marrow donation. It’s something easy that almost anybody can do, and it can save a life. To learn more about how you can become a bone marrow donor, visit HealEmru.com.

From both Jerry and Amid, we want to offer our sincere condolences to Emru’s entire family, and particularly his sister Tamu who is an active member of the animation community and an important part of FPS’s online presence. Emru will be missed.

Remembrances of Emru are beginning to be posted online:
Richard O’Connor
Matt Forsythe
Penelope
Vicky Tamaru
“StandingInTheMiddleOfLife” (nice writeup)
Dan Tynan
Madeline Ashby
Rufftoon
Dronon
Niall
Mark Mayerson
Chris Robinson
Harry McCracken
Didier Ghez

Emru (c.) with animators Ward Jenkins (l.) and Pat Smith (r.)

I’m allergic to cats so I never wander down the pet food aisle. So imagine my surprise when I found a stack of Disney Aristocats brand cat food on display — and on sale (two for a dollar) — at my local super market this week. For the record, I’ve blogged about Disney Dog and Cat Food before, but the colorful kid-friendly label of this canned Aristocats product really grabbed my attention.

My question: I know the studios have stopped marketing unhealthy food products towards kids - so now they go after their pets? And speaking of healthy Disney food for kids, I couldn’t help but snicker at this awkward sounding item (pictured below) now being sold in England: Mickey’s Fun-Size Bananas!

Sometimes I think I should just blog about oddball cartoon merchandise…

Cartoon voice actress June Foray (Witch Hazel, Granny, Rocky, Natasha) will hang out on Stu’s Show live today at 4pm Pacific Time/7pm Eastern Time. Host Stu Shostack and animation historians and writers extraordinaire Mark Evanier and Earl Kress will ask June about her incredible career - and listeners can call in too. If you miss the show, it will be repeated every day for the next week in the same time slot each day. But listen in today (It’s Stu’s 100th broadcast), call in and speak to a living legend!

I’ve linked to similar films before on the Brew, but I think this is a particularly stellar example of time-lapse/pixilation animation. The choice of photos and editing show a sophisticated eye at work; it’s little surprise then that the person who made it, David Hubert, identifies himself as an animator at DreamWorks. Hubert took 3300 photos in London, and composited them with AfterEffects and Premiere, and set it all to Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” If I were the city of London, I’d license this film from David (and Daft Punk); it’s a terrific advertisement for the city.

(via NotCot and Fubiz)