After I did this interview with Canada’s National Post about trends in feature animation, I got to thinking about whether there might be the potential for three stop-motion Oscar nominations this year. That scenario is beginning to look like a distinct possibility with three top-notch contenders: The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Mary and Max and Coraline. Since the inception of the Animated Feature Oscar, there have been only two stop-motion nominees, Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which took home the Academy Award in 2005.

Fox has announced that they are developing a primetime animated series with actor Matthew McConaughey based on his brother’s life. The show, Rooster Tales, is about “a beer-swilling, redneck sheriff who marries a much younger woman from Mexico.” According to McConaughey, “My brother’s life is so unbelievable, we had to animate it.” If this show doesn’t end up happening, you can always look forward to the Gordon Ramsay animated series that is being shopped around by Toronto’s Cuppa Coffee Studios. The brains behind that show promise to take “the essence of who he is and have a bit of fun with it.”

(via Animation Guild blog)

An impressive three animated films reached the top ten at the North American box office last weekend. Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol held steady in the number five spot with $15.8 million. Its total after four weeks stands at nearly $105M. In its second weekend, Planet 51 dropped to 7th place with $10.2M and a total of $28.5M. The film’s performance hasn’t been as disastrous as Astro Boy and should end its run in the mid-$40M range. Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox went wide and settled for ninth place. It took in $7M and boosted its three-week total to $10M. The film had a better per-theater average than Planet 51 ($3,426 vs. $3,367), but it’s a disappointing performance for what I feel is one of the most charming and unique animated films in recent memory. Placing outside of the top 10, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog raked in $786,000 from just two theaters. Inflated ticket prices at the two theaters account for the large box office take. The film’s real test will be in a couple weeks when it goes wide, though there appears to be little doubt that Princess and the Frog will be a success.

Last night a friend gave me an early Christmas gift of an old issue of Street & Smith’s PIC magazine, cover dated April 4th, 1939. PIC is an odd, oversized LIFE magazine knock-off, with plenty of articles covering Hollywood and Broadway. This issue featured a 3-page spread on the current (and last) Silly Symphony short, The Ugly Duckling (which was released on April 9th). I scanned the pages for you (click thumbnails below to read), but please excuse the fact that my scanner was barely able to scan the oversize pages. It’s a nice pictorial, giving the public a glimpse behind the scenes with story sketches and model sheets – once again stating that Disney cartoons are “never written, but drawn”.

(Thanks, Mark Trost)

This 1970 German documentary on Robert Crumb contains rare footage of Ralph Bakshi in his studio during the making of Fritz the Cat. Young Ralph is shown in the studio, walking through New York and looking at one of his animators flip through drawings. The documentary was loaded onto YouTube in three parts (embeded below) and is NSFW (not safe for work, due to naked hippies). Bakshi first appears a little after 6:30 in part one:

(Thanks, Rogelio Toledo)

This week’s round-up of animation-related comic strip gags:

Mark Tatulli’s Lio from Friday Nov. 27th.

Mike Peter’s Mother Goose and Grimm from Wednesday November 25th.

Above: Arlo and Janis from last Sunday November 22nd. Click panel above to read entire strip. Below: Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater from Friday, 11/27.

If you spot a national comic strip making a clever reference to animated cartoons of any era, forward the link to us for our weekly round-up.

(Thanks this week to Wayne Daigrepont and Jim Lahue)

Oswald Iten has a sweet and short observation on his blog Colorful Animation Expressions about how Eric Goldberg is incorporating a bit of Chuck Jones’s drawing flair into his design of Louis in The Princess and the Frog.

Gene Deitch has written this plea before, but he’s not ready to give up hope. The first cartoon he ever directed – for UPA no less – is apparently a lost film. Writes Gene:

“The short animated film that I consider my seminal work appears to be lost and gone forever. It is not listed on any roster of animated films. Technically, it does not exist. The only evidence that it ever did, beside my word and a very few living witnesses, is a magazine article in the also vanished Colliers magazine, with one barely representative illustration (above, click to see it larger).”

The name of this hopelessly obscure little film is also weirdly surrealistic: HOWDY DOODY AND HIS MAGIC HAT. Surrealistic because the film had nothing to do –really – with the grotesque television puppet Howdy Doody. So what is the origin of this artistic tragedy? Here’s the story: The Howdy Doody production organization, Kagran Corp, paid us at UPA-New York, in 1952, to make the film, hoping to establish their string puppet star into a movie star. We disappointed them. They felt we screwed them, and they got the ultimate revenge: They destroyed the negative. They destroyed my seminal work of animation art! I ultimately got that information from a most reliable source: my best friend, and the one-time voice of Howdy Doody and his entire gang, Allen Swift. Allen told me that Bob Smith, the creator of Howdy Doody, hated my film so vehemently that he ordered it wiped it off the face of the earth!

What had we done, and why? We, the then masters of modern animation – the purveyors of progressive design, got it into our eggy heads to influence Kagran to transform Howdy Doody with elegant graphics; to give children something better than the schlocky look of their immensely popular TV show. To this day I don’t know what made us think we could get away with it. We were delighted to take Kagran’s money, and the opportunity it gave us to show our stuff.

When I claim my so-called HOWDY DOODY film is a work of art, I don’t mean that it was all my art. Cliff Roberts was the graphic designer, and Duane Crowther the animator, and I can’t even remember the name of the great young avant garde composer. We were all proud of our film, feeling it was a landmark, that would not only rejuvinate the ugly H.D. but would become a classic film for us.

My personal contribution was partly the storywritten in collaboration with my long-time friend, William Bernal, ( a cowboy rough-rider variation on the magic talisman that endows victory, but that is lost and forces the hero to win without it), plus my visual conception, layout and direction. Coping with the low budget, I decided to do it as paper cut-out animation with special camera effects of my own invention, which became the basis of my filming technique throughout my career and to this day. That’s why the ‘HOWDY DOODY AND HIS MAGIC HAT film is still so important to me. Others have since done these same multiple exposure depth effects, overlapping dissolves and backlit glows since those early days before computers existed, but without a copy of this simple little 1952 bag of tricks filmette, how can I prove I did it first?

When I left UPA New York to pursue other glories, I did manage to get a 16mm print, and I eventually brought that print with me on my first trip to Prague, 50 years ago in 1959 – to impress the communist-repressed locals my skills. It worked, and I won my incredible wife in the process. But in that first trip, nothing like that was assured. I had only a few days to stay here, and according to US Customs regulations at the time, I could not carry films to America in my luggage, so the Czechoslovak Air Cargo outfit shipped my film back to Bill Snyder’s office. It arrived. It was not confiscated by the Czechs, yet when I returned, Snyder could not find it. I had my mind set on more urgent matters, and assumed it would turn up. It never did.

Snyder and his assistant repeatedly told me the print could not be found. I had returned to Prague and had no chance to get to New York during that time – the early 1960s. When I did get there, I could not find it in the Rembrandt Film’s store room. Later, after Snyder died and his company was taken over by his son Adam, our close friend, neither he could find it.

So this possibly lone 16mm film print slipped from my grasp. Many colleagues tried to locate a print, but to this day, nearly 50 years later, it appears to be hopeless. So my first UPA film, “Directed by Gene Deitch,” seems to be lost forever.

Only the Kagran Corporation, now also defunct, could have derived satisfaction, that this brazen little animated movie, which dared to meddle with the design and name of their beloved character, has been erased from history! – Gene Deitch

If one 16mm print existed, surely others were struck from the negative. And what of the negative, or any original art? If anyone has any clues as to the existence of anything related to the film (not the Little Golden Book), please contact us.

For those enjoying Fantastic Mr. Fox and all others who might want to catch up on the history of stop-motion animation, I’m happy to announce the release of Stop Motion Matinee from my friend Tom Stathes. This is his first professional release through his Cartoons On Film website. It comes complete with beautiful packaging designed by the infamous David Gerstein and produced in collaboration with Ray Pointer of Inkwell Images. This DVD collection is an exploration of early stop-motion animated films and includes high-quality transfers of these historic classics:

The Automatic Moving Company (Bozzetti, 1912)
Revenge of the Cameraman (Starewicz, 1912)
Dinosaur and the Missing Link (O’Brien, 1917)
Chip in the Land of Whiz (Kinex Studios, 1929)
Creation (O’Brien, 1931)
and concluding with Starewicz’s surreal mini-feature masterpiece, The Mascot (1933).

Read a full description, complete with synopses and images, and see a video trailer on Stathes’ blog. For ordering info visit cartoonsonfilm.com

It’s becoming an annual tradition in Los Angeles – just as last year, the Cinefamily/Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Ave. is running the classic Lou Bunin stop motion/live action Alice In Wonderland. Made in 1949, but released in 1951, the film was originally suppressed by Disney for fear of its potential upstaging of their own animated Alice. This rare showing of the beautiful MOMA-restored 35mm print will screen Saturday night at 5pm and 7:30pm. For advance tickets, a clip from the film and more info, click here.

A sweet little piece from Laurent Clermont

I am happy to announce the creation of a new resource for cartoon research: The Early Animation Wiki. This site is the creation of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates at the University of Toronto, and is designed to collect data on the early days of film and television animation. Nic Sammond, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, says:

“The goal of this wiki is to support a robust community of scholars, historians, and collectors of animation-as well as animators-who can share their wisdom and knowledge about this rich and amazing art form. The Early Animation Wiki is attempting to chart the beginnings of animation, with a focus on the careers of animators and the rise (and sometimes fall) of studios. That this leads toward the present day is inevitable, but our initial focus is on building a useful tool for studying the early days of animation.

“It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say the website is ready for use. The Early Animation Wiki is now online, but the first thing it needs is contributors. As you will see, many of its entries are incomplete, and there are quite a few entries missing as well. Also, it isn’t yet as open as other wikis. We hope eventually to add video content and more graphic features to what is, at the moment, a very text-based resource. What we need from you now is the benefit of your knowledge, expertise, and critical and constructive suggestions. I hope you will lend as much as you can.”

if you’d like to contribute, contact Sammond via the site.