Just found out about this great interview with Ralph Bakshi that appeared in BOMB magazine. It’s available to read on-line. Smart questions throughout, like:

Morgan Miller: You seem very attracted to garbage! The Billie Holiday music montage sequence in Fritz the Cat when the camera pans slowly across a trash heap in an abandoned lot in Harlem… at first you see broken bottles, syringes, and then it becomes more personal⎯old photos, then entire old photo albums, people’s memories just sitting in the trash. Later, garbage becomes the introduction of Hey, Good Lookin’ where personified pieces of garbage talk to each other about life after death. Even when you moved into the fantasy realm in Wizards, you maintain bleak futuristic worlds built on garbage, where things are rediscovered, like the Nazi remnants that are in that film. It occurs to me that it’s a metaphor for mortality, but not just that; maybe also a metaphor for what a generation throws away and what might be discovered by the next. Or what might just be forgotten.

Ralph Bakshi: I like that, Miller! I’m dead serious about this: who we are, who we used to be, what we’ve been through, what we’ve become⎯it’s very important. We’re all part of a long trail. The scene in Heavy Traffic where the mother is walking through the photographs looking at her uncles⎯my family’s up there. My ancestors. Faded walls, old wood, old paint⎯every fleck of paint is another story, not to be discarded. Stuff like Kindle is so cold. It’s great for reading I guess, but texture and being able to touch stuff is so important. The past is to be learned from and to respect. Too much of it is thrown away out of shallowness or for things that are new and cheap. That’s the thing about this country: money became God. It doesn’t matter how you get it. It’s the reason for lying, cheating, and stealing. In Hey, Good Lookin’, this poor garbage thinks it’s going to go speak to God, but it’s just going into an incinerator. You know what I’m saying?

The interviewer, Morgan Miller, is also a filmmaker. Here’s his delightfully NSFW Vacuum Attraction:

Happy birthday to Japan’s most successful and influential animated filmmaker of all time, Hayao Miyazaki, who turns 70 today! I’ll take the opportunity to recommend this article about Miyazaki from a 2005 edition of The New Yorker.

Greetings from Anatoly Belikov in Ekaterinburg, Russia. The rabbit says, “New year has come! Old year go away!”

Art Grootfontein in Paris:

Le French Bulldog in Tel Aviv:

Karolien Soete in Ghent, Belgium:

Jerry already shared a few of the holiday greetings he received so I thought I’d share a few of my favorites too.

Hands down my favorite greeting of the year: Joe Pelling designed and directed this one for London-based production studio Sherbert. All the models were cut from wood and hand painted (see the making of photos). The spirit of George Pal lives on!

CREDITS
A film by Nicos Livesey, Azusa Nakagawa, Joseph Pelling, and Becky Sloan
Photographed by Thomas Bolwell
Sound by Andrew Kinnear and Joseph Pelling

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Colorado-based filmmaker Corrie Francis Parks depicts snow with an ironic use of sand animation.

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Queens, NY-based David Sheahan, whose short film Together! earlier appeared on Cartoon Brew TV, created this cheery holiday ditty.

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Rio de Janeiro-based artists Cristina Eiko and Paulo Crumbim, who publish a webcomic in both Portuguese and English at QuadrinhosA2.com, created this greeting.

The motley crew pictured above are (left to right) Henry Selick, Bill Kroyer, Jerry Rees, Brad Bird and John Musker circa 1978. The photo comes from Rees’ new personal website which touts his interesting career, but works for us as a fascinating scrapbook of his many film projects. Rees has also posted his early live-action shorts, co-directed with Tim Burton, including Luau (part 1, embed below, featuring animation artists Joe Ranft, John Musker, Brian McEntee, Sue Kroyer, Ed Gombert and Harry Sabin – among others), and Doctor of Doom (which stars Burton himself — his voice dubbed by Brad Bird!)

He has pages devoted to his feature The Brave Little Toaster, his work on the original Tron, the beloved Disney World film Return to Neverland and Warner Bros. Space Jam. There are all kinds of surprises here; well worth exploring if you are a student of the current generation’s early roots.