A super-cool and incredibly rare 1928 Oswald The Lucky Rabbit Stencil Set sold on ebay today for $1525. Click here for photo gallery of this item, one of the earliest known pieces of Disney licensed merchandise to exist. Would this have sold at that price a few weeks ago?

Heads up for those in Los Angeles area. On Friday (3/3, 7:30pm) the UCLA Film & Television Archive is running a tribute to Comic Art Onscreen. The Friday night program presents a selection of animated cartoons from the silent to early sound era (drawn from the Archive’s own collection, the Museum of Modern Art, Library of Congress, George Eastman House and Columbia Pictures).

Titles include: LITTLE NEMO (1911), DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND: BUG VAUDEVILLE (1921), Fragment from THE CENTAURS (1921), GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914), BOBBY BUMPS STARTS A LODGE (1916), BOBBY BUMPS AT THE DENTIST (1917), INDOOR SPORTS (1921), BREATH OF A NATION (1919), THE BEER PARADE (with Scrappy, 1933), KRAZY KAT GOES A-WOOING (1916), KRAZY KAT AND IGNATZ MOUSE AT THE CIRCUS (1916), THE APACHE KID 1930 (Krazy Kat), FELIX THE CAT IN BLUNDERLAND (1926), FELIX THE CAT WEATHERS THE WEATHER (1926).

A second program (Saturday March 11th, 2006, 7:30PM ) features another rarity, the only non-live-action feature film by Japanese New Wave master Oshima Nagisa (MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE [1983], IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES [1976]). BAND OF NINJAS (1967) is not animated, but rather a filmed manga (comic book). Using sound and montage techniques, Oshima made an action epic by filming the pages of Shirato Sampei’s 16-volume manga classic about bloody revenge and revolt in feudal Japan.(Thanks, Sharon Burian)

I rarely buy dvds, but one of the few that I’m planning to get is the forthcoming GOLDEN AGE OF CARTOONS: CARTOONS FOR VICTORY!. I saw a ‘rough cut’ of the dvd a few months back and it’s a spectacular collection of super-rare World War II-era cartoons from the US and Europe. The group of filmmakers represented on this dvd is stellar: Lou Bunin, Jiri Trnka, Hans Fischerkoesen, John Hubley, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Frank Tashlin, among others. DVD producer Steve Stanchfield is passionate about animated films and puts a lot of care into finding the best prints around and presenting these cartoons properly. The dvd also has commentaries by Cartoon Brew’s very own Jerry Beck, as well as Eric Goldberg and John Kricfalusi. For a mere $10 on Amazon, it’s hard to go wrong with this collection. For more details about what’s on it, check out this review.

Our pal Harry McCracken goes inside Pixar and tells us about it on HARRY-GO-ROUND.

An article in BARRON’S is suggesting that Apple may eventually purchase Disney, sending up stock futures by 6%. I think there’s a good chance of this occurring and said so back in January. Here’s what I’d written about a possible Apple-Disney merger: “If this were Vegas, I’d personally put money on this scenario happening within the next 18-30 months.”

It’s Mary Blair Week!
Guess where?

Yesterday’s NY TIMES (use BugMeNot to bypass registration) had a piece by Charles Solomon about John Canemaker’s Oscar-nominated short THE MOON AND THE SON: AN IMAGINED CONVERSATION. At the end of the piece is this eloquent thought by Canemaker:

The potential for animation to be emotionally expressive and personal has barely been touched. In the future, we’re going to see more personal films, including memoirs and diaries… Animation has been ghettoized as a kids’ medium, which is a waste of its potential for artists who could express larger visions.

(Thanks, Joel)

TACHIGUISHI RETSUDEN is an upcoming Japanese animated film by Mamoru Oshii (GHOST IN THE SHELL) and Production IG. It is yet another example of the type of innovative animated features that are being produced in seemingly every corner of the world nowadays except the United States. I was really impressed with the film trailer. The film’s visuals are comprised largely of digitally manipulated photo cut-outs mixed with some straight-up CG. It’s worth noting that the filmmakers don’t hide the fact that these are flat photos, and the animation style emphasizes the flatness when characters are turned and moved around. The last film I saw that innovated this much with photo cut-outs was Virgil Widrich’s mind-bending FAST FILM.

A synopsis of the film at Twitchfilm.net is both confusing and intriguing for its nuttiness: it is apparently some type of historical comedy/fantasy about “fast-food grifters.” At least that explains why people continuously yell ‘Hamburger’ in the trailer. Catsuka.com offers some other interesting details about the production. The film uses 30,000 photos, taken in only five days, and a lot of the digital animation was created by students. Most of the cast was made up of folks who work in animation: the actors include the CEO of Production IG, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, ESCAFLOWNE director Shoji Kawamori, and storyboard artist Shinji Higuchi. One can sense that the filmmakers and crew were truly having fun on this project. This anything-goes spirit of experimentation and playfulness is one of the primary factors that makes cartoons from the Golden Age of Hollywood animation so appealing, and it’s something that’s largely absent from contemporary animation. It’s nice to see the spirit is alive and well in Japan.

TACHIGUISHI RETSUDEN opens in Japan on April 8. The official website (in Japanese) is HERE.

Well, that didn’t take long. Congrats to our friends at the Weinstein Company for releasing the first CGI bomb of 2006, DOOGAL. The film opened relatively wide in over 2,300 theaters, but managed only $3.6 million for an 8th place finish. The film had a per-theater average of $1,556, the second-lowest per-theater average in the top ten. With over a dozen CG cartoons still on the slate for ‘06, and most of them poorly conceived, DOOGAL promises to be only the first of many flops.

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