Cartoon Brew

TODAY'S ANIMATED FEATURES

It's a big day in Los Angeles, as two oddball 2-D animated features open in local area theatres.

HOME ON THE RANGE is Disney's final film in a series of traditional hand drawn features dating back to SNOW WHITE in 1937. Even if they revive the animation studio someday in the future, this film will be noted as the last of the original line. I liked it, but the reviews have been luke warm. Roger Ebert was not impressed.

TAMALA 2010 opens at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A. - it's a bizarro Japanese anime, sort of a "Hello Kitty" from Hell. Vitagraph Films (American Cinematheque) is putting this cool looking picture in art theatres across the U.S.

BREW RADIO

Brewmmaster Jerry Beck will appear Friday morning on The Connection, a live, daily call-in show that airs on NPR stations nationwide. The program will be broadcast on April 2, from 11am-12noon Eastern Time (8 - 9 am Pacific). It can be heard live on numerous stations nationwide (check here) or on the web. The show will be available on The Connection's website archive.
Beck will be discussing the future of hand drawn animation in film.

A Cartoon Brew-sclusive

APRIL FOOLS!A reliable source from deep within the bowels of the Mouse informs the Brew that Disney is developing a new animated TV series, which wouldn't ordinarily be a big deal, except that this show is based on an original concept by Mr. Michael Eisner himself. The all-CG project, called DIS & EIS, is being kept under tight wraps. An 11-minute pilot is currently in production. The show follows the gentle kids-in-school formula of DOUG and RECESS, but here's the twist: the stars are a 10-year-old Walt Disney and 12-year-old Michael Eisner, who happen to be best friends at a school in Marceline, Missouri (for Disney buffs, that's the actual town where Walt Disney grew up). According to my source, Eisner is insisting that the show exhibit reverence for Walt's legacy and as a result, the characters will stay very true to their actual personalities: Walt will be sort of the oddball goofy creator type who's constantly getting into mischief while Eisner is his smart responsible friend always bailing "the Dis" out of trouble. Reportedly, the mean principal of the school that Dis and Eis attend is a caricature of Roy Disney Jr. There will be plenty of other "cameos" by famous Disney personalities. For example, caricatures of the Nine Old Men's Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston will be used for the school janitors, except that they'll both be black in the cartoon. Frank will be voiced by Damon Wayans and Ollie will be voiced by David Alan Grier. Sound like a winning concept to me.

Take A Long Lunch Tomorrow

Tomorrow's April 1 and that could only mean one thing: the annual Animation Nation meeting in Los Angeles. This year is the sixth edition and it'll take place at 1:30 pm at the Pickwick Center (1001 Riverside Drive, Burbank, California). Food and beverages will be served and everybody will have a chance to speak and vent about the crappy state of the animation biz. No charge but contributions are welcome. For more details, check out this thread at AnimationNation.com.

POLLY AND HER PALS

Here's a terrific on-line collection of Cliff Sterrett's classic comic strip POLLY AND HER PALS. Sterrett's work is what cartooning is all about - personality, humor and appeal. Not to mention Sterrett has an exquisite sense of storytelling, composition, design and color. It's an all-in-one cartooning master class well worth studying. The French website that features these comics also has sections on other fine cartoonists like T.S. Sullivant and Lyonel Feininger.

(Thanks to Marc Deckter for the link)

JOHN CANEMAKER & MARY BLAIR in San Francisco

On Friday, June 25, John Canemaker brings "The Art and Flair of Mary Blair" to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

The widely respected independent animator and animation historian John Canemaker will sign his latest book, THE ART AND FLAIR OF MARY BLAIR, and present a profusely illustrated lecture on designer Blair's life and influential career. The multimedia presentation won acclaim last year at both New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Following an intermission, there will be a rare 35mm screening of the Disney feature ALICE IN WONDERLAND, with color and styling by Blair.

Mary Blair (1911-1978) was one of Walt Disney's most brilliant conceptual designers, helping define the look of such classics as CINDERELLA (1950), ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951), and PETER PAN (1953). Although much of her art veers away from naturalism toward abstraction and Surrealism, she was one of Walt Disney's favorite artists.

The Pacific Film Archive theatre is located at 2575 Bancroft Way near Bowditch Street, Berkeley, California.
For more info, call: 510/642-1412 or check www.bampfa.berkeley.edu Tickets, $4-$8.

Italians offended by SHARK TALE

Big news story of the day:
John Mancini has a beef with some cartoon fish. Mancini is the founder of the Italic Institute of America, which decries what it calls Hollywood's stereotyping of Italians as dumb thugs or murderous gangsters. Now the organization has targeted the upcoming DreamWorks movie "Shark Tale," because some of its villainous sea creatures are played by Italians and have Italian names.
Read the full story HERE.

GLENN BARR & MILES THOMPSON

The BREW mailbox has been flooded with colorful postcards for Artists gallery openings. Here's two of note:

Glenn Barr (Ren & Stimpy, et al) will present new paintings and prints under the title "Haunted World", at the La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Feliz, CA. The Artists reception is Friday April 2nd at 8pm.

A Sick & Twisted favorite, Miles Thompson (Brian's Brain) has a new exhibit "Idol Time" at the Copro Nason Gallery in Culver City. The Artists reception is Saturday April 10th at 8pm.

From Winsor McCay To This...

As long as we're posting examples of inappropriate uses of CG (like the image from the new GARFIELD movie below), here's a look at the DreamWorks primetime animated series FATHER OF THE PRIDE, which will debut in the fall on NBC.

You can see the full image HERE, which also includes the equally grotesque CG versions of Siegfried and Roy. One thing you have to give Jeffrey Katzenberg credit for is that he always manages to defy everybody's expectations. Just when you thought a DreamWorks animated project couldn't become any more unappealing, Katzenberg proves that his lack of visual taste knows no bounds and he produces something like FATHER OF THE PRIDE. I'll be watching at least one episode of the show, if only to see how DreamWorks could blow a reported $2 million per episode and still end up with a cartoon that looks this sad.

THE GARFIELD MOVIE

For those of you who haven't choked on your Scooby snacks yet - here's the trailer for the forthcoming live action/CG GARFIELD THE MOVIE, with Bill Murray as the voice.
I'm just wondering how much mileage is left in this new hybrid genre (CASPER, SCOOBY-DOO, ROCKY & BULLWINKLE, STUART LITTLE, KANGAROO JACK, CATS & DOGS and others). I don't know about you, but I'm tired of it already. And this GARFIELD flick looks horrible.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CARTOON VIOLENCE?

Check out this article posted on THE TOQUE (Canada's version to THE ONION), which asks "Whatever Happened to Wholesome Cartoon Violence"?

SUPERMAN-SEINFELD WEBISODE

As a fan of both SEINFELD and SUPERMAN, I'm delighted with the new combination live action/animation "webisode", premiering today, entitled "A Uniform Used to Mean Something".
Sponsored by American Express, the four-minute film was co-written by Seinfeld and directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man). Patrick Warburton does Superman's voice. There's also a nice Behind The Scenes piece, but it doesn't say who animated Superman (the original AmEx Seinfeld/Superman commercial in 1998 was animated by the Warner Bros. Classic Animation division - these webisodes were animated by UNPLUGGED STUDIOS in Toronto using Flash).

Deep Thoughts For A Monday Morning

"I've always felt that characters should be uncomplicated, then put the complicated things into the animation." - Grim Natwick

"The mechanics of moving the human figure cannot be isolated from the motivational drives and dramatic meaning of any action, without rendering it empty and useless. It is primarily the emotional content of an action that is of interest to an audience, and the goal of animators must be to express this in graphic motion; not merely to move arms, legs and bodies around in space. At this point it will become possible to deal with 'realistic subjects' and make them exciting and believable." - John Hubley

"A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, THE LITTLE PRINCE

"I believe licensing usually cheapens the original creation. When cartoon characters appear on countless products, the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it...I don't want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor's voice, and I don't want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip's world is diminished. CALVIN AND HOBBES was designed to be a comic strip and that's all I want it to be. It's the one place where everything works the way I intend it to." - Bill Watterson, CALVIN & HOBBES

(Thanks to Nick Cross, Harry McCracken and Jim Korkis for the quotes)