Cartoon Brew

BARRIER v. KRICFALUSI

You gotta read this e-mail exchange between Mike Barrier and John K. on Barrier's website. Great stuff!

LOONEY TUNES RADIO

There's a website (tobaccodocuments.org) dedicated to information related to the tobacco company litigation of the past several years. Oddly enough, one of the documents on the site is a radio script of the Al Pearce Show from April 11, 1941, with Leon Schlesinger as guest! Since the show had Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan as regulars, they also presented "the first radio showing of 'The Wild Hare'"(sic). Check out image scans of the script here.

Thanks to Eric Wilson for the link.

Ren & Stimpy Tomorrow Night???

Regarding yesterday's item, there seems to be some mass confusion about the airdate of the new REN & STIMPY: ADULT PARTY CARTOON episodes. A Spike TV rep told me this morning that the episodes will not premiere on August 20th and that no airdate is currently set for the new installments. Confusion indeed.

John K. Interview Coming Soon

In the next day or two, I'll be posting an interview with John Kricfalusi about the new episodes of REN & STIMPY: ADULT PARTY CARTOON which premiere August 20th on Spike TV.

Modern Character Design

MUCHA LUCHA creators Lili Chin and Eddie Mort weigh in on my comments from a few days ago regarding modern character design. Says Lili, "So many cartoon characters on TV today look really cool because they are so 'designy' but at the same time it's hard to warm to them as living characters." Read both of their thoughts at the fwak! blog.

A Frank Cartoon

Jim Woodring's trippy comic FRANK is the inspiration for a fun new animated short which can be seen HERE. Taruto Fuyama, the film's director, says "My version focuses on how to depict the movements of the characters accurately in the CG without doing injustice to the beauty of the pictures and global vision found in the original."
(via Tirade)

POPEYE BOOK

Famed Popeye fanatic Fred Grandinetti has updated and expanded his McFarland book POPEYE: An Illustrated Cultural History into a slightly larger, 337 page revised edition. It's a true improvement over his previous effort, with more illustrations, more details on each film (all Paramount cartoons, King and Hanna-Barbera TV incarnations are covered), more on the people behind the comic strip, the comic books, the voice actors, the merchandise, the commercials, censored scenes, the Robin Williams feature, the Fried Chicken chain, why the classic cartoons aren't on video... everything you wanted to know about Popeye but were afraid to ask.

My favorite part of the book is a chart of Popeye heads drawn in the style of each TV animator (now I can tell the difference between Rudy Larriva's Popeye, Ed Friedman's Popeye and Harvey Toombs Popeye!). A labor of love by a true Popeye maniac, Grandinetti's new Popeye volume may not be the last word on Segar's cartoon creation, but it's certainly a thorough overview and worth having.

Chris Sanders' American Dog

The images displayed HERE from LILO & STITCH director Chris Sanders' next feature project AMERICAN DOG are absolutely mouth-watering. I'm not holding my breath that the final film will look nearly as cool, but it's one of those instances where I'd be delighted to be proven wrong. Mike Gabriel has ably demonstrated with his Disney short LORENZO that the sort of style suggested in the AMERICAN DOG concept art (with its painterly texturing and lighting, soft edges around the characters and sophisticated color palette) is more than possible for a finished animated production. It's heartening to know that a Disney feature could potentially look this stellar, and with Chris Sanders at the helm, there's every reason to be hopeful that it actually might.

INNOCENCE

If you are an anime fan, and an Asifa-Hollywood member, you can attend a free screening of GHOST IN THE SHELL 2: INNOCENCE on the Dreamworks lot, with the director Mamoru Oshii in person next Tuesday, August 24th. You must RSVP, bring your Asifa membership card and photo I.D.
Check the Asifa-Hollywood website for more details.

CartoonRetro.com

Of the countless millions of websites floating around the Internet, there is only one which I've ever felt compelled to pay a monthly subscription fee for and that is Shane Glines' CartoonRetro.com. After months of eager anticipation, CartoonRetro launched last June and I'm pleased to report that the site is everything I had hoped it would be and much more. CartoonRetro, simply put, is a daily source of visual inspiration and education. Every weekday Shane posts rare high-quality artwork from the greatest cartoonists and illustrators of the 1920s and 1930s. One day it might be the beautiful children's book illustrations of Vernon Grant, the following day a vintage magazine piece about the art of caricature by William Auerbach Levy, and the next a collection of ESQUIRE spot illustrations by Roy Nelson. Many of the artists featured on the site straddle the border of obscurity and complete anonymity which is completely at odds with the remarkable quality of their artistry. Shane has undertaken the difficult task of rescuing the work of these artists from musty books, tattered magazines and deteriorating microfilm, and painstakingly restoring the art to its full brilliance. The same care that is put into the restoration is also afforded to the presentation. Shane doesn't haphazardly dump a collection of images onto the site, but presents it with thoughtfulnesss and context. By posting a handful of drawings from an artist on any given day, he allows the viewer to truly appreciate, understand and savor the work. Daily updates are often supported with biographical info about the artists and comments about the graphic qualities of the drawings which adds further value to the artwork.

The ultimate purpose of CartoonRetro is not only to build a library of classic cartoons, but for viewers to learn from the artwork that is posted and to apply the lessons to their own projects. To that end, CartoonRetro also features comic and animation projects that Shane and other artists like Katie Rice, Luke Cormican and Fred Osmond are developing exclusively for the site. Each of these artists provides extensive commentary about the development process of their cartoons and specific explanations of how they are being influenced by the works of earlier cartoonists.

CartoonRetro while still in its infancy has already proven to be an invaluable resource. Without any reservations, I can say that it belongs in the bookmarks of every animation artist, illustrator and designer. The spare, yet infinitely complex and creative, beauty of the artwork on CartoonRetro is a refreshing change of pace from the mathematical sterility of today's CG artistry and serves as a daily reminder of what attracted me to cartoons and drawing in the first place. Perhaps the best news for myself and other subscribers is that Shane has committed himself fully to the site and turned CartoonRetro.com into his full-time job and sole source of income. With the type of vision and dedication that he has towards the art of cartoons, I am confident that CartoonRetro will be on the scene for many years to come, and I'll be along for the ride every step of the way.

For a full listing of the site's features, see the Cartoon Retro Tour or jump straight to the Subscription Page.

A Conference About (Character) Design

PICTOPLASMA: The 1st Conference on Contemporary Character Design and Art will take place in Berlin, Germany from October 28-30, 2004. The idea for the conference is intriguing and the website lists an impressive line-up of speakers, but the event also exemplifies a key problem of contemporary character design. A common trait that runs through a startling majority of the sample artwork posted on the conference site is the noticeable absence of personality in the designs. Too many artists today seem overly focused on discovering a graphic solution to characters, in other words the "design" aspect of the equation, while completely neglecting the "character" portion which dictates that the graphics should communicate personality and emotion. The end product is designs that succeed as iconic imagery, perfectly suitable for being printed onto T-shirts and adapted into toys, but unsuccessful as character designs that are meant to engage and entertain audiences.

The very best character designs in animation and comics - to name a few, Grim Natwick's design of Betty Boop, Elzie Segar's Popeye, John Hubley's Mr. Magoo, Marc Davis' Cruella de Vil and Ed Benedict's conception of Fred Flintstone - equally consider both aesthetics and personality and successfully integrate them into a whole, resulting in dynamic combinations of shapes that emote. It is doubtful that this topic will be addressed in much detail at the upcoming event, but the very fact that there's enough interest in character design to generate an entire conference devoted to the subject is a hopeful sign for the future.
(Thanks to Raiinboy for the link)

Little bit of vip

I'm a little late in mentioning issue #6 of COMIC ART magazine, but I just picked it up over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed the piece on Virgil "VIP" Partch, who is one of my all-time favorite cartoonists (the other fave being Ronald Searle). Joel Goldstein's article is well researched and offers many previously unknown biographical details about Partch, as well as insights into his complex personality. The article focuses only on VIP's work through the 1940s and while there is still much to be written about Virgil Partch, this article serves as a fine introduction to his work.

Now for a couple completely random notes related to Partch. In a recent email, Oscar Grillo mentioned a Disney short which sounds mighty entertaining. Here's part of his note: "I 'found' on the Internet an exquisite Donald Duck short, DUCK PIMPLES. It's an absolute beauty, written by Virgil Partch (VIP) and animated by Milt Kahl. It is a real tour de force of beautiful animation and weird ideas." This is incidentally Partch's only writing credit at Disney, which he shares with buddy Dick Shaw. When the short was released in 1945, he had long departed Disney and was already a successful magazine cartoonist. Next is an instance of a cartoon discussion occuring in a most unlikely place. My dentist, a middle-aged Orange County Republican, the type of person who has a photo of George W. framed in his office, redeemed himself on my last visit by telling me that his parents had been drinking buddies with the Partch's and Shaw's in the Fifties. He told tales of how Partch and Shaw formed their own club where they'd preside over wacky events like 'sailing a boat' to Las Vegas and 'driving a car' to Catalina Island. Next time I go in to have my teeth cleaned, I'll try to press him for more Partch-related trivia.

VERY SCARY

"Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" came in 4th place this weekend with $9.4 million in three days. That's more than TEACHER'S PET made during it's entire run... heck, it's more than TRIPLETTES OF BELLEVILLE made in it's entire release, and that was nominated for an Oscar!

Very scary indeed!