Author Archives: Amid Amidi

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Long Drawn-Out Trip by Gerald Scarfe

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Long Drawn-out Trip by Gerald Scarfe

The Lost Continent is a real treasure of a blog and has introduced me to lots of great British animation over the past few months, some of which I should have already known about. One such film is Long Drawn-Out Trip: Sketches from Los Angeles by Gerald Scarfe. The eighteen-minute film was shown on TV only once in its entirety and that occurred 1973 on the BBC. It has a stream-of-conscious flavor as evidenced by this tantalizing four-minute clip.

The film’s lack of distribution is largely due to the fact that Scarfe didn’t obtain clearances to the music he used, which included everything from Jimi Hendrix to Neil Diamond. (Shades of Nina Paley’s problems with Sita Sings the Blues). It’s unlikely he would have ever been able to make the film either had he pursued legitimate channels. Try asking Disney for permission to use “When You Wish upon a Star” when your film has an extended sequence of Mickey smoking a spliff.

In this interview, Scarfe spoke about how the film came about:

Well the BBC in London sent me to Los Angeles, to work on what they thought was a new animation system. It was something called the de joux (ju) system which is spelled dejoux. That was a system started by a Frenchman which was supposed to make animation an easier experience. When I got there I found that it wasn’t a computerized system at all. It was just a system whereby between shall we say frame a and frame e, it kind of mixed through b, c, d, into e. It kind of dissolved from one picture to another. So if one drew a picture it would then dissolve through, or mix through, to the next picture.

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement. But it wasn’t a very successful system in that way. But since I was in Los Angeles, I decided to make the best of it, and I did a kind of stream of consciousness drawing everything I could think of about America at that time. Like, the Statue of Liberty, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Black Power, Mickey Mouse, Coca Cola, Playboy Magazine, sort of a million images all melting one into the other. I was supposed to be there for 10 days, but I stayed for about 6 or 7 weeks. Hence the title, Long Drawn Out Trip. And it was also a kind of a trip, cause it was very much the drug era. And it was a kind of a hallucinatory trip too.

The entire film doesn’t appear to be online, but there are plenty of frame grabs available on the Lost Continent blog.

Artists Want Alternative to San Diego Comic-Con

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Creator Con
Artwork by Jeff Pidgeon

A group of artists frustrated by the San Diego Comic-Con’s lack of emphasis on artists and art are pushing for the creation of an artist-friendly event called “Creator-Con”. They’ve started an informal Facebook page with this mission statement:

This page was created as a forum for the artists, writers, designers, self-publishers, retailers and fans that have become disillusioned and frustrated with what the flagship of comic conventions has become (y’all know the one…in San Diego).

The Creator Con idea was hatched a few years ago by a few exhibitor friends as a reaction to the popular media takeover of a convention that used to celebrate artists and creators. We were tired of being pushed further and further aside each year to make room for the bigger, louder and flashier attractions that had nothing to do with the convention’s humble beginnings. This page hopefully will give us all a platform to get the ball rolling on something new or at the very least, voice our opinions. So let it ring! We want to hear what you have to say.

In only a couple days, membership in the group has swelled to nearly five hundred people, which indicates not only the grassroots support for the idea, but how much discontent there is with the San Diego Comic Con’s treatment of the artist community. Many notable names in animation and comics have joined the group including Kazu Kibuishi, David Silverman, Stephen DeStefano, Scott Shaw!, Richard Sala, Katie Rice and Steve Purcell. Discussions are happening on the page about possible locations for a Creator-Con. Some are suggesting that it should be hosted in San Diego, while LA, Portland, Vegas and the Bay Area are also being name-dropped.

I’m in full support of a Creator-Con. As a former Comic-Con exhibitor (I exhibited three times with artists like Shane Glines, Gabe Swarr and Jim Smith), I eventually came to the realization that the Con wasn’t the most receptive outlet for indie companies and artists. The last time I attended (not as an exhibitor) was in 2007, and I cut my trip short after a day (a Thursday no less!). The emphasis of San Diego had shifted so far away from comics and artists that it was pointless spending any further time there.

In many ways, the very idea of a “comic-con” is outdated. Today, most artists practice across a wide range of artistic disciplines (comics, graphic novels, illustration, fine art, publishing, film, animation, toys, merchandising and branding, etc.). A Creator-Con that is focused around artists and their varied creative endeavors reflects more accurately how the contemporary visual artist thinks and works. The Creator-Con is an idea whose time has arrived–now it remains to be seen who will make it a reality.

UPDATE (6pm ET): Over 1,000 people have now joined the Creator-Con group on Facebook.

Battle of the Sexes: Animated!

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Battle of the Sexes

Bill Plympton and Signe Baumane will present the Battle of the Sexes on Monday, April 12, at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West Third Street, NYC). According to the description:

Famed animators and Woodstock Film Festival Animation Programmers Bill Plympton and Signe Baumane will square off toe-to-toe by showing the funniest, sexiest animated cartoons in a 5-round match to discover which gender makes the hottest cartoons! And get this – the audience gets to decide the winner! Yes! The paying public will end this age – old controversy, once and for all declaring the winner! Screening will be followed by an exclusive Q&A with select animators and programmers.

Representing the women will be the following films:
Teat Beat of Sex by Signe Baumane
Vessel Wrestling by Lisa Yu
Time for Carla by Saray Dominguez
Carnival of Animals by Michaela Pavlatova
Girls Night Out by Joanna Quinn

And on the men’s side:
Chirpy by John Goras
Roof Sex by PES
The Making of Gladiator by Duncan Beedie
Cosmic Honeymoon by Ondrej Rudavsky
How to make Love to a Woman by Bill Plympton

A New Era of Animated Political Ads

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Last weekend’s New York Times discussed a new trend in political ads in which politicians are depicted as grotesque animated caricatures. Two examples they cited are ads that attack Meg Whitman and Barbara Boxer, which I’ve posted below. These would be wonderful if they were made by citizens fed up with the shenanigans of the political elite, but unfortunately, they’re made by special interests groups who are as nasty and agenda-driven as the people they’re lampooning.

(Thanks, Celia Bullwinkel)

Cartoon Brew Site Problems

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Many readers have noticed a malware warning when they’ve come to the site over the last couple days. We’ve traced the issue to our OpenX ad server. The issues affected many sites which run the OpenX server. There is more information about the issue at LegitReviews.com which also experienced the same hack:

A group registered in Russia and constantly moving around Scandavavia on a daily basis using the domain newtickepicker.com has hacked into many of the OpenX Ad servers including ours to insert a plug in. It then places itself into a one pixel unit on a graphic position for an advertisement. The plugin is called “mergedDeliveryFunctions.php.

Our tech guy informs us that no malware was ever added to the site, however, as a precaution, Google flagged all sites using these OpenX invocation codes. We are currently working with Google to get our site relisted as safe. Everything should be back to normal by the end of today. Thank you to everybody who has helped out and sent over screenshots and info about what they’re seeing on their computers.

Moomins and the Comet Chase Trailer

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A trailer for the children’s film Moomins and the Comet Chase, the first stereoscopic 3-D feature out of the Nordic region. It’s being produced by Finnish studio Filmkompaniet Alpha, who previously made the feature Moomin and Midsummer Madness in 2008. The characters are based on Tove Jansson’s classic book and comic characters Moomins which have been the subject of numerous animated TV series and features throughout the years, including a hand-drawn Japanese version of this same Moomin story from 1992 titled Comet in Moominland.

Cold War CGI

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Computer animation from Russia in 1968 (yep, that’s forty-two years ago!):

A group of Russian physicists and mathematicians with N. Konstantinov in the head of it created mathematic model of the cat and its moving and realized this model in the program for the computer “BESM-4″. Computer printed hundreds of frames on the paper using alphabet symbols and then they were converted to the cinefilm.

(Thanks, Mark Newgarden)

Lipsett Diaries Trailer

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An enticing trailer for Lipsett Diaries, a short directed by Theodore Ushev (Drux Flux, Tower Bawher). It’s rare to see animated imagery with such substance and beauty–so intensely powerful–and it’s only the trailer:

[Lipsett Diaries] depicts the maelstrom of anguish that tormented Arthur Lipsett, a famed Canadian experimental filmmaker who died at the age of 49. His descent into depression and madness is explored through a series of images as well as sounds taken from Lipsett’s own work.

The film is written by Chris Robinson, the artistic director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival; this marks his first major involvement in the production of an animated film. LipsettDiaries.net has more background about Lipsett and the film, including a fascinating tidbit about the influence of Lipsett’s work on George Lucas and Star Wars. The film is in competition at Annecy this year, and something tells me it might be selected for Ottawa too.

Megamind Teaser

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Here’s the teaser for a godawful looking low-budget European co-production… waitasec…my bad…this is DreamWorks’s Megamind. By now, I’ve come to expect very little from DreamWorks product, but this one strikes me as being even blander and clumsier than their usual bland and clumsy style. It looks like a slapped together patchwork of CG cliches, so much so that in these clips the characters appear uncomfortably detached from their background environments. The strain of a three-films-a-year schedule is becoming painfully evident.

Annecy 2010 Film Selections

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Let's PolluteLet’s Pollute by Geefwee Boedoe

Yesterday, the Annecy International Animation Festival announced the selections for its 34th edition, which takes place June 7 through 12. This is a milestone year for the world’s oldest continuously running animation festival as it marks its fiftieth year of existence. The Annecy site has the complete list of selections for shorts, TV series, music videos and commercials. Feature film selections will be announced next month. Their site states that 48 animated features were submitted. Wow!

Of note: one of only two American films in the short film category is Let’s Pollute by Geefwee Boedoe, who designed the titles to Monsters Inc.. There’s a brief but intriguing Cartoon Modern-esque trailer on IMDB.

Also, in the graduation film category, I’m delighted to see that Jake Armstrong’s The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9! was accepted into competition. The film had its online debut on Cartoon Brew TV last year. It makes us feel good knowing that Brew TV shorts continue to excel at festivals after their online premieres. Similarly, another Brew TV premiere, David Sheahan’s Together! made it into Slamdance earlier this year. Great work guys!

La Fete by Malcolm Sutherland

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A sketchbook-style piece (with many funny moments) from Malcolm Sutherland whose consistently original works are positioning him as one of Canada’s top indie animators. Description from his Vimeo page:

[The film] takes a look at people at a “La Fete Nationale” celebration in Montreal. The film was an independent production, directed and animated by Malcolm Sutherland with music by Kevin Kardasz, and was produced with financial assistance from The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

TALKBACK: Devin Clark’s Ugly Americans

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Ugly Americans

Tonight Comedy Central debuts a new animated series Ugly Americans. The show was created by New York animator Devin Clark. Here’s a short interview with him about how the show made the leap from a webseries into a TV show. The Flash-animated series was made at Augenblick Studios in Brooklyn and Cuppa Coffee in Toronto. If you’ve watched the show, please share your thoughts below.