Author Archives: Amid Amidi

About Amid Amidi

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Animation Industry: West Coast vs. East Coast

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NY animation studio

Last week I had the pleasure of being the guest speaker for Dave Levy’s animation career class at SVA (School of Visual Arts). It was a lively conversation, owing to Dave’s skillful moderation and plenty of excellent questions and comments from the SVA senior class. A significant portion of our discussion revolved around comparing and contrasting the Los Angeles and New York animation scenes. Dave Levy has summarized and expanded upon that class discussion with this post on his blog. It’s a thought-provoking read for artists both east and west.

Marcell Jankovics Animation Used In A Super Bowl Spot

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Licensing old songs has been a staple of TV advertising in recent times, but could licensing animated shorts become the next trend in the world of commercials? Brew reader Joshua points out that a GMC Yukon Hybrid commercial aired during yesterday’s Super Bowl repurposed animation from Marcell Jankovic’s 1975 Oscar-nominated short Sisyphus. Watch the commercial above.

The message delivered is not entirely effective but that’s not the fault of Jankovics’s animation, rather in how they decided to use it. In fact, it’s to Jankovics’s credit that a short film he made over thirty years ago looks as fresh and vital as any contemporary piece of animation. So who’s next? Will other ad agencies take a cue and begin making use of visually striking animated shorts like Norman McLaren’s Begone Dull Care or John Hubley’s The Adventures of an *? Considering how well some of these films hold up graphically, and also the fact that the average TV viewer has never seen these films, there are a lot of fascinating possibilities.

And speaking of Marcell Jankovics, last week I wrote about his rarely seen (but must-see) animated feature Fehérlófia. The comments in that post are well worth reading including a particularly nice commentary about Jankovics’s work by Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung.

“It’s Mine”

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It

Not only was it a really good Super Bowl game, but Coca-Cola scored a touchdown with a terrific animation-related commercial titled “It’s Mine,” starring Underdog, Stewie from Family Guy, and, well, you’ll just have to watch to see the third character. Everything about this spot just works: an unlikely mash-up of cartoon characters, a complete story told in one minute with a sweet feel-good ending, and funny filmmaking throughout (even the shot selections are humorous). In fact, the non-animation crowd that I watching the game with actually cheered at the commerical’s ending. There’s something that doesn’t happen often.

Credits for the spot, which mixes live and CG, can be found at Duncan’s TV Ad Land, and an in-depth analysis of the commercial can be found in this blog post by Richard Buran. But before you go any further, watch it below.

Badflavr.com by Arthur Metcalf

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An impressive young talent who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting since moving out to NY is Arthur Metcalf. A self-taught animator, his first short, Fantaisie in Bubblewrap (2007) has become an audience favorite at the few festivals it has played at so far. Today, Metcalf released a new one-minute hand-drawn cartoon exclusively online, Badflavr.com, starring Kitteh and Puppeh. Watch it below. The humor derives from the seemingly indefatigable lolcatz, but even if you’re becoming worn out from that meme, the cute kitty really sells the piece. The cat’s typing skills and two-pawed mouse usage garnered a good laugh from me because it’s so skillfully and humorously animated. More about Arthur Metcalf at MetcalfLovesYou.com. His experimental “holiday card” on YouTube is also worth a view.

Essential Viewing: Art Babbitt Documentary

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Mathieu Vierendeel has posted onto YouTube the fascinating 1987 documentary Animating Art which examines the life and art of legendary animator Art Babbitt. The 40-minute film includes commentary from Babbitt himself, as well as interviews with Richard Williams and Andreas Deja. It’s a terrific intro to Babbitt’s work that leaves one wanting to hear and see more about the master animator. Part 1 is below, the rest of it can be viewed here.

It’s a Cartoon Modern World

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Dear Brew readers, please indulge this shameless late-night post. I discovered a new fact tonight: nothing perks one up at 1:30am like walking by MoMA and seeing your book in their store window display. I snapped a couple phonecam shots for posterity.

Cartoon Modern at MoMA

It’s equally exciting to know that Cartoon Modern is extending its reach all over the globe. It was a delight to hear Paco Calderón, a cartoonist from Mexico City, state in a new Amazon review that Cartoon Modern was his personal “book of the year.” And on a recent trip to Japan, Christopher Butcher discovered that my book was on display in the country’s largest bookstore, the flagship Kinokuniya Books. He snapped the pic below showing it alongside some fine company: The Art of Ratatouille and the Fantagraphics Peanuts reprints.

Cartoon Modern at Kinokuniya

Of course, a book is no use if it just sits in a bookstore. Thankfully plenty of artists are putting it to good use. Guillermo García Carsí, the co-creator, director and designer of the exemplary CG preschool series Pocoyo told me that after going through Cartoon Modern he was inspired to create a stylized Flash-animated segment for a recent episode. He sent a few stills which I’ve posted below. Also be sure and check out his new website GuillermoGarciaCarsi.com which features Pocoyo and non-Pocoyo animation as well as plenty of his eye-catching illustrations.

Pocoyo

The accompanying Cartoon Modern blog is also inspiring artists. For example, Adam Garcia of Philly-based design studio The Pressure posted onto Flickr this page of studies based on images from the blog.

Cartoon Modern studies by Adam Garcia

Saving the best for last, here is an intriguing sight: knitted versions of the cover’s Ernie Pintoff/Fred Crippen-designed characters.

Cartoon Modern scarf

Why are they knitted? Because I’m now the proud owner of this awesome one-of-a-kind Cartoon Modern scarf I received from my friend, filmmaker Heather Harkins. It’s the perfect complement to my Mary Blair boxers. Thanks, Heather!

Cartoon Modern scarf

Marcell Jankovics’s Fehérlófia

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Every so often I find out about such an awesome piece of animation that I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never heard about it before. Tonight was such an instance when my friend Joshua Smith introduced me to the 1982 Hungarian animated feature Fehérlófia (aka Son Of The White Mare) directed by the legendary Marcell Jankovics. (Note: Other websites peg the film’s release date as 1980 and ’81. If anybody knows for sure, let us know.)

Admittedly I’ve never followed Jankovics’s work very closely. Like most indie animation fans I’m familiar with his award-winning short Sisyphus (warning: unintentionally NSFW soundtrack) and that’s about all. I had no idea that he’d also directed features, especially one as daringly experimental as this one. The first bit of Fehérlófia that I watched was this clip:

After watching this, I thought there’s no way there could be an entire film that maintains this visual intensity and innovation throughout. Then a search on YouTube revealed that the entire film is posted in eight parts and in fact it’s a pretty damn amazing piece of work. Visually, it’s rooted in a pastiche of late-’70s/early-’80s graphic styles yet it also manages to look remarkably fresh and contemporary. This ten-minute segment blew me away:

What the film lacks in the type of nuanced character animation that we demand from our US animated features, it more than makes up for with its experimental graphic animation and sweeping artistic vision. Joshua Smith tells me that he’s working to create an English fansub of the film. I hope he makes that available online so we can all learn if the story is as fascinating as the artwork.

Visions of Frank dvd

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Visions of Frank

Visions of Frank is a dvd that came out last year collecting eight animated shorts by Japanese animators, all based on Jim Woodring’s wondrous comic creation Frank. The 45-minute dvd, which sells for $25 on Woodring’s website, also comes with a 16-page booklet, and includes Woodring’s own animated short Whim-Grinder. More info from the website:

VISIONS OF FRANK collects 8 wild Frank animations made by some of Japan’s most innovative and idiosyncratic filmmakers: Taruto Fuyama, Eri Yoshimura, art unit COCOA, DROP INC., Masaki Naito, Kanako Kawaguchi, Naomi Nagata. Each piece is an interpretation of a classic Frank comic and is scored by musicians from Japan and the USA. The films run the gamut of animation techniques: 3D CG, paper craft, clay, iron sand and traditional cel 2D…For each animation, you are able to choose between the original music and the newly composed music by other musicians. Participating musicians include James McNew (from Yo La Tengo), The Coctails, Dame Darcy, Kicell, Milk Yabe, and others.

A number of the shorts, if not all, are viewable on YouTube including this fine one:

Lili Chin and Eddie Mort Abandon Flash

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Flash error

Everybody has been jumping on the Flash bandwagon these past few years, but could 2008 be the year that animators begin abandoning the infamously buggy software for a more stable and artist-friendly program? Lili Chin and Eddie Mort, the creators of one of the earliest Flash-animated TV series ¡Mucha Lucha!, have announced on their blog that they’re through with Flash. The creative duo is currently wrapping up a feature in Flash called Los Campeones de La Lucha Libre, but they say that beginning with their next project, a short for Cartoon Network Asia, they’ll be switching to Toon Boom’s Harmony. The statement on their blog reads:

“Goodbye Macromedia Flash. After 8 years we are truly over you. Those buggy filters you tantalisingly tempted us with in Flash 8 were the last straw. And you got an ANNIE AWARD for your inadequate software? We’re looking forward to working in some new kind of HARMONY for Rocquita.”

Is this an isolated incident or has the exodus begun?

Lost Classics from Zagreb Film DVD & Contest

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Zagreb Films

Last year saw the release of lots of rare animation (Popeye, Lantz cartoons, Oswald, etc.) but perhaps none so rare as a dvd that came out last winter: “Lost Classics from Zagreb Film”, a collection of many of the studio’s most experimental and distinctive early shorts, almost none of which have ever been released before. (Full disclosure: I was an unpaid consultant on the set and the dvd follows very closely the lineup of films that I’d suggested.)

There are no words to describe how happy I become when I watch these films. The Zagreb filmmakers were willing to try just about anything, and their films are packed with tons of inventive visual ideas. Sometimes the risks they took paid off handsomely, sometimes they flopped. One can’t help but admire their fearlessness though. They managed to create these films with limited resources, limited budgets and next to no animation training. The animators were self-taught and as a result their timing and the way things move can be utterly bizzare. Concepts like squash-and-stretch were foreign to a lot of these artist so they figured out graphic solutions of their own and came up with some wildly eccentric styles of movement in the process. Thematically, the films tackle a broad range of subject matter from alienation to militarization, topics that were hardly common fare in animated shorts of the time.

There is a downside to the dvd: The prints, which come directly from Zagreb Films, are unrestored and in fairly poor shape. This is doubly a shame because color and design are such an integral part of these films. Nevertheless, these films have never been available on any home video format, and not having any major studio support behind them, don’t hold your breath for a restored edition of these films anytime soon. This dvd is the only way you’re going to be able to see the following films:

Opening Night (1957)
Alone (1958)
The Great Jewel Robbery (1959)
The Inspector Returns Home (1959)
At the Photographers (1959)
La Peau de Chagrin (1960)
A Man and his Shadow (1960)
The Boy and the Ball (1960)
Perpetuum & Mobile, Ltd. (1961)
Boomerang (1962)
Typhus (1963)

The distributor, Rembrandt Films, also recently released DuÅ¡an Vukotić on DVD, a collection of the works of Zagreb’s most famous director. Owning this and the “Lost Classics” dvd will give anybody a solid collection of the studio’s early work. The films on the Vukotić dvd are:

Playful Robot (1956)
Cowboy Jimmy (1957)
Concerto for a Machine Gun (1958)
Revenger (1958)
The Great Fear (1958)
Piccolo (1959)
My Tail is My Ticket (1959)
The Game (1963)
A Stain on His Conscience (1968)
Ars Gratia Artis (1969)

UPDATE: Thanks to all who entered. The contest is now over. The correct answer was DuÅ¡an Vukotić’s 1961 short Surogat (also known as Ersatz and The Substitute). The two winners are Scotty Arsenault and Gail Veillette.

And here are a few frame grabs from the animated shorts on the “Lost Classics from Zagreb Film” set:

Zagreb Films

Zagreb Films

Zagreb Films

Zagreb Films

Zagreb Films

Zagreb Films

Zagreb Films

Minotauromaquia by Juan Pablo Etcheverry

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Minotauromaquia is an intriguing stop motion short I saw a few years back in Annecy. It’s directed by Spaniard Juan Pablo Etcheverry. The short will appeal most to those who are familiar with Picasso’s work, though the message should be clear to all. Jeff Hasulo’s blog Hydrocephalic Bunny also offers some nice thoughts about the film.

A Child’s Metaphysics by Koji Yamamura

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Animation by Koji Yamamura

According to the website of Koji Yamamura, he has completed a new short entitled A Child’s Metaphysics. The film, which premiered last October, is just beginning to hit the festival circuit. The synopsis of the film is intriguing if slightly confusing:

A child whose head is numerals, a child who winds his own face and has it under his arm. What was left is his identity, a child whose eyes are provided by fishes, a child who lies down on the floor and head-butts his identity, a child who cannot say anything because of a zipper across his mouth. He undo the zipper but under it is another zipper…

Ecology and philosophy of children with sadness and humour.

Yamamura has emerged as perhaps the finest independent Japanese animation director of his generation. Though he’s been creating animated films since the late-’80s, he didn’t begin attracting worldwide attention until 2002 when his short Atama yama (Mt. Head) became a huge hit on the festival circuit and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then, he’s turned out a couple of other winners—The Old Crocodile (2005) and last year’s Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor, which I’ve heard is nothing short of incredible. You can familiarize yourself with a couple of his best known works below.

The Old Crocodile

Atama yama

Ratatouille vs. Persepolis

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The Oregonian has a short but interesting article about what animation artists in Brad Bird’s home state, Oregon, think about the Oscar race between Ratatouille and Persepolis. The piece offers quotes from animators Joan Gratz and Will Vinton, who believe Ratatouille deserves to win, while Joanna Priestley and LAIKA recruiter Tom Knott are in the Persepolis. camp. I agree with Tom Knott who says that recognizing the accomplishment of Persepolis will have long-term benefits for the industry as a whole, and will hopefully encourage animated films with more substance and personal styles of storytelling. Knott says in the article:

“‘Ratatouille’ has some of the best animation to appear in decades, and Brad did a great job telling a story. He’s a friend of mine. But personally, I’d like to see ‘Persepolis’ win just because it’s an independent film, and it’s lower-budget. I think it gives hope to other filmmakers trying to do things on lower budgets that are more personal. So if something like ‘Persepolis’ can find an audience, that’s good.”