Author Archives: Amid Amidi

About Amid Amidi

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Rebecca Sugar Gets It On

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Drawing by Rebecca Sugar

Frankly I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: drawings of the Terrytoons characters Sourpuss and Gandy getting it on, drawings of characters from Ed, Edd n Eddy getting it on or drawings of characters from Ratatouille getting it on.

What cannot be denied is that the artist behind all of these, Rebecca Sugar, is ridiculously talented, with drawing skills that are made that much more amazing when one learns that she is a mere twenty years old…she’s certainly an artist with a bright future ahead of her. She also has a website here.

Profiling Joel Trussell

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War Photographer

It used to be that you had to live in Los Angeles or New York to make it big in the US animation scene, but today a whole new breed of artists are creating names for themselves while living far from these animation hubs. Among them is Joel Trussell, of War Photographer fame, who makes his home in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was recently profiled in the Knoxville weekly Metro Pulse. It’s an inspiring read that shows how it’s possible for contemporary animation artists to establish their identity via the Internet and to parlay that online notoriety into a steady stream of work…all while living in Tennessee.

No Need To Create, Just Transcreate

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Powerpuff Girls

The Wall Street Journal has a depressing article about a growing trend in the cartoon world: ‘transcreating’ cartoon characters, in which American cartoons are remade for foreign audiences. A notable example of this is the recently produced Japanese version of the Powerpuff Girls called Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z.

The characters mentioned throughout the piece, like the Powerpuff Girls, Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man, are successful in the first place because their American creators were passionate about and personally invested in the characters and stories that they were creating. It’s a shame that today’s corporations don’t believe that investing in foreign artistic talent could lead to similarly popular creations, and instead are commissioning foreign artists to simply churn out cheap copies of American originals. ‘Transcreated’ cartoon characters may result in short-term profits for these companies but not much else.

Dean DeBlois’ New Film

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sigurros.jpg

Everybody knows what Lilo and Stitch co-director Chris Sanders is up to nowadays, but what about the film’s other director, Dean DeBlois? Apparently, DeBlois has just directed a live-action documentary about the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. The film Heima (Homeland) has been quite well received by critics. Here is a recent New Yorker audio interview with DeBlois and the band.

(Thanks, Jakob Schuh)

C.L. Hartman Animation Reel

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Animation by C.L. Hartman

The grandson of Golden Age Hollywood animator C.L. Hartman has posted a reel onto YouTube of commercials animated by Hartman at John Hubley’s Storyboard and Quartet Films. The reel includes some ultrarare commercials that I’d only seen stills of previously. Lots of beautiful design and funny animation throughout. Also, for the curious, a while back I posted a UPA-era photo of Hartman onto Flickr.

Un Regard Moderne (Paris)

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Un Regard Moderne
Storefront and interior. Click for bigger version

A few months ago, I solicited suggestions from readers about what to see and do while in Paris. I never did a follow-up but today I wanted to write about a highlight of that trip: Un Regard Moderne, one of the coolest bookstores I’ve ever visited. The tiny shop, located at 10 rue gît le coeur 75006 Paris, is a place that claustrophobics would be well advised to avoid. It houses thousands of volumes, mostly related to art, comics and pop culture, in two crowded rooms, with all the books precariously piled atop one another, in seemingly random order, and quite ready to topple at any given moment. The store is cramped so much so that the owner only allows four to five people in the store at any time. When we there, there were only four people and it was quite a challenge moving around.

What impressed me most was the owner’s stock which was extremely up-to-date. In fact, we found many books there that we didn’t find at the better known comic stores in Paris, including titles like Three Trees Make A Forest, I Am 8-Bit and The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.

Also fascinating was the owner’s encyclopedic knowledge of every book crammed into his shop. My travel companions were author and video game designer David Calvo and Marseilles-based musician Guillaume Pervieux, and when my friend David inquired about an obscure graphic novel that he’d been looking for, the owner had dug the book out of one of the piles within a few minutes.

The owner generously allowed me to take a video of his store and I posted it onto YouTube a while back. The quality is fairly poor but it should offer some sense of what the store is like. Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood.

Monte Schulz on the Peanuts Book

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peanutswide1.jpg

Charles Schulz’s son, Monte Schulz, has posted a new in-depth comment on Cartoon Brew detailing some of the family’s specific objections to David Michaelis’ new book. If the book’s gross inaccuracies (which Schulz points out) are true, and I have no reason to believe they’re not, this would be a seriously flawed work of historical research. I feel it’s important to draw attention to the family’s complaints as it provides valuable information to potential readers of the book. It’s also a viewpoint that counters some of the raves that are appearing in the maintream, like this glowing New Yorker review by John Updike.

(Note: To keep the discussion from breaking into numerous threads, comments are closed for this post but can be continued in the other post with Schulz’s comment.)

Earlier Stories:
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
More on the Schulz book

Ty Wong Paintings on Display

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Ty Wong
Ty Wong standing in front of his illustrations for The Wild Bunch at the opening of the show a couple weeks ago. (Matt Petit/©A.M.P.A.S.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences recently opened a new show at their LA headquarters called “The Art of the Motion Picture Illustrator.” The show recognizes the work of three illustrators who worked in the art departments of live-action film studios: William B. Major, Harold Michelson and Tyrus Wong.

To animation fans, Wong is best known as the artist who devised the lyrical watercolor art direction of Disney’s Bambi, but this exhibit examines his film career following his brief stint at Disney. For twenty-five years afterwards, Wong worked at Warner Bros. creating storyboards and illustrated key sets for live-action films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima, Calamity Jane, Rebel Without a Cause, Around the World in 80 Days, Auntie Mame, Harper, and The Wild Bunch. The exhibition runs through December 16 and admission is FREE. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday (10am-5pm) and weekends (noon-6pm). The Academy is at 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA.

Ty Wong Painting
Set design painting by Wong for an unidentified Warner Bros. musical

10K Comments on the Brew!

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Comments Please

We reached a milestone earlier in October that I think is worth mentioning: 10,000 reader comments on Cartoon Brew. We only launched comments in mid-February of this year, and we reached the 10,000 mark in under 8 months, which averages out to around 42 comments a day.

What has surprised both Jerry and I is not just the sheer number of comments but the consistently high quality of participation that we receive from industry professionals, cartoon buffs, and animation students alike. Sure, online discussion by nature lends itself to some silliness, but there’s also a lot of lively, passionate and informed discussion on the Brew. For this the credit has to go to our readership, which certainly must be one of the most knowledgeable animation communities on the Internet.

Comments moderation is not an easy task for us and takes up a significant amount of time. That includes fixing people’s links and formatting, emailing readers when a comment is inappropriate or off-topic, despamming comments that accidentally end up in the spam filter box (over 25,000 pieces of spam to date), and in general, keeping things in order. However, we believe that the effort has been more than worth it; we’ve learned a lot from the comments and feel it adds a valuable dimension to the Brew. So here’s to the next 10,000 comments and beyond.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see what the most commented upon posts were on the Brew. These posts by no means represent the finest comments, but they are revealing in that they highlight what has generated the most reaction amongst our readers. As it turns out, bad animation will do the trick every time.

119 comments: New George of the Jungle in Flash

118 comments: Worst. MoCap. Ever.

116 comments: How Many Licks Does It Take To Make It CG

109 comments: Brew Review: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie Film

108 comments: Here Comes Trouble

105 comments: Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Incompetence

More on the Schulz Book

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Schulz and Peanuts

There’s a lot more reaction appearing online to David Michaelis’ new book Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. In the Wall Street Journal, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson gives the book a positive review, saying that Michaelis has written a “a perceptive and compelling account of Schulz’s life” that “finally introduces Charles Schulz to us all.”

Editor & Publisher has an excellent piece highlighting many of the revelations in the book and the family’s objections to them.

Charles Schulz’s son, Monte, who we’ve already pointed out isn’t pleased with the book, posted a comment on our previous Cartoon Brew post further detailing his objections. Here’s his comment in full:

“The point of objection to this biography of my father is how much is simply untruthful, and deliberately so. There are many factual errors throughout the book; there are people who are give authority to speak about our family who have no insight to do so; and there are so many elements of my father’s life that David deliberately left out of the book, that it really is impossible for anyone outside of our family, or Dad’s circle of friends, to come to any genuine conclusions. I can tell you absolutely that he was not a depressed, melancholy person, nor was he unaffectionate and absent as a parent. Honestly, the quote I’ve really wanted to give the press, after reading both the early of the manuscript and the final book, is this: “The book is stupid, and David Michaelis is an idiot.â€? That said, I had a six year on-going conversation with him about this book, and like David quite a lot. But I was shocked to see the book that emerged, because it veered so drastically away from what he told us he intended to write. Which is why we’ve been so militant in our response. Incidentally, the material David edited out of the book is even more outrageous. The fact is, after reading the book, I decided I’d learned more about David Michaelis than I did about my dad. I found that interesting.”

UPDATE: A new in-depth comment from Charles Schulz’s son, Monte Schulz, as well as his sisters Amy and Jill, can be found in the comments below.

Brickfilms and the Amateur Animation Community

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Brickfilm

There was a front page article in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal about the brickfilm community. Brickfilms is a general description for any film made using LEGO bricks, and most of these shorts employ a stop-motion animation technique. For more information about brickfilming, see the definitive online resource BrickFilms.com.

I wish somebody would do a more in-depth exploration of all the new animation filmmaking techniques that have emerged as a result of today’s abundance and accessibility of digital technologies. Thanks to new ideas like Flash, Machinima, and brickfilming, there are more people producing animation today than there have ever been in the history of the art form. There are easily thousands, if not tens of thousands, of creators who are currently making their own animated shorts. Granted, in most cases these animated pieces are unable to transcend the novelties of their techniques and truly resonate as films, but the simple fact that there are so many people producing animation independently is a notable paradigm-shifting moment in the animation world.

It used to be that animation was the realm of specialists. Even a couple decades ago, an amateur would have to make a significant investment in resources to produce anything. Today, however, any 9-year-old can create animation using the laptop and digital camera in front of them. To my mind, this mainstreaming of animation production is one of the most exciting developments that has happened in years. It has yet to pay off in any appreciable manner but I can’t help and think that with so many young people knowledgeable about the animation process, good things won’t come from it.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the top post on BoingBoing is about the first brickfilm festival in Europe, which will take place tomorrow in Sweden.

(Image at top of this post from the brickfilm Gefunden – Found by GoLeGo. Watch it here)

Cold Rush

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Cold Rush

Cold Rush is a new French student film created by Mikael Lynen, Simon Corbaux, Tristan Urbin and Rémi Certhoux at the Supinfocom school. My enthusiasm for the film was slightly dampened by the plodding pace of storytelling and unsatisfying ending, but the short has a lot going for it including a grand cinematic vision and a well-conceived near-monochromatic production design. As a piece of student CG, it’s undeniably impressive, and from a technical standpoint trumps many professional CG productions. Watch the film HERE (57mb QuickTime file) and read more behind-the-scenes details at CGSociety.com.

(Thanks, Tim Bjorklund)