Comic book and animation artist Kyle Baker was recently interviewed in Mike Manley’s excellent DRAW! magazine, and Mark Mayerson posted an excerpt from that interview on his blog. I couldn’t resist sharing the excerpt as well because it’s an excellent example of how some artists are wisening up to the games of the animation studios and refusing to sell themselves out for a few pennies. Kyle Baker says:

[Warner Bros. was] developing Why I Hate Saturn [one of Baker's graphic novels] as a TV show and when that fell apart, I stayed out there for seven years, doing screenplays and all that junk. And in the old days of Hollywood, they used to give you a whole lot of money up front. Like, when I was at Warner Brothers, they’d give me a big pile of money, a nice contract, and they totally ruined the work, made the script suck. The show never went on, I don’t get the script back, etc., etc. But at least I got a big pile of money, and I bought a house. It was worth it. But with the kind of deals that at least I’m getting offered now in animation – I don’t know if this is the general deal, but the people are coming to me with is, like, “Okay, here’s what we need. We need you. We don’t really have much of a development budget anymore, so we want you to practically develop the whole thing before you bring it in. Then we’ll pay you about ten grand, and we’ll make this thing, and if it succeeds, we get everything, and you get nothing. And if it fails, you get nothing.” That’s all you end up with now, is, like, ten grand. And it’s easy enough to find ten grand somewhere, so that you don’t have to give everything up and watch them ruin your script. You know what I mean? I mean, the last thing I did like that, I did a Fox pilot, and that’s how much I made, ten grand. It wasn’t worth it to me.

My book CARTOON MODERN: STYLE AND DESIGN IN FIFTIES ANIMATION is starting the new year with a bang. Today’s NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW has a plug for the book along with a great UPA image reprinted from the book. The link above takes you to the online blurb, but below is how it appeared in the actual paper.

And then, the new January/February issue of PRINT MAGAZINE, which is just hitting newstands, has a review of the book by none other than animation historian extraordinaire John Canemaker. I’m not convinced that my book or my writing deserve so many kind words but who am I to argue with John Canemaker? You can click on the image below to read his review.

To celebrate the occasion of these two CARTOON MODERN plugs, I just uploaded a bunch of storyboards and concept paintings from Ward Kimball’s classic short TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953) to the CARTOON MODERN blog. Trust me, you’ll want to download the hi-res versions of this stuff for your personal collection.

Softlightes “Heart Made of Sound,” a music video by Kris Moyes, is one of the most fun and playful pieces of stop-motion I’ve seen in a while. Visual eye candy as only possible in animation.

(via Kottke.org)

This is the sad type of story that obviously no one would like to be reporting. After losing their home during Hurricane Katrina, filmmaker/animator Helen Hill and her husband, Dr. Paul Gailiunas, returned to New Orleans last August. Yesterday morning, Helen Hill was shot and killed in her home and her husband was also shot, in an apparently random act of violence. An AP story says Hill was the fifth person violently killed in New Orleans in a span of 14 hours. All the sad details about her death can be found in the South Carolina paper THE STATE.

Hill, 36, earned her Master of Fine Arts in experimental animation from CalArts in 1995. Her animated shorts screened at numerous festivals, and in 2004 she received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Program for Media Artists for THE FLORESTINE COLLECTION, a film “reflecting on handcrafted work and race in New Orleans through the story of a collection of hand-sewn dresses and the woman who made them.” In addition to her filmmaking, Hill taught filmmaking and animation to youth and adults, and served as visiting artist at the California State Summer School for the Arts and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
(Thanks, Heather Harkins)

UPDATE: Ottawa International Animation Festival director Chris Robinson writes a beautiful tribute to Helen Hill.

More blog remembrances of Helen are HERE, HERE and HERE.

Brew reader John Carter offers a memory of Helen:

I was saddened to hear about Helen’s passing. I knew Helen and her family, I went to school with Helen at Dreher High School in Columbia, SC and her mother Becky Lewis was my fourth and fifth grade teacher. Mrs. Lewis was perhaps one of my favorite teachers that I ever had.

Helen loved film and animation and I remember seeing a film that their family made at their home in our fifth grade class. It was a stop motion and live action piece. Very creative. In fact if there are ever two words that could sum up Helen’s character it would be creative and loving. She was one of the most genuine people I have ever met, kind and very sincere. I had lost touch with the family over the years and did not know she was in New Orleans.

I wanted to share with you a story about her mother, and in a way, Helen. You see, we watched Helen’s homemade film in class as a preparation for an assignment from her mother. We were going to make an animated film as a class. We listened to different selections of music and we drew what came in our minds while listening. While listening to Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag I drew an Elephant coming upon a rainbow and then sucking in that rainbow through his nose. (Hey, I was in fifth grade – cut me a break.) Mrs. Lewis loved it and so my section of the film was Maple Leaf Rag. I cut out an elephant and rainbow a la South Park and in fifth grade made my very own animated segment. Helen even came to class a couple of times with her mom to help (she was a grade ahead of me). Our class made a short film of animated segments as individuals or teams and then put everything together. It remains one of my fondest memories of my childhood and helped to make me even more passionate about something I already loved: animation. So even at a very young age, Helen was making films and sharing her passion and helping others.

The title of this post is the headline from a 1943 newspaper article that Hans Perk recently posted on his blog. It’s about Bee Selck, whom the article claims was the first woman assistant director in the animation industry while working on Disney’s VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER. This reminds me of a few months back when I was at a random non-animation event and was introduced to a woman who had been an assistant animator at Warner Bros. during the mid-40s, until she left to raise a family. As a matter of convenience, animation histories routinely tell us that during the Golden Age, with few exceptions, the men held all the creative artistic positions and women were ink-and-paint artists. But if one digs a little, they’ll discover that there were far more women working in creative positions at that time than traditional animation histories let on. For example, while researching my book CARTOON MODERN, I discovered that at UPA alone, women in creative positions included background painters Michi Kataoka and Rosemary O’Connor, assistant animators Joyce Weir and Tissa David, character designer/layout artist Sterling Sturtevant, and various other designers including Shirley Silvey, Dolores Cannata and Charleen Peterson.

On a related note, Ben Ettinger at AniPages Daily recently wrote a fascinating profile of two pioneering woman animators in Japan during the late-1950s – Kazuko Nakamura and Reiko Okuyama.

This one is only for our Francophone friends: Brew reader Olivier Ladeuix lets us know that last month Radio France broadcast a 20-part series about the history of animation. Each episode is a half-hour and the entire series can be heard at the Radio France website.

Amanda Visell will be opening her first solo painting show, “Switcheroo,” this Thursday, January 4, from 7-10pm, at Gallery 1988 (7020 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90038). Her fun and light-hearted painting style has a distinct animation sensibility, which shouldn’t be a surprise since she’s worked plenty in animation, mostly as a fabricator and sculptor on stop-motion projects. She’s also one-half of the creative group The Girls Productions which develops everything from merchandise to animation projects. Here’s a recent video interview with Visell where she discusses her work.

What can software developers learn from animation? Apparently, quite a bit. This post by Matt Linderman at 37signal’s Signal vs. Noise blog highlights some of the lessons that he’s picked up from studying animator Walt Stanchfield’s drawing and animation notes.

It’s nice to see this finally turn up on YouTube. A KITTY BOBO SHOW was a Cartoon Network pilot from 2001 created by Meaghan Dunn and Kevin Kaliher. It has a beautiful look and appealing character posing (if not particularly appealing character personalities). Lots of top-flight talent contributed to the short including background design by Dan Krall, bg paintings by Anna Chambers and Tim Maloney, and animation layout by Charlie Bean, Chris Mitchell, Albert Lozano, Aaron Springer, Carey Yost and Mike Stern, among others.

Jerry and I tend to view Cartoon Brew as both a complement and antidote to the mainstream media’s coverage of the art form. We aspire to fill in the gaps of MSM coverage by offering historical and independent perspectives on the animation art, and by creating a reliable outlet for sharing the insider views of all the industry artists who are in constant communication with us.

Looking back at our monthly news archives, I personally think this past year was our most successful in fulfilling these aims. I have a feeling that many readers would agree with that assessment, especially because we also experienced a banner year in terms of site traffic. In fact, Cartoon Brew’s traffic more than doubled from the previous year with over 1.6 million unique visits to our homepage in 2006, and well over 2 million uniques across all Cartoon Brew pages. It may be true that the Brew is something of a niche blog, particularly when compared to general interest blogs like BoingBoing or Metafilter, but with these type of numbers, it’s safe to say that animation is a thriving and popular blog niche.

What went on behind the scenes at our humble website was even more exciting. We’ve been hard at work on a major overhaul of the Brew website which will add all types of new functionality including individual entry pages, search functions, and the ability for reader comments. There’s also an even bigger Brew-related project in the works, one that I can’t discuss right now, but which I’m sure many of our readers are already aware of. 2006 was a great year for us, but 2007 promises to be even bigger and better. None of this, of course, would be possible without you, our valued readers, and we hope you’ll continue to come along with us for the ride.

Just for fun, here’s a roundup of some of my most popular/controversial posts from 2006:

Artist reactions to the Disney-Pixar merger

Continuing coverage of Cartoon Network’s abandonment of animation: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Interview with Garrett Gilchrist about his THIEF AND THE COBBLER: RECOBBLED CUT project

Commentary: Is My Animated Short Worth A Penny? and responses

Commentary:To Pitch or Not To Pitch

The year of stupid animation comments, courtesy of Mick LaSalle, James Lipton, Jason Anderson, Jeff Lenburg and George Miller

I don’t really collect anything (besides dust) so I’m always a bit in awe of people like this guy who’s amassed an unbelievably massive collection of IRON GIANT-related merchandise and memorabilia. In the miscellaneous section of his site, he even shows off his IRON GIANT license plate and a permanent Giant tattoo. Talk about being a hardcore collector.