Overman, the director of the unbelievably popular Machinima film we mentioned yesterday, MALE RESTROOM ETIQUETTE, has posted an entry on his blog in which he theorizes why his film has become so popular. Lots of interesting ideas in his post. I particularly agree with this final thought he offers:

In closing, someone asked me recently, “What is a good machinima?” My answer, which may get published elsewhere too, was this: A good machinima is a film which is not intricately wrapped up in it’s own “machinima-ness”… I believe the best thing machinima can do for itself is forget that it is machinima and remember that it is film.

This blog post about the making of the recent animated film CURIOUS GEORGE, written by one of the film’s supervising animators, is pretty depressing, but probably not any more depressing than how the typical US animated feature is produced nowadays.

I’m super-excited to announce that I’ll be headed to Scotland for the Projector 2006 festival, which takes place next week from October 11-14. The festival takes place in Dundee, Scotland, about a one-hour drive north of Edinburgh. I’ll be doing a “masterclass” about 50s design on Friday, October 13, and will also be presenting a couple different programs of rare 1950s animated shorts. If you’re anywhere around the festival, these are screenings you’re not going to want to miss. Even though I’ve personally seen all the films in the 50s programs, I’m anxious to attend the screenings myself because there’s nothing quite like seeing amazing animation design projected via film onto the bigscreen, the way it was meant to be seen.

A full schedule of Projector events can be found at ProjectorFest.com. Festival director Susie Wilson has put together a strong slate of screenings and talks that also includes Chris Landreth of RYAN fame and sound designer Larry Sider, a frequent collaborator with the Brothers Quay. It promises to be a lot of fun. I’m also going to try and check out Edinburgh for a day or two. If there’s any good animation sights to see over there, let me know at amid [at] animationblast [dot] com. Below are some of the shorts that I’ll be screening at Projector:

If anybody is in need of some tough love from Dr. Phil, it’s probably Hayao Miyazaki and his eldest son Goro. This Reuters article about GEDO SENKI (TALES OF EARTHSEA), the first film by Goro Miyazaki, is quite revealing, sad and funny all at the same time. Among the details revealed in the piece:

The NY TIMES published a piece today about the glut of poorly performing animated CG films. That’s hardly news to anybody working the industry. The article has your typical pass-the-buck quotes from execs, like this one from Nickelodeon’s Julia Pistor: “I think audiences are saying, ‘I’ve seen a lot of computer animation and it’s not so special anymore.” Of course, Julia. Audiences must surely be tired of the computer animation technique itself, not by the poor decision-making of animation execs who have continuously greenlit poorly conceived, derivative, stupid films over the course of this CG animation goldrush. On another note, the most interesting “news” revealed in the piece is that DreamWorks and Aardman have had a falling out and FLUSHED AWAY will be their last film together. To my knowledge, that’s the first time this news has made print.

Note: Use BugMeNot if NY TIMES registration is required.

(Thank, Mark Gilson)

Machinima is a CG animation technique that uses real-time, 3D gaming engines for its imagery source as opposed to traditional CG software like Maya. The technique has been around for a while, though for the most part, Machinima has remained on the fringes of animation and pop culture. That may be changing however with the release of a recent film that could be classified as the first breakout Machinima hit. The film is MALE RESTROOM ETIQUETTE directed by Overman, and it uses the SIMS 2 game engine for its graphics. The 10-minute film starts off as a mock-instructional film but winds up documenting the world’s toilet apocalypse.

The film has been blowing up online since its release on September 14 with hundreds of blogs linking to it. It was featured on YouTube’s front page last weekend – the first for a Machinima film? – and has received over 1 million views on YouTube in the past three days, and over 1.5 million views total. If anything, this film should go a long way towards proving that Machinima is a technique capable of resonating with mainstream audiences as long as the storytelling and filmmaking are on a par with other forms of animated filmmaking. We’ll keep on top of further developments about this film.

UPDATE: Alessandro Cima, director of the Machinima film DRACULA’S GUEST, points out this WIRED article from last January that highlights a couple of progressive Machinima films, including his own. He also writes:

I think with a software tool completely focused on Machinima filmmaking and separated out from any sort of a game environment, Machinima will indeed be a powerful medium. For now, it’s still a bit too difficult to make games flexible enough to tell real stories. I had to pull my footage out of the ‘Movies’ game and render my own soundtrack in order to get around the game’s limitations. But very soon some enterprising company will give us a complete, powerful Machinima-making application.

Watch MALE RESTROOM ETIQUETTE BELOW:

The LA TIMES published a piece today by Josh Friedman with this mind-bogglingly ignorant sentence about animation:

[OPEN SEASON], based on the humor of cartoonist Steve Moore, introduces a technique dubbed “squash and stretch” that allows the cartoon characters to change shape during action sequences.

I hear the animators working on HAPPY FEET have also come up with an exciting new technique. They call it a “walk cycle.” What will they think of next?

UPDATE #1: Paul Naas writes the following:

I saw the item out of this morning’s L.A. Times about squash and stretch, and dropped a quick email to the author, Josh Friedman. To my surprise, he responded quickly, saying:

“Sorry about that. I’m working up a correction for Tuesday’s paper.”

Quite a difference from the response a few months back from Mick LaSalle and his ridiculous comments about facial animation. I’m looking forward to seeing if the correction actually appears.

UPDATE #2: Story artist Jenny Lerew comments about the LA TIMES piece on her blog Blackwing Diaries.

UPDATE #3: The LA TIMES indeed ran a correction in Tuesday’s paper. It reads:

An article in Monday’s Business section reporting the weekend box-office results incorrectly described as new the “squash and stretch” technique used in the film “Open Season.” The method, which enables the cartoon characters to change shape during action sequences, has been used before.

So, you say you’ve read Taylor Jessen’s amazing piece about the production of TWICE UPON A TIME (1983) in ANIMATION BLAST #9 and now you want to watch this rare film. You’re in luck. Somebody has posted TWICE UPON A TIME in its entirety on YouTube. The choppy compressed video hardly does the visuals justice, but it’ll have to do until Warner Bros. releases the film onto dvd someday. A YouTube playlist with all the segments is below.

The must-see LA art show of the fall season has been anounced. “3 Trees and 3 Flowers” opens November 4 at the Gallery Nucleus (30 West Main Street, Alhambra, CA 91801). This is the second edition of the successful show that took place last year called “3 Trees Make A Forest.” The “3 Trees” are Japanese ilustrator Tadahiro Uesugi and Pixar story artists Ronnie del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa. They are joined this time by three female Japanese illustrators: Yoko Tanji, Icco Sasai, and Wakako Katayama. More details about the show can be found at the Nucleus website or Enrico’s blog. Enrico has also announced that Gingko Press is publishing a book of art from their first show, which should be released by November. The book can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

Guess who has their own MySpace now?

http://www.myspace.com/tomoreb

Poor guy has no friends though. Probably because he died in 1987. Become Tom Oreb’s friend on MySpace so he can send you some of his amazing artwork from the beyond.

I know two things about Lorelay Bove.
1.) She’s a character animation student at CalArts.
2.) She has some beautiful paintings on her BLOG. I’d describe them as Mary Blair-ish, but they’re not quite; she’s definitely got her own thing going on and I can’t wait to see more work by her.

KOMANEKO, a theatrical cartoon series from Japan, is so nauseously cute and adorable it just might make you feel dirty. It’s about a stop-motion cat who wants to make her own stop-motion animated short. Man, talk about postmodern. The five episodes can be viewed in the YouTube playlist below. The official Japanese KOMANEKO site is HERE.

(Thanks, Arthur Bristol)

I’ve known about this exhibition for a while, but it didn’t occur to me that I should post about it until a friend mentioned that it wasn’t on the Brew. An amazing exhibit of classic Disney artwork opened on September 15 at the Le Grand Palais in Paris. The show is called “Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney” (“Once upon a time, there was Walt Disney”), and folks who have attended are calling it one of the greatest animation exhibits ever. Didier Ghez of the Disney History blog has an interesting write-up about the exhibit, wherein he describes its importance:

What brings the whole thing to another level is the very concept of the exhibition: it is a quest to understand what works of art (especially European ones) inspired the art of Disney artists. Based on the seminal book of Dr. Robin Allan, Walt Disney and Europe, the Grand Palais exhibition displays works by the greatest European masters, like Gustave Dore, Heinrich Kley, or even Breughel, German expressionists and French architect Viollet le Duc alongside Disney concept art, layouts and backgrounds. And as all of you know, Disney’s artists works do not pale in front of those of those masters. In fact the association is mind-boggling: if you are a layman, the quality of the concept artists’ works become even more obvious and you start understanding that Walt had some really outstanding individuals working for him, that he was not the only one who drew everything and that the Studio was far from being a factory. If you are a Disney enthusiast you are bound to be stunned by connections with famous or less famous works of art from the past that you were not aware of.

For more info, there’s an article about the exhibit HERE, a slide show with lots of artwork HERE, and a video and even more artwork HERE. The show runs through Christmas in Paris, and if you’re anywhere in Europe, you’re not going to want to miss this. The exhibit then travels to Montreal where it’ll be at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from March 8 to June 24, 2007. I can’t make the Paris show, but I’m definitely going to check it out when it hits Montreal.

UPDATE: Carbunkle Cartoons animator Colin Giles was recently in Paris and he has high praise for the exhibit. Colin writes:

I’ve just returned from vacation in Paris and London and I must say the Walt Disney exhibition was the highlight of the trip. It blew me away. So many important pieces of Disney Art – Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle, Joe Grant, Marc Davis and many others. It only cost 10 euros to get in and I went around twice just to soak it in. They even had a “Destino” section displaying Salvador Dali’s layouts. The work displayed truly showed that these artists were masters. It really is an important show and anyone close to Paris should make the trip. When it arrives in Montreal it should be required viewing. Seeing boards done by Ub Iwerks for “Plane Crazy” was the highlight for me. It was a very well organized display and really well thought out. I bought the DVD of the exhibition which contains a film made specifically for the show and I’ll be posting screen grabs on my blog.

(Thanks to Will Kane for the links)