Animation director Michael Sporn points out a depressing moment he saw on JEOPARDY’s “Teen Tournament” a couple nights ago. There’s apparently more than a bit of truth to all those research studies that claim kids today have no idea who Walt Disney was. And these teens on JEOPARDY are supposedly the smart ones.

UPDATE: Tim Nickel writes:

You can view the game with that clue HERE. The clue itself is in the second round under the category “NATIONAL INVENTORS HALL OF FAME” and the clue reads “‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ was the first full length animated film to use this inductee’s multiplane camera”. Which makes it sound like the answer should be Ub Iwerks, not Disney. So you can see why no one got it, it was a confusing clue.

Did Michael Eisner attempt to break up the Disney-Pixar merger?
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(Thanks, klahd222)

Check out this commercial for insurance company Winterthur by THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE director Sylvain Chomet. The animation and overall look is top notch, but the concept for the ad is somewhat flat and uninspired. You can just feel the ad agency all over this one. Chomet has a lot of good stuff coming up, including the feature THE ILLUSIONIST and a sequence in the upcoming anthology film PARIS JE T’AIME.
(via Hydrocephalic Bunny)

Our friend Harry McCracken has a list of questions about the Oswald/Al Michaels trade. The questions are more light-hearted than the set of questions Harry had about the Disney-Pixar merger, but they’re the type of thoughts that all hardcore cartoon buffs are wondering right now, like:

Who owns Floyd and Lloyd, Oswald’s sons? Are they now orphaned? Will Disney need to trade two more sportcasters to NBC to get them?

Here’s the best thing I’ve found online this week: a three-part video interview from 2001 with all-star cartoonists living in Carmel, California. The participants include magazine cartoonist Eldon Dedini, GORDO creator Gus Arriola, and DENNIS THE MENACE creator Hank Ketcham. All three of them started in animation before finding success as print cartoonists, and sadly, following Dedini’s passing last month, only Arriola is still with us.

To summarize the videos, the following are things that these master cartoonists dislike nowadays: Magazine cartoons, especially THE NEW YORKER (“a lot of times you don’t need the picture”); daily newspaper comics; cartooning skills of artists currently working in both animation and print; ditto their writing skills; contemporary animation that focuses on techique at the expense of character development and humor; and CG animation (in the words of Arriola, it’s so slick “even garbage is pretty.”)

And here are the things they like: Pixar. Yep, that’s pretty much the only bit of modern cartooning that gets some love in this interview. Ketcham says about Pixar, “They do the whole thing in drawing first. They draw their cartoons before they put the technology overlap…that kind of thing may work out fine.”

Also recommended on the same site is an interview with Wah Ming Chang (1917-2003). Chang worked on PINOCCHIO and BAMBI in the Effects and Model Department, and later created stop motion animation for George Pal’s THE TIME MACHINE and THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF BROTHERS GRIMM, as well as designing costumes for THE KING AND I, creating masks for THE PLANET OF THE APES and designing creatures for the TV series THE OUTER LIMITS and STAR TREK. This interview only scratches the surface of Chang’s career, but it’s worth a view.

That’s sportcaster Al Michael’s famous call during the 1980 Winter Olympics, but it might as well apply to today’s events. The Associated press has two stories – HERE and HERE – with more details on the incredibly shrewd business deal that the Disney Co. has engineered: today Disney traded sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC in return for, among other things, the 1920s character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It’s hard to even wrap my head around how cool this deal is; Disney is using their ESPN division as leverage to further their cartoon holdings. For a company that has shown so little regard and appreciation in recent years for its primary business – animation – this is a particularly meaningful gesture. From one of the AP articles comes this quote from Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller: “When Bob [Iger] was named CEO, he told me he wanted to bring Oswald back to Disney, and I appreciate that he is a man of his word. Having Oswald around again is going to be a lot of fun.”

Despite the fact that Oswald has been a largely forgotten character here in the US for many decades, there is currently a lot of appealing Oswald merchandise coming out of Japan. Combine the merchandising potential of the character along with the old Oswald shorts likely coming out on dvd and other ways that Disney will exploit the character, and I think in a couple years NBC Universal will be kicking themselves that they gave away a valuable animation character to Disney…for Al Michaels.

Flash animator Nate Pacheco is working on translating the hard-edged, yet organic, style of mid-century illustrator Charles Harper into Flash animation. We’ve mentioned Harper’s work here before; he is an artist whose work has influenced many contemporary animation designers. Nate has posted a few tantalizing stills on his BLOG, and he says he’s working on the animation now. I’m not sure if this is a Renegade project or just a personal experiment, but it’s a terrific idea.

An article from the San Francisco Business Times about DreamWorks Animation’s hiring binge.