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VIEW POSTS BY “amid”Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
December 5, 2006 2:07 pm
Today is Walt Disney’s 105th birthday!  No Comments » posted in Old Brew 
December 5, 2006 8:12 am
What’s one of our favorite recurring topics here at Cartoon Brew? Of course, it’s the “Preston Blair swipe,” which is when an illustrator-hack pilfers artwork from Preston Blair’s classic animation textbook and uses it for their own commercial projects. The latest swipe was found by Adam Koford in Orlando, Florida. If you want to visit this shrine of cartoon incompetence, Adam has geotagged the location on Flickr:  Previous Blair rips on Cartoon Brew: Halloween decals, Ohio lottery ticket, Australian restaurant ad and Ohio school mascot. No Comments » posted in Old Brew
December 5, 2006 6:44 am
 Brew reader Arthur writes about this funny and well done commercial spoof of the classic British holiday special THE SNOWMAN:
Read about the controversy HERE or watch the commercial below: No Comments » posted in Old Brew
December 4, 2006 5:49 am
 Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES had an article by Charles Solomon about Disney’s new plan to produce animated short. The article states that four animated shorts are in development:
(Use BugMeNot.com if registration is required) UPDATE: The storyboard art in the NY TIMES article, including the image above, is by Wilbert Plijnaar. No Comments » posted in Old Brew
December 3, 2006 7:41 am
 Today marks the launch of the Animation History Archive on Flickr, a new group I started where we can all share interesting visual bits of animation history. Hopefully this can be sort of like a ’show and tell’ of classic cartoon history and, in time, become a valuable visual resource for artists everywhere. Here’s a quick description of what can be posted in the group:
If you’ve got things in your collection that you want to share or just want to see cool stuff from other people’s collections, you can join the group here: No Comments » posted in Old Brew
December 2, 2006 10:29 am
 It’s been a Ralph Hulett kind of week around here. First it was his Christmas cards, now here’s a link to ONE GOT FAT, a bizarre (borderline disturbing) live-action bicycle safety film that he art directed in 1963. The real highlight might be the film’s amusing narration, which comes courtesy of character actor (and “Fractured Fairy Tales” narrator) Edward Everett Horton. (Thanks, Patrick McCart) UPDATE: Kevin writes to let us know there’s more info about ONE GOT FAT in the comments section of this post at the Animation Guild blog. UPDATE #2: Ralph Hulett’s son, Steve, writes in with more info about the film:
No Comments » posted in Old Brew
December 1, 2006 3:05 am
 The fourth in a series of holiday gift-giving suggestions from your pals at Cartoon Brew. If you pick up one dvd of foreign animation this holiday season, make it the ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA four-dvd box set from Films by Jove. I’ve been working my way through the set for the past week and every disc is packed with unbelievable material that I’d never seen before. The films, created between the mid-1920s through the mid-1980s, are separated into four categories: Disc 1: American Imperialists As can be expected from the disc titles, the films are shamelessly propagandistic, taking aim at everybody from the Americans and the British to the Germans and Fascist ideology. The films have an endearingly kitsch quality at first, but after a few hours of watching this stuff, the material begins to take on a more depressing tone, and one begins to feel sorry for the Russian people who were fed this manipulative garbage for decade after decade. What’s really fascinating about these films, however, is how much creative effort the Russian animators put into the visuals. They clearly believed in the messages of the films, and though they had little control over what they were saying, they could exercise their imagination with how they presented the same tired slogans. There’s a spirit of experimentation from the earliest films on the disc. For example, SAMOYED BOY (1928) uses regional art styles of northern Russian peoples and BLACK AND WHITE (1933) is graphically mature in a way that few cartoons in the US were in the early-30s. The Russians weren’t tied down by the demands of creating entertainment cartoons with recurring characters; their assignment was to get across a particular message, and as such, they focused more on the filmmaking aspects than on character and personality development. Though in some of the later films, like SOMEONE ELSE’S VOICE (1949) and THE ADVENTURES OF THE YOUNG PIONEERS (1971), they also exhibit a solid grasp of traditional character animation principles. If you’re looking for visual inspiration, there’s enough graphic ideas scattered throughout these dvds to keep you busy for a long time. A few of the visual highlights for me: INTERPLANETARY REVOLUTION (1924) is animation at its most Constructivist with photo montage and strong graphic design; the heavy use of black shadows in THE PIONEER’S VIOLIN (1971) gives Mike Mignola a run for the money; THE SHAREHOLDER (1963) is a 23-minute powerhouse of beautifully animated, elegantly staged characters that evoke high-style magazine illustration; and SHOOTING RANGE (1979) uses colorful, gritty ’70s style graphics that somehow still feel fresh today. With politically-oriented films such as these, providing context is imperative to understanding the works and each disc is supported by a half-hour documentary. The documentaries are appreciated, but I thought they could have been even more helpful to a layperson like myself who isn’t well versed in Russian history. There were snippets of interviews with some of the filmmakers, but I would have liked to have seen longer versions of these interviews instead of extended clips of films that were already on the dvd set (though the clips that had narrative explanation added were very useful). Also, I’d be curious to find out just how much of this propaganda was seen by the average Russian compared to other forms of animation; non-propaganda characters like Cheburashka and Fyodor Khitruk’s version of Winnie the Pooh were also popular among Russian kids so they obviously were exposed to other types of animation. But this is all nitpicking. The dvd set, produced by Joan Borsten, is a must-have for any fan of foreign animation; it’s not only an incredible survey of Russian propaganda animation, but also of the development of the animation art in Russia. The set is $89 at the Films by Jove store. The website also has a set of notes about the films and offers for viewing a part of the documentary included on the dvd. Below are some of the inspiring visuals that you can find on the set: 
No Comments » posted in Old Brew
November 30, 2006 6:20 am
Have you ever wondered what Chuck Jones’s HIGH NOTE (1960) would look like if it was remade in CG? Well, neither have I, but somebody went ahead and made it anyway. “One Bad Note” is a 50-second TV commercial directed by Craig Wessels of the South African studio Wicked Pixels. The results are pretty decent. Watch it below: (via Hydrocephalic Bunny) No Comments » posted in Old Brew
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