An extraordinarily prescient comment about Steve Jobs by an anonymous Apple manager in the January 3, 1983 issue of Time magazine:

“He should be running Walt Disney. That way, every day when he’s got some new idea, he can contribute to something different.”

Twenty-eight years later, he’s pretty close.

(via Kottke)

“Art in the Streets,” the first major museum survey of street art and graffiti, opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and I highly recommend it. It ranks among the most fun art exhibits I’ve ever attended, and features lots of eye candy in the form of large-scale installations that at times can feel more like an amusement park than a museum. As a first-of-its-kind exhibition, it’s also guaranteed to spark plenty of vigorous debate about what was chosen for inclusion and what wasn’t, not to mention all the controversy it’s already generated from the Blu mural debacle to irrational police fury.

Though minimal, animated works do have a presence in the show. A sequence of animation drawings from the opening of the influential early-1980s documentary Wild Style is displayed in one area. The sequence (watch it HERE) was designed by Charlie Ahearn, who directed the film, and graffiti writer Zephyr. In the “Battle Station”, a fantastic recreation of the Tribeca loft of the late Rammellzee, a mograph music video called “Alpha’s Bet” is screened on a television. The video, posted below, was directed by Celia Bullwinkel in 2002. (Disclosure: I am a personal friend of Celia and attended the show with her.)

Graffiti/street art has a complicated relationship with animation, which is a thread that the curators of the exhibit never explore. While the show features a handful of artists, like the aforementioned Rammellzee, who have the ability to express personal ideas beyond the confines of referential pop culture, many of the artists from Kenny Scharf to Banksy to the anonymous graffiti writers who painted on the sides of subway cars have relied on animated characters as their lingua franca for communicating with the general public. These cartoon characters, to my surprise, are rarely used to make any statement or to subvert the original intentions of the characters, a la Wally Wood’s infamous Disney “orgy” drawing. For graffiti and street artists, the act of recreating popular cartoon iconography is considered an accomplishment in and of itself.

If one looks only at the art displayed in the show, the conclusion could be drawn that things are beginning to change. More recent artists, like the Brazilian twins Os Gêmeos, have dispensed with drawing pre-existing animated characters and are creating libraries of new cartoon characters drawn in their personal styles. Like any vital art form, street art is evolving, and the evolution points in a positive direction that emphasizes personal creativity.

Below are a few of the cartoon references I saw in the show.

Will you take the Mickey or Woody train?

Kenny Scharf began doing Hanna-Barbera tributes in 1981, long before anybody else considered celebrating Hanna-Barbera’s cruddiness.

Only in the world of graffiti could Hanna-Barbera and DePatie-Freleng characters co-exist.

Ward Kimball would have totally appreciated this.

Donald and Franken Berry

Banksy-caliber wit

Airbrushed Felix

B”art”

Berlin-based Stephan Flint Müller has made plenty of films in his young career, but my favorite remains his 2004 short Bow Tie Duty for Squareheads (or Fliegenpflicht für Quadratköpfe if you prefer the German). The film’s no-budget punk production style is teeming with creativity and humor, and with that comes the timeless lesson that effective visual ideas don’t require money, technology or huge crews, just imagination.

In its second weekend, Carlos Saldanha’s Rio dropped a slim 32% to retain the top spot at the US box office. Its estimated $26.8 million weekend pushed the US gross to $81.3M. More impressive, its worldwide total stands at $283.9M, pushing it ahead of Rango’s $235.1M worldwide take as the top grossing movie of 2011. The other animated film in the US top ten was llumination’s Hop which benefited from a 16% Easter Weekend boost to place fourth. Its estimated weekend take of $12.5M pushed its domestic total to $100.5M.

For those keeping track, this is the fourth straight week that an animated movie has topped the US box office. Through the first four months of 2011, four of the top seven films at the worldwide box office have been animated. Even more noteworthy, only one of those films was released by Disney or DreamWorks. In a year when fewer people in the US are attending the movies than any year since 1995, animation is coming into its own and dominating Hollywood as never before. With any luck, these successes will encourage greater experimentation and diversity within the medium.

Just in time for Easter, Christian Broadcasting Network has announced a computer-animated remake of their 1980s series Superbook. If CGI doesn’t turn today’s kids devoutly religious, there’s still one last hope: 3-D!

Circular continuity is one of animation’s oldest concepts — think phenakistoscopes and zoetropes — so it takes a certain amount of creativity to build on the idea. Ned Wenlock, from Wellington, New Zealand, offers a fresh approach in his music video “Apache” for Danger Beach. The digital “paper-roll” concept isn’t used to fulfill any particular demand of the story, and as such, it comes across as a bit of a gimmick, but the appeal and novelty of Wenlock’s approach is worthy of recognition. I fully anticipate seeing his technique ripped off by multiple ad agencies within the next few months. Rodney Selby did character animation on the piece. Wenlock speaks about some of his ideas for the video on his blog.

Matthias Hoegg, whose graduation short Thursday appeared on the Brew recently, just completed two delightful mini-shorts — “Ollie” and “George” — for CBeebies, the BBC’s channel for preschoolers.

A few details on the production from Matthias:

We had 3-4 weeks for each of them and were working with a small team (in fact just myself for most of it) in the London based studio Beakus. The production process was all-digital using After Effects, Flash, Photoshop and a tiny bit of Maya.

Cbeebies provided us with the edited voice recordings of the kids and gave me pretty much free reign over how I interpreted their narrative. They were really a perfect client and got on board with my direction from an early stage. Working for preschool kids meant an emphasis on characterisation and bold, colourful designs, which were definitely part-inspired by Mary Blair. I wanted to create the impression of discovering the world with child’s eyes and frame everything from a low angle, so you’re in with the flowers and rabbits.

Full credits after the jump:
Read the rest of this entry »

Hyundai created this ‘live’ performance piece to promote their 2012 Accent. They suspended a real car sideways against a building wall, and a real human walks into the car, but everything else is projected animation. The piece debuted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last February, and is scheduled to be shown at the New York International Auto Show beginning this weekend.

Some have described it as projection mapping, and indeed, it does appear to be showing on three separate surfaces, but there’s not a whole lot of mapping since the projection is onto flat surfaces. Regardless of how it’s described, it’s a novel site-specific installation, and it would be interesting to see more companies explore advertising in this direction.

This video gives some clues about how the show was installed:

(Thank, Mike Rauch)

The website of director and animator Mike Smith — RealMikeSmith.com — is a model for how an artist’s website should function. It’s an easy-to-navigate site packed with rare films, storyboards, line tests, commercials and music videos dating back to his earliest days, and materials from unproduced projects. I spent half an hour on the site and didn’t even come close to scratching the surface of everything that’s posted. Of course, it also helps that Mike has produced some excellent work throughout his career that’s well worth a view.

Historian Harvey Deneroff has posted a fascinating interview with Fleischer Studios veteran Don Figlozzi that he conducted in 1979. In it, Figlozzi (1909-1981) speaks about working as a “television artist” at WPIX in the late-1940s. If he wasn’t the first regular animator working in television, he was certainly among the first:

“They asked to see some samples, and I realized I wasn’t dealing with anybody that had been used to looking at art samples before. I was dealing with laymen, so to speak, engineers and people like that, and Hank Ross, who was a director, didn’t know anything about the art end of it. So I figured I’d make the stuff as close to TV as possible. I made their call letters and a call background — just like an announcement background. And then I made a series of things like the Twentieth Century-Fox heading that they have now; I originated that for WPIX, where letters come over a skyline; and worked up several different things: maps, little tiny maps — I thought everything had to be drawn small, so I did them small. I worked with a magnifying glass.”

Rauch Brothers Animation, operated by Brooklyn-based Mike and Tim Rauch, epitomizes all that is good about New York animation. A couple years ago, they started producing self-funded animated shorts based on audio recorded by the StoryCorps oral history project. These films inspired an entire series of shorts commissioned by the PBS documentary program POV. The Rauch Brothers are now producing their second season of StoryCorps shorts for POV.

I conducted an interview via e-mail with Mike and Tim to learn more about their unconventional background and how their passion project evolved into a full-time job. They will also be presenting their work TONIGHT (4/20) in New York at an ASIFA-East program. In addition to previewing some unaired shorts, they’ll be discussing the process of producing these shorts. The screening begins 7pm at the School of Visual Arts (209 East 23rd Street, 5th Floor, Rm 502). Admission is FREE.

——————————————————

CARTOON BREW: Tell me a little bit about your backgrounds. Neither of you studied animation in school, right?

MIKE RAUCH: We both drew voraciously in grade school, and studied animation and drawing on our own throughout grade school, junior high, and high school. Our teenage brother knew we were into cartoons, and in 1992 he took us to see Beauty and the Beast at a dollar cinema that showed movies after their initial run. When we left the theater, we were both convinced that animation was our future. 

TIM RAUCH: The more we got to know about Disney animation, the more we came to respect the role of traditional draftsmanship skills in creating hand-drawn animation. Eventually, we discovered the work of Aardman Animations and the film Going Equipped in particular. Seeing an ex-convict tell his life story through quiet, carefully observed acting was very powerful for us and we began to think about using animation to tell stories about the human condition.

MIKE: I had dreamed about going to a school like CalArts since the age of 12. However, with six kids to send off, our parents sent us to whatever school offered the most scholarship money. For both me and Tim that turned out to be St. John’s University in Queens.  
 
TIM: St. John’s didn’t have any animation courses and the focus was very much on traditional visual arts training. By the time I finally got back around to trying my hand at animation in my senior year, I had spent a good deal of time studying master drawings and sketching people in the subway. As when I was a kid, I was more interested in using small adjustments in posture or little facial ticks to act out a story than bigger, louder movements. With our current work, I am still very interested in these subtleties but we are also beginning to embrace clearer staging and broader acting when it can enhance the story.

MIKE: Self-study and self-directed work has always been a major part of our lives, so we never considered not having a formal training in animation as a limitation. In fact, I think the reverse can sometimes be true. I studied graphic design in college and enjoyed it, but after four years of school I found that all the rules and practices I learned were holding me back. When I sat down to a blank page, there was a war in my head. I found myself overly concerned with the “right way” to do things.

I eventually landed at StoryCorps, where I helped record interviews with everyday people and edit them for radio broadcast. It was a really exciting time for me because I was learning how to shape stories in a much more organic, experiential way than I had learned design. I learned a lot by simply using my ears, my intuition, and then getting feedback from my editor. While I was working for StoryCorps, Tim and I started to work collaboratively, returning to our long-running interest in animation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Animatorio created this stunning piece of stop motion animation. There’s some CG effects thrown into the mix too. I’ve posted the description of their short below, but honestly, it’s such a visceral feast for the eyes that no written description will do it justice:

Transformation trough mutations stages. Evolution as a function gain is called neo-morphic. Imaginary creatures adapt into an Ecosystem and the transformation of these habitats for these creatures generates a fantastic cycle. The mutation symbolism is part of our experiences in that trajectory, changing places, finding a new spectrum, a new phase, evolving.

UPDATE: A ‘making-of’ vid posted by the Animatorio crew: