A three-minute preview of Prep & Landing was released online today. It’s a TV special from Disney Feature Animation directed by Kevin Deters and Stevie Wermers-Skelton. It premieres on ABC next month.

As a historian, I get a real kick whenever I discover that somebody I had no idea was still alive is, in fact, alive and well. Such is the case with this article in the Monterey County Herald which reveals that Maxine Patin is still around at 95, and is even having a show of her paintings this weekend. She was married to Ray Patin, who was an animator before launching Ray Patin Productions, one of the most successful TV commercial studios in LA during the 1950s. (A lot of the studio’s art can be found online including here and here.) It doesn’t appear that Maxine ever worked in animation, but it’s clear that she’s lived quite a full life herself. I particularly liked this quote from her daughter: “She has a beauty, intelligence and a nobility that she’s completely unaware of — and that, in itself, is part of her beauty. She doesn’t know how not to be kind. She doesn’t know how to put on airs because she came from a generation of people who never learned how to manipulate. What you see is what you get.”

I was blown away earlier today when I discovered the work of Rebecca Dart. She has a fantastic sense for funny appealing shapes, and powerful cartoon drawing. It wasn’t surprising to learn that she works in animation, and again, no surprise to see her credits on her IMDB filled with some of the crassest TV trash imaginable. It’s hard to adequately put into words how depressing it is to know that talent of this caliber exists within our industry, and the rampant cluelessness that results in these artists producing shit like this. It’s like hiring Velázquez or Vermeer to paint the lines in a parking lot — an utter, total waste of skill and talent. Though the animation world has no appreciation or use for such skill, she’s at least able to utilize her artistic voice in the comic books she makes.

(via Drawn)

The 1971 X-rated feature The Telephone Book screens Thursday evening, November 5, at the Egyptian Theatre. The film, described as a “biting satire on sexual morality about a girl who falls in love with the world’s greatest obscene phone caller,” probably isn’t for everybody. But it has developed a cult reputation over the years and was considered a source of inspiration for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris while Steve Martin labeled it one of his favorite films of the Seventies.

The reason it’s on the Brew is because the climax of the film is an outlandish and humorously erotic piece of animation directed by my pal, animation legend Len Glasser. Len has an illustrious history in the field. A student of Franz Kline and S. Neil Fujita, he worked at Terrytoons on Tom Terrific and designed films and commercials for Ernie Pintoff before starting his own commercial studio Stars and Stripes Productions Forever, which produced some of the craziest and most creative TV spots of the 1960s. Here’s one of his well-known spots:

The Egyptian screening will be followed by a Q&A with Len, along with the film’s director/writer Nelson Lyon and producer Merv Bloch. The film was also recently released on dvd in Europe. Ordering details can be found on the film’s official website.

Todd Hemker and Soyeon Kim of Yellowshed recently directed the end title sequence for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Hemker discusses the process and shares an animatic in this interview with Art of the Title.

UPDATE: Designer Chris Mitchell, who wasn’t mentioned in the interview above, has written a blog post about his role on the end titles and more details about how the production happened. It’s a good complement to the interview.

I saw Tim Beckhardt’s Pellet Gun in Ottawa a couple weeks ago. It’s a student film from RISD. I liked the crisp linear style and it made me chuckle even though I didn’t get it. Tim explained it to me afterward, and the explanation was quite reasonable, which made me wonder why I didn’t get it in the first place.

Wow, how quickly times change. A few years ago, while I was researching my book Cartoon Modern, I traveled all the way to Montreal to see the NFB short The Romance of Transportation. Today, it’s available instantaneously and free-of-charge on my iPhone.

If you have an iPhone, be sure to check out the newly released NFB iPhone app. Dozens of great and classic NFB animated shorts are available on it including Richard Condie’s The Big Snit, Norman McLaren’s Begone Dull Care, Caroline Leaf’s The Street, Ryan Larkin’s Street Musique, Gerald Potterton’s My Financial Career, Peter Foldes’s Hunger, and, of course, Colin Low’s The Romance of Transportation. More recent films like Chris Landreth’s Ryan and Theo Ushev’s Tower Bawher are also on there.

The app is a bit rough around the edges, but it is well-intentioned, offers terrific content, and did I mention, FREE! One of its nicest features is a “Watch Later” option that allows you to pre-download films and watch them off-line for up to 24 hours, which is perfect for subway and plane trips.

This is what they did for Halloween at Pixar yesterday. (PS: “Michael” is none other than Alex Woo.)

UPDATE: Mike Frederickson and Nick Pitera were impressive yesterday too:

UPDATE 2: Here’s a photo gallery of different costumes worn by Pixarians at the studio’s Halloween show.