Author Archives: Amid Amidi

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Carlo Vogele Explains How To Reanimate Fish

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Carlo Vogele who has breathed life into Ikea lighting fixtures and socks and pants has moved on to animating fish. That’s the trailer above for his new short Una furtiva Lagrima, which picked up an award at Annecy last week.

Carlo most recently animated on Pixar’s Brave, but the lo-fi stop motion process he uses for his personal films is decidedly grittier. His how-to guide on animating fish corpses is a must-read:

After purchase of the bass at the fishmarket, I’d stick it in the freezer until I was ready for a full night of animating (stop-motion 101: if you want consistent lighting, daylight is not your friend ;-D). I would take the stinky bastard out a few hours ahead of shooting, while setting up the lights and camera. The fish would thaw from stonehard to kind of rigid in 3 hours, and for a while, its head, fins and mouth would have the right rigidity in order to hold a pose for a while.

So I’d animate as fast as I could, until the fish thawed completely and its jaw went slack… that is when invisible thread was useful : I’d lift the slack jaw with a string which I’d attach to an overhead structure off-screen. Later I could easily mask the thread out of the frames, if it showed too much.

Gross Trivia : somehow the inner stuff of the fish started bloating after a week, and that pressure tended to push its tongue out of its mouth… I had no choice but to ram it back down its throat with my fingers, and was instantly rewarded with a sound that it is too obscene for words. It was easy to forget that this was actually a slowly decaying dead body I was animating. Some orange pus oozing from underneath its gill cover during the shooting was a nice reminder of that.

Juxtapoz Meets Adult Swim

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The new issue of Juxtapoz is dedicated entirely to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block. Issue preview HERE. Description below:

Just in time for beach trips, travel, and Comic Con, we present to you our very special collaboration with Cartoon Network and Adult Swim on the July 2012 Special Adult Swim issue. Adult Swim has taken over ever feature, profile, photo, review, Pop Life moment, featuring their brand new program, Black Dynamite, on the cover. We got the makers of Venture Bros, Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, Superjail!, Aqua Teen, Childrens Hospital, Robot Chicken, and Loiter Squad all to talk about the stories behind their shows. Throw in exclusive interviews with the likes of Rob Corddry, Seth Green, and special exclusive artwork by Skinner, Tim Biskup, and Olek, with Kevin Kirkpatrick creating a special bust of Carl from Aqua Teen.

(Venture Bros. illustration by Patrick Leger)

The Cute Greeting Card Artwork Of Louie Schmitt And Stan Spohn

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This impeccably cute Fifties era Hallmark booklet was drawn by Louie Schmitt (1908-1993) and painted by Stan Spohn (b. 1915), both of whom were Disney trained artists. Schmitt had animated at Disney since the mid-1930s, but is best known for being Tex Avery’s layout man and character designer for a series of MGM shorts in the late-1940s such as Little ‘Tinker (below), The Cat That Hated People, Lucky Ducky, and Bad Luck Blackie. Spohn was an Art Center-educated Disney background painter who did some terrific development artwork on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia.

Around 1948, give or take a year, Schmitt and Spohn met J. C. Hall, the founder of Hallmark Cards. Hall offered them a lucrative deal to come and work at Hallmark’s headquarters in Kansas City. Schmitt and Spohn told their story to cartoonist Dean Norman, who recounted it in his fantastic self-published book Studio Cards: Funny Greeting Cards and People Who Created Them:

“When we first came [to Hallmark] they said they didn’t have space for us yet in the art department. They really just didn’t want us to corrupt the sweet young girls that worked there, because our language can get sort of salty. So they made us work in a tent on the roof. It was hotter than hell in the summer in Kansas City. After a couple of weeks of sweating it out in the tent we came down off the roof, found an empty office and moved our stuff in. The Old Man thought the girl artists would be jealous, because we got an office while they worked in booths. But they didn’t mind. We got along fine and didn’t corrupt any of them…We thought we would go nuts. A whole building full of twittering young girls, and the stuffy work rules! We hated it, but it was good money, and we did get to do complete art on our cards. Mr. Hall loved our art. So after we had been here a few months, we told him our wives missed California so much that they were going to leave us. We was awful sorry, but we had to quit. Well, the Old Man did what we figured he might do. He offered us contracts to mail in our art from California.”

Schmitt, who I believe did the drawings for the “How to Take Care of Baby” booklet, had a style that was pure syrupy cartoon formula–historian Michael Barrier dismissed Schmitt’s designs as “bargain-basement-Bambi flavor”–yet he also had terrific command of cartooning principles and knew how to inject personality into his characters. It’s easy to understand why his work was so highly valued by Hall, especially when contrasted to the listless illustrative style that was predominant in the greeting card industry at the time:

It seems that Schmitt and Spohn worked as a team, and even had an art studio together after they moved back to Los Angeles. Schmitt died in 1993, but Stan Spohn is (I believe) still with us at the age of 97. There was an article about Spohn in the Monterey County Weekly a few years back where he was holding up one of his Hallmark paintings:

If anyone at Hallmark is reading this, please consider doing a book of Schmitt and Spohn’s artwork. I’d be happy to help–just drop me a line. Their work looks deceptively simple, but there’s a real art to creating such aggressively cute cartoon characters. I have more of their booklets and fold-outs that I will post here if there’s interest. Click on any of the booklet images in this post for a larger version.

A Must-Read Interview With Forgotten Animation Legend Phil Monroe

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Golden Age animator Phil Monroe (1916-1988) is rarely discussed, even amongst animation cognoscenti, which is unfortunate because he had an amazing career. Over the course of his career, he animated for an honor roll of legendary directors including Bob Clampett, John Hubley, Chuck Jones, Pete Burness, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin. Animation historian Michael Barrier has posted a never-before-published 1976 interview with Phil Monroe that he and Milton Gray conducted.

The interview delves into details that may appeal to only a small portion of our twenty thousand-plus daily readers, but if you appreciate classic Warner Bros. shorts and animation history in general, the interview is guaranteed to blow your mind. There’s even a great story about how Monroe got Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng to square dance with one another, even though “they were barely on speaking terms.” Barrier conducted a follow-up interview with Monroe in 1987, which he promises to publish online soon.

“A Family Man” By The Rauch Brothers

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Just in time for Father’s Day: A Family Man is the latest animated documentary short from the Rauch Brothers, and the nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps. The Rauch Brothers’ work combines intelligence, heart and humor in the space of a few minutes–a rare feat in animation. Character design is by Tim Rauch, storyboard by Stephen DeStefano and BG layout and painting by Bill Wray.

Vimeo Awards and Festival in NYC

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UPDATE: The winner in the animaiton category last night was Malcolm Sutherland’s Umbra.

Tonight in New York City is the second annual Vimeo Awards. I was one of the judges in the animation category, and one of these four nominees in the category will receive $5,000:

Little Boat by Nelson Boles (US)

Les chiens isolés by Rémi Bastie, Nicolas Deghani, Jonathan Djob-Nkondo, Paul LaColley, Nicolas Pegon, Jérémy Pires, Kevin Manach (France)

Umbra by Malcolm Sutherland (Canada)

Cross by Fabian Grodde (Germany)

Tickets are sold out to the award ceremony, but there are still tickets left to the Vimeo Festival which takes place tomorrow and Saturday, and offers lots of interesting talks targeted toward short filmmakers. Vimeo is offering a special deal for Cartoon Brew readers. For a $40 all-access pass to the 2-day festival, go to Ticketfly and use the discount code “brew”.

Ray Bradbury, RIP

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Ray Bradbury has died at the age of 91 The above painting of Bradbury was created by The Incredibles production designer Lou Romano.

Today would also be a good day to:

Watch Ray Bradbury’s Oscar-nominated animated short Icarus Montgolfier Wright.

Read a funny anecdote from Brad Bird about Ray Bradbury’s work on the animated feature Little Nemo.

See the never-before-published notes from a space-related meeting at Disney with Ray Bradbury and Ward Kimball.

Lifestyles of Animation Executives: Bill Damaschke

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In the mid-1990s, Bill Damaschke was a struggling LA actor who found a job working as a PA on Pocahontas. Today, he is the Chief Creative Officer of DreamWorks Animation. He also owns a classic Modernist home in the Hollywood Hills. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece about how Damaschke and his partner, John McIlwee, have restored the home. The article comes complete with a quote from Jeffrey Katzenberg.

The architect of the house, John Lautner, also designed the UPA studio in 1949, that sadly was demolished a long time ago. Damaschke and McIlwee purchased the Lautner classic in 2002 from actor Vincent Gallo. They paid $1.3 million for the home, and have spent another $1 million on renovating it. The article doesn’t mention that a few months ago, Damaschke and McIlwee also bought President Gerald Ford’s Rancho Mirage retreat for $1.675 million.

Duncan Studio’s “My Beastly ABC’s” Reaches Its Fundraising Goal

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Here’s another success story from LA’s growing independent studio scene. Veteran feature film animator Ken Duncan, responsible for characters like Meg in Disney’s Hercules and Jane in Tarzan, has successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign for the interactive iPhone/iPad app My Beastly ABC’s.

Duncan’s fundraising goal for the project was $35,000, and he ended up with $37,900 from 405 backers. The project will be produced through his company, Duncan Studio, which also recently produced the drawn animation for the short Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Masters. My Beastly ABC’s is slated for release this September.

It’s Time For 365 Days Of Ward Kimball

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A companion to my upcoming biography of Ward Kimball, 365 Days of Ward will be updated EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next year. The site is a bit of an online experiment–an attempt to explore biographical storytelling through the crisp rapid visual bursts of the Tumblr format. Perhaps there’s something dissonant about presenting someone’s life via a blogging platform that didn’t exist when they were alive, but considering Ward’s forward-thinking approach to life, I want to honor his legacy with a little unconventional thinking.

By itself, I hope 365 Days of Ward will provide a daily jolt of inspiration–an introduction to the wealth of creativity that flowed from Ward’s mind for over 80 years–but I also hope it’ll whet your appetite for the in-depth book Full Steam Ahead!: The Life and Art of Ward Kimball, which provides the context for much of what I’ll be sharing over the next year.

Below is the daily schedule of posts. I anticipate there’ll be breaks in the format, but this is the general plan:

Mondays: Animation-related artwork by Ward

Tuesdays: “Asinine Alley”, a look at the antique automobile comics that Ward drew for thirty years

Wednesdays: Animated GIFs of some of Ward’s famous animation moments

Thursdays: Dedicated to the Grizzly Flats, the legendary full-sized railroad that Ward operated in his backyard

Fridays: Music-related posts that explore Ward’s twenty-plus years as the leader of the quirky jazz group The Firehouse Five Plus Two

Saturdays and Sundays: Random fun–childhood artwork, personal sketches, caricatures, posters, photos, and other ephemera

If you’ve always wanted to know more about animation’s rebellious wild man, pay close attention for the next 365 days.

Glen Keane Talks About His Post-Disney Plans

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How’d I miss this? In late-April, Glen Keane spoke for the first time about his post-Disney plans. He talks about wanting to return to hand-drawn animation, but not Disney-style “cel” animation where his drawings would be cleaned up by others. Keane said of the traditional Disney look, “It’s a style that looks that way because of a technical limitation.” He continued, “I thought if I ever get a chance, I want to animate something where my original drawing stays on the screen.” Frédéric Back and William Kentridge, watch out!

LeSean Thomas Is The Seoul Brother

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Seoul Sessions is a well-made mini-doc series by Creative Control about animation director LeSean Thomas (The Boondocks, The Legend of Korra, Black Dynamite: The Animated Series), who moved to Seoul, Korea to oversee the production of the shows he’s directing. Lots of American animators make the move to Korea at some point or another in their careers, but it’s unlikely that anyone has done it with as much swag as LeSean. The first episode is above; next installment will be released end of June.

A Summary Of Brad Bird’s Talk About Classic Disney Films

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If you missed Brad Bird’s talk in San Francisco about “The Disney Treatment: Walt’s Versions of Classic Stories,” the Walt Disney Family Museum blog offers this lengthy summary of the talk. Brad sounds sharp as usual:

Brad pointed out that while Snow White had a very simple opening, it showed what a good storyteller Walt was. When the book of the Snow White fairy tale opens, it has a bit of a “silent movie” approach, with text that audiences have to read. When the Queen’s castle is revealed, Brad noted, “Instead of happy music it begins with mysterious music, which immediately puts you in a different state of mind. The coolest thing is he (Walt) instinctively begins with not only the Queen, but also the mirror. He shows right away she is a slave to her own image.”