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Animatope by Takashi Ohashi (Japan)
Unfettered by Dax Norman (USA)
pf 2010 by Marek Pokorny (Czech Republic)
Null by Dimo Trifonov (Bulgaria): “A promotional short for a font by Font Fabric.”
Le Chat du Rabbin (The Rabbi’s Cat) opens in French theaters on June 1, 2011. Directed by Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux, the film is based on Sfar’s popular comic series of the same name.
It’s being produced by the Paris-based animation studio Banjo and production company Autochenille. Both companies were launched by Sfar, Delesvaux, and illustrator Clement Oubrerie with the goal of “making author-driven, challenging films to appeal to children and adults.” The hand-drawn film is modestly budgeted at under US$18 million. That’s similar to the budget for The Illusionist, and a far cry from the ever-increasing costs of CG features like Hop ($63 million), Rango ($150 million) and Tangled ($200-plus million). No word yet on theatrical distribution beyond French territories, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.
The official film synopsis:
Algiers, 1920s. Rabbi Sfar has more than one problem. His beautiful daughter is becoming a teenager and above all, his parrot-killing cat has just started talking! The delivery of a trunk from Russia further complicates matters when a painter is discovered inside, more dead than alive. The painter is on a quest for a hidden tribe and its mythical city in Africa. Convinced that the city really exists, he sets off on an incredible adventure, taking with him the Rabbi and his cat, a wise old Arab Sheikh and an eccentric Russian millionaire.
(Thanks, Jakob Schuh)
Bagatelle I is a music video for the saxophone quartet sonic.art created by Schnellebuntebilder, a German trio comprised of Johannes Timpernagel, Robert Pohle and Sebastian Huber. It’s exciting to watch the jittery energy of the lines and the playfulness of the imagery which at times nearly collapses into pure abstraction, though I wish they’d resisted the temptation to insert the fully-rendered images of the musicians–suggestion can be more alluring than a full reveal.
I’m not exactly sure about the technique used, but looking at the behind-the-scenes photos, it appears that the musicians were filmed first and the artwork was created over the live-action footage. Their production notes state that, “The astonishing and impulsive moments of György Ligetis’ composition was visualized by audio reactive and generatively created graphics and accomplished by hand-drawn animations.”
Hop, Illumination Entertainment’s second animated feature following last year’s Despicable Me, debuted in first place in North America with $37.5 million last weekend, making it the second strongest domestic opening of 2011. The solid US debut for the live-action/CG combo was tempered by the film’s tepid foreign premiere where it grossed under $7 million from 2,362 locations in 26 markets. Universal, which distributed the film, offered a perfectly rational reason for the poor overseas performance, blaming it on the “first warm and sunny weekend of the year.”
ILM’s Rango scored $4.5 million in its fifth frame for a total of $113.7 million in the US. Extraterrestrial live-action/CG combo Paul followed behind with $4.2 million and a three-week total of $31.8 million.
Some other US and worldwide tallies for recent animated pics:
Tangled ($199.1M, $576M worldwide)
Yogi Bear ($100.2M, $200.4M worldwide)
Gnomeo and Juliet ($96.9M, $167.1M worldwide)
Mars Needs Moms ($20.4M, $34.4M worldwide)
The Illusionist ($2.2M, $5.5M worldwide)
My Dog Tulip ($232,975)
A Jack Kirby panel custom-drawn for traditional animators. Read more about the panel HERE.
(via Super Punch)
New York animation director and ASIFA-East president David Levy has written a trio of helpful books aimed at young artists entering the industry. First, there was the general overview Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive
In this exclusive excerpt from Directing Animation, Dave describes a particularly bad experience working with a director, and the importance of maintaining open lines of communication between the director and the crew.
The Closed-Door Director
by David Levy
According to Nickelodeon’s Making Fiends creator and director Amy Winfrey, one advantage to having in-house animators is that the director can talk directly to the animator. “It is much easier to get exactly what you want from a shot if you are able to communicate directly with the animators,” she says. That may seem like common sense, but there are plenty of stories of animation directors squandering the opportunity to collaborate with an in-house crew. In contrast, Winfrey works closely with her entire staff, encouraging the storyboard artists and animatic editors to suggest changes and gags, which can make the finished episode much stronger. The animation director of an in-house production has the chance to bring the whole crew together. On Making Fiends, Winfrey says, “We always showed the first pass of the animatic to the whole crew. It was wonderful to see the work of the writers, storyboard artists, and voice actors come together. It’s always satisfying to hear people laugh!”
If Winfrey provides a best-case scenario, a recent job animating on a pilot provided my worst experience to date. And in the same way that it’s useful to examine what makes good direction so effective and inspiring, analyzing the opposite extreme can help bring into focus the pitfalls of directing and how they can be avoided.
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Who wants a pair of De-3D Cinema Glasses:
* Eliminates 3D effect for more pleasurable movie viewing
* Converts standard 3D movies in to relaxing 2D
* Eliminates headaches and nausea associated with 3D movies
* Works with current 3D movies in theaters using RealD 3D technology
* View 3D movies comfortably with your 3D loving friends
Don’t get out your credit cards just yet–it’s an April Fool’s gag by ThinkGeek, but can the real item be far behind?
(Thanks, Sheila Sofian via Twitter)
I’m not much for compiling lists of favorites, but if I had to ever list my favorite cartoonists, there’s no question that Robert Osborn would appear high atop the pantheon of greats alongside other cartooning heroes like Ronald Searle, Otto Dix, Vip Partch, Rowland Emett, and Miguel Covarrubias.
Osborn’s work has been on my mind recently. His name came up in a conversation a few days ago, and then there was Jerry’s post about Grampaw Pettibone, a character that Osborn designed and drew for a long time.
Osborn is the definition of late bloomer. He was approaching forty years old when he began drawing cartoons for the Navy, his first major body of work. He created between 2,000-3,000 drawings for posters and military training booklets, many of them featuring Dilbert, a goofball pilot who did everything incorrectly. It’s a crime that these drawings have not been collected nor reprinted anywhere since their original publication seventy years ago.
Thankfully, there’s the Ask a Flight Instructor website, an unlikely repository of Osborn’s work, collecting nearly 600 of his drawings from that era. It’s easily the largest collection of Osborn’s wartime work that I’ve ever seen and it’s a real treasure. The drawings are all related to the operation of aircraft and aimed squarely at pilots, but from a cartooning standpoint, they can be appreciated by all.
The first thing that strikes me about these drawings is the quality of Osborn’s line. The texture, the dynamism, the intensity–diminished somewhat by the low-res scans on-line, but still plainly evident. In my opinion, he had the most exciting line of any cartoonist.
Years ago, I had a conversation with cartoonist Eddie Fitzgerald and he theorized (quite eloquently, I might add) that the content of Osborn’s work was overshadowed by the sublime beauty of his line. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but the point is well taken–Osborn’s line is that of a master draftsman’s; we’d be more accustomed to seeing such elegant work hanging in an art museum than reprinted in instructional booklets for aviators. Osborn, said art historian Russell Lynes, “has never been one to observe too closely the distinction between cartooning and pure painting.”
The real thrill, however, is seeing how Osborn applies that line to the art of cartooning. He doesn’t hesitate to twist and distort forms, caricature expressions, anthropomorphize airplanes, and gag up an idea. And he does it all using a naturally funny and inventive drawing style which evolved to even greater heights in the years following his Navy cartoons.
A remix of the new Looney Tunes Show by HotFriedSkadoosh. Apparently, the kids today call these “YouTube Poops”. Old people, like us, call them remixes or mash-ups. Same difference.
(Thanks, Martin Juneau)
Skeletor Saves is a He-Man-themed art show (NOT an April Fool’s Day joke I assure you) taking place next Thursday, April 7, at HeadQuarters Studio (385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013). As oxymoronic as the concept is, it’s hard to fault the show’s goal which is to raise money for the Ali Forney Center in New York City, a shelter for homeless LGBT youth.
Some major names from the fashion world are contributing pieces, including Marc Jacobs and Helmut Lang, but most of the artwork appears to be culled straight from the math notebooks of bored high schoolers. Let’s hope that after this show, we can we finally put a stick in the “let’s-ask-a-bunch-of-random-artists-to-create-cheesy-artwork-based-on-a-lame-childhood-memory-that-nobody-in-their-right-mind-would-hang-in-their-home” trend.
I’ve collected some of my favorite pieces after the jump… and by favorite, I mean most homoerotic. It’s kinda NSFW, but if you really think about it, so was the original Filmation series:
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Don’t miss these never-before-seen hand-drawn maps by director Bob Clampett illustrating the various Warner Bros. animation facilities (called Leon Schlesinger Productions at the time) and identifying where the artists worked.
It’s a nice complement to this recent photo that turned up on eBay that identifies the various buildings on Disney’s Hyperion lot in the 1930s.
Matthias Hoegg whose earlier student short August was featured in Cartoon Brew TV’s Student Animation Festival, has followed up with an even more impressive graduation short Thursday. Produced at the Royal College of Art in London, the short was nominated for a BAFTA last year. The slice-of-life love story takes place in an unsentimental near-future where emotion struggles to break through an onslaught of techno-gadgetry.
Patterns, rhythms and color dominate the visual design of the film. Hoegg says in this Motionographer interview that he was inspired primarily by American quilts and Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaics. Credit also belongs to the sound designer Marian Mentrup, whose rich layer of audio adds a degree of warmth and humanity to the images.
See concept art from the film on Matthias’s website.
CREDITS
Sound Design and Music by Marian Mentrup
“Thursday’s Space Waltz” written and performed by Marian Mentrup
Published by Kobrow Musikverlag
Additional Animation by Aaron Lampert
Additional Modeling by Mattias Bjurström
Foley Artist Günther Röhn
Mixed at Talking Animals Studio Berlin
(Thanks, Fiachra Hackett)
This Japanese music video for group_inou‘s “Heart” by AC部 is pretty incredible. I can’t find any information in English about the directors, but they appear to be a Japanese collective comprised of three artists. If you know more about them, please share.
Some would argue that the video is incredible for all the wrong reasons–trippy, creepy, freaky!–but the unorthodox style works because the directors sell us their vision with complete conviction. In an animation world where everybody strives to make characters move according to established rules and principles, it’s refreshing to see animators betray every convention of the natural world–even if that vision is at odds with the “correct” way of animating. It’s always exhilarating when an animator establishes their own rules of movement and has the ability to execute those ideas with clarity and skill. AC pulls off that feat in “Heart.”
Below is another piece of animation by AC:
(Thanks, David OReilly)
If you read just one thing today, make it this newly released 1976 interview with Disney animator Milt Kahl conducted by Michael Barrier and Milton Gray. Hearing Kahl speak his mind brings the past alive in a way that few history books can, and sheds light on the divisions and rivalries between the golden age Disney animators. When the interview took place, Kahl had recently left the Disney studio after forty-plus years and he doesn’t mince words:
“The way that I feel about it is that my performance in The Rescuers is good. The only thing is that you know that this picture is going to be mediocre. It has a few high spots, but it’s full of bad taste that is, as I like to put it, tempered by bad judgment. That’s kind of a lousy way to put it, but I feel that way. I’m really rather bitter about the set-up, about some of the people who I thought considered that we were working together, and I find that we really weren’t. Here I am, a person at the height of my powers, and I feel there’s not a place for me anymore. I don’t want to be involved; I can’t fight this thing. And there certainly isn’t a place for me anywhere else in this business.”
Cute imagery and creepy lyrics rub up against each other in Farm Music, a short by up-and-comer Yousuke Oomomo. To learn more about Oomomo’s work, Ben Ettinger’s AniPages Daily offers some illuminative commentary about the young Japanese filmmaker.
