Author Archives: Chappell Ellison

Digging into Disney’s “Day of the Dead” Problem

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Last week after word got out that Disney was seeking to trademark “Día de los Muertos” in preparation for its 2015 release of a Pixar animated feature inspired by the traditional Mexican holiday, several online communities were outraged. The backlash kicked into high gear when cartoonist and illustrator Lalo Alcaraz shared a poster of a Godzilla-like Mickey Mouse under the words, “It’s coming to trademark your cultura.” [Go here to see Alcaraz's cartoon via Pocho.com.]

Social media has always kept Disney in check, and this time is no different. Latino Rebels, an online community that has done a terrific job of tracking Disney’s depiction of Latino culture, helped handle and report on the groundswell of public outcry over the last few weeks. After several petitions and pressure, Disney announced last Tuesday that they would withdraw the trademark filing, claiming that it was no longer necessary since they had changed the title of the fim.

In an interview with Cartoon Brew, William Nericcio, a scholar specializing in the representation of Latinos in American pop culture and author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, said, “[Hollywood's] attitude towards culture is like a pelt hunter from the 19th century. They need the skin that people recognize and value in order to sell a project that will yield predictable profits.”

Nericcio acknowledges that Pixar and Disney face an uphill battle in producing their Day of the Dead feature, which is to be directed by Toy Story 3 helmer Lee Unkrich: ”I think it’s wonderful that Pixar is working on a Mexico, cultural-based project. But it’s a public relations nightmare. They’re not really equipped to talk about other cultures in a way that shows even the slightest sensitivity.”

While Nericcio supports the critical eye cast by social media, he does express concerns over extreme backlash. “The downside of it is, companies like Disney could get scared off of projects that might be focused on Latin American culture, just because they got burned,” he explains. Ultimately, the appeal of a Dia de Los Muertos film is undeniable; the imagery connected to the celebration is so lush, providing a palette that would inspire any moviegoer. “It’s good business to green light a project on la cultura Mexicana. Everybody’s loving the wrestlers, the icons, the color, the exoticness,” Nericcio says. “But when you have the patent lawyers involved, they come off looking terrible.”

Nericcio, a self-admitted Pixar fan would love to see a Dia de los Muertos animated film, as would so many others. Fortunately, there’s another film on the horizon—Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez are currently producing and directing (respectively) their own Day of the Dead-themed feature at Reel FX called The Book of Life, to be released through Fox in October of 2014, more than a year before the Disney-Pixar feature. There’s no word yet whether Mexico-born del Toro and Gutierrez will seek trademarks of their own.

“DuckTales Remastered” Pushes Video Game Nostalgia To New Heights

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The line between animation and video games has long been blurred. There was the Saturday Supercade on CBS in the mid-80s, where Frogger, Q-Bert and Donkey Kong starred in short segments. A handful of years later, Fox ran the Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and NBC had Captain N: The Game Master. All of these shows were relatively short-lived marketing methods of pushing Nintendo further into homes and the minds of children. But lately, the animation and video game industries have united under the banner of nostalgia, appealing to adults whose childhoods were spent chasing down the aproned token keeper in the local arcade.

This nostalgic trip is partly due to a major shift in demographics. Generation X and Y, the first to experience video game-filled childhoods, have grown up, and many of them now have young children of their own. It explains the broad appeal of Wreck-It Ralph—a father who spent countless hours feeding quarters to a PacMan arcade game was just as likely to be entertained by the film as his child. In fact, Disney succeeded in creating faux arcade games that felt so real, adult audience members were convinced to the point of feeling nostalgic. Fix It Felix Jr., the game in which Ralph was the villain, felt ripped from your childhood arcade.

You could assume this nostalgia trend would’ve peaked with Wreck-It Ralph, but it shows no signs of slowing. Ratchet & Clank, the series of Playstation games initially released in 2002, is finally receiving the animated film adaptation that its fans have craved. Rainmaker Entertainment and Blockade Entertainment plan to produce the film for a theatrical release in 2015. Fortunately, the fan base has grown right along the game. Says one commenter on The Nerdist : “The twelve year old in me (currently 23) just stood up and yelled, ‘Finally!’”

Then there’s game developer WayForward, set to release a remastered version of DuckTales, Capcom’s hit that originally sold nearly 3 million copies on NES and Game Boy. It was and is exceedingly popular, with gamers still raving about the game’s tight handling. Among 8-bit musicians, who derive their tunes from the sounds of Nintendo, the DuckTales soundtrack is a unanimous favorite. Some even say that the Nintendo game eclipses all other aspects of the DuckTales franchise, including the animated series.

What’s most incredible about this project from WayForward is its unabashed pandering to a nostalgic audience. WayForward’s remastering remains true to the original, with whole levels of the game completely duplicated, save for enhanced background graphics. According to an article on the Verge, Disney even went so far as to provide original art assets and the voice actors from the DuckTales animated series, including 90-year-old Alan Young as Scrooge. “We’re really trying to make it play as identical to the original as possible,” says WayForward’s Austin Ivansmith. “We thought, well if the original developers could make this again today, what would they do?”

There is no doubt that DuckTales was a major keystone of early video game history—I even revisit my own copy once every few years. Young parents who grew up playing DuckTales on NES will leap at the chance to reintroduce the game to their kids on the contemporary consoles of today. These sorts of modern reinterpretations can certainly yield some fresh, artistic perspective. But the relationship between the animation and video game industries is becoming more blatantly based on the desire for financial sure-bets. And if we know anything about Hollywood, where movies based on boardgames are greenlit, audiences will continue to be encouraged to wallow in childhood nostalgia.

Spectacle: A Music Video Exhibition For the MTV Generation

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Currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, Spectacle: The Music Video is the first ever exhibition to celebrate the artform that was once the bread and butter of MTV. Curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Grey Wells put together an impressive spread of 300 music videos in beautifully designed exhibition.

While most music videos in the exhibition were featured in looped groupings on wall-mounted monitors, the videos that received their own, stand-alone installations were ones that had accompanying props or assets left over from production. For example, the four jumpsuits worn in the video for OK GO’s “This Too Shall Pass” are hung on the wall next to a video monitor. Another corner is filled with a giant model of the anthropomorphic milk carton from Blur’s “Coffee and Tea.” Also on display is a prop from “Tonight, Tonight,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ homage to Georges Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon.”

Stop motion and 2-D animation are heavily represented in the show. Piles of colorful yarn props comprise an installation for Steriogram’s “Walkie Talkie Man,” directed by Michel Gondry. As one of the most prolific and creative music video directors in the past two decades, Gondry’s work received the most gallery space by far. Another corner is accented with bold LEGO pieces while an accompanying monitor plays “Fell in Love With A Girl,” the iconic music video that pulled The White Stripes into the mainstream.

Original drawings from “Take On Me” by A-ha are on display as a reminder of the video’s landmark status in pop culture. Director Steve Barron and animation directors Michael Patterson and Candice Reckinger combined pencil-sketch animation, rotoscoping and live action for a total of 3,000 frames that took four months to complete. It is still one of the most memorable music videos of all time, and was the first to push a song to number one one the charts.

Several monitors around the gallery space display curated lumps of animated music videos, but there were a few notably absent or screened without additonal background information: Kanye’s Bakshi-inspired video for “Heartless,” Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” and anything by The Gorillaz. Of course it’s impossible to satisfy everyone’s expectations, so the curators devised a lounge provided by Vevo where patrons can select and watch their favorite music videos.

Approaching this exhibit, I wondered how the curators, who are self-proclaimed products of the MTV generation, could keep their nostalgia in check. At times they can’t, and the exhibition is more celebratory than critical. The future of the music video isn’t wholly confronted. An installation of Arcade Fire’s ventures into interactive music videos was one of the most current explorations of the medium on display. Additionally, fan-made videos, highlighted in a section called “REMIX,” show how fans harness YouTube to interact with and create their own music videos today. But the question still remains: what will the music video of tomorrow look like?

Where the exhibition shines, however, is establishing the history of music videos, tracing their roots back to the earliest sound films of the 1920s. Included was a mention of “Colour Box” by Len Lye, a 1935 experimental animated short set to a Cuban dance beat. The narrative thread continues on, showing how The Beatles, Queen, David Bowie and several experimental artists contributed to the establishment of the music video as a definitive medium.

The exhibition, which is absolutely worth seeing, is currently on loan from Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. With any hope, the show will become even more accessible and take part in a national tour. And now that Billboard has decided to include YouTube views in its rankings, the music video could once again be a driving force worth rediscovering.

Why Is It So Difficult to Make Cute Cartoon Characters?

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Over on question-and-answer website Quora, someone posted a very simple question: Which is the cutest cartoon character ever created? The answers from Quora members cover a broad spectrum, some more obvious (Tweety, Pokemon, Pooh) and others less so (Gertie the Dinosaur, Night Fury from How to Train Your Dragon).

So what makes a cartoon character cute? You could reduce the answer down to a few basic characteristics: big eyes and head, fluffiness, warmth and chubbiness. “Cuteness is based on the basic proportions of a baby plus the expressions of shyness or coyness,” wrote Preston Blair in Advanced Animation. According to Blair, other cute traits include:

  • Head large in relation to the body.
  • Eyes spaced low on the head and usually wide and far apart.
  • Fat legs, short and tapering down into small feet for type.
  • Tummy bulges—looks well fed.

But cuteness is far more complex than even Blair’s set of rules; some consider E.T., Yoda and WALL·E to be the epitome of cute, despite their furless, odd appearances. Cuteness and a character’s perceived hugability aren’t always determined by aesthetic appeal. “Cuteness is distinct from beauty,” wrote Natalie Angier for The New York Times. “Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap.”

In essence, any creature deemed cute is one that speaks to our nurturing instincts. The cuteness of an infant can motivate an adult to take care of it, even if the baby is not a blood relation. Even more, studies have found that humans transfer these same emotions to animals (or even inanimate objects) that bear our similar features. Finding Nemo combined all of these psychological elements perfectly—you can’t hug or cuddle a fish, yet adorable Nemo, with his fin damaged from birth and his human-like facial features, appeals to our caregiving instincts. In fact, every character in Pixar films, whether it’s a clownfish or a car, features forward-facing eyes, the most crucial feature for achieving an emotional connection with the audience.

But with any extreme comes another. If a character is too cute and sugary sweet, the audience can develop skepticism. “Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, ‘Let’s not worry about complexities, just love me,’” philosopher Denis Dutton told The New York Times. It is for that very reason cuteness stirs uneasiness and sometimes feels cheap.

After all, the adorable, smiling face of a child can hide the havoc he just wreaked by breaking all of his toys. “Cuteness thus coexists in a dynamic relationship with the perverse,” writes Daniel Harris in his book Cute, Quaint, Hungry And Romantic: The Aesthetics Of Consumerism. You could call this the Gremlin Effect—a character with an underlying creepiness. Troll dolls (which were recently acquired by DreamWorks Animation) and Cabbage Patch Kids are the inexplicable result of this paradox.

There’s no denying a cultural need to pigeonhole and perfect the attributes that could be popularly deemed cute. In his fantastic short essay on Mickey Mouse, biologist and historian Stephen Jay Gould asserts that Mickey’s changing appearance over time is a physical evolution that mirrors cultural attitudes toward cuteness. As the Benjamin Button of animated rodentia, Mickey’s eyes and head have grown larger, his arms and legs chubbier. Mickey has become more childlike and, most would say, more cute and less rat-like. Mickey isn’t the only character to undergo this transformation. The teddy bear, first sold in 1903, started out anatomically similar to a real bear, with a long snout and gangly arms. Today’s teddy bears more closely resemble the Care Bears, with pudgier features and colorful fur.

Audience don’t always need Mickey’s goofy grins and huge eyes to connect with a character’s cuteness. Pictoplasma, the artists’ network and conference that celebrates characters extracted from context, reveals how sometimes it’s our own invented narrative that blasts a character into hall-of-fame cuteness. As Pictoplasma co-founder Peter Thaler said explains, “It’s a horrible example, but Hello Kitty has no facial expression. You don’t know if she’s happy or sad; you just see these two dots. You’re projecting all the narration, the biography.”

Our ideals of cuteness continue to evolve, a trajectory in visual culture that has birthed Hello Kitty and Japan’s kawaii movement, Giga Pets, Furby, Elmo and Slimer. Often the most exciting, memorable cute characters are the ones who bear negative traits that reveal the vulnerability. Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from Ice Age, is adorable and loved by audiences even more for his greed. Cuteness, perhaps then, is not just about an objective set of physical features—it’s also about a behavior that compels audiences and connects us emotionally to the character.

Animated GIFs: Annoying Fad or Teachable Moment?

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Opinions on animated GIFs range from pure hatred to unabashed overuse. “Hide your eyes,” wrote one reporter on CNET. Meanwhile, Tumblr, which is the undisputed platform for animated GIF enthusiasts, announced it has reached over 100 million blogs. Now that Google has released a new search tool for these dynamic images, some wonder if we’ve reached peak GIF.

We may be experiencing the second incarnation of animated GIFs, a 25-year-old medium, but it feels totally different this time. More than just dancing babies and glittery hearts, animated GIFs now have the potential to evoke a whole new narrative depth. They can be distractingly anarchic or subtly creepy. They can also strike a balance between these two, offering a small, yet thoughtful charge of emotion. Alastair Macaulay’s homage to the State of Liberty in The New York Times was illustrated with three animated GIFs, each with calming, subtle looping movement—the rolling waves of the New York Harbor, a bird soaring past Lady Liberty, and the swaying branches of the trees on Ellis Island. Why aren’t all newspaper articles illustrated so dynamically?

Whether or not the revival of the animated GIF is a fleeting trend, they present an opportunity for animators and the community-at-large. Vine, which is Twitter’s answer to the animated GIF, is quickly becoming a teachable moment. “Vine is a wonderful thing,” wrote Daniel Stuckey on Motherboard. “It’s teaching the mainstream how to loop.”

On an obvious level, animated GIFs are a simple, lo-fi educational tool for teaching loop cycles. But I think they could yield far greater potential; animated GIFs could be to up-and-coming animators as ACEOs are to illustrators, painters and print makers— highly collectible miniature works of art that are traded and sold. I could also see an increase in animators taking commissions to create customized GIFs for avid fans.

Now that apps and software have foolproofed the GIF-making process, many have begun to experiment in wholly refreshing ways. Animators like Polly Dedman are creating animated GIFs unlike any I’ve seen before (see above). Major events, such as elections and award ceremonies, are being live GIFfed. Even Hollywood is exploring how animated GIFs can effectively promote feature length films by making them available as collectible downloads. The GIF is here to stay. So how can the animation community stake its claim in this rapidly evolving narrative medium?

What Every Animation Student Should Know About Title Sequence Design

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Art of the Title, an addicting resource with dozens of high-def clips, recently posted their Title Design Finalists for the SXSW 2013 Film Awards. Of the animated title sequences, The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez and ParaNorman are standouts: the first for its use of vintage woodblock typeface and spaghetti western aesthetic, and the latter for its 1950s horror-inspired design. Both sequences are richly nuanced, and imply an understanding of the history of typography and graphic poster design. This applied visual knowledge is the direct result of the collaboration between animators and designers.

Title sequence design has evolved since the days of Saul Bass, Maurice Binder and Pablo Ferro, some of the most recognized godfathers of the artform. More and more animators and graphic designers are building entire studio practices devoted to title sequence design. The first (or last) fifteen minutes of any film is increasingly crucial to the overall art direction, and often seen as an opportunity for experimentation.

I’ve spoken with several young animators who still treat title sequences as an after thought. Or, even worse, they just slap on the default fonts provided by Flash or After Effects. I’ve never understood this attitude. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t spend several months working on a cake recipe, bake it to perfection, just to cover it in store-bought icing. But for animation students just starting out, executing a thoughtful title sequence in addition to animating a film can be overwhelming. Fortunately, help is usually nearby in the graphic design department, where students will leap at the chance to assist in creating a title sequence.

One of the (many) ironies of higher education is that colleges attract hordes of bright, eager students, then isolate them into separate buildings, sometimes several city blocks or miles from each another. When I was a design student at the University of Texas, the animation students didn’t even realize my department existed—and vice versa. Unfortunately, animation and graphic design departments are rarely adjacent, and it’s up to students—not their teachers—to make these connections.

So if you’re an animation student, do yourself a favor: open up your university map, locate the graphic design school, then drop by and make introductions. Not every animated film, short or feature-length, needs a complex, typeset title sequence with bells and whistles. But building relationships with graphic designers, especially now that motion graphics is a required area of study in many design schools, could yield infinite possibilities with mutual benefits.

How “The Croods” Builds On A Century of Caveman Stereotypes

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We can’t seem to get over our obsession with the caveman, who has appeared on screen since at least 1912. In fact, anthropologist Judith Berman has written that a new caveman character has been introduced into pop culture every year since World War II.

DreamWorks’ The Croods, directed by Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco, presents the most recent version of prehistoric man; Grug, is a responsible father facing such dad-like issues as a teenage daughter who just wants to be her own person. He transcends the behavior expected of a typical caveman, but his character design doesn’t evolve past a stereotype that is largely of our own making.

We’ve distilled an entire subspecies of human down to a single iconic image, one that is perpetuated year after year through film, animation, comic art and bad Halloween costumes. The caveman is always brutish, dressed in some type of fur loin cloth and possessing limited intelligence. Some stereotypes of prehistoric humans are certainly based on archeological facts: the structure of the skull, anatomical proportions and pelt-based wardrobe. But other stereotypes, such as wielding clubs, communing with dinosaurs and pulling women by the hair, are our own projections of prehistoric behavior.

The iconic caveman image we know today was already established by the 1930s, seen in the comic strip Alley Oop. He carried a stone axe, manhandled women and rode a dinosaur named Dinny. Alley Oop, along with the Fleischer’s Stone Age Cartoons series, was a response to western society grappling with what it meant to be modern. The simple world of the caveman was a nostalgic comfort to those who feared progress.

Alley Oop was the pop culture bookend of a caveman fiction trend that began in the 19th century. One of the earliest examples is Paris Before Man, a novel written by Pierre Boitard in 1861. The frontispiece print (above) shows a club-wielding caveman, protecting his mate. As the genre developed, the caveman became more brutish and ill-mannered—an 1886 short story written by Andrew Lang describes a marriage custom in which women are “knocked on the head and dragged home.” By the 1920s, numerous newspaper headlines used “caveman” and “neanderthal” as adjectives to describe senseless male brutality.

The mid-century resurgence of cavemen in film (The Neanderthal Man, Monster on Campus), comics (B.C.) and television (The Flintstones) can partly be blamed on World War II rhetoric. Newscasters sang the praises of atomic power while warning of its devastating potential to send us back to a new Stone Age. To help us deal with these fears, the caveman was domesticated; The Flintstones showed that, even as the worst case scenario, the Stone Age wasn’t so bad. Even cavemen could wear neckties and accomplish an honest day’s work.

Over time, films and TV shows have moved away from the wife-clubbing caveman of the 19th century to fit G-rated expectations of civilized society. In fact, The Croods has pushed the caveman to the opposite end of the spectrum, with a father figure that seems like he could handle modern-day discussions of co-parenting and all-terrain strollers. No longer a commentary on uncivilized man or our fears of the future, the caveman and his era presented in The Croods is merely a backdrop ideal for contrasting our modern reality of iPods and WiFi.

Dallas Opera to Hold the World’s Largest Screening of “What’s Opera, Doc?”

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After drawing a crowd of 15,000 attendees to Cowboys Stadium for a live simulcast of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the Dallas Opera aims for repeated success this April with Turnadot. This year’s curtain-raiser, however, will be the world’s largest screening of What’s Opera, Doc?, displayed on the Stadium’s record-breaking 160-foot wide, 72-foot tall HD screens. 

Surprisingly, Cowboys Stadium was planned from the outset to bring high art into the lives of sports fans—Gene Jones, the wife of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, is almost solely responsible for the Stadium’s museum-quality collection of contemporary art. This arena-turned-cultural center will provide the setting for the latest chapter in the love-hate relationship between animation and classical music.

With Fantasia, Walt Disney quite literally tried to align animation with the high arts, with ostriches unironically performing ballet pas de deuxs set to the “Dance of the Hours” from the opera La Gioconda. Eventually, animation and classical music became a tongue-in-cheek pairing; during the early 1950s it was commonplace to see Wile E. Coyote assemble a spring-loaded rocket launcher to the sounds of a lilting oboe. By the time Chuck Jones produced What’s Opera, Doc? in 1957, it was a way of saying “Screw ‘em,” to the established arts. “I never made a cartoon that didn’t contain some flick-of-the-wrist at the establishment of the day,” said Jones in Chuck Jones: Conversations.

This April, in a very public arena, Jones and his work will be embraced by the very establishment he parodied. Only now, as opera faces its biggest identity crisis, does it wholeheartedly embrace the exaggerated cultural conventions we’ve established over the years: busty valkyries, lovesick brutes and overdone pageantry. Keith Cerny, the CEO of Dallas Opera acknowledges that What’s Opera Doc? is “still creative, interesting, fresh, plays off the same stereotypes about opera that we’re addressing today.” Proponents of opera have realized that the best chance of fruitful survival is to laugh with us—if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.