Author Archives: Jerry Beck

Mary and Max opens Sundance

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The Sundance Film Festival in Park City started last Thursday night, kicking off with an independent animated feature by Adam Elliot. The first reviews appearing online are intriguing – catching many veteran festival goers by surprise. Check out these quotes from Scott Foundas’ review in the LA Weekly:

For the first time in its 25-year history, the Sundance Film Festival opened Thursday night with a movie from Australia. It was also the first time the festival has opened with a feature-length animation — one, I feel confident in saying, that is among the strangest animated films ever made.

Pixar this most certainly isn’t. In fact, where most feature-length animated films, by sheer virtue of the painstaking labor involved, aim to reach the broadest possible audience, Mary and Max — which took over a year to produce, at an average rate of five seconds of finished animation per day — is as insular and private as any live-action “personal filmmaking.”

In the eight years that I’ve been covering Sundance, this is one of the only times the opening night film has been less than a calamitous failure, and maybe the only time it has been a movie of serious ambition, worth talking, thinking and arguing about afterward.

Mary and Max is in negotiations for theatrical distribution and will hopefully open in the U.S. in 2009.

Disney Moments Flipbooks

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Disney hasn’t figured out every way to merchandise their brand… but they’re coming very close! Check this out:

Now you can create animation without drawing, without thinking… without really doing anything! Upload ten seconds of any video and Disney will print it out as a flipbook – for $12.95. To be fair, it does come with an imitation leather slipcase. For more info click here.

Coraline sneak peek

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I’ll keep it brief: Go see this film!

I saw Laika’s Coraline tonight and, despite the publicists request to embargo reviews for three weeks, I can’t stifle my enthusiasm. It’s great! A beautiful little gem, a stop-motion masterpiece and certainly Henry Selick’s best film.

The Academy has its first contender for 2009. I will have a lot more to say about the movie in future post… but here are a few more superlatives: The animation is terrific. The art direction is fantastic. Shane Prigmore, who did the 2D animation the replacement faces were based on, is the unsung hero of this show – his work is superb! And yeah, the story is solid. They Might Be Giants have a cameo song in the film! And speaking of cameo’s, there is a nifty visual tribute to Joe Ranft…

That’s all I’ll say about it for now. However I’m a bit concerned about the marketing. The bus posters and billboards (particularly one at Hollywood and Highland) are not very attractive. This film has so many incredible visuals, surely something more compelling than this could be created. Memo to Focus Features: you have a hit on your hands, please tell the world.

Krazy over Herriman

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Kat lovers unite – you’re about to be hit with a brick! Craig Yoe has just started a website devoted to cartoonist George Herriman.

It’s a treasure trove of all things Krazy including separate blogs filled with Herriman comic strips, rareties, animation, news and more! Go there now!

(In the archival photo above: producer Charles Mintz, unknown, Miss Krazy Kat, animators Ben Harrison and Manny Gould)

Animation’s 2nd-Class Status

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Film reporter Patrick Goldstein, in today’s LA Times, writes about movies that are long shots for the Oscar’s Best Picture nomination. One of them is Pixar’s Wall•E:

A wonderful, critically beloved movie, “Wall-E” in any normal world would be a shoo-in nominee for best picture. Its problem? It’s an animated film, the one genre (along with comedy) that gets no respect from the academy — no animated film has won an Oscar for best picture, even though many classics, notably “The Lion King,” “Toy Story 2,” “Spirited Away” and “Ratatouille,” were just as good as the live-action winners in their year of eligibility. Actors, who make up the biggest branch of the academy, almost never vote for animated films, so it’s virtually impossible to put together enough support from other branches of the academy to register a win.

Hence, the best animated film ghetto, which, just like at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, allows an animated delight like “Wall-E” to get some recognition without having a legitimate shot at best picture stardom. Some commentators have suggested that if Disney had spent just another $20 million to push “Wall-E,” it could’ve gotten over the top, but Disney is probably right not to throw good money after bad — too many academy members have a built-in bias against animated films, viewing them as just not “important” enough to vote for.

As much as I’d like to see an animated film recognized alongside live action in the Best Picture category, I’m afraid Goldstein speaks the truth. This is the reality: no matter how much money animation makes, or how many hits Pixar and Dreamworks churn out, animation is still a 2nd class citizen in Hollywood.

I don’t like it that way. It’s not how I think — but it’s the way it is. And nothing that happens seems to change that perception. Four of the top 10 movies of 2008 (in U.S. box office gross) were animated features – four – and the other six were blockbusters that had more than their fair share of CGI effects (Iron Man, Dark Knight, etc).

And consider this scenario, which is entirely within the realm of possibility: Waltz with Bashir could be nominated (and win) in three categories (Animated Feature, Foreign Film and Documentary), Wall•E could be nominated (and win) as Best Picture, and leave, perhaps, Kung Fu Panda (my pick) winner as Best Animated Feature. Even if this could happen (and it’s not impossible) animation would still be considered by non-animation folk, as Goldstein says, “not important enough”.

It’s been a hell-of-a-good year for animation but, according to some, we still rank 2nd place.

Tonight at L.A.’s Silent Movie Theatre

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Sound cartoons… Disturbing sound cartoons. Cartoons too violent, too scary, too depressing and, though made decades ago for all ages, are considered no longer suitable for todays kids! Tonight, Tuesday January 13th, at 8pm I’m returning to the Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood with a full program of classic cartoons no longer shown on television and not on DVD.

If your childhood wasn’t already perverted by hours upon hours of unhinged animation, this show will make it up to you. I promise to fry your brain with ultra-rare 16mm and 35mm prints. Bring kids at your own risk. For more details, check the Silent Movie website.

UPDATE 3:00pm: The 8pm show is almost sold out! A second screening at 10:15pm has been added. The show also got a nice plug on LAist.

Comics and the American Jewish Dream

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Wanna meet three comic art legends? The YIVO Institute in New York will be presenting one-on-one interviews with three comic book innovators.

Al Jaffee, Jules Feffier and Harvey Pekar will be interviewed by comics writer and critic Danny Fingeroth. YIVO’s Comics and the American Jewish Dream series kicks off Wenesday January 21st at 7:00 pm with The MAD, MAD, MAD (Jewish) World of AL JAFFEE. The series continues with Jules Feffier on Tuesday, February 3, at 7:00 P.M. and Harvey Pekar on Tuesday, February 17, 7:00 P.M. The YIVO Institute For Jewish Research is at 15 West 16th Street, in Manhattan. Admission $25 / YIVO members: $18 / students: $12. For tickets call 212-868-4444 or visit smarttix.com.

Cel-ebrating Animation’s New York Roots

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We’ve plugged the forthcoming It All Started Here! several times already, but once more couldn’t hurt. I also couldn’t resist posting this photo of J. J. Sedelmaier and Howard Beckerman which appeared in the Westchester section of the local NY Times on Thursday. The Times article gives a good overview of the events planned starting next Saturday around the New York area. Don’t miss this series if you live in the Northeast. You’ll hate yourself if you do. For even more details, click here.

T28 teaser trailer

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Already deep in production on Astro Boy and Gatchaman, the creative heads at Imagi Studios now have their sights set on another classic anime series to revive in CG: Gigantor.

They have just produced a kick-ass teaser trailer for T28 (short for Tetsujin 28, aka Gigantor). Click here to watch. It looks very hot to me. Faithful to the original manga and beautifully rendered. Looks like a winner – if they can get it produced.

Times Up! What are your favorite Looney Tunes?

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The Looney Balloons above remind me that today is the deadline for you to contribute your personal lists of favorite Warner Bros. cartoons. This is your chance to influence the outcome of the contents of my forthcoming book, The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes. Please post your choices in the comments below – or in the comments of the original post. Thank you to all who have participated!

(and thank you to Adam King for the Looney Balloon link)

Steve Martin in Disneyland Dream

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A postscript to my post last week on the Library of Congress selection of the home movie Disneyland Dream to the National Film Registry.

Apparently comedian/actor Steve Martin, a former Disneyland cast member and Disneyland buff, appears in the home movie itself! Says Martin, in a letter to filmmaker Robbins Barstow, published in The Hartford Courant:

“At age eleven I worked at Disneyland. I sold guidebooks at the park from 1956 to about 1958. I am as positive as one can be that I appear about 20:20 into your film, low in the frame, dressed in a top hat, vest, and striped pink shirt, moving from left to right, holding a guidebook out for sale.”

Disney’s Secret of the Magic Gourd

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If you believed Roadside Romeo was Disney’s oddest co-production; or if you thought Disney couldn’t sink any lower than producing the hybrid Beverly Hills Chihuahua – Well here’s a contender for 2009: Disney’s The Secret of the Magic Gourd, “featuring the voice talents of High School Musical’s Corbin Bleu!” The film, which was Disney’s first-ever Chinese co-production, was released in China in 2007, where it grossed a respectable amount roughly equivalent to the Chinese box office take of Ratatouille and twice as much as Shrek the Third. There is an article about Disney’s involvement in the film at OnScreenAsia.com

(Thanks, Pete Emslie)