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TAG FOR “Bad Ideas”Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
January 2, 2011 10:50 pm
I can’t wait to continue NOT seeing any of these films in 3-D during 2011: 33 Comments » posted in 3-D, Bad Ideas, Lame Fads 
December 12, 2010 7:28 am
Italian street artist Blu, who also happens to be one of my favorite contemporary animators, was commissioned by LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) to paint a mural on one of the museum’s walls. The mural, which depicted wooden caskets draped with dollar bills, proved to be too contemporary for the museum and they whitewashed it (literally!) less than 24 hours after it was completed. Los Angeles Downtown News offered details about the situation:
MOCA has provided just about the lamest response imaginable: “Directly in front the north wall is the Go For Broke monument, which commemorates the heroic roles of Japanese American soldiers, who served in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, and opposite the wall is the LA Veterans’ Affairs Hospital. The museum’s director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese American community, the work was inappropriate.” Unurth, a street art blog, tore into that rationale, writing that, “This is a terrible explanation. The concept that street art and graffiti must be ‘appropriate’, to the point of not making political statements, is absurd and contrary to the history of the medium.” The most embarrassing aspect of this is that MOCA is opening a show next Spring about street art. Too bad it’s now going to be viewed as a joke by many of the artists it was supposed to be celebrating and promoting. Here’s a video of Blu’s painting being whitewashed: 60 Comments » posted in Bad Ideas, Blu, MOCA
December 4, 2010 12:15 pm
Talk about cruel and unusual punishment! Inmates in a Florida jail are being forced to watch Robert Zemeckis’s mo-cap trainwreck Polar Express over and over again. One inmate is so distressed that he filed a lawsuit claiming that the experience is akin to Chinese water torture. “I hear those little kids screaming through my brain. All night long I can hear them,” he told CNN. “I can close my eyes, but I’m still going to hear them over and over and over.” To be fair, the guy killed a woman driving drunk so Robert Zemeckis’s films are exactly the animation hell he deserves. (Thanks, Joshua Wolf) 39 Comments » posted in Bad Ideas, Mo-Cap, motion capture, Robert Zemeckis, The Polar Express
November 29, 2010 10:00 am
Released mid-2010, in a “limited edition” of 250,000, was this Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Collector’s Pez Set. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time… but the designers failed to notice an inappropriate design flaw. Luckily, toy collector Mike Mozart caught it and brought it to our attention: 25 Comments » posted in Bad Ideas, Disney, pez
November 24, 2010 1:52 pm
A blind person could tell the difference between the forged animation artwork being sold by Pittsburgh-area Gallery on Baum and the genuine article. Some of the forgeries on eBay, however, are more carefully produced and thus more difficult to distinguish from the original artwork. One seller on eBay, Hkleiman, has been selling what appear to be forged pieces of animation art for at least the past year. [UPDATE — Sept. 29, 2011 : Since I originally wrote this post, I have spoken to both HKleiman and multiple other reputable people in the animation art community who know Hkleiman. It turns out that he has a long history in animation art and is a well respected seller. He has since amended some of his eBay descriptions and stopped selling these particular pieces in question. Although there are countless disreputable sellers on eBay, HKleiman is not among them and one of the good guys.] 37 Comments » posted in Bad Ideas, Disney, Animation Art, Buyer Beware
November 1, 2010 11:52 am
The limitations of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s approach to Tintin is evident from the very first still they’ve released (above). The most glaring flaw—besides the fact that Tintin and Snowy look like zombies and they’ve lost all the appealing shapes in the original designs and everything is drowning in an obscured mess of shadows and excess detail—is the tilt (or lack thereof) in Tintin’s pose. Performance capture can only capture what it records, and the animators are clearly hindered in this image because no human can comfortably run at Tintin’s angle as drawn by Hergé. The ability to achieve the impossible is one of the strengths of cartooning (and art in general), and so remains the paradox of why anybody would be foolish enough to spend a hundred million dollars to create a more inept and less appealing version of something that could be better drawn by artists. This quote by Peter Jackson is particularly hilarious in light of the images that WETA is cranking out:
A couple more stills follow the jump: 158 Comments » posted in Bad Ideas, CGI, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Tintin, WETA
October 28, 2010 9:38 pm
This is a long way to go for a visual pun, but here’s a literal Tramp stamp. Tonight, a lot of folks in Disney consumer products are thinking to themselves, “Why didn’t we think of that first?”
6 Comments » posted in Bad Ideas, Disney, Lady and the Tramp
October 17, 2010 5:19 pm
Constable Adam Josephs, whose nickname has become “Officer Bubbles” after he was filmed harassing and threatening a woman for blowing bubbles (see video above), is now suing YouTube claiming that he’s the victim. What’s the cause of harassment? Animation. Apparently, a filmmaker posted animated videos on YouTube that satirically depict Josephs abusing his power in other ways besides blowing up over bubbles. According to an article in the Globe and Mail:
The YouTube account has already been shut down and the videos have been removed from their site. Whether YouTube or the maker of the films removed them, I find the situation to be unfortunate. The type of social commentary in those animated films should never be silenced under threat, and YouTube’s decision to cave in to an irrational lawsuit sends a chilling message to animators and political cartoonists who post their work onto the site. In the 1800s, cartoonists like Honoré Daumier in France and José Guadalupe Posada in Mexico were jailed for lampooning political figures. Those days were supposed to be long gone in civilized countries, but one police officer in Canada wants to keep persecuting artists and stifling artistic expression by threats of financial harm and judicial intimidation. Constable Adam Josephs works in Toronto’s 52 Division. You can place a complaint over his bullying behavior with the 52′s Community Relations Officer Constable Michael Moffatt at (416) 808-5291. UPDATE: Somebody posted all of the Officer Bubbles videos onto YouTube again. They were all created with a free on-line animation program called Go! Animate. Go Animate! has also removed all the Officer Bubbles videos from their site. Crude as the cartoons are, they are quite effective works of satire. We’ve previously reported about easy-to-use web animation software, and an incident like this will only bring more attention to the potential of such products and the continuing democratization of the animation process. More cartoons after the jump: |
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