(Alternate commentary-free version: This link will allow you to watch the cartoon without audio commentary)

This episode from the Cartoon Brew TV Vault features a rare episode of A Few Quick Facts, a companion series to Warner Bros. Private Snafu shorts. This cartoon was originally shown to servicemen during World War II as part of the Army/Navy Screen Magazine, a newsreel program produced from June 1943 until early 1946 by the Army Signal Corps under the supervision of director Frank Capra. This 3-part episode honors the Navy’s latest battleships; praises the American soldier’s brain; and explains the cost and care of a G.I’s shoes.

A Few Quick Facts were produced by several Hollywood studios, including MGM, Hugh Harman Productions and United Film Productions (later known as UPA). The budgets were low, but the artists were allowed a lot of freedom to experiment with graphics and pioneer limited animation techniques which would soon, for good or ill, become commonplace in the industry.

Jerry Beck and Mark Kausler provide audio commentary on this short. Thanks to Keith Paynter for providing this rare film to us. Special kudos to Michael Geisler for recording the commentary track, and Randall Kaplan for sound and picture editing.

Like Me, Only Better is a film that made us laugh in Annecy last spring, and then made us laugh even harder when we saw it again in Ottawa last fall. That’s when we knew we had to find a way to share it with viewers of Cartoon Brew TV. Directed by Martin Pickles as a graduation project at the Royal College of Art in London, the film has been a big hit on the festival circuit appearing in over fifty festivals to date. Prior to studying animation, Martin had been primarily a live-action filmmaker and many of his earlier films can be seen on his film company website.

Martin Pickles will be participating in the Brew comments if you have any questions for him. Here is his artist’s statement about the film:

Like Me, Only Better is about our day-to-day neuroses and compulsions. I treat a serious subject with sympathy and humour to try and make a film that is both pertinent and entertaining.

Before the RCA I made mainly live-action films, in which the apparatus of filming was often integral to the story. But my experience on the MA course and my sideline as a Flash animator led me towards more traditional animation and my graduation film is almost entirely hand-drawn on paper.

Afterwards I would like to do more commercial work whilst pursuing my own projects and perhaps, in the distant future, even combine the two.

(Warning: This film contains strong language.)

As I was watching Dan Mountain’s Adventures in Broccoli at the year-end Pratt screening a few months back, I was thinking to myself that not only is this a damn good student film, it’s also something I wouldn’t mind seeing every week on television. The setup is draped in mystery—a boy wakes up in a broccoli (or is he even awake?)—and odd characters and events are introduced into his life in rapid-fire stream-of-conscious fashion. It’s somewhere between Avatar and Adventure Time with equal mixes of action and whimsy. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of any cartoon that gives the hipster-on-a-bicycle his comeuppance.

Dan Mountain will be participating in the comments section so fire away if you want to know anything. Here are some comments from Dan about how the film came about:

Adventures in Broccoli got its title in early May 2008, after about eight months of production, and about forty hours before it was due. This was a very haphazard time, because when I came back to Pratt for the Fall 2007 semester, I had a completely different story already storyboarded, and I was eager to start ASAP on that particular story. However, Pat Smith and Andy London (our class’ thesis advisors) kept telling me that it wasn’t even a story; it was just a bunch of random ideas with the only thread being that it takes place in giant broccoli. This greatly discouraged me, but was the first driving factor to making this.

The problem was that this film is a mere idea of a greater story I have been working on that is sort of an on going social commentary placed in an alternate reality to point out things I think about in this reality. Its a pretty epic story I hope to develop into a series, which is loosely based on The Mars Volta album “De-Loused in The Comatorium”, the evolution of music and the images that come to mind when I listen to music, the colonization of North America, technology, and every day human nature. Also super heroes and the idiots that become them.

I started drawing in October, knowing what I wanted to put in the film, but not how to organize it. I didn’t even have a storyboard; just a few scene animatics that I started placing here and there. Only then did I begin to figure out how to segue between them. This ended up with me accruing a total of about two weeks of all nighters during the Spring 2008 semester. I think that is what made this film so ridiculous; the fact that it was put together on the fly, as it went, while being completely sleep deprived.

Adventures in Broccoli is my first animated film, and I plan to make many more, because I had so much fun making it. It’s funny to sit back and think seriously about how ludicrous you can make a story.

(Alternate commentary-free version: This link will allow you to watch the trailers without audio commentary)

This episode from the Cartoon Brew TV Vault features three unique trailers from the “Golden Age” of anime.

First up, the 1974 Japanese animated Jack and The Beanstalk (Jack to Mame no Ki). With this film, anime veteran Gisaburo Sugii made the move from animating on artistically surreal, X-rated projects like Belladonna (Kanashimi no Belladonna, 1973) to directing family-friendly feature films like Jack. This movie was released in the U.S. in 1976 by Columbia Pictures, limiting its distribution to Saturday matinees. Jack lived on despite this, gaining its widest exposure on home video and in numerous showings on HBO. However, its greatest appeal to U.S. baby boomers is its all-star cast of voice actors including Speed Racer’s Corrine Orr and Jack Grimes, and Astro Boy’s Billie Lou Watt and Ray Owens.

Next, Princess Knight (Ribbon no Kishi). Osamu Tezuka began this film as a serialized manga in 1954. It became a 52-episode anime series in 1967. Aimed at girls, the premise centers on a severely conflicted heroine: a princess raised as a boy, who must hide her true sex or lose the kingdom, secretly fighting crime in male guise as the “Phantom Knight”—and donning a separate feminine identity to appear as her own sister! Joe Oriolo (TV’s Felix The Cat, Hercules, etc.) bought the series in 1970 and dubbed it in English. Unfortunately the show wasn’t widely seen in the U.S. (Oriolo also edited together three episodes and tried releasing it as feature, Choppy and the Princess); this promo-trailer also doubled as the show’s U.S. opening title sequence.

Finally, it’s a shame Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon (Wanpaku ôji no orochi taiji, 1963) isn’t more widely known and is so difficult to see. Genndy Tartakovsky has touted this as one of his biggest influences on Samurai Jack and you can see why in this rare American TV spot (presented here in black & white). The original was presented in vivid Fujicolor (”Magicolor!”) and wide screen ToeiScope (an anamorphic 2.35:1 screen ratio - aka “WonderScope!”), two aspects hurt in the awful U.S. dub which mainly exists today in faded Eastman Color with pan-and-scan editing. What remains visible regardless is the beautiful character design and stylized animation, years ahead of what Japanese animators were doing commercially at this time. This is a little classic that deserves wider exposure. Seek out the Japanese DVD if you can. Some great model sheets of the main characters are posted here.

Jerry Beck provides audio commentary on these trailers. Thanks to Michael Geisler for recording the commentary track, and Randall Kaplan for his expert sound and picture editing.

The Shoebox is a graduation film created at the Art Academy in Rotterdam by Joost van den Bosch and Erik Verkerk, better known as Ka-Ching Cartoons nowadays. The film’s original Dutch title de Kijkdoos translates literally to “the looking box” and comes from an old tradition in Holland in which children create elaborate dioramas inside shoeboxes.

Since graduating from school in 2006, Verkerk and van den Bosch have worked on the animated series Skunk Fu! and created more short films of their own. The directors will be participating in the comments section so please forward any questions to them. Here are some additional details they’ve provided us about the film:

We wrote this film as a concept for a series, where we always would start with live-action, then a problem would appear the main live action character would find a ‘magic’-shoebox, and when they look inside it they’ll see a story with a similar problem and a solution (animated). This solution would help the live-action character solve their problem.

This film was made with this concept, we’ve got a lot of help from very talented students from the Film Academy to support us with the live-action. They even arranged really good and professional actors for the film. All the animation was created in Maya where we tried to simulate a real paper feeling. We originally tried to do it in stop motion, but the deadline for graduation made that impossible. We animated facial expressions in Flash, then we put it as an animated texture on our paper-3D model to achieve the result we wanted.

The music was all composed for this film and then live recorded by the musicians who were playing and watching the film at the same time. This film was in many ways challenging. We had never done live action before and never done 3D animation before. We also had to do this all in a very short time. We were very happy with the result and it allowed us to graduate with honors.

This film was the start of our company Ka-Ching Cartoons and the start of series of very special projects, we just finished a monster movie (with 3D glasses) called The 3D Machine and we’re currently working on a 25-minute opera about cockroaches.

This week on Cartoon Brew TV, we’re reaching back to 1980 and rediscovering Paul Vester’s animated short Sunbeam. The independent short, which is an homage to early cel animation, was released in UK theaters with the feature film Chariots of Fire. It was produced at Vester’s commercial studio Speedy Films inbetween commercial gigs.

Paul Vester, currently a Guggenheim Fellow, is working on a new short film, In the Woods. He is also repped for commercial work by DUCK Studios and teaches in the Experimental Animation department at CalArts.

Here is a bit of background about Sunbeam from Vester:

In 1974 I was taking time out from my studio in London and working on a film in Portland for an entity that I think was called the Energy Institute of New York. We got paid for the first two weeks and then the money dried up. For some reason we believed the promises we were given, and we all kept working on the film and did finish it, and were rewarded at the end of the job with all our back pay. I drove down to LA and rented a quarter of a small house on Cabrillo in Venice, which was very cheap then, and started work on a comic strip (unfinished) called the “Non Adventures of Nellie Nada.” I also did a lot of drawings and took many photographs of Venice. Sunbeam comes out of this period of my life.

(Alternate commentary-free version: This link will allow you to watch the original cartoon without audio commentary)

This week we shine a spotlight on a rarely seen Hollywood cartoon by the great Bob Clampett. It’s a Grand Old Nag (1947) is in fact Clampett’s final animated cartoon created during the golden age of Hollywood.

Clampett was one of the chief architects of the Warner Bros. school of cartoon comedy. In addition to directing dozens of classic Looney Tunes (including such titles as Porky In Wackyland, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery and Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs), Clampett created two Warner Bros. mainstays, Tweety and Beaky Buzzard. After Clampett left Warner Bros. in 1945, he spent several months punching up stories for Screen Gems (Columbia’s ill-fated cartoon unit) while setting himself up as an independent producer. He approached Republic Pictures, which did not have a cartoon division but had a need to demonstrate a new 2-color film process: TruColor (the studio owned one of the biggest film labs in Hollywood, Consolidated Film Industries).

In 1946, Clampett made a deal to produce one theatrical cartoon, budgeted for $20,000, with an option to make 35 more. Taking his cue from the kind of pictures Republic was known for—B-Westerns and rural comedies—Clampett created “Charlie Horse”, sort of a four-legged Mortimer Snerd (not unlike the personality he gave to Beaky Buzzard at Warners).

The film is filled with Clampett’s gag sensibilities, from the eye-popping double takes to the punny signs that cover the action. (I’ve Always Loathed You was a take-off of Republic’s biggest film of 1946, I’ve Always Loved You; Ciro Van Snoot being referred to as “The Horse With The Inhuman Mind”, a jab at the billing for Roy Roger’s horse, Trigger, “The Smartest Horse In the Movies”).

The cartoon even has a “joke” director credit (to “Kilroy”, the graffiti phenomenon of the 1940s), and though Don Towsley (Dumbo, Bambi, Fantasia) is credited as Supervising Animator, Clampett clearly has his fingerprints all over the film (and that’s literally his handwriting in the credits and in other lettering seen throughout the film). Bob used voice talents Dave Barry (as “Mr. Retake”) and Stan Freberg (as “Charlie” and “Ciro” - take note, this is Freberg’s first official screen credit!) both of whom had worked with Clampett at Termite Terrace. One credit noticeably missing is that of “story.” Rumor is that Clampett hired Michael Maltese to moonlight on the film. (In 1954, animator Paul J. Smith directed A Horse’s Tale for Walter Lantz. It’s a de facto remake, with a tell-tale story credit to Maltese.)

It’s a Grand Old Nag was released on December 20th, 1947. No information exists to gauge its initial success, but it was released at a turning point in Republic’s history. Financial losses due to the war and depressed revenues at the box office were forcing Republic to tighten its belt. Early in 1948 Clampett’s multi-cartoon deal was cancelled. Undeterred, Clampett threw himself into his pioneering TV puppet show Time For Beany (bringing Stan Freberg along for the ride). Clampett returned briefly to animation in the late 50s/early 60s with a series of Beany & Cecil cartoons for ABC-TV.

Charlie Horse is just a footnote in the fabulous career of Bob Clampett. One wonders what the other 35 cartoons could have been like - or where Clampett (and Republic) may have gone if things worked out differently. For now, we have this one surviving example of that alternate route - and, like the rest of Clampett’s work, it’s a refreshing blast of cartoon energy.

Jerry Beck and Mark Kausler provide audio commentary on this short. Thanks to Michael Geisler for recording the commentary track, and Randall Kaplan for his expert sound and picture editing.

Here is an original cel from the short:

This week’s short, The Story of One-Eyed Ophelia Jackson is a 2008 graduation film by Kat Morris from School of Visual Arts. The eye-catching short, about the luckiest girl in the world, Ophelia Jackson, and her encounter with a Sea Witch, stands out for its confident drawing style and sophisticated sense of design.

Recently Kat Morris has contributed to the Adult Swim series Superjail. To see more of Kat’s work, visit her blog or check out this experimental short animated in Ralph Steadman’s style.

The filmmaker will be participating in the comments section so if you have any questions for her, feel free to ask. Here are some production notes about the film from Kat:

From initial concept to finished film, The Story of One-Eyed Ophelia Jackson took approximately nine months to complete. Everything was drawn with graphite on animation bond, then inked with a Kuretake brush pen, scanned, and composited in AfterEffects. The final look was achieved by assigning levels of grey to different layers in AfterEffects, and then applying a scanned texture (a book cover) over the entire composition. I tried to keep everything lo-tech to prevent the film from feeling too polished.

The script was both very difficult and amazingly simple to come up with. I knew I wanted a voice-over narrative that took place by the sea, but it wasn’t until I drew Ophelia that I knew the direction I wanted to go in. I think as an artist, I am first and foremost a storyteller, therefore I made it my primary goal to create characters I cared about. The characters dictated the tone of the story, which in this case resulted in a less quippy take on Fractured Fairy Tales. The story was further brought to life by Allan Todd, the actor I was fortunate enough to find to read the script.

Thematically, I wanted to explore the relationship between the Maiden and the Hag (like Vasilisa and the Baba Yaga) . I love and hate archetypal characters: on one hand they’re boring and cliched, but on the other hand, they can be much more efficient at conveying ideas and emotions, especially in short stories. With Ophelia and the Witch, I wanted to create two characters that were both archetypes and individuals —‚ Ophelia is young and naive, but also prideful and selfish, while the Witch is old and mean, but ultimately just a lonely woman who likes to play games.

Visually, my aim was to display as much of my personal aesthetic as possible. Ophelia began as a doodle on a scrap of paper, while the witch was designed after the soldiers in Raoul Servais’s Chromophobia. The secondary and background characters were all gleaned from pages in my sketchbook. I’m not a very strong animator, so I tried to design each shot to work well as a still image, which is probably why the film has a “comic book” feel to it. My advisor, Don Poynter, really kicked my ass to make sure those compositions were the best they could be, I owe a lot to him.

A selection of pre-production artwork from the film: