Due to special circumstances, this film is temporarily unavailable on Cartoon Brew TV.

From Burger It Came (2008) is a humorous and thought-provoking personal tale about how fear can consume our lives. The film really stands out in our eyes for its sophisticated and eclectic approach to visual storytelling. It was directed by Dominic Bisignano in the CalArts Experimental Animation Program.

The filmmaker will be participating in the comments section so if you have any questions for him, feel free to ask. Here are some background details about From Burger It Came from director Dominic Bisignano:

From Burger It Came is a film I made digitally, using 3-D software, photography, drawings, and digital paintings. It is based around experiences I had as a kid growing-up at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. I tried to incorporate as many elements from that period which touched me personally (kid’s cereal, heavy metal, sci-fi movies, Moonies, AIDS, Catholic school) without burying the story.

I constructed the soundtrack (with the exception of SFX) first, recording myself recalling these episodes to people that I did not know. I then recorded an interview with my mother, and a script performed by an actress named Trudy Forbes. I spent about one year constructing the narrative. In my mind there were four elements that needed to converge for the story be complete:

1. My narrative about fear (told to the audience)

2. My mother’s narrative about fear, both hers and mine (told to the audience)

3. A conversation between us (spoken to one another)

4. Some popular ideas about the subject of AIDS at the time (told through the part of the teacher).

I am influenced greatly by American folk music and traditional storytelling, and my intention with this film was to do a sort of “’round the campfire” sort of narrative, but with modern subject matter which may or may not be easy to hear or talk about. Because of the voice overnarrative, I was careful to try and construct the visuals in a contrapuntal way to the soundtrack, as opposed to merely illustrating the dialogue the whole time.

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

You’re A Madman, Charlie Brown!

This week from the Cartoon Brew TV’s “Brew Vaults”, we offer several rare animated spots featuring Charles Schulz’s beloved Peanuts characters. We’re dedicating this episode to Peanuts animation director Bill Melendez, who passed away last month. First, the rarely seen theatrical trailer for the initial feature-length Peanuts movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969). This trailer was the first 16mm film I ever bought (at a New York Comic Con in the 1970s) and it led to a lifetime of collecting cartoons on film, so it holds great nostalgia for me. I actually saw A Boy Named Charlie Brown at Radio City Music Hall (it was the big Christmas attraction that year). I still recall how odd it was to see such simplistic animation on the huge Music Hall screen—a screen which usually played host to Disney’s latest fully-animated masterpieces. In retrospect, the film is one of the best pieces of Peanuts animation, comparable to the earliest Peanuts holiday specials. Schulz, as usual, wrote the screenplay and retained a smattering of the adult-skewing wit that had all but disappeared from the Peanuts TV shows produced at this time. Poet-Composer Rod McKuen wrote the four songs in the film, and they are pretty good. The movie was a huge hit, becoming the number one film the week it was released, and ultimately spawned three sequels.

Following the movie trailer, we dive into “Animated Peanuts B.C.B.C” (Before Charlie Brown Christmas). The first time the Peanuts crew were animated was to pitch the Ford Falcon compact car in commercials created for Ford Motor Company. Ford also sponsored The Ford Show (1957-1961) starring country entertainer Tennessee Ernie Ford. Playhouse Pictures, a commercial animation studio in Hollywood made up primarily of ex-UPA employees, was commissioned by the J. Walter Thompson ad agency to create a new Ford sponsored animated opening each week for the Ford Show. In 1960-61 they decided to use the Peanuts characters in several of the actual show openings. Note that the first gag here uses Paul Frees as the voice of Charlie Brown! This is followed by a Ford car spot promoting the 1961 Falcon models. This commercial features my favorite Peanuts character, Pig-Pen. Unlike the later Charlie Brown TV specials and movies (and a bit like the old Dell Peanuts comic books), these Ford spots represent Peanuts with the least creative involvement by Schulz, who was known to write and draw almost all Peanuts material himself.

In a 1984 interview with the Museum of Broadcasting, Bill Melendez recalled his first encounters with Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown:

Well, I was doing Ford commercials at J. Walter Thompson when it was decided that Charlie Brown would be the spokesman for the Ford Falcon. I was told Charles Schulz was very shy and reticent about commercializing his strip. So I went to San Francisco and met Sparky and we hit it off. I told him what we did, and he nodded and said, “All right, we’ll try it.” He was very leery of getting involved with “Hollywood types” as he used to call us.

Of course he understands that his drawings are flat, two dimensional designs, and that, for example, the front view is very different from the side view. They are not three-dimensional characters. You can’t turn them around the way we used to turn the Walt Disney characters, who were designed to be round and three-dimensional. To animate Peanuts characters we have to be more inventive, because we tend not to be realistic. We don’t try to ape real live action as we did in animating Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

I imagine Sparky must have been curious about how we were going to do it, but he never gave us any kind of a hint or anything at all about what he wanted. So we showed him how we thought it should move, how we thought they should turn, how we thought they should walk and he accepted everything. From then on we hit it off pretty well.

Thanks to Michael Geisler and Stu Shostack for recording the audio track, and Randall Kaplan for his expert sound and picture editing.

Steven Subotnick’s film Hairyman began as an interpretation of an American folk tale from the South, but the idea evolved in an unexpected fashion that weaves back and forth between narrative and abstract imagery. The film’s striking images were created on underlit etched cels rubbed with lithographic ink, as well as some scenes that are simply ink-on-paper.

Subotnick, an independent filmmaker and a teacher at Rhode Island School of Design, is a graduate of the experimental animation program at CalArts, which was run by the late Jules Engel. In this video interview with Engel, he talks about how he came to accept Subotnick specifically into the school’s animation program.

Here is some background about Hairyman from an interview that Subotnick did with Lumen Eclipse:

‘Hairyman’ was shot on film. By the way, I had to shoot it three times, because there was a burr in the camera’s transport mechanism which kept scratching the negative. The film was inspired by a folk tale from Appalachia called ‘Wiley and the Hairy Man.’ It was about a wild, half-devil, wild man, who lives in the forests and eats children who wander in. A little boy named Wiley, with the help of his grandmother, tricks the Hairy Man three times, which magically makes Wiley safe. I developed three characters based on the folk tale: Hairyman, of course, and I changed the boy to a little girl, and the grandmother. And, rather than tell the story – I did actually storyboard the story several times, but I realized I was more interested in what the characters were rather than the folk tale. I began animating the characters improvisationally - like improvisational theater. When I accumulated enough scenes like this, I began editing them, and working with sound. I kept rearranging sequences until particular cuts began to suggest a narrative flow. So the narrative was woven out of the original improvisational scenes.

For the sound, I worked with Caleb Sampson. He was a sound designer who had worked with other independent filmmakers, like Flip Johnson and Amy Kravitz. He was one of the founding members of the Alloy Orchestra. I met with him actually for an earlier film. I went to his studio with my film, and he said ‘I found this zither recently.’ It was missing strings and it was all out of tune, but he began strumming the zither. We played the film, and the two of us just kept making noises with the zither and our voices, watching the film. At one point, he started screaming and grunting while he played. Well, it didn’t work for the film I was scoring, but later, when I was working on ‘Hairyman,’ I pulled out Caleb’s screaming and zither. His sound was a crucial element to ‘Hairyman’.

Today offering on Cartoon Brew TV is The Last Temptation of Crust, a graduation film created by Dax Norman at Ringling School of Art and Design. It’s a CG short quite unlike any other that we’ve seen recently, and is directed with an assured sensibility that brings grittiness and cartooniness into the world of computer animation.

Dax Norman’s creative endeavors don’t end with this short film. In fact, he can’t stop creating, whether it’s bowling pin characters (buy them here), paintings, psychedelic animation tests and various artistic experiments. His home on the Internet is DaxNorman.com.

Dax Norman will be participating in the comments section so if you have any questions for him, feel free to ask. We also asked Dax to give us background on the project. Here, in the filmmaker’s own words, is everything you need to know about The Last Temptation of Crust:

It is a true honor to be included on Brew TV, thank you so much. This website is an invaluable tool for animation artists and fans alike.

I’d like to tell a bit about where “The Last Temptation of Crust” came from. This tome, as wacky as it may seem, is based on a true story, so I will begin at the “First Temptation of Crust.”

It was less than a year before I was to start production on my senior thesis at Ringling School of Art and Design, in Sarasota, Florida. As I was walking home from school I noticed something glowing. This object that caught my eye would later capture my imagination. Sitting on a bus stop bench, with a streetlight shining upon it, was a perfectly pristine piece of cherry pie, encapsulated in a clear to-go box.

Here is where most people would say they looked around, wondering if anyone was watching, or if it was some kind of trap. I guess that’s just not the kind of person I am. I inhaled the pie. It was absolutely scrumptious.

One of the factors that might have contributed to this automatic response I had to the pie would be my love for food, and more particular, free food, as anyone who witnessed me trolling all of the free pizza events at Ringling can surely attest.

So after this happened, I went about my walk home, and thought little of it.

Only a day later, in my concept development class, I was called upon by my teacher, Jamie Deruyter, to tell the class a nugget of story that could possibly be good for an animation. So of course I told about the pie. Everyone reacted favorably to the story and that is when I realized it could be a viable idea. Basically, it is a man vs. self-situation, where the character decides whether to eat the pie, or not.

The next semester was pre-production; this is when I began creating storyboards, character designs, and an animatic that would form what was to become “The Last Temptation of Crust” the next year.

Brent Lewis, a classmate, came up with the title. “The Last Temptation of Crust” perfectly encapsulated what I wanted to say in this story, and almost acts as a concept statement in and of itself, as well as being an ironic play on the Martin Scorsese movie title.

During the course of the year, the story kept evolving and mutating during production. My wife actually came up with the idea for the band-aid part, which was spectacular. Once I built Frank Finkerton, the protagonist, in 3D, he took on a life of his own. I was just having fun thinking of ways he could become sloppier.

I really wanted to limit the dialogue and try to tell the story with little words. Frank Finkerton makes lots of noises, but only says two words.

The look of the film was also very important to me. I had not really seen any gritty CG environments, so that is something I wanted to shoot for. Everything I have seen in CG is too clean and shiny for my sensibilities. Animation is an exaggeration of real life, so I wanted to portray the world based on how I see it. Unfortunately, the world Frank Finkerton lives in is not an exaggeration; I would routinely find band-aids, old socks and discarded lobsters on my walk home from school. I looked heavily at the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the photography of William Eggleston for reference and inspiration.

Last but not least, a few words on the character, Frank Finkerton. My goal was to make a character that I could imagine existing outside of this one isolated story. In my favorite movie, “The Big Lebowski,” the Coen Brothers do this perfectly and I think that is a reason why the film is so beloved.

I sought to make a character that is not idealized in any way. Frank is basically a likeable goofball, but he thinks he is the coolest guy in town. He is a legend in his own mind. The biggest compliment I would get, upon seeing Finkerton, is that people would say, “I used to know a guy like him.”

Originally, Frank was conceived as an odd amalgam of Bill Murray’s Big Ern from Kingpin, Randy Quaid’s cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation, and R. Crumb. Around the time I had started animating the piece, however, I found a book in the Ringling Library that blew my mind, “Wolvertoons” by Basil Wolverton. This was a major revelation to me, and no doubt would partially form the way Frank would act. I even made a drawing after I was finished, of Frank Finkerton in Wolverton’s style, as homage.

His actual movements, oddly enough, were subconsciously inspired by my own. My wife says she sees a lot of the way I act in him.

The actual production for the short was 6-7 months long and included modeling, texturing, rigging, layout, animation, lighting, rendering and compositing. I did all of this for “The Last Temptation of Crust” myself, but with considerable guidance and advice from my teacher, Keith Osborn, as well as classmates and all of the Ringling Faculty. The talented Neil Anderson-Himmelspach composed the original score for the short.

My next CG short that I recently started modeling characters for, continues where “The Last Temptation of Crust” leaves off. Frank Finkerton heads into the bowling alley seen in the short. Finkerton will aim to win the affections of an unknowing lady at the lanes. It will be called “Llavarse los Manos” (To Wash the Hands).

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

Welcome to the first in our series of Cartoon Brew TV’s “Brew Vaults.” Every three weeks we’re presenting an animated short, movie trailer, vintage TV commercial or some other cartoon rarity and offering an exclusive audio track commentary about its production, historical significance and the artists who made these films. Animation historian Jerry Beck and other guests will provide the commentaries.

The first pick from the “Brew Vaults” is one of the earliest sound cartoons ever released. Dinner Time (1928) is perhaps the most significant cartoon in animation history that no one has ever seen. It was one of the few synchronized sound cartoons produced before (though released after) Disney’s Steamboat Willie. It played a small but pivotal part in Walt Disney’s creation of his first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon. It was this film, shown to Walt in New York on the cusp of recording his track for Steamboat Willie, that gave him the confidence to press on with his plans.

Dinner Time was an entry in Paul Terry’s popular series of the era, Aesop’s Film Fables, produced by Amadee J. Van Beuren, and released through RKO Pathé. During the 1920s, Terry produced one Fables cartoon each week through his New York based Fables Studio, and Walt Disney was known to be quite fond of them. But when sound came in, Terry had little interest in adding music, voices or effects to the cartoons, and this led to a disagreement between the animator and his producer. Terry left Van Beuren the following year to start his own company, Terrytoons.

Dinner Time is not a particularly good cartoon. Walt Disney himself called it “one of the rottenest Fables I believe that I ever saw. And I should know, because I have seen almost all of them!” The film, and Walt’s reaction to it, has been noted in every major biography of Disney (Michael Barrier, Bob Thomas, Neal Gabler), yet no one has really seen it in eighty years.

It turns out that Disney was right. The soundtrack is “rotten” and the animation quite primitive (especially compared to Fleischer’s KoKo cartoons or Messmer’s Felix cartoons made the same year), but the early Paul Terry cartoons have an old-school hand-drawn charm that all the technical innovations to come can’t begin to match. There’s an air of chaos in Terry’s cartoon universe, with cats chasing birds, dogs chasing bones, farmers chasing hounds, and plot and character nowhere in sight. And yet, the Fables were fun, popular and a mainstay of the silent era and early days of sound. Terry ultimately had the last laugh on his old boss, Van Beuren. His rival Terrytoons studio thrived for four decades (Van Beuren’s studio closed in 1936 with his passing), and Terry himself never really left Dinner Time behind—he lifted animation from this short to pad his 1931 Terrytoon release, Jazz Mad.

UPDATE: Additional research since the time we first post this cartoon has turned up the missing coda or “Moral”:

Aesop Says: “There is a real need for a tonic for people whose heads are bald on thew inside”

We’d like to thank Mark Kausler for his participation on the audio commentary and locating the source films; Randall Kaplan for editing and restoration services; and Michael Geisler for recording the audio commentary.

The Pumpkin of Nyefar (2004) is a short directed by Tod Polson (El Tigre, Another Froggy Evening, Poochini) and Mark Oftedal. The story was co-written by Maurice Noble (1911-2001), who began his animation career at Disney in the 1930s, and eventually designed many of Chuck Jones’s classic Warner Bros. cartoons including Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century and What’s Opera, Doc?. The film is narrated by June Foray (the voice of Rocky in Rocky and Bullwinkle).

Go here for a Flash website with plenty of details and artwork from the film. Below is a some background information about the film from its director Tod Polson. Tod will also participating in the comments section and looks forward to your comments and questions.

In 1994, Maurice Noble began training a group of young designers at Chuck Jones Film Productions. A lot of us were working on our own personal short projects, several of them based on ethnic folktales. Maurice thought it would be a great idea if the group of us could develop a series of shorts inspired by stories from around the world. We called this series “Noble Tales,” and we, his trainees, became known as the “Noble Boys” (which also included a few girls). Many of us traveled around the world and developed and together designed several dozen idea.

“The Pumpkin Of Nyefar” was one short idea Maurice and I wrote while visiting Turkey. Our first morning in Istanbul we came downstairs to the dining room and around the table were twenty belly dancers and a lot of pumpkin dishes. All the girls of course were smitten by Mr. Nobles charm. Ha ha… I can still see him grinning from ear to ear.

Afterwords we talked things over, and decided to write a story about a prince who could marry any beauty in his kingdom, but instead chooses to wait for true love. As fate would have it, the prince finds true love in the form of a pumpkin. While I was supervising a TV show in Thailand, James Wang (Wang Flm) invited Maurice and I to use his Thai studio to make our short. Maurice underwent surgery so that he could make the flight to Bangkok. Unfortunately he died a few weeks later. I came to Thailand a few months later to work on the short myself. But my friends didn’t leave me to do the film alone.

Soon after, my pal Mark Oftedal, came to town for a visit. His short vacation, turned into a several year working holiday. He became so involved with the project, re-working designs, storyboards, editing, setting the animation style, that he became the co-director. It was very much a partnership and it was fantastic working with such a talented fellah. Other friends from America helped out too. June Foray donated her voice to the film. Ben Jones, and Lawrence Marvit both did short stints in Bangkok to help get things going. Sue Kroyer did a lot of inspirational character design as did Roman Laney. Jules Engel looked over a lot of the early design and color. Aaron Sorenson, Dave Marshall, Dave Thomas, and Mike Polvani all donated time to the project. It was really a great collaboration of friends, just the way Maurice had dreamed about: doing a short film together, everything donated, just because they wanted to do it.

We’re pleased to bring you our first episode, Michael Langan’s Doxology, a graduation film produced at Rhode Island School of Design. Since its debut in 2007, the film has won over ten festival awards including Best Undergraduate Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and Best Experimental Short at the Slamdance Film Festival.

Langan offers this description of the film:

Before reaching spiritual enlightenment, one sweater-vested young man must face a dancing Oldsmobile, endure a boozy encounter with God on a frozen tundra, and brush his teeth, comb his hair, floss, Q-Tip, lather and shave simultaneously. “Doxology” combines groundbreaking stop-motion animation techniques and unusual storytelling with the time-honored quest for spiritual awakening.

Below is an interview with Langan about the film. He’ll also be participating in the comments section of this post so if you have any questions for him, feel free to ask.

Interview with Michael Langan, creator of Doxology, by Sung-Joo Kim, head programmer for Seoul International Animation Festival

Sung-Joo Kim: What would you like to tell to audiences through “Doxology?”

Michael Langan: Learn to adapt to and find contentment in your surroundings.

SJK: What was your motivation for making the film?

ML: I set out to create a film, having no idea what the end product would be. The only rule I gave myself was to trust my intuition completely. I began by creating tons of animated “sketches,” very quickly-executed ideas, which accumulated into a bank of loosely-associated short films. I rushed the entire process, not allowing myself to censor or judge each idea before it had been executed. Eventually the pieces began to speak to one another, and I started drawing lines between them and shaping them into a film. The overarching theme that developed is an account and commentary on the relationship between Heaven and Earth, incidentally connected by tennis balls (which I like to think of as prayers.)

SJK: Could you explain your proprietary techniques used to make this film?

ML: I used a combination of stop-motion and pixilation in “Doxology,” with a little altered live action thrown in for good measure. There is one scene featuring 3D-animated snow, but nearly everything else in the film is photographed from life. I developed a number of original techniques for the film. The recurring image of the earth from space is in fact a time-lapse panorama of the sky from below, which I flipped upside-down and warped to simulate the curvature of the earth. The climactic scene at the conclusion of the film involves a combination of visual techniques which alter the original footage into a new interpretation of space and time. First, I shot image sequences out of plane windows with a digital still camera every time I flew in a commercial jet over the course of a year. Then I stabilized these shaky sequences on a focal point, like a church steeple, so it appears as if the viewer is rotating around this central point. Next I simulated a narrow depth of field by blurring the background and foreground, thereby miniaturizing the subject to call attention to the relativity of scale. Finally, I duplicated the footage several times and wove these sequences into themselves, creating an animated Shepard’s Scale in which time and distance appear to pass, but are in fact perpetually rooted to the same moment and place.

SJK: What was the most difficult point in the production of “Doxology?”

ML: The most difficult scene to animate in “Doxology” was the bathroom sequence, in which I appear to be brushing and flossing my teeth, combing my hair, cleaning my ears, lathering, and shaving all at the same time. This scene was shot using pixilation–that’s stop motion animation with actual people and places–one frame at a time, for two hours. Like some other effects that appear in “Doxology,” I had to first take out all drifting motion before I could connect the elements. Compare it to trying to assemble a puzzle on a boat in rough seas; you need everything still before you can put it together. After stabilizing each arm and the corresponding section of my face, I carefully pieced together every action so that they could all take place at once without interfering with one another. The last step was to re-introduce the motion I removed in order to assemble the puzzle. Shifting the head with the combing motion and including sideways bumps from toothbrushing and shaving makes the illusion seem more natural. The finished composite involved hundreds of layers and over three months of editing to reach completion.

SJK: Any notable memories?

ML: Perhaps my favorite part of filmmaking is designing the sound and music for a film. “Doxology” involved extensive original recording, for which I enlisted the help of a choir, two organists, a box of corn starch, and a mariachi band. The song which plays over the climax of the film is called “The Doxology,” which is an English hymn sung at the close of many church services. To achieve the full sound of an enormous church congregation, I had to multiply the sound of a single choir many times over. This required animating a sing-along video of sorts, from which the choir and organist could take their cues and sync up when joined by editing. I recorded the Higher Keys of Brown University in a large dance hall, asking them to sing the song ten times, changing their voices and positions after each take to add as much variety as possible to the recording. They sang like grandparents, children, opera singers, bored teenagers, and hopelessly tone-deaf churchgoers. On a separate day in another hall I recorded the organist playing the hymn with no choir. I then layered all of these sounds on top of each other, creating the illusion that the audience is listening to a single, gigantic congregation being led by an organist.

A little trivia: The music playing during the credits sequence is an old German klezmer tune, “My Hat, It Has Three Corners,” which is the theme to Jan Svankmajer’s film “Etcetera.” I adapted the song for a Mexican mariachi band and recorded it as an homage to one of my favorite filmmakers.

SJK: What is your purpose in creating animations? For commercial success or indie animation or what?

ML: My ultimate goal is simply to continue exercising my artistic license to the fullest extent possible. That said, I’m definitely not limited to independent filmmaking. So far I’ve been very content creating bizarre, commercial short films for a clothing label in San Francisco called Upper Playground. You can see these shorts at youtube.com/walrustv.