Leonard Maltin, aware of my interest in old-time animation publicity materials, sent along this image (above) from Benjamin Hampton’s 1931 book A History of the Motion Picture.

This picture got me thinking about how, back then, each individual cartoon short was treated as special as a live action feature. Stills, publicity art, posters, sometimes lobby cards and newspaper ads were created for individual cartoon shorts. And all that old promotional material seems fun to me, like the image above.

We’ve come a long way since then.

Today, Cartoon Network and Disney Channel may mount an occasional bus poster or billboard for one of their new series (mainly in New York or L.A. to attract advertisers), but publicity for individual episodes is pretty rare. There are some exceptions to the rule: The Simpsons has always done it; Frederator creates original postcards for each of its shorts. But those are special cases. I guess my point is, promotion of animated TV series, not to mention individual episodes, is practically non existant these days.

It’s just one of the differences between the business then and the business now. And it’s one of the reasons why I prefer the business then.

Let’s remake a classic hand-drawn animated commercial…

in CGI…

Are ad agencies so deprived of original thinking that the best they can do is recycle a forty-year-old soundtrack, and remake it shot-by-shot in CG?

What does this new version offer that the original didn’t? Less charm? Check. Uglier character designs? Check. Blander animation? Check. Fussy over-detailed backgrounds that overwhelm the characters? Check.

Computer animation is a wonderful tool. It’s a shame that more artists aren’t using it to explore new ideas which aren’t possible by other means, and instead use to incompetently replicate existing techniques.
(Thanks, Andrew Ebert)

UPDATE: In the interest of equal time, Ezra from LucidCircus, the production company responsible for the CG spot, made a comment below about the studio’s work. Here’s some of what he says:

I appreciate the critiques but it’s about a year too late. The style and overall look and feel were dictated to us. The agency folk in the room understand. What you see isn’t the original design but the final approved version. In a nutshell I was asked to copy Over the Hedge. We didn’t have creative license. This isn’t art, it’s a commercial. The client got what the client wanted. I feel your pain. I hate all CGI remakes as well. But it’s a good portfolio piece and the general public approves.

According to the folks at Black 20, “Spiderman 3 went way over budget, and to finish the film, producers had to use product placement to generate more money”.

This spoof (embedded below) is too good to ignore, despite the fact that half the 2:02 video is an ad for the Black 20 website, followed by 20 seconds of their logo. You can cut it off at the :47 sec mark.

This is a fairly amusing promo for Cartoon Network Latin America. It was accepted into this year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Directors: Daniel Xavier and Manoela Muraro
Production studio: Soapbox Studios
Post-production: Magick Lantern.

And here is a behind-the-scenes video showing digital post work by Magick Lantern’s Adam Plouff and Jesenko Fazlagic.

Chris Padilla recently hipped me to some visually striking animated spots from the 1970s. Chris actually showed some of these commercials theatrically as part of his late-70s theatrical release Fantastic Animation Festival. The spots have an exciting spirit of innovation and are in a wholly different league from the mainstream work being produced in the industry during that period. Some of the ads are notable for their groundbreaking use of computer animation, while others use processed live-action to achieve an effect similar to Bob Sabiston’s techniques on Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The agency art director for the Levi’s campaign was Bay Area-based artist Chris Blum.

Levi’s “The Stranger”
AD: Chris Blum

Levi’s “Walking Trademark”
Studio: Robert Abel & Associates
Director: Richard Taylor
AD: Chris Blum

Levi’s “Rodeo”
Studio: Duck Soup Produckions
Director: Roger Chouinard
Studio AD: Mel Sommer
Agency AD: Chris Blum

Mark Kausler, of It’s the Cat fame, animated on the “Rodeo” commercial. I asked him if he could share a few memories:

Duck Soup did that one, Roger Chouinard directed it. The late, great Mel Sommer was the art director at Duck. It’s mostly processed live action (the cowboys), Xeroxed onto cels and then we animated the clothes as if they were herds of cattle. I did the opening scenes, it took a lot of hours to do that shot where the clothes “fan out” as the cowboys ride alongside. In the end, I don’t like this spot very much, too much work for too little pay. Animating disembodied pants and shirts was no fun at all, no eyes, no personality. I guess now computers would “animate” stuff like this, they can have it!

7-UP
Studio: Robert Abel & Associates
Director: Richard Taylor
There’s another spot from the same campaign on Taylor’s site

Gorillaz animation director Pete Candeland of Passion Pictures has turned out a visually stunning spot for the videogame Guitar Hero II. It would have been even better if the animation of the guitar playing had been more closely timed to the music, but the superb drawing and movement of the two main characters, not to mention great inking style, makes this spot a winner.

(Thanks, Aaron)

UPDATE: Dany points out in the comments that this spot was animated by Robert Valley who has a blog here.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran an article about a new animated series on Fox called Oleg the Taxi Man. The cartoons, however, are only 8-seconds long and will run inbetween commercials to entice viewers not to flip the channel during commercial breaks. In the short clips, Oleg the taxi driver will offer up random thoughts and talk to ’spoof versions’ of Tom Cruise and Donald Trump. Fox Broadcasting’s president of sales Jon Nesvig, told the WSJ: “It’s something that pops up that is unexpected and the viewer says, ‘What the hell is that?’ It may keep them around for a while longer.” The paper also reported that other networks are starting to experiment with programming inbetween commercial breaks, though Fox seems to be the only one taking an animated approach.

A couple of the 8-second vignettes are viewable at the Wall Street Journal’s video page (look for “Turn up the Commercials”). Granted, there’s only so much that one can do in eight seconds, but I was still surprised by the concept’s pointlessness. If anybody at Fox had understood the medium of animation and how it could be applied, they could have captured everybody’s attention with something eye-catching, funny and exciting; instead they came up with an unappealing CG character sitting in a taxi and talking, something that would have likely been funnier in live-action. TV commercials don’t usually make me want to change the channel, but having to watch these lamely conceived animated vignettes certainly will.

Style5 is a new Toronto-based company that has admirable ambitions: to offer advertisers animation with more adult sensibilities and an edgier illustrator-driven design approach. The operation is in the capable hands of Sam Chou (the studio’s creative director) and Chuck Gammage (exec producer). Gammage, a fine animator and director in his own right, is no stranger to the commercial world and already runs his own successful production studio Chuck Gammage Animation.

Style5 currently has a roster of six designers including Edel Rodriguez, Hobo Divine andRaymond Xu, and the studio is developing long-form projects to go along with its current slate of commercials, IDs and music videos. Their website, Style5.tv, offers some tantalizing examples of their work, and shows how they’re seamlessly blending contemporary hip-hop-influenced styles with solid classical animation principles.