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TAG FOR “Animators”Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
April 16, 2009 12:15 pm
I’m a big fan of Kyle Baker’s comic art. In addition to his prolific work in illustration, comic books and print cartooning, he’s been self producing a series of animated sequences based on his cartoon books, The Bakers. His previous animation translates his hand drawn style perfectly. His latest clip now combines his drawings with CGI. Check out the new look to The Bakers. 13 Comments » posted in Animators 
April 15, 2009 12:25 pm
Alan Coats, the son of legendary Disney background painter Claude Coats, has started a website about his father’s work at ClaudeCoats.com Right now, the site is mainly a storefront that sells giclée prints of Coats’ personal paintings, some of which are quite attractive. I hope Alan eventually fleshes it out with more family photos, personal ephemera, and career details as well. One of the unexpected delights of the Internet age has been seeing the children of Golden Age animators launch websites devoted to their parents. After toiling in anonymity for their entire careers, it’s fitting that these artists would finally receive marquee recognition with entire destinations devoted to their individual accomplishments. The gold standards for family-operated artist sites are AbeLevitow.com, BillPeet.net and this incredible blog by Irv Spector’s son. (link via Disney History) 5 Comments » posted in Animators, Disney, Internet/Blogs
April 14, 2009 9:40 am
. Jossie Malis, an animator and illustrator living in Barcelona, has been developing an animated series online for the last 3 years called Bendito Machine. Each film pits primitive people against alien creatures and intergalactic robots, done in an Aztec designed cut-out silouette style. I like them a lot – I especially dig the soundtrack on the latest one (above). One way Malis is producing these shorts is by selling art prints. Says Malis: I’m working on this project without any funds or financial aid, only in my spare time. It takes a lot to compete each episode because I’m always working on other commissioned projects during most of the year. In this last installment, I have a new collaboration with Sxip Shirey, a great and fantastic musician and composer from NY. You can catch up with the first two episodes at benditomachine.com. 5 Comments » posted in Animators, Shorts
April 13, 2009 7:18 pm
Layout artist and background painter Joseph Holt has started a new blog featuring loads of his production artwork from from the late-’90s through today. There is work from Mission Hill, The Oblongs, Time Squad, and My Life as a Teenage Robot, among other productions. I particularly like the work he did on Meddlen Meadows (posted above), which was a short made within the Cartoonstitute Shorts Program at Cartoon Network. Holt says on the blog that he’s also been creating visual development for Symbiotic Titan, a series being produced by The Orphanage Animation Studios for Cartoon Network. 11 Comments » posted in Animators
April 9, 2009 12:15 am
. The Upstate Four (viewable in two parts above) is an eleven-minute Cartoon Network pilot created by brothers Fran Krause and Will Krause. When I first saw it last year, I was immediately taken by the quality of the production. Funny and fresh, energetic and entertaining, it looks and feels like nothing else currently out there. On top of that, the character animation is handled beautifully with none of the corner-cutting that has become an unfortunate hallmark of contemporary Flash TV animation. The pilot wasn’t picked up for series production and languished at Cartoon Network, but the brothers Krause received recognition for their efforts in the form of a top prize for Children’s Television Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival as well as an Excellence in Animation prize from the 2008 ASIFA-East Animation Festival. The Krause’s pilot for The Upstate Four raises the bar for TV animation everywhere, and proves that, with thoughtful planning and execution, top-grade TV animation is within reach. I wanted to learn how such an inspired and quality piece of work made it through the moribund development pipeline at Cartoon Network. The interview below was conducted via email, and in our far-ranging conversation, Fran and Will guide us through the tangled development process, their feelings about pitching, whether the type of quality they achieved in this pilot could be maintained in regular series production, and some of the lessons they learned from creating this pilot. 47 Comments » posted in Animators, Flash, TV, Fran Krause
April 9, 2009 12:05 am
Ger Apeldoorn has uncovered a real find. A set of obscure comic strips, created for a local California newspaper in 1950 (The Redwood Journal-Press-Dispatch in Ukiah), that were written and drawn by Hollywood animators! Art by Gil Turner, Ray Patin, Gus Jekel, Dick Moores, Jerry Hathcock, Tom Ray, James Will, Dave Mitchell, Jack King, Jack Bradbury and (maybe) Cal Dalton has been identified. Ger is looking to find more information on this batch of mysterious strips. Check it out here. No Comments » posted in Animators, Comics
April 1, 2009 11:08 am
I’ve learned that American animator Jack Dunham passed away a couple weeks ago at age 98. I’d written about Dunham back in 2006 after a story was published in the Montreal Gazette about how he and his wife had become homeless in Canada. Born in North Dakota in 1910, Dunham worked at Universal on Oswald shorts in the early-1930s before moving to Disney in the mid-1930s. After Snow White, on which he was an inbetweener, he moved into management where he worked as a unit manager until 1947. There’s a fascinating series of videos on YouTube that offer short interviews with Dunham from a couple years ago. The memories aren’t very specific, likely because he wasn’t being challenged with specific names or events, but it’s still a treat that these videos exist. Here’s one of him talking about encounters with Walt Disney: A couple photos of Dunham exist online. The first one comes from Michael Barrier’s website and shows Dunham (right) with Tex Avery at Universal.
The second photo, from the Animation Guild blog, shows Dunham (left) at the infamous Snow White wrap party at the Norconian Club in Norco, California.
The description text in the YouTube videos offers an account of Dunham’s post-Disney career:
9 Comments » posted in Animators, Disney, Jack Dunham
March 31, 2009 10:25 am
Did you know that Adventure Time creator Pen Ward drinks Shasta Cola in the bathtub? How about that Sony animator Kim Hazel wants a remote control airplane? Or that even Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane can’t get decent customer service from AT&T? If you love useless minutiae about the lives of other people, Twitter can fulfill those needs. Animation artists are beginning to join the site in significant numbers, though at the moment the number of graphic designers and illustrators using the service seems to outweigh the number of animators. If you’re just getting started with Twitter, here’s our list of twenty-two animation Twitterers who are worth following, as well as three feeds that are related to Cartoon Brew and the Brewmasters. Feel free to share your suggestions for twittering animators in the comments. |
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EVENTS
RECENT BREW TV EPISODES By Sitji Chou. A man tries to understand the futility of creating human connections when they’ve been impeded by the microcosmic void between material particles.  By Nikolas Ilic. A story of a Scottish sheep farmer who shears his sheep and tosses them cliff side…  By Dylan Hayes. Lesson 1: Everyone gambles, not everyone loses. Lesson 2: The world is full of traps. Lesson 3: You cannot win if you don’t take risks.  By Jean Yi. A personal and humorous exploration of being the ‘Nice Girl’ and coming to terms with the label and all its different meanings.  By Ferg Brennan. A lonely fisherman catches an unusual fish, which he decides to keep as a pet. |
