Kudos to the anonymous writer at the Associated Press who managed to sneak in a subtle Warner Bros. cartoon reference into the title of this news article.

It had to happen, after years of gossip.(Thanks, Joe D.)

One more piece of rare animation to point out today, and this one is an incredible treat. BLUM BLUM was the student film of Duane Crowther (1928-1998), who was one of the best commercial animators of the 1950s. He made this film when he was only twenty years old at UCLA. I wrote about the film back in 2004 HERE and HERE.

The film was posted by Steve Moore, who has directed a number of films in recent years that I’ve enjoyed, including the kooky Disney short REDUX RIDING HOOD and his personal film THE INDESCRIBABLE NTH. Steve tells me that he’s going to be posting all sorts of rare films on his site, including student shorts from when he was at CalArts in the early-1980s, by the likes of Chris Sanders, Kirk Wise, Kevin Lima, Brenda Chapman, Ralph Eggleston and Tony Fucile.

Again, thanks to the Internet, it’s possible to discover the work of an animator whose work is otherwise inaccessible nowadays. North County Public Radio has a terrific website about experimental animator/filmmaker Carmen D’Avino. The site has audio interviews with him, as well as complete Quicktimes of nine of his films, including the Oscar-nominated animated short PIANISSIMO (1963) and the Oscar-nominated short documentary THE BACKGROUND (1973). To find out more about D’Avino, check out the interview with him in Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s out-of-print EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION: ORIGINS OF A NEW ART.
(Thanks, Karl Cohen)

One of my biggest grievances against contemporary animation is that characters won’t shut up. Too often in American animation, dialogue is used as a substitute for storytelling, acting, and communication between characters. It happens everywhere, and I’ve mentioned it frequently, whether it be on TV shows like Cartoon Network’s CAMP LAZLO or trailers for animated films, like DreamWorks’s OVER THE HEDGE. Blame it on whoever you want - animation execs who are visually uneducated and can only understand characters that communicate verbally, scriptwriters (for obvious reasons), or artists who aren’t confident of their abilities to act without dialogue - the fact is that today’s cartoons talk too much. I was really pleased to see historian/critic Charles Solomon tackle the issue in this weekend’s NY TIMES, with a hard-hitting piece about how wall-to-wall dialogue hurts so many current animated features. The entire article is worth reading, but here’s an excerpt:

In “Robots,” eager young Rodney Copperbottom, on arriving in Robot City, meets Fender, voiced by Robin Williams. All the wonder the audience should feel as Rodney beholds the Erector-set metropolis of his dreams is crushed under Fender’s nonstop shtick. The characters in “Hoodwinked” natter constantly, even as their unfortunate mouth movements reveal inadequacies in the design of their faces. And if the trailer is any indication, “The Wild,” coming from Disney on April 14, with voices by Kiefer Sutherland and Janeane Garofalo, among others, looks like yet another gabfest.

American animation wasn’t always like this. Some of its most memorable moments have no talking: Mickey Mouse dancing with the brooms in “Fantasia”; the Seven Dwarfs weeping at Snow White’s bier; Bugs Bunny riding in as Brunhilde on a white charger in “What’s Opera, Doc?” Animation is often funnier, more dramatic and more powerful when words aren’t distracting the viewer’s attention from the stylized expressions and movements.

(Use BugMeNot to bypass NY TIMES registration)

Michael Sporn had the great luck of breaking into the animation industry at John and Faith Hubley’s studio, Storyboard, in the early-1970s. He’s posted some fascinating remembrances on his blog about his time working on the Hubleys’ LETTERMAN interstitials, produced for PBS’s THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. Read them HERE.

It’s also worth noting that last month a 4-disc dvd collection of THE ELECTRIC COMPANY was released. Not sure how much LETTERMAN is on it, but surely, there’s at least a few episodes.

As folks may recall, I put out a call for help last December asking readers to offer their suggestions on the cover for my book, CARTOON MODERN: STYLE AND DESIGN IN FIFTIES ANIMATION. We finally finished the cover and you can check it out HERE.

“The Over the Hedge trailer is horrible,” says Jim Hull. He should know since he worked on the film. Jim has an interesting post on Seward Street where he compares it to what he feels is a more successful trailer for Pixar’s CARS.