TACHIGUISHI RETSUDEN is an upcoming Japanese animated film by Mamoru Oshii (GHOST IN THE SHELL) and Production IG. It is yet another example of the type of innovative animated features that are being produced in seemingly every corner of the world nowadays except the United States. I was really impressed with the film trailer. The film’s visuals are comprised largely of digitally manipulated photo cut-outs mixed with some straight-up CG. It’s worth noting that the filmmakers don’t hide the fact that these are flat photos, and the animation style emphasizes the flatness when characters are turned and moved around. The last film I saw that innovated this much with photo cut-outs was Virgil Widrich’s mind-bending FAST FILM.

A synopsis of the film at Twitchfilm.net is both confusing and intriguing for its nuttiness: it is apparently some type of historical comedy/fantasy about “fast-food grifters.” At least that explains why people continuously yell ‘Hamburger’ in the trailer. Catsuka.com offers some other interesting details about the production. The film uses 30,000 photos, taken in only five days, and a lot of the digital animation was created by students. Most of the cast was made up of folks who work in animation: the actors include the CEO of Production IG, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki, ESCAFLOWNE director Shoji Kawamori, and storyboard artist Shinji Higuchi. One can sense that the filmmakers and crew were truly having fun on this project. This anything-goes spirit of experimentation and playfulness is one of the primary factors that makes cartoons from the Golden Age of Hollywood animation so appealing, and it’s something that’s largely absent from contemporary animation. It’s nice to see the spirit is alive and well in Japan.

TACHIGUISHI RETSUDEN opens in Japan on April 8. The official website (in Japanese) is HERE.

Well, that didn’t take long. Congrats to our friends at the Weinstein Company for releasing the first CGI bomb of 2006, DOOGAL. The film opened relatively wide in over 2,300 theaters, but managed only $3.6 million for an 8th place finish. The film had a per-theater average of $1,556, the second-lowest per-theater average in the top ten. With over a dozen CG cartoons still on the slate for ‘06, and most of them poorly conceived, DOOGAL promises to be only the first of many flops.

Michael Barrier posted an article excerpt on his site from yesterday’s WALL STREET JOURNAL that said the Vintage ToonCast, which is an independent site that broadcasts classic public domain cartoons, is beating out mainstream corporate podcasts like the one for ABC’s LOST. What the article didn’t say is that the Vintage ToonCast will soon be getting some competition from ReFrederator, a new podcast being prepped for launch by Frederator, which promises to deliver one classic public domain cartoon everyday.

Unfortunately, the WALL STREET JOURNAL article is behind a subscription barrier, but here’s part of the excerpt that Barrier posted on his site:

One of the most popular podcasts currently online was made 63 years ago and stars Bugs Bunny.

On iTunes this past week, beating out ABC’s podcast for “Lost,” in which the show’s stars are interviewed, was a video podcast called Vintage ToonCast. It’s a free weekly posting of cartoon shorts from the 1930s and ’40s, with adventures of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Woody Woodpecker. The first, in December, of the 1943 short “Falling Hare,” has been downloaded close to 50,000 times.

While big entertainment companies are focused on charging viewers to download TV shows and music videos, this podcast and others like it are a reminder that there’s plenty of competition online from free media. The early animation clips shown by Vintage ToonCast are no longer protected by copyright and can be freely distributed by anyone. Any money made by podcasts usually comes from ads on the podcasts’ Web sites, or occasionally, product mentions in the podcasts themselves.

“Anyone could be doing what I’m doing,” says Vintage ToonCast creator Josh Cuppett, a 25-year-old chemical engineer at an environmental services contracting company, who is also a budding filmmaker. Mr. Cuppett gets the clips from Internet Archive (archive.org) a nonprofit “Internet library” offering free access to historical digital materials. The classic cartoon collection was provided to the archive by Film Chest, a company that collects old film clips and stock footage.

Don Knotts has passed away. He’ll always be remembered as Barney Fife and Raph Furley, though Knotts also had a lot of animation to his credit including THE INCREDIBLE MR. LIMPET (1964), CATS DON’T DANCE (1997) and CHICKEN LITTLE (2005).

One of the hot things emerging on several cartoon blogs lately is the detailed deconstruction of classic animated features and shorts. By “deconstruction” I mean the study of individual animator’s styles within a cartoon by determining who animated what scene. Records of this work, known as “animator drafts,” were created in-house during production and usually discarded once a film was completed. Disney, of course, saved theirs. The existence of these records from other studios is usually harder to come by - but miraculously several survive from the likes of Warner Bros., UPA, MGM, Terrytoons and Fleischer simply because the animators themselves occasionally hung onto them.Jaime Weinman has been examining classic Warner Bros. cartoons (such as RABBIT OF SEVILLE) scene by scene on his blog; Jenny Lerew has posted drafts from Disney shorts like THE NIFTY NINETIES; and Michael Sporn just posted several pages of animator drafts from Disney’s PINOCCHIO. Adding to the fray, I’ve just posted a draft of a 1937 Max Fleischer Color Classic, A CART-TUNE PORTRAIT, up on my Cartoon Research website. Animators identified in this cartoon include Dave Tendlar, Joe Oriolo, Bill Sturm, Nick Tafuri and several other Fleischer regulars. Once you get a handle on an artist’s particular traits, following their work becomes easier - and studying their accomplishments significantly adds to our collective knowledge of the history of animation.

Master character designer Harald Siepermann has been doing some exceptional posts on his blog where he discusses how he arrived at the designs for various characters in recent Disney films. His latest post is about developing the character of Jane in TARZAN. Also worth checking out are Harald’s earlier posts about developing the villains Clayton in TARZAN and Yzma in THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE.

Story artist Jenny Lerew has written another wonderful piece on animation storytelling, this time with a discussion of the story pitch, and why the pitch process has remained largely unchanged for the last seventy years. If you haven’t read it yet, be sure to also check out her previous piece about simplicity in animation storytelling.

Homestat Farm, the current manufactuers of MAYPO (the maple flavored oatmeal cereal) are relaunching the product with an updated version of their animated mascot, Marky Maypo.The company has also posted four classic John Hubley Marky Maypo commercials on their website. These are some of the best TV ads ever produced. Hubley had complete freedom and approched the spots as independent films, using a voice track improvised by his infant son and superb character animation by the likes of Emery Hawkins and Bobe Cannon.(Thanks, Jason Groh)