Three more books I’m recommending for holiday gift giving, mainly because they are really good reads.

Directing the Story by Francis Glebas (Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas, Hercules, etc.) is the ultimate book on storytelling and storyboard techniques. 346 oversized color pages explaining everything about the craft, with excellent informative text and hundreds of storyboard drawings to illustrate every point. Highly Recommended!

Ted Stearn is a storyboard artist (Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Drawn Together, etc.) by day and an alternative comics genius at night. His Fantagraphics funny animal duo, Fuzz and Pluck, star in separate adventures in their latest graphic novel, Fuzz and Pluck: Splitsville. These are seriously demented stories, and hopefully the template for some future animated adaptation. Crazy drawings and crazy fun. Recommended!

I wish Fantagraphics had also printed Beetle Bailey: the First Years 1950-1952. This book doesn’t have the classy feel of the Peanuts or Dennis The Menace reprint volumes, but nonetheless is a fascinating volume tracing the origins of America’s favorite Army private. I spent a half hour going through this book at Barnes and Noble (note to my close buds or Brian Walker: I don’t own a copy and would love to get one as a a gift - hint, hint), I couldn’t put it down. Walker was a terrific cartoonist back then and you can see why the strip became a hit. Recommended!

If you are looking for a gift for someone this Christmas or just in the mood to buy something for yourself, my number one choice (and favorite picture book of the last year) would be Kirk Demarais’s:  Life of the Party: A Visual History of the S. S. Adams Company.

S.S. Adams was the mastermind behind many of the most popular gag/novelty pranks of the last century, including the Joy Hand Buzzer, the Dribble Glass, the Snake Can, the Squirting Nickel, the Bug in an Ice Cube, the Exploding Cigar, and hundreds of others.   As one writer put it,  “The man’s rivals must have felt toward him as other dramatists have felt about Shakespeare.” I’m not exactly sure who his rivals were - other fart-cushion manufacturers, maybe? - but the sentiment is right on.

This book is treasure and nostalgia all wrapped up in one, like reading the back of an old comic book and trying to decide whether to order the vacuum cleaner hovercraft or a new pair of X-ray specs.   The images are often enlarged so you can really appreciate the original art and packaging genius of Louis M. Glackens*, the cartoonist who Adams hired to bring all of his products to life.  I also confess a soft spot for the personal touch of ordering it direct from the factory in Neptune, New Jersey.  I wish all books were like this.

In 1906 Adams discovered the existence of a potent chemical called Dianisidine and began marketing it in small vials labeled  “Cachoo Sneezing Powder” (the company was originally called the “Cachoo Sneeze Powder Company”).   The powder was so powerful that you could fill a room with sneezing people simply by blowing it through a keyhole or a crack in a door.

While Adams was busy exploiting Dianisidine stateside for laughs, the Germans were on the other side of the Atlantic stuffing it into their artillery shells, wreaking further disorder in the trenches of their enemies as the chemical also inhibits breathing.  Fortunately for Adams, he had a good 35 years before the F.D.A. decided that Dianisidine wasn’t as “harmless” as his label proclaimed and banned it.  By then, Adams had built an entire business with the money he made and had already used it to create countless other novelty items, some of them just as successful, if not more so, than sneezing powder.

Asked to share some advice on what makes a great novelty item, Adams once said, “The best idea is to work with an ordinary everyday object which is around the house.”  Case in point is his “Snake Jam Jar”, also known as the “Snake Nut Can.”

Apparently, around 1915 Adams had a habit of leaving the jam jar lid unscrewed. His wife wasn’t too happy about it and she began checking the lid to catch him in an act of neglect.   So, Adams rigged the jar by stuffing a wire coil wrapped in colorful fabric, and sat in the wings waiting for his wife to come in and inspect it.  The rest is history: when the 4-ft “snake” jumped out of the jar at his wife, she let out a scream so loud that Adams knew instantly that he had a new classic.

You will spend hours soaking up the thousands of images in this unbelievably rich and beautifully-produced “Visual History.”  If you’re lucky, you may even find yourself curled up under the sheets with a flashlight and a magnifying glass, feeling just like a kid again.

Get it here directly from the S.S. Adams factory in Neptune, New Jersey.

*Glackens was also a successful director and animator.  Check his filmography here.  If anyone can turn up a sample of his work online, please share it in the comments.

Several animators have expanded beyond simply publishing their own sketchbooks and have moved up into creating personal illustrated stories, and authoring children’s books. Here are a few suggestions, off the beaten path, for gifts you might want to give your animated loved ones this holiday season.

First off, if you were wondering where to find a great childrens’ book about a town of hamburger-headed people… Well, your worries are over! Writer Mike Reiss (The Simpsons) has teamed once again with animator Xeth Feinberg (their past collaborations include Queer Duck and Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln) to create a clever, funny book just published by Inkwater Press, City of Hamburgers.

Next, meet Gabriele Pennacchioli, a Dreamworks animator-story artist who’s spent one year of weekends developing the story of a little horned hero. Now he’s collected his incredibly appealing drawings into a book, The Young Minotaur, which he’s selling $15.00 (which includes his signature and a sketch). See his blog for more information.

David G. Derrick Jr. is an artist and sculptor at Dreamworks Animation who has documented his adventures sketching animals in Africa in a new self published soft cover, African Diaries. It’s a first person account, in words and drawings, of his recent trek through the dark continent. Check out his website to order and see his amazing sculptures.

Speaking of Africa and Dreamworks, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, once again, my own holiday gift book The Art of Madagascar. Take a look:

(Thanks to Teoh Yi Chie/Parka81 for making the video above)

Has anybody gotten their hands on this book yet? A Century of Stop-Motion Animation: From Melies to Aardman is co-authored by animation legend Ray Harryhausen and film historian Tony Dalton. It looks very comprehensive both text-wise and image-wise. A potentially valuable addition to animation libraries.

(Thanks, Ken Priebe)

My friends at Chronicle Books are having their annual “Friends and Family” sale. Through Friday, December 5, every book ordered from their website is 35% off and includes free shipping. To receive this discount, simply use the promo code FRIENDS at checkout. In addition to their currently available books, there are two new titles that can be pre-ordered on their site: Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts and my own The Art of Pixar Short Films. Also available at 35% discount is, of course, Cartoon Modern. Speaking of which, I got the itch recently to start a new blog about Fifties animation design. There won’t be a lot of writing on it; it’s just a place where I can share cool artwork. The new site is at cartoonmodern.tumblr.com.

This weekend, Picturebox, the publisher of the John K book I’m working on, is having a massive book and magazine sale at their place. I’ve browsed through the selection and there’s plenty of quality and rare stuff that’ll interest anybody into cartoons and illustration. It takes place on Saturday and Sunday, November 15 and 16, from 12-5pm. Available at affordable prices are hundreds of volumes about graphic design, illustration, fine art, graphic novels, imported manga, vintage children’s books, silkscreened books, prints, and tons of design and art magazines. Credit cards will be accepted. Picturebox is located at 121 3rd St. (corner of Bond) in Brooklyn. Take the F or G train to Carroll St., exit at Smith and 2nd place, and walk down 3rd St. to Bond.

Brad Bird writes to say, “Just thought you’d like your readers to know that the latest issue of Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope All-Story magazine was guest art edited by Marjane Satrapi, who also did drawings and paintings for the issue.” Satrapi is, of course, the creator and co-director of the Oscar-nominated and Cannes Jury Prize-winning feature Persepolis. If you can’t find the issue in bookstores, it’s also available for online purchase on the Zoetrope website.

I received a complimentary copy of the The Art of Bolt in the mail recently. I’m going to ignore the fact that it wasn’t intended for me since there was a note inside of the book that was addressed to the editor of a certain other animation-related print magazine which shall remain unnamed.

In terms of text, there’s little to discuss. The book, credited to Mark Cotta Vaz, is thin in the writing department, even relative to other ‘art of’ books in my collection. It makes me wonder why I invest so much effort when I’m hired to write similar ‘art of’ books. With the exception of a dozen or so pages of text, everything else is quotes, including deep bits of insights like the following from a couple of the animators: “Animating a dog is quite complicated. Instead of two legs you have four, and the overall motion is something the audience is very familiar with, so it has to look perfect for everyone to believe in it.”

Then again, it’s called The ART of Bolt for a reason. We buy these books for the artwork and there’s plenty of that on every page. At times, the book almost feels like it should be titled “The Art of Paul Felix.” It’s dominated by the digital paintings of Felix, who was art director on the movie. I’m not complaining. Felix’s work is skillful and has a certain charm. There are also plenty of other digital paintings by artists including Greg Miller, Jim Finn, Ric Sluiter, Kevin Nelson, Sean Samuels, as well as some graphite drawings (how quaint!) by Bill Perkins.

The buzzword for the art direction of this film is “painterly.” It’s repeated frequently in the book, and they cite a desire to recreate the “painterly” feel of Edward Hopper, George Bellows and the Ashcan School artists. It’ll be interesting to see how this painterly notion appears onscreen since the treatment of light and color has been a weak point in a lot of contemporary CGI (though it is improving). There are examples in the book of render tests, and what they illustrate is that in CGI, “painterly” translates to softer textures and a brushstroke feel, but at the end of the day, the backgrounds are still controlled by the perfect geometries of a computer-generated image. It is, at best, an approximation of a painter’s work. There is no abstraction of masses or compositional decisions that are based outside the realm of the digital model. That is not a fault of the artists so much as it is asking something of the technology that it is incapable of providing. But it’s also why I find it difficult to muster enthusiasm for page after page of Disney’s attempt to codify a “painterly” approach in their films (top image) without really ever approaching anything remotely as exciting as a true painter’s work (bottom image, by George Bellows).

One area in which CGI doesn’t have to play second-fiddle to the traditional arts is in the realm of characters, and there’s plenty of character design artwork in this book. The book offers solid and appealing designs by lead designer Joe Moshier, supported by work from Jin Kim and Chen-Yi Chang. Moshier comes from the Tom Oreb school of character design, and he does the super-graphic and elegant shapes and forms as well as anybody today. I think his designs excite me even more than Craig Kellman’s designs for Madagascar, which is another heavily Oreb-influenced production. My reservations are in the obviousness of the design choices. There’s never any real exploration of the graphic possibilities, such as what one saw in Teddy Newton’s inventive character exploration work on The Incredibles.

Another thing that I don’t see in the character designs is a unified vision of the universe, especially not in the way that was evident in the work of Chris Sanders on American Dog, the earlier incarnation of Bolt. Not only is the work of Sanders absent in this book, but his name has also been entirely omitted from the production history. As a historian, this type of revisionism raises my ire, but I don’t know the behind-the-scenes story that necessitated his name being omitted from the book. In the book, Vaz writes that Paul Felix started figuring out the look of the film in 2005. Did Felix and Sanders never speak to one another during Sanders’ tenure as director? Obviously a lot of stuff was figured out when Sanders was still aboard.

In a hint at why Sanders was let go, Lasseter writes in the foreword that in Bolt, “as innovative as the production design is, the artists made sure the style was always serving the story.” My only wish is that the style they ended up using wasn’t so safe and generic. The Disney studio has built a reliable animation brand that hews to the “Illusion of Life” philosophy, but I don’t believe for one second that to achieve that, they need to dumb down their design sensibilities and regress to blandness. As is evident in films like Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians and Lilo and Stitch, the Illusion of Life is not tied to any set Disney style. It’s a flexible idea that can accommodate more creativity and experimentation than the artwork that’s shown in this book. This ‘art of’ book may not have the most interesting or inspiring art, but let’s hope at the end of the day, at least it serves the story, as Lasseter believes it does.

Click here to buy the book on Amazon.