Art director Hans Bacher (Mulan) has started up an incredible new blog called Animation Treasures. He’s painstakingly recreating pan backgrounds from classic animated films currently on dvd (mostly Disney ones) to offer a sense of what the original backgrounds looked like before the characters were composited on top. There’s lots of insightful notes to go along with each image. Truly a terrific educational resource that everybody should take advantage of. Thanks Hans!

Dan Kois makes the case for Disney direct-to-video sequels on Slate.

Got a few hours tonight? Tune into the online broadcast of Luxuria Music from 7-10pm PST where the guest on the “Kitsch Niche with Strike” will be animation artist and director Jordan Reichek (Ren & Stimpy, Invader Zim). Jordan also happens to be a primo collector of Disneylandia (trust me, I’ve seen the collection) and he’s sharing some of the aural parts of the collection on air tonight including rare recording session outtakes, Disneyland commercials, weird “sing-along” records made at the park and theme park cover songs. Rare photos of the park will also be displayed on the Luxuria webcam. It’s all for free at LuxuriaMusic.com.

(via Don Brockway’s Isn’t Life Terrible)

I was out of town when this news emerged a couple weeks ago but I wanted to make mention of the passing of Disney animator and director Art Stevens. Stevens passed away on May 22 at age 92. His career was notable in that he worked at a single studio—Disney—for nearly four-and-a-half decades. There’s a solid obit at O-Meon.com which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about him.

In the Disney hierarchy, Stevens was not considered one of the star animators, but he made many important contributions to the studio. He was one of Ward Kimball’s two primary animators (the other being Julius Svendsen) during all of Kimball’s experimental projects (Toot Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the space specials, It’s Tough To Be a Bird and Dad, Can I Borrow the Car, among others). Also, The Saga of Windwagon Smith was largely his and Svendsen’s project although directing credit went to Charles Nichols.

I had the opportunity to interview Stevens on a few occasions because of my research on John Dunn and Fifties animation, and he was one of the friendliest and most cordial people you could imagine. It always struck me as interesting that though Stevens worked at Disney his entire career, he was the farthest thing from your typical idea of a Disney animator. Looking at his sketchbooks, a lot of them filled with cats, he obviously enjoyed cartooning, caricature and design far more than the academic drawing we associate with a lot of the classic Disney artists. Stevens’s first gig as a full-fledged animator was on Peter Pan where he was assigned a lot of the marching sequences with the Lost Boys. But just as he had achieved the highest peak in the Disney animation department, he jumped ship and accepted an invitation to join Kimball’s unit where he could do more stylized and cartoonier animation, like the hilarious ‘popping strings’ section that he did in Toot Whistle. It’s pretty clear that he preferred fun and experimentation over the traditional Disney product.

On a sadder note, for the past few years, I’d been trying to get ASIFA-Hollywood to honor Stevens with a Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contributions to the art of animation. Stevens never received the recognition from ASIFA-Hollywood despite my multiple attempts. I’m not privy to the politics or Stevens’s history that denied him this recognition, but I think it’s nothing short of disgraceful for an animation organization to ignore somebody like Stevens. With nearly everybody else who is deserving of that award now dead, it bothered me greatly to see somebody as qualified as Stevens not receive it year after year. It’s too late now to do anything about it, but perhaps we can take solace in the knowledge that despite his passing, Stevens’s contributions to the art form will continue to live on for many years to come, and an ultimately useless award from an even more useless organization won’t do anything to change that fact.

A couple model sheets by Art Stevens for the short Scrooge McDuck and Money (1967). Click for larger versions.

Brad Bird at last night’s world premiere of Ratatouille at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

The best film of the summer will be released next week. Not best animated film - best film, period. The reviews are literally unanimous - 100% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes.

I saw the film and add my name to the chorus. It’s brilliant! But what really excites me is that once again Pixar, and Brad Bird, have pushed the envelope, progressing the art and storytelling potential that can be accomplished with computer graphics. And this is a film Bird took over and reworked — usually a recipe for disaster. Not this time.

The animation and art direction are superb. Every creative descision seems just perfect - from casting to design and through every plot twist and turn. The 2-D graphic end credits should be noted - once again the Pixar animators tease us with the possibility of what a traditionally hand drawn Pixar cartoon might feel like. And the final tagline in the end credits gave me the biggest smile of the night:

“Our Quality Assurance Guaratee: 100% Genuine Animation! No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film.”

Don’t miss it.

Disney’s ad this year in the Annecy animation festival program book announced a new name for their feature animation division. They’ve actually been using the new name for a few months now but this is the first time I’ve run across an announcement about the name change.

For those of you who were disturbed by our post of Bimbo in Israel, here’s the flip side of the coin.

Currently playing in San Francisco is Disney In Deutschland, a new play by John J. Powers. It purports to recount a meeting between Uncle Walt and Der Fuehrer, face-to-face, with Leni Riefenstahl thrown in for good measure. It even goes so far to suggest Disneyland was Adolf’s idea! Calling Max Bialystock!

Luckily, our brave buddy Harry McCracken went, saw the play and posted his review here. It sounds awful.

Look out, Jiminy Cricket!

I think this promotional paper mask from the 50s, being offer for sale on Toyzine.com, is scary enough to kill insects on sight!

(Thanks, Adam Blake)