Imagination, an experimental indie feature that combines live-action with hand-drawn animation, stop-motion puppet animation, pixilation, and time-lapse, was released onto dvd earlier this week. The dvd offers numerous special features including:

1. “Making Imagination” Documentary with cast/crew interviews
2. “Behind The Animation” Documentary with director Eric Leiser
3. Q&A with the Leiser brothers & Ed Gildersleeve at Sunset 5 Theatres
4. Isolated Film Score
5. Stills Gallery
6. Director’s Statement

Additionally, the film has two theatrical screenings scheduled for this weekend. Tonight, it plays in Portland at the Hollywood Theatre, and on Saturday evening, it screens at the Capitol Theater in Olympia, Washington. Director Eric Leiser will be present at both screenings, as will his brother Jeffrey Leiser, who co-wrote the film and composed the film’s music.

To read reviews of Imagination and find out about future theatrical screenings, visit the film’s MySpace page. The film was previously mentioned on the Brew last July.

Speak Up has in-depth interviews with the director and producer of the forthcoming part-animated feature-length documentary Pablo, about the life of film title designer and animator Pablo Ferro. The filmmakers have also started a blog about the production of the film.

Earlier Brew coverage of Pablo here.

(via Motion Design blog)

A few items of note from the Pixar universe:

* Pixar story supervisor Ronnie del Carmen writes about the celebration at the studio following their Oscar win for Ratatouille. Identifications for the above photo of Pixar story artists can be found on Ronnie’s blog.

* Production designer Bill Cone (A Bug’s Life, Cars) has started a blog to showcase his plein air pastel paintings.

* How does a graphic designer fit in at Pixar? Rataouille title designer Susan Bradley explains her role at the studio in this interview.

The new blog Market Saw keeps readers updated about the latest 3D craze sweeping the feature animation biz (and movie industry as a whole). The site also has a list of upcoming 3D features including major studio films like Bolt, Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, Frankenweenie and Ice Age 3, as well as some animated features I hadn’t heard of such as Gaumont’s Boat and New Line’s Planet 51. This Wall Street Journal piece gives more background on the growth of 3D movies, and this page offers the perspective of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is one of the technology’s biggest proponents and has announced that all of DreamWorks’s animated features from 2009 onward will be produced in 3D.

Steve Hulett, over on the daily must-read The Animation Guild blog, lists all the known union projects currently in production in L.A. — including a few Disney items I’d never heard of (Joe Jump? King of the Elves?).

Most intriguing project: Batman Anime (Gotham Knight?) at Warner Bros. Scariest titles mentioned: Tinkerbell 2 and 3(!) from Disneytoon Studios.

Based on what little I’ve seen from this film, it looks awesome.
Here’s the latest trailer from Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda.

New stills have appeared online from the forthcoming direct-to-video Rob Zombie feature The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. Chris Battle, who did some work on the film, posted a few of the images on his blog with this accompanying thought:

“Above are some of the better pics that actually retain the brilliance of Carey Yost and Mark Colangelo’s original art, but judging from some of the other pics, the final product is falling a bit short of what it was supposed to be. I guess that’s what happens when the studio shuts things down way too early and sends everything overseas before it’s ready in order to concentrate on sure-fire winners like ‘Everybody’s Hero’…”

That’s disappointing news to hear. Back in August 2006, Jerry had written on the Brew about the promise of this project.

UPDATE: Multiple well-placed sources inform us that El Superbeasto is still being prepped for a theatrical release and not direct-to-video.

When I posted about my move to NYC last month, I alluded to the exciting trend of independent animated features being produced on the East Coast. ASIFA-East president David Levy has penned a new column in the ASIFA-East monthly newsletter Anymator about the growth of indie East Coast features. An incredible seven artists out here are working on or have recently completed independent features: Bill Plympton, Michael Sporn, Nina Paley, Paul Fierlinger, Emily Hubley, Dan Kanemoto, and Tatia Rosenthal.

In his article, entitled “Better Late Than Never,” Levy learns more about these features by interviewing four of the filmmakers: Michael Sporn, Nina Paley, Paul Fierlinger and Dan Kanemoto. It’s a pleasure to hear the filmmakers describing the subject matter of their films: the relationship between a WWII pilot and his father, a film based on the memoirs of British author J.R.Ackerley, a biography of Edgar Allen Poe, and an animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Sounds like American animated features are finally growing up.

(Image above from Paul Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip)

Every so often I find out about such an awesome piece of animation that I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never heard about it before. Tonight was such an instance when my friend Joshua Smith introduced me to the 1982 Hungarian animated feature Fehérlófia (aka Son Of The White Mare) directed by the legendary Marcell Jankovics. (Note: Other websites peg the film’s release date as 1980 and ‘81. If anybody knows for sure, let us know.)

Admittedly I’ve never followed Jankovics’s work very closely. Like most indie animation fans I’m familiar with his award-winning short Sisyphus (warning: unintentionally NSFW soundtrack) and that’s about all. I had no idea that he’d also directed features, especially one as daringly experimental as this one. The first bit of Fehérlófia that I watched was this clip:

After watching this, I thought there’s no way there could be an entire film that maintains this visual intensity and innovation throughout. Then a search on YouTube revealed that the entire film is posted in eight parts and in fact it’s a pretty damn amazing piece of work. Visually, it’s rooted in a pastiche of late-’70s/early-’80s graphic styles yet it also manages to look remarkably fresh and contemporary. This ten-minute segment blew me away:

What the film lacks in the type of nuanced character animation that we demand from our US animated features, it more than makes up for with its experimental graphic animation and sweeping artistic vision. Joshua Smith tells me that he’s working to create an English fansub of the film. I hope he makes that available online so we can all learn if the story is as fascinating as the artwork.

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