Within the last two weeks I saw Disney’s Bolt and rewatched Pixar’s Wall•E (as well as moderating a Q&A with writer/director Andrew Stanton). Talking to Stanton about his innovative new film, I was reminded that Pixar’s next release is Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s offbeat Up and Stanton’s next project is an adaptation of Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars. Two completely different films, pushing Pixar (and animation by extension) in new directions, following several prior envelope-pushing efforts from Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles, etc.).

Meanwhile Bolt, the first effort from Walt Disney Animation Studios (the new name of the Feature Animation group), is a good solid commercial production. It plays it safe and gives audiences what it expects from a film labeled with the Disney brand.

I had wondered how John Lasseter, running parallel studios, might differentiate the material Pixar would tackle versus the projects to be released under the WDAS banner. Originally I had hoped that John would return Disney to being a hand drawn animation studio, empowered (as Pixar is) to challenge the preconceptions of what hand-drawn character animation can be. However, the choice of The Princess and The Frog seems (to this outsider) a throw-back to what Disney once was, designed to placate the demand for further Disney Princesses’™, and not the progressive direction I was hoping for.

And then it occurred to me. It all became clear.

I don’t know if this is by design, or is Lasseter’s master plan, or if it’s just my wild fantasy… But I think the two studios could (should?) co-exist as a modern day, feature length equivilent of Disney’s two concurrent shorts series of the 1930s: Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies. At least it seems to be where they are heading.

Back when, the Mickey Mouse cartoons were the soul of studio. Disney’s bread-and-butter pictures; they were what the public expected and demanded from his studio. Big, broad and designed to please. The Silly Symphonies were the heart (or at least where Walt’s heart was, en route to Snow White). Each Silly was completely different, pushing the latest technologies, developing new ideas and pursuing new talent. And won all the Oscars.

Presently, WDAS is in full “Mickey Mouse” mode: reinforcing the brand, producing crowd-pleasing films of highest artistic quality and delivering what audiences of all ages, all over the world have come to expect.

Pixar’s films are already reminiscent of the pioneering ways of Walt’s Silly Symphonies. In fact, the basic situations in Toy Story, A Bugs Life and Cars might’ve been inspired by classic Disney shorts like Broken Toys, Grasshopper and the Ants and Susie, The Blue Coupe. They don’t play it safe, consistently break new ground - and win all the Oscars.

There’s no way to bring back Walt Disney. He was one of a kind. In addition to his triumphs in film, theme parks and family entertainment, Walt laid the foundation to create great works of animation - and the blueprint is right there in the studio’s history. Perhaps John Lasseter has figured that out.

If not, may I make a suggestion…?

Disney’s Roadside Romeo has opened in India and it’s a huge hit. Let me repeat that: It’s a HUGE HIT. According to a Disney exec, “in its first four days it exceeded the entire Indian gross of The Incredibles.”

This means only one thing. The population of India is clearly not ready yet for animated films. It’s understandable, I mean didn’t they just introduce automobiles into the country last year or something. So here’s my proposal: All animation should be immediately removed from the nation of India. I’ve written a letter outlining the plan.

Dear People of India,

As of tomorrow, anything animated—whether CG, stop-motion, Flash or drawn—will be taken off of your airwaves and out of your theaters. Additionally, any DVDs containing animation can be dumped in useless neighboring countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Furthermore, a moratorium will be placed on any animation currently being produced in India. Send your animators home. Trust me, nobody wants to see this crap anyways. As part of your cartoon re-education, all children’s toys based on cartoon characters must be traded in within 72 hours for books about Renaissance painting and storytelling how-tos by Robert McKee. As a goodwill gesture, we will also ship you Richard Williams who will conduct his popular Masterclass in India’s 200 largest cities.

We’ll try the plan for two years. Don’t worry, good ideas like this take time. When the fine people of India feel they’re good and ready to respect the animation art form, I will personally send over a print of One Froggy Evening. If you enjoy that more than you did Roadside Romeo, we’ll send you Dumbo the following month. If you still enjoy Roadside Romeo, we’ll take more drastic measures like defrosting Walt and sending him over to help you see the light. Either way you’ll finally be able to see that your enthusiasm for Roadside Romeo was one huge terrible fucking mistake. Don’t feel too bad, even animation-savvy countries make mistakes sometimes.

Do we have a deal India? Let me know when you have a moment. We’ll go to In-n-Out afterwards to celebrate.

Sincerely,

Cartoon Brew

Animation is such a ubiquitous part of our contemporary lives that it can no longer be confined to mere screen projection. It increasingly appears all around us and has become part of the fabric of our everyday lives. Over the past year, I’ve been pointing out examples of artists who use real-world settings either as a canvas for creating animation or as a place to project finished works. These artists include Blu, Fons Schiedon and Karolina Sobecka.

Pablo Valbuena is another artist who can be added to the list. Valbuena pushes it further than these other artists and actually manages to alter our perception of real-world space through his animation. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, check out this piece he created in the Netherlands:

For the full effect of this piece, see the official video on Pablo’s website. His indoor experiments are equally mesmerizing. For all the talk of “stereoscopic 3D” animated features, all those films are still being projected onto a single surface . Valbuena is pursuing a more honest and exciting form of 3D animation by using three-dimensional space as his work canvas.

On his website, Valbuena offers the following explanation of what he’s trying to accomplish through his work:

“This project is focused on the temporary quality of space, investigating space-time not only as a three dimensional environment, but as space in transformation. For this purpose two layers are produced that explore different aspects of the space-time reality. On the one hand the physical layer, which controls the real space and shapes the volumetric base that serves as support for the next level. The second level is a virtual projected layer that allows controlling the transformation and sequentiality of space-time.

“The blending of both levels gives the impression of physical geometry suitable of being transformed. The orverlapping produces a three-dimensional space augmented by a transformable layer suitable to be controlled, resulting in the capacity through the installation of altering multiple dimensions of space-time.”

(via Submarine Channel)

We couldn’t let the historic events of last night pass without notice on Cartoon Brew. It was a crazy evening for anybody who experienced it, and this morning the entire Internet is talking about it, from Facebook and Twitter status updates to seemingly every blog and website. My personal cab ride home through Brooklyn last night was nothing short of surreal — the entire city was engaged in a spontaneous street celebration with cars honking their horns, cabbies yelling out of their windows, people dancing and shouting in the streets, and an electricity generally reserved for sports championships. We don’t inject off-topic posts into the Brew often, but this is a milestone moment in American history that transcends left-right politics. I know you’re all talking about it at work today and I wanted to create an OPEN THREAD for the animation community (both in the US and abroad) to share with the rest of the world their thoughts, feelings, drawings and artwork about last night’s events, Obama and the elections.

As our financial markets continue to meltdown and our currency is in flux (I recently found myself staring blankly at a $14 Whopper at the Zurich International Airport),  Mark Wagner seems to be having the time of his life.

Wagner, a collage artist, has been busy cutting up thousands of U.S. one dollar bills and reshuffling the pieces into fantastic works of art.   The meticulousness of these collages is awe-inspiring.   Just one look and you can see what I am talking about.  Here’s Riddle of the Sphinx:  Click for a high resolution scan.

In one of my personal favorites, Marxism, Wagner scrambles the portrait of George Washington into a portrait of Groucho Marx, a clever reduction of our founding father to the father of Duck Soup.

In Bout,  George Washington is seen in a boxing ring fighting a shadow of himself, which is skillfully constructed by using the shaded parts of a dollar bill.   It’s a fantastic piece, and I’m sure it’s hanging in some investment banker’s living room right now.  Click for a high resolution scan.

I love thinking of Mark Wagner sitting in his studio, destroying money like a shredding factory.  Just the artist, thousands of dollar bills, and a few X-Acto knives.

It reminds me of that guy who discovered that pennies made before 1982 were 95% copper (as opposed to today’s which are 97.5% zinc), so he melted them down and sold the copper and made a fortune.* Of course, the government caught up with him, but there’s something similar going on here.  Our money is worthless -  more so every day - so Wagner cuts it up and turns it into art that sells for $20,000 a piece.  I love it.

*More on the bizarre worthlessness of our currency: Penny Dreadful from The New Yorker.

Click for larger upright version of this Snoopy ruler.

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first post by regular Guest Brewer Linda Simensky. The picture above is from from her cameo appearence in episode 6 of PBS Kids’ WordGirl.

I just finished celebrating my birthday. My actual birthday was about a month ago, but I was busy then and kind of distracted and it rained that day, so we didn’t really do much. But there was a high point that day, and it was a big one for me. My daughter asked to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons with me.

A little background first — I have a son, Ethan, who is eight and a daughter, Sara, who is three. They find my job in kids TV mildly interesting, but as far as they know, every kid’s mom works in kids TV. That’s just how life is for them. They do like TV, at least. But as far as ways to kill time, Ethan would just as soon play games. He loves his Wii, videogames and Club Penguin the most. Coming in second would be his Bakugan toys. Next would be Bionicles. Next would be reading or anything to do with Harry Potter. Then we get to watching Bakugan. By the time we get to this point, his free time is all used up.

You’ll notice no mention of funny cartoons. He does watch the occasional funny show, but only if for some reason it isn’t time for Wii. Now one of my major interests in life, as well as my career, is animation — and specifically funny cartoons. So you see the irony here. Others in animation with kids warned me of the “they don’t always like what you want them to like” syndrome. I always knew it could happen to me.

My daughter, on the other hand, is still open-minded and malleable. She does have some definite opinions, and she does love TV. She likes funny things. She hasn’t really discovered computers yet, and she doesn’t play videogames yet. So this was her birthday gift to me — she came shuffling in to the bedroom on the morning of my birthday and said, “Let’s watch some Bugs Bunny cartoons.” I’d have to say this may be one of my biggest accomplishments in child rearing as of late.

We did watch Bugs Bunny cartoons that morning. And we’ve watched on several weekend mornings since. She seems to like Bugs the best, although she is definitely drawn to Daffy as well. And the crazier the gags, the more she likes them. My mother had mentioned to me that by three, she already could see that I liked cartoons, so maybe it just runs in the family.

With that in mind, I spent my Amazon gift certificate getting caught up on the Looney Tunes DVD sets. I already had four of the DVD sets, and with volume six coming out just last week, I realized I had better get volume five. Especially now that I have an eager three-year-old to share them with. (Subliminal advertising: Go buy the Looney Tunes DVDs.) Apparently volume six is the last of this excellent series.

A three-year-old watching Bugs Bunny probably doesn’t seem like a bi deal to many of you, but consider that kids aren’t watching the Looney Tunes the same way we all did. When I started in the kids TV industry in the mid-1980s, I was ten years older than the oldest kids in the audience. We had pretty much the same lives. Sure, they grew up with cable, and we didn’t have it until I was in junior high, but that was the biggest difference. Otherwise we all had had many shared experiences growing up, and watching Looney Tunes on Saturday morning was one of them. Kids now don’t watch the Looney Tunes much — it’s hidden on Boomerang. And there are more funny cartoons available to kids these days — and most of them were made in the past decade, not half a century ago.

You can see why it would be such a big deal that my daughter would want to watch Looney Tunes. So yes, it was a pretty good birthday.

Next up for my daughter — some NFB films. We’ll start slowly.

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first post by award-winning filmmaker and regular Guest Brewer Pes.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in the fabulous Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx — doing research for a new short film. It’s been no hardship to pass the day here…Woodlawn is one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever seen and feels more like an impeccably manicured park than a burial ground.

Woodlawn is home to many creative luminaries including Miles Davis, Herman Melville and Thomas Nast, and curiosity getting the better of me, I decided to stop by their graves to see what’s going on. I was slightly horrified to find that people choose to pay their respects to Herman Melville by balancing BIC and other cheap clickable ballpoint pens (the free kind you get at a bank) on his tombstone — so that it now looks a bit like a trash can. Despite this, I really like that Melville’s tombstone has a blank sheet of paper sculpted into the front, as if encouraging every visitor to think for a moment about the dreaded blank page at the end of life. I wondered momentarily if this was Melville’s last brilliant idea.

In my wanderings in the cemetery, some other interesting things have happened. For instance, one day I was photographing a tombstone and just as I clicked the camera, a rabid wolf or wild dog thing jumped from behind the tombstone baring his teeth at me. My heart raced. I was in the center of the cemetery, alone, and I hadn’t seen anyone for at least an hour. I instantly thought about being mauled alive by this thing. Would my tombstone read something like “Eaten alive by a wolf right on this spot”? Fortunately, I held my ground and the thing ran away. Evidently he was more scared of me than I of him. I later learned from a groundskeeper that what I had seen was one of the cemetery’s resident (and harmless) coyotes and that I should be happy to have seen him without having to pay admission to the nearby Bronx Zoo.

In another corner of the cemetery, on another day of research, I stumbled upon this fascinating tombstone, which tells of a 15-year-old boy who died on his birthday in 1909 in a most unfortunate manner. The tombstone has to be seen to be believed: click to enlarge.

Curious, I did a little research. First, the Penbid website (yes, an Ebay for pens!) clarified this little thing called an “ink eraser” : “Modern ink is dye or stain, but writing of the early period was done with inks containing carbon as a pigment and on animal skins (such as vellum or parchment) or on paper made entirely from rags. Carbon ink did not penetrate these writing surfaces but dried on the surface, sort of like paint. This explains the tools known as steel erasers or ink scrapers [aka 'ink eraser'], which were used for scraping mistakes from the writing surface.”

So, basically an “ink eraser” was a knife, kind of like an X-Acto blade: and George Spencer Millet fell on his while trying to avoid getting the cooties on his 15th birthday.

But did the ink eraser stab him in the eye or in the heart when he fell on it? And what about the girls, throwing birthday kisses at him? What happened to them? Just how did this horrifying scene unfold? After a bit more research I uncovered this New York Times article from February 16, 1909 (links to downloadable PDF article) which helps reconstruct the horrifying event and adds some interesting plot details along the way.