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.

Some happy news to report today. The Mass Animation project that we mentioned here last week released a new set of details today on their Facebook page. Notably among those details is that every artist whose work is used for the short will be compensated financially. Granted that the project is still structured like a contest and there’s a chance that the work you create won’t be used in the film (hence no compensation), but at least the artists whose work wins approval will receive something for their effort. Exploring new production models based on online collaboration is a worthy cause as long as it’s not done on the backs of artists, and I’m glad that we can now show some support behind a contest like Mass Animation.

Animators beware! There’s a new collaborative animation project called Mass Animation that is asking animation artists (both pros and amateurs) to come together via a Facebook application to produce a 5-minute CG animated short destined for theatrical release. The project hasn’t launched yet, but the details that are available on the official website and in this Intel press release aren’t encouraging.

The program, which doesn’t compensate any of the animators who work on it, is being sponsored by Intel, Autodesk, Facebook, Aniboom and Reel FX. The film is being directed by former Sony Pictures Digital exec Yair Landau. He says, “Mass Animation combines original computer-generated animated storytelling with social networking in a powerful, new way…we will reach so many talented animators who might not otherwise have access to this community of imagination and artistry. This project is the future of creative collaboration.”

Apparently Landau believes that the future of creative collaboration on the Internet means getting lots and lots of different people to create free work for deep-pocketed corporate sponsors so that they can release your work theatrically. Unlike earlier technologies, the Internet empowers artists so that they can avoid being taken advantage of in this manner. Companies that are trying to facilitate the exploitation of artists via the Internet are truly living in the past. Perhaps this contest started with benevolent intentions, but the press release makes it sound super-exploitative, and the fact that a Hollywood exec is directing the project simply adds to the ick-factor. I’ll make an effort to stay on top of this story and find out how it turns out.

(Thanks to Chris Roman for bringing this to everybody’s attention on the Cartoon Brew Facebook group)

As the line between live-action and animation blurs, there are more and more controversies about what qualifies as animation. Is A Scanner Darkly animation? Is Beowulf animation? It’s all up for debate. Here’s an easy one though. Is Year of the Fish animation? Most definitely not.

Year of the Fish is an indie film that opens next week in New York and San Francisco. I’m perplexed why the filmmakers are billing the film as an “animated feature film” when there is nothing remotely resembling animation in the trailer (watch it here). Movement that is created in real-time and then digitally-enhanced does not fit the definition of animation, which is generally acknowledged to be movement created frame-by-frame through the manipulation of static images. The confusion with films like A Scanner Darkly and Beowulf stems from the fact that there is possibly enough frame-by-frame enhancement and distortion of the recorded live-action footage to constitute animation.

Year of the Fish, on the other hand, appears to have had minimal work done on it by animation artists. Here’s the description of the “animation process” from the film’s website:

Using Synthetik Studio Artist….Kaplan and his small group of part-time assistants were able to work quickly and efficiently, doing with 3 people what would normally employ 40 full-time animators. A single miniDV live-action frame was upconverted to a high-definition painted frame, and that one frame was interpolated into a technique for converting an entire shot. After rendering these shots, Kaplan and his team were able to go back and refine the images frame by frame, add particle effects, and hand-paint details. This entire animation process was achieved on four Macintosh G5 computers and two Wacom tablets, and took only 6 months.

The process described—which is setting a stylistic filter on one frame per scene and rendering out the rest of the scene with that filter setting—is not animation. The filmmaker does say he went back for frame-by-frame manipulation, but it’s evident from the trailer that they were enhancing the filter effects frame-by-frame, not creating or enhancing movement frame-by-frame. The number of digital crew (3) and amount of time it took to do the “animation” (6 months) also makes clear that this is more a case of digital processing than animation.

In recent years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has qualified films like Waking Life and Beowulf for Oscar consideration in the animated feature category. It’s a slippery slope that has now opened the doors wide open for experimental live-action films like Year of the Fish to claim that they are animated.

The CalArts Character Animation Department is looking for a new program director. Here’s the job listing. The CalArts grad who sent us this link added in his email:

“As an alum, I’ve grown somewhat disappointed with the level of ability graduating from the same department that raised me (don’t even get me started about last year’s Producers’ Show), so I have great hopes that whoever they get back in the school will do whatever it takes to restore its once sterling reputation.”

Dan Harmon, one of the writers of Kung Pu Panda, has written an entertaingly long rant about how much he disliked working on the film and particularly how much he disliked working with Jeffrey Katzenberg. Actually I’m not sure what’s more amusing: that Harmon hated working with Katzenberg so much or that he’s so damn clueless about the animation process. To begin the piece, Harmon expresses incredulity that some animated films are written with storyboards and not scripts: “First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.”

Here’s another choice excerpt:

“I came in about four writers into the process. It’s kind of hard to write a “better” scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.

“It’s harder than it sounds. Especially when the larger “bucket” that the movie is contained in cannot change: the fact that the story has to be about a panda who is informed he is the chosen one, destined to …beat up… a guy who has escaped from prison and who is spending the entire movie walking to town, in order to…try to beat him up, because that’s the prophecy. And I won’t spoil the movie, but the bad guy doesn’t win. Because he’s not destined to. But just to make sure he doesn’t win, and because there’s 70 minutes of time to kill before he gets there on foot, the panda is trained in the martial arts. it’s kind of like Karate Kid, but if Mister Miyogi had long ago banished the Kobras and was running the karate tournament.”

(via Seward Street)