Ok, so imagine you’re the post office and you need to make three animated shorts to illustrate the following concepts: new parcel rates, post office savings accounts,and the value of posting your letters early. Sounds like a barren creative landscape. However, when given the opportunity, a talented commercial artist can take even the driest subject matter and interpret it in innovative and imaginative ways. Take a gander at these three shorts from the 1930s—A Colour Box, Rainbow Dance, and Trade Tattoo— directed by Len Lye, which illustrate the themes mentioned above. These films shatter every preconception about what an informational piece of commerical animation should look like while succeeding brilliantly in getting their points across.They were created for the UK’s state-sponsored GPO Film Unit, which was headed by the visionary filmmaker/producer John Grierson, who later was instrumental in establishing the National Film Board of Canada.

It boggles the mind that anything like this could have ever been made, though that probably says more about the sorry state of contemporary creativity than anything else. Why must visual experimentation in commercial animation today be the exception and not the norm? I’m not suggesting that every commercial has to be an avant-garde trip like Lye’s, but it also need not be the aesthetically lethargic and redundant fare that one sees over and over nowadays. If there’s a lesson to learn from Lye’s inspiring treatment of such mundane material, perhaps it’s that there’s no such thing as weak material, only weak interpretation of material.

A Colour Box (1935)

Rainbow Dance (1936)

Trade Tattoo (1937)

The most interesting writing and interviews about animation can no longer be found in any particular magazine; rather it’s spread out across the entire Web. Finding it is often the biggest challenge so I’m going to do my part and try to share more frequently the worthwhile pieces that I discover online. Here’s a few to start off with.

Animation director Mark Mayerson asks “Where’s Animation’s Brando? and then he expands on that thought. Director Michael Sporn offers his personal answer to the question. It’s a thought-provoking read from both.

This is a nice interview with artist Ree Treweek. She’s a member of the South African collective The Blackheart Gang, which produced the mesmerizing animated short The Tale of How.

One of my favorite cultural commentators, Momus, looks at the results of last week’s elections in Scotland and its implications for Scottish independence through the prism of the country’s most famous animation artist, Norman McLaren.

John K interviews can get kind of repetitive, especially when the interviewer asks the same old questions, but Aaron Simpson of the indispensable Cold Hard Flash manages to get some good stuff out of John in this recent interview. John’s ideas about his personal animation school curriculum are quite inspiring, if not quite fully developed, and point out just how much is missing from contemporary animation curriculums.

Are The Simpsons and Family Guy creatively bankrupt? Is the Pope Catholic? The New York Sun’s David Blum wrote a sharp commentary about this topic earlier this month:

Is it genuinely funny to see an animated, overweight, middle-aged dude on a living room couch, waiting for the chorus of the “Maude” theme song to kick in? To me it’s mildly amusing, but I don’t think I’m supposed to be the target audience for Fox’s “The Family Guy,” where that reference turned up on a recent episode. Very few 12-year-olds have a working knowledge of theme songs from 1970s sitcoms, and those who do need to get into something more useful, like stamp collecting. But this is what happens when you entrust the writing of prime-time cartoons to adults. They write what they know. And if you’ve ever met a Hollywood television comedy writer, you know that most of them grew up with baby sitters named Sony and Panavision.

I don’t think there’s all that much entertainment value in a television version of Trivial Pursuit, and that’s what television cartoons have largely become — a catalog of lines from old movies, theme songs from 1960s sitcoms, and mentions of actors like David Hasselhoff. I’m probably the only person in my ZIP code to catch the “Simpsons” reference to Fox’s 1991 sitcom trainwreck “Herman’s Head,” and that’s not a proud moment.

(again, via Michael Sporn’s Splog)

Todd Goldman is a talented artist whose t-shirt/apparel company David and Goliath, Inc. made $90 million in 2004. That’s hardly a surprise considering that his work is popular with everybody from prostitutes to grandmothers to Saudi Arabian women. In fact, the only person who doesn’t like Goldman is Fox News commentator Bernard Goldberg who listed Goldman in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Life, in general, couldn’t be going better for Goldman except for one slight problem: the Internet.

You see, over the past month, a lot of mean people online have been pointing out how some of Goldman’s work coincidentally looks like existing cartoons, comics and illustrations drawn by other artists. The differences between Goldman’s work and other artists are night and day but that hasn’t stopped evil Web people from harassing poor Goldman. Frankly, I’m disappointed with websites like BoingBoing, Slashdot,, Digg, MikeTyndall.com, and The Comics Journal who are disparaging the fine artistry of Goldman. Those awful folks at SomethingAwful have even posted a 110-page thread documenting these supposed similarities.

Seriously, can Goldman help if he made—totally by coincidence—a drawing that looks like a famous Disney character down to the pose, and then he put the Disney character’s name on it, and then he mass-produced the t-shirt and made lots of money selling it at retail stores and on his website. Fortunately, I know the lawyers at Disney are big-hearted and understanding; I mean which one of us hasn’t occasionally drawn a cartoon that looks like a famous Disney character and then mass-produced those drawings as merchandise.

And then, some other lame people online have been claiming that one of Goldman’s t-shirts looks like a character that illustrator Chip Wass designed for an animated commercial for Intel. These people, however, completely ignored the fact that Goldman’s character has stitches on its face and says “Bad Ass” beneath it. Apparently, 20/20 vision is not a prerequisite for critiquing artwork online.

Of course, what really bothers me is when well-known comic artists like Roman Dirge start claiming that the honorable Mr. Goldman is plagiarizing their work based on tenuous evidence. Compare Dirge’s design to Goldman’s design and just look at the eyes. Completely different characters if you ask me.

In fact, I spent most of last night designing my own new cartoon character. I call him Rugs Rabbit. Let’s just hope the Internet hounds don’t jump on my back like they have on Mr. Goldman’s and try to claim this completely original character is based on something else.

Fortunately, Todd Goldman isn’t taking this lying down. His lawyers have been defending his integrity by sending take-down notices to everybody, including Wired Magazine and Juxtapoz Magazine, who has dared point out these coincidences (or not-even-being-close-to-coincidences, as I prefer to call them). And a few weeks ago, Goldman himself set the record straight when he told the Las Vegas Sun what was really going on: “This is just a bunch of hater artists trying to take me down. I’m not an online Web guy. I’m not trying to rip people off. I work with a team of artists at David & Goliath. We create thousands of designs.”

Bottomline, here’s my advice to the online community: stop being a “bunch of hater artists” and let Mr. Goldman make his $90 million a year so he can defend himself from all your virulent online attacks.

This is an amusing anecdote from Rocky & Bullwinkle writer Bill Scott which took place back in the early-1950s while he was working at UPA. The story provides a good example of how throwing a lot of talent at a project doesn’t necessarily guarantee success; creative people need a solid foundation to work from and should be assigned projects that are suited to their particular skills. Fortunately, Bosustow was smart enough to recognize that he was more of a businessman than a creative (which is more than can be said for the majority of execs working in animation today). For this reason, he had placed director John Hubley in charge of the studio’s day-to-day creative decisions to avoid situations like the one described by Scott:

Another time, you know Steve Bosustow was close friends with Ted Geisel—Dr. Seuss—since they’d worked together during the war. They were having lunch together, and Geisel says, “I have a great idea for a film about eyebrows. You start with some guy’s face, and see how his eyebrows move up and down, and furrow and knit and all the things eyebrows usually do, and then suddenly the eyebrows manage to move away from the face and just keep on dancing on their own.”

Steve thought it was great, and bought it. I mean, he pulled out his checkbook right there at the table, and bought it on the spot. Then he passed it on to Phil [Eastman] and me, and said, “Here’s a new film we’re going to do.”

We looked it over, and said right away, “Wait a minute. Where’s the story? What happens?”

Steve said, “Well, can’t you figure something out?”

So we worked on it for a while, but basically it isn’t the idea for a film; it’s a gag that has to fit into some other context. When Steve finally realized that, he went back to Geisel and asked for his money back. And he got it.

The advice in the video above from guitar legend Dick Dale is geared towards musicians, but everything he says applies equally well to animation artists. To paraphrase, Dale suggests, “Save up your money, create your own films, build up your following by continuously getting your work out there, learn to market yourself and sell your own films. And most importantly, never surrender your creativity to studios because you’ll get screwed every time.”

Many artists in animation have followed the path that Dale suggests, whether it’s John and Faith Hubley back in the day, modern independents like Bill Plympton and Don Hertzfeldt, or contemporary studios like JibJab and Brothers McLeod. The results: the Hubley family still earns money from films that were produced fifty years ago and Bill Plympton earns money from films that he produced twenty years ago. Which creator in the industry can say that his work still draws income 20-50 years later? Not many, that’s for sure.

The most important thing to understand is that an artist like Plympton (or the Hubleys) also works on industry projects. In fact, you’re probably not a successful independent unless you’re producing commercial work because that means that your work has resonated with the mainstream. The difference between a career industry artist and an independent is that somebody like Plympton is able to produce commercial work on his own terms. And if he’s unable to do that, he can walk away from the project because his name and reputation have already been established on the strength of his personal work. In other words, he invested time upfront in building his ‘brand’ and that brand exists independent of any studio or network. It’s unnecessary for him to compromise his creative vision while creating commercial work.

With the arsenal of cheap and powerful digital production tools available to artists today as well as all the new distribution channels, there is nothing that the big studios offer that a business-savvy independent couldn’t get on his own. It’s nice to have somebody like Dick Dale remind you of that sometimes.

(video created by Tommy Liberto, link via Boing Boing)

It’s amazing the things one can find in old magazines. Below is an article I recently stumbled across in issue 16 of Lithopinion: The graphic arts and public affairs journal of Local One, Amalgamated Lithographers of America published in winter 1969. The article was written by husband-and-wife artists Eugene Fleury and Bernyce Polifka, both of whom had worked in animation. By the late-1960s when the article was published, they were teaching at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles as well as exhibiting their fine art.

Earlier in their careers, Fleury had been an in-house instructor at Disney and background painter at Warner Bros. on shorts like The Dover Boys and The Aristo-Cat. He had also worked in the Army Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit and Lantz. Polifka also designed backgrounds at Warner Bros. (most notably on Wackiki Wabbit,), worked on UPA shorts like Hell-Bent For Election and Giddyap, and art directed Frank Tashlin’s short The Lady Says No, which we’re currently offering on CartoonBrewFilms. Both Fleury and Polifka also contributed to Lou Bunin’s puppet-animated feature Alice in Wonderland.

Their article, “In Celebration of Color,” is about how we perceive and appreciate color in art. It’s a fairly abstract examination of color, but then again, color has always struck me as being a fairly abstract concept. Beyond the application of basic color theories like hues, values, complements, and the like, there’s a second more expressive and pyschological component to good color. Most artists are content as long as their colors are tasteful and harmonious and never consider that second part of color. But there are tremendous possibilities to exploit color for deeper meaning and effect, and this article does a nice job of encouraging one to think about those other possibilities.

(Notes: The article pages are presented in their original order. The last page is a large fold-out. I was too lazy to scan in the oversized pages so these are digital camera pics, which is why some of the pages may appear somewhat warped.)

Dear AOL/MSN/Yahoo/NBC-Universal and News Corp.,

Congratulations on the news of your new company to compete with YouTube.

The announcement of of this new partnership has me very excited. You say you are going to use your vault assets to create a new venue for programming—a “video-rich site… with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips, representing premium content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios.”

One of my favorite quotes in your press release is the one from Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel, who says, “We are excited to be a part of this landmark partnership that connects people to the content they care about…”, promising users “unprecedented access to their favorite shows”.

Allowing us access to the riches in your combined movie/TV libraries will be a great thing for our culture and will add to our collective knowledge of film history. It might even help thwart Internet piracy.

My only concern is that you might overlook the thousands of classic animation titles in your massive holdings. AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, holds the popular Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, the MGM Happy Harmonies, Tom & Jerry and Tex Avery masterpieces and the incredible Max Fleischer/Paramount Popeye cartoon; News Corp owns Crusader Rabbit, the historic first TV cartoon series; NBC-Universal has the wonderful Walter Lantz library of vintage Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy, and Oswald Rabbit. I’m not even mentioning all the TV cartoons and animated features contained therein, everything from Marine Boy to Wizards, all awaiting a chance to find—and entertain—a new audience.

And I’ll let you in on a secret. Your home video divisions have only released a fraction of the material you own.

Making them all available—the entire library, at minimal cost—will certainly connect your content to people who really care about it, namely our readers. There’s tons of money to be made from this proposition. This illegally posted 1940s Tom & Jerry short on YouTube has over 400,000 views. That’s more views than most of the modern animation posted there.

This is a watershed moment, the begining of a new age, with no rules, no ratings, no demographics to tell you people don’t want this or that. One thing we’ve learned from DVD is that people do want complete runs of great material. One thing we’ve learned from YouTube is that people are interested in esoteric material.

So release your old cartoons. Make them available for purchase. Believe it or not, people really want to see them. And I promise to be the first person in line to support the effort.

Best of luck,

Jerry Beck
CartoonBrew.com