The official selections have been announced for the 2009 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Of particular interest is to see how many films in the shorts category have already been hits on-line. There’s Muto’s wall-painted animation Blu, PES’s Western Spaghetti, David O’Reilly’s Please Say Something, and Takena Nagao’s Chainsaw Maid, which is probably not even eligible since it’s from 2007. The music video category also includes the Rex the Dog music video “Bubblicious.”

Can anybody point to a short film from, let’s say Annecy in 1985, that was seen by millions of people at the time of its release. This year’s competition program offers numerous shorts that fall into that category and it’s exciting as hell. Even a decade ago, animated shorts remained a fringe-culture oddity seen by a relative handful in festivals and touring-compilations. Thanks to the Internet though, independent animation has been lifted out of the cultural ghetto and is quick becoming as visible and mainstream as it was during the Golden Age of theatrical animation when shorts preceded feature films.

What we are seeing are the beginnings of a new age of animated shorts, an age where short-form animation is an integral part of the cultural mainstream. As shorts increase their visibility, more and more people will see them and be inspired to create their own, which is great news for everybody, except for animation festivals like Annecy which must begin to rethink their roles or face the risk of irrelevancy. Festivals are no longer in a position to introduce these films to the audience because there’s a good chance the audience has already seen them. Therefore, festivals must find new ways to add value to their programming, whether through creating connections between the rich history of the art form and the contemporary shorts movement, or looking to the future and bringing understanding to where all of this is headed. Most importantly, they could begin to serve as a focal gathering point for artists and businesspeople who want to help one another make money from the animation that is being produced.

Toronto live-action screenwriter Denis McGrath imagines what kind of notes today’s industry executives might give to Chuck Jones’ classic Warner Bros. cartoon One Froggy Evening. They are all too real. Samples from his blog:

re: the frog. Have you done research on Frog’s lifespans? Does it track that this frog could survive from 1892 to 2056? Is his long lifespan tied into his ability to sing?

Do they allow mental patients to keep pet frogs? Is it a companion animal thing? Will have to explain this, I think. The audience will want to know.

Read the whole piece on McGrath’s Dead Things On Sticks blog.

(Thanks, Warren Leonhardt)

Earlier this decade, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began handing out Oscars for best animated feature, I viewed it as a misguided decision. Increasingly, over the past eight years, I’ve come to see it not only as misguided, but as downright awful, an idea that is at best backwards and out of touch with contemporary times, and at worst, a reactionary measure designed to protect their live-action base of filmmakers from the threat of an emergent art form. Furthermore, the immature manner in which the Academy presents the animation award during their ceremony is completely at odds with what is actually happening within the art form. If I didn’t know better, I’d think their intentions were to pigeonhole animation into its own specialized niche instead of promoting the art form as a valid equivalent to the live-action process.

The Academy’s animated feature award looks increasingly antiquated as more progressive film awards and festivals begin to recognize animation on its merits as film and not as some weird subset removed from the rest of film art. Yesterday, the 29th edition of Fantasporto, a major film festival in Portugal, awarded its top prize for Best Film and Best Screenplay to Bill Plympton’s feature Idiots and Angels. Plympton beat out of dozens of live-action films for both awards. The screenplay award is notable because Idiots and Angels is dialogue-less and Plympton relied purely on visual storytelling to make his film.

Also, this week at the Fargo Film Festival, Don Hertzfeldt’s latest short I Am So Proud of You won not only Best Animation, but also Best Picture and Best Screenplay. The 22-minute short won the Best Picture award over dozens of live-action features, animated films and documentaries. Festival co-chairman Matt Olien told Fargo’s local paper Inforum that their selection of Hertzfeldt’s film falls in line with animation’s emergence “as a major player in movies” and that he felt WALL-E should have received a best picture nomination at the Oscars.

Animation filmmakers are continuing to push creative boundaries as never before and they are being recognized for their progress throughout the film community. It’s unfortunate that at the exact moment animation began coming into its own and regularly equaling live-action in terms of writing and filmmaking quality, the Academy took action to make it more difficult for animation to compete in its major categories. As animation continues its evolution so should the Academy. It should embrace animation as a film art worthy of its major awards and abolish its separate but equal treatment of animated films.

Danny Hayes, a guy who worked on Coraline, complains in Bitch magazine that the Coraline production was too much of a boys-only club. Says Danny:

Make no mistake – Coraline (the just-released stop-motion feature made by Laika Productions right here in Bitch’s hometown of Portland, OR) may be a girl’s story, but the animation industry is still very much a boys’ club. Stick around for the credits after the film and you’ll see that the screenwriter, director, editors, most of the animators, and the “Based on the Novel by” guy are all dudes. This tidbit may come as a surprise, but it shouldn’t. Men were at the helm of almost every major animated feature in recent and not-so-recent history, including those movies that have been embraced specifically by female audiences.

But what does keeping female voices out of the upper echelons of the movie machine do to the industry as a whole?

In my (admittedly limited) experience, it creates a stressful, and at times hostile, work environment. From Henry Selick (the movie’s sometimes maniacal leader) on down, there was definitely a machismo feeling on the set. Competition among co-workers and an assembly-line type of atmosphere was imposed on employees, most of whom were there because of their obsession with the art form but let down by the studio’s poor treatment of its workers.

Danny has a valid point that animation production in general is too male-dominated, but I’d argue that the situation has been changing very rapidly during the past decade. Though the mainstream industry’s creative figureheads remain almost entirely male, the independent animation industry has become much more diverse, with many of the coolest commercials, music videos and independent films being made by women like Gaelle Denis, Suzie Templeton and Laurie Thinot. Two recent indie animation features were also directed by women—Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99 and Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues—and women are principals of some of the coolest studios around like Shy the Sun, Panda Panther and Tiny Inventions. In other words, the animation world is currently experiencing an unprecedented diversification of its gender make-up, and as a result, the art form is becoming much richer and more interesting to watch.

Even though Motionographer posted this advertisement for the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, I felt it was important to post it again on Cartoon Brew. Not because it’s visually impressive (it is), but because of the technique it “borrowed” for its production.

The creators of the spot—director Elliot Jokelson and NY-based studio Ghost Robot—credit recent Pratt grad Javan Ivey for coming up with the Stratastencil technique upon which they’ve based their entire piece. When Javan posted his short “My Paper Mind” on his website last year, he also posted technical notes on how he achieved the look. (We mentioned Ivey’s work in last month’s piece about 3D papercraft animation.)

The ethical question here is, If an artist comes up with an original technique and style and a studio decides to use it shortly after the artist puts his work online, should the original artist be offered a job, financial compensation, or creative credit on the project?

Let me make one thing clear: techniques can’t be hidden away; they need to be pushed around, explored, discovered. Computer animation would not exist today if not for the early SIGGRAPH conferences where artists and technicians openly shared their discoveries. There’s a big difference here though in that Ghost Robot and Ivey were not working collaboratively and contributing to each other’s artistic development. Ghost Robot took another artist’s fleshed-out technique and got hired by a client to replicate that look. Examine Ivey’s original piece and the Bonnaroo spot and you’ll see that they not only borrowed the technique, they brazenly took actual animation ideas from Ivey’s piece. In my opinion, if you’re a studio that’s taking money on the basis of another individual’s brand-new technique, it’s shamelessly low not to make an effort to have the originator direct the piece.

In the comments of the Motionographer post, Ivey notes that he was emailed by the director but he didn’t respond to their initial inquiry. Ghost Robot’s single email to Javan does not, in my mind, constitute a sincere effort to communicate with him, and since the director was emailing him, it was clear that they weren’t looking to have Ivey direct. They’d already sold the job based on Ivey’s technique and, more than likely, they wanted to make their own jobs easier by having the originator show them the way.

In my opinion, this is what it boils down to: how creatively bankrupt does a commercial studio have to be to troll the Internet looking for the ideas of college students to rip off? Is there nobody at Ghost Robot who possesses an ounce of creativity so that they don’t have to pitch the ideas of college students to clients? Sadly this situation is considered business as usual in the icky world of advertising where studios regularly repurpose ideas, technique and styles. And just as I feel it’s important to point out the creative people in this business, I also feel it’s important to point out the Jokelsons and Ghost Robots who coast off the creativity of others.

At the end of the day, Javan lost money and work because of this, but he’s gained credibility within the animation community by having the validity of his animation technique proven by an uncreative commercial studio supported by deep-pocketed clients. It should be pointed out that despite being taken advantage of, Ivey has been a class-act about the situation and tells Motionographer:

“This is precisely what I mean every time I say ‘I’d like to see someone try.’ Because I do, I love to see what someone else does with it. They’ve taken the idea and applied manpower and a budget to it, and I’m absolutely floored. It looks great. I mean, I’m kinda bummed I wasn’t invited to the party, but I really enjoy seeing what they’ve done.”

Randy Nelson, head of the in-house Pixar University, gives a 10-minute talk that offers insight into character traits the studio looks for when it hires employees. One of the primary factors is to hire people who are interested rather than interesting. Also, collaboration does not simply mean cooperation, but it means amplification—people who bring separate depth to the problem and bring breadth that gives them interest in the entire solution.

(via Kottke)

Click image to enlarge. (from an idea by Jake Friedman)

The image above is of Charlee, a fan of the Avatar series, who protested the live-action film’s racially questionable casting choices at an Avatar casting call in Philadelphia today. He writes about his experience in this blog comment.

Apparently part of Paramount’s marketing plan for Avatar is to alienate every Asian-American before the film is released. For example, listen to the film’s dimwitted casting director Deedee Rickets, who recently explained to a Pennsylvania newspaper how they wanted to cast ethnic extras: “We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you’re Korean, wear a kimono. If you’re from Belgium, wear lederhosen.”

Apparently, nobody informed her that the kimono is not the national dress of Korea, but of Japan. The Angry Asian Man blog is rightfully angry. He writes:

“Right. Koreans, kimonos, funny Asian outfits… they’re all the same. It’s apparent that the people making this movie really don’t care about the kind of movie they’re making, as long as they get to use Asians (and their basket-weaving skills) as props.”

More links to disappointment:

A blog that explains how to protest Paramount and documents the growing chorus of discontent.

Avant Garde Retard reimagines Avatar director M. Night Shyamalan turned white.

Passionate outrage from Maykazine

A blog post by angered Chinese-American who laments “a great opportunity for aspiring young Asian actors that has been taken away.”

Well, Fuck You Too, Hollywood: Not eloquent but an honest sentiment from a fan.

And it’s not just Asians, even the Angry Black Woman is angry: “I’m holding out one hope — that this is some kind of messed-up viral marketing effort, maybe using reverse psychology to get people all riled up about the film so they’ll blog about it, etc. But if this is really the cast they’re planning to go with, I will definitely be boycotting this movie, and urging everyone I know to do the same.”