Michael Langan, whose short film Doxology holds the distinction of being the first episode of Cartoon Brew TV, created this striking signal film for the Ann Arbor Film Festival which opens tomorrow. He also made an informative making of video that shows the labor-intensiveness of stop-motion.
Bill Plympton and Signe Baumane will present the Battle of the Sexes on Monday, April 12, at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West Third Street, NYC). According to the description:
Famed animators and Woodstock Film Festival Animation Programmers Bill Plympton and Signe Baumane will square off toe-to-toe by showing the funniest, sexiest animated cartoons in a 5-round match to discover which gender makes the hottest cartoons! And get this – the audience gets to decide the winner! Yes! The paying public will end this age – old controversy, once and for all declaring the winner! Screening will be followed by an exclusive Q&A with select animators and programmers.
Representing the women will be the following films:
Teat Beat of Sex by Signe Baumane
Vessel Wrestling by Lisa Yu
Time for Carla by Saray Dominguez
Carnival of Animals by Michaela Pavlatova
Girls Night Out by Joanna Quinn
And on the men’s side:
Chirpy by John Goras
Roof Sex by PES
The Making of Gladiator by Duncan Beedie
Cosmic Honeymoon by Ondrej Rudavsky
How to make Love to a Woman by Bill Plympton
Imagi, the LA feature animation studio that went out of business a few months ago, is auctioning all of its equipment and furniture. Michael Sporn has posted the auction catalog on his blog. Perhaps now somebody will use the equipment to create something that people actually want to watch.
Last weekend’s New York Times discussed a new trend in political ads in which politicians are depicted as grotesque animated caricatures. Two examples they cited are ads that attack Meg Whitman and Barbara Boxer, which I’ve posted below. These would be wonderful if they were made by citizens fed up with the shenanigans of the political elite, but unfortunately, they’re made by special interests groups who are as nasty and agenda-driven as the people they’re lampooning.
(Thanks, Celia Bullwinkel)
Many readers have noticed a malware warning when they’ve come to the site over the last couple days. We’ve traced the issue to our OpenX ad server. The issues affected many sites which run the OpenX server. There is more information about the issue at LegitReviews.com which also experienced the same hack:
A group registered in Russia and constantly moving around Scandavavia on a daily basis using the domain newtickepicker.com has hacked into many of the OpenX Ad servers including ours to insert a plug in. It then places itself into a one pixel unit on a graphic position for an advertisement. The plugin is called “mergedDeliveryFunctions.php.
Our tech guy informs us that no malware was ever added to the site, however, as a precaution, Google flagged all sites using these OpenX invocation codes. We are currently working with Google to get our site relisted as safe. Everything should be back to normal by the end of today. Thank you to everybody who has helped out and sent over screenshots and info about what they’re seeing on their computers.
If you’re bored and stuck in Los Angeles tonight, I’ve got some good news! Our monthly live comedy/cartoon revue, Cartoon Dump, goes on this evening at 8pm!
Tonight we celebrate with special guest comedian Karen Kilgariff (from Mr. Show)! Join me, Frank Conniff, Erica Doering, J. Elvis Weinstein, and Mighty Mr. Titan (putting the spotlight on his ass, above) tonight at the Steve Allen Theater, 4773 Hollywood Blvd. • Free Parking! • Advanced Tickets here • Phone: (323) 666-9797 • Map & Directions
This week’s Hi and Lois (3/18/10) by Brian Walker, Greg Walker and Chance Browne; B.C. (3/16/10) by Mason Mastroianni; Realty Check (3/17/10) by Dave Whammond; and Close To Home (3/18/10) by John McPherson.
(Thanks, Jim Lahue, Uncle Wayne and Chris Cook)
Who needs Viagra??? Just get a bar of Camay Soap!
Check out this set of five smokin’ hot animated spots from the 1950s that our friends at Something Weird Video just unearthed (first one embed below; then watch #2, #3, #4 and #5). The animators were not shy about letting us see the leading lady’s charms in the bath tub, and each commercial is packed with unsubtle Tex Avery-inspired “erection” double takes. Check them all out.
Inquiring minds want to know: who did them? What year? New York, L.A. or elsewhere? And for what market (Latin America? Europe?)? The credit to Technicolor on the main title might suggest these spots were intended to play movie theatres. Do any of our reader have any answers?
(Thanks, Joe Bacon)
Production artist Nicolas Marlet will be among those taking part in an artist panel at Alhambra’s Gallery Nucleus on Sunday March 28th, talking about and showing some of their work from Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon. Other artists in attendance will be: Alessandro Carloni (Head of Story), Pierre Olivier Vincent (Art Director) and Simon Otto (Head of Animation).
This event is free and its highly recommended you arrive early – seating is limited. The panel will begin at 3pm. For more information please check the Gallery Nucleus website.
A trailer for the children’s film Moomins and the Comet Chase, the first stereoscopic 3-D feature out of the Nordic region. It’s being produced by Finnish studio Filmkompaniet Alpha, who previously made the feature Moomin and Midsummer Madness in 2008. The characters are based on Tove Jansson’s classic book and comic characters Moomins which have been the subject of numerous animated TV series and features throughout the years, including a hand-drawn Japanese version of this same Moomin story from 1992 titled Comet in Moominland.
Elk Hair Caddis is another mini-masterpiece from those crazy kids at Denmark’s Animation Workshop: Peter Smith, Alice Holme, Anders Brogaarde and Magnus Moller.
Peter Smith told us:
One of the goals with this piece of animation was to explore some of the boundaries of the 3D media, and how close we could bring it to a 2D feel in terms of broadness and flexibility. One of the very important inspirations that made us think along these lines was the work of the Swedish company Meindbender. Particularly the short Football vs. Rabbit was a very helpful source of inspiration. For the animation we used Maya and Blender (Anisculpt) and for comp we used Fusion.
Computer animation from Russia in 1968 (yep, that’s forty-two years ago!):
A group of Russian physicists and mathematicians with N. Konstantinov in the head of it created mathematic model of the cat and its moving and realized this model in the program for the computer “BESM-4″. Computer printed hundreds of frames on the paper using alphabet symbols and then they were converted to the cinefilm.
(Thanks, Mark Newgarden)
Only on Cartoon Brew do you get scoops like this:
Just in time for Passover: Brew reader Afonso Bruno snapped this pic of the new rodent-head shaped ham slices now available in Paris supermarkets. It’s right up there with our previous posts on Disney food tie-ins like Aristo-Cats Cat Food, Old Yeller Dog Food and Mickey Mouse Liver Paste.
An enticing trailer for Lipsett Diaries, a short directed by Theodore Ushev (Drux Flux, Tower Bawher). It’s rare to see animated imagery with such substance and beauty–so intensely powerful–and it’s only the trailer:
[Lipsett Diaries] depicts the maelstrom of anguish that tormented Arthur Lipsett, a famed Canadian experimental filmmaker who died at the age of 49. His descent into depression and madness is explored through a series of images as well as sounds taken from Lipsett’s own work.
The film is written by Chris Robinson, the artistic director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival; this marks his first major involvement in the production of an animated film. LipsettDiaries.net has more background about Lipsett and the film, including a fascinating tidbit about the influence of Lipsett’s work on George Lucas and Star Wars. The film is in competition at Annecy this year, and something tells me it might be selected for Ottawa too.
Here’s the teaser for a godawful looking low-budget European co-production… waitasec…my bad…this is DreamWorks’s Megamind. By now, I’ve come to expect very little from DreamWorks product, but this one strikes me as being even blander and clumsier than their usual bland and clumsy style. It looks like a slapped together patchwork of CG cliches, so much so that in these clips the characters appear uncomfortably detached from their background environments. The strain of a three-films-a-year schedule is becoming painfully evident.
