Don’t miss these never-before-seen hand-drawn maps by director Bob Clampett illustrating the various Warner Bros. animation facilities (called Leon Schlesinger Productions at the time) and identifying where the artists worked.
It’s a nice complement to this recent photo that turned up on eBay that identifies the various buildings on Disney’s Hyperion lot in the 1930s.
Disney released this 60 second excerpt from the forthcoming Winnie The Pooh feature, set for release on July 15th:
(Thanks, Edward Himel)
Matthias Hoegg whose earlier student short August was featured in Cartoon Brew TV’s Student Animation Festival, has followed up with an even more impressive graduation short Thursday. Produced at the Royal College of Art in London, the short was nominated for a BAFTA last year. The slice-of-life love story takes place in an unsentimental near-future where emotion struggles to break through an onslaught of techno-gadgetry.
Patterns, rhythms and color dominate the visual design of the film. Hoegg says in this Motionographer interview that he was inspired primarily by American quilts and Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaics. Credit also belongs to the sound designer Marian Mentrup, whose rich layer of audio adds a degree of warmth and humanity to the images.
See concept art from the film on Matthias’s website.
CREDITS
Sound Design and Music by Marian Mentrup
“Thursday’s Space Waltz” written and performed by Marian Mentrup
Published by Kobrow Musikverlag
Additional Animation by Aaron Lampert
Additional Modeling by Mattias Bjurström
Foley Artist Günther Röhn
Mixed at Talking Animals Studio Berlin
(Thanks, Fiachra Hackett)
This Japanese music video for group_inou‘s “Heart” by AC部 is pretty incredible. I can’t find any information in English about the directors, but they appear to be a Japanese collective comprised of three artists. If you know more about them, please share.
Some would argue that the video is incredible for all the wrong reasons–trippy, creepy, freaky!–but the unorthodox style works because the directors sell us their vision with complete conviction. In an animation world where everybody strives to make characters move according to established rules and principles, it’s refreshing to see animators betray every convention of the natural world–even if that vision is at odds with the “correct” way of animating. It’s always exhilarating when an animator establishes their own rules of movement and has the ability to execute those ideas with clarity and skill. AC pulls off that feat in “Heart.”
Below is another piece of animation by AC:
(Thanks, David OReilly)
If you read just one thing today, make it this newly released 1976 interview with Disney animator Milt Kahl conducted by Michael Barrier and Milton Gray. Hearing Kahl speak his mind brings the past alive in a way that few history books can, and sheds light on the divisions and rivalries between the golden age Disney animators. When the interview took place, Kahl had recently left the Disney studio after forty-plus years and he doesn’t mince words:
“The way that I feel about it is that my performance in The Rescuers is good. The only thing is that you know that this picture is going to be mediocre. It has a few high spots, but it’s full of bad taste that is, as I like to put it, tempered by bad judgment. That’s kind of a lousy way to put it, but I feel that way. I’m really rather bitter about the set-up, about some of the people who I thought considered that we were working together, and I find that we really weren’t. Here I am, a person at the height of my powers, and I feel there’s not a place for me anymore. I don’t want to be involved; I can’t fight this thing. And there certainly isn’t a place for me anywhere else in this business.”
Two brothers go down town to buy a present for their little sister’s upcoming birthday when the unthinkable happens… From the madcap minds of Norwegian sibling animation/design duo Tommy Vad Flaaten and Markus Vad Flaaten: Spend It Wisely.
(Thanks, R.A. MacNeil)
We are getting a clearer picture of what to expect from Cartoon Network’s new Looney Tunes Show which is now set to premiere May 3rd at 8pm. The channel has set up a new website loaded with images, downloads and many clips. For example, this musical Yosemite Sam video…
And this update of Marvin Martian…
Daffy, Bugs and Sam ghost-bust a house…
And here is an example of the CG Road Runner and Coyote (TV style):
Cute imagery and creepy lyrics rub up against each other in Farm Music, a short by up-and-comer Yousuke Oomomo. To learn more about Oomomo’s work, Ben Ettinger’s AniPages Daily offers some illuminative commentary about the young Japanese filmmaker.
We are happy to announce that a new member has joined Cartoon Brew’s editorial team. Chris Arrant is the editor of CB Biz where he curates a daily collection of breaking news releases from across the industry. His addition to our editorial team addresses one of the most common requests we receive, which is to offer a broader spectrum of straight industry coverage. His posts can be conveniently accessed via the INDUSTRY HEADLINES box in the right-hand column.
A little more about him: Chris Arrant is a freelance writer specializing in comics, animation and film. In addition to being the editor of CB Biz for CartoonBrew.com, he writes about entertainment for Newsarama.com, MTVGeek.Com, CBR’s Robot 6 blog, iFanboy.com and Marvel’s Marvel Spotlight magazine and website. He is also a published comics writer, writing 2008’s Female Force: Princess Diana and doing stories in anthologies such as Tori Amos’ Comic Book Tattoo, 24seven Vol. 2 and Negative Burn.
Publicists may submit their press releases directly to Chris at the following e-mail: PR [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com
Russian animator Egor Zhgun mashed up audio from Disney’s Three Little Pigs and an Angry Birds graphic style to create Three Big Pigs, an explanation of the situation in the Middle East. It’s a testament to the iconic quality and staying power of Walt Disney’s filmmaking that, nearly eighty years after the fact, one of his shorts can be successfully remixed in a new context.
This’ll be one of the nerdiest things I’ve posted on the Brew, but if you are as big a fan of Invader ZIM as I, you’ll understand. Rikki Simons (voice of “Gir” on ZIM) got together last weekend at InvaderCon in Georgia with Richard Horvitz (ZIM), Andy Berman (Dib), Melissa Fahn (Gaz), and writer Eric Trueheart to do a live script reading of a couple of unproduced episodes. Rikki posted Mopiness of Doom here and I’ve embed Day of da Spookies below. It’s worth viewing just to watch Richard Horvitz scream…
Promising trailer for A Morning Stroll by Grant Orchard, whose brilliant timing and shrewd minimalism have made him a long-time favorite of mine. The short was produced by Studio AKA which also reps Orchard for commercial work. Here’s a bit more about his latest, which will premiere at Annecy in June:
‘When a New Yorker walks past a chicken on his morning stroll, we’re left to wonder which one is the real city slicker…’ Based loosely on a real life event recounted in Paul Auster’s brilliant book True Tales of American Life, Grant Orchard’s A Morning Stroll tells the story of one New Yorker’s early morning encounter with a chicken, an event that plays out over 100 years.
Rio de Janeiro-based animator Rodrigo Leme directed and animated these spots while working in-house at Globosat TV in Brazil. The top piece promoted the airing of the four Indiana Jones films, while the bottom was a promo for a block of horror films.
CREDITS
“Indiana Jones Rock Song Promo”
Art Direction/Animation: RodrigoLeme
Writer/Lyrics: Alex Mendes
Music: Eduardo Miguens
“Fear Club” Promo”
Art Direction/3D/Animation: RodrigoLeme
Writer: AlexMendes
Sound: Flavio Biniou
Just released on Warner Archive’s on-demand line of DVDs is Gene Kelly’s ambitious ballet film Invitation to the Dance. The film’s third segment, “Sinbad the Sailor,” is a half-hour combination of live-action and animation, the latter directed by MGM’s team of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. The film has never been on DVD before, and if not necessarily a classic, the combination of Kelly, Hanna and Barbera makes for some fun moments.
The delightfully grouchy Ed Benedict, who I interviewed in 2002 for Animation Blast #8, spoke about his involvement in the film and why he disliked it:
“That was a miserable project. I was at home…[Fred] Quimby called and briefly described this project that he wanted me to come over and work on. I got the impression that I would be designing this so I was excited. I was quite enthusiastic about it and felt challenged. I went over and started fumbling around, making scribbles, trying to find a style. But they weren’t the designs that I originally did. I just turned my back away from the whole thing as much as I could. I got Don Driscoll, a friend of mine who worked at Paul Fennell’s, to paint the backgrounds. He had the ability but he wasn’t the painter. Anybody could have painted the backgrounds because they didn’t have anything on them.
“Invitation to the Dance was a farce and I was shocked because if you look at a lot of the old MGM musicals, they used Lautrec, Cezanne and a lot of different styles of backgrounds, just great stuff. Gene Kelly is running the show more or less on those type of decisions and he’s over there making the approvals on this stuff. There’s samples coming from the art department on the main lot, others besides myself were handing in ideas, and nothing took place.”
See some of Ed’s development art from the film HERE.
