Monthly Archives: August 2011

Phallic Sylvester by artist Daniel Edwards

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“Fe, Fi, Fo Fat – I tawt I taw a puddy tat!” (a direct quote from Tweety and the Beanstalk, 1957). Yes, that’s what it looks like. It’s a bronze statue by artist Daniel Edwards called “Allegory of a Teen Sex Symbol (Justin Bieber)”, now showing at the Cory Allen Contemporary Art gallery. From their website:

“Daniel wanted to create a work that opens a dialogue about the inevitable exploitation of teen sex symbols as they grow from child stars to adults, like we’ve seen with past celebutantes Lindsay, Miley, and Britney,” said the artist’s representative Cory Allen.

“It would be naïve and hypocritical for anyone to be offended by this simple sculpture, yet be apathetic towards the plethora of images to which they subject themselves on a daily basis,” said Daniel Edwards, “I stand by the work.”

I dare say this is unlicensed and unauthorized.

(Thanks, Devlin)

Mickey Mouse’s Cartoon Band

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Long before the Firehouse Five Plus Two (not to mention Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), Pinto Colvig (storyman, voice of Goofy) apparently organized a Disney Studio in-house “Cartoon Band”. I know nothing about the story behind this June 29th, 1936 mystery photo (click to enlarge) beyond the clues in the picture itself: It’s on the Hyperion street lot; there’s Ward Kimball on the far right with the trombone; and is that Pinto with the white beard, center, behind the drummer? And heck, is that Walt center right, standing with the trumpet, fourth from the right?

This photo comes from that cache of rare Disney material for sale from our friend Mary Rose.

UPDATE: Amid shares another image of the band below from the 1936 United Artists Convention. Click on the image for a bigger version with identifications.

Disney band

Syrian Cartoonist Ali Ferzat Savagely Beaten

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This just might be every cartoonist’s worst nightmare: Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat was kidnapped and later found bleeding on the side of a road with his hands broken. Unsurprisingly, the attack is being blamed on the security forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Ferzat, according to the Guardian, is “one of Syria’s most famous cultural figures,” and he has “long criticised the bureaucracy and corruption of the regime and since March has turned to depicting the uprising.” His work has also served as inspiration for animated projects in Syria.

A few weeks ago, the Syrian regime killed the singer Ibrahim al-Qashoush, the composer of a popular anti-regime song, and dumped his body in a river with his vocal chords ripped out of his throat. These desperate attempts to shut down the voices of the country’s most creative people is disheartening, but it also speaks to how much power artists wield throughout society and how much fear they can instill into governments. Even in the United States, cartoonists have been responsible for bringing down corrupt politicians with nothing but their pens. Ferzat’s story is something that every cartoonist and animator should remember the next time they make a drawing: cartoons have the power to create positive change, and there are cartoonists around the world risking their lives to do just that.

The Facebook page We Are all Ali Ferzat has been set up in his support. We applaud Ferzat’s bravery and wish him a speedy recovery.

According to a tweet, this is the last cartoon Ferzat drew before he was beaten and here’s a selection of more cartoons by him:

Animated Sheet Music by Dan Cohen

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Dan Cohen takes existing sheet music and animates it to the songs. The concept bears out the cliche that the best ideas are often the simplest. Not only does animating music in this manner hold great potential as an educational tool, it also helps the listener–musically-inclined or otherwise–to appreciate the artistry of musicians. The best thing that Cohen does is to display each individual note as it is played, which really allows the listener to visualize the melodies and rhythms of a composition. It’s an especially striking effect for some of the songs, like Charlie Parker’s “Bloomdido.”

Oh, and because someone will inevitably mention High Note, yes, it’s true that Chuck Jones once made an animated short that used sheet music as a setting, and frankly it’s not nearly as interesting or entertaining as the musical visualizations that Dan Cohen has created.

(via Kottke)

“AANAATT” by Max Hattler

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Max Hattler‘s “AANAATT”, a music video for Japanese artist Jemapur, is an abstract stop motion journey that disorients the viewer through novel placement of mirrors and windows. Hattler’s geometric universe functions using an internal logic of its own that isn’t immediately evident to the viewer, and thus creates a visual tension that is both mysterious and hypnotizing. The video dates back to 2008 but is appearing on-line for the first time. It ranks among the more unique examples of stop motion animation I’ve seen recently.

CREDITS
Director/Producer: Max Hattler
Animation: Max Hattler, Noriko Okaku
Assistant Animators: Philip Serfaty, Rodrigo Vives
Music: Jemapur
Commissioned by: W+K Tokyo Lab
Creative Director: +cruz

(via Motionographer)

Tweety’s lost titles

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Here’s something I’ve never seen before – and you won’t be seeing it on DVD (or in color) anytime soon yourself. Cartoon historian David Gerstein is one of several animation archaeologists (along with colleagues Steve Stanchfield, Tom Stathes and Thad Komorowski) determined to hunt down lost Hollywood cartoons the major studios have long abandoned or forgotten. This includes missing bits and pieces – like title sequences and cut footage – and all have succeeded in recent years by locating such footage, both important and obscure, found collecting dust in private collections or neglected at major archives.

Gerstein’s latest find is the original opening titles and credits (albeit in black and white) to Warner Bros. Oscar winning 1947 short, Tweetie Pie. Even Warners doesn’t have this opening – having been cut from the original negative long ago, for a 1955 Blue Ribbon reissue. Let David tell you about it (and see it and hear it) on his blog. And keep his page book marked – David’s found several more which he’ll post in later weeks.

“An Abstract Day” by Oerd van Cuijlenborg

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An Abstract Day is a 2009 experimental short by Dutch animator Oerd van Cuijlenborg that has just been posted on-line. The film uses semi-abstract imagery to visualize the sounds in the daily life of a couple. (Note: Audio is NSFW so wear headphones.) The film is unique enough to stand on its own, but intentionally or not, it owes a debt to a UPA industrial film that John Hubley made called More Than Meets the Eye that represented sound in a similarly abstract manner.

Jewelry based on 20s/30s cartoon imagery

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Inspired by black and white cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, Paris-based web designer Tracey Polyflavor has been creating decorative millefori jewelry and fashion accessories using polymer clay. Here’s how she does it. Some of her designs are based on imagery from Ub Iwerks’ 1929 Silly Symphony, Hell’s Bells (see below). A perfect gift for that early-talkie cartoon girl in your life… Check out her whole line at polyflavour.com.

“Aristocats” pencil test

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Here’s something I haven’t seen before (pardon me if I skipped the Special Edition DVD): an early pencil test sequence from Disney’s The Aristocats (1970) posted on Andreas Deja’s blog. Andreas has (as usual) some interesting observations about the animation by Milt Kahl and Ollie Johnston. Apparently Milt wanted O’Malley to be thinner, while Ollie drew him heavier. Note Milt’s animation at the beginning, which recalls Shere Kahn, followed by Ollie’s slightly chubbier version. Neat stuff:

(Thanks, Ben Price)

CBeebies Interstitial by Matthias Hoegg

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To be sure, there’s a cute voice track in this interstitial for British children’s channel CBeebies, but the piece as a whole is charming and delivers on all fronts, with sharp direction, design and animation (I love the run cycles of the brothers at the beginning). The piece, called “Sam,” was directed by Matthias Hoegg of Beakus, who also made a couple other shorts in the series earlier this year.

CREDITS
Directed, Designed by Matthias Hoegg
Animated by Amaël Isnard and Matthias Hoegg
3D Animation by Amaël Isnard
Additional Compositing by Leo Bridle
Produced by Beakus

A 60-Year-Old Article is More Relevant Than Ever

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Ted Parmelee

Ted Parmelee (pictured above, right) is perhaps best remembered today as the director of UPA’s The Tell-Tale Heart, but his career in animation stretched from Pinocchio through Rocky & Bullwinkle and included lots of fine work in TV commercials and industrial films inbetween.

While browsing through some files related to my book Cartoon Modern, I stumbled onto scans of an article that Parmelee had written in the mid-1950s. The piece, which I’ve reprinted below, smartly sums up many of the issues that progressive animation artists faced in the 1950s. For example, Parmelee argued that Disney’s heavy reliance on live-action was an artistic dead-end and countered every other development in art at the time:

All efforts were directed toward better drawing to produce a kind of reality from what had originally been a very simple and direct medium. They were so delighted to see it move, and pleased with a medium more plastic in the use of “time” that they became involved in trying to make it round, real and spacious as they could. This was exactly the same standard of “good” that made Aunt Matilda’s “real-genuine-oil painting” good. “The apples looked so sure-enough for real you coulda’ picked ‘em right out of the painting.” For this the artists to the Italian Renaissance for aid and borrowed the know-how of several centuries of draughtmanship. It was only natural and practical thinking. If you have a new gadget, don’t you take it out and try it on anything handy? Finally you have it doing the things it was designed for so well that it just gets monotonous, so you have it attempting things it never was built for.

There is a strong correlation between Parmelee’s critique of Disney in the 1930s and ’40s, and today’s art form — only the technique has changed. Contemporary big budget CG features exhibit increasing sophistication in lighting, textures, character animation and effects, but to what effect? Realism has again been cast as an end, when it is only a means for expressing a personal artistic vision.

Parmelee credits World War II as the impetus for animators experimenting with new filmmaking techniques, storytelling approaches and graphic styles. He also hails the arrival of the TV commercial, in which the form’s brevity allowed artists to explore different approaches for communicating with audiences.

Thankfully today’s animation medium is diverse enough that there is tons of experimentation happening, even moreso than in the 1950s. Parmelee, of course, anticipated this when he wrote that the single biggest improvement awaiting the industry “would be a decisive change in the actual physical means for making animated pictures, a more fluid kind of thing. . . a thing that provided quicker results.” Indeed, digital animation software and techniques have proven to be the savior, and offer an improvement over old production methods, especially when used by artists for the purpose of expressing themselves.

Read Parmelee’s article by clicking on the image below:

Ted Parmelee article

“Tattoo Step” by Mike Maryniuk

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I’ve been a fan of Winnipeg-based Mike Maryniuk ever since I saw Cattle Call, a 2008 short he co-directed with Matthew Rankin. Mike recently posted another one of his films on-line, Tattoo Step, a high-energy experimental affair that celebrates the inherent beauty in temporary tattoos:

Made with nothing but thousands of temporary tattoos and a strip of 35mm leader. A tip of the hat to Stan Brakhage’s “Moth Light”.