Monthly Archives: August 2011

Lantz piece spotted in Columbia Picture

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Here’s one of the most trivial discoveries in all my years of cartoon research.

So last night I was catching up on some movies I recorded off TCM and in the middle of a 1944 Columbia Pictures B-musical, Kansas City Kitty (1944, Directed by Del Lord), star Joan Davis is standing in the office of a music publisher. On the wall behind her (see frame grab below) are several pieces of sheet music tacked to the wall. It isn’t hard to notice that one of them is Cow Cow Boogie, from the Universal Walter Lantz cartoon, with a cover by Alex Lovy.

It just goes to show, you never know where references to classic cartoons will show up…

Here’s a close up of the real deal…

“Garabonciák” by Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz

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I think one could easily make the case that in the early-1980s, the most visually inventive and coolest looking cartoons in the world were being made in Hungary. To bolster the theory, here’s a 1985 piece of Hungarian psychedelia directed by Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz. The title Garabonciák translates to Wizards in English, and the music was composed by Károly Cserepes. Someone somewhere really needs to put together a retrospective of Eighties Hungarian features and shorts.

(via Meathaus)

Del Connell (1918-2011)

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Del Connell

Del Connell, who was a veteran Disney animation artist, Western Publishing editor, and comic strip/book writer, passed away on August 12 at age 93. Connell started working at Disney in 1939. Among other accomplishments, he worked in Joe Grant’s Character Model department, served as a story artist on Alice in Wonderland, and wrote the shorts The Pelican and the Snipe and The Cold-Blooded Penguin.

In the 1950s, he started a thirty-year run at Western Publishing where he wrote and edited thousands of Dell and Gold Key comics featuring cartoon characters from Disney, Warner Bros., Walter Lantz, Hanna-Barbera, and MGM. He remained especially close to the Disney characters: he wrote Donald Duck comics for decades, scripted the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip between 1968 and 1988, and invented Goofy’s alter-ego Super Goof.

I never met Connell, but heard plenty of nice things about him from his colleague Pete Alvarado who worked with him at Western Publishing for many years. For more about Connell’s life and work, follow these links:

Extensive chronology and memories of Del Connell by his grandson
Remembrance by Mark Evanier
Recent article about Del in the The Bakersfield Californian

(story via Disney History blog; the Connell photo at the top of this post is taken from Mark Evanier’s remembrance post)

“Cartoons Are No Laughing Matter!”

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Yesterday, the Parents Television Council released its latest study, Cartoons Are No Laughing Matter: Sex, Drugs and Profanity on Primetime Animated Shows Kids Watch Most, documenting the “shocking levels of adult content on networks with the highest-rated primetime animated cable shows”. The networks cited in the study included Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel and Nick at Nite.

The report has it in particularly for Adult Swim. Says PTC President Tim Winter:

“Adult content isn’t just creeping into the cartoons that kids today are watching the most; it has overtaken much of that animated programming. We’re not talking about cartoon characters slipping on banana peels and ramming into doors. Our data demonstrates that today’s norm is profanity-laden storylines involving everything from rape and cocaine to STDs and crystal meth. There is now more sexual content on these cartoons than violence — even when counting traditional ‘light’ cartoon violence.

“Parents might not be surprised that there is an abundance of adult-themed content on a cable network called Adult Swim; but those same parents are likely to be very surprised at just how adult the content is and how often teens and pre-teens are flocking to the network. Many don’t even realize Adult Swim appears on the same channel as the decidedly kid-centric Cartoon Network“

Major findings in the report include:

Sex

• Sex (680 instances) surpassed every form of violence (674 instances) in animated primetime cable programming.

• Sexual depictions included simulations or obscured scenes of sexual intercourse, pornography, masturbation, pedophilia and prostitution.

Drugs

• There were a total of 208 incidents relating to drugs, including cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth, psychedelics and alcohol. Eighty percent of the drug-related incidents were depictions rather than references.

Profanity

• The study identified 565 incidents of explicit language on shows rated TV-PG and TV-14. Twenty-seven percent of the uses of “f**k” and “sh*t” occurred on TV-PG programs.

Content Ratings

• Eighty-five percent of the TV-PG shows and 64% of the TV-14 shows containing sexual content did not have an “S” descriptor warning parents.

• Cartoon Network failed to use the ratings system to warn parents about sexual situations (S), suggestive dialogue (D) and coarse or crude language (L) 100% of the time.

You can download the entire report (as a PDF) HERE.

The latest “Tintin” poster

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I’m not intentionally ragging on the Tintin movie. I love the character and the original stories, worship his creator Hergé, and admire filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. And I really hope this movie is good. But this latest U.S. one-sheet poster (below) looks awful.

What a big crowded mess of ugly images. I mean really, this is how you are selling the movie to U.S. audiences – a large percentage of them who have never heard of or seen these characters before?

“Steve the Super Hero” by Jason Doll

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Manitoba-based indie animator Jason Doll makes modest little shorts between his higher paying professional gigs. His latest production, Steve the Super Hero, is a traditionally animated kid’s music video about a boy who battles Bad Guys using “only his natural stinky boy body odor powers”. It feels like a Sesame Street spot, or the opening credits for a pilot – and I mean this in a good way. Jason has just started a blog which features a few posts on the production of the video.

Digital Domain’s “The Legend of Tembo”

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Tembo

A few months ago we reported about Digital Domain’s plans for its CG animation studio in Port St. Lucie, Florida. They announced recently that this studio, which they’ve officially dubbed Tradition, will work on The Legend of Tembo. Slated for 2014 release, the film will be directed by Disney veterans Aaron Blaise and Chuck Williams.

Former Disney exec Pam Coats, who is heading up creative development at Tradition, told TCPalm that Tembo is the story of a baby African elephant who is captured and shipped to India:

“When he gets to India that’s where sort of the journey takes place, and this is a guy who becomes someone else. So, he has to transform himself into a fierce, battle elephant, which is based in truth. They did use elephants in battle in India. He has to become something he is not in order to return home.”

Check out the TCPalm website for more pre-production images from the film.

Lost Louis Prima Disney Song

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Here’s a real curio – and a treat for fans (like I am) of Louis Prima. The son of late song writer Floyd Huddleston (The Aristocats), Huston Huddleston, has just posted the first of several lost songs produced by Disney for use in a proposed version of The Rescuers. Says Huston:

“This is a song written by Floyd Huddleston, recorded at Disney in Burbank by Louis Prima, Sam Butera and the Witnesses. EXTREMELY rare recording, not even Disney has it, and was not used for the final film. To my knowledge, there were only storyboards and sketches for the Louis The Bear version of the film, most of which Disney has never released.

“Over the next few months, I will be releasing ALL of the unreleased songs and Demos from the film including “Rescuers Aid Society”, “Misery”, “I Never Had It So Good” “Sittin’ In My Favorite Position Doin’ Nothin’‘” and “All I Ever Do Is Think Of You“.

“Unfortunately, the demo version of “Someone’s Waiting For You” sung by Nancy Adams (singer of Love from Robin Hood) is, to my knowledge, forever lost.”

It’s certainly a pleasure to hear this, though its debatable if this version of the story would have made a better film. Who knows how much more discarded material the Disney vaults hold (if they kept it all)?

“The Story Of a Nice Girl” by Jean Yi

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The seventh film in our Student Animation Festival, The Story Of A Nice Girl, comes to us from Jean Yi who produced it at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

Yi’s film is an animated therapy session that reflects raw, real feelings in a perfectly charming way. Part of that charm comes from her vocal track which connects the viewer immediately to her story, her conversational performance being powerfully authentic and engaging. Her line drawings are deceptively simple. She draws herself as a simple stick figure, while others are drawn with more heft and personality. She uses color sparingly and for effect: gray lines for action or fantasy creations, pink for her band-aid, full color for her live “hand”. All this adds up to a perfectly satisfying autobiographical short that’s personal, sweet and yeah, dare I say it… nice.

To comment on the film or read notes from the filmmaker, click HERE.

Cartoon Brew’s second annual Student Animation Festival is made possible through the generous support of Titmouse and JibJab.

Titmouse and JibJab

Robert Breer (1926-2011)

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Experimental animator Robert Breer has passed away. Breer was a fine art painter who became interested in creating films as art in the 1950s. In his early shorts he experimented with the form by creating films using distinctly different images photographed one frame at a time. He became one of the most important figures in the 60′s New York experimental scene. In his later years he taught at Cooper Union in New York and created films for PBS’ The Electric Company. His longest piece, an experiment using the rotoscope, Fuji (1974), was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.

You can watch a nice selection of his shorts at UBUweb. Below is one of his most celebrated later films, Swiss Army Knife With Rats and Pigeons (1980):

Nicktoons 20th Anniversary

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We celebrated the date August 11th, 1991 earlier this week by marking the anniversary of The Ren & Stimpy Show. But that same second Sunday morning in August also marked the beginning of Nicktoons itself and the start of a creator driven cartoon explosion. Since today is 20th anniversary that symbolic second Sunday of August, I thought another post to mark the occasion was due.

Long gone – but not forgotten – is the cool Nicktoons ID intro and several character bumpers created by J.J. Sedelmaier. His collaborator Craig Yoe recalled how it came to be:

“20 years ago Nickelodeon’s VP of Creative, Scott Webb had seen an MTV ID that J.J. Sedelmaier of J.J. Sedelmaier Productions (still knocking out great animation) and I had done and drafted us to do an opening and closing for their new cartoon block, Nicktoons. Webb’s assignment was to “do an intro so cool that it will become as famous as the beloved Looney Tunes one”. Oh, sure, no problem there! We came up with the bit below joined by animators Doug Compton, JP Jacquet, and John Dilworth and with the music/sound design of the long missed Tom Pomposello. It debuted with Nicktoons, won some awards, but was quickly shit-canned by some suit who had other ideas and some political pull and, well… that’s all folks!

Sedelmaier just posted the original Nicktoon bumpers on his site. Click the image below to see them: