A wonderful minimalist fantasy, Jake Wyatt skillfully directed Metro last year at the Brigham Young University Center for Animation. Strong art direction and color design turn its simple story into an beautiful experience. Making the festival rounds and garnering much praise over the past year, it’s now online:
How does a 21-year-old Iranian-born kid living in Vienna, Austria become a key animator on a Japanese anime series directed by ShinichirÅ Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo)? That’s the unlikely tale of Bahi JD, one of the fast-rising stars of the animation world.
Bahi first started receiving attention a few years ago as an eighteen-year-old when he created an epic animated GIF called Shithead Action. The piece (formatted as a YouTube video above) displayed exceptional command of drawing and layout, and became a calling card for the young artist.
Since then, he has gone on to animate on the Konami game Skullgirls, various Japanese animated music videos, and most recently on Watanabe’s new series Kids on the Slope. His story is documented in this fascinating interview on AniPages.
The thing that struck me most while reading the interview was how Bahi JD’s development as an artist and subsequent career in the field are inseperable from the Internet: he was initially inspired by the “sakuga” anime style that he discovered on-line; he created critical networking links by participating in on-line forums and interacting with other aspiring artists and Japanese industry pros; he became known by posting his work online; and today he telecommutes to Tokyo-based animation studios through an Internet connection from his home in Austria.
The remarkable part of the story isn’t that Bahi found a job in the animation industry, but that he found a job in a highly competitive sector of the industry that’s 5,000 miles away from his home. As the animation community grows online and animation software becomes as accessible as the Internet itself, Bahi JD’s path to the industry will be one that we may see repeated ever more frequently in the coming years.
(Thanks, Tim Drage)
Jiří Barta’s dark, mixed media (combining stop-mo, hand drawn, live action) feature, In The Attic (2009), is headed for a U.S. theatrical release starting September 7th. Hannover House will be releasing an English-adaptation of the film to theaters across the U.S. this fall. It’s an analogy based on the cultural and political contrasts of the Cold War era; the world of the attic is divided into the land of happy toys in the West and the Land of Evil in the East. Here’s a look at the original Czech trailer:
My friend Dan O’Shannon (writer of Redux Riding Hood, Modern Family, The Fan and The Flower) is slowly starting a new website, O’Shannonland, devoted to the many things he loves – including comedy writing, comics (his own) and the City of Cleveland. Knowing Dan, I fully expect to see posts on Fleischer’s Popeye and the Lost In Space robot relatively soon. In the meantime, he has compiled a group of music cues from the classic soundtracks to Grantray-Lawrence’s Spider-Man (1967) TV series. This is the cool-jazzy Ray Ellis music, not the public domain KPM library music that began to show up in the second season. Obscure – but someone had to do it. Thanks Dan. More about the Spider-Man TV music at WFMU’s blog.
Ian Cheng‘s expressive use of motion capture was featured on Cartoon Brew last year. His new music video for Liars’ “Brats” is a hunter versus rabbit scenario with an untamed kinetic energy that threatens to burst out of every side of the frame. Cheng says of his first commissioned piece:
For “Brats”, I used a familiar animated narrative– hapless hunter vs. terroristic rabbit– as a format to grow a garden of signature motions. This collection of motions becomes material to recompose a new non-narrative choreography that animates the bodies of Liars. The Brats video documents this entropic haunting– from the ingredients of familiar meaning arises the terror of reckless non-meaning. A dog wanders indifferently through the animation, true to its nature.
CREDITS
Director: Ian Cheng
Choreographer: Madeline Hollander
Producer: Christian de Vietri
Performers: David Yijae, Max van der Sterre, Ade Chike Torbert
Assistant animation: mike liu
Motion capture services: Motion Capture NYC, Steve Day, Henry Brito
Thanks: Patrick Daughters, Micaela Durand, Zelda Roland, Rachel Rose
Today, as part of Cartoon Brew’s Student Animation Festival, we’re delighted to present Money Bunny Blues by Ellen Coons of Detroit’s College for Creative Studies. As stop motion animation in feature films becomes slicker and increasingly indiscernible from CGI, it’s refreshing to find a stop motion short that embraces the technique’s quirky and whimsical possibilities. The film’s setting is an intricate handmade universe comprised of common household objects–candy, coins, fruit, playing cards. Within this fantasy backdrop and accompanied by a folksy, unadorned song of economic woe, loose-limbed Dolly attempts to connect with the elusive Money Bunny. Whether you’re in need of a few bucks or have more money than you know what to do with, the free-spirited charm of Money Bunny Blues will put a smile on your face.
Click HERE to read an interview with the filmmaker Ellen Coons.
If you are in Southern California (or Northern California, the west coast or anywhere west of the Mississippi) you are summoned to what sounds like an incredible evening at the Motion Picture Academy in September. Oscar winning animator and acclaimed animation historian John Canemaker will present an illustrated lecture and screening of the lives and work of independent animators John and Faith Hubley on Friday, September 14th, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in Los Angeles.
Canemaker will host an in-depth, intimate look at the life and work of these two iconoclastic artists, including screenings of Flat Hatting, The Ragtime Bear, Rooty Toot Toot; Storyboard, Inc. TV commercials; Faith Hubley’s Northern Ice Golden Sun; John and Faith Hubley’s Adventures of an *, The Tender Game, The Hole, Windy Day, Voyage to Next, and newly discovered footage of a never-completed animatic by the Hubleys of Edith Sitwell and William Walton’s Facade. Anyone who’s been to any of Canemaker’s lectures know these are not to be missed.
Tickets for An Academy Salute to John and Faith Hubley go on sale later today, Mon. July 30th, online – and you can get yours if you click here. See you there!
Over two years ago, we instituted a strict “no links to crowdfunding” policy. In other words, we will never post links to any fundraising projects on Kickstarter, IndieGogo, or any other number of sites. If it’s a noteworthy project for reasons other than the creator needing money, we may write about it at a later date, but only after the fundraising campaign has ended.
To be clear, we have no issues with artists who use crowdfunding to raise funds for animation projects. We instituted the policy as a response to the growing volume of film funding requests, which threatened to overwhelm our ability to focus on more important topics, like films that have already been finished. Even though we haven’t linked to any crowdfunding projects in over two years, we still receive multiple submissions every single day–imagine the volume if we actually linked to them.
Further, if we linked to projects or artists whose work we personally enjoyed, we could be accused of giving unfair preferential treatment to certain people. Within the tight-knit animation community, we didn’t want to constantly be put in the position of defending ourselves about why we supported one person in their efforts to raise money and not another. The easiest solution was to remove ourselves from the fundraising pool and remain as objective observers of the broader fundraising scene.
In the two years since we’ve instituted the policy, crowdfunding has grown to become an even bigger part of the animation world. Today, mainstream artists like Phil Tippett and Ken Duncan use it to raise funds, and more ambitious projects are being undertaken thanks to this new type of film funding. We thought it would be a good time to revisit the issue and we want to hear what readers think.
Do you think we should treat crowdfunding submissions as we do any other news submission and give them editorial consideration for Cartoon Brew? Should we only focus on projects from established artists who have mainstream credits under their belt? Should we be completely objective and post any crowdfunding submission if they pay a small fee to be listed on Cartoon Brew? Or should we continue with our existing policy and not link to any fundraising efforts? There are any number of ways to handle this and we’re open to your suggestions.
PS – Just to be clear, we are not changing our policy anytime soon so don’t send us crowdfunding links.
Classic American cartoon characters pop up throughout Europe in unexpected ways. A couple examples from my recent trip:
Betty Boop street art in Paris
Popeye enjoys another kind of green as the mascot for this Amsterdam “coffeeshop” (I’m guessing they aren’t an official King Features licensee)
A couple days ago, I wrote about Bob Givens, the 94-year-old artist who designed Bugs Bunny in his debut short A Wild Hare. While I was writing that post, I ran across a couple items related to Givens that are worth sharing. The first is a newspaper clipping from the Alhambra Post-Advocate annoucing that 18-year-old Bob Givens had been hired at Disney.
The second is an ambitious gag “bulletin” about Ward Kimball and his two assistants David Swift and Tom Oreb. The drawing, which makes fun of the trio’s lack of “mox”, is signed by Givens, who had moved over to Warner Bros. when this was drawn in October 1939, along with two WB writers Rich Hogan and Dave Monahan. Typically, gag drawings were confined to colleagues at the same studio, but there’s a reason why Warner Bros. artists are making fun of their Disney counterparts. At the time of this drawing, Givens lived with Swift (as well as Hogan and some other artists) in a rented mansion in Los Feliz. If any Cartoon Brew readers are in touch with Bob, ask him to explain the joke about “mox.” Inquiring minds want to know.
This fan-made animated Batman film uses stop motion toys that turn out to be just as emotive as the actors in the live-action feature films – maybe more so. Bravo to filmmakers Derek Kowk and Henri Wong.
These striking illustrated posters promoting Laika’s latest film ParaNorman are being displayed around various US cities. I saw them in Manhattan yesterday. According to some of the artists who drew the posters for Mondo, passerby are free to grab them off the walls if they wish. Click on the images below for hi-res versions.
With the Ottawa festival on the horizon, here are the trailers for two new shorts just hitting the festival circuit that look quite intriguing.
First up, from Connor Finnegan, a film about a bird with A Fear of Flying who tries to avoid heading South for the winter.
Next, animator Leah Shore illustrates a conversation between Canadian author Marlin Marynick and cult killer Charles Manson in Old Man:
Kid President asks the tough questions that we all want to know.
Animation Block Party returns this weekend for its ninth edition. The three-day festival opens tonight with an outdoor screening on the lawn of the Automotive High School (50 Bedford Ave. at North 3th St. Williamsburg Brooklyn). Doors opens at 8pm, live music at 8:30pm, films at 9, and after-party at 11:30pm. Get your tickets HERE. Or visit Animation Block’s website for info on full festival passes and complete screening schedule.
