"Daffy's Rhapsody" talkback
"The Snow Queen" trailer
"Arrietty" Will Be Ghibli's Biggest US Release Yet
Ricky Garduno, RIP
Follow @CartoonBrew on Twitter
YouTube
Vimeo
RSS
Follow Cartoon Brew on Facebook
|
|
|
|
TAG FOR “Ideas/Commentary”Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
April 22, 2010 10:15 am
Eric Bauza, the voice of Marvin the Martian in the new Looney Tunes Show, read your comments on yesterday’s Brew post and he’s got it all figured out. Apparently, the artwork is fine; the problem, he wrote on Facebook, lies with Cartoon Brew readers who are “35-40 year olds that don’t have girlfriends, jobs or lives.” Bauza then goes on to complain about how everybody is judging the show based on one frame. Generalizing is wrong, he believes, except of course when he’s making generalizations about Cartoon Brew’s readership. Here’s his entire comment:
156 Comments » posted in Ideas/Commentary 
April 1, 2010 2:36 am
This video of Orson Welles has absolutely nothing to do with animation, and it has absolutely everything to do with animation. (Thanks, Ricky Garduno) 38 Comments » posted in Ideas/Commentary, Ricky Garduno
March 22, 2010 10:46 pm
A group of artists frustrated by the San Diego Comic-Con’s lack of emphasis on artists and art are pushing for the creation of an artist-friendly event called “Creator-Con”. They’ve started an informal Facebook page with this mission statement:
In only a couple days, membership in the group has swelled to nearly five hundred people, which indicates not only the grassroots support for the idea, but how much discontent there is with the San Diego Comic Con’s treatment of the artist community. Many notable names in animation and comics have joined the group including Kazu Kibuishi, David Silverman, Stephen DeStefano, Scott Shaw!, Richard Sala, Katie Rice and Steve Purcell. Discussions are happening on the page about possible locations for a Creator-Con. Some are suggesting that it should be hosted in San Diego, while LA, Portland, Vegas and the Bay Area are also being name-dropped. I’m in full support of a Creator-Con. As a former Comic-Con exhibitor (I exhibited three times with artists like Shane Glines, Gabe Swarr and Jim Smith), I eventually came to the realization that the Con wasn’t the most receptive outlet for indie companies and artists. The last time I attended (not as an exhibitor) was in 2007, and I cut my trip short after a day (a Thursday no less!). The emphasis of San Diego had shifted so far away from comics and artists that it was pointless spending any further time there. In many ways, the very idea of a “comic-con” is outdated. Today, most artists practice across a wide range of artistic disciplines (comics, graphic novels, illustration, fine art, publishing, film, animation, toys, merchandising and branding, etc.). A Creator-Con that is focused around artists and their varied creative endeavors reflects more accurately how the contemporary visual artist thinks and works. The Creator-Con is an idea whose time has arrived—now it remains to be seen who will make it a reality. UPDATE (6pm ET): Over 1,000 people have now joined the Creator-Con group on Facebook. 44 Comments » posted in Comics, Ideas/Commentary, San Diego Comic-Con
March 11, 2010 6:09 pm
Director and animator Will Finn made a thought-provoking observation on his blog a few days ago. He began the discussion by surmising that if Disney ever decided to remake Lady and the Tramp, it would likely be some Frankenstein hybrid of keyframed CGI, live-action and performance capture. I don’t doubt that for a second. Where it gets interesting though is that Will feels this is happening because cartoons, in their traditional sense, are increasingly viewed as ineffective. He writes:
Will’s comments are particularly relevant in light of how Jeff Smith’s Bone is in the process of being transformed from its cartoony original form into mo-cap animation, and how forthcoming Yogi Bear and Tom & Jerry features are being turned realistic a la the Chipmunks. As Will is careful to point out, this is not CG vs. 2D; it’s a deeper and more profound change in attitudes towards cartooning. His thoughts remind me of an experience I had not so long ago with an ad agency in which the agency rep informed me that our website was considered unhip for corporate advertisers because it had the word “cartoon” in it. Cartoons are considered by many to be fuddy-duddy because of the term’s long-standing association with junky animation (i.e. Saturday morning cartoons). Films like Avatar present an alternative that further diminishes the cartoon form, even to the point of redoing successful cartoons in more realistic styles. As Will says, “I fear that in the aftermath of AVATAR and films like it the public and the industry may find cartooniness to be too quaint, too passe, too childish, all the specious negatives that threw up roadblocks in my early career days.” 55 Comments » posted in Ideas/Commentary, Mo-Cap, motion capture
March 2, 2010 3:33 pm
Filmmaker David OReilly has entered the Sesame Street-AniBoom competition, despite signing our no-spec letter that promised he wouldn’t enter. We are disappointed by his entry: 67 Comments » posted in Ideas/Commentary, AniBoom
February 26, 2010 4:01 am
This repost of John Canemaker’s article about John Hubley’s unproduced feature Finian’s Rainbow reminded me of a book idea I’ve had for years. With my full plate of writing, editing, and creative directing various book projects, I know I’m never going to get around to doing this book, but I believe in the idea so I’m going to put it out there and hope somebody runs with it. Here’s what I’d like to see: a richly illustrated coffeetable book that explores unproduced animated features. Kind of like Charles Solomon’s The Disney That Never Was minus all the dull-as-dishwater Disney projects. There’s a good reason why most of those Disney films were never produced! (An exception might be made for Marc Davis and Ken Anderson’s Chanticleer.) Looking past Disney, there is an extensive catalog of daring and colorful feature animation projects that were unrealized. It’s an eye-opening alternative animation history that spans some of the art form’s biggest names. Anybody who tackles the book should be sure to include: * Orson Welles’ The Little Prince (developed with Hugh Harman and Mel Shaw) The “what could have been” factor of these films is a persistent source of fascination for me. Any number of these projects had the potential to change the course of the art form. Imagine if Orson Welles had released an animated feature at the height of his influence, or if John Hubley’s vision of mature feature animation had come to fruition in the 1950s. Some of these films were indeed produced in bastardized forms (Little Nemo and Arabian Knight are examples), but most perished for a variety of reasons like financing, a director’s inability to finish, a director’s death, the Hollywood blacklist, or in the case of Huck’s Landing, the head of the studio being sent to prison. Putting together this book won’t be easy. Whoever does it will have to do tons of research and detective work; it would even be wise perhaps to divide it amongst a cadre of historians and writers to ensure that the book is finished in a reasonable period of time. But if executed properly, I have no doubt it would be an entertaining, educational, and thoroughly unique contribution to animation literature. 52 Comments » posted in Books, Ideas/Commentary
February 23, 2010 11:56 pm
In last week’s LA Times, James Cameron continued to assert his position that Avatar isn’t animation, though at least he’s acknowledging now that “a whole team of animators” is used in the process:
In the LA Times, animation director Henry Selick also weighed in publicly for the first time on the issue:
In response to the recent article, Kristin Thompson at Observations on Film Art has written a thoughtful article about the hybrid nature of the performance and the disingenousness of Camerons’ claim that the creative work ends with his actors. (Earlier Brew coverage about the amount of animation in Avatar can be found here, here, here, and here.) 46 Comments » posted in Ideas/Commentary, James Cameron, Mo-Cap, motion capture
February 23, 2010 2:10 pm
I spent some time on Facebook last night compiling data that shows who the most popular classic animation artists are on the social networking site. As a historian, I’m interested in understanding how artists from the early years of animation are remembered within the online community. The results aren’t particularly encouraging. Of the forty-eight artists I managed to find, roughly a quarter of them have attracted over five hundred fans. That’s a small number considering that these are some of the most revered names in our art form. Furthermore, a majority of the artists (nearly 60%) have less than 300 fans. However, there is a silver lining. Classic artists who have continued to receive exposure in recent years have a disproportionately larger number of fans, which means that people would care about these artists if they were more aware of their accomplishments. Mary Blair, who has had a couple gallery exhibits and books published about her recently is the sixth most popular animation legend on Facebook. Walt Stanchfield, whose instructional handouts were compiled into books last year, is one hundred times more popular than Bill Tytla, who despite his stature, has received scant attention in the past couple decades. What is most surprising are the omissions. Are Bob McKimson’s cartoons so disliked that he can’t garner even one fan from a pool of 400 million Facebook users? And McKimson is the tip of the iceberg. For starters, where are Ken Anderson, Bobe Cannon, Norm Ferguson, Carlo Vinci, Hawley Pratt, Pete Burness, Dick Lundy, Emery Hawkins, Preston Blair, Rod Scribner, Ray Patterson, Bob Givens, Art Davis, Dave Hilberman, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Dave Tendlar, Grim Natwick, Bob McKimson, Milt Kahl, Sterling Sturtevant, Frank Thomas, Tom Oreb, Eric Larson, Les Clark, Shamus Culhane, Bill Littlejohn, Ken Harris, Art Babbitt, Virgil Ross, Manny Gould, Willard Bowsky, Al Eugster, Joe Grant, Dick Huemer and T. Hee to name but a few. Nobody appreciates any of these artists enough to start a fan page for them on the world’s largest social networking site, and that says a lot when nearly everything else has a fan page or group on Facebook nowadays. Animation artists have never been ones to hanker for the spotlight, and as a result, there are few celebrities in this art form save for the characters themselves. So while nobody may appreciate the name Bob McKimson anymore, his character the Tasmanian Devil has 82,000 fans on Facebook, and though the name Grim Natwick may draw blank stares, rest assured that his eighty-year-old character Betty Boop has 92,000 fans. The list of classic artists on Facebook is after the jump. I’m curious to hear what others make of these numbers. |
ADVERTISEMENTS
EVENTS
RECENT BREW TV EPISODES By Sitji Chou. A man tries to understand the futility of creating human connections when they’ve been impeded by the microcosmic void between material particles.  By Nikolas Ilic. A story of a Scottish sheep farmer who shears his sheep and tosses them cliff side…  By Dylan Hayes. Lesson 1: Everyone gambles, not everyone loses. Lesson 2: The world is full of traps. Lesson 3: You cannot win if you don’t take risks.  By Jean Yi. A personal and humorous exploration of being the ‘Nice Girl’ and coming to terms with the label and all its different meanings.  By Ferg Brennan. A lonely fisherman catches an unusual fish, which he decides to keep as a pet. |
