In all the years of reading animation blogs, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an artist post a tribute to an animation exec. This is a first. Chowder creator C.H. Greenblatt recently wrote some nice words on his blog about the executive in charge of his show, Jay Bastian. It almost makes him sounds human. (I keed…I keed.)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NY is putting on a major retrospective about Tim Burton’s career this fall. It will run from November 22, 2009 through April 26, 2010. There is a page about the show on MoMA’s website, which includes the following information:

Following the current of his visual imagination from his earliest childhood drawing through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums—drawings, paintings, storyboards, digital and moving-image formats, puppets and maquettes, props, costumes, ephemera, sketchbooks, and cartoons.

In conjunction with the show, MoMA is publishing a 64-page catalog that can be pre-ordered from Amazon. The images in this post are taken from a promotional item from the book. Tim Burton’s official website advertises that a new book called The Art of Tim Burton will soon be released that is 400 pages and has over 1000 illustrations. This appears to be a different book from the MoMA catalog.

More Burton images from the MoMA book after the jump.

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Animation is not strictly a kids medium, despite the general perception (here in the U.S.) that it is. Clearly – South Park, Adult Swim and Fox Sunday Nights aside – animation produced for television is still largely kid-driven and supports the industry, thanks to multi-million dollar merchandising and ancillary businesses.

But animated feature films have been appealing to adults for a while now – and yet with every success, it’s still a surprise to the mass media. As The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday:

“UP grabbed the attention of audiences of all ages in its first weekend, according to Disney officials. “It was as strong with kids aged two to 11 as it was with adults both under and over 25,” says Mark Zoradi, president of Walt Disney Motion Picture Group.

Is this still news? Not to me. Every (or most) Pixar and Dreamworks film has opened at number #1 and gone on to gross well over $100 million dollars domestically. Mainstream reporting like this just shows that we still have a way to go to change the kiddie-show perception of animation.

Brooks Barnes wrote this in yesterday’s New York Times:

The medium is showing signs of expanding beyond the kiddie market. The success of video games has resulted in a generation of adults who are comfortable consuming animated entertainment, Hollywood executives say. One indication: “Coraline,” the sophisticated 3-D picture about an adventurous girl, found an adult audience, so far selling $85.2 million in tickets.

Disney will test this part of the market with “Ponyo” on Aug. 14. This Hayao Miyazaki film is centered on a 5-year-old boy’s friendship with a goldfish that wants to be human. “Sophisticated stories coupled with powerful imaginations and beautiful animation appeals to everyone,” said Kathleen Kennedy, who is co-producing the English version of the film.

I’m not sure Ponyo is the film to test the adult appetite for animation. I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks like one of Miyazaki’s more juvenile films (though personally, I can’t wait to see it). Barnes’ article notes the emerging competition to Disney and Dreamworks – a whole slew of forthcoming films films (Astro Boy, Planet 51, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) vying to compete for the “new” all-ages theatre going audience. While noting the failure of Battle For Terra and mild success of Igor, Barnes neglects to mention the true tests of his theory: Shane Acker’s 9, Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max and perhaps Wes Anderson’s the Fantastic Mr. Fox – all opening later this year, all with a more mature point of view.

As for The Princess and The Frog, Mr. Barnes (who is apparently the official NY Times animation reporter) wrote a separate article last Friday on the “controversy” (is there one?) over a black princess. This piece alone indicates that the mainstream media has a long way to go to catch up with what the rest of us has known all along: animation is for everyone.

I was, and still am, a huge fan of Dreamworks Kung Fu Panda. But the announcement today of the a new Nickelodeon TV series based on the movie has saddened me.

If ever there was a character with the potential to fuel a series of theatrical sequels, it’s Po. I don’t expect Jack Black to be providing the voice and personality of the character for the TV version.

A TV series poised to appear before the second film (now in production) seems like a business decision based more on a way to make some fast cash, rather than a sincere effort to nurture a worthy property. Going to series doesn’t neccesarily negate the possibility of further theatricals, but it sure cheapens the franchise.

Couldn’t Nick have been simply based a series on the Panda’s co-stars, The Furious Five?

This is one of the most sage pieces of filmmaking advice I’ve ever run across:

“Don’t let this idea ‘Box Office’ and this idea of what pleases people bother you. Concern yourself with the best and finest thing, by God, that you know and do it to the top and give it to them to the hilt and you’ll go places and you’ll never lose.”

Who said it?

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

He offered this golden nugget to Disney artists during his visit to the studio in the 1939. Historian Wade Sampson has written a nice article—“Why Frank Lloyd Wright Disliked Fantasia“—which appears at MousePlanet.com. And here is the link to the transcript of Wright’s entire Disney talk.

Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues—now a film that everybody can (and should) watch—continues to make an impact in surprising and unexpected ways. Last week, the above Reuters photo by Krishnendu Halder appeared online with the following caption: “Members of laughter clubs attend a session during ‘World Laughter Day’ celebrations in Hyderabad, India.” The celebration in India included a huge sculpture of the mythical figure Ravana based on Nina’s design from the film.

Consider for a second the amazing nature of this photo’s contents. Nina Paley made Sita Sings the Blues in her apartment—all by her lone self, on a shoestring budget, using a desktop computer. One short year after its debut, with absolutely no promotional budget, no theatrical distribution and little mainstream media coverage, the film has traveled around the globe and fans are creating sculptures based on her work.

Nina has made it possible for everybody to see her film by placing her film into Creative Commons and allowing it to be shared without copyright restrictions. Conventional thinking leads us to believe that this type of distribution is impossible and that global visibility is only possible through millions of dollars worth of marketing and advertising. Paley, however, has entrusted the distribution to her audience and (surprise, surprise) people are watching her film and building a community around it. The success of her experiment proves that independent artists with limited means can indeed compete on a world-wide playing field, not by trying to mimic strategies of entertainment conglomerates, but by taking advantage of ideas like Creative Commons licensing and employing comprehensive online distribution strategies.

It’s been acknowledged by the creators of The Simpsons that the blood-thirsty antics of Itchy and Scratchy were inspired less by Tom & Jerry and more by the violent situations of Herman and Katnip. By the 1950s, the writers at Paramount’s Famous Studios were suffering from cartoon fatigue — endlessly rewriting and redrawing the same tired stories for Popeye, Casper, Baby Huey et al. for years on end. The Herman and Katnip pictures were pure cat-chasing-mice opuses, which were by now running on auto-pilot, and got progressively more and more violent as the years went by.

The cartoons have what I call “Shemp syndrome” – it’s the same problem the Three Stooges shorts of the 50s had – they forgot what was funny about slapstick in the first place. The filmmakers just knew that “hurt gags” worked, so they upped the “hurt”, figuring it’ll be funnier. The results were less funny and more painful, and often in horrible taste.

Embedded below is the last 90 seconds from Mouseum (1956) which features my all-time favorite bad-taste ending. I love it. It makes me laugh because of how wrong it is. By this time, the animators had really lost all perspective. Here’s the set-up: Katnip is chasing Herman and his cousins through a natural history museum.

What follows next is pure genius: The cat chases the mouse into a stuffed elephant’s head. Katnip sticks a rifle into the elephant’s trunk and Herman, using super-human strength, bends the rifle to aim it back towards Katnip. His gunshot blast blows the elephant’s glass eyes into Katnip’s head! The eyes fall from his head and the cat thinks the eyeballs are his! He shoves them into his eye sockets making himself blind… he goes running into the street blindly, as Herman and the mice laugh at his handicap. Iris out.

Quentin Tarantino would be proud.

Over the past year, I’ve been sent links to a number of online start-ups that allow consumers to create their own animated films using free web software. Every one of them has left me unimpressed. Every one of them, that is, until Xtranormal.com.

Xtranormal advertises that “If you can type, you can make movies.” It’s not just the ease of creating cartoons that makes Xtranormal so appealing, it’s also that the final results don’t look half-bad, and at least as professional as many “Adult Swim” series. Xtranormal’s software has a robust (as far as these type of things go) selection of built-in camera angles, expressions and animated movements, and the end result is a film like this:

The cartoon above was made by Fran Krause, who we interviewed on Cartoon Brew last week. There’s probably a good post here about the democratization of content creation, but I’m going to follow another idea that occurred to me while watching various Xtranormal shorts, and that is the ramifications this has for professional animation production, particularly as it relates to the TV industry.

Fran Krause titled his first blog post about Xtranormal “New Website Makes Animators Obsolete.” In my opinion, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve long felt that the amount of effort invested into TV animation is disproportionate to the quality of work that appears on the finished screen. Too many production dollars are wasted on menial artistic tasks that could more efficiently be handled by a computer. The only reason that studios continue to employ so many artists is that they’re too shortsighted and cheap to invest in R&D and devise new automated production systems that are appropriate to the dialogue-driven nature of contemporary animated shows.

Too much manpower and production money is wasted on redoing tasks that don’t need to be redone. Take this recent interview with Fairly Oddparents background designer Jim Worthy in which he discusses how much wasted effort goes into the production of the show he works on: “After 7 seasons, I’m amazed how many times I still need to design Timmy’s bedroom. Thanks to all the board artists for keeping me employed.” In other words, he doesn’t need to be redoing Timmy’s bedroom every episode; he only does it because an intelligent production system is not in place that could call up a template of the bedroom.

Dialogue-driven shows that are visually formulaic (i.e. Fairly Oddparents, The Simpsons, Family Guy, most pre-school and “Adult Swim” series) could easily be replaced with automated production systems. Crazy talk? Consider South Park, a half-hour show that uses automated systems to deliver finished episodes in as little as two weeks and doesn’t suffer with audiences one bit.

The New York animation industry, in particular, is a hotbed for this type of automated animation production, especially with preschool-oriented shows like Little Einsteins and Wonder Pets. These shows rely on stock libraries of movements, expressions and takes, and entire episodes are animated in a month or less. The digital animators (a more accurate term would be “digital technicians”) set up the scenes and determine the sequence of these actions, but they don’t create original actions; there are also a couple traditional animators on board who create the original movements needed for each episode. The only manual part of the process is adding lip sync to the characters. In other words, Xtranormal is not leading the revolution; they’re only offering a consumer version of production systems that are already becoming dominant in animation. (Xtranormal, for its part, is currently working on creating a desktop version of its software that includes voice-capture and character customization.)

I don’t begrudge anybody putting together these copy-and-paste animated productions. While it’s certainly not my cup of tea, there is a legitimate need for this type of material as the number of channels proliferate in this new era of digital cable. My only question is why aren’t more shows throughout the industry saving money by switching to automated production systems?

Many traditional artists are beginning to see the future, even those who have worked in TV animation. For example, former TV series director Pat Smith (Daria, MTV Downtown wrote about Xtranormal on his blog recently: “If you’re wondering where the future is…pre-programmed actions using text. all this needs is professional voice acting, custom character design option, then tweeking by director, and you have a dialogue driven script and one hell of an entertaining film!!!”

There could not be a bigger supporter of artists than myself, but common sense tells me that the majority TV shows could cut their crews and budgets in half or more with minimal consequences on the visual creativity of the production. There are only a handful of shows that truly depend on their artists for the final results (Spongebob Squarepants and Superjail among them). So let’s get the technicians to create the rote and run-of-the-mill, and let’s let animators rededicate themselves to creating unique imagery that could only come out of the hands and minds of artists. With companies like Xtranormal, anybody can create South Park- and Family Guy-quality animation from their home now. Now is the time for animators to step up to the plate and create the kinds of inspiring artwork again that can’t be emulated by a ten-year-old sitting in his bedroom.