Somebody recut Disney’s MARY POPPINS into a horror film. A cheap laugh but it works.

Today is Walt Disney’s 105th birthday!
As good a reason as any to celebrate.

What’s one of our favorite recurring topics here at Cartoon Brew? Of course, it’s the “Preston Blair swipe,” which is when an illustrator-hack pilfers artwork from Preston Blair’s classic animation textbook and uses it for their own commercial projects. The latest swipe was found by Adam Koford in Orlando, Florida. If you want to visit this shrine of cartoon incompetence, Adam has geotagged the location on Flickr:

Previous Blair rips on Cartoon Brew: Halloween decals, Ohio lottery ticket, Australian restaurant ad and Ohio school mascot.

Brew reader Arthur writes about this funny and well done commercial spoof of the classic British holiday special THE SNOWMAN:

To promote their tangy soda drink Irn Bru (the number one soft drink in Scotland), Scottish soft drink company Barr have created a cheeky homage to Raymond Briggs much loved christmas classic The Snowman, the commercial is also causing a bit of a stir due to the current hysteria in the UK over advertising junk food to children.

Read about the controversy HERE or watch the commercial below:

Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES had an article by Charles Solomon about Disney’s new plan to produce animated short. The article states that four animated shorts are in development:

“The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate – with disastrous results.

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UPDATE: The storyboard art in the NY TIMES article, including the image above, is by Wilbert Plijnaar.

The nominees for the 34th Annual Annie Awards have been announced. The complete list is posted here. Here’s a sampling of some of the nominees:Best Animated Feature
Cars – Pixar Animation Studios
Happy Feet – Warner Bros.
Monster House – Columbia Pictures/ImageMovers/Amblin Production
Open Season – Sony Pictures Animation/Columbia Pictures
Over The Hedge – DreamWorks AnimationBest Animated Short Subject
Adventure Time – Nickelodeon
Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot – Thunderbean Animation
No Time For Nuts – Blue Sky Studios
Weird Al Yankovic “Don’t Download This Song” – Acme FilmworksThe Awards will be presented Sunday February 11th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, CA. For more information click here. Congratulations to all the nominees.

Mark Evanier is the first to note the passing of my friend Sid Raymond. Raymond was best known as the voice of Baby Huey and Katnip for Famous Studios during the 1950s. He also did voices for Terrytoons and radio, and appeared in many classic TV shows (including The Honeymooners) and movies. He made a fortune playing a bartender in a series of commercials for Schlitz Beer in the early 1960s.That’s a picture of Sid and I, above, taken in Vancouver during the voice recording sessions for the new Baby Huey cartoons produced by Carbunkle Cartoons for Harvey Entertainment in 1994. If you want to see a larger version of the photo click here. I not only spent a whole week with Sid that year, but subsequently met up with him in New York (where he took me to breakfast at the Friars Club, and to a party at Jackson Beck’s apartment!). If that weren’t enough, I visited with Sid and his lovely wife in Miami where he showed me several pieces of Famous Studios memorabilia. We kept in touch throughout the years – and Sid never stopped working! He was on The O.C. last year – that was his last appearence on screen. Say what you will about the Famous Studios cartoons, the voice work is teriffic. Stang, Mercer, Beck, Questel and Raymond are hilarious, and give classic vocal characterizations.Howard Weinberg made a documentary about Sid a few years ago, Sid At 90 which is well worth buying. Below is a brief clip from the film where Sid discusses voicing Baby Huey, his small part in The Prize (1963) and excerpts from his Schlitz Beer commercials.His niece wrote about him on my My Space. He will be missed.

Today marks the launch of the Animation History Archive on Flickr, a new group I started where we can all share interesting visual bits of animation history. Hopefully this can be sort of like a ’show and tell’ of classic cartoon history and, in time, become a valuable visual resource for artists everywhere. Here’s a quick description of what can be posted in the group:

Visual materials related to Golden Age animation and animation artists. “Golden Age” means 1920s-1950s, though depending on the material, it could also encompass a few things in the ’60s and ’70s The material posted could include sets of storyboards, layout drawings, old magazine articles about animated films, photos of animation artists and other ephemera related to the industry (for example, gag cartoons or the currently incuded Top Cel union newsletter covers drawn by animation artists).

If you’ve got things in your collection that you want to share or just want to see cool stuff from other people’s collections, you can join the group here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/animationarchive/