Just when you thought the era of ugly Popeye merchandise was over…

In a universe of bad ideas, we may have winner! Or this may be genius. You decide. Limited edition rubber duck incarnations of famous people and cartoon characters called Celebriducks. This is the brainstorm of entrepreneur Craig Wolfe, and his product is now showing up at retail outlets like Virgin Megastore, and even at Disney World.

Check out the animated characters including Betty Boop, Pink Panther and Felix The Cat. Even more outrageous are the movie stars (The Lone Ranger, Mae West and Mr. T) and religious figures – which includes rubber duck versions of Moses, Satan and Jesus Christ!

(Thanks, Steve Moore)

I’m getting an award!

The Annie Award nominations were announced this morning. The big news is that the juried awards are going to John Kricfalusi, John Canemaker and Glen Keane (getting The Winsor McCay Award, for lifetime achievement), and to Jonathan Gay, Gary Grossman and Robert Tatsumi, the creators of Flash computer software (recieving the Ub Iwerks Award for technical achievement). And little ‘ol me will be recieving the June Foray Award for “significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation”. I’m not sure what to say… except that I’m sincerely honored!

The Annie committees also nominated Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie, Persepolis, Surf’s Up! and Bee Movie for Best Animated Feature; Everything Will Be OK (Bitter Films), How to Hook Up Your Home Theater (Walt Disney Feature Animation), Mascot Prep (Walt Disney Television Animation), The Chestnut Tree (Picnic Pictures), and Your Friend the Rat (Pixar) for Best Animated Short Subject. Click here for the full list of nominees and winners. The Awards will be presented Friday February 8th at a new location, Royce Hall (on the UCLA Campus) in Westwood. Tickets are now on sale, more information here.

The animation history round-ups have become one of my favorite types of posts to do on Cartoon Brew. It is always eye-opening to see the wealth of classic material that appears on-line on a regular basis. The cartoon history being posted online is about as grassroots as an effort gets, lots of various people (animation historians, the families of artists, and students and fans of the art form) coming together to share things from their collections without any specific agenda. There’s also no financial incentive here, only the desire to help one another and the art form grow and prosper. It will be exciting to see how the new generation of artists learns from this material and pushes the art form even further forward.

• Powerful Dumbo storyboards by Bill Peet are matched only by powerful Dumbo animation by Bill Tytla.

• Rare drawings by Playboy cartoonist (and former Disney story artist) Eldon Dedini (via Flog!)

• Animation director Ward Jenkins examines the Tex Avery-Tom Oreb classic Symphony in Slang (1951).

• A Virgil Ross-animated pencil test of Bugs Bunny from A Hare Grows in Manhattan.

• The wonderful commercial animation of animator Jack Schnerk can be seen in the reel below as well as the second and third reels on YouTube. Director Michael Sporn offers some memories of working with Schnerk on his blog.

• “It is a well-known fact at Disney’s that a man has to love an animal thoroughly before he can draw it well,” says this 1942 article from Nature magazine about the making of Bambi.

• Animation director Bob Jaques offers an appreciation of Jim Tyer’s animation in the 1946 Popeye cartoon The Island Fling.

Previously on Cartoon Brew:
Animation History Round-Up #1
Animation History Round-Up #2
Animation History Round-Up #3
Animation History Round-Up #4

Former Animato and Animation Planet editor G. Michael Dobbs has collected his writings, interviews and reviews from those publications into a new book from BearManor Media, ESCAPE: How Animation Broke Into the Mainstream in the 1990s.

Dobbs’ book contains several interviews with the key players during that last decade, including Parker and Stone, Klasky and Csupo, along with voice actors and various executive personnel at Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. For more info on this book, check the BearManor website.

I’m not sure how long this has been posted, but I just found out that Cracked Magazine.com has listed what they believe are the 9 most racist Disney characters of all time. It’s quite a list.

Aardman Animation is using their incredible talents to create a series of TV spots to highlight the problems faced by people with disabilities. Creature Discomforts is part of a campaign to try and change the way most people view the disabled. The spots will begin airing in the UK next month, but the website, now live, posts all them and a behind the scenes piece.

Ottawa-based animator/director dynamo Nick Cross talks to Chris Robinson about his career in this article in Guerilla magazine. He explains why he chooses to work from home instead of animation studios (“Every time you go into a studio, it just feels like, ugh.”), and why he jumps back and forth between industry gigs and creating his own independent films (“I just have to do something of my own. I get more satisfaction just doing short films… Maybe it’s really arrogant, something like that, ’cause I just like doing my own things and having my control of things. I just do it to please myself, you know.”)

Nick’s latest film, Waif of Perspephone, which has the distinction of being labeled “an interminable twelve and a half minutes of pseudo-Kricfalusi ugliness” by Michael Barrier, can be purchased on dvd here.

Check out the Christmas issue of Flip. This month features stuff to buy from FLIP artists, and articles by Nancy Beiman, Signe Baumane, Tina Price, Dave Pruiksma, Sarah and Carolyn Bates, and special feature: a rare video, and behind the scenes story, of the annual live Disney staff Christmas “special” (performed in the windows and on the roof of Disney’s animation building in 1982), The Eddie Show!