Animation Writing Roundup
Quick Stop Entertainment has a lengthy interview with Bloom County and Opus creator Berkeley Breathed. Breathed talks about the earlier troubled adaptations of his comics to animation, his current work with Robert Zemeckis to adapt one of his children’s books into a mo-cap feature (“just to annoy the animation community”), and his thoughts on the recent Calvin & Hobbes student film (“Bill [Watterson] is going to have a cow when he sees this. Not that it isn’t terrific. I think it’s like how we’d feel finding our wives naked on YouTube… no matter how hot they look.”)
File this one under Tragically Amusing: it’s the Super-Short Animation Career of Godfrey Bjork courtesy of Joe Campana’s Animation—Who and Where blog.
This essay by Troy Steele is surprisingly insightful, managing to seamlessly weave together a discussion of gender politics in the movie industry, the live-action films of Jane Campion, and the Ren & Stimpy: APC episode “Naked Beach Frenzy,” about which Steele writes:
Kricfalusi’s sexism is so innocent, so reverent of a sex he clearly doesn’t even begin to comprehend. The inclusion of a grotesquely hirsute male lifeguard only helps to make the women look that much better in comparison. Kricfalusi clearly doesn’t understand women beyond objectification, but at least that pedestal he’s putting an entire sex upon isn’t one of dour victimhood and sour grapes.
WFMU’S Beware of the Blog tells you more than you could ever want to know about one of my favorite voice actors of all time: Bill Thompson, the voice of Droopy. Interesting factoids abound including that Thompson was originally cast as the voice of Fred Flintstone, and that he left show business in the early-’60s to become a business executive at Union Oil.
Interview with the boss’s son: Animation Magazine interviews Laika animator Travis Knight, who also happens to be the son of Laika owner and Nike founder Phil Knight. I’ve heard many positive things from stop-mo folk about Travis’s animation skills, and it’s clear that Laika is embracing more interesting and promising projects than when the studio was Vinton’s, so I tend to be cautiously optimistic about Laika’s future. (via Ward-O-Matic)
And finally, the LA Daily News looks at what happens to CalArts students after they graduate with their $120k chararacter animation degrees.