Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- In case you haven’t seen the first trailer for Pixar’s CARS 2, here it is, complete with explosions, Japan, guns, rocket launchers and more explosions. It’s getting to look like Pixar might like doing effects for live-action films. They’re not too far off the mark. The trailer, and no doubt the film, is loud enough to catch somebody’s attention. It should be another winner unless Dreamworks figures out a way to have even louder explosions.
To quote the old SCTV skit: “They blowed him up real good.”

- John Lasseter didn’t have to fire anyone, this time, when he made himself co-director of Cars 2. First time director, Brad Lewis, got himself a partner with Lasseter. I wonder how much time the new co-director will have to spend on the film given all the other chores he’s taken on running both Disney and Pixar. This is old news, but I heven’t talked about this film before.

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And you’ve probably seen the trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2 which actually gets my interest, as opposed to the awful Cars 2 trailer. It’s funny. In case you haven’t seen it, here it is.

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Lately, one of my favorite blog-spots is Signe Bauman‘s blog. Essentially, this was started to promote a feature she’s trying to get funded, called Rocks In My Pockets. She writes once or twice a week, and each of her pieces is so personal and informative that I can’t help but getting enveloped in what she has to say. She has a good seven part series on fundraising for a film, especially when the film is not very commercial. She writes about the difficulty of accepting rejection when you’ve applied for a grant and don’t get it. She’s even written about Depression. Check out the site and go back a bit to read her commentary. Very interesting stuff. ______________________

- When the story of Robert Zemeckis having been approached to remake The Wizard of Oz from the original 1939 script hit the blogs, everything went wacko. Lots of rumors flew like monkeys in the sky.

Well the truth is that Zemeckis turned down the job when discussing it with WB. Of course, this doesn’t mean the film won’t get remade; it just means that the #1 Motion Capture guy isn’t planning to do it until he can tear apart The Yellow Submarine. That, of course, will be his next opus – due out in 2012. Maybe entering it in the Oscars, that year, will give us 16 entries.

Speaking of which, I notice that there are only 15 accepted feature documentaries for the Oscar. Somehow, they’ll still have five nominees, while animation – with the same 15 acceptable number – will only be allowed 3 nominees. Something smells rotten in Hollywood.

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- Today I’ll be out all day screening the animated shorts which were deemed eligible for Oscar consideration. That should take about 5½ to 7 hours of watching shorts. It’s grueling, but I love doing it. I see that Cartoon Brew has listed the shorts that’ll be screened. Two years ago I listed the shorts and was chastised by the Academy in a very formal letter. The following year, they started listing the titles. So I like to think that I pushed them into realizing that the shorts could be treated no differently than the features, and they could be announced to the public without hurting their chances. (It gives a little more publicity to the shorts filmmakers, and they’re the ones who could use it.)

- Like many others, I received a copy of Jeff Kurtti‘s book, The Art of Tangled.
I’m glad I did. It shows me that there was once a soul behind the new Disney feature, Tangled.

I have to admit to something unorthodox here. I haven’t seen this Disney film. I will see it Dec 2nd though it’s going to be a hard pull for me to go there. Yet I still have some commentary – just on all the clips I’ve seen. THere have been about seven minutes of them and none of them pretty.

Because Glen Keane was so intimately involved in the first years of this film, I was more than a little curious to see it. But, to quote Joseph Heller, “something happened”. Keane left the film as director and became an animation advisor – not even animating. The book says he had a “health attack”. The direction, thanks to the sanction of John Lasseter, went to the two responsible for the final version of Bolt, Byron Howard and Nathan Greno.

I’ve seen the clips, let me tell you I’ve seen clips. I’ve read reviews. The Variety review couldn’t be worse. (Quotes: “If the film is hardly one for the pantheon, that’s because it seems more interested in tossing off one-liners than in tapping into its heroine’s deepest desires in the tradition of the best fairy tales.”

“. . . there’s room for visual improvement, particularly a garish, unattractive underwater scene involving Rapunzel’s hair (which often resembles a very long coil of spaghetti, extra al dente). The dimming effect of the 3D eye-wear seemed especially detrimental at the screening attended, draining too much color and light from the image and causing skin tones to appear weirdly pixelated . . .”)

What we’ve seen in the clips is a macho tough guy relationship between the Prince/the thief/whatever he is and his horse. They constantly jab each other and play off each other in that sarcastic and smarmy way Dreamworks characters act. The horse doesn’t talk, but it may as well. He keeps elbowing the hero. (If only a horse had elbows.)

Originally, the story was called Rapunzel. That’s when the Brothers Grimm had something to do with it. Now the bright folk at Disney have taken a great and complex story and have turned it inside-out making the male the lead. You can’t call it Rapunzel anymore, hence the title, Tangled. All the timely gags, all the smart aleck comments make it seem ever more like a Dreamworks production. The film is dated before it’s released.

And it looks so ordinary, it’s annoying. Maybe they should have called it Megamind and changed the horse’s color to blue. He could have come from outer space to harness Rapunzel’s hair. The Variety review does say that the film settles down midway to just concentrate on the fariy tale story. That I’ll have to witness for myself.

All this would be only so depressing, if we hadn’t seen the artwork in the book, The Art of Tangled. There’s some amazing art in that book, and very little of it seems to be cgi. Plenty of animation drawings and models by Glen Keane give an indication of what the characters could have looked like. Then those background paintings. Yes, some of them look like Eyvind Earle clones, but
others look like they were watercolors painted by Rembrandt. They’re stunning.

You go through beautiful background after beautiful background, and the end result is the ordinary and dull thing they’ve put on the screen. Who’s responsible? Lasseter? Byron Howard and Nathan Greno? Glen Keane? – no, he seems to have been the guy who got the big shaft.

What a sell out, Mr. Lasseter! How sad I feel about the Disney organization. They can’t do ANYTHING with artistic merit. It’s so obvious they were going down that road, and things were stopped, pulled, and tangled.

They’ll probably get their 12 year old girl audience, and the film will go the way of the Bolts and the Treasure Planets and the Meet the Robinsons.

Here are some of the pretty pictures in the book. These don’t look inspired by other animated films, although the film certainly takes its look from earlier films.

So here’s an Art of book that seems to matter. It shows us what we’ll never see. Glen Keane may have left the directing with a “health attack” (as Jeff Kurtti informs us), but he won’t say a bad word about the company or what followed. He’s a positive guy, well invested in the organization. I just wish some of what was in his mind actually made it to the screen. Perhaps that won’t happen again now that Disney isn’t invested in their 2D division. I can’t imagine Glen Keane has animated anything on the Winnie the Pooh film.

The pictures above were drawn/painted by:
cover: Glean Keane, graphit | Ian Gooding, digital painting
tower: Douglas Rogers, digital painting
island: David Goetz, digital painting
Rembrandt sketch: Claire Keane, digital painting
island: Craig Mullins, digital painting
Rembrandt sketches: Claire Keane, digital painting
2 character models: Glen Keane, graphite
towers: Andy Gaskill, graphite | Douglas Rogers, graphite
girl in town: Craig Mullins, digital painting

- On Thursday, this week, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see the reconstructed prints of the Laugh-O-Grams they were screening. These were among the first series Disney produced in Kansas City. Apparently, four of the seven titles were missing, and found within the MOMA library mislabelled.

The Laugh-O-Grams were originally produced for a man named Frank Newman, a local theater owner. They were designed as quick sketch movies with an animated hand seemingly drawing illustrations which would end up as quick gags or ads for local merchants. The first film shown was one of these films, and it’s probably the one of those that I most enjoyed.

Eventually, Walt and his staff started making a story film for themselves, trying to improve the product. Little Red Riding Hood was finished within six months and they began work on the Four Musicians of Bremen.

MOMA screened both these films as well as the found others. They were all British prints attributed to Bollman and Grant, credited as producers for the New York-based Sound Film Distributing Corp; in England, Wardour Films distributed these films. They were headlined as “Peter the Puss” films, which Disney had called “Julius the Cat.”

All of the films had new titles:
Little Red Riding Hood was called Grandma Steps Out.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears was called The Peroxide Kid.
Puss In Boots was The K-O Kid
Cinderella was The Slipper-y Kid

The Peroxide Kid AKA Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

It was a treat seeing these all projected with a live piano accompaniment that started as stiffly as the animation in the films, but soon grew very lively and filled with a sense of fun.

The films made me think of all the Flash animation being done today with much more limited results than these unknowledgeable beginners were able to pull off back in 1922. These guys were making up an industry and having more fun doing it than most of what I see on a screen today. (Actually, it’s more YouTube and Vimeo than a real screen. Perhaps if it were harder to get the films screened more imagination would go into them.) I wish there had been more animators in attendance at the Museum show and hope that they went to the first screening last Sunday.

The screening ended with a never-ending supply of Ub Iwerk’s films in glorious Cine-color. There’s nothing that’ll make things more attractive than an Aqua and Orange pallette. I’ve seen all of these films a hundred times if I’ve seen them twice, so I was not ready to make my way through an hour’s worth of them. If I’d been alone, I would have left.

The attempt was made to keep the fairy tales by Disney playing with fairy tales by Iwerks. I would have preferred seeing some of the later Iwerks Willie Whopper films. Those have a really odd side to them, and their backgrounds are most peculiar as well as the live jazzy soundtracks employed.

Willie Whopper, The Good Scout hung out to dry.

Balloon Land aka The Pincushion Man is probably the oddest of Iwerks’ work.
It played to near absolute silence.

I met Mike Barrier for the show; he was in town for the weekend with his wife, Phyllis, celebrating a key wedding anniversary. David Gerstein and Tom Stathes also joined us. David, with some help from Tom, was instrumental in identifying these films. It was nice to finally meet the two of them; Mike and I have been old friends for a long time.

- They’ll need 16 animated features entered into the competition for the MP Academy to select five films for Oscar contention. To date, according to Nikki Finke‘s column, there have been only 14 – meaning a choice of three titles for the Award. Producers have until Monday, Nov. 1st to get a film entered.

So far these have been entered:

Pixar’s Toy Story 3
Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon
Disney’s Tangled
Dreamworks’ Megamind
Despicable Me
The Illusionist
Zack Snyder’s Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole
WB’s live action/ani combo’d Yogi Bear
DreamWorks’ Shreak Forever After
Bill Plympton’s Idiots And Angels
the Japanese anime, Summer Wars
Lions Gate’s Alpha And Omega
Tinker Bell & The Great Fairy Rescue
Paul & Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip

The first two films, Toy Story 3 and How To Train Your Dragon are both vying for Best Picture as well. Good Luck, in the field of 10 titles.

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- Darrel Van Citters‘ blog for Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol is turning into one of my favorite places to visit. Aside from showcasing the excellent book Mr. Van Citters wrote (trust me this should be in your collection if you have any interest in 2D animation and/or UPA), the site focusses on many of the artists who worked on the UPA TV special.

The intro to Sherman & Peabody by Shirley Silvey.

Recently Shirley Silvey‘s career was highlighted in a great piece. Here’s a brilliant artist whose work has been pretty-much ignored by the animation community, and it’s great to see her get a little of her due attention. The same can be said about other artists who have been featured on this site: Tony Rivera, Phil Norman or Bob Inman.

Van Citters has also been running a four-part series about the takeover of UPA from Stephen Bosustow by Hank Saperstein and his company, Television Personalities. Immediately, The Mr. Magoo Show, The Dick Tracy Show, and other product went into production and on the market.

Take a look at the site.

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- I’m sad to see the passing of James MacArthur. He was the adopted son of actress, Helen Hayes, and starred in so many of those wonderful Disney live-action films of the late fifties, early sixties.

How clearly do I remember sitting through Third Man on the Mountain many times so that I could get to see Snow White again. Back then, there was no video tape/no DVD. Films ran in theaters on double-bills (two films for the price of one), and you had to get through the dud to see the one you wanted to see. I was there – many times – to see Snow White, but Third Man was always running when I got into the theater. However, I saw Third Man so many times I got to like it as well.

James MacArthur was a big part of that experience. He was also in these Disney films:
The Swiss Family Robinson, Kidnapped, and The Light in the Forest.

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Bill Benzon has another excellent piece on his blog, New Savanna. This is an analysis of the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence from Dumbo.

Called Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed, it, like all of Bill Benzon’s writing, deserves to be noticed and read.

Take a look.

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- Richard O’Connor has been posting excellent wrap ups of the daily events and films at Ottawa. If you haven’t been reading you should. Some of the capsule reviews of these shorts is excellent. Look to Asterisk for these posts.

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- This week PBS aired a magnificent show about William Kentridge which showed his process for animating pieces for the opera he directed at the Met, The Nose. His combination of animation and live action was just thrilling, and to watch him doing this live with a stop-motion camera (No computers, he. Norshtein would be proud) was mesmerizing. Mistakes and all add to the life of the pieces.

I was sorry to have missed this opera, now I’m even more so.

Jeffrey Brown of The Newshour interviewed Kentridge about the show. You can watch and/or read this interview here.

You can see a short trailer of the show here and if you keep coming back, I suspect they’ll eventually have the entire show up there.

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- Copngrats to Cartoon Brew editors Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi. Their breaking news about Brenda Chapman‘s being replaced on the Pixar film The Brave made it to the NYTimes on Thursday, and they got a nice mention. A nice scoop for them.

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- Bill Plympton told me that his film, Angels and Idiots, was doing so well at the IFC Center in NY that it’s been held over, again, for a third week. Here’s hoping the film runs another dozen weeks.

Those in LA shold look out for the LA opening Oct 29th at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater.

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- Another site worth watching is the National Cartoonist’s Society blog. They presently have a display of drawings by Jack Davis. It was nice taking a look at some of the pieces they’re displaying. The double spread record album cover for The Mad Mad Mad Mad World just brought back a nice cozy feeling. Take a look at the site (and keep on looking after you’ve seen Jack Davis’ work.)

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- Watching Bill Maher, last night, the realization that a good part of the world doesn’t know the story behind Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas drove home. Much of the world is too young to have heard of or remember the big deal that was when Thomas was vying for his seat on the Supreme Court. Obviously, a guy who likes his porn, Thomas was also accused of some other questionable behavior. Believe me, his misdeeds outshone Bill Clinton’s, and Thomas still got to the big bench to help destroy that institution.

As animators, we also have a delicate history, and without careful watch and studious work on the part of the young, that history will also be forgotten. You have to get out there and see films to appreciate the animation history part of it.

Currently, I’m looking forward to the screening of the recently discovered Laugh-O-Grams at the MOMA. These shorts were restored by MOMA and will be presented for the first time at these two screenings. Serge Bromberg, the director of the Annecy animation Festival and a champion of early animation, will conduct the presentation of these first films by Walt Disney done in Kansas City. The films will have a piano accompaniment. There will be two screenings: Sunday Oct. 31st at 2:30pm and Thursday Nov. 4th at 4:30pm.

- There’s a breaking story on Cartoon Brew about Brenda Chapman and her short tenure at Pixar as director of The Brave (recently retitled from The Bear and the Bow.)

It’s obvious to me the once John Lasseter was put in charge of both Disney and Pixar studios, his head turned inside out. The first thing to happen was that directors were fired from Bolt (American Dog), Tangled (Rapunzel) and he had strong influence over Stephen J. Anderson on Meet the Robinsons, changing much of what had already been done (possibly for the better.)

Now the sword is attacking at Pixar and the victim is a woman, Brenda Chapman, who has already put together an amazing career and certainly deserves to be a director in the industry. There’s unrest in the Magic Kingdom, and we’ll have to watch Lasseter’s moves closely since it’s obvious that he’s getting heat. His recent history would show that he doesn’t seem to be taking it too well. Or at least his slate of directors isn’t receiving it well.

Even more alarming are the anti-woman comments left on Cartoon Brew. When one blogger writes, “…And I’ll be honest with one exception, Julie Taymor, I haven’t been blown away by most films directed by women and honestly neither has most of America …” You can see the level of negativity women have to take to get ahead in the business or, at the least, be treated equally with men. It’s no wonder they were relegated to the Ink & Paint department; many of these bloggers seem to agree with that. I felt embarrassment in reading many of the heartless comments.

Did we forget already that the Oscar last year was won by a woman, Katheryn Bigelow? And her film was chosen as the year’s best movie! The Oscars are not my code for judging the best films, but it certainly qualifies as, at least, a small statement about female artists.

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- The NY Times had an interesting article about the Quay Brothers in a recent edition of their paper.

The article is about a short film the brothers are making which will be screened at a retrospective to appear in symposia at the Mütter Museum, a 19th-century repository of curiosa at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and following that at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the LA Museum of Jurassic Technology.

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- Get Animated! is a Canada-wide series of free screenings, master classes and activities marking International Animation Day.

Watch the Natinal Film Board’s latest animated films on the big screen for free and attend special presentations with acclaimed directors from your area.

This year’s program:
Animation Screenings: NFB New Releases
Family Program Screenings: Fairy Tales for All

And meet the directors…
Come see Andrea Dorfman (Flawed) in Halifax, Chris Lavis with Maciek Szczerbowski (Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life) and Theodore Ushev with Chris Robinson (Lipsett Diaries) in Montreal, Anita Lebeau (Louise, Big Drive) in Winnipeg, Cam Christiansen (The Real Place) in Calgary and Matthew Talbot-Kelly (The Trembling Veil of Bones) in Vancouver. Plus, view the Hothouse 6 series in 3D in Toronto!

Go here to see clips of some of the films to be screened.

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- To celebrate Interanational Animation Day, the NY chapter of ASIFA, ASIFAEast, will have a screening of films on Oct 26th.
Admission: FREE!

Details of the films that’ll be screened will be coming soon.

SVA
School Of Visual Arts
209 East 23rd Street
(Bet. 2nd & 3rd Ave)
3rd Fl, Amphitheater
NYC

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- I’ve been watching some older animated features lately. Plague Dogs, I thought, deserved another chance, so I rented the DVD. I was right. The film is a very odd one.

Surprisingly, despite the depressing subject, I found myself unattached to the story’s emotions. I would guess it has to do with the direction of he work.

The film starts with one of our two lead characters
in deep trouble in the laboratory.

The story is essentially the story of two dogs who escape a laboratory that experiments on animals, and they make their way across the British countryside while teams of people search for them. One of the dogs has been inflicted with a plague bacteria and could spread the disease outside of the lab.

The story is told through a sort-of narration done in a very clever way. Disconnected human voices talking about the situation are used as voice over. We don’t often see who’s talking but we hear their voices. There are times where the voices start and we join the speakers in their conversations. The two dogs communicate with each other and a fox, who helps them in their escape.

The dogs escape and travel the back roads in the mountains.

The animation throughout is just about serivceable. No scenes really shine even though there are a couple of standout names in the credits – including Brad Bird, Tony Guy and Retta Scott – as animators.

The film was a follow-up project for producer/director, Martin Rosen. He was the original producer of Watership Down, and his ego allowed him to think he could direct that film better than John Hubley, who was fired within the first sixth months.

There’s the constant play between the travelling dogs
and the humans who talk about them roaming the countryside.

It’s no surprise that Plague Dogs includes no poetic scenes such as the introduction and the “Bright Eyes” sequences of Watership Down. It’s all down and heavy, done with a lack of grace. Yet, despite this there are several very clever devices for keeping the story moving forward. It would have been nice to see what better animation and a better director might have brought to it.

However, the film’s tough subject matter was sure to bring back poor business, and there’s no surprise in its low grosses at the box office. However, as I’ve said, the film deserves another look.

The film gasps for air with the heavy approach, though it deserves
praise for trying to be different and take animation seriously.

A lot of things seem to have happened in the past few weeks. I thought it time to just ramble about some of them.

- Bill Plympton‘s feature, Idiots and Angels, has hit NY’s IFC Center like a storm. Bill seems to be attending quite a few of the screenings with Q&A’s added. News about the show is everywhere in NY. The film got glowing reviews from the NYTimes and the NYPost. No word from the NYDaily News (which didn’t review My Dog Tulip, either.)

Bill’s been working overtime promoting the movie. Since he’s self distributing the film, it takes real drive to get the attention he’s created. His is a lesson we can all learn from. It’s a small part of the job making the film; the largest part is selling it. Kudo’s to team Plympton for a job well done.

Bill’s film had an Academy screening this past Thursday in New York and will screen for the Academy in LA on Oct. 31st, Halloween night. It’s quite a coup, I think, to see that he’s gotten the film on their schedule to make sure members can see it. The Oscar push has already started (and Nikki Finke took note in her column.)

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- Last week John Canemaker appeared at the Museum of Modern Art with a talk and book signing for his Two Guys Named Joe. The house was packed and the talk was light and informative. The power-point show was choc-a-block with great photos and artwork. Many of them didn’t appear in the book.

John has a way about these talks that just keep you interested and entertained. To get a good idea, he was on NPR’s Leonard Lopate show that same day as his MOMA talk. You can listen to it here.

Meanwhile, there are two articles by John posted on the Print Magazine website. One about the Disney Family Museum and a second about the Irish Animation scene. Both are enormously informative reads. The Irish article includes several embedded videos.

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- Darrell Van Citters has started a new blog dedicated to Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Take a look. He has pieces on some of the artists. An article about designer Bob Inman is particularly informative as is another about Phil Norman. This is fast becoming a must-view blog.

You’ll remember that Darrell has written one of last year’s best books, called The Making of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. I’ve read the book three times already and suggest you all buy a copy.

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- While away on Vacation, I missed John Dilworth‘s talk at the 92nd Street Y (downtown). The ASIFA East blog covers this event well and I suggest you all turn there to read a report on the event. Sounds like it was fun, as I expected it might have been.

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- I’d been entertaining the idea of travelling down to Washington D.C. to attend the rally which John Stewart is gathering. It’s sort of an anti-Glenn Beck rally. Arianna Huffington is supplying free buses from NY to D.C. and back. It makes it just too damn attractive. But I’ll have just returned that week from a trip to Ottawa, and I’ll be feeling my age if I do go down to Washington.

I’ll have to miss it.

By the way, I believe the Festival in Ottawa has given me a hotel room where I’ll have access to the Internet. This means I’ll be able to add updates to my regular blog posts, even during the Festival. I did this the last time I was up there, and it worked out well.

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- I’ve gotten a lot of flack in NY recently for comments I’ve posted about the Dash Shaw trailer posted on Cartoon Brew. Too bad. I didn’t like what I saw and I commented. We’re accepting too much crap these days, and animation as a medium is taking a bad hit for it. Some of us have to start saying that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes; oh, and he’s also not an Emperor. It’s just my opinion, and you, certainly, can think I’m wrong. He does have one of NY’s greats working for him – Biljana Labovic. If anyone will make the film worth seeing, it will be she. Her work on Bill Plympton’s films went unsung for too long, and she finally got a co-producer credit on Idiots and Angels. I think highly of her opinion, and she must like the work or she wouldn’t be there. So maybe it’s my age or my ego somehow out of whack, but I’ll stick with my opinion until I see something that changes my mind.

However, for those who do like his work, Dash Shaw will lecture at SVA on Nov. 4th. Here’s a press release for this event:

Thursday, November 4, 7pm
SVA Theatre
333 West 23 Street

The New York Times has called artist and SVA alumnus Dash Shaw (BFA 2005 Illustration) “a hard-core experimentalist” and “a hell of an artist, constructing vivid, uncanny compositions with a spectacular sense of color and space.” With the publication of Bottomless Belly Button (Fantagraphics, 2008) and BodyWorld (Pantheon, 2010), Shaw has quickly established himself as a leader among today’s graphic novelists. The animator and director of IFC’s The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., Shaw is currently working on the animated feature The Ruined Cast. The event is free and open to the public and presented by the The Alumni Society of School of Visual Arts.

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- I still roil over the young death of Japanese director, Satoshi Kon. He was a brilliant animation artist who deserved greater attention. International success seemed to be just starting to touch his films, when he died. I’m glad I had the opportunity of interviewing him several months before his death. (I wrote about it here.)

His film Paprika will play at the Gotham Screen International Film Festival, on Oct. 13th at the Tribeca Film Theater, 54 Varick Street (just off 6th Ave, south of Houston). Tickets are $8 – $10.

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- Today’s NYTimes reviews the new DVD release from WB: Essential Bugs Bunny Collection. It’s a 2 disc set with one disc containing not very essential material or shorts. The reviewer for the Times ends with this paragraph:

Better that you explore the several volumes in the “Looney Tunes Golden Collection,” also from Warner Home Video. Here you will find all these and more, including “What’s Up, Doc?,” a semi-autobiographical cartoon from 1950 that is not in this “essential” collection, yet is essential to any understanding of the artist. Among other insights, it includes an epiphany by Mr. Bunny that rings so true I just can’t get it out of my head: “I was a rabbit in a human woild.”

- Tomorrow, Oct. 6th, Bill Plympton’s most recent feature, Idiots and Angels opens officially in New York. The IFC Center will screen the film for a limited run. However, if people turn out that could be extended. Bill needs your support; take the family and see the film.

As we did with Paul & Sandra Fierlinger‘s film, My Dog Tulip, we’re posting three short reviews of Idiots and Angels. These are by the three animators in my studio, Matthew Clinton, Katrina Gregorius, and me. In doing that, the hope is that we’d have a wider scope in the review and one that would focus on the craft of the animation. We all agreed that we had problems with the film, yet I’m not sure whether we got that point across in the reviews. You’ll have to decide.

Review by
Katrina Gregorius

Bill Plympton’s latest feature Idiots & Angels has taken me through a journey within myself in the same way the main character is transformed within the film.

Idiots & Angels is about a guy who is inherently angry and is a jerk to everyone around him. One day, he mysteriously starts to grow wings that eventually try to prevent him from doing any harmful deeds. The rest of the film explore his reaction as well as other character’s reaction to these wings.

Initially I am left without a lot of positive feelings about the film regarding character and story development, but a closer look reveals a film that is an in-depth study of human nature. What I originally thought of as a lack in character development is actually a disturbingly accurate and genuine portrayal of human nature.

Bill Plympton uses color to create the perfect mood for the film. He also creates some playful transitions that are really fun to watch.

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Review by
Matthew Clinton

Idiots & Angels is mysterious right from the start. It’s almost like you’ve landed on one of the dark planets in “A Wrinkle in Time“, where you don’t know who is controlling things or what the truth is. You can feel that things are off, and it’s unsettling. Angel, a devious man who kind of just blends in, wakes up and heads off to his favorite bar. The city is busy with cars and Angel’s awful ways become clear when he blows up a similar suit-wearer who has taken his parking space. He lights the car’s gas tank on fire. Strangely, the city seems totally empty of people – nobody is there to notice the horrific crime, and it is daylight. Maybe nobody is allowed to see? Angel walks into the bar and doesn’t give the murder a second thought.

The bar is the center of this decrepit planet. It gives power to the few poor souls who haunt the place: a suit-wearing barkeeper, his barmaid wife, a large card-playing lady, and Angel himself. It’s a motley group. The barmaid shines among the rest of the creepy cast and even manages to penetrate all the septic cigarette smoke and noir shadows. The animation of this character is very nice too. She loves to dance with her broom, and those light scenes are quite necessary to relieve the stifling atmosphere. Of course Angel has to attack her.

The next morning Angel wakes up to discover that small, feathery wings have grown out of his back. He cuts them off with a razor blade, spraying blood everywhere. However, with boney remnants still lodged in his back, I wonder why he didn’t see a doctor at this point – the very first time it happens. (Eventually he does see a doctor…) But he heads back to the bar. Soon he is consumed by hallucinations of birds and wings, a motif that is used cleverly throughout the film.

The wings grow back, and will not be stopped. Soon the film becomes a battle to control the wings. The wings want to be an angel, and Angel want to be an idiot. This idea is very full of possibilities, and it’s a good one. There are some stylish scenes that explore that. It becomes increasingly outlandish, though, as the barkeeper and the insane doctor lust after the power of the wings. It gets very crazy now – is it really happening or is it a metaphor? The drastic motives are hard to understand. I guess anything goes in their world, where being a monster is normal. It all makes you want to turn the light on.

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Review by
Michael Sporn

Idiots and Angels is Bill Plympton‘s sixth animated feature. Fifth if you don’t count the one that’s made up of a shorts collection. Still, it’s amazing that an individual can so doggedly, and singlehandedly turn out so much work with with so little. Of course, he doesn’t do it alone – ask all the interns -, but still the animation is his. And we’re talking about films longer than 90 minutes apiece!

At first these features were done by hand on cel with an animation camera, yet none of the features cost more than $500,000. Today computer assistance makes it a mite easier, but not much. There are some secrets here that would be valuable to learn. There’s also a lot of respect that we have to give someone who pulls this feat off.

I’ve seen all of the films, and Idiots and Angels is, by far, my favorite. The story attempts something intelligent, and the graphics are far-and-away my favorite of all the films. It’s still not 100% for me, but it’s getting closer.

The film, for the first 2/3 of the way, follows a character who is unlikable. (This seems to be something Bill likes to do, have an insufferable protagonist.) Somehow he is gifted with a pair of wings. Every time the character does something nasty, the wings force him to correct the situation and be courteous to his neighbor. Needless to say, there’s an inner-struggle going on. Our hero does everything he can to remove the wings – cutting them off, going to a doctor to have them removed, having others pluck them from his back. The wings don’t go away very easily. Our hero dies at the 2/3 point in the film, and a bartender and dermatologist take center screen – each trying to exploit the wings for themselves.

This is the part of the film where I faded out. The story went off course, and I had a hard time following things. I would have preferred a more developed story about the hero – with a possible character development for him. But instead, he was killed-off and two other greedy folks took center stage.

The graphics, as I said, are, to my mind, the best we’ve seen from the Plymptoon factory. There’s an Eastern European feel to the limited colors and the use of dark grays and umbers employed in most of the coloring. The graphite feel is part and parcel of the Plympton style, and it’s used strongly in Idiots and Angels. In this film. there’s strong control of the textures, and I was pleased to see that. It took some hard work and loving care to pull off.

Anyone who makes a feature film with such a small crew and with his own finances, deserves my attention. I think he also deserves your attention. Bill is what I consider a natural animator. He hasn’t studiously studied the work of the masters, yet he seems to have absorbed all of the rules just by watching. Right from his first film, he had it down. I wish that he’d use a few more inbetweens at times, but I can’t argue with the extremes. I also wish so much of it weren’t on Fours – but then this is what passes for full animation these days. Budgets are the excuse, but sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t go deeper.

Saying all that, Bill’s a self-made master of the medium. I doubt he had to study Preston Blair or Frank Thomas; he just got it. See the film at the IFC Center (starting tomorrow, Oct. 6th in New York) and support it.

Idiots and Angels opens at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theater in LA on October 29. Bill will make appearances at the opening night screenings.

While in LA ASIFA-Hollywood will present “Tom Sito’s Evening with Bill Plympton” on Oct. 27 at Woodbury College. He will also do a signings at Amoeba in Hollywood on Oct. 28, 8 pm, and at Dark Delicacies Bookstore in Burbank on October 31, 2-4 pm.

Tulip Talks

If you would like to hear a recording – dare I say “podcast” – MP3 recording of George Griffin interviewing Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, there is a link to the Film Forum website. It’s a good recording with plenty of audience comments and questions peppering the dialogue.

Take a listen if you have any interest in the work of this key animating couple or in Independent animation. They talk about how the film was funded and made within their small home in Pennsylvania.

Yesterday, David Nethery kindly left several clips on my blog which show how TVPaint was used to make My Dog Tulip.

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Chabrol Dies

- In the last year, we lost the great Eric Rohmer.

Then this Sunday the NY Times reported the death of the brilliant Claude Chabrol. Rohmer was probably one of the greatest influences on my work, but Chabrol brought a grace that I loved watching. He was an inestimably great producer as well as a distinguished director. I recommend you rent a DVD of his work to celebrate his life.

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Kevin McCarthy Dies

- And then on Monday I learned of the death of Kevin McCarthy. You may remember this actor from his role in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He led the film, and got to perform in the remake as the guy screaming in the street warning of the next invasion.

McCarthy was a client of my lawyer. The lawyer not only represented him in legal matters but also acted as his agent. I always wanted to use his voice for some film, but the occasion never came up. My loss. McCarthy had a great sound and was a solid actor – and icon of the fifties and sixties.

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Greg Kelly

Greg Kelly is a young animator who is working hard to learn the craft. He continues to turn out animation and sends his samples to me for criticism. Here’s a most recent piece of his on Vimeo. Short and cute with a good attempt at character animation. Here and There

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The Illusionist

Sylvain Chomet‘s new film, The Illusionist, is scheduled to open in a limited release on Christmas Day, Dec. 25th, this year. It’ll qualify to compete for the Oscar. I’m looking forward to seeing this film, and I’m heading to Ottawa this year, not because I have a film in the race, but because I’m anxious to see Chomet’s movie.