Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Every couple of months HBO Family schedules a lot of my shows for a one day marathon. Today’s one of those days. Here’s the schedule for the films on that channel in case you’re channel surfing looking to fill a couple of minutes:

Saturday January 16th

LYLE LYLE CROCODILE
2:00 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
5:00 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

THE STORY OF THE DANCING FROG
2:30 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
5:30 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

THE RED SHOES
3:00 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
6:00 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

EARTHDAY BIRTHDAY
3:30 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
6:30 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

MIKE MULLIGAN & HIS STEAMSHOVEL
4:00 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
7:00 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

THE MARZIPAN PIG
5:00 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
8:00 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL
5:30 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
5:30 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

IRA SLEEPS OVER
6:30 PM HBO FAMILY – EAST
9:30 PM HBO FAMILY – WEST

Each month I update the full monthly schedule of the screening of my work over at my site www.michaelspornanimation.com

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- Variety, this week, had a couple of articles about animation that were probably designed to catch the eye of Oscar voters, but gave me a bit of reading about 2D, Hollywood style.

Strong voices toon up was nominally about voices for animation, but in this case, particularly Keith David who did a couple of voices for animated features this year. He was the villain, Dr. Facilier, in The Princess and the Frog and the cat in Coraline.

Retro sequence sings in ‘Princess’ is a short piece about the well-designed “Moderne” song number (“Almost There”) from The Princess and the Frog. I rather liked this sequence and would have hoped for more from Variety on this piece (probably also promoting the song for the Oscar). During Friday Night’s Critics’ Choice Awards, this was the song that was singled out for attention. It might have been nice if Variety had named an animator or designer in the article.

This image was pulled from Chronicle Books’ The Art of The Princess and the Frog by Jeff Kurti. The four images are credited to visual development artist, Sue Nichols. I would have liked to have seen more about this sequence in this book, as well. A total of two pages go to the standout sequence. Short shrift.

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There were also quite a few lines about animation in other articles in Variety that perked my ears. This one, for example, had me wondering about the WGA:
“This year’s eligible WGA titles include an animated film — Henry Selick’s adapted script for Coraline from Neil Gaiman’s book. Since the WGA doesn’t usually cover animation, those screenplays are usually ineligible.”

Why are screenplays ineligible? Is it because animation is considered inferior by the WGA relegating animation writers to the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild? Ratatouille received a WGA nomination, though it looks as though Brad Bird was not a WGA member at the time.

Meanwhile the Oscar rules for music contribution have gotten a bit arcane and bizarre. This week it was decided that Randy Newman’s score for The Princess and the Frog was ineligible to compete for an Academy Award for the Best Score. The rule states: “scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other preexisting music,
diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs, or assembled from the music of more than one composer.”

In English, that means there are songs so they don’t want the musicals to compete for score, too. Apparently this idiotic rule came in when Alan Menken won a number of Best Songs and Best Scores in a row. The board put a stop to that!

Why isn’t there still an award for Best Song Score? This existed for many years and now it’s a no-no. Pretty foolish. Just like the automatic selection of 10 films for Best Picture so that some popular films won’t be left out. The problem is this year there aren’t 10 films that I can name which are worthy of an Oscar.

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- There’s an excellent article in the NYTimes (actually one of many) by André Aciman celebrating the work and the intimacy of Eric Rohmer. I still am sad over this week’s enormous loss.

- The BAFTA short list released on Thursday includes five nominees for Best Animated Film (meaning feature – they haven’t released the names of the Animated Short nominees, as yet.) The five features are:
CORALINE, Disney’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, UP, and ICE AGE 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Interesting their choices of popular films over quality in a couple of the titles. Missing, of course, are PONYO and THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.

The Producers’ Guild chose as their five nominees:
9, CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, and UP.

Of course, the one that stands out is “9″. No other awards group has chosen that film among their nominees.

The Golden Globes have chosen CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, UP and CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.

How populist of them!

Who knows what the Oscars will choose. Perhaps TINKER BELL AND THE LOST TREASURE has a chance.

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- I thought I’d point out the most popular post I’ve put up in the past four years of this website. The piece features the book by Frank Webb, How To Make Faces – Part 2.
It and the original post, Part 1, on this book continue to generate comments every week or two. It certainly wasn’t planned on my part, back in Aug. 2007 and Mar. 2008, but apparently Frank Webb had a large extended family and a lot of friends.

Even this last week two people added comments (unfortunately, you have to go back to those original posts to read the comments.) Often enough, the contributors are writing to each other rather than to the rest of us. This was, for me, a little annoying at first. But then I came to realize that they were using these pages as a way of gathering. The Frank Webb lovers meeting place. How could I be bothered with that?

Check out the whole book by following the links above.

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- Signe Baumane writes to tell us of a screening this coming Wednesday, Jan 13th. (The 13th already! My how the year is whizzing by.)

She writes:

Woodstock Film Festival that normally takes place in mountainy Woodstock, 384 miles, or $26.50 by bus from NYC is coming to the City That Never Sleeps to present an animated film program curated by Bill Plympton and me.

There are 13 films to watch. Six very special animators will attend the screening to answer your burning questions about meaning of life, if eating fish is healthy and why animation.

Festival’s director Meira Blaustein and Festival’s adviser as well NYC liaison Sabine Hoffman are going to be there for you to make the connection with the Festival directly.
At $12 it’s a steal. Or magic, depends how you look at it.

92YTribeca Screening Room is at 200 Hudson Street, 1 block south of Canal.

Detailed info about the films and how to get the tickets is here.

Bring your money pot – filmmakers are going to sell DVDs of their work at special Woodstock prices.

- Andrey Khrzhanovsky is one of Russia’s premiere animators. The list of his an1mated shorts can be found here.

He has completed a live action/animation feature that has been scoring excellent reviews. A Room and a Half draws on the biography of Joseph Brodsky, the Russian -Jewish -American poet, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 and was made poet laureate of the U.S. in 1991.

The reviewer in Variety wrote:

Veteran animator and documaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s feature debut, at the age of 69, is a magical, wildly creative fantasia on the life of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. . .

Khrzhanovsky has stated that Brodsky’s life was the “creative impulse” for his film, meaning it shouldn’t be seen as a biopic. Or rather, it’s as much a biopic as one of Fellini’s self-referential reveries. . .

“A Room and a Half” is unmistakably the work of a mature artist, and it’s the helmer’s absolute mastery of the different formats that makes his work so joyous. Silhouette cutouts reflect pre-Revolutionary elegance, an animated cat appears inside a credenza and musical instruments float across the city skyline, fusing Magritte and Chagall.

The magazine Screen adds:

Some of the most touching moments in the film cover his childhood, painting an intimate, cheerful, closely knit family, that never lets their cramped living space or the penury of the lean years sap their spirit. The film freely elaborates on young Brodsky’s flights of imagination at the time, including a magical animated sequence in which Soviet soldiers throw culture out of the window, followed by a whole orchestra’s worth of instruments.

The Film Forum will be screening A Room and A Half for two weeks beginning Jan 20th.

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- Speaking of Russian animation, there’ve been some additions to Niffiwan’s site, Animatsaya In English. Lots of recent animation has been posted (all subtitled in English) as well as a lot of information.

Niffiwan has put together a Wiki site which offers a large number of animated films, both current and historic, which have been subtitled. There’s a list of films subtitled in English and a list of films that are wordless. You owe it to yourself to start catching up on some of the world’s finest animation.

Some of the treasures include:

Of course, there are Norshtein‘s films: The Heron and the Crane and The Hedgehog in the Fog

There’s also Fyodor Khitruk‘s masterpiece Film, Film, Film as well as several of his Winnie the Pooh flms.

There are number of films by Edouard Nazarov including There Once Was A Dog.

There are classics like Ivan-Vano-Ivanov‘s The Little Hunchbacked Horse or The Stolen Sun.

Plenty (maybe too many) of the commercially successful Well, Just You Wait! films.

Get a taste of the Russian Roadrunner, then move on.

There are at a couple hundred films on this site. Spend some time.

Additionally, Niffiwan leads us to another site: Digital Cake which offers some other animated films (many are the same as his wiki.)

On New Year’s eve/day, we went to the Morgan library. This was the first time I’ve been in the new building since the reconstruction. The new architecture was designed by Renzo Piano and reopened in 2006.

I used to enjoy going through the large iron doors (at least, I think they are iron) which are still there, but are now permanently locked on what has become the side of the museum. There was something grand about it. There’s now a grand new entrance which is wheelchair friendly going through a large faceless glass entrance.

Once inside, you face a high ceilinged room with a great expanse of open space. Dining facilities are all about you, and it’s one of the better features of the building. A nice place to have a cup of tea/coffee and a spot of lunch.

Of course you’d go to the library for the exhibits on display. Closing this Sunday (today) is a show of the art of William Blake. While there, I took out my camera and started photographing some of the etchings and watercolors. No sooner had I shot two of them, than I was caught in my tracks by a guard asking me not to photograph anything. These are the two I did capture:

“Satan Smiting Job with Boils” by William Blake

Satan – “Head of a Damned Soul in Dante’s Inferno” by William Blake

However, I did learn that you can view the entire Blake exhibit by going online to here. There, all of the images are offered (at least through today.) The Book of Job is outstanding as are others from the Book of Europa. However, no photograph or reproduction can satisfy as much as standing in front of the actual article.

Also on display, through March 14th, is a show of Jane Austen’s manuscripts, letters and other artifacts. Being the visual person I am, of course the cartoons by James Gillray, which offer a glimpse of the society she dealt with, are an absolute riot. It was nice to be reminded of his brilliant work.

I was able to photograph several of them, but in two cases images I found on line were better than my soft photos. Here are three examples:

Tales of Wonder by James Gillray

Marital Harmonics by James Gillray

A Little Music or The Delights of Harmony by James Gillray

I was also fascinated with Austen’s letters. Having done a lot of research about Edgar Allan Poe, I’ve seen quite a few of his letters, and the two were writing at roughly the same time.

Letters did not come in envelopes. They were large-ish sheets of home-made paper that were folded into very small parcels and were sealed with wax. Since paper was valuable you did not waste any of it. Writing went from left to right, up and down and in the margins. Wherever there was empty space there was room for more writing. Letters were also contained to one sheet of paper since the carriage of the letter was expensive.

I don’t quite know how they managed their postal system, but it must have been somewhat arcane in comparison with today’s system of dropping a letter into the corner mailbox. I do know that Poe sometimes employed friends to carry letters to those he was writing.

The visit to the Morgan Library was entertaining and enjoyable. I’m sorry I don’t do it more often, certainly considering how close it is to my apartment.

Happy New Year
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Here’s one of my favorite pieces. We did it for a home video of children’s poems.
It’s a piece by the brilliant Russell Hoban. The animation is by Mark Mayerson, and the design is by Jason McDonald. The music is by Caleb Sampson. I think all of these artists did brilliant work.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

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- I’ve grown to know that I am too old for New Year’s Eve’s TV celebrations.
Watching a 40 year old mother, J-Lo, in a skin-tight nude outfit with sparkles, moving around the stage on all fours while lip-synching a generic song and two guys pretend to violate her – this does not have much to do with New Year’s Eve for me. As I said, I’m too old for this coarse crudity. Even reruns of Guy Lombardo in his tuxedo sounds better. Especially when you’ve drunk too much. Call me a prude, I don’t care; I’m all for dignity. We watched the Twilight Zone reruns on SYFY. All those great Bernard Herrman and Jerry Goldsmith scores.

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You can start your New Year off with a bit of Art. The good news is that the IFC Center has extended the run of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues through next Wednesday, Jan. 5. Get off the couch and go. Perhaps they’ll extend it another week.

See A.O. Scott‘s NYTimes review here. (It’s very positive and well written.) See the readers’ reviews (all positive) here.
Go to Elizabeth Weitzman‘s NYDaily News top ten pick of 2009 here. Anyone know of other 10 Best lists the film made it onto?

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- I congratulate Sally Cruikshank on having her film Quasi at the Quackadero selected into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, but I have to admit I find it whacky that Rooty Toot Toot, Moonbird, The Old Mill, Peace On Earth and dozens of other true history-making shorts of U.S. animation haven’t been selected before this film. I can only assume they will get their just deserts next year.

- I’ve seen a couple of this year’s features another time this past week and have had some more thoughts about them.

I’ve now seen The Fantastic Mr. Fox a third time. Twice in theaters and once on DVD. All three times it was every bit as entertaining for me as it was on the first viewing. I was more impressed with the levels of depth cleverly written within the film.

There are the same father/son complications of every Wes Anderson film, however more interesting to me was the thought on the nature of the film’s creatures.
The Royal Tenanbaums treat each other as if they are Royal. The Foxes are wild animals; they know it and allow their true nature to emerge. Look at every time they eat, attacking wildly and voraciously.

The animals in costume are little more than their natural selves: a fox is a fox and it’s unable to resist its natural, wild tendencies. A badger is a badger and tempers will rise when mixing with a fox. Though he’s a friend and lawyer to the fox, the two spit and spat whenever they meet.

This is not the same lax world as many past cartoon creations. Bugs Bunny was rarely, if ever, a bunny. He was more a foil for Elmer Fudd (or in some cases Daffy Duck, who started life as a duck but became something other.) Mickey Mouse could mix with Donald Duck, or Goofy, and all could just act as humans do with little regard for their off-sized proportions or animal natures. (Admittedly, Pluto always stayed a dog despite the fact that Goofy was also a dog, and Mickey Mouse was his owner and larger than the dog.)

This is the cartoon world, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just that Mr. Fox takes it into a different direction – thanks to the spirit of Raold Dahl, which Wes Anderson followed closely. And in doing that Anderson asks what is our true nature? What is wild within us when we, as adults, seem to have learned to temper those base instincts.

The animation of some of the Beatrix Potter stories have followed the animal natures of the characters, but adaptations of The Wind in the Willows have not followed the book’s logic. In the book the animals ARE pointedly animals – despite wearing clothes and acting more human-like.

To me, the film is witty, charming and wholly satisfying. Even the stodgy, stiff animation is part of the appeal. There’s a quaint and homespun feeling to the characters in this old-time, hand-made animation. Sitting next to me in the theater, this last time, was a mother (about 30) with her son (about 10). She was quiet during the film, he was certainly enjoying it. When the film ended, the boy asked his mother excitedly, “Didn’t you just love the farmer?” The mother hesitated for a long time, then said, “I guess so.” She seemed not to enjoy the film while her son gushed over it all the way out of the theater. Not all films are for everyone.

The Princess and the Frog I saw for a second time on DVD. Actually, I could only make it through about 2/3 of the film on the second viewing. Its flaws were larger for me on the small screen and at second viewing.

The largest hurdle for me on the first viewing was the story, and it remained the complete shambles it was the second time out. It’s an embarrassment to me that this film came out of the Disney studio with no one noticing how poor the story and the storytelling is.

The only joy was in seeing animation so rich – not always good but always rich and professional. It’s been a while since we’ve had even that.

The movement and character development, in this film, was often more Warner Bros than Disney – wilder, broader and hard-edged. The last few Disney 2D features seemed to be making a split. Half the animation seemed very Don Bluth while the other half was more WB. This, of course, was just my perception. Only a couple of animators seemed distinctly out of the Disney mold – Andreas Deja and Glen Keane, for two.

I like Andreas Deja‘s animation of the voodoo queen, Mama Odie, introduced to us in the last third of the film. (Really! Was there no way to introduce this character earlier in the film?! I can think of half a dozen ways to do it, and the film could have used more of her.) Unfortunately, she’s on the screen too short a time to separate her from Mad Madam Mim or The Rescuers’ Madame Medusa.

It’s interesting that the film includes the death of a bug (a bug also introduced in the last third of the film), and that’s supposed to make us feel something. Of course, it becomes a star (there must be lots of stars – meaning dead bugs – that we don’t see up there) as the directors try pointlessly to pull the heartstrings. More disheartening than heartfelt.

In Mr. Fox, when the villainous rat dies, no such poor attempt is made to manipulate our emotions. Anderson didn’t sentimentalize the death. “Just another dead rat in the garbage pail behind the Chinese restaurant.”

- I just learned the sad news of Arnold Stang‘s passing.

He played a bird on my film, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile. During the session, which included a song number, that Arnold participated in, Charles Strouse, the composer, jumped in to attack Arnold for not sounding enough like a bird. There was a back-and-forth fight between the two of them as to what an animated bird would sound like, as compared to a human being. Arnold pointed out that he was many animals in animation but had never been criticized for sounding human.

Recognizing the inherent problems in the discussion, outside of the booth I asked Charles to keep quiet and allow me to direct. I then told Arnold he was doing a great job – which he was – and to finish the piece in the same direction. He did, and the track ended well.

After the session, I privately spoke with Charles and resolved any problems. (He ultimately did this to me several times in several different sessions over the course of different films. In every case, I had to firmly stick to my guns.)

Arnold and I exchanged Christmas cards up until this year. Several times he called to ask if I had anything brewing for him. Unfortunately, we never worked together again. I’m glad for the bittersweet memories I do have, and I’m sad that he’s gone. He was an extraordinary and unique talent.

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- Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues will, at long last, make its New York City premiere on Christmas Day. The film will open at the IFC Center on Dec 25th and play through Dec 31st, New Year’s Eve. This will be the first official screening of the movie.

On Dec 25th Nina will appear for a Q&A session at the theater and may make other appearances at the theater during the week. These will be announced at a later date.

If you haven’t seen the movie projected on a screen, you ought to. It takes on new dimensions, and you owe it to yourself. The film has played at over 200 International film festivals and has won many prestigious awards including at Berlin, Annecy and Ottawa.

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- You’ll remember that I did a couple of posts on Bert and Jennifer Klein and their film, Pups of Liberty. I’m pleased to say that this film has been nominated for an Annie Award for best animated short. (The only other film in that category that I’ve seen is Bill Plympton’s Santa, the Fascist Years. I suppose I can also guess what Robot Chicken: Star Wars 2.5 is. A Cartoon Network tv show. Honestly, it’s not the best selection of shorts I’ve seen. Pups of Liberty has a good chance, and I congratulate the Kleins.)

Bert Klein recently contacted me to say that he’s produced a feature film, with Jennifer Klein, – a live action documentary about his father, David Klein, the inventor of the Jelly Belly. It’s called Candyman and is directed by Costa Botes, who directed Forgotten Silver with Peter Jackson in New Zealand.

You can view a trailer on their film’s site, Candyman.

The film, Candyman was just accepted into the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival. It’s going to be an exciting January at the Klein household.

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- Recently Jonathan Giles approaached me at an ASIFAEast program. He gave me a card for a website comic strip he’s been drawing/posting for the past couple of years.

Anecdote is a strip that features a lot of kids with timely/often political subject matter. It’s a well-drawn, entertaining read and I highly recommend it. Apparently, new strips are posted Wednesdays at 5:30pm, but plenty of strips remain on line.

I encourage you to check it out.
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– I haven’t given a lot of attention to the animated epic now playing at the Film Forum in NY. A Town Called Panic is an oddity that I can’t quite figure out.

When I was 12 I’d bought my first movie camera – a regular 8mm camera (pre super-8mm days) with paralax viewfinder (meaning you could properly frame animation) that was able to shoot single frame images (so you could shoot animation.) I bagan filming my first drawn films – that usually lasted about 10 or 20 seconds apiece.

The challenge was that the roll of film was 100 ft long (3 minutes) and you had to do something with the rest of the roll of film before you could send it away to get it developed (via the local pharmacy.) So I filmed some pics of my siblings playing and quickly got bored with that number.

That’s when I started filming the massive collection of cowboys and indians that I owned. I’d set up the charge of the light brigade and animate it. I recreate the battles in a John Wayne (meaning John Ford) film I’d watched in animation. Hundreds of cowboys and Indians crashing into each other while galloping over my bedroom linoleum and recreated scenery.

I ultimately shot about a half hour of this stuff trying to fill up the rolls of film that incorporated the paper-drawn animation I was so desperate to see.

So now comes a movie out of France, “A Town Called Panic,” and I’m not sure what to make of it. From the YouTube trailer and short film called cake of these pieces, I’m hardly sold on it. It seems like little more than what I did when I was 12 with a snappy, loud, screaming voice track added on to it.

But then comes recvommendations by people I know (like Elliot Cowna and Mike Rauch) who’ve seen it as well as extremely positive newspaper reviews (NYTimes “Mr. Aubier and Mr. Patar are up to much more than pop-culture parody, though they do their share of that.” NYDaily News – 4 stars “. . . best saved for those who like to find surprises under their tree.”)

I guess my difficulty is that I don’t really think of it as animation – of course it is, just not very sophisticated animation. The telling is in the sound track, and I’m a bit tired of that type film. South Park did it and still does it best, while at the same time surprising you with infrequent bits of superb animation. With A Town Called Panic, I have no expectations of superb animation, but when A.O.Scott uses words like “lyricism” and “Michel Gondry” it has to pique my interest.

I know I’ll eventually see it, and should take all the positive comments as a reason to recommend others see it, but it’s still hard for me to get up the energy. The difficulty is that there’s only a limited window of time to see it. I have to get off my rocker.

The Film Forum is showing it
through Tuesday, December 29 with showtimes at: 1, 2:40, 4:15, 6, 8, and 10.

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- Last night I went to a screening of AVATAR. This film promises a lot that I dislike in movies: 3D, science fantasy (full of weird names like Na’vi and Pandora etc.), fantastic “Art”, and MoCap, just to name a few. For me, it all blends together in one big word that I have trouble getting past – “FAKE”.

Surprise, surprise. I loved the movie. It’s borderline pretentious in some places but the rest! Not only was I pulled in by the 3D (despite my watering eyes through the last half of the film), but I had a hard time taking off my glasses. The story was absorbing enough that it was hard to feel the 2 hr. 40 min. running time. The acting was watchable (though a number of lines really popped out as laughable).

The big thing about it was the imagined world, that just seemed real. You get totally absorbed into Cameron’s animation that you buy it wholly. While watching it, a fleeting thought kept passing the front of my brain. This is what we’re going to get in the future. This is what movies will be like in another 3 or 4 years. Not real and not animated. Some kind of bastard child that will be poorly handled by most filmmakers, but will come alive in the hands of a James Cameron. It’s terrifyingly sad in some ways because I think we’re already there.

(Johnny Knoxville is already promising “AVATAR-like effects” with his 3rd installment of “Jackass” !)

Scott Tobias, in his review at the Onion’s AV Club, wrote a prophetic line: “As the film’s technical marvels grow commonplace, it will look like a clunky old theme-park attraction, a Captain EO for our time.”

Maybe that’s why I champion The Fantastic Mr. Fox – because it’s such a hand-made picture. Lovingly finger-touched heart winning animation. It’s the antithesis of Avatar and will probably remain more evergreen. Bite the bullet and see both of them – in a theater.

Tonight, ASIFA-East is presenting an evening with John R. Dilworth. This means that John will be there with a number of surprise guests from his past and present, including Howard Beckerman, who taught him; me, who hired him; and Courage the Cowardly Dog, who was drawn by him. Given John’s affinity for the unexpected, it’s doubtful that it’ll be the typical Q&A.

Some of his shorts will be shown as well as several of his films. I could tell you which ones they are, but that would spoil the surprise.

The festivities begin at 7pm at the School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd St, 3rd floor amphitheatre. The admission price is free and worth every bit of it.

Of course, if you insist on buying some things, ASIFA calanders will be sold as will John Dilworth goodies.

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- Once again, let me promote The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated feature that I just love. There was a good interview with director, Wes Anderson, on Charlie Rose 11/30/09. There’s no direct link from here, but you can see this clip by going to Charlie Rose ‘s website, then typing in Wes Anderson on the search box. You can see the whole interview (about 30 mins) there._______________
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- Now for something different. Just for the opportunity of showing off some beautiful blue-pencilled ruffs by Frank Thomas, loaned to me by John Canemaker, I’m going to post them here. They’re from Sleeping Beauty, of course.
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This last one is from Ichabod and Mr. Toad –
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Ichabod and Katrina.
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- The most peculiar news story of the week was the headline at the top of Sunday’s NYTimes. It talked about a Taiwanese company that was creating their own videos of the news using cgi animation. The Times reports that the “. . . Taiwanese newspaper, Apple Daily, has dozens of programmers, designers, animators, even actors on its staff . . . responsible for scripting the videos.” We were shown a poorly created video of Tiger Woods (they admit that it didn’t really look like him, but they were happy over the color of his skin and his hair.) Maybe Robert Zemeckis could help out.

The question is how long it’ll take for ALL newcasts to include animated stories because they’re too lazy to do the actual reporting. Get rid of newspapers and make up your own videos. Apparently, MSNBC’s Keith Olberman made some sly comments about it. When he needs to make up the stories, he uses his “finger puppet theater.” In Taiwan they use cgi.

The world’s gone berserk, but now there’s a whole new line of work for animators of the future.

Here’s the YouTube presentation of that newscast.

- I’m a bit cranky. Having just come from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, I’m not sure how to comment on it fairly. There were moments when I just relished the hand-drawn animation done at such a high level. I treasured the levels of technical depth being executed on the screen. I enjoyed whole sequences of animation and overall design choices. However, the story has such deep problems. I don’t intend to drag the film down with negatives.

I hope the film does well. 2D animation needs a boost. Would that someone had pulled the film in a straight-arrow direction and told the story more directly. But that isn’t the case.

I won’t complain about the incessant violence and loud actions in the film, but I will tell you something else that’s irritating the hell out of me. PR people have released information that I’ve seen repeated a few times. Anika Noni Rose repeated it on Jimmy Kimmel Friday night. They’re saying that she’s the first princess ever to sing and act the part, herself. Prior to her it was done by two people.

I suppose Adriana Caselotti as Snow White’s singing and acting voice doesn’t count. Nor does Ilene Woods as Cinderella, or Mary Costa as Sleeping Beauty, or Paige O’Hara as Belle. Can’t they even get their facts right about their own movies! Do they have to take away from the brilliant talent of some of the past films?

The two illustrations above come from Jeff Kurtti’s book, The Art of The Princess and the Frog. The pencil drawing was by Ruben Aquino, and the color sketch is by James Aaron Finch and Armand Baltazar.