Articles on Animation &Daily post 09 Jul 2007 08:15 pm
Ends & Odds
– Dave Hilberman has died.
Karl Cohen of ASIFA San Francisco sent me a note to inform me that Hilberman had passed away. Along with his long time partner, Zach Schwartz, he was one of the key founders of UPA, and his death marks a dark moment ending an era. I’d like to lead you to another document I posted a while back;
it’s an interview by John Canemaker which was originally published in Caroonist Profiles. Please check it out. Here.
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– On the entertaining site, A Hole In The Head, Johnny C posts some drawings from an old 1947 Life Magazine article in which some well known cartoonists were asked to draw their cartoon characters blind folded. The results are published and they’re fascinating.
Equally fascinating is that many of these “famous” cartoons are probably not recognizable to a substantial part of the world today. Even the most famous, at the time, Dick Tracy isn’t published any more. Still out there is Gasoline Alley and Blondie, but their hold is a tenuous one.
At first I laughed at the drawings the blindfolded cartoonists had made, and then I got a bit sad at the fragility of fame.
- We all know George Herriman’s incredible work on Krazy Kat, but Alan Holtz on his site Stripper’s Guide has been hosting completely different work by Herriman. Every Saturday there are several panels of early work by this inspiring artist.
Why do cartoons look so meagre these days in comparison?
- Here’s the link to a Russian site which features reuse of animation in the Disney features. Apparently, they found another use for xerography in the era of the Nine Old Men. (I wonder if Don Bluth was there at the time.)
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Here’s a nice article about Pixar artist Jason Deamer. He talks about character design for Ratatouille and Cars and examples of his drawings are featured. As a matter of fact there’s a lot of material out there about this film. Lots of drawings and interviews. Just go to YouTube and type in Ratatouille.
on 10 Jul 2007 at 12:25 pm 1.toby said …
what a wonderful site for animation geeks like me. thanks for sharing!
on 10 Jul 2007 at 1:00 pm 2.Tom Minton said …
That Russian site addresses a valid point. I saw “The Wind in the Willows” years ago on a double bill with “The Jungle Book” and when the non-industry audience realized that the animation with the monkeys running around in the latter was totally cribbed from the courtroom scene in the former, it was as though someone had killed Santa Claus. The chorus of audible gasps and chatter pulled the crowd right out of the picture. The same thing would probably happen were “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” and Don Bluth’s “Banjo, the Woodpile Cat” were ever consecutively run, which would miss that feline leaping in perspective up a tree toward camera that was rotoscoped from “Bongo”.
on 12 Jul 2007 at 8:33 am 3.Alexey Kobelev said …
Dear Michael! I’m regular reader of your wonderful blog. Thank you for the link to my article about reuse of animation material at Disney’s studio. Unfortunately I translated to English the first page only but anyway I write to say a word for Don Bluth. Trust me I really tried to find some examples of cloning in Bluth’s independent features but have failed! Certainly he reused some footage in THE SMALL ONE but once he left the Disney’s studio in his output there were no reusing anymore.