Daily post 08 Nov 2008 09:33 am
Betty, Mononoke and Mickey
- An article appeared in yesterday’s Variety and then was picked up in the NYTimes announcing a new musical for Broadway. It’s being called the “Betty Boop Musical” at the moment, and it’ll be interesting to see what title they do arrive at. The show is expected to open during the 2010-11 season.
The music for the show is being composed by David Foster, the pop master who has written for Whitney Houston, Barbra Streisand and Josh Groban, among others. The book for the show will be written by Sally Robinson and Oscar Williams.
The show was originally announced in 2003, and Foster is the third composer attached to it. Jason Robert Brown and book writer David Lindsay-Abaire were originally attached. Andrew Lippa replaced Brown a year later and is now replaced by Foster.
- In many ways, Princess Mononoke is one of my favorite of Myazaki’s films. The spirituality behind the film keeps me coming back to this beautiful animated epic. In many ways it synthesizes all that is great about Myazaki’s body of work.
Now, a series of videos which details the making of this film has made it to YouTube. These videos have been collected by Daniel Thomas MacInnes into three seperate posts.
You can find them on his site, Conversations With Ghibli.
They’re broken into three groups. See:
Part 1,
Part 2, and
Part 3.
– Early animation art has always been a source of great inspiration for me. If you haven’t checked Bob Cowan‘s site recently you’ve missed the magnificent drawings he’s displayed from the Mickey short, The Mail Pilot. There’s a wealth of treasure on display with these beuatiful pencil sketches.
If you haven’t scrolled through this site, I urge you to do so. The Cowan collection is a gem. Production art for everything from Make Mine Music to Lady and the Tramp, Gulliver Mickey to Tarzan or Snow White. It’s all great and all worth drooling over.
I find it a bit odd that the link to a review for Madagascar 2 has been on the NYTimes front page since Thursday morning. I suppose I should be pleased that Dreamworks is obviously paying for this, but I’m disappointed in the Times.
By the way, is there any reason that animators these days can only do the fast-paced generic popping action for their characters. In cgi do you have to worry about how many drawings you make? There is virtually NO character animation being done anymore. All characters move the same way.
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on 08 Nov 2008 at 11:14 am 1.Rudy Agresta said …
Michael, I agree with you with regard to CGI and the lack of true character animation. If you just look at (it doesn’t require scholarly study to see this) the hand-drawn output of the past, without the title credits, and with the sound turned off, you can tell there are distinct visual styles and acting nuances that the individual character animators bring to the table.
The animators of the days gone by may have used stock formulas for certain movements, but they developed many which added a touch of uniqueness across the various studio landscapes. Not so today. Technology is a good thing. However, today’s CG stuff all has a tendency to look the same, no matter the studio.
Even with distinct location themes (Kung Fu Panda vs. Cars), it has that sameness to it. I do not mean to minimize the enormous talents of our CG colleagues, but it seems that technology is master over the art form and not the other way around. Particularly with the character animation. The movements seem to me the same formulaic approach across the board, regardless of studio. I also object to the lack of visual focal point with many of these films. It’s like a three ring circus at times – you don’t know where to look.
As always, kudos to your most generous time and talent in sharing on SPLOG!
on 08 Nov 2008 at 11:34 am 2.Bob Cowan said …
Michael- Thanks for the mention! Glad you’ve enjoyed some of the pieces!
-bob
on 08 Nov 2008 at 4:02 pm 3.Michael said …
To be honest, Rudy, I wasn’t just talking about cgi, although I certainly agree with you.
At some point, young animators decided to imitate Tex Avery films by snapping to and out of poses. Now, this has become the norm both within 2D and 3D animation. All of Madagascar offers this style of animation – actually, I should just call it movement. It’s not animation. None of the characters are alive; they just move and move too much.
This is the pattern of 2008′s animators, and there seem to be few who try anything unique for their characters. Or at least that’s how it feels from my desk.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 4:37 pm 4.Rudy Agresta said …
You’re right Michael. Although it is said that imitation is a sincere form of flattery (how many of us learned to draw by copying our favorite characters), the process of becoming an artist who one day, hopefully, will develop his or her own unique voice requires – actually demands – one to move out of a comfort zone and explore other creative possibilities, and to come up with new ways of doing things. Sadly, much of today’s 2D also suffers from such a myopic vision that it, too, is totally boring to watch. And the stories – well, that in and of itself is another story!
on 10 Nov 2008 at 9:14 am 5.John Celestri said …
Michael, I’m hoping that you or one of the many visitors to your site will have the answer to a question I’ve had for a while. It ties in with the Grim Natwick Betty Boop drawing you posted and I’ve tried researching this on my own, but with no luck. During what years did the various animation studios shift from using letter size paper (8 1/2 by 11 inches in dimension) to 10 1/2 by 12 1/2 inches and larger? I’m curious because as a traditional 2D pencil and paper animator I found myself having to revert to letter size paper because the expense of buying an oversized scanner is so costly. I draw on paper and scan the artwork into Photoshop, and then import into ToonBoom.
I know that you use letter size paper, but I feel cramped in when I draw.
Thanks.
John
on 10 Nov 2008 at 10:24 am 6.Michael said …
Hi John, Various studios used the paper for varying lengths of time. Fleischer worked on 8½ x 11 paper into the late 30′s. WB worked on it into the 40′s as did Lantz. Disney used 9×12 paper into the mid 30′s about 1935/6. I assume Snow White brought the larger paper. Pegs also varied from studio to studio. Fleischer had their own brand.
on 10 Nov 2008 at 5:04 pm 7.Jenny Lerew said …
Michael, I didn’t see the review link on the NY TImes website, but why does its presence lead you to think that Dreamworks would be paying the Times to link to a review on a major release in its own paper? Sometimes a cigar(link to film review)is just a cigar, and this is one of those times.
I’d be astonished (and also disappointed) if the Times blurred the line between advertising and editorial in other than a clearly paid advert, whether in print or online; I doubt that they have.
If they left a review of the film up for a whopping entire day after it’s appearance in the print edition, I’d assume it’s because it’s a big family film release of a sequel with a very high profile. I’d be unsurprised if, say they had a link to “The Dark Knight” review 24 hours after that film was initially reviewed in its opening week.
on 10 Nov 2008 at 5:26 pm 8.Michael said …
Jenny, I don’t think the newspaper industry works the way you think it does. To get an article in the Times, you have to advertise. The bigger you advertise the bigger the article. It’s like that with all papers and magazines. I got a front page article about me on the NYTimes Weekend section when Woman of the Year took out two full page ads and demanded the article. I did the same of magazines I’ve advertised in, and it always works.
I listened to a big time theatrical producer demand TWO articles for all the ads he’d placed (especially after he’d gotten a negative review.) The Times gave him what he asked for.
It isn’t always this way, but it often is.
For Madagascar 2 to have a review/link on the front page of the NYTimes site for four days, ads were bought, demands were made. Perhaps I’m jaded, but this is what I’ve seen of the marketing business. Money is everything.