Commentary 01 Dec 2007 09:16 am
TV or not TV
- I noticed only one new Network Christmas special this year, Dreamworks’ Shrek the Halls which aired last Wednesday. It’s interesting that I also noticed few blogs talking about it. Animated News reported its airing and positive ratings but not much more than that. Jim Hill also gave it a positive review; the comments were mostly negative. The animation blogs were silent, though. The show did get good reviews, but so did those three movies. I missed the program completely. I went out that night, but truthfully I wouldn’t have ________________Turkey, anyone?
watched it if I were home. I’m not a fan of Shrek.
Will Finn did comment on the Tom & Jerry Nutcracker Tale which aired on Cartoon Network. I saw more of that than I did of Shrek. After coming in on T&J Nutcracker already in progress and after watching a minute of it, wondering, at first, whether it was one of those Gene Deitch cartoons then realizing there was a lot of digital composition and movement, I knew it had to be more recent. I figured out what it was and decided I’d seen enough. By the way, when was the last time T&J were animated in the U.S.? Maybe Chuck Jones?
I did turn on the Charlie Brown Christmas show on ABC this past Tuesday. It took me a full five minutes to realize it wasn’t the original one – I wasn’t really paying attention, but the voices were too theatrical. It was Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales done in 2002. It was too slick, and I lost patience.
Not much “Special” for me anymore in these Christmas Specials. I’m getting to feel like a grinch about animation anymore. At least with dvd we can pull out one of the golden oldies. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, anyone?
- My good friend, the excellent composer and musician, Ernest Troost, has a film he scored premiering on Sunday night. If you’re looking for something enter-taining to watch, this is undoubtedly it.
The Pictures of Hollis Woods is a film adaptation of the Newbury honor book by author, Patricia Reilly Giff, who also coauthored the script. Tony Bill directed the film.
I’ve written about Ernest’s music in the past (see here and here); he and I did quite a bit of film together, and the work was enormously rewarding.
Ernest moved to LA and feature films years ago. He’s won an Emmy and been nominated for several more. We’ve continued to work together on a couple of Weston Woods shorts long distance.
As for me, all you have to do is tell me that Sissy Spacek and Alfre Woodard are together in a film, and I’m there. Ernest is a plus for me. I’m looking forward to the show.
The Pictures of Hollis Woods
Sunday, CBS, 9pm ET/PT
on 01 Dec 2007 at 9:30 am 1.Larry Levine said …
“By the way, when was the last time T&J were animated in the U.S.? Maybe Chuck Jones?”
I think either or both the H-B TV stuff (Jerry with the bow tie) & the Filmation series, both produced in the 70s were animated in the U.S. I’m pretty sure original T&J animator Ken Muse worked on the H-B one.
on 01 Dec 2007 at 10:22 am 2.Michael said …
I’m not sure if the 2005 short, The KarateGuard was animated in the US or not. I know Dave Brewster was credited for animation on it. Certainly, you’re right, the Filmation shows would have been done in the US.
on 01 Dec 2007 at 3:09 pm 3.David said …
“By the way, when was the last time T&J were animated in the U.S.? Maybe Chuck Jones?â€
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The 1992 feature film “Tom & Jerry : The Movie” (clever title, eh?) was animated in Los Angeles at Film Roman with various satellite studios including Baer Animation . A lot of the inbetweening was sent to overseas service studios and all the cel-painting (cels ? what are those?) was sent overseas.
I remember it well, because I animated on it (at Dale Baer’s) and was shocked at the results we got back from the overseas studios … they threw out our rough inbetweens and lip-sync partials and/or didn’t follow the lip-sync indicated on the timing charts . Scenes that looked pretty good in rough were soft and mushy (especially the lip-sync) when they came back in color.
That was my first experience (in theatrical feature animation) with that system, which is now, of course, the standard way it’s done almost everywhere. It’s absolutely bizarre when you work to provide someone with perfectly usable rough inbetweens and then they pull them out and just inbetween everything as straight , mechanical half-way inbetweens. (might as well use a computer inbetween system in that case ) . Also, some animation that was intended to be on Ones had drawings arbitrarily pulled out to put it on Twos to save on the cel count … so who pulled the drawings and did they understand whether they were pulling out extremes or inbetweens ? Urgh…
There was a lot of good (rough) animation done on that movie , but you’d hardly know it from watching the movie (lame story , mediocre songs, and T & J talk !). They even had Irv Spence animating on it , but I’d be hard pressed to pick out his scenes . My great regret on that picture was not getting to meet Irv Spence . (he worked at home and dropped off his stuff at Film Roman)
on 02 Dec 2007 at 11:14 pm 4.Tom Minton said …
Both the Filmation and the Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry TV series were indeed animated in the United States. I don’t know every detail about the Nutcracker Tale DVD but the animation in “The Karate Guard” was largely done in the United States, much of it by Spike Brandt. Tom and Jerry remains a difficult property to get right. Chuck Jones, Gene Deitch and even its creators, Hanna and Barbera, had a tough time approximating the fully animated sheen of the golden age, classic theatrical shorts. Trying to bring it back on a limited budget with overseas crews unfamiliar with its intricacies is usually a doomed proposition from the start. The older a given animation style, the more difficult it tends to be to approximate under modern production conditions.