Animation &Daily post 22 Aug 2006 08:17 am
Animation Blast
- It was a nice surprise to find a copy of the latest Animation Blast in among the bills yesterday.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Amid Amidi‘s been giving us progress reports for weeks and warning that it should be sent out soon, but, for whatever reason, I wasn’t really expecting it. (Just today, Amid tells us at Cartoon Brew, that 1/4 of the issues have gone out.) When a mag takes as long as this does to develop, you sit back and wait on it. The anticipation is on a low boil, and it makes the arrival so much more enjoyable.
It was the case all those years with Michael Barrier’s Funnyworld. The sheer enjoyment of holding the most recent copy of that publication was enormous. (Unfortunately, disappointment always settled in when you finished reading it, so you’d have to go back and reread earlier issues.)
This is true for Animation Blast. I wasn’t expecting it in the size envelope in which it arrived. The magazine has taken a different dimension. It’s a bit larger than my copy of A Contract With God, and it’s about half as thick.
The contents:
- an article by Pete Doctor on Disney animator, John Sibley;
- an extensive article on Twice Upon A Time (I have a longish story about that one that I’ll save for another day – perhaps after I read this article);
- Jerry Beck‘s article about wartime art by animation artists;
- David Calvo’s article about The Three Caballeros (was this called Three Gay Caballeros once or is it just the song?);
and much more.
The magazine is jam packed with art old and new and has a dynamic modern graphic style all its own.
Go here to see more detail on its contents.
Presently, I’m over the top and have a lot of reading to do. I suggest anyone who hasn’t ordered a copy do it. They’ll go fast. Go here.
– There’s more about the Tom & Jerry anti-smoking story in a number of papers. Apparently, they’re also censoring Scooby Doo’s smoking habits from the H&B cartoons. Here are some of the stories in today’s papers:
- The NYTimes has a short piece.
- ITV has their version
- as does ABC
- Ditto China Daily. (China Daily!)
