Expectations are high for this new festival… perhaps mostly because of the closure of the Big Apple Anime Fest some years back.

BAAF just disappearing was a let down, it was so exciting and fun.

Really looking forward to this.

That is ironic.

It’s a trifle early to claim it’s going to be bigger than Otakon, don’t you think?

what’s more ironic is that if Speed Racer came out today you would be complaining about “the end of animation as we know it.” Instead you’ll be waiting on line to get in.

screw otakon, this is NYC, cultural capital of the world

maybe be not this year, but soon, this convention will surpass all other anime conventions in the country

Otakon is very nice, but I’m really interested in what this con has to offer….i just found out about it 2 weeks ago ^_^; If all goes well Saturday, I’m totally going to go back Sunday!

Hope to see ya around the con Jerry!

Corrine Orr kinda looks like Trixie in the photo!

I’m excited about this show!! I too was sad that the Big Apple Anime Fest didn’t last more than 2 shows.

Are there going to be better photos or scans of this piece soon?

wysiwyg unless somebody has better scans.

I love “Stokisaurus”!

Man, I sure do wish Walt was around. I feel that sometimes Disney has lost the essence of what it was created for. I love their movies, that`s for sure. But the heart of it all has sometimes been lost,

“The first girl to make the coveted grade of animator is young and blond Retta Scott!” Hee hee! A lot of this copy reads like a “Girls ‘N’ Giggles” pulp magazine. I wonder if the media sexed up the image of animators in this country, would there be more audience for animation? “Say hello to Ginger, Queen of the Tween! Do we ever wish we could be on her Exposure Sheet! Yowza!”

Good to see ole’ T.Hee there!

Guessing that the happy skeleton was one of Mr. Kimball’s gags.

Just look at those crazy kids! Yeah, it’s true. The Walt Disney Studio was once a fun place to work. Think maybe it could be that way again?

Nah!

Conducive to romance? Walt Kelly’s widow (the late Margaret Selby Kelly) wrote in a 1980s Pogo compilation that when she and Walt were formally introduced to each other, he remembered that she had worked at Disney’s in the early 1940s when he also worked there, and that he had often seen her in the parking lot. And seeing her in the parking lot was ALL he was allowed to do, according to Selby, because at the time Disney had a strict rule forbidding male and female employees from fraternizing with each other, violation of which would result in dismissal.

Of course, Selby’s memory could well have been off, because Ollie Johnston married a Disney ink-and-paint employee in 1943. Or maybe the Nine Old Men had special privileges :)

That’s Joe Grant in the foreground of the photo with T. Hee. That appears to be Frank Thomas sketching at the Zoo ( with Retta Scott?)

Wow… my condolences.
Seven men? More like nine old men.

Let me get this straight… Your life is scarred for 18 years because of a film starring a flash-in-a-pan 1980s actor?

Personally I’ve always wondered how MST3K castmember Bridget Jones felt when “Bridget Jones’ Diary” came out.

Ha, come on, that movie looks pretty goddam awesome. All I’ve got semi-named after me is a golfer, an airport, and a concert venue for New York hipsters. I wish my name was Alexander Pieces or Alexander Manatou or something.

I had no idea you were such a badass.

It looks better than films coming out today. Maybe I’ll rent it!

“I’d go through a door with you anytime” narrowly missed being included on AFI’s top 100 classic movie quotes.

holy shit!! this is awesome! Wow. this looks like a super awesome movie. This trailer is better than any of these crappy new movies coming out. I’d watch this over beowulf, or enchanted or any other contemporary “blockbuster.” These types of movies remind me of cartoons, because they are total exaggeration. Like Cobra or Commando. It’s sad when live action becomes more cartoony than actual cartoons.

I always knew Jerry’s life was more like this. This cartoon thing is obviously a cover.

Too bad, Jerry. Now, we know.

I could tell it was you because of the glasses.

Ha hah! That’s fantastic!
What great B-grade shlock!
Come on, you could’ve worked that as a great pick-up line.
“I’d go through a door with you anytime, Mr Beck”

If they’re not afraid to come through a door with you, then you must be a very thin man.

Oh man. They dont make em like they used to… or this bad anyways… or this vehemently republican.
Dead Bang… sounds like a necrophilia picture…

It could be worse - In one scene in “Demolition Man” Wesley Snipes is going through a list of murderers kept in the cryo-prison. One name on the list was Scott Peterson, at least a decade before the infamous wife-killing fertilizer salesman came to public attention.

I’d go through a door with you anytime, Beck *wink*

Very funny movie. In Argentina it was not released but it went directly to video instead.

So this is what working at the offices of Cartoon Brew is like.

we should make the sequel. also an action movie, but starring you. and call it:

“Trouble Brewing”

I’m Steven Segal, I think I could kick your butt, Jerry Beck.

That reminds me of a Simpsons episode, “Homer to the Max”, where Homer discovers that a character in a tv cop show is also named Homer Simpson. He’s delighted that such a tough cool guy is named after him, until the producers of the cop show decide to change the eponymous cop character into a bumbling fool instead.

Art imitates life sometimes.

Doesn’t anyone notice that John Frankenhiemer directed this? This was back when a action movie like this came out all the time. They all were the same and hardly ever had any real difference between them.
(like now)
No sooner was it out in theaters it was on home video. So you couldn’t tell when one was coming or going.
But I like this one cause it had Tim Reid in it.
“Hey,you look like Woody Allen.”Funny scene.

Jerry, look at the bright side: at least they got Don Johnson to be “you”. Can you imagine the pain if they cast Joe Don Baker instead?

wow… is what you do now just as action-packed?

The same thing happened to Homer Simpson, of course.

I can see why you went into cartoons instead. Must’ve been some hard times back then.

Dead Bang doesn’t really sound like a “lone cop on the loose” movie title… sounds more like a porn movie…. with zombies…

Wow! It’s hard to believe that is from as late as 1989.

Would French Connection be the originator of that genre, or is there an earlier example?

well hell I’d watch it.

“Dead Bang” was supposed to be a big comeback picture for Frankenheimer, until it flopped.

Dude, you get to fight neo-Nazis. There is absolutely nothing cooler than fighting dudes in swastikas.

1989? Really? This trailer seems more like 1985 tops. Man, the ’80s was just one big blur, wasn’t it? ‘Batman’ and ‘Ghostbusters II’ seem more ‘timeless’ (if you wanna call ‘em that) than this!

I remember that one! Not bad actually, in a Burt Reynolds kinda way..

“Jerome Beck”???

Looks like one of those fake trailers inside Tarantino’s “Grindhouse”.
The narrator’s voice is exactly the same in this trailer!

DON JOHNSON AS BRUCE WILLIS IN THE JERRY BECK STORY!

Soundtrack by Whitesnake and Spinderella™

Dude - what a rep you have! Chicks must dig that. It actually looks good to me…guns, guns, guns…

It looks better than films coming out today.

Wait — you know Venus Flytrap?

Are you changing the name of this website to “Dead Bang Brew”? If so, I know a lot of lone cops hell bent on vigilante style justice who are in need of a blog/message board to express their views.

> The same thing happened to Homer Simpson, of course.

Being reminded there was a film named after one of the Simpson directors too (”A Night in the life of Jimmy Reardon”).

Really, you outta create a parody of this trailer to vent your frustrations with the industry and community here!

JERRY: “Is there anyone that’d be afraid to walk off a cliff with me?”
ME: “I’d walk off a cliff with you anytime, Beck!” :-)

Last Action Brewmaster! :-)

And if you thought of the neo-nazis as hollywood producers, you would root for Don Johnson too, and you know it!!

LOL!

Looks like you were one tough dude, Jerry! (j/k)

Seriously, it’s kinda’ hard for me to picture the *real* Jerry Beck in an action film! :)

I dunno if there was any fictional characters named John Cassidy, but on a trip to a comic-book store, I overheard some people talking about a “John Cassidy,” and I thought they were talking about me, when they were actually talking about comic-book artist, John Cassaday!

Yeah, I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I’m not THAT famous yet! :)

Oh, come on, Jerry. At least nobody’s ever seen Dead Bang. Imagine what I’ve been going through the last few years with the name Will Turner and working at Disney on top of it. Just don’t call me “bootstrap!”

I know exactly how you feel Jerry. I used to think that I was the only person in the world named Ron Yavnieli.(in the US at least it’s a very rare last name) Now I know there is at least one more. He lives in Tel-Aviv, is a detective and recently solved a big murder case. And this is real life not an action movie. I bet if they did make a movie of ” Detective Ron Yavnieli” It might star Don Johnson…wouldn’t that be interesting.

Jerry, you’ve got the perfect forum to wreak poetic justice on “Dead Bang”: Cartoon Dump! Just appear as a character named ‘Don Johnson’ and do a live re-enactment of the final shot from John Waters’ “Pink Flamingoes” on stage! Hollywood will never mess with you again, and the audience will get the living crap entertained out of them. Best of all, Wayne Newton would be so jealous.

Yes, names can be cruel. Wouldn’t it be cool if Al Capp had an artist son who went into animation —and his first name was Moe.

I think the fact that the whole trailer resembles an SCTV spoof of tough cop movies is far funnier than the fact they stole Jerry’s name.

Gotta love 80’s action movie titles. I swear, it’s like they used a big Chinese menu.

Column A: Lethal, Hard, Dead, Deadly, Fatal, Striking, etc.
Column B: Vengeance, Weapon, Force, Commando, Distance, etc.

Choose any combo!

I think you’re better off with Don Johnson playing “you” in a crappy cop movie - I have to put up with Peter Gallagher as “me” in a crappy dance movie (Center Stage) — http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0210616/ — and his character page is so lame that in one of his two quotes, he doesn’t even actually say anything; it’s all just stage directions. (Seriously, though, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this movie, since I had no idea in advance about the character name.)

Everybody do the Jerry Dead Bang!Everybody likes the Jerry Dead Bang!…That lovin’ baaaaang!

Hey, could be worse… I have to use my middle initial on all of my identification because there’s a convicted felon in my county with my same name, build, and has a birthday two weeks away from mine :\ And try being six-years-old, overweight, and carrying a last name like ‘Brady’.

How come at the end of the trailer there’s a freeze frame of a 400 pound lady at a microphone?

The only thing I remember about that movie is that “Jerry Beck” gets to sleep with Penelope Ann Miller.
Not something I would complain about…

Heck, I’m actually named AFTER a TV detective- Craig Stephens, who played Peter Gunn. That’s like the 1960’s equivalent of Don Johnson! (At least I got a decent theme song out of it!)

Spock Foolish is onto something — “Dead Bang” is an infamous failure of tuff-tuff-tuff syllables slammed together. And it’s so close to “Die Hard,” too. Reminds me of Mel Brooks’s comment that, in the era of “Rock Hudson” and such invented stud-monikers, they couldn’t use the best one of all: F**k Jones.

But is that 400lbs *really* a lady? =:o

I was being nice.

Geez, Jerry, who new you were such a hard-ass back in the eighties? Ah, they just don’t write romances like this anymore. Actually, at the moment, they don’t write anything anymore! Go, writers!

Don Johnson ended up gaining a paunch, wearing a vest and starring in ‘Nash Bridges’ after ‘Dead Bang.’ At least for Jerry ‘Dead Bang’ isn’t the good old days.

It could have been worse….

They could have ryhmed your named and say oh….
Hairy Back?

Oh, Jerry! So all this cartoon stuff…it’s just a subterfuge! Secrets and lies! Secrets and lies!

lol…

Maybe you should change your name to “Max Power”

Well, at least you’re not bitter about it like Michael Bolton in the movie “Office Space” who had to share a name with “that no-talent ass-clown”.

Aha! Checked out imdb and found Beck wrote the screenplay… some quotes here:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097166/quotes

thank you for posting that, that is hilarious!!

I *did* see this when it came out, not because of Don Johnson, but because the director…the late, great John Frankenheimer…directed two of my favorite movies from the ’60s: “Seconds” and the original “The Manchurian Candidate”!!

And, yes, there is a framed poster on my wall of the Burt Reynolds movie that bears *my* name! :^)

That, and my former Groundlings director Deanna Oliver named a character in an Animaniancs’s Chicken Boo segment she wrote ‘Hooper’!! :^)

The movie was a lot of fun. I was worried about the nature of the humor, but, as you said, it was done with respect and class, and filled with those little jokes that aren’t in your face.

The animation could have been better, yeah, but I still enjoyed that section of the movie, with its happy pretty princess colors and art nouveau-type influence.

I had the pleasure of stopping by James Baxter’s studio twice during the development of the animation in Enchanted. I’m glad the movie sounds like it’s doing well off the bat - what I had seen during its production was a real treat. My biggest congrats to James and his crew for such beautiful animation!

Drat, now I have a gut feeling to WANT to see it! :)

Congrats to them. I do hope all these films push people’s interest in 2D features all the more.

Congratulations to James Baxter and his crew for the fine work in “Enchanted.”

Having said that, it’s still a shame that the world’s premiere animation studio had to “outsource” production on the film. It’s a sad day when Disney animation can’t be done at Disney. Hopefully, that’s changing.

I cautiously believe this, as well as Princess & Frog, will kickstart high-end hand-drawn animation. I think Disney will be impressed, but they’ll never again have more than one movie in full production at once the way they did 8-10 years ago. It’d going to be a continuing “wait-and-see” situation. (Whew… lots of hyphens!)

I hope audiences rediscover hand drawn animation.

Much as I respect & enjoy Pixar’s incredible CGI work, IMO nothing can recreate the beauty & imagination of characters brought to life by a cartoonist’s pencil.

I loved Enchanted. I’m seriously thinking about seeing it a second time.

I had read in several places that the new Goofy short was going to be shown with Enchanted so I was disappointed yesterday when it wasn’t there.

Apparently this film has been in development for 15 years. I think Enchanted could have been a sensation if they had done it before Shrek came out, but after three Shreks it has a bit of a “me too” air to it, especially an item like the chipmunk turd joke which seemed an unecessary venture into dumbness.

As a straight, single guy, I know it is quite… awkward of me that I’m actually EAGER to see a movie about a princess

Well, what are you gonna do, right? ;-)

I can always shield myself by taking my little niece with me.

“but they’ll never again have more than one movie in full production at once the way they did 8-10 years ago.”

That might not be so bad. It was when they started to make too much at once that the perceived “specialness” of each film started to go down.

“Much as I respect & enjoy Pixar’s incredible CGI work, IMO nothing can recreate the beauty & imagination of characters brought to life by a cartoonist’s pencil.”

Fortunately the Pixar guys never wanted to see hand-drawn die out either. Sure they were (and are) making their CGI films but it was never *their* intent to destroy hand-drawn.

I hope this inspires more hand drawn animation too. With all the effects and techniques 2d can be as beautiful as any 3d creation. If you look at a 3d pipeline its hard to believe any art comes out after all that math and typing, sure you get digital eyelashs or something ridiculous like that but the passion, art, vision and magic are lost. viva la 2d!

and check out the enchanted music video, they animate carrie underwood for the first and last parts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nRGC720Qak&feature=bz303

The Goofy short has been moved to the front of the new “National Treasure” movie to spread awareness of the new Disney short program beyond the animation community, who they believe would go see Enchanted anyway. This way, now that group will also go see “National Treasure”

Congratulations to all the Enchanted team. The animation does look beautiful.

I wonder that someone yet hasn’t done an interview with Kevin Lima and Brenda Chapman-Lima as a husband/wife team of directors?
Brenda was head of story on Lion King and co-director of Prince of Egypt and is developing a feature at PIXAR. Kevin co-directed Tarzan, then did 102 Dalmations and now Enchanted.

I sure hope it does!

“Fortunately the Pixar guys never wanted to see hand-drawn die out either. Sure they were (and are) making their CGI films but it was never *their* intent to destroy hand-drawn.”

No question that John Lasseter & Brad Bird have oftened expressed their love for hand-drawn animation, if I remember correctly Bird originally wanted to make The Incredibles traditionally.

But the fact is hand drawn animation is on life support & much as it needs great talents like Eric Goldberg with pencil in hand–it also needs GREAT SCRIPTS to survive (Treasure Planet anyone??).

That comprehensive list forgot to mention that when Edward changes the tv station and you can’t see what’s on tv, you can hear “Pink Elephants On Parade” playing.

I don’t know why I hoped that maybe, just maybe, people would refrain from beating the “2D is back” drum if this movie did well in it’s first week. I should have known better; the same knees started jerking this summer when “The Simpsons” had a great opening weekend. Didn’t seem to matter to anyone that Simpsons was a pre-sold property, just like it doesn’t seem to matter that there is a long live-action movie in the middle of those brief 2D bookends.

No one would love to see a 2D resurgence more than me, but it’s a bit of a reach to think that this movie doing well means anything of significance for the future of 2D. Me, I’ll wait and see how “Princess and the Frog” does before I start thumping that drumhead.

And some of you need to repeat after me: “It’s not 3D’s fault, it’s not 3D’s fault…” You know who you are…

I think Disney were smart to put the animation into the hands of one of Disney’s top animation talents (even though he’s not there anymore)!! James, and his crew, have lovingly given this show all they have and does justice to the great 2d films of the past!

I hate to say it, but there’s still an attitude (even at Disney) that 2-D animation has to “prove itself.”

Can you imagine any live-action producer with that attitude? That live-action film making has to show that its viable?

Disney should focus on making good films –not whether these films can find a market. Success comes from doing your job well, not about “streamlining” the process.

Back when I started seeing the trailer for “Enchanted”, I must admit I was expecting something more in the cynical, irreverent “Shrek” vein, and I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy the result. Having just returned from seeing it today, I’m overjoyed to say that the film itself is so much better than the trailer had me believe. In fact, I am overcome at the sheer wonderfulness of “Enchanted”! Amy Adams was just note-perfect as a real live equivalent to the animated Disney princess of yore, and James Marsden was great too, even if he seemed to be the butt of the joke quite often. It is indeed a triumphant return of Disney traditional animation in the bookend sequences of the film. Looks like the whole team behind this film provided the necessary “True Love’s Kiss” to awaken this “Sleeping Beauty” of an art form. My thanks to all involved in the making of “Enchanted” - you’ve done Disney proud!

Yeah looks really clever. Its about time Disney 2d features loosened up a bit. I hope there is a resuragnce in 2d features. Our studio, The People’s Republic Of Animation are in the midst of developing one entire 2d feature (with no cg at all), all animated in the new photoshop. I think the world of cg features needs 2d features to ‘keep them honest’

“But the fact is hand drawn animation is on life support & much as it needs great talents like Eric Goldberg with pencil in hand–it also needs GREAT SCRIPTS to survive (Treasure Planet anyone??).”

Right.

Larry, I know you may have not meant it that way, but I’m tired of hearing that particular drum beat , too .

Everyone : live-action, stop-motion, hand-drawn and CG needs great scripts to survive too . (Bee Movie anyone ? , Happily Never After anyone ? The Ant Bully anyone ?, The Barnyard anyone? , Robots anyone ? can I stop now ? )

What traditional hand-drawn animation mostly needs to survive right now is (true) great scripts , and also let’s get out from under this “2D is on life support” doom-and-gloom negative thinking . One of the guys who pontificated that “2D is Dead” wants to make a Bazooka Joe movie now . Right . So what ? Animation survives. Animation goes on . Tell Marjane Satrapi that 2D is on “life-support” . Tell Sylvain Chomet that 2D is on life-support.
Tell it to Miyazaki-San .

To end on a completely positive note: congratulations to James Baxter and Crew to a wonderful job on the hand-drawn animation in Enchanted . And congrats too for director Kevin Lima .

“Having said that, it’s still a shame that the world’s premiere animation studio had to “outsource” production on the film. It’s a sad day when Disney animation can’t be done at Disney.”

Well, since most of your outsourcing animators here were Disney alumni, and most moviegoers don’t know about the outsourcing, I’d call this particular instance a win.

I saw it. I liked it a lot, except I could have done without that one shot of the CG chipmunk projectile-pooping. That just threw a big brick wall up in front of the story…

One more thing. I don’t believe this will “kick-start” hand drawn animation. Why?

MONEY.

CG films are faster and cheaper to make. Sorry. it’s the simple truth.

Saw the film tonight with my entire family and we had a great time. Well, my 3 year-old son had a hard time staying still, but that’s to be expected. Anyway, I thought that the animation was great. (Why do you think that the animation “could’ve been better”, purin??? That’s a strange thing to say, what with James Baxter & Co. doing some incredible work…) The art direction for the animated segments was colorful, rich and fluid. Some wonderful stuff. Love the art nouveau look as well.

And the only wrinkle for me was the chipmunk dropping a pellet, too. Seemed a little off to me. (My daughter thought it was funny, so I guess that’s why it’s in there.)

Great job, guys. I’m impressed.

“But the fact is hand drawn animation is on life support & much as it needs great talents like Eric Goldberg with pencil in hand–it also needs GREAT SCRIPTS to survive (Treasure Planet anyone??).”

Hey, I liked TREASURE PLANET! It’s problem was just that it was 5 years ahead of the sub-cultural curve that would have really appreciated it. (which puts it about 7 years ahead of when it might have been really profitable) Yeah the story was ho-hum, but so is ANY story about a princess finding true love… It’s not what you have, but what you do with it. Filmmaking in general, and animation especially, is a visual medium and requires visual storytelling. The unfortunate wildcard is public taste.

I think TREASURE PLANET is a fantastic movie whose praises are unsung because Newsweek didn’t start writing articles about Steampunk until 2006. I can think of a few other masterpieces that went unrecognized at the time *cough*FANTASIA*cough*… It just takes culture a while to catch up to some things. In the North American case, despite three decades of anime, animation that isn’t fairy tales and cute animals.

That’s also why I’m not surprized that ENCHANTED is doing well, but I am a little worried about THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG. I know I’m going to see it moreso because of the 1920’s New Orleans setting than the fairy tale aspect, (love Disney-era fairy tales, don’t care about Eisner-era fairy tales) but I worry that this setting will put it in the same class as the late Eisner “experimental” films like TREASURE PLANET, ATLANTIS, POCAHONTAS, BROTHER BEAR and HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME that don’t seem to be on most people’s list of memorable classics… I hope I’m wrong, but people might not “get” it the way they’ll “get” ENCHANTED and RAPUNZEL.

Why is it every post on the brew becomes a debate where everyone agrees but continue to bicker as if they dont? And why is it always the 2d vs CG debate?

I saw this today with some friends. It was pretty great. Funny. It reminded me alot of Hocus Pocus. And the music was pretty.
Definitely worth the price of admission.
My favorite bit was how the CG chipmunk pantomimed his story to the Prince. One of those rare times where a photorealistic CG animal actual looks cute and alive.
Really wonderful musical film.

Disney needs to go back to it’s roots & give audiences great CHARACTERS that we can care about & believe are real–not flat caricatures with recognizable celebrity voices.

What made a hand drawn feature like Lilo & Stitch so enjoyable is that it was the vision of Chris Sanders, not a studio commitee (as the old expression goes “a camel is a horse put together by a commitee). Imagine if Chuck Jones had listened to Eddie Seltzer’s suggestions .

Make ‘em fun again & audiences will go see it!

Ward… I’m not exactly sure. I admit I’m not knowledgeable enough to be able to go on for pages about good and bad animation, what makes bad design, etc. I’m just a viewer and a fan. It was really more of a feeling I got that something was “off” somehow, that it wasn’t all it could be. It still looked really good in motion and I loved the colors and art direction (except maybe I would have tweaked the character designs a touch)… Maybe, after picking up the general tone of animation blogs, I was expecting everyone to be negative and wanted to go along with it. I am ashamed.

Speaking of such, I am dying to see some production and concept art! When and where will it ever show up (oh “coming soon” birds, how you mock me!)?

Oh, yeah! I forgot about when Pip dropped a peanut. That definitely was not classy one bit. It was quite the mood killer, in fact. Tsk tsk.

“CG films are faster and cheaper to make. Sorry. it’s the simple truth.”

Not simple and I’m not convinced it’s true .

I join my Kudos and Accolades to those echoed throughout this thread. “Enchanted” is throughly and proudly “Walt’s” down to the tiniest details. It’s traditional in so many ways: traditional family, traditional marriage values, traditional idealism rediscovered, traditional musical making and, of course, traditional animation.

And by “traditional animation” I mean that the creators use each available style of animation appropriately as it fits the story telling and to the best of each one’s ability. Hand drawn pencil to paper sweat and blood animation is beautifully captured with passion clearly visible in each frame. Graphed, modeled, en-fured and iridescently scaled animation is done perfectly according to the realistic and/or caricatured intent of the movie crafters. Special effects and computer generated environments draw (yes, draw) the viewer deeper into the experience and fantasy.

This movie has it all and every art serves the final product well. Again, thanks for showing us how its supposed to be done. Here’s to doing it now again and again and again . . . and I don’t necessarily mean in sequels.

Interesting to see all the good words this film has been getting, considering how much the trailer made me cringe. Now if only that Goofy short was part of it’s screening this would be a dead cert for going to see at the cinema when we eventually get it in the UK for me, as I need an excuse to go see a princess movie..

“Well, since most of your outsourcing animators here were Disney alumni, and most moviegoers don’t know about the outsourcing, I’d call this particular instance a win.”

We agree, but you’re missing my point. The animation was done outside Disney. Would Walt think that was a cool idea?

The Goofy short has been moved to National Treasure 2?

That’s just great, now I have less reason too see Enchanted, and might as well skip it, and there’s no way I’m paying to a ticket for National Treasure just to see a goofy short.

My entire family loved Enchanted. I have never been this delighted by a Disney release since Roger Rabbit. At the time, Roger Rabbit signaled a new age for animation, cartoon characters, and maybe Disney itself. Unfortunately, things became, umm, “complicated” at Disney and nothing ever came of the film’s success, though its impact was felt in many ways.

That said, Roger Rabbit was a dark film with a hard, cynical edge — a quality that worked in the film, but perhaps not so well in films that followed. In seems that dark, bitter, sarcastic, cynical attitudes have affected many, though not all, 2D and CG films over the past several years. Even Shrek seemed to be a reaction to disillusionment with the whole fairy tale thing that was becoming institutional and commercial rather than inspired.

Then along comes Enchanted — with a true Disney fan and animation veteran at the helm. It breaks all the rules of modern filmmaking — it’s a happy, positive, celebration of Disney joy, and it means it!

I have seen so many spoofs of fairy tales, from Saturday Night Live sketches and the goofball sitcom “The Charmings” to Shrek and Ella Enchanted (which fell victim to the Shrek route) — and I can really appreciate how astonishing Amy Adams’ performance is. She never becomes a one-note joke, never a bubbleheaded, blank-eyed ditz. It is amazing and a marvel to see her character evolve, all the while getting every movement, every expression, every nuance, absolutely spot-on as a genuine Disney princess.

Whether this ushers in a 2D rennaissance is anyone’s guess. But I hope it ushers in an era in which Disney embraces the strengths, heritage and emotional ties with the public that seemed to be an “un-cool” embarrassment in the not-too-distant past.

As to the post about whether Enchanted might have been made a few years earlier, it must be noted that the script has been in development for at least a decade. At one point the script was much darker and less wholesome (apparently Giselle was supposed to pop out of a cake at a Bachelor party when she entered the real world, and the party guests were to assume she was a stripper). An Enchanted made a few years ago, when Disney was a very different Disney than it is even now, would have been perhaps more of a Pretty Woman type film.

Best of all, even Pete Emslie likes it! Way to go, Pete!

When Disney is allowed to be true to itself, and not what bone-headed executives want it to be, they’ll succeed.

I hope they’ve learned their lesson this time around.

My wife, nephew and my sister and I saw it today! It’s a great, cute and funny film. We loved it! Beautiful work 2D, 3D and the live action mix was outstanding! If they make a sequel I might just check that out.

Just saw it with the family and all loved it…though, oddly enough, my 13 year-old daughter liked it least. She is 13 , after all.

THE best thing of the move was Amy Adams. Head and shoulders above all else. She made an impossible and easily screwed part sing and made the whole film work. She should be nominated.I don’t know if I could’ve sat through this without Amy Adams.

Baxter’s animation was excellent and worked wonderfully. But that’s no real surprise…is it?

Least favorite part of the film?…Susan Sarandon. If only they could’ve removed half her dialogue (and mugging) - and all of her dialogue once she turned into the dragon. I thought she’d never shut-up and stopping explaining the movie’s obvious plot points.
But in spite of Sarandon and the obvious drastic cuts that were made to keep the length down they have a solid crowd pleaser. James Marsden was also teetering on the edge of not working, but he was close enough.
There was plenty of applause from the matinee I attended. Kudos to all involved. It all came together splendidly and should have good legs.

“Would Walt think that was a cool idea?”

Walt’s dead. Has been for quite some time. The sooner Disney stop with the “What Would Walt Do” Mantra for animation the sooner they’ll start making good films again. Of course there are still a lot of other things that need fixing but that’s just one of the backwards thinking mindsets that needs to be swept away.

“The sooner Disney stop with the “What Would Walt Do” Mantra for animation the sooner they’ll start making good films again.”

Perhaps, but that wasn’t Floyd’s point. He was talking about outsourcing, not story decisions, filmmaking, or anything else.

“Walt’s dead. Has been for quite some time.”

so is william shakespeare. No harm in honouring innovative thinkers.

You know who is just like walt? Nobody. He started the place, and it carries HIS name as a brand, what’s wrong with following his vision? (unfortunately for us, to joe punch clock it also means “animation” but that’s another battle.)

Mr. Norman was making amazing contributions when Walt running the place, so when he invokes his name it means something…back when Disney was real magic.

The disney brand is built on nostalgia; Walt made films about old fashioned values; we have enough “in yo’ face new school thinking” we don’t need it from the mouse.
It would be nice to go back to the past. Now that we’re here,”tommorrowland” sucks.
Fairytales sound pretty good right now.

“The sooner Disney stop with the “What Would Walt Do” Mantra for animation the sooner they’ll start making good films again. ”

They did back in the 80’s, but for the past decade, they strayed too far from their roots and began dismantling their own heritage (making sequels for the sake of it, not letting animators control their own projects, etc.), which they’re now recovering from.

What Disney needs to continue prospering is to move forward (like Meet the Robinsons taught us), but stay true to itself (like Enchanted is teaching us).

Great movie. I’m going to have to buy this when it comes out. Also the 2D animation was amazing!

Interesting to see all the good words this film has been getting, considering how much the trailer made me cringe. Now if only that Goofy short was part of it’s screening this would be a dead cert for going to see at the cinema when we eventually get it in the UK for me, as I need an excuse to go see a princess movie..

It was great to see that caliber of 2D on the big screen again, I would pay full price to watch just those. Beautiful work!

I completely agree (with Mr. Pontillas)! I thought it was really fun and the animation was GREAT. In fact, I wish Disney would just make a 2-D picture that looked like that! With everyone spoofing the “Disney/Fairy Tale” genre, Disney should just go the opposite direction and make a incredibly beautiful, insanely lush saccharine sweet fairy tale musical stripped of all anachronism and irony. Disney’s biggest problem is their attempts to be cool, hip and modern (adding extreme sports references to “Tarzan” and “Treasure Planet”, old disco songs to “Chicken Little”, sports to “Hercules”, etc.)– it’s like when your parents try to use slang that’s six years old. I’m not saying every movie should be that way, just every once and a while do what you do best and give all those little girls out there another princess fantasy.

- Matt Sullivan says:
- One more thing. I don’t believe this will “kick-start” hand drawn
- animation. Why?MONEY. CG films are faster and cheaper to make.
- Sorry. it’s the simple truth.

Ahahahahahahaha! You’re kidding right? Most of the 2D features made took less time, less money and smaller crews than almost all of the 3D productions going on now.

For those who are interested, I just wanted to share a link to the blog of story artist, Troy Quane, who worked on the film. Hes sharing some great concepts and various dev work from the film.

http://troyquane.blogspot.com/

Steve, CG IS faster. If hand drawn were faster you woul;d have seen more films per year. Recent;y, there have been DOZENS of cg films…whereas it took certain studios upwards of 4 years to produce a hand drawn feature.

“certain studios upwards of 4 years to produce a hand drawn feature”

It takes up to 4 years because hand drawn features go thru committees until all creative juice is sucked out of them. What traditional animation needs to suvive is to bring back the unit system. Let the director set up his/her own team of animators, writers, layout artists, etc & create art, not slick over-blown productions wrongly second guessing what audiences want to see.

CG isn’t any faster than 2D. It still takes about the same amount of time from concept to release for a top-level CG feature, and costs about the same as a 2D film (back when 2D features were still being made, that is.) The time and money get spent differently in a CG film, but they’re still spent.

I enjoyed this movie, more than I thought I would. It was carried by a strong script and a great performance by Amy Adams.

But the film’s success should not be mistaken as another renaissance for hand-drawn animation. The animation itself was a workmanlike parody of much greater works.

More tellingly: in the movie, “true love” is found in the real world. The losers move back to the cartoon world. The moral of this story doesn’t bode well for future animation works.

“More tellingly: in the movie, “true love” is found in the real world. The losers move back to the cartoon world. The moral of this story doesn’t bode well for future animation works.”

Sounds like someone’s taking things too literally~ I’m pretty sure the moral was more about how true love can exist outside fairy tales more than anything else. Also, they may live in different worlds, but the two couples consist of a ‘real’ person and a ‘cartoon’ person, so there isn’t really any separatism as you think.

Anyway, as a 17-year-old Disney fangirl I rather enjoyed the film! It was certainly a lot better than expected. However, I’m not sure if it will spark a renaissance of 2D animation in theaters, and I’m not sure if that’s even a good thing. Honestly, I would prefer just one REALLY good 2D animated film released only every three years over a dozen mediocre ones released every six months.

What the success of ENCHANTED tells us is that the public will embrace any form of animation as long as the quality’s there and the story is strong. It was short sided producers who prematurely read hand drawn animation it’s last rights……but hopefully, they will see that the world of animation is big enough for 2D and 3D. There have been PLENTY of rotten 3D films that failed to dispell the myth that people will only accept 3D. Hopefully, ENCHANTED will be a step in the right direction. Kevin and James are to be congratulated on a great job!! The Goofy short would have fit right in with this. It really feels ‘classic’ and retro without feeling ‘old fashioned.’ Maybe it’ll be on the DVD release. In the meantime, I say, “Draw it…and they will come.”

“What the success of ENCHANTED tells us is that the public will embrace any form of animation as long as the quality’s there and the story is strong.”
No, it doesn’t. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone outside the industry who went to see “Enchanted” because of the animated bits. The bulk of the public went to see a family movie, or McDreamy on the big screen, or whatever, but they went to a LIVE ACTION MOVIE with animated segments, not an animated movie.

I happen to agree that a well-made animated film is the key to attracting audiences, regardless of how many D’s it possesses, but the success of this film doesn’t do anything to prove that point.

I agree that most people didn’t go to the movie for the animation…but the fact that the 2D was so successful I think audiences have responded favorably to the ‘traditional’ look of the animation and it might wet their appetite for more quality 2D, that’s all I meant.

I don’t know. From what I’ve been reading, the animated part had a big effect on people, not necessarily because they were animation fans waiting for Disney to get back in the game, but because they grew up with “classic” Disney, and the animated part served as a good reminder of something Disney hasn’t done in a long time. In those 15 minutes adults who grew up with the second golden age saw something they hadn’t in years, something they’d only seen shallower reminders of in Disney Princess merchandise. I think the demand for what Disney has been known to do best will increase because of that.

I don’t even think audiences know what they are looking at in the first place. I had someone refer to “Ratatouille” as ‘hand drawn’ the other day, when I told them it wasn’t, they said “What’s the difference?”

Does any of this really matter? Does anyone think if 2-D “re-emerged” that the movies will be any better than they were? Disney’s “return” to 2-D has already been announced and what is it? A fairy tale musical with songs by Randy Newman. Yeah, that sounds sooo different than the stuff people got tired of before. And the average 3-D movie that comes out is pretty unspectacular.

Disney’s “return” to 2-D has already been announced and what is it? A fairy tale musical with songs by Randy Newman. Yeah, that sounds sooo different than the stuff people got tired of before.

No, it was the fairy tale musicals with songs by Phil Collins that people were tired of before. A completely different thing.

I hardly see anyone say it but I really felt the Disney musicals got derailed after Howard Ashman died. It seemed like he was the magic element of good taste that no amount of executive management or focus group testing could duplicate.

Alas! Alas!! Tonite I went!!

And as 54 year old….i laffed thoughout…i cried throughout!! I haven’t been that enthralled in a film since “Sound of Music” and/or “Jurrassic!”

Just so so SO superb!! In every angle & aspect!

C. Edwards said: “I don’t even think audiences know what they are looking at in the first place. I had someone refer to “Ratatouille” as ‘hand drawn’ the other day, when I told them it wasn’t, they said “What’s the difference?”
Does any of this really matter? Does anyone think if 2-D “re-emerged” that the movies will be any better than they were?”

I’ve no doubt that there are some poor souls who are clueless about the difference between CG and traditional animation. But I think the majority of filmgoers recognize the two media as being different, whether or not they have a preference for one over the other. However, in answer to your question - yes it DOES matter. As wonderful as Pixar’s films have been in recent years, there are many of us who still prefer to watch the magic of a hand-drawn cartoon image seemingly spring to life on the big screen. That is what inspired me and all of my friends of a similar age to pursue either animation or, in my case, print cartooning as a career.

The bottom line is that there are many of us who love to watch characters emote in an expressive, fully animated fashion, and drawn cartoons satisfy that urge for us more than CG. It has nothing to do with how well done or not the CG is, but rather, that we just aesthetically prefer an animated DRAWING. The two media should be able to peacefully co-exist alongside each other, as people like John Lasseter and Brad Bird have always understood and agreed with. The problem is the idiot studio execs who feel that CG is superior to drawn animation for the simple, misguided reason that the former more closely follows the conventions of live-action filmmaking than the latter. They’ve never been able to come to terms with the fact that many animation fans have a decided preference for the magic that is inherent in a drawn cartoon with that “Illusion of Life”. Yes, there is a difference!!! Hopefully, the success of “Enchanted” will prove that Disney traditional animation still has a huge following that will remain ever-faithful to that craft.

I’d much rather watch a Pixar CGI film than a modern Disney hand drawn film, and I HATE CGI.

Well, of course there’s a difference to us.

The real bottom line is that there aren’t enough of us to change anything with just “love”.

“The real bottom line is that there aren’t enough of us to change anything with just “love”.”

I believe there are. And we’re now voting through the box-office receipts of “Enchanted”. I also predict that vote will be reinforced on the opening weekend of “The Princess and the Frog” as well.

Okay. “Enchanted” will change our traditionally animated lives and the next fairy tale musical will rock our existences to the core. Sure, whatever you say. I give in.

I’m going to go sit in that other part of the room where people don’t expect multi-million dollar studios and fickle audiences to make my life better.

I’ve read the posts here with great fascination, and what I got was, “Walt is gone BUT we need to honor his philosophy”, “2d may come back BUT does it matter?”, “hats off to the team that created Enchanted BUT they were outsourced BUT it was still a victory BUT it won’t bring back 2D BUT it might….”
On CG talk, the same arguments rear their ugly head. But inbetween the balanced realists lay the block-headed 3D zealots, who think that 2D can never come back in the face of the superior 3D. What’s with all the animation Nazis? But they do have a point. A well-designed, 3D character model can be animated well by someone who doesn’t know how to draw. And the model will have it’s visual consistency (even if that visual sucks) no matter who animates it. Motion capture will eventually be cheap, all technology drops in price eventually. What this amounts to is cheaper, repurposeful animation. A real bargain!
That, to me, means that REAL animators will be more precious than ever. It’s an exercise in contrasts. It’s not
Traditional animation, beautiful, compelling, and inspirational, fell dead because it cost more than it could make. The true murderer of 2D animation was the The Lion King. With that behemoth, I imagine a lot of raises were passed out - even though it’s popularity may have been a fluke. I don’t think 3D is to blame for that. Now, with the same haughtiness that got us here, we sing praises of the second coming of 2D while forgetting that subtle point of the past. Hollywood is a business, the business of entertainment. And while the pawns argue down below, the chessmasters continue to move the pieces where the money is. I mean - shall I mention “Hoodwinked”? It cost about 23 million and it made 60 but they sacrificed their reputation, too. If any one of the commentators here is willing to die of starvation to make a “good” 2D film - well, then - make it. Part of balancing a professional artistic life is making the best possible vision while still eating and maintaining the good life your inherently picky tastes demand.
Bottom line: Moviegoers just want to escape, and their inherent tastes are just fine with whatever they see and are rarely disappointed. Producers want to make money. Artists want to see good work and are passionate about it. The three worlds must always be reconciled to one another - and this site largely represents only one of those worlds. It’s not only but also.

I’ve read the posts here with great fascination, and what I got was, “Walt is gone BUT we need to honor his philosophy”, “2d may come back BUT does it matter?”, “hats off to the team that created Enchanted BUT they were outsourced BUT it was still a victory BUT it won’t bring back 2D BUT it might….”
On CG talk, the same arguments rear their ugly head. But inbetween the balanced realists lay the block-headed 3D zealots, who think that 2D can never come back in the face of the superior 3D. What’s with all the animation Nazis? But they do have a point. A well-designed, 3D character model can be animated well by someone who doesn’t know how to draw. And the model will have it’s visual consistency (even if that visual sucks) no matter who animates it. Motion capture will eventually be cheap, all technology drops in price eventually. What this amounts to is cheaper, repurposeful animation. A real bargain!
That, to me, means that REAL animators will be more precious than ever. It’s an exercise in contrasts.
Traditional animation, beautiful, compelling, and inspirational, fell dead because it cost more than it could make. The true murderer of 2D animation was the The Lion King. With that behemoth, I imagine a lot of raises were passed out - even though it’s popularity may have been a fluke. I don’t think 3D is to blame for that. Now, with the same haughtiness that got us here, we sing praises of the second coming of 2D while forgetting that subtle point of the past. Hollywood is a business, the business of entertainment. And while the pawns argue down below, the chessmasters continue to move the pieces where the money is. I mean - shall I mention “Hoodwinked”? It cost about 23 million and it made 60 but they sacrificed their reputation, too. If any one of the commentators here is willing to die of starvation to make a “good” 2D film - well, then - make it. Part of balancing a professional artistic life is making the best possible vision while still eating and maintaining the good life your inherently picky tastes demand.
Bottom line: Moviegoers just want to escape, and their inherent tastes are just fine with whatever they see and are rarely disappointed. Producers want to make money. Artists want to see good work and are passionate about it. The three worlds must always be reconciled to one another - and this site largely represents only one of those worlds. It’s not only but also.

Is that old woman to suppose to be like the evil witch in SNOW WHITE ? If she is, her design looks extremely bland compared to the original counterpart.

Hooray for real quality in the 2D animation in Enchanted. Humor executed visually. Wow! What a concept. Three cheers for James Baxter and his crew.

Wow, what a cool idea. What life was like before the multiplex.

Best news I’ve heard all day. :)

I *LOVED* this show when I was growing up! I watched it every Sunday and I still tell people about it. Between this and the TV Ontario weekday evening show Magic Shadows, I got my fill of feature films, as well as serials, cartoons and musical numbers.

God, I remember watching MATINEE AT THE BIJOU on PBS in the early 80s when I was a kid! So it’s not dead after all. Thanks for sharing this, Jerry!

Boy, what a day of retro goodness for me! KTLA happens to be running a marathon of past tv gems, so this morning brought Uncle Waldo’s Cartoon Show, Underdog, Popeye, & Our Gang/Little Rascals. This seems further proof that with each passing decade, quality entertainment is becoming more of a rarity.

Hey thanks for the info!

Haha, my mom is Debbie Reynolds, not that one though.

“Boy, what a day of retro goodness for me! KTLA happens to be running a marathon of past tv gems, so this morning brought Uncle Waldo’s Cartoon Show, Underdog, Popeye, & Our Gang/Little Rascals. This seems further proof that with each passing decade, quality entertainment is becoming more of a rarity.”

I heard about it too late! Dang it!!

I loved this show as a kid…I’m glad it’s back.

Cool- I saw a great many magnificent movies on this show…

…not to mention a crapload of the Black and White Looney Tunes as I was growing up….

This is really exciting!! I loved this show on PBS in the early 80’s on Saturday mornings! I remember the features being cut to about 45 minutes….but the shorts were so amazing!!! It was because of this show I started collecting 16mm films….and I was able to get quite a few of the shorts that were shown on Matinee at the Bijou. My collection needs a zip code of it’s own now, but I can’t wait for these new episoded to air. Debbie Reynolds is the perfect hostess for this too. Yippee Aye O!!

ah man! can’t imagine this exhibit is gonna travel as far as Dublin!!!

It’s all a scam, Mr. O’Flanagan, to get you to travel to northern California.

WHAT! I lived in Redding all my life and have never heard of anything like this… I am more excited than I ever have in all of my days of being a student animator.

Why can’t they bring this stuff up to Seattle. California gets all the breaks, and I’m not just talking about earthquakes.

I got pictures of this Exhibit! I got them posted here

http://coryag.animationblogspot.com/

Nice drawing there. Happy Thanksgiving too!

Also, I bet some others who visit this place saw it too, and I must say that watching Cartoon Network’s float (Foster’s Home characters singing Queen’s ‘You’re My Best Friend’) was disturbing. I wonder if Brian May had a say in this…he’s kind of busy though - he’s the chancellor at a major university in Liverpool!

Feliz Día de Acción de Gracias, my gringo brewers ;-)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwS6y7UC88g

The Foster’s float would have re-enacted the Kennedy assassination on its 44th anniversary but they probably couldn’t get it to look enough like Flash.

“The yams did it !! The yams ! The yams did it….!!!”

Happy Thanksgiving Jerry and Amid and all the ships at sea.

Happy American Thanksgiving, from north of the 49th! Don’t get yourselves killed on Black Friday!

“He’s in there! He’s in there! He’s in there! He’s in there! He’s in there!…”

Cheers, everybody!

Sorry this has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, I just noticed that new “BUMPER BLASTOFF” banner ad at the top of the page.

It advertises work from “EIGHT CONTINENTS!” …have new land masses been discovered that I’m not aware of? :)

Hey RR, I suppose the man-made Great Pacific Garbage Patch might count as a new continent :-(

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL

Sorry for the un-holidayness of my comment, but maybe some creative guy reading this thread might some day choose to make a short or movie about it. An artist has to be aware of the world around him… and the garbage is becoming a VERY BIG part of that world.

Oh, those yams! Those backgrounds!

Tom Turk and Daffy was one of my favorite holiday traditions but I haven’t had a copy for years. Just in case someone working on volume 6 of the DVDs is reading this.

“Porky in Wackyland”

dibs!

haha we’ll see! if i get the apartment i want, i just might do it!

Wow, that looks amazing!

Ken Jennings (King of Jeopardy!) is doing something similar in his daughter Caitlin’s room - he’s painting an alphabet mural with each letter representing a cartoon or children’s book character, and the renderings he’s doing are top notch. (What can this man not do?) Check it out at www.ken-jennings.com.

I’ve always thought that “A Dream Walking” would make a great mural, with Popeye, Bluto and Olive appearing multiple times across the backdrop that starts at Olive’s house and moves around the walls to the construction site, finishing back at the house again.

Actually, I wouldn’t mind a “chuck jones bedroom” in the style of his Pepe Le Pew cartoons…very pink, very stylized Paris…very cute!

What a beautiful, awe-inspiring job, Joey—not only incredibly professional in style, but a subject matter dear to my heart. I love the fact that even on the arena poster, Beppo is still drooling. In just a few weeks, you might feel like painting the next room over with an Oswald mural…

“Knock-knock…Mr. Ellis? It’s Disney Legal. We’d like to have a word with you…”

I tell ya, I just came from a stay at a hotel with various-themed “fantasy rooms.” Didn’t stay in one of those, but as they were being cleaned, I could see: a “Flintstones” fantasy room with nothing more than mortared boulders painted on the wall, and a “Scooby-Doo” fantasy room with attempts at the main characters painted on the walls, plus many other incongruous characters, like the same barely recognizable Garfield that junior high bands have designed for their T-shirts for 30 years now. Worse yet, the hallway had ultravioet blacklights to show off more amateur paintings of Disney and Hanna-Barbera characters, plus, because it was near Great America, an attempted recreation of the promenade line from the “Bugs Bunny Show” opening.

It’s such a pleasure to see cartoon characters painted on walls by someone who knows what he’s doing.

“Porky in Wackyland”? Way too scary for a kid’s room! (Would YOU like to live in Wackyland?) Might as well do “Bimbo’s Initiation”!

This looks really spectacular. I like the 3D effects with the safe, the house, the piano and the car. They really jump out at you. On top of that, it’s very well drawn.

Keep it up and some billionaire will pay to buy these walls for his or her own collection, in forty years.

tres cool! :)

I’m with Rod Bennett–better save Wackyland(much as I love it)for your own living room, Jerry!

Mickey & Co of the early 30s are perfect for small kids. I greatly envy the little recipients-what they’ll remember in 30 years. Lovely job.

Thanks everyone! Everyone who sees it asks me “Does your son like Mickey Mouse?” and I say “Who cares?”.

See, THIS is why I cannot wait to own my own home. Themed murals - one in each room. Wackyland, maybe Disney’s Music Lands, What’s Opera Doc (for the Maurice Noble luv), Koko singing St James Infirmary Blues (the backgrounds would be a killer but how awesome would THAT be?)… or for those who don’t like backgrounds, a Chuck Amuck one :)

And I don’t even intend to have kids!

He should paint the craddle white. You know, to blend in with the background ;-)

Is a big, drooling gorilla named “Kongo Killer” a good choice to show a small child?…

…Looks magnificent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some legal dipshit at the Mouse House shows up on the guy’s doorstep with a C&D order demanding that he paint over it all due to some bogus copywrong violation.

…Hmm, lessee, famous cartoon backgrounds for wall mural usage such as Joey’s:

* Fat Albert’s Ghetto
* Anything Maurice Noble did for WB - Duck Dodger’s space station is mine, dammit!
* Some of the Fleisher Popeye backgrounds, including the “real life” miniatures!
* Yellow Submarine!
* Altair IV, green skies and all!

I want a Monkey Doodle room.

Veteran Animator, and Disney Director/Writer, partnered with the late Joe Grant had done nearly the same thing over 70 years ago for his children’s nursery. These were done in color on canvas mounted on plaster and lath walls in his North Hollywood home. The property was sold two years ago. ASIFA was alerted and assembled a rescue crew over the weekend to remove the walls and save the murals from destruction.

The canvas has since been meticulously removed from the plaster, and the murals have been sent to The Disney Family Foundation for inclusion in their new museum due to open in 2009.

I think murals inspired by cartoons and animated films should be a new thing for painters. The color version of Porky in Wackyland would be nice, what with the Dali-esque backgrounds.

And speakin of Dali, I think scenes from Destino would make a great mural, though not for a nursery, heheh.

Great Job!! …and how much are his kids going to enjoy it over the years.
I was first inspired a number of years ago by a friends mural featuring a massive assortment of animals done in his own style. But this is great and I’m sure will be a huge source of envy amongst his child’s friends as he grows up.
The only problem is, I don’t have an excuse now to do my daughters room and fulfill her Disney Princess obsession.

Very lovely. I call dibs on the “Yellow Submarine” mural.

These are great!

It’s not painting the bedroom, but my better half volunteered to teach surealism and Dali to our son’s third grade class. Me and the lad convinced her to show Porky in Wackyland as a teaching aid.

I frequently toy with a Dodo tattoo, but never found exactly the right image or an artist I trust to get the line right.

Ray,
Is the Veteran Animator, and Disney Director/Writer you speak of Dick Huemer? Who I might add did some very fine cartoons for Charlie Mintz and under Ub Iwerks at Columbia.

Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore but I had an upright piano painted as a Krazy Kat Sunday Page.

OH…the Maurice Noble backgrounds from “What’s Opera, Doc?” would be killer…I claim that one in the name of Mars! Isn’t that delightful?

In answer to Bryan, yes, Ray is talking about the murals that my father Dick Huemer painted in 1935. I’m sure the rescue crew from ASIFA must have wondered what subsequently became of them, so I’m glad that Ray has posted the information. They will be displayed in the Disney Family Museum when it opens in a couple of years in San Francisco. Incidentally Dick got the Disney Legend award (posthumously, of course, and it’s about time!) on Oct. 10; text and pix at http://www.huemer.com/Disney_Legends_2007w.htm .
(BTW, I doubt that Dick ever worked for Ub Iwerks.)

this reminds me how once on television, they showed that Rob Zombie had painted his kid’s room to look like the Nightmare Before Christmas

I love the room! I have a weak spot for B&W animation. it seems so crisp and clever. With the exception of Chuck Jones, there aren’t too many colored backgrounds i like.

Saw that original cartoon on YouTube. I thought that it was slightly interesting how this reversed convention and made the mechanical creature heroic and vilified the organic creature. Wasn’t it just about five years later there was a Donald vs. a robot cartoon where the robot was made cyclopean to hint that it’s creepily dehumanized and unnatural?

(Would YOU like to live in Wackyland?) -

uh oh, I live in Wackyland. My hallway at least. I have what a call my “stress relief” hall. I painted the wall using chalkboard paint. Then used art chalk and drew some elements from the B&W Porky in Wackyland on the walls.

Oh, in a similar vein, I’ve got Peanuts characters painted on my workout room downstairs.

MY first choice of theme room was a FLEISCHER-esque ‘GOONLAND’ job, but others have beaten me to this style, —so I will settle for a ‘MAD’ magazine-inspired den, with a ‘SPY vs. SPY’ elaborate diorama, with possibly DON MARTIN gag recreations and a vast ALFRED E. NEUMANN facial reproduction.

Anyone else ever get a little ticked off at the resemblance of Murakami’s character (above) to Cheburashka?

Well it looks a little like that.
It would be easy to appropriate the image without knowing.

I have seen Chebarushka only once - the Eels played an entire half hour episode before their concert in Melbourne….

zoe: If there wasn’t a resemblance in his style as a whole his artistic foundation as an artist would crumble. Anything less than appropriation would undermine his whole venture with these works.

As I recall, wasn’t there a bit of a stink raised over Murakami’s Little Boy exhibition? Something similiar to the “Jim Davis machine” or “late Edison industry”, in that his name is stamped on the work of a corps of artists working underneath the Murakami umbrella. This could be completely off-base or overblown, though.

Saw some of his work at the S.F. MOMA a few years back.

It’s a really great show, I recommend that you don’t miss it. Go early, there’s usually a big line to get inside.

in that his name is stamped on the work of a corps of artists working underneath the Murakami
That’s not really correct. He does employ a huge team of assistants (like 100 of them!) similar to an animation/film production team. It’s no big scandal or secret, I was even reading an article detailing their roles in an some art magazine the other day.

True, it’s not a secret that he has a load of assistants on whose work his name is stamped, and I believe they are paid, but from what what I understand they tend to all be aspiring artists who work for a pittance in the hope that they can break into the fine art world through it, so I do kind of feel like they are exploited.

The website of his little art collective / factory, which is called Kaikai Kiki, is here: http://www.kaikaikiki.co.jp/

Also, his whole philosophy strikes me as very cynical, he said that starting as an artist he decided to begin with a business plan rather than an artistic criteria. So he promoted himself in NY emphasizing his Japanese context to build attention, then returned to Japan to make loads of money as the guy who’s big in New York. And rather than make one artistic object, he has his collective make several, so that a particular work can be sold and resold at a huge profit, while still not technically being ‘mass-produced.’ When I was at the Mori Tower in Roppongi last summer, a huge mini city built by ultracapitalist billionaire Matsumoto Mori, their little commercial art gallery at the top features postcards of a Murakami painting of Mori Tower. It was so hollow, really. A painter friend of mine who loathes him once said he’s really evil in a really interesting way.

All that said, he has been a huge influce on Studio 4ºC, who made the amazing films Mind Game and Tekkon Kinkreet, so he’s not all bad.

At the risk of sounding like a slacker journalist, falling back on the obvious comparison - Murakami is a lot like Warhol, and all that that implies. His work methods are comprable, his Factory structure and orbiting gaggle of artists is comprable, his relationship with commerce is comparable - as his his relationship to the post modern. So really any conversation about his methods is going to be as personal and objective as any conversation about Warhols, who love him or hate him has remained an open and unresolved argument for decades.

Personally, I think Murakami is one of the most important artists and thinkers of our time, regards the corner of culture into which animation fits - but I couldn’t really tell you in a polite comments section what I think of Warhol! But that’s just me.

Another great thing about Murakami is that the english texts, interviews and essays in his books/catalogues are a really an invaluable insight into japanese otakuism, moé, and other animation culture related issues.

Isn’t he trying to satirize anime culture rather than paying tribute to it? that’s what I heard: how anime objectifies women and such

Does this make Kanye West’s Graduation the “Velvet Underground” debut album of our time?

Isn’t he trying to satirize anime culture rather than paying tribute to it? that’s what I heard: how anime objectifies women and such
What he’s doing is nowhere near as simplistic as that.

Hmm that wasn’t very helpful! :) His art is all about Otakuism, but it’s not really ’satire’ of it, more of a general deconstruction; some critique but also a respect for it. He has described himself as a “failed otaku”.

You can go back a whole lot further if you want to find artists with studio assistants, it is a venerable tradition and many assistants went on to be well known in their own right. It is said that El Greco worked as an assistant to Titian; Raphael was a pupil and assistant to Perugino who was himself taught by Piero della Francesca. It doesn’t have to mean an exploitative relationship.
As for animation being shunned by the mainstream art establishment, South Africa’s most famous artist, William Kentridge, is an animator who has shown all over the world including The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Great piece, Joshua —Thanks!

I’ve always thought that Winsor McCay was the greatest animation pioneer that influenced nobody. His draughtsmanship was too sophisticated to be mass-produced, so animation went the hose-and-circles route and evolved from there.

It’s no surprise that there are more homages to McCay’s ideas than his style. Notice how many films mentioned are live action.

Oh, my WORD! Quiiiiite fascinating!! I love the parallels. Who knew??

I love this Chuck Jones quote about McCay:
“It is as though the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay’s animation, it took his followers nearly twenty years to find out how he did it.”

Its wonderful to see all these great McCay anthologies coming out! I love seeing McCay’s work get the attention it deserves.

We’re also trying to give Winsor McCay some much overdue attention in his hometown. I welcome anyone that’s interested in such news to check out the updates here: http://springlakemccay.blogspot.com/

Yea McCay!

I always wondered what his influence was on film editing. The idea that sequential composed shots can relate to each other in a way that makes immediate sense to the human mind. It was my understanding that was one of McKay’s great achievements was bringing that kind of putting images in sequence in a revolutionary way to comics.

Actually this post happens to bring up the two things that at provoked me about Ulrich Merkl’s amazing and borderline unwieldy book (which by the way I’m thrilled to own).

Firstly the graphic use of red re-coloring (as seen in the image above). While fortunately it’s not employed in the full strip examples within the book, the repeated use red highlighting inside many excerpted panels throughout the book is a notable eyesore within the book’s design. It reminds me of someone being obsessed with using a highlighter pen. Could it be because the author could work with a second color plate they did that

Mainly the crux of what troubles me is what exactly to make of the strip and famous film parallels being presented by Mr. Merkl (and multimedia-ized in the Boston Globe webpage). In one sense maybe I can be understanding. Mr. Merkl seems to be saying “hey look, isn’t this amazing how close the McCay strip of the 1900s or 1910s is to the 1930s or later film. So in the sense of finding what could be at minimum a coincidence is at least interesting.

The author seems to imply but doesn’t seem to outright claim the film works were inspired by (or potentially even ripped off from) the strip. What bothers me is the lack of any scholarly backing up of the examples. I mean it’s one thing to bring up the coincidence. Perhaps the author is just hoping someone reading the book will take up the challenge of providing some scholarship as proof. The Boston Globe surely goes out to a greater audience than the book, which certainly helps promote the book, but seemingly might help establish an unproven myth that the films and filmmakers cited were indeed influenced by the strip. The book doesn’t provide any info I could find on who could have been exposed to the work. Unlike for instance major European artists in the 1930s mentioning admiration of “Krazy Kat” by name, a strip that was contemporary, I for one wonder what kind of exposure the various filmmakers could have had to these decades old strips.

An equal point might be made in my mind is that as the strip mined nightmare archetypes for 800 or so stories, one would be surprised if there weren’t parallels with a good portion of nightmare situations depicted in films.

Nicholas: Yes, it would be nice if the book led to some substantiation of these various “coincidences”. At the same time, I wouldn’t discount the influence of decades-old artwork either. Just look at the impact of Heinrich Kley on Disney artists during the 30’s and 40’s.

Can you make a tour? Please?

You had me going already, but Patton Oswalt? IT’S A FLAVOR EXPLOSION IN MY MOUTH!

What about Cartoon Dump, the periodic web series for those of us who don’t live in L.A? :0)

Viva Viva Cartoon Dump! The production is slick, the toons are hip-fully bad, and the chicks are hotter than hell!!

I ask you!!

I second the web series comment.

Us folks who live on the (East, Central, Mountain) time zones need some love.

‘Sides, you gotta have a whole stash of bad Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas cartoons over there.

Paul and Shaw - We will begin presenting Cartoon Dump live on a monthly basis in New York City starting in January. Details to come. We are also planning to present CARTOON DUMP live showsin other cities in 2008. If you know of any theatre, comedy club, or university in your town willing to sponsor us, get them to contact me.

Ooh. NYC sounds good.

Do you have some sort of “presentation kit” I could forward to those places you just spoke of?

I just recently received mine. It’s a real gem, Amid. You have every reason to be proud. Thank you for the effort.

Wow, if I don’t die of starvation I’ll die from embarrassment! But yeah, this book is awesome and has been a huge inspiration in terms of putting all the great artwork seen in Cartoon Modern in context with the artists that created them and the kind of environment that allowed for such creativity. Highly recommended! Thanks Amid.

Ha THats Stone! Very talented guy right there, and cant wait to get my copy!! woot woot

Got my copy the other day…beautiful!! Long live Cartoon Brew books, etc.

And the bookplate? Wow! Getting it framed!

Sweeeeet! I’m coppin this fo’ sho!!!

Well done, Amid. Got my copy this weekend.

Does it come with a DVD? Is there a Cartoon Modern DVD in the works, pretty please?

Not to give the comment that everyone’s expecting, but I’d be a lot more comfortable calling this animation than I would mocap. Even the really quick cutting in the first short is just right on the boundary between the spirit and technique of animation and the technical reality of live action.

I guess you could probably call the second short “celluloid comics” like you could call mocap “digital puppetry” but this guy still made a film like an animator, in technique and in the resulting style that emerges from that technique.

Anyway, it was pleasant.

The second short would probably be considered ‘animated’ than the other two in its use of drawings timed to the reading of the soliloquy more than anything. I actually saw “Enter Hamlet” some time ago from a video someone sent me of different experimental/animated films and found this one particularly pleasing the most, and it reminded me of something similar I saw about 17 years ago I couldn’t put my thumb on until it came back to me. Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman once commissioned a series of ID’s for a local TV station out of Minnesota that used the concept of taking quotes and timing the lines to a series of drawings that flash on the screen with the words printed on screen. A similar bit was also used for several ID’s made for HA! TV Comedy Network around ‘90.

Thanks for posting these. They are very reminiscent of the similarly “animated” films of Japanese pop artist (and occasional actor and musician) Tadanori Yokoo. As it turns out out, these can also be found on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wYALOq22QE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcQdwZO7Hi8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjBmFKdDZBQ

I’d also say these films qualify as animation at least as much as Clutch Cargo does.

I think we start to dilute “animation” when we apply it to too many things. These clips are really “editing”.

I’m not saying they are bad. A couple are rather thought provoking. But the “illusion of life” that is the core of animation is not there.

I liked the bug crawling across the counter in the one clip in “The Great Society”.

I liked a finger tipping a box of Niagra starch at the conclusion of The
Great Society.

I hope Hollywood doesn’t make another movie like Beowulf. But seeing as how “awesome” it looks I’m sure one is right around the corner.

Jerry, I just read this after visiting Mark Mayerson’s excellently written post, and BEOWULF aside (I haven’t seen it), I cannot agree that mo-cap is anywhere nearly the same as 2-D rotoscoping. For all it’s shortcomings, (and they are myriad), rotoscope involves DRAWING. That can be done well or done poorly, but to in order to do it well one has to be a good ARTIST, at least. If you’re also a good animator it will turn out even better. Technically speaking, the only person who has to be an artist in mo-cap is the actor wearing the ping-pong balls. No art or animation are required.
Let me be clear: I am not generally a fan of rotoscoping but even to trace a single photo still well requires far more discretion and artistic interpretation than mo-cap ever will. Mo-cap is the digital film equivalent of audio-animatronics. Should the lifelike Johnny Depp robot in the newly revamped Pirates ride at Disneyland be nominated for an Oscar, too?

I agree, Beowulf was awful. But I encourage people to go see the Coraline teaser trailer in 3D and then walk out. :)

This is exactly the kind of nightmares I had about it 20 years ago, when I thought of what it might be like if they started making movies this way and basically take the human element out of on-screen acting or stunt playing as they could do it all with mo-capped CGI. It’s just pointless.

Don’t know about the movie, but I love the pun in the title of your post! You could give Jay Ward a run for his money!

I didn’t pay to see beowulf, I snuck in (i refuse to pay). It was ludicrous, and about as immature as animation gets. The story was incomprehensible, the direction manic, and the art direction just god awful from top to bottom. Like vaudville, that shot itself in the foot by promoting early sound films, mo-cap actors are a producers dream: kill the megastar! Actors take heed…this is going to undermine your craft. It’s already undermining people’s perception of animation.

I love the Raggedy Ann And Andy movie. It’s so disturbing and creepy that it leaves you feeling molested. I mean, the Raggedy Ann property is already for weird girls, but the movie takes it to new heights.
Heights of weirdness.

First, let me start by saying that I am in no way a movie critic; however, I found Beowulf to be extremely entertaining. Aside from a few “sing-a-longs” in the beginning, there wasn’t much room for improvement. I felt it covered all bases and showed incredible spirit. The character (Beowulf) himself was a microcosm of the film. For all his braggadocio and flair, he was in fact a flawed man. But through these same flaws, the film found a level of perfection. Like it or not, the film was also visually astounding (whether it was animated or final fantasy).

Thanks for the forewarning, Jerry. I’m still tempted to see it, but I’m expecting to be more focused on the technology than the story —like an amusement park simulator ride. I give movies a lot of room to stake out new territory: “Black Hawk Down” does one thing well, “Memento” another, and “Raggedy Ann and Andy” yet another. I don’t care if Beowulf doesn’t compare with any of them —it shouldn’t.

For all it’s potential —and there’s a lot, I think you’re right that this is a misappropriation of the technology. Someone in an earlier post rightly said that mo-cap is essentially puppetry. The advantage of Mo-cap is that once you’ve done the elaborate setup: modelling, set design, etc. you can create the movement in real time. Who is taking advantage of this?

I think the time is right to have a Gorillaz concert with backstage performers giving life to the cartoon musicians projected onstage who can interact with the audience and take requests. Or how about an animated alien pundit who reports on the daily news ala Jon Stewart? Cheesy maybe, but it makes more sense than replacing top-billed actors with their uncanny-valley doppelgangers.

“Technically speaking, the only person who has to be an artist in mo-cap is the actor wearing the ping-pong balls. No art or animation are required.”

The artists who create the models that the mo-cap drives might disagree with you. Those models don’t just materialize because an actor put on some ping pong balls.

Extremely talented people build those characters the old fashioned way and once it leaves their hands… that can turn out great or not depending on what the plan is after that point.

Grendel was the only part of the movie that seemed to require some imagination. And what a hideous beast he was.

Will, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m tired of hearing comparisons between MoCap and rotoscoping. They’re not the same.

The people in the picture make me feel old. I love them all and wish I could’ve heard their tales. Thanks, Jerry, for tellling us about the event. No one else seems to have said anything about it.

Wish I had gone to the Raggedy Ann screening, it would have been nice to the film on the big screen. I did not see it when it came out back in the 70s, but I did buy the video tape, and enjoyed it everytime I watched it. The book of the making of the film was great. We can only hope that it will be released on DVD in widescreen soon.

The two distinguished gentlemen on the right side of the photo are Dave Block and on the far right, Kevin Petrilak.

Jerry, you have surprised me once again. First with your endorsement of Bee Movie (which you attempt to justify by saying you are biased because your involvement in the art of book) and now with your unnecessarily harsh criticism of Beowulf. I believe this movie is worthy of merit although it is admittedly not a perfect film. Grendel comes to life in this film not merely as another static monster to awe the audience, but as a developed character, a tormented giant with an almost childlike disposition. The hero, Beowulf, is a flawed character with a weakness for women as the movie alludes to with his flaunt with a mermaid. Yes, the mocap at times generates stiff performances in particular John Malkovich’s character and it is also evidenced in the secondary and tertiary characters, but overall I found the film to be a fun experience. This film, if it continues to succeed at the box office, may do more for animation than any of the countless, forgettable talking-animal films which inundate American cinema. I hope this film will allow audiences and studios to see that animation is not a genre, but instead a medium that can tell any type of story from comedy to horror and everything outside and in between. So before you pretentiously cleanse your palate of this film because of its “misguided embrace of … technology” or some other equally unqualified reason and await the second coming of Jerry Seinfeld as a bee, please ask yourself how many more anthropomorphic animal films do you really want to see Hollywood chug out?

As for Will, capturing the mo-cap information from an actor is only the first step to creating a performance. Animators use the mocap as a starting point for the final animation, ie. Gollum from Lord of the Rings. All hero characters in a mo-cap films are to a large extent key-frame animated to refine the mo-cap information. In fact, all of Gollum’s facial animation was key-framed by animators contrary to what the making-of videos may suggest with the footage of Andy Serkis with little dots all over his face. But my real point is that there is no reason to ignorantly state that there is no artistry involved in motion capture animation when there is much care put into these performances by well-trained animators.

I’m not a fan of counting motion capture as animation. However, I think it’s a little unfair to say that there is no art required. That completely dismisses the artistry that can go into the character design and modelling. Not that I really liked Beowulf’s character design.

Saw Beowulf. Thought the action scenes worked well. The acting scenes were better than “The Polar Express” but still not quite ready for prime time. There really was no reason to make the character models look like the actors - Malkovich comes off looking especially un lifelike.

More movies like this will be made, and they will get better. I do not think they will replace animated films completely. This is just a new technique. That’s all. Anything done in this film can be done in animation.

Perhaps the animation community should look at films like this as a challenge. Can the animation community make a better film than Beowulf? One that competes as an action movie for young adults? I think the community can - but why isn’t it happening?

An animated film that competes with Beowulf will need to be generated by animators, because the studios will never do it. The studios will always think of animation as cartoons for kids. It will take a new Bakshi to remind people of what animation is capable of. The Japanese have various directors who make adult animation - we can too. Which of the Cartoon Brew readers will it be?

Will, I disagree with some of your comments. First off I hate all mocap movies. I see not a single reason to sit through them, I also see no reason in making them. Mocap is best used and suited for vfx work and games.

My main argument is with your comment regarding no skill being involved processing mocap data. Obviously you have never worked with motion capture equipment before. I have. I also managed several people processing said data. And while you claim no skill being involved, let me tell you this, processing and fixing mocap data sucks. It is incredibly tedious and monotonous work. You actually don’t just push a button and everything is fine and dandy. You actually need an animator on the other end handling the data. Someone needs to make sure the data retargets correctly and looks right, someone needs to clean up noisy motion data, create new motion for obscured markers and thats just the tip of the processing iceburg. Occasionally someone even needs to create new keyframe data to interpolate between takes because the motion isnt working quite right.

To say that there is no skill involved in mocap is just plain old misguided nonsense. You are about as far off as Zemeckis in stating his pro performance capture dialogue.

If it’s any consolation, Beowolf made only $28 million against its whopping $150 million budget, so it seems unlikely to break even domestically…

Hey, Will.

I guess no “artists” were involved in making the Jack Sparrow figure at Disneyland, then? Nor was there likely any art required of Blaine Gibson or Marc Davis in the creation of the rest of the audio-animatronic cast of that ride?

No artists built the models for Beowulf? No artists painted the textures? No artist designed the scenery? No artist lit the scenes?

NO art required?

What the hell, Will? Computer artists aren’t artists to you?

Listen, I haven’t seen Beowulf either. I’m not excited to see it. It’s not to my tastes… but this elitism is really lame. I don’t come on here and disparage the work of artists because I don’t like the movie they work on.

“No art required”? What garbage. Not an animated film was ever made that required no art.

Perhaps not enough of that art is in evidence. And perhaps the choices Zemeckis made were not the ones you’d make, Will. But to disparage the work of others on the internet ALSO requires no artistry.

To light the way creatively requires you do better than your colleagues, not speak worse of them.

I just can’t help but wonder why they’d bother trying to make it look as “realistic” as possible when they could have done the same thing with real actors and tried to fill in the rest of the crazy-ass special effects later. Even George Lucas uses real actors in his effects wonder land. (They are not “special” effects if they’re in every scene.)

The problem with mo-cap is that I find it lacks the stylization of traditional animation. There’s no exaggeration or caricature. The end result ends up looking awkward and lifeless.

Saw Beowulf this afternoon for only five bucks, just to see if it was as bad as it looked, and it was far worse than that in my mind. Just…just so UGLY and lame that it defied my expectation of mere homeliness and instead reached near fugly levels.

Even the concept design was weak here. The creatures and the costumes were worse than the bottom rung of Heavy Metal magazine in the seventies. Just terrible.

Everyone who worked on this film should be ashamed, but Zemeckis should be beaten like a pinata.

I still don’t know how you can slam a movie like this and then turn around and put Bakshi on a flippin pedestal. His movies. ALL OF THEM. Are just awful. I’d much rather watch somthing Rankin Bass cooked up then his poorly designed, awfully paced, lazily animated drek. BLEH!

I never understood the quest for hyperrealism in CGI. Back in the 1990s I thought the film industry would go in the direction of live actors in virtual sets, at least for genre flicks. 300 is a great example. It was neat, and I rnjoyed it, but it would not have had a fraction of the emotional impact if the live actors were replaced by mocap puppets.

Why try to replicate real actors in CG? Just use the bloody actors!

I would figure the next step is virtual wardrobes. Real actors in CG costumes. Sounds like a good challenge.

Hi all - Thanks for the mention, but don’t construe that I love the movie. It’s a clunky script and Mocap is far from perfect, but, in Digital 3D, it’s amazing to watch.

I still believe that it’s, in many ways, the future of the business. I installed digital projection and 3D at my Palm Desert theatre property, and it’s spectacular. Digital projection will soon be the benchmark in exhibition and there are between 10-15 big budget 3D films in development for 2010.

I wrote more extensively about the pipeline of upcoming 3D films and the battle between CG and Mocap films like BEOWULF. If you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t recommend the movie in traditional 2D. It’s 3D or bust. Thanks again. Love the site.

motion capture still look like bad drawings animated poorly. Can you honestly hold up any still frame from Beowolf and frame them up on your wall?

I agree with Will. The artistic bar for motion capture needs to be raised dramatically if it’s to be respected as a art form.

“Someone needs to make sure the data retargets correctly and looks right, someone needs to clean up noisy motion data, create new motion for obscured markers and thats just the tip of the processing iceburg.”

where is the “artistic” skill in motion capture? A lot of what your talking about with fixing motion capture data seem more technical choices then artistic ones. Motion capture “engineers” seem more appropriate then artists.

No, Jerry, motion capture is not ‘rightfully’ an animated film. It is a live action performance that is modified with special effects.

An animated performance may use a rotoscope base (as they did with Marge Belcher as Snow White, or with the actors in A SCANNER DARKLY) but their appearance is modified into something else. Snow White is not Marge Belcher. The bugs and things crawling around in SCANNER are animated. They are created by an artist, not an actor.

Angelina Jolie, Andy Serkin, and the other BEOWULF actors are not animated characters. They are real people who have been put into a special effects film.

The problem with Beowulf isn’t the use of mocap specifically, but that the project itself is so misguided, so unappealing and literal-minded in its design. There might be artistically valid reasons for going for a photorealist look, but Zemeckis isn’t interested in finding them.

Obviously, many skilled animators are involved in translating the actors’ work into the form we see on screen. (We all know Ray Winstone isn’t built like that!) Problem is, they’re being utilized as technicians, not artists, and working for directors who simply want movement for movement’s sake. As a result, the characters looks stiff and robotic during dialogue scenes and utterly weightless in action. This seems to be a problem with mocap in general (including mo-capped characters in otherwise live-action movies, like Lord Of The Rings and Phantom Menace), at least as it’s been used so far.

As to Beowulf specifically, there’s also the awful script and laughable music, but we can’t blame that on technology!

To light the way creatively requires you do better than your colleagues, not speak worse of them.

Rat, I think that is one of the best things I’ve heard in regards to comments like that that appear on CB. Thank you.

Re: Beowulf,
I have read how the story was completely butchered and, being a fan of the epic poem, I am hesitating to see it. Though I probably will someday when the curiosity of “how horrible it really is” gets the best of me. But thanks for the reviews folks.

I think I will save my money for The Golden Compass. (R&H did a great job on that damn golden monkey too. Scary!)

Love it or hate it, PLEASE stop confusing motion capture with animation!!

Jerry, this is a very big mistake and I’m kinda surprised at you..

Motion capture is NOT “like rotoscope”. Yes, both processes begin with live actors, but rotoscope still requires an artist working with (tracing) those images, one frame at a time. THAT is what defines animation: the creation of a motion picture by means of a frame by frame process!

There is NO FRAME BY FRAME PROCESS INVOLVED IN MO CAP. It is thereore by definition NOT animation.

Below Me and John Kimball, directly below me Carol Millican and next to her Alyssa Meyerson, at least at the time, assistants both. And John Musker already mentioned Dave and Kevin on the other end. It turned out to be a grand day. For the record there’s still alot of important things about that movie, which another book could address, the great last hurrah movie on one hand. And yes the nature of the aftermath for the rest of us, the power of the legacy and how to make a special movie that kind of got lost in the shuffle, food for thought.

” the film was also visually astounding.”

No. It’s not. It’s visually a mess, with some of the worst art direction and character design ever put on film. It looks like a high school student with no artistic talent at all designed the film.

Like George Lucas, Robert Zemickis was one of my favorite directors, and these guys did great work.

Sadly, both are now “rich boys” playing with their toys. That’s cool of course, because they’ve earned the right to do so. But I sure as hell won’t go see anymore of their lame movies.

It’s like all of the ART is gone. They’re not making movies anymore, they’re engineering them. If Beowulf is the way films of the future are going to be, then in the future we will also go into an over-priced Planet Hollywood style restaurant and instead of looking at artwork or props from films we will be staring at some floppy disks and CDs that contain the models for the dragon in Beowulf.

You lost me at calling Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly animation.

really surprised by your and others negative reviews of Beowulf- I saw it in 3D Imax and was pleasantly surprised by the story and blown away by the creature designs and action scenes (which I’m pretty sure were 100% animated and not performance capture).

Yes- the human characters are not convincing (especially the women, who look like they jumped out of Shrek), and there is quite a bit of unintentionally funny parts, but by the end of the movie I sure was entertained - more than I can say for BEE MOVIE, TEKKON KINKREET, and CARS.

I thought the sea serpent sequence was spectacular.

Rat, Mike, Emily etc…
First of all I was not talking about the design and scuplting of the characters when I said no other art (beside the actor wearing the pingpong balls) is involved. I was talking about THE CHARACTER ANIMATION!!! There is obviously art in the desing and scupt phase but that does not make it ANIMATION.

I also did not say there was no skill involved in mo-cap, there obviously is, but it is equatable with the skill of driving a car or learning a computer program, which virtually anyone can learn. What I said was there is arugably no ART necessary in mo-cap animation (again, i am not talking about designers or scuptors or colorists, etc). I am also no implying that the people who do it have no talent, they may have tons. But much of that talent is rendered kind of irrelevant under the circumstances of making a movie this way.

I guess it’s impossible to not get misread in anything running less thant twenty paragraphs anymore. But at least this gives me the opportunity to add that I also object to THRU A SCANNER being called animation as well. It was a graphically stylized motion picture, but the actors who were filmded brought themselves to life exculsively, no one else did.

P.S. I don’t count characters like Golum and King Kong (or anything in MONSTER HOUSE for that matter) as pure mo-cap because there was clearly intensive and highly creative intepretation going on in their animation long after the mo-cap performance was rendered. Any time this happens to that degree, there IS artistic discretion of high degree going on and I not only recognize it, I respect it. Unfortunately way too many other mo-cap projects I have seen make a point (or an accident) of NOT doing much of that and when that happens I cannot call the performance truly animated.

I’m confused as well behind the hype behind Beowulf. Wasn’t there a
“hype” behind the advances of Final Fantasy:Spirits Within? Wasn’t that…kind of a disaster?

If Beowulf is supposed to be such a technological masterpiece, I would rather it had been a short to show off the CG (think Rockfish), instead of it sounding (I have yet to see it) like this incredible visual film with bad script and score even. If film makers want to explore mediums like this, go for the short…don’t butcher a feature. That’s just my two cents.

Thanks to Lou and John for identifying the rest of the folks in the photo. I’ve corrected the caption to include all the names.

Another thing…what are artists in the CG field saying about this film? I have a CG artist/animator as a room mate and even he dislikes what he’s seen from the trailers…faces too stiff, acting strange…I even introduced him to the argument on here about Beowulf being animated and he didn’t think it should be considered so. Though as some pointed out here…things like the creatures and dragon are obviously animated…nothing to mo-cap for them! But I agree more with the idea that this is a special effects film…kinda like the new Transformers - but just robots and no humans. That kind of film.

I’m sorry, Jerry, but I am suddenly reminded of Roger Ebert and his “videogames are not art” commentaries.

You sound exactly the same as he did.

A lot of work goes into making a computer animated feature look good. Especially with motion capture. There’s lots of things that can go wrong (*cough Pavarotti Zombie and Buff Mickey*), and several famous movies already use motion capture in one way or another.

Mocap is a good tool, and lots of people don’t want to accept that, instead considering it the same as rotoscoping, when it’s not. After the capture data is processed, animators still have to tweak stuff like clothing and environmental effects - and that can take weeks per scene. It’s still a lot of work.

I’m disappointed by the comments several people are making. Sad.

Will, I’m glad you clarified. But it still seems like you are determined to diminish the skill and creativity of the grunts making the movie.

You wrote:

“I also did not say there was no skill involved in mo-cap, there obviously is, but it is equatable with the skill of driving a car or learning a computer program, which virtually anyone can learn. ”

Will, I challenge you to learn to do what I do. I honestly think you couldn’t do it. “Virtually anyone can learn” a computer program? That statement is so vastly far away from understanding what creativity in the computer realm requires that it’s insulting. Again, it’s the mentality that it’s just button-pushing, or knowing which button to push when.

I don’t work with motion-capture data, but I know enough about it to know that there are artistic choices that have to be made. You cannot choose to make zero artistic choices. Even if there was a way to somehow magically pipe capture data directly from performer to some rig without any manipulation, then deciding to DO that ITSELF is an artistic choice. It may be a poor choice. It may be a choice you do not agree with as an audience member. But it is a choice that affects the final film.

Whether good or poor artistic choices were made in this film, that should be what we’re talking about. When I’ve seen the film, I’ll give you my unvarnished opinion.

Still, it’s kind of pointless to complain about anyone’s work in this film other than Zemeckis’. I think it’s especially hard for me to hear when it comes from the mouth of a director, and it comes down on the work of the grunts in the trenches. I don’t care who those grunts are, and if you consider them as being non-creative production personnel. It’s still bad form, to me, to hear a director saying that about the crew of a movie– why pick on them? If the creative choices in Beowulf were poor, they belong to Zemeckis. If he didn’t fully use the talent at his disposal, then put him in your crosshairs, as one animation director to another.

In a few years, the whole of “Beowulf” will play as campy low comedy, sort of how the puppet character Yoda comes off in the 1980 “The Empire Strikes Back” today.

And Hollywood’s powers that be won’t bat an eye that a few animators are complaining about the permeating MoCap devolution in feature film. That will take an en masse reaction by the acting community, whose work is being counterfeited and sold down the river at inflated ticket prices. It doesn’t matter how much money they pour into icing when there’s no cake.

Will and others:
We can all agree or disagree on whether Beowulf qualifies as animation or something else, but we can’t define a technique by the success of the outcome. Gollum, King Kong, and Beowulf all employed the same performance-capture technique with different degrees of artistic control and tweaking and different degrees of success. Likewise, Fire and Ice, Waking Life, and Snow White all used rotoscoping with various degrees of finessing, and artistic interpretation and again with varying degrees of success.

Both techniques are in a sense shortcuts or “cheats”, but I’ll point out that mocap (carefully used) has at least produced two characters that were done as well as could be imagined. I can’t think of a rotoscoped character that doesn’t pale in comparison to it’s non-rotoscoped screen companions.

I have something to say to anyone who has a problem with the visual stylings of Beowulf: if you spend any of your time and money playing with your Xbox or futzing around on World of Warcraft, then it’s YOUR FAULT this movie exists. Don’t dump on Zemeckis for what you’d consider shortcomings in his multi-million dollar production; he’s obviously happy with the results.

For the record, the same hype and technological future of movies was given to the movie “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” when it came out.

And I haven’t heard word of that movie in three or so years.

Beowulf may become among the number of “the future of movies!” to fade away and be replaced by some other “the future of movies!” film. People, including me, forget too fast about the past. I haven’t seen Beowulf, but I read the tale in British Literature back in high school. It was flawed in the characters and somewhat in events, but that was kind of the message. I personally couldn’t sympathize with the characters, except for the guy that helps Beowulf when he’s injured (can’t remember which part) and no one else helps. I wonder: if people read the tale beforehand, would they still want to see the movie or be turned off by the story?

As for Raggedy Ann and Andy–loved the dolls (had Ann), the books (I have a crayon scribbled copy of Sunny Bunny comes Home) and the Saturday morning cartoon, but never saw the movie. And from hearsay, I’m a little afraid to do so. I think I’ll just stick to my memories of the cartoon and specials.

Ted - I hate to sound such an internet dipshit, but I think that Yoda’s performance is a remarkably nuanced performance and not at all campy (for a Star Wars character anyway).

In a few years, the whole of “Beowulf” will play as campy low comedy, sort of how the puppet character Yoda comes off in the 1980 “The Empire Strikes Back” today.
What heresy is this!? Yoda is an amazing piece of puppetry. Much more life and character than the CG version

Also “what is animation?” is almost as boring as “what is art?” Anyone getting upset about rotoscoping in this day and age should get some perspective. It’s an animation technique, and one which nowadays is used rarely and almost exclusively as a stylistic choice. Scanner Darkly and Waking Life were animated films, and anyone who says otherwise is really just saying “I didn’t like them.”

I’m reminded of a quote by Saint-Saens regarding Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” - “A thousand critics writing a thousand lines a day for ten years would no more injure this work than a child’s breath would go towards overthrowing the pyramids of Egypt.” I’m afraid “Beowulf” and its mo-cap brethren are here to stay.

the arrogance of this post astounds me. waking life? waking life is a gloried after effects filter. talking heads. how does that technical achievement take precedence over beowulf, which while not perfect, had a lot more to offer in terms of pushing the envelope not only in mocap, 3d lighting and rendering, but the quality of 3d stereo as well. it seems to me that people in the animation industry are really insecure, and given the quality of “real” animated movies perhaps they should be. because at least beowulf has a good story, w/ some depth to it.

It was COMPLETELY asinine. Ludicrous beyond words, beyond belief! I laughed out loud all the way through it.

All the characters seemed either blind or cross-eyed, or both.
The dialogue is HILARIOUSLY stupid; (the title character routinely “announces” himself - like He-Man or Space Ghost - before stripping naked for some homo-erotic man-wrestling with convenient, strategically-placed props to hide the naughty bits! Didn’t we already see that in AUSTIN POWERS?)

The “acting” reminded me of the animatronic puppets in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyland, except not as fluid. Calling it ‘mechanical’ would be supremely kind. The marionette cadavers of POLAR EXPRESS and FINAL FANTASY have given way to doll-eyed, flesh-covered robotic Muppets.

And the art direction? Ugh-lee! Angelina Jolie has stiletto feet, for Christ’s sake! (She seems to have been designed by a new breed of sexless computer nerd: Step aside, furries - make way for the “scalies”!)

I walked out of the theatre thinking it was the end of the world, and I’d just stared into the abyss of what was once the film industry. I can see Zemeckis fiddling while the whole town burns, just like in DAY OF THE LOCUST.

Hey, here’s an idea for a new sign to be posted just outside Hollywood:
Abandon Hope, All Who Enter Here!
(Don’t Back Up, Severe Tire Damage…)

Wow…. I give up. The lack of basic understanding abotut animation fundamentals on this board kills me :) Honestly, go sit down and define animation. Look it up if you need to. You’ll find that motion capture is in no way shape or form fits that definition. For the 1,000th time, motion capture has nothing to do with rotoscoping. There is a technical divide between the two that involves a frame by frame process that animation fundamentally requires. Jerry and the rest of you should really know better for making that mistake.

For the same reasons, AMPAS has officially deemed motion capture not a part of the animated arts in current Oscar rules - which is absolutely correct.

Rat (whoever you are):

For the last time, I am speaking as an ANIMATOR (not a director) , and I may be just as able to say you might not be able do on paper what Milt Kahl or Rod Scribner could do either, but that proves nothing. Furthermore I have chosen my words here very carefully (read my blog for a more full appraisal) and have avoided like the plague ad-hominym attacks on individuals. I have never referred to ANYONE on a crew as a “grunt” (your word), under any circumstances or in any capacity. Nor have I condemned anyone as inherently ‘un-creative’, since I know all too well how unfair it is to judge an individual crew member based on the results of a total film.

Furthermore, I do not enjoy seeing an opinion of mine assailed as “garbage” (your word again) because you not only don’t share it but in fact have mis-read it. It is my opinion and i have made it un-anonymously to boot. You are entitled to disagree with me but I don’t think you have understood the point I am making about my rejecting the blanket assertion Jerry made in the main post. This is not about any one film. It is about the definitions of techniques and I think the technique has varying degrees of merit depending on how it is done and who permits it to be done that way.

If you want to make the argument that mo-cap IS animation, then by all means go ahead, but don’t tell me it is the same as rotoscope, that’s all.

This reminds a lot of the debate about Gay marriage. If you don’t approve of it don’t marry someone of your own sex. It doesn’t change your marriage. If you don’t think Beowulf or Mo-cap is animation don’t accept a job doing it. It doesn’t alter change 2D or keyframe CG.

Now the big question would be if someone offered those of you complaining it’s not animation a chance to direct a $150 million mo-cap film would you turn it down. That’s where it’d be interesting to see how strong you’d stand on your principles….

An animator ‘creates life’ from inanimate materials. Mocap modifies living materials, therefore it isn’t animation. I won’t comment on the quality of BEOWULF since I haven’t seen anything more than the trailers, but I’m obviously not the target audience.

I am curious–are there actors posting on this forum? It would be interesting to see if they consider BEOWULF to be acting or animation.

An animator ‘creates life’
No, that’s just one limited idea of what animation is.

I applaud Will Finn for using a great word like ” ad hominem.”

Brian Meyer

Too bad i can’t bleeding spell. Even with the aid of a computer!

If I misunderstood you, Will, I apologize.

I know that on this site, and in animation circles, films like Beowulf and the artists who work on Zemeckis’ motion-capture films will have few defenders, and even fewer champions.

Anyway, I know what it feels like to be a black sheep in animation when you’re just working to put food on the table. And all the while hoping that what you’re working on will prove the naysayers wrong, and just for once in your career you’d work on a film you’ll be personally proud of. It’s not fun.

Will, I’m not your enemy, and I really do admire you. Try not to get exasperated at me. But I really did need to hear from you that you don’t blame the artists for working on a motion-capture movie.

Because only an artist could be insulted by saying their job doesn’t require any artistry. A technician will admit that their job isn’t creative. When you’re an artist, those words hurt.

Whoa guys. Calm down. The movie wasnt THAT bad. It was mediocre. No need to fly off the handle AGAIN.

> Perhaps the animation community should look at films like this as a challenge. Can the animation community make a better film than Beowulf? One that competes as an action movie for young adults? I think the community can - but why isn’t it happening?

America just never had the kind of people like those that founded GAINAX who challenged the business with their approach and ideas 20 years ago. I don’t think America is culturally set up to accept animation in a manner that we’ve seen in other countries were the diffferences in social acceptances are of a far different scale than here.

> An animated film that competes with Beowulf will need to be generated by animators, because the studios will never do it. The studios will always think of animation as cartoons for kids.

It’s a stigma that’s still hard for many to get out of their heads, and I often think it would take several generations before that’s ever really licked.

> It will take a new Bakshi to remind people of what animation is capable of. The Japanese have various directors who make adult animation - we can too. Which of the Cartoon Brew readers will it be?

I often think I would be the to initiate it someday, sort of what I want to call the Bronze Age of Animation it we haven’t came to that yet. Though I can’t say for certain what that would be, I see it as the handover of the craft from the hands of the industry to the heartland of America, basically, letting the indie group and other homegrown efforts become realized further than centralized into specific parts of the country. All I need to get started perhaps is a Super-8mm camera (now I’m getting a little overboard here, but I like to think how novel that concept is in principle).

> Tim Drage says:
>
>> In a few years, the whole of “Beowulf” will play as campy low comedy, sort of how the puppet character Yoda comes off in the 1980 “The Empire Strikes Back” today.
> What heresy is this!? Yoda is an amazing piece of puppetry. Much more life and character than the CG version

Needless to say it put me to tears!

> A Longtime Observer says:
>
> As for Raggedy Ann and Andy–loved the dolls (had Ann), the books (I have a crayon scribbled copy of Sunny Bunny comes Home) and the Saturday morning cartoon, but never saw the movie. And from hearsay, I’m a little afraid to do so. I think I’ll just stick to my memories of the cartoon and specials.

Heh, I guess I feel better off for having seen the film early enough to enjoy it despite knowing of it’s flaws now. I still think it’s an OK film for it’s animation over plot elements.

I just got back from it. I think everyone here needs to take a deep breath and relax.
I, personally, wouldn’t classify Beowulf as an animated film. I’d call it a special effects movie. The fact that it was shoehorned into the Best Animated Feature category by the Academy reflects more of their (albeit understandable) difficulty at pinning this odd beast down, rather than, as some people here think, a concerted effort by Zemeckis and all involved to spit on the grave of traditional animation. Don’t worry, folks, Walt and Tex aren’t spinning in their graves.

It’s not hard to see why Zemeckis is infatuated by mo-cap technology. He, as a director, has always been on the bleeding edge of SFX tech. And has subsequently been frustrated by the limitations of the medium. Do you have any idea how liberating it is when you go completely CG? To directors like Zemeckis, Lucas, Cameron, etc. who have struggled with the limits of technology for years, this is a god-send. Are they preoccupied more with the gadgets than the acting? Perhaps. But we need these directors, these movies, to move the medium forward.

Honestly, anyone who says that there was no artistry in Beowulf is just spiteful. I’m not saying it was movie of the year, but it doesn’t deserve the vitriol the animation community is showing it. Will mo-cap overtake keyframe? Perhaps. Will mo-cap improve the more it is used? Absolutely.

Obviously when new ground is being broken, some toes will be stepped on. Just when animation fans were getting used to CG, along come live-action movies like the Star Wars prequels that arguably have more computer animation in them than live humans. So the industry doesn’t quite know where to file these movies away. Just relax and give it time, everything will sort itself out.

I have a Minolta, a Yashica (with in-camera lap dissolve) and a J.C. Penny Super 8 that all shoot single frame and about 6 rolls of Kodachrome in the freezer. Let’s go!

As an outsider, (non animator, but writer of animated product), I would just like to toss in my two cents. I loved Polar Express, my family and I consider it a Christmas classic…Monster House was a very fun, but not great film, (bad 3rd act). That in mind, I challenge you to put a hundred people , (non animators), in a screening room and have more than two percent tell you they can readily notice, (or care about), the difference between Monster House and any other CG film. Sorry, but what many of you call “odd movements”, or “the uncanny valley”, by the charters, goes unnoticed by the laymen, who across the board have the same reaction…”Huh, I didn’t see any difference between that and any other other CG film/Cartoon”. Trust me, I’m in that 98%. Sure, if you sit me down and point out the differences, I’ll probably have some reaction…but, NOT a negative one…simply, different. Black & White, 2d, 3d, Mo Cap, Stop Motion, or “Living Color”….it’s all the same. Story and characters. But, this is an animation website, so, you can rightfully destroy your Mo Cap enemy…but, understand, that you do so as the rest of us gleefully pay our cash money for a ticket, in ignorant bliss. Respectfully, B.

> Art Binninger says:
>
> I have a Minolta, a Yashica (with in-camera lap dissolve) and a J.C. Penny Super 8 that all shoot single frame and about 6 rolls of Kodachrome in the freezer. Let’s go!

Lucky! (kinda had my eye set on one of those expensive Fujica single-8 models personally, found a place that could put an oxide stripe on it as well if I bother sticking a soundtrack on as well) I still think it’s a waste what Kodak did to start discontinuing anything Kodachrome these days (the Paul Simon song couldn’t be truer than the fact). Kinda amused at the few places out there online that still sells or processes movie film at all these days, though I wish it could be as simple as taking a roll down to the drug store.

IF ‘B-WOLF’ represents the future of movie-making, then bring back creaky old BORIS KARLOFF, also WILLIS O’BRIEN’S jerky ‘KING KONG’ which had more humanity in any given single frame…..
——-P.S.: I don’t think the ‘39 ‘GULLIVER’S TRAVELS’ was TOO bad, JERRY…….I saw a late ’60s theater release of this, and though it is slow in getting under way, I loved it as a kid.

though I wish it could be as simple as taking a roll down to the drug store.
I believe that in the states you can still send super-8 for processing at any Walmart. You have to know what you’re doing tho, what to write on the processing envelope or whatever to get it to go to the right place! Don’t ask the staff, they will have no idea. Look on www.filmshooting.com forum for more info maybe.

to clarify they don’t process it of course, it just gets sent off to some lab somewhere via their system.

I thought the Mark Mayerson definitions of motion capture and animation to be very good. Someone also mentioned rotoscoping and live action reference. There is a difference between the two that I tried to address in an earlier posting on my blog: http://joelbrinkerhoff.blogspot.com/search?q=rotoscope

Cheers

Well, here comes a bit of a rant….

I’ve read some of the comments here, so sorry if there were any retractions…BUT I have to say I’m sick and tired of the attacks on the individuals who worked on Beowulf, or films of that genre. Don’t like the movie?…don’t go see it. Simple as that. The idea though that working on a mocap film somehow makes you at the bottom of the Animation Caste system is ludicrous.

The animators on Beowulf (yes…I did say animators) worked on Open Season, Surf’s up, Spiderman, Monster House amongst others. They are NOT incapable of producing fantastic animation. Quite the contrary in fact. What they are are individuals who are striving to realize the director’s vision on HIS project. They are professionals, crewed onto a show…doing what they are asked to do.

When you walk the halls and see a group of animators working as hard as the ones on Beowulf, it goes beyond irritating that anyone should be able to take that away from them…and classify them as sub par.

You want to prove you’re a better animator?…throw up your reel….let’s all take a look and see if you can back up your claims of being a superior artist.

I don’t know, it may very well be that the studios are endorsing this technique so strongly because they envision the day when they can claim the rights for the “digital appearance” of any actor.

It kind of makes you feel bad for guys like Brad Pitt. With these kind of tools, the studios would NEVER let him age, get fat or bald, or develop any other kind of character than the attractive male stereotype he is so handsomely paid for. Rather than follow the steps of Robert Redford or Paul Newman, who changed the types of role they played as they got older, 50 years from new the studios could still make movies with his undated digital appearance.

And of course, it will be all the more profitable when the actor dies and the studio no longer will have to pay any kind of royalties for image use.

Mmmm. Creepy.

> Tim Drage says:
>
> I believe that in the states you can still send super-8 for processing at any Walmart. You have to know what you’re doing tho, what to write on the processing envelope or whatever to get it to go to the right place! Don’t ask the staff, they will have no idea. Look on www.filmshooting.com forum for more info maybe.

I remember reading someone say that, but I thought that was a joke. Yes, these people would never even heard of Super-8mm in this day and age or what I’m doing with it.

> to clarify they don’t process it of course, it just gets sent off to some lab somewhere via their system.

That’s true (as to be expected). Perhaps it could be cheaper dealing with Wal-Mart than places like these that force you to pay extra for both the film and processing…
http://www.pro8mm.com/main.php

Earlier I mentioned the Fujica Single 8 cameras, here’s one site with some good info on that…
http://www.single8film.com/

Really, I should’ve started this 20 years ago than now. :-(

> red pill junkie says:
>
> I don’t know, it may very well be that the studios are endorsing this technique so strongly because they envision the day when they can claim the rights for the “digital appearance” of any actor.

I would no be surprised if that was the case.

It’s not about the movie but the technique, soon we’ll see the day in which any actor could have a chance to perform any character, regardless the body proportions or the esthetic of the actor, but his talent… and yeah, this is not an a animation movie, but in some aspects, the future

> Fernando de Anda says:
>
> It’s not about the movie but the technique, soon we’ll see the day in which any actor could have a chance to perform any character, regardless the body proportions or the esthetic of the actor, but his talent… and yeah, this is not an a animation movie, but in some aspects, the future

Seems more like a cheap excuse to say your (noun) is bigger than everyone else’s in the digital age. That’s how I see this play out.

I sent a roll of Kodachrome that I shot in September through Wal-Mart here in California and it was back in about a week, which alone surprised me. It was only about $5 or so and it looked fine considering its expiration date was 1999. Last Thanksgiving, a friend came by to de-bug my computer and his teenage son noticed a Super-8 50 foot reel on the desk. I unspooled a bit for him and he exclaimed “There’s pictures on this!”. Fashion and technology, they change so fast. I hope we’re not getting too far off-topic Jerry. :-)

One of the best Super 8 cameras was the rock solid Nizo S560, though its intervalometer was NOT connected with its single frame shutter. The other big drawback was Kodak’s design of the Super 8 cartridge, which physically limited the number of frames that could be backwound. As much fun as that bygone format was, the sad fact that one was limited to shooting on reversal film meant one worked one’s tail off to shoot the ONLY COPY in all existence of any given stop motion filmic adventure. It was a labor-intensive way to go blind which technology arguably improved over time.

Hmn. Gotta say I disagree with a few of you folks. I consider mo-cap and rotoscope very similar in a few important respects; both have a performance foundation that begins with someone other than the animator, and the ultimate success of each is dependent on how skillfully they are altered from that foundation.

The best characters to begin with a mo-cap foundation (Gollum and Kong–both courtesy of Peter Jackson & co.) were re-worked extensively by animators (some of Gollums best scenes were entirely keyframed– the Andy Serkis reference studied and interpreted by eye rather than by computer).

This is true of rotoscope as well. When great animators extensively rework the live action base you get Cruella DeVil, Captain Hook, Smee, Chernabog from Night On Bald Mountain, etc…

But when an animator simply accepts the live action perfomance without strengthening the poses or finessing the timing and lazily traces a hand over a hand, a shoulder over a shoulder, you get the watery, dull, unconvincing Prince in “Snow White”, Gulliver in “Gullivers Travels”, Anastasia in “Anastasia”, and EVERYBODY in Bakshi’s “Lord of the Rings”, “American Pop”, “Fire & Ice”, etc.

I would argue that talented animators did some fantastic reworking of Andy Serkis’ very fine initial interpretation of Gollum. Like most animation, not all scenes are created equal, but the best scenes of Gollum have weight and life behind the eyes and a physicality that is lost in most mo-cap.

I agree that rotoscoping is at the very least touched by human hands holding a pencil, but as someone who was shackled to some truly awful live action footage and tasked with rotoscoping something presentable from it (the director would not allow me to animate the scenes from scratch) in my animating days, I can’t share in any misty-eyed nostalgia for rotoscope.

It was a tedious, joyless, awful process that, when strictly adhered to, nearly always yielded uninspiring results.

The last similarity for me is economic. Movies are made in the real world, and certain characters demand HIGHLY skilled animators to pull them off convincingly. Disney turned to rotoscope for CINDERELLA because he didn’t have the resources (money/time) to experiment with the large number of human characters.

Likewise, although Peter Jackson had a big budget for LOTR, it was barely enough to execute the vast vision he had in mind… and mo-cap was the fastest good way to get Gollum integrated with the live action and consistent performance-wise, with the myriad other elements Jackson had to juggle.

Bottom line for me: Mo-Cap is a tool that can be used well or badly, much like rotoscope, and like rotoscope the most successful examples of mo-cap have been significantly altered by animators on their way to the big screen.

For me personally, I think mo-cap works best as a tool to create convincing digital characters that are intended to share the screen with live actors (ala Peter Jackson).

So far (and while I remain open to any filmmaker willing to prove otherwise), when mo-cap attempts to take center stage– I have yet to see an instance when I don’t find myself wishing to see either pure animation or pure live action.

Brad Bird: We appreciate your comments on mocap, but what do you think about processing super-8 at Walmart?

Wait a minute…this has all the ear-markings of a civil debate. :)

I agree philosophically with a lot of Jerry’s post. I don’t consider mo-cap to be the same as animation, I think it is a different (and completely valid) storytelling tool. I also think that Zemeckis’s quest to create human life in digital form is wrong-headed and will never work. The “cartoony” humans in THE INCREDIBLES are a thousand times more natural and “lifelike” than the people in FINAL FANTASY, POLAR EXPRESS and BEOWULF because you can accept them as stylized and don’t have to be distracted by the little things that aren’t right in an almost-real character like Beowulf (the eyes, the perfect cornsilk hair, etc.)

But just because I feel that way about this aproach to movies doesn’t mean I should pretend like BEOWULF is some travesty. Despite those flaws it actually is a really entertaining movie, at least in 3-D. I saw OPEN SEASON in 3-D Imax too, I really liked the character designs in that, but I would rather watch BEOWULF twice in a row than watch that again. It’s a good story, it has some interesting characters (well, mainly Grendel), it has a pulpy sense of adventure and action, it has some excellent uses of the “camera” (as did POLAR EXPRESS), and even some clever twists on the ancient manuscript it’s based on. And if you’re going to compare it to animated movies, then this is a type of movie I haven’t seen in animation before.

I don’t work in the animation industry, I just watch ‘em. So maybe I don’t take it as personally. But I don’t see mo-cap as a threat to any other methods. It’s crazy to think that mo-cap or 3-D are going to replace other types of movies, that’s just a line for a couple ambitious directors to tell stupid entertainment magazine writers for their cover stories. I like the post by Tony way up there somewhere, he had a good point that if the public considers BEOWULF to be animation then it only opens up more doors for animated movies which have been stuck in this CGI talking animal rut. Just as far as the subject matter goes, isn’t it great to have RATATOUILLE, PERSEPOLIS and BEOWULF in the same year? It could be two movies about penguins, two about barnyard animals, three about woodland creatures in the suburbs. I’m glad different filmmakers are getting a chance to try different things.

Being against all mo-cap is like being against all puppets or all CGI. If it’s not something you are into then that’s fine, but you can’t pretend it could never be put to good use. Personally I’m excited to see what Tim Burton does with his mo-cap version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. As an animator turned live action director he might be the perfect guy to use this technique that’s in the middle somewhere. I also can’t imagine he’ll go for the life-like wax dummy look of the Zemeckis movies, which to me is the one major weakness of Zemeckis’s approach.

> Art Binninger says:
>
> I sent a roll of Kodachrome that I shot in September through Wal-Mart here in California and it was back in about a week, which alone surprised me. It was only about $5 or so and it looked fine considering its expiration date was 1999.

You were lucky. I found an old role of K-40 in the cupboard I took into a Kmart a decade ago and got back a roll of clear film (it was something my mom had filmed but never got around to developing at all since the 70’s)! Not sure if I still have it or not, but I could’ve took some fine-point marking pens and tried creating a rather interesting piece out of the 2 minutes or so of footage.

> Last Thanksgiving, a friend came by to de-bug my computer and his teenage son noticed a Super-8 50 foot reel on the desk. I unspooled a bit for him and he exclaimed “There’s pictures on this!”.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Want to impress those with my 16mm collection if it came to that (also have a Krasnogorsk-3 if I get around to tinkering with that)!

> Fashion and technology, they change so fast. I hope we’re not getting too far off-topic Jerry. :-)

Yeah, it did seem monotonous I steered this away from Beowulf and Raggedy Ann into something more esoteric, but that’s who I am, I’m the King of Esotericism!

> Dave says:
>
> One of the best Super 8 cameras was the rock solid Nizo S560, though its intervalometer was NOT connected with its single frame shutter. The other big drawback was Kodak’s design of the Super 8 cartridge, which physically limited the number of frames that could be backwound. As much fun as that bygone format was, the sad fact that one was limited to shooting on reversal film meant one worked one’s tail off to shoot the ONLY COPY in all existence of any given stop motion filmic adventure. It was a labor-intensive way to go blind which technology arguably improved over time.

Probably why I got rather interested in Single 8 for it’s sturdy configuration and backwinding possibilities.

Various negative stocks are avaliable in super-8 now, for telecine or there are even a couple of places who will make you a print!!! But that sort of thing starts to get close to the 16mm price range really…

Anyone interested in super-8 needs to visit www.filmshooting.com and www.onsuper8.org, great sites which between them contain pretty much all the 8mm info there is on the internet.

P.S. any movie is 3D if you sit near the front of the cinema and close one eye. Try it!

We now return to your regularly scheduled argument about mocap.

8mm? I had a used Leicina. Multiple shutter speeds, including single frame. Automatic through the lens metering when virtually no other 8mm camera had it. Angenieux zoom lens. Awesome.*

*(But I always wanted a Beaulieu).

Why did I think we were talking about mo-cap?

You can blame me Brad for having taken this down that road! I’m the one who somehow just had to sneak in such an analog concept into discussion like I felt it was important. If not, it’s nice to have learned Wal-Mart still offers Super-8 processing. I think the most extreme I would want is to tell everyone to exploit that fact, and flood their stores with roll after roll of Super-8mm film for developing and see what kind of madness may occur, if only to lead to a news story suggesting the possibility of a retroactive super-8 craze was in the works. In a perfect world, that would be sweet (if only as an excuse for people to set up projectors and screens in their living rooms to show off to their friends one last time)!

Ahhh! The Beaulieu! I longed for one of those like other teens wanted a new Corvette or Mustang. I wanted a Nizo for the longest time and got a shock when a friend bought an old camera bag at a local thrift store for $6 back in the ’80’s. Inside was a perfectly working Nizo! And I passed it by thinking “Oh, I don’t need another camera bag”. Oh, the pain! The pain!

So if you have Ms. Jolie (who is fetching in the flesh) acting for your movie, why not use her in the fetching flesh instead of using this artificial synthetic plasticy looking substitute?

Brad, The Iron Giant really got down and Googied!

BTW, Had a Chinon 506 SMXL way back when….

Yeah, the Beaulieu allowed for a full two hundred foot backwind, which of course meant it didn’t use the Super 8 cassette system at all. I borrowed one once and shot some animation with it. A very cool camera, though I shot everything else with my old Nizo S560, which cost $487.89 new in 1974, a whopping sum in those days that took me an entire year to save. There is something organic about film that went the way of the Dodo.

I wonder just how much the critics and suits fawning over Mo-Cap being “more expressive” is just an Emperor’s New Clothes herd mentality, or just how much their idea of the supposed non-expressiveness of hand drawn cartoons came from the formative experience of growing up with cut-corner Filmation and Hanna-Barbera type throw-away kiddie fodder.

Obvious suggestion to Jerry or Amid: Start an all new posting about home-brew 8mm animated films. I have a couple of URLs that I could post there.

doug holverson says:

Obvious suggestion to Jerry or Amid: Start an all new posting about home-brew 8mm animated films. I have a couple of URLs that I could post there.

Thanks for making that suggestion, Doug. I was afraid that this side discussion of 8mm/Super 8 was going to get us put over at the “kids table”.

They should remake “Beowulf” using the Raggedy Ann and Andy crowd for MoCap. They don’t even need to be altered digitally much to fit the parts.

Also, tell Brad Bird that I have a Leicina AND A BEAULIEU in perfect working order.

> Brad, The Iron Giant really got down and Googied!

Speaking of which, had they marathoned it yet this Thanksgiving? :-)

> Yeah, the Beaulieu allowed for a full two hundred foot backwind, which of course meant it didn’t use the Super 8 cassette system at all. I borrowed one once and shot some animation with it. A very cool camera, though I shot everything else with my old Nizo S560, which cost $487.89 new in 1974, a whopping sum in those days that took me an entire year to save. There is something organic about film that went the way of the Dodo.

Pretty much what I miss about the analog days when you still got your hands dirty in it! I don’t get the same deal in the digital age the way it felt to do things by hand like with art.

True, there was a tangible, physical connection to the past in working with film. But there’s a connection to the future in all things digital. It’ll be argued forever whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Actually, I’ve reached a very happy working arrangement between the analog and digital world. If things remained as they were 20-30 years ago, I would still be doing what Chris said earlier, showing my old films on a screen in my living room. Now they’re reaching a whole new audience via YouTube. I’ve just finished printing out my hand-drawn, full color Christmas cards that I previously would have to hand color or settle for BW offset copies. As long as protect my originals, they’ll be ready for the Next New Thing.

You know.. I haven’t seen B-wolf yet (but I plan on seeing it sometime this week), so I can’t really say anything about the film.

However, as an animator.. I DO have to say that I’m not really all that threatened by b-wolf. I worked on LOTR & on Gollum and was able to directly see what worked & what didn’t, and I know there were incredibly talented artists both tweaking the mocap data & creating animation from scratch.. all of it working towards Peter’s vision. That’s what made gollum so good.. peter, fran, andy, and randy cook pushing us towards creating the best performance possible.

As for whether or not performance capture will replace animation.. I think the live action people have more to “fear” than those of us creating stylized animated films. See, in live action you’re completely constrained by location, time of day, the physicalness of what was shot WHEN it was shot. What props are available, what costumes can get created by the time it’s shot, etc etc etc. Then, once the scene is shot it’s SHOT. You’ve got the coverage you have, from the angles you’ve got. Any kind of “tweaking” or anything you have to rely on 2d techniques, or clever editing. You can’t easily change the camera angles.. lighting.. costumes.. anything. I say “easily” because you CAN do quite a bit with compositing & other techniques.. but currently that’s expensive & time consuming.

Let’s pretend that in 10 years the “performance capture” technique has improved to the point where it actually DOES capture everything we’re saying it’s missing today.. meaning, it’s so damn good that you really can’t tell the difference between a live action actor and their digital counterpart. Well, you CAN tell the difference.. but only if you suddenly change the angle, adjust the lighting, give them different clothing, etc etc. See, the director/art director/dp/etc will all have the ability to tweak what was shot until it meets their “ultimate vision”.

But what if they want acting changes? Well, not only will they capture the physical acting of the actors, but they’ll be analyzing that data.. capture the actor long enough & they’ll be able to build a fuzzy logic brain to go along with the actor. Soon enough we’ll have enough data about keanu in order to recreate almost any reaction to any given situation. So while you’d still have to get the actual performance for any of the important beats.. much of what happens can be figured out by the fuzzy logic system.. think “massive” (the crowd simulation program written for LOTR, now used all over the place) but a bit more advanced with a LOT more data running through it. Of course, we’ll still have frame-by-frame control like we do now, so even if the performance isn’t 100%, we can still go in and tweak things to make it perfect.

Directors will have ultimate freedom to create “their movie”. THIS is where the technology is going.. it’s going to affect live action films way more than our cartoony stylized ones.

I’m not saying this is a “good” or “bad” outcome.. I’m just saying that this is where it’s headed. And for some directors, it’s already there.

So for me, I’m not concerned about mocap. As long as there’s still an audience for funny, stylized characters that do things that people can’t do.. animators jobs are safe. No matter how talented any performer is, he’s never going to be able to have the ability to get from point A to point B in as many ways that I can dream up in my head.

Nice points there Jason :-)

You can’t easily change the camera angles.. lighting.. costumes.. anything. I say “easily” because you CAN do quite a bit with compositing & other techniques.. but currently that’s expensive & time consuming.

I suppose that for director and studios, this mo-cap technology is akin to a sculptor choosing to work with CLAY instead of MARBLE. With clay, if you mess up or change your mind, you can do it all over again, while with marble, one mistake and its “OOPS!”, and the whole block is thrown to the pile.

But of course, sculpting with clay still needs of talent, and can be as demanding and time consuming (maybe even MORE time-consuming)than chiseling marble. It’s just more on working on the safe side, but it can lead to failing to make good critical decissions because of all the options available.

Sculpting with marble takes BALLS ;-)

A simmilar thing happened in my biz of architecture/interior design with the introduction of CAD software. I wouldn’t even dare to imagine how awful it would be if we still had to draw with rulers and pencils, but it’s funny how with CAD you can end up with a gazillion different variants of your design, and how you can’t really grasp the actual “dimension” of your idea until you view it built in the real world. And then of course, it’s too late…

Good points, Jason. What you described is pretty much what James Cameron wanted when he first conceived of Avatar ten years ago, with his “synthespians”. I wonder if he’s upset that Lucas, Jackson and Zemeckis beat him to the punch.

I don’t know if he’ll be creating humans per se in his next two films, but I’m sure he’ll be pushing the limit of mo-cap technology.

Jason, thanks for your insight information. Hats off in addition.

BTW I did not mean to offend anybody by holding the word “artist” apart and apologize if offense was taken. I thought it went without saying that there are considerable degrees of art, skill, craft, talent, and creativity involved, all of which overlap to varying degrees. I still wish to call character animators artists though, as long as their contribution requires imagination and artistic finesse to render it (in addition to the technical skills invariably involved) even in motion capture situations I don’t personally enjoy.

All previous mo-cap aside however, the advent of movie stars “animating” their own digitally identical figures by necessity marginalizes the unique imprint of individual character animators involved and that is what still worries me, on behalf of everyone. I have overheard too many heavy hitters in the “biz” intone that they would love nothing better than to virtually automate the character animator’s job (for reasons both financial and creative) and while that may not be the case yet, it one day could be.

If on the other hand I have merely embarrassed myself as an alarmist here, no one will be more relieved than me.

OK—I vote that Zemeckis use No-Cap next time and just make a fuh-reaking live-action feature like the good ol’ days of Back to the Future.
Now pleasssse don’t throw or lob grenades at me, I totally agree with what’s being said about Bearfwoof (might as well call a charade a charade-you wanna vomit[Bearf] at this dog[woof]) but I was shown about 10 minutes of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, and–I shudder to say, what I saw was REALLY good-like Roger Rabbit good- it works, period. I saw none of the crap poses posted here on the Brew, it really looks like classic animation in 3D, the characters, both animated and real, are acted without flaw. I was soooo shocked about the quality, I stood there speechless through the clips– that’s a feat for me. I didn’t want to like it, but it took me back to my kid memories of the first version, it’s funny and cute and sarcastic, I hope Amid, that you like it, because of your love of UPA-style, like the original series. I hope folks give it a chance, I’m really looking forward to seeing the whole feature. And, no, I wasn’t “high” or “drunk”(two beers only at that point in the night-that’s not intoxicated for me) at the time of my viewing. Maybe, just maybe– this is a good thing for 2D and 3D– I hope, if it’s accompanied by a new cartoon show that stylistically, it’s UPA-all the way.

I saw the film tonight and actually didn’t think it was that bad. I took the chip off my shoulder before viewing though. Did I do something wrong?

… the horror… the horror…

*rocks back and forth*

Ughughughughughugh; Arf, arf, arf!!

Well, at least it looks more like Popeye than that weird looking costume from the 30s, which looked more like a hideously deformed kabuki mask. :)

I wish I had fifty spare bucks right about now. (sob!).

I’ll print a nice copy from the large jpeg later and frame it. That ought to hold me. Best to whoever buys it, though! Enjoy!

Popeye getting a double dose of vitamin “A”!

This picture is a BEAUT, JERRY………for some reason that I can’t explain, it brought me instant joy………….this photo will be stored on my hard-drive, [in all seriousness].

I liked My World And Welcome To It. I credit it with getting me to read more (especially Thurber) as a kid, and admit to having a TV crush on Lisa Gerritsen (daughter Lydia Monroe).

Wow… you sure don’t see no intelluc…intellic… high-hat stuff like that no more!

Wow! I remember that show.

There is a DVD available on this entire series (26 episodes) which I just found on donkey dvd. It’s on five dvd’s for $65. I’m trying to find out if this is legitimate.

I remember that series well…quite unusual and enjoyable in its way. There was also a movie that came out a few years later that also made use of Thurber’s drawings in animation, if i recall right, called The War Between Men and Women. Jack Lemmon played the cartoonist. I’d love to see that one again also.
I beleive the same director and writer might have worked on both.

and to quote Mr. Chevalier, “ah, yes, i remember it WELL!” Thank YOO for a fond memory of decades past!!

Did anyone tell you about the Thurber house in Columbus last week? I’ve never visited it myself, but it’s supposed to open to the public.

I am in complete agreement with you on a potential release of My World and Welcome to It, one of the funniest sitcoms in the history of television. I have told people–in complete seriousness–that once it and He and She are available on disc, my work on Earth will be done.

Not long ago these series were shown on British TV. “The Unicorn in the Garden” they certainly weren’t.

A DVD release of this series would be very desirable. The same goes for the similar project that came three years later, the Jack Lemmon comedy “The War Between Men and Women.” Based on Thurber’s writing, it was likewise accented with some animated sequences.

Based on that first clip, the canned laughter would make watching an entire episode excruciatingly painful. If someone is working on a DVD perhaps they have enough master source material to make an alternate soundtrack sans laffs.

I remember that show. I was too young to “get it”, but I recall thinking “not enough cartoons”. Years later I recognized Windom on a Star Trek re-run as being the guy from that show with “not enough cartoons”.

Watching the second clip, I sense that Windom never really found a way to translate the Thurber writing style into a spoken performance. There are several stand-up comedians I can imagine finding the right rhythms and cadences to make that dinosaur routine work, but Windom seems to be just reciting. Maybe that’s why I didn’t “get it”.

Ivan G,

CBS once described ‘He and She’ as being ‘the best show we ever cancelled.’

I recall watching “My World… and welcome to it” on Spanish TV in the early 70´s. I found it particularly ejoyable because the main character was a cartoonist (as a kid then, my dream was to become one)! Also the animated segments by DePatie-Freleng were enjoyable; I remember that one episode offered an adaptation of “Unicorn in the Garden”, even though it obviously was a far cry from the original UPA version. Later I saw “The War Between Men and Women” on TV and noticed the similarities between this movie and “My World”; in fact, I did videotape the animated segments (not the entire movie, alas) and I still must have them on an old Beta tape. Here´s another vote for a DVD release of this short-lived but memorable series!

MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT aired when I started High School. I watched it, but was also bothered by the Laugh Tracks, which were totally unnecessary. I think they were added to remind people that this was supposed to be funny. The trouble is that that laughs came just as the idea was registering and this was a distraction. But there was also a problem putting over the comedy due to the pacing. It’s a bit too slow. Call it “laid back” it you want, but it’s dull and the music a bit sleepy as well. ROCKY AND HIS FRIENDS, later to be known as THE BULLWINKLE SHOW,was an example of good pacing with high brow comedy, not to say that this show needed to follow that type of delivery.

never heard of it before, seems interesting — can’t really see it working today, maybe on the net. I watched that clip you linked to with the dinosaur, very funny. Love that he says, “hello stupid.”

> Brent Collar says:
>
> There is a DVD available on this entire series (26 episodes) which I just found on donkey dvd. It’s on five dvd’s for $65. I’m trying to find out if this is legitimate.

Chances are it’s a typical filthy bootlegger (even this YouTube clip is an advertisement to sell off these discs quickly), but I wouldn’t put it past people who might be too curious to wait at all if they want to forgo the legalities to watch or discover this classic again.

> Thor says:
>
> Ivan G,
>
> CBS once described ‘He and She’ as being ‘the best show we ever cancelled.’

Heh, I’m still waiting for my “Square Pegs” box set (OK, so it wasn’t that big, but it’s nostalgic)! :-)

“The War Between Men and Women” features Jack Lemmon (one of his best performances) in what appears to be a thinly-disguised, warts and all, biography of James Thurber. It’s a pretty good film with first-rate animated sequences - and it’s available on vhs for a ridiculously low price on amazon.com.

My dad’s favorite series for the short time it was on(wasn’t it aired as a summer replacement?). I was attracted by the simple animation but I certainly knew it was not for kids.

I watched this as a kid…and it introduced me to Thurber’s work long before I got to see Unicorn In The Garden.

This is another one of those shows, like the superhero parodies Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific that should see the (dvd) light of day.

And I thought that Uncle Wayne and me were the only fat old farts to remember this one.

I watched this show when I was a kid and was excited to see a cartoonist character on tv. Lisa Gerritsen also played the daughter on PHYLLIS (the spin-off from MARY TYLER MOORE). She was on other sitcoms as well, including THE ODD COUPLE. Then she dropped out of sight. Some say she went into computers.

http://members.tripod.com/~former_child_star/gerritsen_lisa.html

I, too, was a big fan of the show. In fact I saw William Windom in a one-man stage show of Thurber’s work which he toured for years after the show ended. Lisa Geritsen was also the daughter in War Between Men & Women. Seeing the clips now of the series, the laugh track would indeed drive me nuts.

I discovered Thurber in high school, both as a cartoonist and as a writer. He singlehandedly wrote one of the greatest sentences in the English language; it’s from his story “The Night The Bed Fell,” elements of which found their way into an episode of “My World…”:

“Old Aunt Melisse Beale, who could whistle like a man with two fingers in her mouth, suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, since she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street.”

It would take a lesser writer an entire chapter to describe the eccentric, provincial nature of Aunt Melissa; Trurber nailed it in one sentence. The man was a genius; the show was pretty good, too.

I was 13 and had just discovered Thurber when this show aired. I was in heaven, even though I wasn’t thrilled with the attempt to shove Thurber’s sensibility into a typical sitcom.

Even at that age I remember recognizing that the mean dog in the opening credits was very unThurberlike — Thurber people were often mean, but Thurber dogs, never!

Omigosh! I thought I was the only person who remembered this show. I only have very vague childhood memories of it (mostly because of the animation). I don’t think I understood any of it back then. I just waited for the cartoon parts.

I remember this show! The house morphing into the woman’s face is a classic Thurber drawing. I’d forgotten about the laugh track though. Thanks for posting the clip. Until (or if) the show ever comes out on DVD, may I suggest reading Fables For Our Time and Further Fables For Our Times by James Thurber.

Another Thurber work into cartoon form: the Secret Lives
of Waldo Kitty (Filmation; re-titled The new Adventures of
Waldo Kitty), inspired by Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
I do remember seeing “My World…” when it was first on.

NBC insisted on a laugh track during every episode- I can imagine executive producer Sheldon Leonard telling the network brass, “It don’t NEED one!”. But virtually every NBC sitcom had one at the time {WITH the exception of “JULIA” and “THE BILL COSBY SHOW”; Hal Kanter and Cosby had more clout than Leonard did}. Other than that, “MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT” was a great series…I watched it every Monday night. Unfortunately, “GUNSMOKE” was the most watched show in its time period [7:30-8:30pm(et)]- which also happened to be “MY WORLD”’s. The fact that it also won an Emmy as “Best Comedy Series” didn’t influence NBC’s decision to cancel it after one season and 26 episodes….I even remember when CBS showed selected repeats on Thursday nights in the summer of 1972…

3D is good, but it’ll never replace 1D. lol

Nice gag. But technically this short is still 2D.

Filmation is kicking itself in its grave for missing such a cost-saving device.

I was bugged that he was passing by stuff, rather than having to climb over it, or through a hole a la “Flatland.”

Of course to be 1-D, the characters and objects would also have to be infinitesmally (sp?) wide. But a mathematician might have better ideas about this.

And it’s a cartoon, so there’s room for suspension of disbelief!

I’m assuming One D was made with Mo-Cap. How else does one make animation?

Cute, but whyfore the Pixar hate?

I know I’ve seen this before, probably at ComicCon, and It’s still just as much fun as I remember.

Hehehe, I’m so happy to see this up here! Thanks Jerry! :)

Heeheeheeheehee, but indeed why the Pixar hate? Eisner’s gone… he was the mass marketeer…
But I digress, heeheeheehehee

If 1950s U.P.A. output could have been taken to the next [minimalist ‘flat’] level, it may have looked a bit like this………

thanks! if you hadn’t put this up and i’d only seen that terrytoons 3d thing below i would have had to cry myself to sleep…in the middle of the day!

this is pretty hilarious though! nice find!

This was hilarious; I’m glad there’s humorous socio-artistic commentary out there…I grow weary of all the tear-filled, anger-ridden ones. It gives an even jab at everyone.

When I figured out what the floating dots in front of the 1D girl were I laughed the hardest!

This is especially funny since I saw the animated feature Flatland tonight.

Ehhhh…… it left me flat. Kind of thin on the budget don’t you think? And the chracters… narrow minded. Lacks dimention.

Great toon though!

“When I figured out what the floating dots in front of the 1D girl were I laughed the hardest!”

I’m still wondering why the “dots” become black rather than flesh-colored when Diane goes topless. And when the “dots” roll out of the stick/log cabin, well that was just a bit too…ahem…graphic.

“But technically this short is still 2D.”

Yes, yes, we all know that if it were truly 1D, we wouldn’t be able to see it at all. The point is it’s a spoof.

As much as I’d feel like a huge nerd on that tour, I’d honestly prefer it to the traditional “shrines/castles/kabuki/tea ceremony” tour. Some of their past tours have visited Square-Enix and the Tokyo Game Show… pretty hot tickets.

Ever since they launched their Pop J-travel Tours, I’ve said the same thing: I wish I had the cash…

Oh, there will be bigger nerds than you on that tour. :)

Two of my friends went on the 2006 summer tour and they loved it. To me, the only appealing part of the tour (only part you might not be able to do on your own) is the animation studio access. Unfortunately that was the part they didn’t enjoy. Studio Gonzo just had them sit down and showed them promo videos for anime that was already released. They were working on a “secret” project (everyone knew it was Romeo and Juliet) so they couldn’t give them a tour. My other issue is, while its cool to visit ANY anime studio, I would prefer high profile stuff like Production I.G. or Studio Ghibli instead of the more mainstream studios. Actually, if they can score a tour with the Kyoto university animation department where people from the industry lecture there, head of the department is the Studio Madhouse guy, that would be worth it.

In the end I opted to go on my own this past September. I got more stuff done and it was a healthy mix of geek and culture. ^^

In any case, my friends enjoyed the experience and highly recommended it.

> Studio Gonzo just had them sit down and showed them promo videos for anime that was already released. They were working on a “secret” project (everyone knew it was Romeo and Juliet) so they couldn’t give them a tour. My other issue is, while its cool to visit ANY anime studio, I would prefer high profile stuff like Production I.G. or Studio Ghibli instead of the more mainstream studios. Actually, if they can score a tour with the Kyoto university animation department where people from the industry lecture there, head of the department is the Studio Madhouse guy, that would be worth it.

Kinda made me laugh to read they had to go to Gonzo, they already have quite a reputation with fans for the way their shows start out rather OK in the first episode, but rapidly fall down in quality a few episodes later.

And the alien gets stuffed up Sydney’s butt! Haw haw!! That’s rich, I’ll say.

If you thought that was scary… Someday I’ll post images from the Klasky Csupo pitch.

Interesting, to say the least, but the “Matrix” bit with Hashimoto has been done to death. Speaking of CG Terrytoons, anyone know if the proposed Mighty Mouse movie has been deep-sixed?

That is bloody ugly!!! And a Klasky Csupo pitch… YIKES!!

I got the feeling that CBS Corp/Viacom doesn’t care about the Terrytoons library as much as they love the Star Trek franchise

Make me vomit and eat it for lunch. Real awful test

Bonus point for working in an old-skool elephant-scared-by-mouse gag, at least.

Reminds me of when I used to sweat all night in my sleeping bag at camp - Except, I enjoyed the sleeping bag a little more.

Wow, that was worse than the Pavarotti CG.

….WHAT just happened??

That is ugly. I wonder what Walter Lantz would do with CGI if he were still around. All those wonderful Paul Smith cartoons re-done in 3D.

Wonder why they selected Terrytoons flattest characters to reimagine in CGI? This test makes Paul Terry look like a creative visionary.

Why? WHY?

HOLY MAKREL!!!!! Some things are better left alone.

I was once offered a development deal to help revive Heckle and Jeckle for MTV networks. You can read all about that sorry story in my book, Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive.

It’s stated to be only an animation test so we can’t expect highly polished imagery or lighting.

The animation itself is not height of what CG can do, but it’s hard to judge it without knowing what the parameters of the job were. The studio may have been asked to “show us what can be done with a budget of X dollars and no more”. What we see may be the realistic answer to that question.

Funnier gags would have helped, though.

Good lord that is horrible! I hate seeing classic animation being “reimagined” in CGI. I don’t see the point in modernizing things that are fine the way they are. I don’t have a problem with an animator using CGI for their own ideas but when they apply it to other people’s ideas to make them “better” I don’t care much for it.

Layout sure has suffered since everything went CGI.

Was Crabby Appleton involved with this?

please please please post the Klasky pitch.

It’s a shiny blobby fetishist’s perfect universe. Reminds me of hell.

Did anyone else think that Hashimoto came off looking like Numbah One from “Codename: Kids Next Door”?

Apparently, “new, new” means “Screw the characterizations and goose up the look.” I always liked Hashimoto, one of the earlier multi-culti toons that didn’t devolve into serious stereotyping like Joe Jitsu from the Dick Tracy toons. This … thing … tried for the look and only the look. To borrow a phrase from a M*A*S*H episode, they’re playing the notes but it isn’t music.

I use a Hashimoto image for a blog icon regularly. I don’t remember Hashimoto being so angry. Wasn’t he a calm character? Also, being asian american I can already tell you that it looks offensive. That maybe could fly in the 60s but not now. There are ways to say ‘asian’ without resorting to the ‘oriental’ symbols that they are using.

it was really crappy

So tired and uninspiring…. ugh.

Hmmmmm… I didn’t hate it.

This does suck! Go to the hell Viacom!

That looked like an animation student’s film reel. And he got a C.

Yow. Shoulda tossed it to the guys at MooseMouse. They coulda done, uh..SOMETHING with this. Or better yet, give it to the guys at Muckpuddy to flash up…they knows their shit. Justifiably D.O.A.

Bad, Bad, Bad. Vincent Van Gopher could’ve done a better job, and he’s practically blind!

Aparently, the people involved had never seen the cartoons these characters came from. HASHIMO is largely out of character as only one example. The reason the later flat-designed characters were chosen is because they were simpler shapes. Taking designs like HECKLE AND JECKLE and MIGHTY MOUSE involves far more time and skill.

This looks more like a school training exercise than a pitch piece. The gimmick of CG lighting and rendering techniques is many times used to disguise a lack of skill, content, and solid animation direction that goes beyond movment for its own sake. It’s mostly the icing without a cake underneath to hold it up.

Money has little to do with this considering the deep pockets that Viacom has. This appears to be another example of using CG for the sake of using it without having a purpose. There is noting really clever about it, and no story. Worst of all, there were people in place who had no idea of what to do with these properties. To top it all off, the people involved got paid to do this!

I didn’t watch the short, but think that all of this 3-D-ing is sometimes-awkward R&D for some pretty serious computer graphics film-making. That Beowulf movie, too.

God knows what they’ll do with it. Certainly CG movies are going to get more facile (I mean more easily-made and graceful) and streamlined. Look for a feature coming sometime in the near future with long-dead actors, and I don’t mean zombies!

It was however, (tongue firmly in cheek) an excellent example of how to take three distinct cartoon personalities and render them as blandly as possible. If you want to turn people off to CG even more…show them this.

The quality just sucks, they must have done it in 2D

why are this youtube film not coming up? second time to happen today on this site…
makin’ me grumpy…
(still love the site tho jerry!)

If only I lived in Spain! That Grillo Popeye exhibit looks amazing - I wish I could have attended.

It’s great reading news about our favorite one-eyed sailor-man so often!

Recalling the stove gag in Popeye’s “Can You Take It” after seeing that one of the songs in “Scandals” was “You Nasty Man”.

That’s Oscar Grillo in the photo? I thought it was Buck Henry.

From the exhibit page:
The Palacio de la Merced will be the venue for an exhibition specially put together by Oscar Grillo for Animacor’07. “Drawing the Sailor Man” is this artist’s view of the famous character invented by Max Fleischer

Let’s get it right, folks..ELISE SEGAR invented the character. Fleischer may have developed/adapted the animated version, But the sailor wouldn’t have been here at all if not for Segar

Mr policeman of small distractions, the name was ELZIE.

Good catch, Chris.

With all respect, Mr. Grillo, getting the creator’s name wrong for such a celebrated cartoon character is more than a minor slip-up.

Your work looks fantastic though, and the gallery space is incredible. That diamond-tiled floor would be a lot of competition most types of art, but goes quite nicley with the piece pictured above. I wish I could see the whole thing.

My apologies, Mr. Grillo. apparently I type faster than my Brain does. I meant no respect to your and your exhibit .
As they say, “Close, but no Segar”

I did it again. I meant to say I meant no DISrespect…again, sorry.

Jerry writes: “This rare original newspaper ad demonstrates that block booking was not always in practice during the golden age - that a cartoon from one studio could (and often did) play with a feature from another studio.”

And, I might add, in a theater owned by yet ANOTHER studio. Fox feature + Paramount short playing in a Loew’s (M-G-M) theater!

Amid, thank you for the heads-up on this one! I’ll actually be in New York on Friday…although dammit, I will JUST miss the hours for the Forbes Gallery.

Maybe I can come in earlier and see it…Searle’s work is probably the most influential of the last fifty years.
He just keeps getting better and better at it, too. Check out his political cartoons for LE MONDE (collected in book form in 2005) and one of my personal favorites, MARQUIS DE SADE MEETS GOODY TWO SHOES.

Searle is incredibly influential on animators and political cartoonists. I can see his influence on Chuck Jones from around 1953, when the first ST. TRINIANS books reached America, and also on the styling of the characters in ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS (late Disney in general.) The most amazing influence is on the GORILLAZ. In RISE OF THE OGRE, the English band members are drawn in Searlian style, circa St. Trinians. There are also thank-yous to Searle in the book and on the Gorillaz’ website.
Thanks again!

Should be well worth a look. I love Searle’s work and have drawings, prints, coins and tons of books and it’s consistently excellent from Forty Drawings, in 1946, onwards.

My introduction was the wonderful Molesworth books which are “grate as any fule kno……..”

Thank you for reminding me of this guy! I read a book full of St Trinian’s drawings when I was a teenager and his stuff rubbed off on me. When I tried to find the book again I couldn’t remember the name and I asked around libraries before giving up.

Yay.

I had forgotten these cartoons entirely.

I just ordered this, and several old collections, online.

I shall keep them next to my Charles Addams collection.

Great news! Wish I could make it to the show in NYC. That’s the 2nd Searle exhibition this year & there’s another early next year in England at the Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

‘Ronald Searle - A Celebration’

Exhibition in the Ruskin Gallery, 10th January - 13th February 2008

Who can’t love Searle?
Thanks for the heads up.

I like that sulky, teenaged Eloise on the cover.

We just did some cartoon inserts for the new movie but we weren’t allowed make them look like Ronald Searle which is a pity, but at least there is the nod to Searle by using animation in black and white.

Thank you for the heads-up on this show, Amid! It is fabulous.
I just managed to get in before closing time on Friday.
The show runs through March, so all New York based animators should get over there and have a look!

It would be nice if someday someone might think about editing in all the animated clips that we missed.

At last someone else remembers “The Jackie Bison Show” and how awful it was. The concept of that turkey wasn’t even original. It was ripped off an old Albert Brooks bit and executed in a manner that only Bucky and Pepito could envy. How embarrassing for the professional voice talent, some of whom are still living.

This is great, but man, that camera man! Keep it on the screen buddy!

Nice video, lots of those scenes should’ve been put in… LOL! Wtf’s the camerman’s problem!?!

Great post! Thanks.

BTW, that cameraman’s “problem” is he has to have a CU of Silverman to be projected on the screen for the theater audience. He possibly just may be doing his job.

You can delete this comment after you read it: you may want to edit this message to say that the exhibit continues until December *2008* so people won’t think it ends next month.

Cheers!

i want that popeye plate.

The Farmer’s Market store is one of the coolest surprises to come down the pike in a while. Shine has the best eye for vintage novelty stuff, masks and games I’ve ever encountered under one roof. But the kicker is that he has all this really rare (but not limited to) 30’s, 40’s & 50’s stuff in multiples in original packaging! Part of me is reluctant to recommend people going there because authentically cool things in LA tend to be spoiled by droves of gawking hipsters (I say this realizing that the guy is in business to sell, not to showcase, but still).

Bernie Shine used to run a store on Melrose Avenue right beside longtime Disney dealer Bob Molinari’s Fantasy’s Come True store.

I remember going into Shine’s Melrose locale 15 or so years ago and seeing the most wonderful Old King Cole Disney “TOYS” sign - the circa 1934 display piece was HUGE and depicted Mickey, Minnie and Pluto frolicking in the snow. I can’t remember the price, but I do recall it was big bucks. At the time Shine was giving out postcards he had made of the image.

Cool stuff!

BTW Amid, you should start a thread as to why animators arent striking as well.

interesting comment about animators, relative to the writer’s strike. yah, maybe there should be mutual creative support.

Got to agree with hugo and fellow matt. here should be a united front. Against evil. And we know what and who I mean.

matt your “evil” line is right on target. speaking of which, i saw this today and thought of you. after seeing this, net10 should consider an animated series.
enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03KY-FLYSWo

thanks for the above link (for net10). the animated shorts are funny and a little weird. cool stuff.

this is great site and excellent resource. thanks, so much!

p.s. next time i’m in LA, i know where i’m going… to the farmer’s market.

Whoa.

I could easily spend a small fortune on that stuff.