Op-Ed Cartoon

Does it mean anything that filmmaking icons Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni passed away the same week The Simpsons Movie opens? Jeff Stahler’s editorial cartoon yesterday nailed the sad truth about current movie going tastes, and the general public’s ignorance of film history.

Spider Pig

Sure, The Simpsons Movie made over $70 million this weekend at the box office. But the big winner in all this is the estate of lyricist Paul Francis Webster and composer Bob Harris (anyone know what became of him?).
Webster may have won three Academy Awards for Best Song (including Love Is A Many Splendored Thing), but his lyrics for the 1967 Spider-man TV cartoon theme will apparently live forever. In addition to its inclusion in the three recent Spider-Man live action features, the tune has become one of the most popular gags (re-worked as “Spider Pig”, by Homer) in The Simpsons Movie.
Compared to his other work, Webster must have been slumming when he penned the words for the Saturday morning cartoon show. But like Spider-man and the Simpsons, the song has established itself as a mainstay of popular culture.

LA: Jules Engel Show & Cartoon Mod Signing

Through the end of August, the Tobey C. Moss Gallery (7321 Beverly Boulevard, LA, CA) has on display a show of animation artwork by Jules Engel. It’s a fairly small selection of artwork but includes pieces from Engel’s work on Disney’s Fantasia, UPA and Format Films color keys, and drawings from his personal short films. This Thursday, August 2, from 7-9pm, I’ll be doing a signing of Cartoon Modern in conjunction with the show. We’ll also be doing a short screening that highlights his UPA work and includes rare interview clips with Engel. Brew readers who’d like to attend can rsvp by tomorrow either by sending an email to tobeymoss [at] earthlink.net or calling the gallery at (323) 933-5523.

The Online Animation Conversation

In early-2005, I declared that 2004 had been the year of the animation blog. It was a good year no doubt, but the same could likely be said for every year since then. In fact, the animation blogging community has evolved in leaps and bounds since its nascent rise in ‘04. Today, the conversation on animation blogs is as vibrant and exciting as ever. What makes the community so dynamic is that it’s not just artists and critics posting random opinions, but actively engaging in back-and-forth conversations with one another.
To offer just one example, when Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi recently posted about his distaste for the stock designs of Disney villains, character designer Harald Siepermann responded with a lengthy post on his own blog that discussed his process for designing the villain Clayton in Tarzan. I can’t imagine a conversation between two such disparate artistic personalities happening prior to blogs but these types of spirited dialogues take place on an increasingly frequent basis nowadays.
Granted, it can be difficult to keep track of all these conversations or even know where to look to find such discourse. But there is no denying that it’s happening, and students and professionals alike now have a tool unlike any other to help develop and inspire their craft. How are we each taking advantage of the possibilities and what can we do to improve the animation blogging community?

The Ultimate Preston Blair Swipe

We’ve posted other swipes from Preston Blair before (here, here, here and here) but this one is the mother of them all!
Steve Stanchfield and Mary Dixon spotted this arcade attraction at the Fowlerville Family Fair (in Fowlerville, Michigan) and it blew their minds:
We were greeted first by a great array of sideshow freaks, including a little guy named ‘Poobaa’ who the barker proclaimed as being the last living Muchkin from the Wizard of oz alive (he was 9 at the time). Poor Poobaa was made to swallow fire over and over to a bored looking crowd of locals.
Then, turning the corner, I see THIS. I’ve seen a lot of things before, but this is far, far beyond the normal Blair ripoff; it’s almost an outsider art homage! I took a bunch of pictures (forgive my not quite perfect alignment of the whole thing…). I have more if you want, but I think these tell the story pretty well. This is a walk though carnival attraction. I didn’t go inside, but I bet I would have seen Red in progression, the policeman and maybe even the hippos from Fantasia…

TONIGHT: Aural Disneyland Delights

Got a few hours tonight? Tune into the online broadcast of Luxuria Music from 7-10pm PST where the guest on the “Kitsch Niche with Strike” will be animation artist and director Jordan Reichek (Ren & Stimpy, Invader Zim). Jordan also happens to be a primo collector of Disneylandia (trust me, I’ve seen the collection) and he’s sharing some of the aural parts of the collection on air tonight including rare recording session outtakes, Disneyland commercials, weird “sing-along” records made at the park and theme park cover songs. Rare photos of the park will also be displayed on the Luxuria webcam. It’s all for free at LuxuriaMusic.com.

Simpsons Movie: 1st Review

Okay, I admit it. I’m excited about seeing The Simpsons Movie. But why are they opening it on the same weekend as the San Diego Comic Con? Over 100,000 first day ticket sales will be busy at the Con buying comics or attending Mark Evanier’s panels. I predict The Simpsons Movie will have a helluva Monday night box office gross, when all the fans get home from San Diego.
In the meantime, I think this is the first official review of the film. It was posted today by the London Times - and it’s very positive.

BG Inspiration

Art director Hans Bacher (Mulan) has started up an incredible new blog called Animation Treasures. He’s painstakingly recreating pan backgrounds from classic animated films currently on dvd (mostly Disney ones) to offer a sense of what the original backgrounds looked like before the characters were composited on top. There’s lots of insightful notes to go along with each image. Truly a terrific educational resource that everybody should take advantage of. Thanks Hans!

Simpsons in Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair has published an extensive oral history about The Simpsons. The piece includes the thoughts of everybody from cartoonist Gary Panter to Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, as well as many people who have worked on the series including Brad Bird, Gabor Csupo, Kent Butterworth, Bill Oakley, Larry Doyle and Hank Azaria. The same issue of VF also has an interview with Conan O’Brien discussing his time working on the series. I think the following comment from Conan really hits the nail on the head about why the humor on the Simpsons more often than not feels so tired and lacking in spontaneity:
By the time an episode came out, you had maybe heard the script read through like 20 times, and if for some reason the joke wasn’t getting a laugh on the 21st time, you had to rework it. Sometimes your first pitch is your best pitch, but over time, if you revisit it constantly, you’ll grow weary of it, it will start to wilt, and then you’re just coming up with a different pitch that’s maybe not necessarily better. Obviously it’s clearly a strength of The Simpsons that by the time you see it, things have been road-tested and thought about and so much work has gone into it. But sometimes I felt like, “Let’s bake the pie and serve it.”

Jack Zander Interview

Animation World Magazine has an interview with 99-year-old animation veteran Jack Zander whose career includes stints at studios like Romer Grey, Van Beuren, MGM and Terrytoons, as well as running his own commercial studios Pelican Films and Zander’s Animation Parlour. I saw Zander speak in LA about five years ago and his memory was impressively sharp. In fact, he seems quite sharp in this interview as well, though it would have been a more interesting chat if the interviewer had been more familiar with Zander’s history. As it is, it’s still worth a read.
Last year on the Cartoon Modern blog, I highlighted a couple advertising productions by Zander which have been lost to time. I thought I’d share a few more Zander artifacts. At the top of this post is a late-’50s magazine advertisement for his studio Pelican. Below is a 1962 Pelican-produced ad for Jax Beer designed by Chris Ishii and animated by Emery Hawkins. Click on the image to see a set of stills from the spot. And below that is another one of the Jax commercials. The comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May provided the tracks for the Jax spots.

The Venice Chronicles by Enrico Casarosa

Last week, Pixar story artist Enrico Casarosa finished his personal watercolor comic The Venice Chronicles. For much of the past year, Enrico has been uploading the comic page-by-page to his blog, and at 124 pages, he finally considers the project completed. The entire thing is available to read online, either as a Flickr set or in Slickr gallery format. I’m a fan of Enrico’s distinctive sense of storytelling and humor, and I’m delighted to hear that he’s also looking to release the Chronicles in book form, either as a self-publishing project or through a mainstream publisher.