Animondays

Starting today, animator David B. Levy (president of Asifa-East) starts a new blog, Animondays, which he will update once a week. I’m really looking forward to this, as David has become one of my favorite commentators on animation with his clever, informative columns in the ASIFA-East newsletters and his excellent book, Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive. Here’s hoping David catches the blogging bug and adds AniTuesday, AniWednesday and so on, to his schedule.
Speaking of Mondays, next Monday night I’ll be presenting my Worst Cartoons Ever! screening for ASIFA-East in New York City. I’ll only be in the city for two days, (as I’m en route to the Ottawa Animation Festival) and I’m hoping to see as many of my old friends and Brew readers there as I can. This is a great way for everyone to meet up and say hello.
The screening will take place at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway (between Waverly and Washington Place), Room 017 at 7 PM. The program is technically for ASIFA-East members and NYU students/faculty/alumni only. However, if you are not a member of ASIFA (and you really should be) or not affiliated with NYU, please contact me by Thursday Sept 13th - and I’ll put you on the list. Should be fun… I can’t wait to inflict this bad stuff in the Big Apple.

Mid-Atlantic Comic Con

Just a reminder that for those of you on the east coast, The Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention is the end of this week, September 13 through the 15th at The Clarion Hotel in Aberdeen, Maryland. Among the events scheduled are an in person appearence by Virginia Davis who will talk about working for Walt Disney at the start of his career - and a screening of Ray Pointer’s Alice In Cartoonland program featuring some of the earliest Alice Comedies. Thad Komorowski is running two separate programs of classic animation, A Salute To Frank Tashlin and Golden Age Cartoons there as well. Consult the convention website for more information.

Who’s Who in The Autograph Hound

Jeff Pepper of 2719 Hyperion offers up a well annotated who’s who of celebrity caricatures in the Disney short The Autograph Hound (1939).

The Chestnut Tree

Bert and Jennifer Klein just finished producing a very charming 4-minute hand drawn short called The Chestnut Tree. It was directed and animated by a young woman named Hyun-min Lee, who is making her directorial debut. The film was executive produced by Don Hahn. Sorry for the late notice, but it’s screening this weekend for Academy qualification with the filmmakers present at both of the Sunday showings.

When Richie Rich was cool

I know it’s hard to believe, but Richie Rich was a cool dude once.
Once upon a time the character, originally created by Harvey Comics in 1952 as a companion feature in Little Dot, actually had a personality, clever stories and appealing comic art chiefly by animator Steve Muffatti, and cartoonists Warren Kremer and Ernie Colon.
Leslie Cabarga and I spent the summer mining the Harvey Comics vaults and cherry-picked the best of the original Richie Rich comics of the 50s and 60s for a new trade paperback volume due out next month. This is the second of several high quality Harvey Comics reprint books we are compiling for Dark Horse.
If you’ve only been exposed to the latter spin-off comic books of the 1970s and 80s, the cheap animated TV shows or that Macaulay Culkin movie, I urge you to give this volume a look. Amazon has just put our Richie Rich book up for pre-order and has posted the the first several pages, including the entire first six-page Richie story from Little Dot #1 (click the Search Inside: Amazon Online Reader option).

Cartoon Museum Benefit at Pixar

San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum is holding its fourth annual fundraiser at Pixar Animation Studios next Saturday. Tickets are $200. a piece, a bit steep but all the money goes to keeping the Museum alive. Animation art is a large part what the museum preserves and celebrates. In fact, a Mary Blair retrospective featuring rare concept art, advertising illustrations and children’s book illustrations will be opening in late October and run through March 2008.
At next Saturday’s fundraiser Pixar’s Mark Andrews (Story Supervisor), Dylan Brown (Supervising Animator)and Sharon Calahan (Director of Photography) will be guest speakers. A premiere screening of a new short, Our Friend the Rat, with in person commentary by director Jim Capobianco, will highlight the evening presentation in the main theatre. For more info on the Pixar event, consult the Cartoon Art Museum website.

Animated Manhattan

Inspired by the book Celluloid Skyline, which examined the depictions of New York in live-action film, the blog Ironic Sans has a delightful on-going series of posts called “Animated Manhattan” which looks at how New York City has been represented in cartoons throughout the years. So far, they’ve documented an eclectic assortment of animated pieces including features like Fritz the Cat and Madagascar, TV series including The Critic and Futurama, and one-off projects such as the Tom & Jerry short Mouse in Manhattan and the opening titles to Late Night with Conan O’Brien.