ASIFA-Hollywood’s annual Annie Awards ceremony, being held at UCLA’s Royce Hall tomorrow (February 4th) at 7:00 pm PST, will be streamed live. It may or may not, as ASIFA-Hollywood would have it, “Animation’s Highest Honor,” it is certainly the most important in the United States outside of the Oscars, and certainly among the most important social events for the L.A. animation community.

Anyway, if you are interested, you can view it  live at The Animation Guild’s blog and AniMazSpot website.

The young David Lloyd George’s dream of David and Goliath in Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

On July 14th, the UK’s National Commission for UNESCO announced the 10 items and collections to be included in its first UK Memory of the World Register, which follows in the footsteps of  UNESCO’s worldwide Memory of the World Programme, which I previously posted about here. Included are two films, both rather obscure — one because of its subject matter and the other because it was a film that was never shown publicly and believed to be lost. The latter is Maurice Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918),  a biography of the British prime minister, which was repressed and presumed destroyed; the latter is  St Kilda, Britain’s Loneliest Isle (1928), a documentary of  life on a island in the Hebrides that was soon to vanish.

Luke McKernan provides a fascinating rundown of the history of Elvey’s film on The Bioscope, his invaluable blog about silent movies. He notes that the film has

a remarkable history of idealism, political intrigue, slander, subterfuge, disappearance, rediscovery and restoration. The Life Story of David Lloyd George was made in 1918, vanished before any cinema audience had a chance to see it, and re-emerged to astonished acclaim in 1994. Its place must be in virtual history rather than actual film history, because its story is one of if onlys and maybes. But what a story it is.

The 152-minute film is available on DVD from The National Library of Wales here and includes 47 minutes of extras, including an interview with ace film historian Kevin Brownlow.

As to St Kilda, it is

A filmed voyage by steamer from Glasgow to St Kilda, containing scenes of the ports en-route and life of the population on St Kilda. Research supports the conclusion that the scenes on the island of Hirta were taken in May 1923, with footage of the voyage from Glasgow out to St Kilda shot later, c. 1928. The film was made on the eve of the evacuation of St Kilda, August 1930, and with it the end of two millennia of human habitation on the island.

The film can be seen on YouTube in two parts (part 1 is embedded above), though you can also see in one sitting on the Scottish Screen Archive site here, which contains additional information on St Kilda.

Meanwhile …

In preparing for this post, I checked UNESCO’s Memory of the World site and discovered its list of Current Nominations, which include a number of film-related items. These include the EYE Film Instituut Nederland’s Desmet Collection, that includes “films, company documents, posters and film stills from the 1910’s” collected by Jean Desmet and Rossellini 77 Triptych, about Roberto Rossellini’s final project. Others include the Audiovisual Collection of Max Stahl, which includes material relating to the founding of Timor Leste, the Thor Heyerdahl Archives (Heyerdahl, the 20th century explorer, made Kon-Tiki (1950),one of the most popular post-war documentaries), and Collection of note manuscripts and film music of Composer Aram Khachaturian.

Thanks to The Bioscope, from whose site I cribbed the frame grab at the top from The Life Story of David Lloyd George.

I’m writing this from Edinburgh, Scotland, where my wife and I have been enjoying a really wonderful Society for Animation Studies conference. A full report will follow when I get back home, but I can’t help responding to the Motion Picture Academy’s new rules for defining what is animation (see press release here), which states in part that,

a sentence regarding motion capture was added to clarify the definition of an animated film. The language now reads: “An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of greater than 40 minutes, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time.”

It was mentioned during one of the conference’s many discussions of motion capture and drew some incredulous responses from the packed room (the person reporting it wasn’t sure if it was correct), but a comment by Sheridan Institute of Technology’s Tony Tarantini made around this time about James Cameron’s assertion that there’s no animation in Avatar is worth reporting. He basically felt that at a time when animation is becoming the dominant mode of production, Cameron is try to take it [the field] away from animators.

In the paper my wife Vickie and I gave yesterday, we discussed how live-action directors, like Cameron, liked motion capture because it enabled them to do animation in a way similar to the way they film live-action (i.e., they direct actors instead of animators). For whatever reason, he does not want to see himself as an animation filmmaker and I suspect the new rules regarding motion capture were added in part to assuage people like him; it would also please Pixar, DreamWorks Animation and Blue Sky, as it would reduce possible future Oscar competition. (Needless to say, I feel motion capture is animation.)

In a discussion about the new rules at Cartoon Brew, a number of people felt that motion capture films could still be considered animation if the data was finished by animators frame-by-frame, while Ryan McCulloch asked whether this would disqualify Happy Feet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature several years ago (I believe it was the same year that another mocap film, Monster House was also nominated)? And the ever sane Floyd Norman said, “This is only going to get crazier.”

The 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for the 2009 National Film Registry were announced today and include the usual mix of classic Hollywood, independent , documentary, amateur and student films. (The Library’s press release announcing the list can be found here.) Also as usual, I found the selection a mixed bag, but among the selections I have no quibble with are Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) (a particular favorite of mine) and Winsor McCay’s first film, Little Nemo (1911) (a pick that was way overdue; pictured above is one of the film’s most magical moments).

Animated films have almost always made the cut since the Registry was first established in 1989, but they do seem more prevalent this year and include: Sidney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949), (a live-action/animation combo that is more of a trick film), Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero (1975), Janie Geiser’s The Red Book (1994), and Helen Hill’s Scratch and Crow (1995) (a student film made at CalArts; the other student effort this year is Martin Brest’s Hot Dogs for Gauguin [NYU, 1972], “with a cast including Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman in her film debut.”)

As the CBC reports, “The UNESCO Memory of the World Register has selected McLaren’s films to be held in its heritage collection of the most significant world cultural artifacts.

“McLaren’s Oscar-winning anti-war film Neighbours is among 82 films and 52 film tests to be preserved.”

The Memory of the World program is aimed at the “preservation and dissemination of valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide.”

In addition to McLaren’s films, other additions include the Diaries of Anne Frank, Song of the Nibelungs, and the Magna Carta. Other film-related material added this year includes the John Marshall Ju/’hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection, 1950-2000 and NRWA Photo and Film Archives of Palestinian Refugees.  A list of this year’s additions can be found here.

Other film-related added in the past includes: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the Tait Brothers’ The Story of the Kelly Gang (Australia, 1906) (the first feature film made), Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, the Ingmar Bergman Archives,Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned), Lumière Films, Roald Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition (1910-1912) and The Battle of the Somme (1916). A full  list of Registered Heritage can be found here.

The CBC further notes:

The Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, which protects Canada’s film and video heritage, nominated the collection for preservation by UNESCO.

The bid was supported by groups such as the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, the British Film Institute, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Film Studies Association of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds an archive of McLaren works.

Neighbours and other McLaren classics can be viewed at the NFB’s online screening room.

(Thanks to Karl Cohen.)

Correction: The CBC report which I initially relied on was in error in saying, “The UNESCO Memory of the World Register has selected McLaren’s films to be held in its heritage collection of the most significant world cultural artifacts.” Instead the honor was reserved for just Neighbours. As its website noted:

Norman McLaren is the most influential animator in the history of the art of animation. Over many years of constant groundbreaking research and experimentation he has created a coherent and extraordinary body of work with a unique inventiveness. This is best exemplified by his most important film, the anti-war parable Neighbours.