Jerry Beck at Cartoon Brew breaks the news that two DVD sets devoted to UPA’s theatrical cartoons are coming out soon: UPA Jolly Frolics due out on March 5th from Turner Classic Movies and  The Mr. Magoo Theatrical Collection 1949-1959 which s due out June 19th from Shout! Factory (both are available for preorder). Until now, the best DVD source for them was the Special Edition set of Guillermo Del Toro’s HellBoy. which includes three Gerald McBoing shorts plus The Tell-Tale Heart as extras. (Del Toro is a long-time animation fan and has been working lately with DreamWorks Animation, where he’s slated to direct a forthcoming movie.)

These films have been shown intermittently on American cable channels, but such major titles as John Hubley’s Ragtime Bear (which introduced Mr. Magoo) and Rooty Toot Toot will now be available in restored versions (they were previously available on out-of-print VHS versions). Because of their lack of availability, the importance of UPA to post-World War II American and international animation has largely been overlooked.

If this isn’t enough, Wesleyan University Press will be publishing Adam Abraham’s When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA which is scheduled to be published March 9th. (It is also available for preorder at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

By the way, I reviewed the book for the publisher, but will hold off my comments until after it comes out; but I should note I recommended Wesleyan publish it.

I’m a bit late posting on this, but it’s never too late to acknowledge Pierre Floquet receiving the Society for Animation Studies’ 2011 McLaren-Lambart Award “for the Best Scholarly Book on animation” for his Le langage comique de Tex Avery, published in 2009 byL’Harmattan.  Floquet, who’s on the faculty of IPB, Bordeaux University. His 1996 PhD thesis was “on linguistics applied to cinema, focusing on Tex Avery’s comic language.”

The McLaren-Lambart Award is named in memory of Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart and derives from the National Film Board of Canada’s initial involvement in the Award.  The Society’s announcement notes:

This book, published in French …, is a detailed analysis of the cinematic nuances at play in the cartoons directed by Tex Avery at MGM from 1942-1951.  With remarkably complex insights into Avery’s comic language, the author distills what at first glance might seem like a director’s reliance on coarse gags and repetitive formulae into a sophisticated colloquy with moviegoers.  The manner in which Avery engages viewers on the nature of cinema has always been disarming, played for laughs instead of reflection, but French film scholars recognized him as an important auteur as early as the 1960s.  This recent book in many ways is a fulfillment of this earlier recognition, a culminating study of Tex Avery’s influential body of work.  Pierre Floquet’s writing on the concept of distantiation, from Althusser and especially Brecht, is essential.  It points to a genuine concern with the form of the language of cartoons that is just as vital in any consideration of modern animation as it is with Avery’s œuvre.

Bravo Pierre!

Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas, the book I helped Fred Ladd write about his involvement with anime (as producer and adapter of films/programs for the American market), as well as his view of the post-Astro Boy history of Japanese animation, is now available as a Google eBook. (It can be ordered here.)

The list price is $24.99 versus $35.00 for the original softcover edition, which is still available from MacFarland and various online booksellers). However, Google is currently selling it for $14.74, which is marginally cheaper than the  $14.99 Kindle edition. The latter originally sold for $9.99, but the new pricing reflects the increased leverage publishers now have in pricing e-books.

Google eBooks, which officially debuted today, will be available from a variety of sellers, including independent bookstores, so you are not stuck with one vendor as is currently the case with, for instance, Kindle eBooks. I did quickly check the Powell’s Books website and found the book selling for $23.12, but I suspect pricing will vary widely as the market matures.

I just received a copy of Tze-Yue G. (“Gigi”) Hu’s long-awaited Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building recently published by Hong Kong University Press, and distributed in North America by University of Washington Press ($28.00 paperback and $55.00 hardcover). Gigi, who teaches Asian Studies at the University of Oklahoma’s School of International and Area Studies, is someone I’ve known and liked for many years. Thus, when she asked me to write a blurb for her book, I was quite happy to do so. My blurb, which accurately sums up my opinion, was that:

Frames of Anime provides a wonderfully concise and insightful historical overview of Japanese animation; more importantly, Tze-yue G. Hu also gives the reader a much-needed frame of reference — cultural and historical — for understanding its development.

The Japanese-language edition of  Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas, by Fred Ladd (with my assistance) has been published by NTT in a translation by Kumi Kaoru, the author of two books on Hayao Miyazaki.  The Japanese title is Anime ga Anime ni naru made (How the Japanese Cartoon Became “Anime”’).

Kumi-san emailed me that “Nihon Keizai Shimbun (the Wall Street Journal of Japan) published a brief notice last Sunday, which he roughly  translated (with some editing on my part) as:

Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atom, which began in 1963, appeared in the US in the autumn of the same year as Astro Boy, and turned out to be a precedent-setting event for the international reputation of Japanese animation.  Mr. Ladd, who directed the English dubbed version, wrote this memoir with the support of Mr. Deneroff, cartoon scholar. It is full of previously unknown stories about the very early days of anime’s English adaptation, such as how the adaptation staff beat their brains to soften the “violence” in Atom so that it could meet American TV standards.

It is available from Amazon Japan here (and presumably other outlets) for ¥2,940 (about $31.50).

 Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas, Fred Ladd’s personal history of his involvement with producing the American versions of such early Japanese animated TV series as Astro Boy and Gigantor, has now been made available as an Amazon’s Kindle Book for only $9.99, which you can order here. (The original print edition is, of course, still available in its original softcover edition from MacFarland for $35.00.) Unfortunately, as far as I know, neither Fred Ladd or myself will be able to personally autograph your Kindle Edition, but I suppose there are other compensating virtues to getting it via Kindle.

Though the official publication date is March 2009, Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth of a Pop Culture Phenomenon, Fred Ladd’s personal history of anime and his involvement in it, is now available and is priced at $35.00. (I am the second author, though save for writing some sidebars and doing the index, my role was mainly editorial.) It is available directly from the publisher, McFarland, and from a number of online retailers both here and abroad, including Amazon. (The latter indicates that copies will not be shipped until after December 24th.)

The above image of Osamu Tezuka playing the accordion (he apparently liked to surprise guests by showing off his musical talents doing this) is one of several supplied by Tezuka Productions that got into the final book. However, a number did not. Among the latter is the drawing of the right of Tezuka with Tetsuan Atomu (Mighty Atom)/Astro Boy.

The above is from Tezuka’s autobiographical manga, Paper Fortress, and Jungle Emperor obviously refers to the first TV version of Jungulu Taitei Leo (Jungle Emperor Leo)/Kimba the White Lion.

Currently, there is an almost total lack of films by Émile Cohl, the pioneer French animator, who also worked in the United States,  available in on DVD; I know of two DVDs that I  that have his seminal Fantasmagorie (1908), which is often seen as the first fully animated film to explore the artistic possibilities of the medium. While there may be other films available here and there, a complete edition of his extant films is long overdue.

However, in searching Amazon France, I noticed the announcement of a new book, Émile Cohl: L’inventeur du dessin animé (Émile Cohl: Inventor of the Animated Cartoon), by Cohl’s grandson Pierre-Courtet Cohl, with an introduction by Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), to be published on August 20th; and best of all, the book also also includes a 2-DVD set of all the Cohl’s existing films. There is no indication yet whether the DVDs are region free; if not, it might be a reason to get a region free player or software.

Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth of a Pop Culture Phenomenon by Fred Ladd, with assistance from myself, has now been officially announced by McFarland, which is publishing it on November 30th. (It is also available for pre-order at Amazon.) The book is Fred’s story of his involvement in producing the English-language versions of Astro Boy, Gigantor and Kimba, the White Lion, among other pioneering anime series, and his dealings with the such figures as Osamu Tezuka. In addition, he gives a personal history of the phenonemon that is anime.

The book is something Fred and I have been working for several years. Actually, the idea developed during conversations we had preparing for a panel discussion I was chairing  which Fred organized, for the Postwar Japanese Anime/Manga Exhibit at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, in April 2003.  I  will have more to say about the book closer to publication, but thought it’s time to break silence and begin putting the word out.