Two forthcoming animation events in Los Angeles caught my eye. The first  is the 2nd AniMazing Spotlight Animated Shorts Festival, which will be held Saturday and Sunday, September 4-5, at Woodbury University, Burbank, under the able direction of Tee Bosustow. (Tee is the son of UPA co-founder Stephen Bosustow; the festival website also hosts the all-important UPA Legacy Project website; I should also note that I am friends with Tee’s brother Nick.)

In addition to screening of films in competition, there is Tom Sito speaking on  “Animation & Politics: the Blacklist, the Mafia and beyond,”  a presentation by the UCLA Film Archive of the work of computer animation pioneer Robert Abel,  Teddy Newton giving a behind-the-scenes look at Pixar’s Day & Night, “The Legendary Fred Crippen” (UPA & Roger Ramjet to Sesame Street), “More Women than Ever” presented by Women in Animation, etc., etc.

Film Historian and Oskar Fischinger biographer William Moritz, Elfriede Fischinger and animation filmmaker and teacher Michael Scroggins, c.1986, in The Hague. Source: Center for Visual Music.

On September 23rd, at 7:00 p.m., the Center for Visual Music, in Los Angeles, will be putting on “A Fischinger Celebration — Benefit Art Exhibition and Reception,  Celebrating Elfriede Fischinger on her 100th Birthday.” Though not as well-known as her husband Oskar, the pioneer abstract animation filmmaker, Elfriede Fischinger was an important figure in animation not only for her tireless efforts to promote her husband’s films, but also for her support of filmmakers and a number of animation-related organizations. Thus, when the Society for Animation Studies held its first conference at UCLA in 1989, it was not a surprise that Elfriede showed up.  I got to know Elfriede in the last decade of her life and always found her an inspiration. In a very real way, her home was a salon for animators and filmmakers, and she is well-deserving of this tribute.

The Center notes,

The evening features an Exhibition of selected photographs, artifacts and Paintings by Oskar Fischinger, a Wine Reception, and a Screening of Home Movies and Videos of Elfriede. Highlights include Oskar’s first Stereo Painting (1949), The Lumigraph film (1970) made by Elfriede, and unshot animation drawings by Oskar. Proceeds from the evening, which includes a silent auction, will benefit the Fischinger preservation, conservation and digitization work being done by Center for Visual Music, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit Los Angeles archive.

Raz Greenberg, in a post on the Society for Animation Studies discussion group, pointed out the above Spanish-language clip from a Euronews report on Ari Folman’s new film, The Congress, which mixes animation and live-action. The movie is based on Stanislaw Lem sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress and is follow-up to Folman’s acclaimed animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir.

In a follow-up to a front page story in the Los Angeles Times entitled “’Avatar’ stirs an animated actors debate in Hollywood,” the paper’s Rachel Abramowitz posted this interview with Steven Spielberg on his use of motion capture in his The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which utilizes the same technology James Cameron did in Avatar. The comments of Spielberg, who has played an important role in nurturing the current animation renaissance, are indicative of why mocap has proven so attractive to live-action directors:

For the director … the new experience was transporting.

“I just adored it,“ he says. “It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller.”

With that small monitor, Spielberg could look down and watch what the actors were doing — in real time — on a screen that showed them in the film universe. Working on the motion-capture stage — which is called the volume  — Spielberg was routinely dazzled by the liberating artistic value of the new science.

Mohamed Ghazala reports that Noshi Iskandar, who has been a key figure in Egyptian animation since the 1960s passed away last week at the age of 71. He started his career as a caricaturist and starting in 1961, he helped set up the Animation Department for Egyptian Television; his works were screened at a number of international festivals; in addition, he was also an important teacher for several generations of Egyptian artists at Minia University, in Minia.

… The idea was breathtaking. Picasso’s love for American comic strips was mentioned in Gertrude Stein’s book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He was now thinking about making an animated version of Don Quixote! Since he knew nothing about the intricate process of making animation, Picasso had left it up to his courtiers to find someone who could help him make the picture.

One of those people was a friend of the producer, so here we were sitting over a beer as I faced this mind-jolting possibility. A stream of thoughts were jostling each other through my head. Imagine working with Picasso on a storyboard! … Where could I get an animation crew in France? Would Picasso do more than just draw a storyboard? Could he learn to animate?

— Shamus Culhane, Talking Animals and Other People,  p.385

Fantastic Mr. Fox is the latest example of the recent trend of live-action filmmakers into animation, something that would have been considered an anomaly only a few years ago, or the stuff of Shamus Culhane’s shattered dream. If there is something anomalous about Fantastic Mr. Fox it is not that it is animated, but that he chose to do it using stop motion rather than motion capture, the current technique of choice of former live-action directors like George Miller (Happy Feet), Robert Zemeckis (Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol), and the team of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson (for their forthcoming Tintin trilogy). (Mocap, of course, is increasingly used for such live-action/animation hybrids as James Cameron’s Avatar, while I suppose the low budget choice would be Flash, as Ari Folman did with Waltz with Bashir.)

Though this paradigm shift is probably all to the good, it has not always been greeted with enthusiasm by the animation community. After all, motion capture is often seen as something other than real animation, which live-action folk seem to latch onto as a poor substitute for “the intricate process of making animation.” Amid Amidi in a recent post on Cartoon Brew, made a similar point with regards to Flash in giving advice to Jonathan Demme about a possible animated version of Dave Eggers’ novel Zeitoun:

…I beg you not to use cheap Flash/AfterEffects-style animation. Don’t Waltz with Bashir this film, and compromise the personal impact of the story with mechanical movement. Maintain the integrity and vitality of the graphic illustration that initially drew you to the project, and bring it to life with the nuance and lushness that only traditional hand-drawn animation can provide.

Though Anderson’s film has been largely given a pass, it encountered some unusual public grumbling from some crew members. Thus, in August, the Spectacular Attractions blog reported on the reaction by cinematographer Tristan Oliver to Anderson’s decision to direct the film long distance from Paris, rather than working alongside the film’s crew in London’s Three Mills Studios communicating via email and sending copies of his favorite films on DVD “to give an impression of what he’d like to see.”

I think Wes doesn’t understand what you can do, and he often wants us to do what you can’t do, and the length of time the process takes … I don’t think he quite comprehends that, and how difficult it is to change something once you’ve started. It takes a big amount of someone’s time to change a very small thing. I think he also doesn’t understand that an animator is a performer. An animator is an actor. And this is the secret to animation: you direct your animator, you do not direct the puppet, because the puppet is an inanimate object. You direct an animator as if you’re directing an actor, and they will give you a performance. So we’ll get a note back from Wes saying “that arm movement is wrong.” But that arm movement is part of a fluid performance. And that has been really quite difficult for the animators.

            Later on, a story in the Los Angeles Times further noted

The move did little to endear Anderson to his subordinates. “It’s not in the least bit normal,” director of photography Tristan Oliver observed at the production’s East London set last spring, when production on “Mr. Fox” was about three-quarters complete. “I’ve never worked on a picture where the director has been anywhere other than the studio floor!”

Moreover, Anderson had no idea that his ignorance of stop-motion … and exacting ideas concerning the film’s look would so exasperate his crew.

“Honestly? Yeah. He has made our lives miserable,” the film’s director of animation, Mark Gustafson, said during a break in shooting. He gave a weary chuckle. “I probably shouldn’t say that.”

Now that the film has been released to general critical acclaim, all seems forgiven. And I must say I found the film quite charming and very much a piece with other Anderson films — perhaps a bit too self conscious but nevertheless likeable.

But the episode brings up the question of how live-action filmmakers will adapt to animation when their knowledge of the medium is deemed less than adequate. The reaction by Tristan Oliver and Mark Gustafson to Anderson’s methods is nothing compared to the reactions I heard regarding director Joe Dante’s handling of the animated segments of Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

In live-action, first-time directors with little or no training pose a similar problem; and over the years, producers have learned to deal with such situations. I believe Elia Kazan once noted that when he went on the set of his first Hollywood movie, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, he didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to do; however, the cameraman, Leon Shamroy, told him he should stage the action and he would handle the camera. Something similar seems to have been the case with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane with cinematographer Gregg Toland. (Welles would acknowledge his debt to Toland by giving him equal billing in the film’s credits.)

A Hollywood cinematographer once confided to me that he was dubious about taking a high-profile assignment because he was tired of the sometimes thankless task of educating first-time directors. As thankless as these sorts of tasks might be, Hollywood has adjusted to the process and not a few of these first-timers have gone on to long careers behind the camera. It would seem the animation industry is in the process of learning to adapt in a similar fashion; the process might not be without pain, but as Fantastic Mr. Fox shows, the results need not be all bad.

P.S. (December 3rd): Another low budget choice for live-action filmmakers doing animation would, of course, be Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop, a computerized rotoscope process used by Richard Linklater in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.

On Friday night, July 10th, ASIFA-Atlanta put on a screening of locally-made animated films at the Woodruff Art Center’s Rich Auditorium. The event, which was made possible by the High Museum of Art, was put on as part of the 21st Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference being held that weekend at the Atlanta campus of the Society for Animation Studies. It was curated by ASIFA-Atlanta President Brett W. Thompson, who has now posted his introduction  to the screening (see above) as well as the question and answer period that followed with some of the artists who worked on the films (posted below).  Unfortunately, because of technical problems, there is a gap between parts 1 and 2, and the end of part 2 is missing.

The final program included the following films:

Animation Draw 1 — ASIFA-Atlanta; Happy and Strickly in “Fuzzy Business” — Robert Paraguassu / Bark Bark; Vice Versa — Jacques Khouri; White Cow — K.A. Callahan / Kristin Jarvis; Avery Matthews — Richard Ferguson-Hull / Steve Vitale, Turner Studios / Cartoon Network; Blossoming Flower, Smooch, Lick — Bradley Bailey; They Must Be Very Hungry — Bryan Fordney; Mouse and Cat — Joe Peery; As Seen on TV! — Lee Crowe; Traveler of the Horizon — Hamid Bahrami; Cornpopalypse — Graham Shirley; Death of a Matriarch — Takuro Masuda; Animation Draw 2 — ASIFA-Atlanta; A Day at the Beach — John Ryan; Fluidtoons — Brett W. Thompson; Stubbe Peter — Kristin Jarvis; Curtains — Amanda Goodbread; Juxtaposer — Joanna Davidovich; I Will Enjoy — Theodosia Burr (Em Kempf); Code Monkey — Jennifer Barclay; Animation Draw 3 — ASIFA-Atlanta; Get Got — Bryan Fordney; Busted — Matt Maiellaro.

The Academy of Television Arts iand Sciences’ Archive of American Television has launched EmmyTVLegends.org website, which aims to put its voluminous collection of over 600 video interviews with  “with the pioneers and legends of [ American]television.” The site, which uses YouTube to host the interviews, represents a second try for the Archives, which according to its press release here, noted, “In 2005, the Archive began to release the interviews online to the public, but until now there was no easy way to search footage.”

Only about 100 of the interviews have been posted so far, including comic genius Sid Caesar (see above) and animation producer/director Bill Melendez (see below). (The Caesar segment covers his career up until he was approached to work in television, while the Melendez covers his first work in TV animation.) The number of animation-related figures does seem rather sparse, but does include Alex Anderson (Crusader Rabbit), Joseph Barbera, Art Clokey, Chuck Jones, Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Phil Roman.

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.

In following the events that are happening in Iran, it occurred to me that Marjane Satrapi, the creator of Persopolis, would certainly not be shy about speaking out on the situation. A quick search found that she, along with filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar), a representative for opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi abroad, spoke out in front of the European Parliament on June 16th,  seen above YouTube video. A report on the presentation posted on Adnkronos International can be found here.

I just came across a brief, but interesting report on renown Iranian animation filmmaker and illustrator Noureddin Zarrinkelk’s recent appearance at Dartmouth College. The story in The Dartmouth begins by noting that,

In 1986, during the thick of the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian animator Noori Zarrinkelk visited Dartmouth for the first time to give a presentation on his work. Zarrinkelk returned to the College last Friday — over 20 years later and with Iran once again in the news — to give a similar presentation in Loew Auditorium. Zarrinkelk screened five of his films, which express the need for global peace and understanding, as well as two others from contemporary Iranian animators.

Unfortunately, the piece tends to be rather superficial, but it did lead me to check out  Zarrinkelk’s website, which announces that,

The 9th exhibition of the Association of Illustrators of Children’s Books is held for commemoration of Nouredin Zarrin Kelk. The exhibition is organized to appreciate the activities of the father of Iran’s animation, in Momayez Gallery of the Iranian Artists’ Forum, from Monday May 29, for 6 days.

It also includes a brief tribute to Zarrinkelk by Borivoj Dovnikovic Bordo, one of the founders of the Zagreb School of Animation.

Film historian Kristin Thompson, in reporting on the screening of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues at this year’s Eberfest (Roger Ebert’s Film Festival hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Media), includes a transcript of a discussion with Paley and animation scholar (and old buddy) Richard Leskosky  (seen above). In it she makes an interesting aside about the way the film was projected (digitally, which is how it was created):

By the way, I want to mention that what you saw was not 35mm. You saw HD-cam, and there are actually 35mm prints of this, and seeing it here was very strange. It was unusually solid, rock solid, a little bit troublingly solid, although that is the ideal that film technology has been striving for. But 35mm prints have all these scratches and splices, and grain and a kind of warmth that moves around, which is almost like a kind of very desirable filter that really warms up the film. So watching it in 35mm is different. I was noticing how computery it looked on the HD projection at this particular size, because I was looking for imperfections that simply weren’t there.

Anyway, do take a look.

The caption in the Life/Google archive for the photo above (by Allan Grant) reads: "Carlo Vinci, artist drawing cartoon at Hanna-barbara [sic] productions." Taken in 1960, the year Hanna Barbera became the force in television animation with The Flintstones, when it debuted on the ABC network on prime time.  The image below has the caption: "Joe Barbera (R), [with] partner Bill Hanna (L), creators of animated cartoons."

Steve Hulett, on The Animation Guild blog, noted this story by Joel Feingold from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on Max Fleischer’s days as a cartoonist at the paper from 1901 to 1905. It also reprints several examples of his work, including the one on the left, from August 1902,  noting “Chawles’ resemblance to Betty Boop.” (Unfortunately, the quality of the images leaves much to be desired.)

The story tells of Fleischer’s career at the paper, where he began working as a $2 a week errand boy at age 17 in 1900. It also notes,

In 1901, Fleischer’s art began appearing in the Daily Eagle – little filler drawings, one-panel cartoons, and eventually photographs. By 1902, Max had taken the cartoonist’s moniker Mack, and his work proliferated in the Eagle’s pages. Fleischer sometimes drew editorial cartoons, though rarely the explicitly political ones – these were reserved for older and less whimsical staff artists. Max’s real specialty was the short, funny cartoon. …

While Fleischer’s one-panel sketches often took the form of sly or truly strange social comment … his multi-panel comic-strips were built on ridiculous physical comedy. At a time when the conventions of the comic-strip were still hazy – Pulitzer had only begun running comic-strips in 1897 – the young Max Fleischer saw beyond the multi-panel strip to an action-oriented, fluid medium. Even in 1902, Fleischer wanted to be making moving cartoons.

The Nitrate Film Interest Group of the Association of Moving Image Archivists‘ has a Flicker site where archivists post frame scans (and clips) of unidentified films. The above "frame scan is from the end of the film when the audience realizes that Krazy has been eating his furniture in his sleep."

David Bordwell recently noted that,

The submissions have tended towards silent films and nitrate prints, but sound films and safety elements are welcome as well. The page is also set up for short video clips, and the first video post has just been uploaded from a new scan of a 28mm print in the Academy Film Archive’s collection. This is also a good resource for anyone out there seeking help in identifying film elements, and you do not have to be a member of AMIA to submit images.

The Krazy Kat is one of the few animation items posted so far and is from the original series done at Hearst’s International Features Service; there is also this film clip identified only as, "Based on the character name Courandair, it is probably a film by Henry Monnier.

I must admit to knowing little about Monnier, other than he seemed to have been active in France after World War I. However, the Hearst studio, which Gregory La Cava ran from 1916-1918, was an important player in early American animation; it was the studio where the likes of Walter Lantz and Grim Natwick began their careers in animation. As Joe Adamson wrote in The Walter Lantz Story, the studio was responsible for several technical and stylistic innovations, including the development (by La Cava) of the storyboard, which was not picked up by others until Disney rediscovered it later on. (La Cava ended his animation career at the Bray Studios in the 1920s before going into live action, directing such movies as Gabriel Over the White House [1933], My Man Godfrey [1936] and Stage Door [1937]).

Below is what is identified as the "Opening credit and first shot of the [Krazy Kat cartoon]. "

The Japan Times just published this story by Mark Schilling about an appearance by Hayao Miyazaki’s at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo on November 20th. He notes that, "After the event, his most widely quoted remark was a dig at Prime Minister Taro Aso, who has often publicly proclaimed his love of manga. "It’s an embarrassment," said Miyazaki. "He should do that sort of thing in his private time."

Schilling added:

Miyazaki also lamented that today’s children live too much in the virtual worlds of TV, games, e-mail, mobile phones and comics, and too little in nature. "It takes away their strength," he said.

In other words, he occasionally sounded more like a cranky 67-year-old (his actual age) than someone who has devoted his entire adult life to creating manga and anime himself ….

Miyazaki’s latest film, Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo On the Cliff by the Sea), is another winner at the box office, having "grossed nearly ¥15 billion [over $161 million] since its July release."

The story notes that,

Miyazaki does not expect his films — or any films — to find wide appreciation 30 years after their release. "That is, audiences today can no longer enjoy films that are more than 30 years old, save in a historical sense," he said.

When an elderly journalist countered with the example of the 1942 classic "Casablanca," Miyazaki was unfazed.

"The films you value can be lifelong friends, but if "Casablanca" were released now, it wouldn’t be a hit," he said. "If (Yasujiro) Ozu were making his movies today, they would play in one theater."

On the perennial question on who might succeed him at Studio Ghibli:

He has not formally appointed his successor at Studio Ghibli, though his son Goro, who made his directorial debut in 2006 with the hit fantasy "Gedo Senki" ("Tales from Earthsea"), is the obvious heir apparent.

"I don’t favor him because he’s my son," Miyazaki said, with a hint of irritation. "He’ll face his true test (as a director) the next time around."

In the meantime, here’s a trailer (in Japanese) for his newest film: