For those in the Portland, Oregon area, the Northwest Film Center is hosting “An Evening with Joanna Priestley” on Saturday, January 28th. The event is part of the Center’s Northwest Tracking series celebrating its 40th anniversary.  Priestley is one of my favorite filmmakers who I’ve written about before. (See my article I wrote for Skwigly here and here.) 

The program includes world premieres of two animated films, Out of Shape and Eye Liner, previews of which are embedded below.

Priestley says Out of Shape is the result of a “two month collaboration with terrific sound designer Marc Rose.”

“Eye Liner,”  she notes, “explores archetypes of the human face, patterning and cultural effigies that echo facial features.”

For more information on the screening and Priestley visit the Priestley Motion Pictures website, where you can also order DVDs and even one of her flipbooks.

Martin Scorcese makes a cameo appearance in Hugo.

Right off the bat, let me say that Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is a wonderful film which I cannot recommend too highly. In a sense,it’s one of those generic, loving homages to the movies that come along every so often; though Hugo is in a class all by itself. While a “family film”  like this may seem off the beaten track for the director of Taxi Driver and executive producer of Boardwalk Empire, it also appears to fit in with much of what he’s been dong throughout his career; in fact, I would venture to say this sort of sums up what he, as an artist, is all about.

Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès and Asa Butterfield as Hugo.

Hugo is about a young boy who encounters the elderly and forgotten film pioneer, Georges Méliès, who has been reduced to running a toy stall in the Montparnasse train station in Paris and  helps spur his rediscovery. (In fact, his rediscovery was prompted by an article published by filmmaker René Clair and Paul Gilson  in the October 15, 1929 issue of La Revue du cinéma; the two are represented in Hugo by the character of René Tabard.)  In the process, Scorsese gets to  show us Méliès at work in his Montreuil studio;  along the way, we also get to see clips from the recent restoration of the hand-colored version of Méliès‘ Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902).

Helen McCrory as Mama Jeanne (Jehanne d’Alcy), Méliès’ second wife, acting in A Trip to the Moon.

In a number of his films, Scorsese has been concerned with various, often unsavory aspects of his and America’s history/identity, such as Gangs of New York  and Mean Streets, while several of his documentaries, especially A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy — have concerned themselves with film history itself. Thus, it seems only natural and fitting that he should make Hugo, a film which seems to sum up how Scorsese sees himself as an artist.

Hugo sort of replaying a scene from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, which figures in the film’s story.

In terms of production, I was initially a bit put off by the film’s use of 3D stereo, which seemed a bit off-putting with its sometimes obvious multiplane effects; but I soon realized Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Dante Ferretti were trying for a style evocative of illustrations for a children’s book; though it does have some resemblance to Brian Selznick’s illustrations for his The Invention of Hugo Cabret, from which the movie was made from, it also had more than a passing resemblance to the look of Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express, which works better than you might think. Anyway, go see it.

P.S.:  December 2nd — The always useful fxguide website has a nice piece on Hugo’s visual effects here (which is actually the first of two parts), which also lists a number of filmic references made in the movie beyond Safety Last. Incidentally, one of the tasks the effects team had to do was to convert some Méliès footage to 3D, which brought to mind something that Serge Bromberg (whose Lobster Films was responsible for the restoration of the color version of Méliès‘ Le voyage dans la lune noted above) did something quite similar and more interesting. As Kristin Thompson reported last year:

Méliès’s early shorts were often pirated abroad, and a lot of money was being lost in the American market in particular. After the Lubin company flooded that market with bootleg copies of a 1902 film, Méliès struck back by opening his own American distribution office. Separate negatives for the domestic and foreign markets were made by the simple expedient of placing two cameras side by side. The folks at Lobster realized that those cameras’ lenses happened to be about the same distance apart as 3D camera lenses. By taking prints from the two separate versions of a film, today’s restorers could create a simulated 3D copy!

Two 1903 titles–I think that they were The Infernal Cauldron and The Oracle of Delphi–triumphantly showed that the experiment worked. Oracle survived in both French and American copies, and the effect of 3D was delightful. For Cauldron only the second half of the American print has been preserved. Watching the film through red-and-green glasses, you initially saw nothing in your right eye, while the left one saw the image in 2D. Abruptly, though, the second print materialized, and the depth effect kicked in. The films as synchronized  by Lobster looked exactly as if Méliès had designed them for 3D.

The Biograph blog  brought to my attention the Museum of the City of New York’s Collections Portal, which has been up and running since December and offers access to almost 100,000 images. The Biograph’s post focuses on photos relating to era of silent film. I did a somewhat broader search and immediately found pictures done for Look magazine by future movie director Stanley Kubrick taken during the location shooting in 1947 of Jules Dassin’s Naked City; I was even more taken with some of Kubrick’s other work, including the 1947 photo above labeled “Shoe Shine Boy [Mickey looking at a movie poster].” The poster is for Zoltan Korda’s Jungle Book (1942), which, like a number of Alexander Korda productions were easily seen in revival during the postwar years in New York. Check it out.

(Copyright: Richard Williams)

Last year, I blogged about the premiere of Richard Williams’ short film Circus Drawing at the opening night of the Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (The Pordenone Silent Film Festival), in Italy, and his long-standing relationship with the festival.

In reading about this year’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival on The Bioscope blog here I came across an image from a trailer he apparently did for this year’s festival. However, the festival site says it was made for last year’s event, but was interesting enough to post some images from same. The festival site notes:

The trailer is a small monument of traditional animation: Richard Williams has gone back to the technique of 1905, with every frame a drawing on paper (no cels, no computers). On June 13[, 2011] the logo was shown at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, before the screening of Frank Borzage’s Humoresque.

The 1905 date is a bit facetious, since the first animation using drawings is usually considered to be J. Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906), which used a combination of chalk on blackboard and cutout animation.

I also noticed an image from the trailer that John Canemaker did for the 2009 festival. The festival site reports that,

This 35-second film, in b&w and colour, is … a tribute to three pioneers of silent animation. First we see the artist’s hand draw Fantoche on a black sheet of paper. This character, created just 100 years ago by Emile Cohl, then changes into Winsor McCay’s colourful Little Nemo, who pirouettes and bows to the audience, to be replaced in turn by Felix the Cat. Otto Messmer’s famous feline has an idea, which makes him grin in satisfaction, showing four pointed teeth. The idea? To use his tail as a lasso, to rope the Giornate logo, and drag it onscreen.

Both trailers (aka signal films by some festivals) were shown silent with live musical accompaniment. Williams’ love of silent film may possibly explain the fact that the two title characters in his unfinished The Thief and the Cobbler never spoke. And Canemaker, of course, wrote the definitive books on both McCay and Messmer.

Finally, I couldn’t resist posting this 2007 photo of Williams (center) and Canemaker (right) posing with Rome mayor Walter Veltrone which I grabbed from Canemaker’s website.

P.S.: Perhaps it’s about time someone put together a program of some of these animated festival trailers/signal films which have been produced by leading filmmakers and studios around the world?

I usually don’t take notice of student films here, but I understandably am making an exception for Evan Curtis’ Chief Serenbe, made last year at the Savannah College of Art and Design — especially since it was made in f my graduate-level Media Theory class. (He has been in three of my classes and I am on his MFA thesis committee.) Ever since then, it has been making the rounds on the festival circuit and can now be seen online as part of the Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival along with some information on its production; you should also check out Curtis’ website here.

The first half of my Media Theory class involves lectures and discussions on media theory with the major student assignment being a term paper; the second half involves a studio assignment where students are urged to expand in some way on an aspect of their term paper.  The topic of Curtis’ paper,  “Toy Monger,” was not really surprising, since he is is an avid toy collector, and action figures in particular. And though Chief Serenbe does, like most of his films, uses toys from his collection, its style is very much inspired by Italian Neorealism. The film’s opening shot (see image above) was filmed after the class was over. My contribution to Chief Serenbe was, at best, rather modest as Curtis seemed to know exactly what he was wanted to do. In any case, do take a look and enjoy.

English National Opera’s promo for Terry Gilliam’s Damnation of Faust production.

It’s really not unusual for filmmakers to direct operas, but someone who started out as animator?

About a year ago, the Lucerne School of Art and Design, in Lucerne, Switzerland, put on its first Lucerne Animation Academy (LIAA). The four-day event was publicized as a “a great opportunity for people from theory and practice to meet and share their views on the characteristics of dramaturgy in animation films, in all its aesthetic and technical aspects.” Now, LIAA has posted videos of what they feel were “the most essential presentations held at the conference last year,” what they call LIAA-TV.

Among the most familiar names among the talks posted, mostly in English,  include:  Yuri Norstein: on “Animation and Poetry” (in Russian) (see image on top),  the Brothers Quay on “Music as a Provocative and Authentic Form” (see image above) and Priit Pärn on “How to Construct a Story – From Idea to Screenplay” (see image below).

In addition, you can find  talks by  filmmakers Jerzy Kucia, Georges Schwizgebel,  David O. Reilly, as well as ace composer Norman Roger, along with a number of others. Many thanks go to Otto Alder, Co-Head of the Animation Department for his work on the conference.

I must admit to being a bit surprised when I discovered that Richard Williams just premiered his long-dormant short, Circus Drawings on the opening night of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto,  XXX ed. (The 30th Pordenone Silent Film Festival) held October 1-8. Pordenone has long ranked as the world’s preeminent silent film event and Williams seems to have a long-standing relationship with it. For instance, in 2003, he gave their Jonathan Dennis Memorial Lecture, a talk by “people who are pre-eminent in some field of work associated with the conservation or appreciation of silent cinema.”

According to the catalog,

[Williams] has always insisted that the silent cinema is a profound influence on the animator’s work, and it is gratifying to think that the Giornate experience may in some small degree have stirred his decision to return to Circus Drawings. …

“In 1953 I was a young artist of twenty, living in Spain near a village
circus, where I drew the acrobats, clowns and onlookers.

“Twelve years later I filmed my drawings to an original score but
didn’t complete the film.

“Now that I’m 77, I’ve finished the film by animating my original
drawings.” …

On release, the film will be shown with sound, with Richard Rodney
Bennett’s 1965 score. However, uniquely for this performance,
Richard Williams wishes to screen the film as a “silent”, with live
piano accompaniment by Maud Nelissen.

As far as I can tell, the only online review of the film has been by Antti Alanen here, which is mostly devoted to quoting the catalog’s description, adding:

First the camera moves inside the 1950s drawings, then the drawings get animated, moving from black and white to colour. A fine animation.

Actually, the festival debuted two Williams films, the second being this year’s signal (“logo-trailer”) film.  Williams also got to play trumpet in the pit band opening night for Buster Keaton’s The Navigator.

Speaking of contemporary animators at Pordenone,  Peter Lord gave the  2004 Jonathan Dennis Lecture, while John Canemaker , who is something of a scholar, did the honors in 2007, when he also received their Jean Mitry Award for his “contribution to the reclamation and appreciation of silent cinema.”

The photo of Williams is from the festival website.

The above article from the December 1918 issue of Popular Science is about how a training film produced by “the Training Division of the War College, Mr. Max Fleischer, a former member of the Popular Science Monthly staff, devised for the General Staff the system that we illustrate.” During World War I Max Fleischer was assigned by the Bray Studios to make training films for the Army, all of which, as far as I know, were destroyed.

You can check 138 years of PopSci  at the magazine’s “The Complete Popular Science Archive” here, though the same material is also available (in slightly easier to read format) on Google Books.

(The man bending down on the lower right image looks a lot like Max Fleischer?)

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.