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.

For those in the Atlanta area, ASIFA-Atlanta will be hosting two programs of international animated films on Saturday, December 10th, at the High Museum of Art’s Hill Auditorium, 1280 Peachtree Street, N.E., Atlanta. The announcement says to

Expect an outlandish assortment of stop-motion, 3D, mixed-media and claymation shorts from Atlanta and beyond. A  Q&A  with  the  animators  will  follow  each screening.

The 2:00 pm screening is for kids while the 8:00 pm screening is for ages 14 and up. The full schedule is available here.

This year’s celebration of International Animation Day by ASIFA-Atlanta is being held this year on November 6th, at the Five Spot, in Atlanta’s Little Five Points Area. As usual, the screening, which is free, will include a selection of films from around the world, including works from Portugal, Australia, Brazil, and Korea.

This year’s poster was designed by Ihab Shaker, which as the ASIFA-Egypt website notes, is the first time ASIFA-International chose “an artist from Africa or the Arab world” for this honor. Shaker began his career in Egypt in 1968, but also spent much of his career in France, where he worked for Paul Grimault.

Photo of Ihab Shaker from the ASIFA-Egypt website.

(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?

Valery Ugarov’s Music Box With a Secret (1976)

One of the nice things about international/immigrant  students is the films they call to my attention. This was recently the case with Russian émigré  Gabriella DeLamater. After I showed clips from Yellow Submarine, she thought she had seen something like it before and found Valery Ugarov’s Music Box With a Secret (1976) on YouTube. (I have embedded the version posted by the invaluable Animatsiya in English site; the film, without English subtitles can be found here.) She wrote that, “I never liked this Russian cartoon in my childhood, probably this why I didn’t like Yellow Submarine as well.” I don’t much about the film, except it was based on Vladimir Odoevsky’s fairy tale, “Town in a Snuffbox.” Animatsiya in English notes:

The point of this cartoon is that it shows the magic of what engineers do – it’s about the love of taking things apart to find out how they work and maybe to improve them. Take away all the fancy graphics and music, and that’s the core idea of the film. There are many people who see no attraction in that at all, and they’re probably the ones who won’t like this film.

Update (December 3, 2010): Timo Linsenmaier notes that Ugarov now teaches at VGIK. He also recommends the book Nashi mulfilmy,  which is “very rare,” which contains information on Ugarov and has characters from the film on the cover.

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.

Being that it is Christmas time, I thought I would post Hugh Harman’s Peace on Earth, especially as this is the 70th anniversary of its release (7 December 1939); the film’s pacifist theme resonated with the American public in the wake of the outbreak of the World War II in Europe and Harman said it was his favorite film “because it has some meaning and a serious theme.” Peace on Earth, which has some echoes of William Cameron Menzies’ version of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come (1936), earned an Oscar nomination and, according to Harman, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. The film’s success was not entirely welcomed by the powers that be at MGM, as producer Fred Quimby subsequently scotched Harman’s plans to do a version of his favorite poem, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

(Incidentally, this week also marks the 70th anniversary of Dave Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels (22 December 1939), which like Peace on Earth also had a pacifist theme — though it was not so blunt in its message.)

Being Christmas, I thought I should also post Paul Driessen’s An Old Box (1975), which the great Dutch-Canadian filmmaker made for the National Film Board of Canada, with music by Normand Roger.

This rare and delightful Mutt and Jeff cartoon directed by Charley Bowers is one of six American films from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia that were preserved with the aid of the National Film Preservation Foundation, which can be seen online or downloaded as a high quality MPEG file here. (The Museum of Modern Art seems to be the archive that did the actual preservation; the NFPF, of course, is responsible for the wonderful series of Treasures from American Film Archives DVDs.)

The film’s plot in many ways anticipates Friz Freleng’s You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940). After seeing how their creator, Bud Fisher, is making a fortune off them, they demand a higher salary and better working conditions; when Fisher turns them down, they go on strike and decide to make their own cartoons.

However, the results are less than stellar …

… and they beg Fisher to take them back.

(Thanks to Jeanpaul Goergen.)

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.

I’m a bit late on this, but I think it important to take note of Fatenah, the new Palestinian animated documentary, which Erika Solomon at Reuters described on July 3rd as:

The true story of a young Gazan woman’s futile battle against breast cancer has been commemorated in the first-ever Palestinian animated commercial film. “Fatenah” debuted last night in the West Bank city of Ramallah, at the Al-Kasabah Theater, and was received by a large and enthusiastic audience [as seen in the above video]. …

The film, only 30-minutes long, draws inspiration from a true story of a woman who died in the midst of trying to get treatment for breast cancer. Her story was documented by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights.

Director and animator Ahmad Habash says the piece, which is being funded by the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territories, tries not to portray either side—Israeli or Palestinian—as sheer good or evil. “That’s the reality,” he said. “There were doctors that tricked the girl and those that helped her on the Palestinian side. And on the Israeli side there were people who helped her, and those who didn’t”.

An Associated Press story notes the film had a $60,000 budget and is schedule to make the international festival circuit. The publicity accorded the film only goes to confirm that the recent trend towards high profile animated documentaries, exemplified in recent years by Persopolis and Waltz With Bashir; interestingly, all three essentially come out of the political caldron that is the Middle East.

A number of interesting new DVD compilations of short films have recently been announced starting with The Astonishing Work of Tezuka Osamu  from  Kino Video, featuring 13 personal films by the renown “god of manga” and “father of anime” made between 1962 and 1988. (The last, his 1988 animated self-portrait, which is also included, was made as part of an ASIFA-International anijam, may have been his last film.) I must admit to not having seen his early TV series, such as Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, when they first came out; instead, I became initially became familiar with his work through such delightful films as Jumping (1984) (see above) and Broken Down Film (1985), which were regulars on the festival circuit in the 1980s and early 1990s. These films have been absent from video in the U.S. in recent years, though they have been available on DVD in France and Australia. The DVD will officially be available on July 28th, though you can place advance orders at Amazon and Deepdiscount.com. (Thanks to Mark Mayerson.)

On the 100th anniversary  of his birth, the Iota Center is offering  Jules Engel: Selected Works, Volume I (see the trailer above). Engel is best known as the founding head of the Experimental Animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, one of the world’s premiere animation schools; previously, he worked for Disney and (more importantly) UPA.  The Center notes:

This first volume of Engel’s selected animation work offers fifteen of his films ranging from one of his earliest experimental works (Carnival, 1963) to one of his last (The Toy Shop, 1998). Arranged chronologically, the collection offers one view of the artist’s progression over almost four decades. Also included is an excerpt from Jules Engel: An Artist For All Seasons, a documentary from Janeann Dill, Ph.D, containing rare footage of his artwork and interviews.

I first got to know Engel some 20 years ago, when I did what became several stories about the CalArts Experimental Animation program. Over the years, he rarely spoke of his own work and instead boasted of such alumni of his program as Henry Selick and Glen Keane; and when the Ottawa International Animation Festival paid tribute to him in 1992, he insisted that they only screen films by his students. Thus, this DVD will certainly help shed more  light on Engel’s career as a filmmaker.

Kristin Thompson, in reporting on David Bordwell’s blog on what she saw at the latest Il Cinema Ritrovato organized by the Cineteca Bologna, and their annual look at films released 100 years ago, notes:

Maybe it’s just my impression, but the hundred-year packages seem to gain in prominence and popularity each year. Presumably in response to such popularity, the festival has just released a DVD with a selection of 22 shorts from this year’s 1909 program: Cento anni fa: Il cinema Europeo del 1909/European cinema in 1909 (running two hours and twenty minutes …). It contains only about a fifth of the roughly 100 films screened, but many of the others are available in online archives. DVDs of previous years’ programs are in the works, with 1907 soon to come. The DVD and other publications of the festival are available here.

Speaking of early films, David Bordwell subsequently noted that Kino Video is releasing a three-disc set of Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913, which is due out on September 1st. The collection includes films by three major French pioneers: Alice Guy (who also had a considerable career in the US), Louis Feuillade and Leonce Perret.

A filmmaker conspicuous by his absence is Émile Cohl, the pioneer animation filmmaker whose works (mostly for Gaumont) have been available as a region-free PAL DVD  supplement to the book, Émile Cohl: L’inventeur du dessin animé (Émile Cohl: Inventor of the Animated Cartoon), by Cohl’s grandson Pierre-Courtet Cohl, which I previously made note of here.

Canadian filmmaker Pedram Goshtasbpour, for some reason, describes his short film  Eleven Roses (aka E1even Roses) (2008) as a “romantic comedy,” though it is more aptly seen as a 98 lb. weakling tale gone horribly wrong. Pedram, who is someone with whom I’ve had a productive, long-standing correspondence with, shows himself to be a expert filmmaker, with considerable comedic and dramatic flair; the (mostly) black-and-white film effectively mixes CGI and traditional 2D animation and is something I can easily recommend. (The film can be viewed here.)

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]. "

Whenever I lecture about UPA, I almost always mention the Life magazine story about Gerald McBoing Boing as an indicator of how popular the film was. Thus, it was no surprise to find a whole slew of images from the film in the Google/Life magazine archives. What is interesting is that they were apparently photographed by Peter Stackpole specifically for Life from specially done cel setups, as normally only a few publicity stills would have been made for each cartoon. (The peg bars are clearly evident in a number of the pictures, including the one above.)

Jerry Beck and Amin Amidi’s Cartoon Brew is one of my favorite animation sites, so I was delighted that they have added Cartoon Brew TV to their mix, featuring new and old films. Their first offering, Michael Langan’s award-winning  Doxology, a student film made at Rhode Island School of Design, was somewhat disappointing; the film, which seems inspired by Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python work, has a few good ideas, but  it really does not hold together.

However, their second offering, Tod Polson and Mark Oftedal’s The Pumpkin of Nyefar (2004) is much more assured film. Done in the Fractured Fairy Tale style glommed onto by DreamWorks in its Shrek franchise, it is a charming effort. Interestingly, it was co-authored by Warner Bros. cartoon legend Maurice Noble when he and Polson were at Chuck Jones Film Productions in 1994. The film itself was made at Wang Studios in Taiwan (aka Cuckoo’s Nest), which is best known as a pioneering overseas studio, and narrated by June Foray (another Warner Bros. veteran, best known for voicing Rocky and Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle, home of the Fractured Fairy Tales).

But what really led me to write this was the first in their series of

… Cartoon Brew TV’s “Brew Vaults.” Every three weeks [they are] presenting an animated short, movie trailer, vintage TV commercial or some other cartoon rarity and offering an exclusive audio track commentary about its production, historical significance and the artists who made these films. Animation historian Jerry Beck and other guests will provide the commentaries.

And it is the commentary which makes this offering so valuable. The first film in the series is Paul Terry’s Dinner Time (1928),  in which Jerry Beck is joined by ace animator and historian Mark Kausler; the duo provide a wonderful analysis of the film, just as you would expect to hear on one of the many first-rate DVD sets Beck has produced over the years.

Dinner Time is a film often referred to in histories of animation, but rarely discussed. Basically, it was the first sound cartoon to get a wide release and was the film Walt Disney worried about when making Steamboat Willie. And sure enough, as Disney and director Ub Iwerks were relieved to find out, it nowhere came close to challenging their first sound offering. (They have also posted a Quicktime version of the film without commentary here.)

(Of course, Max Fleischer was the first to make animated cartoons with sound with his Ko-Ko Car-Tunes series, using the experimental Lee De Forest Phonofilm system; however, the films only played as sound films in a only a few theaters . J.R. Bray claimed to have made an experimental sound cartoon in 1926 using Fox’s Movietone system, though it was apparently never released.)

Beck and Kausler do make one error. Though they clearly state the film was made before Steamboat Willie, they seem to take the Dinner Time‘s December 1928 copyright date as indicating it was probably released after the Disney film,  which was not the case.  Copyright dates do not always reflect a film’s actual release date, and, as IMDB notes, it was released on October 14, 1928, a month before the Disney film.

But I quibble and can easily and unabashedly recommend Cartoon Brew TV.