Vivien Halas has posted this filmic remembrance of her father John Halas (1912-1995), who would have been 100 years old today. Halas, whose studio, Halas & Batchelor, made the first British animated feature, Animal Farm (1954), was obviously a seminal figure in British animation and also served as the founding president of ASIFA-International.

The documentary features a number of interviews with friends and people who worked with him at his studio and ASIFA. It also includes some fascinating clips from his films, including a 1970 experiment with 2D computer animation and a 1930 film he made in his native Hungary.

I never really met Halas, though I did correspond with him when I served as editor of the ASIFA-Hollywood’s Graffiti magazine and The Inbetweener newsletter in the mid-1980s. As ASIFA-International President and President Emeritus, he would send out a column which we and other ASIFA chapters would publish.  I still recall a rather prescient piece talking about the growing affinity between visual effects and animation.

Vivien Halas add that, “This short documentary will be available shortly as a bonus on a new DVD specially made for ASIFA of John’s favourite short films from Halas & Batchelor.”

Happy birthday John.

Adam Abraham’s new book, which has just been published by Wesleyan University Press, is an easy book to recommend to anyone interested in film or animation history. I was one of the anonymous readers Wesleyan engaged to evaluate it. A brief excerpt from my confidential evaluation is used on the back cover as an endorsement; but I would like to say a few more words on why the book is so important. (I did have some reservations, but they did not hesitate me from urging its publications.)

Until now, one of the many glaring gaps in animation, film and TV history has been the lack of an authoritative (or even a superficial) history of UPA, which was the most important American animation studio in the post-World War II period. (I do recall a self-published work issued on ditto whose circulation was obviously limited and lacked the scholarship of Abraham’s book.) The studio’s films, ranging from John Hubley’s Rooty Toot Toot and Ragtime Bear (which introduced Mr. Magoo) to Bobe Cannon’s Gerald McBoing Boing and Ted Parmelee’s The Tell-Tale Heart, were seen in their day as revolutionary and had a profound influence. Their films changed the way animation was designed and set the tone for not only for much of what followed (especially TV programs), but also helped define the field of motion graphics, including the development of the modern title sequence (predating the better known work of Saul Bass).

The studio has been largely neglected, in part, due to the lack of books such as this, as well as the lack of corporate support by the various rights holders (e.g., until recently, the best collection of UPA films on DVD was found as extras on the Hellboy special edition DVDs/Blu-Rays owing to Guillermo del Toro being a UPA fan ). As I noted earlier here, two new DVDs containing the bulk of UPA’s theatrical work are also now available.

Over the years, there has been talk of someone doing a serious study of the studio, a project pushed by the family of UPA-cofounder Steve Bosustow (I recall Charles Solomon once being bandied about as a possible candidate).

My biggest complaint is that the author’s knowledge of animation history pre-UPA seems limited. It’s almost as if he’s channeling the views of Disney animation artists in the 1930s and early 1940s who went on to found UPA, who thought of themselves as the center of the animation universe. This leads to a somewhat parochial view of the film and animation world at the time of UPA’s birth. In his research, Abraham’s also misses some important articles, including Michael Frierson’s  "The Carry Over Dissolve in UPA Animation"in the 2001 issue of Animation Journal. But these are not game changers and this is certainly a book I can easily recommend.

I’ve recently been digitizing interviews I’ve done over the years, especially those I did relating to my PhD dissertation, “Popeye the Union Man,” which dealt with the Fleischer strike and attempts to organize the Van Buren studio in the 1930s. . While I was at it, I also did a good number of interviews with people involved with organizing other studios, including Disney, Schlesinger and Terrytoons.  One of these was with former Disney inker Nancy Massie on June 4, 1981 (two months before she passed away); she was later hired by Richard Williams to teach the secrets of Disney inking to his staff. Unfortunately, only the last part of the interview seems to have survived my several moves since I left Los Angeles eight years ago.

Anyway, during my visit last week to L.A. last week, I dropped off a copy to Nancy’s son, Jeff, the Animation Guild’s Recording Secretary, who posted it on the Guild’s blog here  as part of TAG’s ongoing series of interviews with animation veterans. A list of TAG’s interviews, which I highly recommend, can be found here (they are also available through iTunes).

For those in Atlanta next Thursday, April 5th, check out Atlantamation, Savannah College of Art and Design’s screening of recent student animation, wc is being held this year at the Midtown Art Cinema. As someone who teaches in the Animation Department, I must admit to being a bit prejudiced, but it should be a really good show.

On February 6th, Netflix added the Norwegian TV series Lilyhammer to its streaming lineup. There’s really nothing groundbreaking or adventurous about the program save for the fact that Netflix invested in its production and is the first original program it has offered; while it’s not as high profile as Netflix’s acquisition of David Finch’s forthcoming House of Cards that stars Kevin Spacey, it’s still a milestone. And broadcast and cable television will never be the same again. More importantly, if Lilyhammer proves only a modest success, it might well open up the market in the United States for more foreign-language television programming, which has largely been ignored by mainstream venues.

As to Lilyhammer itself, it’s a rather derivative fish-out-of the water comedy-drama starring Steven Van Zandt as a Mafioso who elects to go to Norway as part of the witness protection program after testifying against the mob. Nevertheless, the scenery is lovely and the characters and story have a certain charm, and I can’t help but wish it well.

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.

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.

40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vimeo.

Recently, Ed Catmull and Fred Parke’s computer animated version of Catmull’s left hand done at the University of Utah was added to the National Film Registry. (For some reason, Parke is not given any credit in the Registry’s announcement.) (The film embedded above, I should note, also includes footage of an artificial heart valve and an unidentified computer animated face.) Needless to say, the film proved to be a landmark in the development of computer animation and was later incorporated in Richard T. Heffron’s Futureworld (1976).

Interestingly, another computer animated left hand showed up a few years later in Michael Crichton’s Looker (1981), when the Susan Dey character’s naked body is scanned into a computer; there’s no particular reason to include the hand, since one would think the viewer’s prurient interest would lie elsewhere .

Rebecca Allen, who worked at the New York Institute of Technology after Catmull left there for Lucasfilm in 1979, mentioned to me that Catmull left behind a digital version of his wife’s body, which Allen used for her own projects at NYIT. Thus, my question is was the hand in Looker a reworked version of Catmull’s or someone  else’s? Ah, such are the mysteries of film history.

I finally got to see Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, his delightful romantic comedy about the end of the transition between the silent and sound era, and it is every bit as good as its reputation. The film’s conceit is that it is shot as a silent film in black-and-white; this sort of thing could easily have become gimmicky, but far from it. Hazanavicius, who previously did several parodies of spy films, which like The Artist starred Jean Dujardin, shows a pitch perfect understanding of the style of late 20s and early 30s Hollywood filmmaking. For example, take the image below of Bérénice Bejo and Jean Dujardin reflected in the mirror, which would easily evoke a feeling of déjà vu to any number of people familiar with the silent era — and it does so without affectation. The same goes for the sound stage sets and costumes, though one policeman’s hat seemed a bit off.

The story revolves around silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), who is somewhat modeled after Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (there is a scene where he watches one of his old films, which is Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro [1920]), though we initially see him at the premiere of a film that harks back to Louis Feuillade’s French serial, Fantômas (1913). He has a brief encounter with Peppy Miller (Bejo), an aspiring actress, who goes on to be a major star in talkies, while he’s too much of an artist to make the transition to sound, which sets up a sort of A Star is Born plot, but again not quite. In any case, it’s a remarkable film and is very easy to recommend.

This has been a remarkable year for what used to be called FOOFs (Friends of Old Films), what with the 150th birthday of Georges Méliès being celebrated with the restoration of the color version of his Trip to the Moon and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, and The Artist. With the Best Picture Oscar race open to 10 nominees, it is easy to believe that both Hugo and The Artist will be nominated in that category, if only for sentimental value. The more interesting race to watch will be whether or not Jean Dujardin will be considered seriously for a Best Actor nod, as after all he did win in that category at Cannes.

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.

The good folks at Cinephile, the student journal put out by the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, recently sent me a copy of their special Reassessing Anime issue. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but its list of international contributors is certainly impressive — though I’m surprised there’s no UBC students or faculty among them — which includes Philip Brophy, author of 100 Anime, on “The Sound of an Android’s Soul: Music, Muzak, and MIDI in Time of Eve, and Paul Wells, author of Understanding Animation, on “Playing the Kon Trick: Between Dates, Dimensions and Daring in the films of Satoshi Kon.” It’s available at several Vancouver bookstores or you can subscribe here.

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.

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.

French trailer for Pequeñas Voces (Little Voices), a film about the lives of four Colombian children whose lives are interrupted by the arrival of armed men in their rural communities.

On the occasion of the French release of Jairo Carrillo et Oscar Andrade’s animated documentary, Pequeñas Voces (Little Voices), the AlloCiné website offers (in French) a nice dossier on what has become one of the more interesting areas of animation in recent years. Dounia Georgeon’s introduction notes:

Ever since Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir people cannot stop talking about the animated documentary as a new genre. Contrary to popular belief, its existence goes back (or nearly so) to the early days of film. On the occasion of the release of Little Voices, AlloCiné offers you an overview of the films that have joined the real with the wonderful.

It’s basically a survey of recent films, including Pequeñas Voces, though it does start off with four older titles, including Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) and Disney’s The Story of Menstruation (1946). If you can read French and/or like me can manage with Google Translate and a bit of college French, it’s worth a glance.