“I really love Flash,” Joanna Priestley gushes. “It’s so easy to use and I rarely have problems. It’s phenomenally fast, I can change things right away and rarely lose things. It’s not for everything, but it suits my style. It has totally changed the way I make films. Best of all, using Flash reminds me of what filmmaking used to be like; and once again, I can do everything myself.” This endorsement is unusual only in that Priestley, one of the leading lights of American independent animation, has traditionally relied on jerry-built techniques that seem primitive even compared to those used when Winsor McCay was starting out.

Priestley used Flash for Dew Line (2004), a delightful abstract film which she compares to “Henri Matisse’s cutout technique of his last years, which was very flat and used solid colors. But Flash is only one many techniques and I like to use many techniques.”

Dew Lines is one of two recent films — the other being Andaluz (2004), co-directed with Karen Aqua — which is included in her first set of DVD releases, Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity. The former includes eight of her classic films, including Voices (1984) and She-Bop (1988); the latter includes Dew Line and Andaluz, as well as The Rubber Stamp Film (1983) and Jade Leaf (1985), a rarely seen computer animated student film made at the California Institute of the Arts. Both discs also include documentaries in which Priestley describes how she works and other bonus material.

“One of my main goals in making films,” Priestley says, “is to try to push the boundaries of what I know, as far as I can. In every film, I try to do something new and different. I try new techniques, new subject matter, new styles, or new color palettes.” The one constant, though, in all her work is their deeply felt and often humorous exploration of her life and personality.

This is clearly seen in Voices, another CalArts student film which remains one of her signature pieces. She has described it as, “A humorous exploration of the fears we share: fear of the darkness, of monsters, of aging, of being overweight and of global destruction.” It features a rotoscoped image of Priestley talking to the camera, whose appearance constantly changes to reflect her fears and anxieties.

This type of personal exploration of her life is also seen in such films as All My Relations (1990) [above] and Grown Up (1993) [below], which deal with relationships and the perils of becoming middle-aged respectively. Her films also reflect a strong feminist instinct, as seen in the poetic She-Bop, which mixes puppets and drawings to examine human frailties, and After the Fall (1991), which examines the isolation of men in modern Western society. This tendency to personalize her films is even evident in her recent turn toward abstraction, including Surface Dive, inspired by her experiences diving in an underground river in Mexico.

Discovering Animation

Born and raised in Oregon, Joanna Priestley began experimenting with animation very early in her life. “One of the first toys I was ever given,” she recalls, “was a zoetrope, which worked on a little turntable and it had little zoetrope strips with it. I loved it! I’m sure I became an animator because of that toy. Then I started drawing on the corners of my textbooks in grade school, and later studied art in high school and college, where I specializing in painting and printmaking.”

After college, she moved to Paris “to study printmaking with intaglio master Bill Hayter at Atelier 17.” Returning to Oregon, she settled in Sisters, “a little tiny cowboy town in the center of the state, where there was almost nothing to do in the evenings.” With no commercial cinema around, she helped start a film society, which became a huge success.

“We then had some money left over and decided to invite Bob Gardiner, who had won an Oscar for Closed Mondays with Will Vinton. He was funny and charming and showed a whole program of animation; and that was when I really discovered animation. I immediately saw the possibilities of transferring over [from painting and printmaking] to animation. So, I went to a store, bought a pack of index cards and started experimenting with them.” It was a very inexpensive way to work which she continues to use.

Working as a film librarian for the Northwest Film Center, in Portland, enabled her to see new work and meet filmmakers like independent animator George Griffin, whose work Priestley “just fell in love with” and who became a big influence. Other animators who have had a great influence include Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Jane Aaron.

“However,” she says, “the one film that’s influenced me the most is La Jetée by Chris Marker, [which consists entirely of still photos]. I saw it in college in 16mm; I was so astounded by it that I insisted I be able to take the film and look at it myself, and was able to look at it four times in a row. At that point, I was supporting myself doing commercial slide shows with three or six projectors. And there’s such an interesting overlap between slide shows and La Jetée and animation, because movement occurs between the dissolves between these still images.”

Rubber Stamps & CalArts

In the late 70s, Priestley began work on her first film, The Rubber Stamp Film. She recalls, “It took me five years to do it. I literally knew absolutely nothing about filmmaking. I bought my own equipment from flea markets.”

The first festival she entered the film in was Telluride, where she met André Tarkovsky, “one of the directors I most admired in the world, and I just thought I died and gone to heaven. And I got a very good response to the film, including positive notices from several major film critics such as Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert.”

Despite this success, she decided to go back to college and enrolled in the Experimental Animation Program at CalArts. “The time I spent at CalArts,” she says, “was one of the most exciting times in my life. I was worked incredibly hard and did four or five films. I was able to collaborate with my mentor, Jules Engel, on a couple of films done on the computer. It was a time when computers first arrived at CalArts, so we were the first people doing computer animation there. My desk was next to the wall adjoining the Indonesian Music Room, so all day long I would hear the gamelan rehearsing. I was also able to take African dance, study acting and stage design, helped live-action filmmakers with their projects, and did lots of wild experiments.”

“After I left CalArts,” she says, “I went back to what I had been doing. And that turned out to be extremely helpful, because what I was doing was sitting with a pile of index cards and animating away. I think sometimes when people are at a school like CalArts, which has wonderful equipment, they become paralyzed after they leave because they don’t have access to the equipment. So, lots of people don’t continue on in filmmaking or in animation. But I just went back to my studio and started working.”

On Her Own

Since then, Priestley has largely made her living making independent short films, usually depending on government funding or foundation grants to support her efforts — supplemented by workshops and teaching at the Art Institute of Portland. One of her more creative efforts at fund raising was for Pro and Con (1993), an animated documentary on prison life she did with Joan Gratz , that took advantage of a law allocating a small percentage of money for public projects to arts funding.

She had worked together with Gratz several years earlier on the joyful Candyjam, an anijam in which 10 filmmakers from around the world did segments featuring animated candy. (The filmmakers included David Anderson, Karen Aqua, Craig Bartlett, Elizabeth Buttler, Paul Driessen, Tom Gasek. Marv Newland, and Christine Panushka, as well as Gratz and herself.)

“It was very thrilling to organize a film like that,” she said, “because what you do is put an idea out there. Joan and I had just traveled in Japan and seen all this amazing candy, which I thought, I’ve got to animate this, it’s so incredibly beautiful. But I couldn’t imagine doing an entire film with candy all by myself. So, I talked to Joan about it and the more we talked the more we thought, Wouldn’t it be amazing to ask different people from all around the world to do something with the candy from their area? So, we did and they said yes. That’s one of the really amazing things about our international community. People are very open. They’re very willing to share their talent and their time and, in this case, their money, to work together.”

In regards to Andaluz, her most recent collaboration, she says, “Karen Aqua and I started working on it when we were both, by coincidence, residents at an artists colony in Southern Spain, in the village of Mojacar. We fell in love with the place and decided to do a film about it. We had no idea what we were going to do. So, the first thing we did was go outside in a field and do a ritual, where we called to the four directions. And amazingly both of us seemed to know how to do this. It was like a miracle. You couldn’t know that about each other.”

“Out of that ritual came the idea of doing a film that would honor the landscape and the architecture and the plants and the culture of this area. That gave us the opportunity to do drawings outside and wander around the town and draw the architecture, study the plants, study the sky, go swimming and study the water. We did about 1200 drawings together.” The wonderful Moorish design motifs that populate the film, she notes, were based on tile patterns and architectural details of the Alhambra.

“The film took about four or five years to make, as a lot of things intervened: Karen was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemo a few times, so there were a lot of emotional challenges.(She is doing fine right now.) We finished Andaluz at the end of 2003 and released it at beginning of 2004.”

Dew Line, Priestley notes, was “based on mechanical studies I did on a trip to Alaska for the Oregon Zoo. I was impressed by an abandoned dew line station in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All the things that were there are still there, rotting in the tundra, including thousands of rusty barrels. In photographing many of the tiny little plants found there, I began thinking of about all the species we are losing. It was also the beginning of my current interest in botany and in being a medicinal herbalist.”

Currently, Priestley has two projects she is exploring. “One,” she reports, “is a very traditional character animation about menopause. The other is experimenting with complicated collages, and putting skwigly drawings on top. I don’t know if either will result in a film. But I love experimenting and seeing where it will go. I hope the menopause film will be funny. My husband [animator Paul Harrod] thought it was a terrible idea, which made me want to do it all the more. It’s an odd subject and have been working on it for six months, I’m not sure if a film is going to happen or not out of it, but I will stay with it another six months before making a decision.”

“But,” she says, “I’ve never done it for the money. I absolutely love what I do. I love coming to my studio and am never as happy as I am when I’m working on my films.”

Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity can be ordered directly from Priestley Motion Pictures at http://www.primopix.com/.

The above photo of Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Roy Disney was taken on November 2, 2002, at the Disney Studio tribute to Ward Kimball, which took place at the Directors Guild. Frank and Ollie were among those giving tribute and it was probably their last public appearance I went to. Frank died at 92 in 2004, and now Ollie passed away on April 14, at 95, the last of Disney’s Nine Old Men.

The Nine Old Men was something of a public relations gimmick created by the Disney organization, as it blithely ignored the talents of people like Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla, who left the studio under uncomfortable circumstances.  However,  the contributions of Frank and Ollie cannot be ignored. One only has to look at their work on Bambi to see how good they were. In addition, their Illusion of Life: Disney Animation is a landmark text which. along with Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit, have helped define the way animation is taught around the world.

Frank and Ollie were, of course, inseparable companions and speakers. And I first met them when they came to speak to a class at the University of Southern California in the fall of 1979; it occurred just after Don Bluth very publicly left Disney, and I recall getting into a conversation with Frank about it. I had recently returned to USC to finish my PhD after an 11 year hiatus and had finally committed to focus my career on animation. Needless to say, I would encounter them many times before I left Los Angeles in December 2003, as they were a vital part of Hollywood’s animation community, ever eager to share their knowledge and wisdom.

Ollie Johnston’s death has been well covered, and a good place to find some of the best online tributes is gathered here by Cartoon Brew. which also posted a nice tribute by Brad Bird.

This was not the first time I left the Midtown because of this problem (usually after my wife and I found the sound of the movie itself much too loud); I even stopped going there for six months last year. This is sad, since, in terms of programming,  the Midtown is one of best  theaters in Atlanta; it shows a wide variety of films, from mainstream to independent, and is a venue for several festivals, including the current Atlanta Film Festival. All this, though, is not worth the damage to my hearing. (Two days later, I realized the damage was such that I was unable to stay at my usual Friday night contra dance and have not tried to go to any other movie theater.)

When I lived in Los Angeles, my wife and I occasionally walked out of theaters because of sound problems; these always involved local multiplexes and my wife blamed youthful projectionists brought up on rock concerts; and the advent of digital sound has certainly allowed theaters to turn up the volume with less distortion. I never had a problem with such L.A. theaters as the Nuart (like the Midtown, owned by Landmark Theatres); and there never a problem during our stay in London, or as a matter of fact in any of the other theaters in Atlanta, including the Tara (Atlanta’s other important art house) and several local multiplexes.

The problem is not a new one and complaints about TV commercials being too loud go back to the early 1950s. I recall a junior high science teacher talking about it and how the local TV station he complained to telling him he was mistaken; he claimed otherwise and he was right. Today, when the sound is too loud during a commercial, you can either turn the sound down, hit the mute button or skip it with your TiVo; in a movie theater, your only option may be to leave the theater; you could, of course, use earplugs, but why should anybody have to use them to see a movie?

A November 27th  article on the WTVD-TV Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, website asks the question, “Are movies too loud?” It does not address the problem with commercials and trailers, but its observations are pertinent. The station investigated the matter after a viewer expressed concern that the sound levels in a theater she took her grandchild to were much too loud.

“He almost immediately put his hands over his ears and a little while later started crying and said it hurt it hurt,” says [Marjorie] Hopkins. “We had to take him out of the movie,” she continued, “We didn’t even stay to see the end because it hurt his ears too badly.”

The station went on to do some random testing.

We saw kids’ movies like The Game Plan, Harry Potter and Bee Movie. We also checked out action movies like American Gangster.

… For the most part, they all averaged well within safe levels as described by the National Institutes of Health.

But, each movie peaked above the safe level, 85 decibels, multiple times. The NIH says those higher levels could damage your hearing after long or repeated exposure.

…. We [also] watched Transformers at the I-MAX in the Marbles Children’s Museum in downtown Raleigh. This time the movie averaged more than 80 decibels. That’s just below what’s considered safe. It also peaked at nearly one hundred decibels.

…Dr. [Edith] Ferris [, an audiologist,] says the decibel readings we found at Bee Movie and Transformers could damage hearing over time.

If the sound levels for the feature presentation are too loud, what then about the trailers, which theaters readily admit are louder still?

The story adds that,

The theater manager at the I-MAX … tells us the studios preset the volume level for movies. He says the I-MAX theater is tested quarterly to make sure it stays within safe volume levels. He also says the staff monitors every movie and if they receive complaints they’ll check it out and sometimes turn down the volume if it appears to be too loud.

I hope what the Marbles Children’s Museum says is true; however, it is obvious the management of theaters like the Midtown apparently do not have the ability or the option to turn down the volume.

Going Over to the Dark Side

The problem of movies being too loud certainly contributes to the ongoing decline of movie attendance. And it looks like I may be joining the crowd.

This past weekend my wife and I went shopping at Fry’s Electronics and spotted a HD TV set playing a Blu-ray DVD of Enchanted (a film we had seen at the Midtown). My wife, who has always been annoyingly blasé about TV picture quality, was startled, and said, “I never knew a TV picture could be that good!” She was especially impressed with the 3-dimensional quality of the image. I was also impressed and realized that the picture was certainly equal to, and in some ways superior to what we saw in the movie theater. Right then and there, we both agreed to start saving for a HD TV and (when they come  out) a region-free Blu-ray player, and set up a home theater.

My fealty to the romance of “the moviegoing experience” and a sense of professional duty has prevented me from making what is, after all, a very logical decision, which an increasing number of Americans are making.

In the meantime, I made an appointment with an hearing specialist and will be ordering a pair of earplugs designed for musicians (though I understand toilet paper will do in a pinch) and writing to Landmark about my decision. I will eventually go back to the movies, being careful to both use earplugs and to come at least five minutes late (to avoid some of the trailers); however, until I have proof they have changed their ways, I will avoid the Midtown.

(Disclosures: Twenty years ago, I worked for Expanded Entertainment, a division of Landmark Theatres, when they published Animation Magazine (I was its first editor). Also, over the years, I have suffered some hearing loss, some of which may have been from causes other than moviegoing.)

In January, I commented on Blue Sky Studios’ announced move from one New York suburb to another, i.e., from White Plains, New York, to Greenwich, Connecticut. The main reason for the move was because of Connecticut’s lucrative tax credit program.  It seemed to give Connecticut a successful animation house, proved again by the subsequent release of Horton Hears a Who! However, in the Please sir, can I have some more department, Blue Sky doesn’t  seem satisfied with the original deal and, according to Connecticut newspapers, is trying to squeeze even more out of the state.

Such negotiations are probably not unusual, except that they do involve an animation studio, which is yet another indication on how far the industry has come over the past few decades. And to prove the point, the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal reports (here and here)  that,

A family-owned animation company servicing the entertainment industry has moved to Winfield from Los Angeles after Iowa legislators created new tax incentives for  film companies locating in the state.

The Iowa Film, Television and Video Project Promotion Program was passed in 2007 to provide tax incentives to attract the film industry, job diversity, and talent to the state. The Iowa Film Office of the Iowa Department of Economic Development operates the program.

“It created fertile ground for companies to relocate to Iowa,” said Stephen M. Jennings, founder and co-president of Grasshorse Technologies Inc. “It was the deciding factor in our transition to Iowa.”

Grasshorse, a digital animation and special effects subcontractor, is obviously not in the same league as Blue Sky, but the story was nevertheless picked up by Fortune Small Business (here and here), which noted that,

In recent years the economic corridor that stretches from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids has emerged as a powerful locus of economic growth, not only in film but also in computer simulation, bioengineering, and renewable energy. … The falling dollar helps Iowa companies compete globally, as do generous local incentives such as a state tax exemption on profits from overseas sales.

“A key factor,” says Jennings, “was being able to compete with animation studios in Korea and India.”

I suspect studios in Korea and India are not exactly quacking in their boots about what Iowa (or Connecticut) are doing. Small regional studios, such as Grasshorse have been around for quite a while, including several which have done work for major Hollywood companies. (For example, much of the animation for the animated The King and I and special effects for Independence Day were widely subcontracted out to smaller studios and individuals.) Though trying just to compete solely on a cost basis is something of a fool’s errand.

As to the situation in Connecticut, Greenwich Time reported on Friday, March 28th, that,

The chief operating officer of Blue Sky Studios Inc. was at the capitol yesterday lobbying lawmakers to support millions of dollars worth of financial incentives to move the company to Greenwich.

… The proposal, circulated by the architect of the tax credits, House Speaker James Amann, D-Milford, has raised concerns because it would require lifting the annual cap on the credits from $15 million to $25 million.

Amann has said that although the digital animation production credits passed last year are open to all takers, the $15 million annual cap was tailored to attract Blue Sky for a 10-year commitment. The company underestimated how much it would need, which is why he wants to lift the cap to $25 million, Amann has said.

The New York Times, on Saturday, put the battle between New York and Connecticut in some perspective, reporting that,

With a proud film history dating back almost a century, to D. W. Griffith’s creation of a 28-acre production lot in Mamaroneck, Westchester County is increasingly watching production companies be lured across the border to Connecticut, which now offers them a 30 percent tax credit, compared with New York State’s 10 percent.

Since the Connecticut tax credit took effect in July 2006, that state has gone from playing host to the occasional film shoot (remember “Mystic Pizza”?) to attracting 66 feature films, television shows and commercials with a collective $400 million in production costs, the majority of it in the Fairfield County suburbs of New York.

At the same time, similar suburbs across the border in Westchester County have seen their film shoots shrivel. In 2006, Westchester was the setting for scenes from 14 big-budget features, as well as numerous independent films; last year, two movies were partially shot here.

The story goes on to say that even New York City, which has been somewhat insolated from these bidding wars, is starting to lose business to several other neighboring states. The state legislature will undoubtedly respond with its own set of incentives. I’m sure the film industry will be delighted. After all, it’s nice to be wanted.

This article, which was published near the start of my writing career, shows me under the influence of The Wall Street Journal, whose delightful front page stories captured my attention.  P.K., who wrote the postscript, was the paper’s arts editor whose name I have forgotten.

The police had been staking out the third floor apartment on West 79th Street for several months. The constant flow of men in and out at all hours of the night had brought New York’s finest to one conclusion: this was a house of ill-repute — obviously!

One night, when two out-of-town businessmen wearily exited the building in the wee hours of the morning, the police accosted them. Under pressure, the men finally broke down and confessed: “We was only watching some old movies, Honest.”

And you know, they were telling the truth. For that third floor apartment was not a cathouse, but merely the residence of one William K. Everson, film historian, teacher and film collector par excellence.

Whether the above tale is true or not is besides the point, for it does tell much about Bill Everson’s character. His obsessive devotion to film and film history; his willingness, even his eagerness to share both his knowledge and his collection of 16mm prints (about 4,000 features, plus selected short subjects), has made him a sort of unofficial guru of New York’s community of film scholars.

The author of many popular books — The Western (with George Fenin), The Bad Guys, The Films of Laurel and Hardy etc. — he also runs the film program at the New School and the now legendary Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is a professor at New York University. Everson is constantly loaning his films out for exhibition and aiding film archives with their programming. Right now He’s helping Rochester’s Eastman House with a British retrospective.

Born in Yeogil, in Somerset (”The center of the English cream cheese industry”), his father was an inspector in the aerospace industry. His mother an ex-teacher. From as far back as he can remember, Everson was always interested in movies. When his father took him along to an aerodrome, he would just jump into a handy plane and “read movie books all day long.”

His father thought this behavior somewhat abnormal, “Which I may have been,” Everson notes. And felt that his only child would never amount to anything.

Although he passed his elevens’ exam, Everson found secondary school too competitive. And when he was only 14, with his father’s blessing, he took a job in the British film industry as a publicity writer. This was during World War II and there was a manpower shortage. Besides, Everson passed himself off as being nearly 16. Around this time he also did some film criticism for a local paper. “They were the most opinionated things you ever saw. I shudder when I think back on them now. I was holding forth like Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice.”

In late 1950, realizing that there was little future for him in England, he came to the U.S.

In New York he landed a temporary job with a small producer-distributor who was, Everson claims, “an absolute nut.”

After that he landed a publicity job with the international division of Monogram Pictures (before it became Allied Artists). In 1955, like many other budding film historians of the day, he went to work for producer Paul Killiam. First working on the tail end of a 15-minute Movie Museum TV series, he then moved on to help develop and write the Silents Please show.

In the meantime, he became active in an informal film society that had been started by others, including Theodore Huff, the film historian who wrote the definitive book on Chaplin. It met once a month and specialized in silents and early talkies. Everson also began his film collection with the $90 purchase of Mal St. Clair’s delightful comedy, Are Parents People? (1925). (To buy it, he saved his money by going on a diet of peanut butter and bread.)

The film society, which had a membership of 20-30 lost its access to its original, free screening rooms and was forced to expand. Over a period of months it changed its locale often, once even screening (appropriately) in a psychiatric institution. In 1954, Ted Huff died and the society was named after him. But when a lawsuit for illegally showing Ecstacy (the Hedy Lamarr skin flick) forced the society to close down. The founding members were wary of trying to continue after the suit was settled, so Everson took charge and has been running it ever since.

But now, after 20 years, the Huff Society is in danger of closing up shop, or, as seems more likely, going back to the once a month screenings of earlier days (it currently screens weekly). Everson has just found the Huff too much of a burden. He also feels that it is not needed as much as it once was, seeing how the number of revival houses have proliferated. The last program before the fatal decision is made will feature Johnnie Walker in Captain Fly By Night (1923), directed by William K. Howard. (Everson’s real name is Keith William Everson and was changed around in honor of Mr. Howard.)

Everson characterizes the society’s hard core following as consisting of the serious film students, who will see almost anything from a masterpiece to an obscure footnote to film history. And a group which he loosely terms “losers.” These are the escapists “who sort of look back on the period in which they were themselves fairly happy and optimistic. It had been the best period of their lives. And they seem to relive that period through the films of that time.”

Among the visitors to the Huff there have been such varied personae as filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Radley Metzger, as well as every film historian in the area. Plus an assortment of old time film stars and directors who drop in to see their films.

Everson’s own opinions are not what would be considered to be in the main stream of critical thought. His taste is heavily weighted by an affection for the sentimental, for Westerns and for Musicals, all which is common among British critics. He also harbors a special liking for action-packed “B” films. If he had been born earlier, Everson confesses, he might have enjoyed working on such films during the 1930’s, when one could operate with considerable freedom within certain limits. However, he has no ambitions to make a personal statement.

Even as a child, he admits, he always had a liking for older movies. And unless it’s a film by a director he likes (e.g., John Ford or Hitchcock) Everson only sees new films he knows his students will surely see — like A Clockwork Orange.

“Of the new directors, I’m very fond of Truffaut because he veers more towards the older style of filmmaking. I just don’t like directors such as Godard who are totally self-indulgent[, who] don’t care whether they are using film as well as they should. They expect the audience to understand their films without giving them clues to work at.”

Today’s movie critics, he finds shockingly ignorant of film history. “They don’t seem to realize that almost anything in film builds on something that came 20 or 30 years before. In some cases it might be a tremendous improvement. In other cases it might be quite a letdown.”

Asked whether he had any pet peeves, Everson comments that there is a total lack of fun in moviegoing today. Theater personnel such as ushers and ticket sellers lack courtesy. Projection is often sloppy and the management does nothing to correct it. And the audiences, he adds, “are so attuned to watching films on TV at home, they behave the same way.” As he feels much of the enjoyment of going out to the movies is in the pleasure of being catered to, there just isn’t much fun left.

No wonder Bill Everson prefers his apartment on 79th Street — police surveillance and all.

As we go to press Bill Everson has decided to continue the Huff Society, through the summer, on a weekly basis. Meetings will be every Monday at 7:30 p.m. on the 18th floor of Academy Hall, 853 Broadway (at 14th Street). Beginning in the fall, meetings will be monthly. Seating is limited and there’s a contribution of $1.00. - P. J.

I have always been intrigued by what may be called the prehistory of cinema and animation studies. It is not uncommon to look back on the history of film criticism and history to look mainly at books and magazines, of which there were precious few dealing with film in the US through the 1950s. However, an active, if rather fugitive film culture did exist around the film society movement and, in animation, around festivals, as well as at archival/museum screenings. It is a culture which helped laid the groundwork for the establishment of cinema studies in the United States, heralded by the founding of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies in 1959.

I thought of this when I saw David Bordwell’s posting last month on Howard Hawks’  His Girl Friday (1940) (see above), which he considers a classic piece of filmmaking; while I’m not as enamored of this version of  Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play, The Front Page, but his description of how the film and Hawks’ reputation was snatched from obscurity did catch my attention. In it, he makes some rather reasonable claims, which I think need to be qualified.

For instance, Bordwell claims that,

Hawks the Artist is a creation of the 1960s. Before that, American film historians almost completely ignored him. Andrew Sarris often reminds us that he’s absent from Lewis Jacobs’ Rise of the American Film (1939), but he’s also missing from Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art (1957), the most popular survey history of its day. Apart from press releases and reviews of individual films, there were few discussions of Hawks in American newspapers and magazines. The most famous piece is probably Manny Farber’s “Underground Movies” of 1957, which treats Hawks along with other hard-boiled directors like Wellman and Mann.

From the start, Hawks was more appreciated in France. There film historians acknowledged A Girl in Every Port (1928), in part because of the presence of Louise Brooks, and they usually flagged Scarface (1932) as well, which they could see and Americans couldn’t.

He feels that Hawks’ modern reputation started with “Jacques Rivette’s ‘The Genius of Howard Hawks’ in Cahiers du cinéma in 1953.” That may very well be the case, but to say that Hawks was ignored by American film historians is only partly true. I say this not to contradict Bordwell’s review of Hawks literature in the United States, but to point out that he ignores the very real reputation Hawks had among the cadre of historians and film fans that centered around the all-important Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society in New York.

The Huff Society, where I started going to when I was in high school around 1956, was run by William K. (”Bill”) Everson, a British high school dropout who was already on his way to becoming one of America’s most important film collectors; he ended up a professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, wrote several popular books on film history, and was involved with preparing a number of silent films for TV broadcast.

The type of people who attended the Huff Society’s screenings was a mixed bag, ranging from the teenaged Leonard Maltin to intellectual-in-waiting Susan Sontag (often accompanied by film critic and historian Carlos Clarens), and sometimes even Andrew Sarris. The Society was part of small but active film society scene in New York that also included  Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, Gideon Bachmann’s Group for Film Study (which published the pioneering Cinemages journal), and campus groups, such as one at Fordham University,  in addition to screenings at the Museum of Modern Art.

Though my collection of Huff Society program notes, which included occasional critical filmographies of directors such as Lewis Milestone (who made the first screen version of The Front Page), was lost some time ago, I am certain they included more than a few Hawks films. No, Everson did not screen Scarface, but the film was certainly admired by many in attendance, along with films such as The Dawn Patrol (1930), The Crowd Roars (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Only Angels Have Wings (1939) , some of which were occasionally screened. (Remember, the early 50s saw the wholesale release of Hollywood’s pre-1948 backlog to TV, which allowed Everson to program many of these films.)

It is understandable that Bordwell would overlook what might seem like fugitive contributions to film scholarship, but they were an important part of my cinematic education. And I think there are perhaps a few others who might also agree.

Screenwriter Malvin Wald died last Thursday, March 6, in Sherman Oaks, California, at age 90. I first got to know him casually when I was a student at the University of Southern California’s Cinema Department, where he taught part time. (He is pictured at left in 1950 while visiting USC with the legendary Slavko Vorkapitch, who is seated.) I got to know him better when, in 1981, I did research for his screenplay for Hollywood Local, a documentary on the  history of Hollywood trade unions, which unfortunately never got produced. (It did however form the basis of a traveling photo exhibit.)

He had gained fame for co-writing Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1949). which gained him an Oscar nomination, which spawned the whole genre of police procedurals, though most of his subsequent credits were for TV dramas; by the time I got to know him, he was heavily involved in documentaries, whose credits seem to be absent from his obituaries. As an active member of the Writers Guild of America, West, on whose board he served, Hollywood Local was right up his alley. As I was then getting involved in writing my history of early animation unions, I felt I had found a kindred spirit.

I later asked him to serve on my dissertation committee and he eagerly agreed. After I gave him a draft, he called to say that he had just finished reading the section on Dan Glass, an animation artist whose death from TB was a crucial event in leading up to the 1937 Fleischer strike. He was so taken with it that he wanted to work with me on a screenplay based on Glass’ story. I was flattered and protested that I wasn’t a scriptwriter; but after he pooh-poohed my claim, saying I was obviously a good writer and could easily write a script, I said yes.

Unfortunately, the project never went anywhere, and it turned out he was ineligible to serve on my dissertation committee, but we continued to keep in touch. Thus, when I was offered an option on a novel, I turned to him for advice; then, when script work started to dry up, he called me when he started writing magazine articles about film.

What I most remember about Malvin Wald was that he was a real mensch,  whose passion for workers’ rights and whose commitment to help students like me was the real thing. I also fondly recall his good humor and lack of pretension. (An early memory was seeing him a USC banquet wearing a tux and his ubiquitous running shoes.) I’m sorry I lost touch with him  later on, but his friendship is something I will always value.

O’Brien created this setup to allow him to add live action footage using rear projection with his stop motion puppets; the latter, as can be seen, performed in what can only be called a multiplane space. I was immediately struck by the resemblance between it and Ub Iwerks’ multiplane camera and the Fleischer Stereoptical Process (aka Setback)  created by Max Fleischer and John E. Burks. The resemblance is all the more intriguing given the fact that the Iwerks and Fleischer devices were finalized soon after King Kong premiered. (The Disney multiplane camera would not be ready until 1937.) As such, I wonder what influence, if any, O’Brien’s work had in their development?

Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy, in their biography of Ub Iwerks, The Hand Behind the Mouse, note that his multiplane camera had a horizontal orientation, much like O’Brien’s setup, and was first used  in the 1934 cartoon, The Headless Horseman. In addition,

Because Ub’s multiplane camera was horizontally oriented, it was well-suited for experiments in stop-motion animation as well as for the studio’s typical cel animation. A stop-motion film entitled The Toy Parade was filmed but never released using the new multiplane technology. (pages 130-131)

When I asked Kenworthy about the Iwerks-O’Brien connection, he wrote that,

… what I gleaned was that Ub had read descriptions of Disney’s prospective Multiplane and understood fully how to use it.  Being that they were physically located on the second floor of a building … they could not of course build a vertical one.  Having the Fleischers vets there may have [led] them to [a] discussion of what Max was doing there, but no discussion ever came up about O’Brien.  …  However, and this is what I found really interesting, the tests were done using stop-motion figures.  There were rumors that a stop-motion film was made called The Toy Parade, but I could not confirm that.  Ralph Somerville remembered animating in stop-motion there, but didn’t recall on what.  … So to make a real link, I don’t think so, but there is no reason to think that Ub wasn’t aware of what others were doing.  I just never heard Obie mentioned at all.

I’m not sure that necessarily settles the question. Even so, what then about a Fleischer-O’Brien connection? The Stereoptical Process involved did not really involve distinct planes of action, but a 3-dimensional set in back of a platen for the animation cels as illustrated in this detail from the patent drawing:

Again, like the O’Brien and the initial Iwerks design, Fleischer/Burks used a horizontal orientation. If Iwerks was aware of what Disney was doing, one must assume Max Fleischer was as well. But who influenced who is not that simple.

The first known multiplane camera was developed for Lotte Reiniger’s marvelous 1926 silhouette feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed illustrated on the left. The purpose was not to create a sense of depth per se, but to give the capability of animating different types of action at the same time. For instance, the main characters might be animated on the top level with animated backgrounds done on another level; the latter included some abstract animations by Walter Ruttman,

Berthold Bartosch, who was also part of the film’s small crew, used a similar multiplane setup to add depth to his his 20-minute cutout film L’Idée, whose production began in France in 1930 and was finished in 1932.

In any case, O’Brien’s role in the development of the multiplane animation camesell and the Stereoptical Process remains is an intriguing possibility.

The Oscar for Best Animated Feature went to Brad Bird’s Ratatouille from Pixar, beating out Persepolis, which was my favorite. In so doing, the members of the Academy went against the trend to honor smaller independent films in the Best Picture category, as opposed to blockbusters like Ratatouille.

The Best Animated Short Film went to Suzie Templeton’s wonderful version of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf, which was my favorite among the contenders.

Although the Visual Effects Oscar is not one usually embraced by the animation community, this year’s winner, The Golden Compass (which I have not seen) seems to have earned its statue because of its digital character animation. (One should remember that Ray Harryhausen, an animation icon if there ever was one, made his mark in special effects.)

Visual Effects Oscars seem to go to movies where the effects are of the How did they do that category. In the process, they ignore work which may be amazing in its own way, but does not try to call attention to itself. For instance, I was particularly impressed by the Dunkirk sequence in Joe Wright’s Atonement done under the supervision of Mark Holt. One would hope both types of visual effects would get equal visibility, but that’s not likely to happen much outside the effects community itself. (The producers of Atonement, I’m sure, were more concerned about getting a Best Picture Oscar than trying to compete against giant polar bears.)

Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse’s Même les pigeons vont au paradis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven) from France’s BUF Compagnie, is a quirky, computer animated tale of a priest who sells an old man a machine guaranteed to get him into heaven, despite his sinful past. The story unfolds in a craggy but predictable manner with considerable humor. (The film is available on YouTube here and here.)

Moya lyubov (My Love), a romantic drama from Russia’s Dag Film Studio,  is Aleksandr Petrov fourth Academy-nominated film — the others are  Korova (The Cow) (1989), Rusalka (The Mermaid) (1997),  and the Oscar-winning IMAX film, The Old Man and the Sea (1999) , based on the Hemingway book. The Academy clearly adores his paint-on-glass technique, which evokes the look of French impressionist paintings. While the look is initially beguiling, in the end it pales in comparison with the marvelous later works of Frédéric Back, which used more traditional cel animation; the pictorial style of both filmmakers are basically conservative, to say the least, but Back’s films at his best has a real joie de vivre that Petrov’s seems to lack. (The film is posted on YouTube in three parts found here, here and here.)

Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s Madame Tutli-Putli from Canada’s National Film Board, uses digitally-enhanced stop motion to tell its moody, mock scary tale. The grotesque nature of the characters somewhat resembles  those in Même les pigeons vont au paradis, but is played a bit more straightforward manner. While I don’t think it’s completely successful, it nevertheless has more than its share of moments.

Josh Raskin’s I Met The Walrus is a rather slight riff on a taped interview the 14-year-old Jerry Levitan did with John Lennon, which seemed to evoke an enthusiastic response from the audience.  While not a great piece of filmmaking, the imagery does evoke the proper period feel. (It can be seen in Quicktime and Flash versions on the film’s official website here.)

Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman’s Peter & the Wolf, a brilliant, if rather old-fashioned puppet film that was co-produced by Britain’s BreakThru Films, Poland’s SE-MA-FOR Studios and Norway’s Storm Studios. It is a somewhat updated version of the Prokofiev musical tale, which is certainly superior to the 1946 Disney version featured in Make Mine Music. And best of all, the film’s cat (pictured above) is the most brilliant depiction of a pet in a film since the dog in  Sylvain Chomet’s Les triplettes de Belleville. (The film can be seen, along with a making of documentary, on the BreakThru Films website.)

I must assume many of these films, along with a selection of their live-action counterparts, will appear later this year on a Magnolia DVD.

Speaking of Sylvain Chomet …

I recently rented a DVD of the anthology film Paris, je t’aime (Paris, I Love You) (2006). The film is one of those all-star affairs featuring brief vignettes by an assortment of internationally renowned directors, ranging from the Coen brothers to Gérard Depardieu, each dealing with a part of Paris. To my surprise and delight, it contains “Tour Eiffel,” a lively trifle from Sylvain Chomet, mixing live action and pixillation. relating the romance between two mimes. Like too many of these sorts of anthologies, the film tends to be uneven, but if you are fans of directors like the Coens and Chomet, it might be worth a peek.

Perhaps historical would be a better word. I’m not talking about the winners in the competitive voting for ASIFA-Hollywood’s Annie Awards proper (listed here), but rather for the juried awards, including the June Foray and Winsor McCay Awards. What was startling was the fact that three of these honors went to animation historians: Jerry Beck (Foray), John Canemaker (McCay) and John Kricfalusi(McCay). (The other McCay Award went to Glen Keane.) I don’t know of any other time so many animation historians have been honored at the same time outside of the Society for Animation Studies.

The Foray Award, given for “significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation,” has been given to important animation historians before, including Leonard Maltin and the late Bill Moritz; so the selection of Beck, who also was a pioneer in the distribution of Japanese theatrical animation in the United States, was really no surprise. What is unusual is the fact that two of the McCay recipients, who are honored for “career contributions to the art of animation,” are also important historians: John Canemaker and John Kricfalusi. (My reaction might be compared to Robert Sherwood’s delight, when he was a film critic for Life in 1926, on discovering that the hero of D.W. Griffith’s The Sorrows of Satan was a critic.)

While Beck’s and Canemaker’s bona fides as historians are rather obvious (one only has to look up their names on Amazon or WorldCat), but one does not usually think of John K. as other than an innovative and opiniated filmmaker. But behind those opinions is a well-thought out approach to animation and animation history. While I don’t always agree with his views, I do think he has provided a salutatory challenge to much conventional wisdom, including that surrounding of Walt Disney. In a way, his thinking on animation and animation history (which can seen on his blog or in his online exchange with Michael Barrier) harkens back to the development of the auteur theory at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s by the likes of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who later abandoned criticism to help create the French New Wave.

So, congratulations to Beck, Canemaker and Kricfalusi for all their work, including their contributions to animation history and criticism.

Images: Top: Jerry Beck, John Canemaker and Amid Amidi at the 2005 Ottawa International Animation Festival picnic. Left above: John Kricfalusi photo found on his MySpace.com page.

Persepolis, directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud based on Satrapi’s series of four autobiographical graphic novels, has just opened here in Atlanta after earning considerable praise elsewhere. These include nominations for Best Animated Feature Oscar and Annie Award, a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and being the official French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Though I feared these accolades might be due more to the film’s intentions than its qualities, I am delighted to say they are well deserved.(The fact that it was a low-budget, $8.1 million cel animated film, done mostly in black and white, might have also helped its reputation.)

The film recounts Satrapi’s life in Iran both before and after the Shah’s overthrow, as well a stay in Vienna, where her parents send her to escape the  Islamic Revolution. This politically-aware coming of age tale is certainly a refreshing change from conventional, Hollywood-style animated movies.  It is Satrapi’s animation debut, though Paronnaud has had more experience in the field, mostly on TV series. Their relative lack of filmic experience occasionally shows through, but the power of the narrative soon makes one forget about its flaws.

It is hard to say who was responsible for what, but Paronnaud looks to have put himself at the service of Satrapi’s art, which bears little resemblance to his own underground comic style done he does under the name of Winshluss (see sample above).

 In Michael Guillén’s interview posted on Twitch, Paronnaud says the two were influenced by Italian comedies for the family scenes, as well as “German expressionism for some of the décors.”  The reference to Italian comedies, if he means the delicious social satires of  Pietro Germi, like Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned (see picture on left), does ring true. As to German expressionism,  the one thing that springs to mind is not so much the film’s décors but its frequent use of silhouetted figures, which cannot help remind one of Lotte Reiniger silhouette films. In any case, the influences seem to have positive.

Though much has been made of the autobiographical nature of  Persepolis, especially as it follows the autobiographical tradition in the world of the graphic novel, one should realize that strong biographical films have also been emerging in animation. For instance, two of the past three winners of Best Animated Short Subject Oscars have been biographical films: Chris Landreth’s Ryan and John Canemaker’s The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, both of which are exceptional films. However, in terms of approach, Persepolis is more like Paul Fierlinger’s feature-length Drawn from Memory (pictured above) made for PBS, as both deal with life under oppressive political regimes. (Fierlinger’s film recounts his life as the son of a Czech diplomat who grows up in America and becomes miserable when his parents bring him to Communist Czechoslovakia.)

Needless to say, I find animated documentaries to be one of the most exciting areas in animation and is something I hope to talk about more in the future. In the meantime, Persepolis is an easy film to recommend.

Film historian Kristin Thompson is trying to compile a rather extensive chronology/filmography for Aardman Animations. The results so far have been posted on her and David Bordwell’s blog in hopes of filling in the blanks, so to speak.

The project arose as a byproduct of Thompson and Bordwell’s work on revising their Film History: An Introduction (which I use in some of my classes). She notes that,

In setting out to update the section on Aardman animation, I ran into difficulties pinning down the dates of certain television series or the director of a given short film. Indeed, I was quite surprised at the dearth of complete chronologies or filmographies for such a famous and important company.

She has, however, set some limits, indicating that,

Aardman has produced many ephemeral animations for station-identification logos, credit sequences, and websites, as well as perhaps hundreds of commercials. I’ve made no attempt to include commercials, apart from the Heat Electric series, which are available on DVD. The [list] primarily includes television shorts and series, as well as films.

As someone who has faced similar difficulties in compiling my studio filmographies, I must commend Thompson’s efforts, especially since it also includes an evaluation of Aardman films on DVD and the Internet.

As an afterthought, I recounted the time an undergraduate came to see me and I saw he was carrying several Japanese-language magazines and a handheld translation computer. When I asked him about it, he told me he was teaching himself Japanese. When I then mentioned this in a graduate class, a Taiwanese student said he did the same when he was younger.

As Americans are traditionally phobic about learning foreign languages, let alone one so different as Japanese, this sort of thing is nothing short of amazing. And it an aspect of anime fandom that the animation community generally overlooks and bodes well for anime’s continuing popularity.

It is really not surprising that Japanese language instructors would use a film like Grave of the Fireflies (pictured above) as a teaching aide, just as a French instructor might use The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. For instance, see the article “‘Those Anime Students’: Foreign Language Literacy Development Through Japanese Popular Culture,”  in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. More to the point is a recent article in California Educator (also here) about “Kimie Matsumoto, who teaches four levels of Japanese language classes” at Los Alamitos High School. It notes that,

Years ago [her] students wanted to take Japanese because they felt it would help them succeed in the business world. Today’s generation of students, however, is drawn to the Japanese language because of anime, the hugely popular animated cartoons produced in Japan.

… Matsumoto, wisely, has decided to incorporate her students’ interest in anime into the curriculum whenever possible, and sponsors an Entertainment Club that includes watching anime in her classroom during lunch.

Though this increased interest in all things Japanese is healthy and can lead to a broader approach to animation in general, this is not always the case. For instance, in my graduate Media Theory and Animation class, I usually start by having students analyze a classic live-action film, such as The Blue Angel, and talk about how it reflects its time and the culture which nurtured it; I then do the same with an animated movie like Dumbo. The reason is that I find we tend to look at animated films as more of a pure aesthetic experience than anything else, while it easier to look at a live-action in a broader context. In this, there does not seem to be much difference between anime fans and non-anime fans, despite the former’s seemingly more catholic approach.

This sort of tunnel vision extends to other matters as well; thus, most of my animation students seem puzzled by the question, What film genres are represented by David Hand/Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s  Akira? (Answer: Musical and science-fiction.)

This narrowness of vision is comes from nearly a century of bad habits, though animation and film schools do help. In this regard, one should take advantage of the intellectual curiosity anime fans profess, rather than dismiss them out of hand.

The posting of this first still from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (due out in 2009) on ComingSoon.net has created a mild buzz on the net, with fawning headlines such as “Can Disney recapture the magic of its classic musicals?”  (Hexus.Lifestyle). The fact that it is a musical and marks the company’s return to 2D cel animation is probably overrated. I do look forward to seeing it, but mostly because it’s being directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, whose last effort for Disney, Treasure Planet, was seriously underrated.

However, I think for now, Katey Rich’s smartass comments at CinemaBlend.com is probably a more sensible tone to take. Thus, she begins by informing us that,

Believe it or not, it’s been over 10 years since there was a Disney movie about a princess. Anyone with a young daughter is probably familiar with the “Princess Collection” line of merchandise, but the most modern princess in there, Mulan, came to us all the way back in 1998.

…. Don’t even pretend to be surprised that [the African-American heroine] Princess Tiana looks virtually just like every other Disney princess—ridiculously tiny waist, opulent dress, enormous eyes. I could get all gender and race theory on you—I went to a liberal arts college!—but really, I’m just excited to be seeing another Disney movie about girls. It’s been since Lilo & Stitch, way back in 2002, that there was an animated Disney movie about a girl, and we all know that movie was really about the Elvis-loving alien anyway.