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.

The 24th Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference will be held June 25-27, 2012 at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The Call for Papers notes:

The theme of this year’s conference, ‘The Animation Machine’, reflects the wide range of processes, technologies, histories and structures in animation. As movement is an essential aspect of animation, whatever creates that movement may constitute an animation machine and one could conceive that animation is itself a machine. The animation machine can be considered from both the production process and the end product. Therefore, it refers to the machines of animation presentation, be these pre-20th century animation devices, movie or video screens, or even automata. The animation machine also relates to the multitude of animation production processes – from animating technologies (animation stands, cameras, computers), through to the animator’s individual creative practice. Ultimately, the animation machine can be described quite broadly and we welcome your own interpretations.

With the centenary of Australian animation approaching, the 2012 conference will also provide an opportunity to highlight some of Australia’s animation heritage. The conference will coincide with the Melbourne International Animation Festival (MIAF) and a number of crossover events are planned.

Proposals, which will accepted through December 12th, are invited “on a wide range of animation topics on all aspects of animation history, theory and criticism.” (The Call for Papers can be found here.)

This year’s keynote speakers include: Thomas Lamarre, Professor of East Asian Studies, Art History and author most recently of The Anime Machine: a Media Theory of Animation (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Robogarage Co., Ltd. CEO and Research Associate Professor of The University of Tokyo Tomotaka Takahashi who, “creates, designs, and invents unique and original humanoids.”

While you’re at it, check out the Society for Animation Studies website 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?

I’m a bit late posting on this, but it’s never too late to acknowledge Pierre Floquet receiving the Society for Animation Studies’ 2011 McLaren-Lambart Award “for the Best Scholarly Book on animation” for his Le langage comique de Tex Avery, published in 2009 byL’Harmattan.  Floquet, who’s on the faculty of IPB, Bordeaux University. His 1996 PhD thesis was “on linguistics applied to cinema, focusing on Tex Avery’s comic language.”

The McLaren-Lambart Award is named in memory of Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart and derives from the National Film Board of Canada’s initial involvement in the Award.  The Society’s announcement notes:

This book, published in French …, is a detailed analysis of the cinematic nuances at play in the cartoons directed by Tex Avery at MGM from 1942-1951.  With remarkably complex insights into Avery’s comic language, the author distills what at first glance might seem like a director’s reliance on coarse gags and repetitive formulae into a sophisticated colloquy with moviegoers.  The manner in which Avery engages viewers on the nature of cinema has always been disarming, played for laughs instead of reflection, but French film scholars recognized him as an important auteur as early as the 1960s.  This recent book in many ways is a fulfillment of this earlier recognition, a culminating study of Tex Avery’s influential body of work.  Pierre Floquet’s writing on the concept of distantiation, from Althusser and especially Brecht, is essential.  It points to a genuine concern with the form of the language of cartoons that is just as vital in any consideration of modern animation as it is with Avery’s œuvre.

Bravo Pierre!

Back in 2004, when I was living in London, I had the pleasure of occasionally writing for Skwigly, an online magazine that seemed to position itself as a British version of Animation World Network (awn.com). I was happy to continue my association when I moved to the Atlanta area. But soon after, they seemed went out of business and their site was taken down. (I did post an article I wrote for them on this blog on Joanna Priestly here.) Then, all of sudden, I got an email from its editor, David Smith, indicating they were back!

As might be expected the site is structured as a blog and recent pieces include a review of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arrietty) from Studio Ghibli, an interview with Alex Williams and a review of Animated Performance, the new book by Nancy Bieman.

Needless to say, it’s good to have Skwigly back. My only complaint is there is no easy way to search the site, especially if you’re looking for my articles (, if you’re interested here are links to my interviews for them with Bill Dennis, Linda Simensky and Robert Lione).