Be Bop Til You Drop

Lots of energy expended yesterday.

1) delivering a motion graphics project
2) getting started on drawn animation for documentary
3) illustration project with lots of seesawing
4) starting up video editing/website stuff for Jon Faddis

Faddis helped us out on the last of the Naked Campaigns for Sundance and "The New Yorker", his track makes the film.



He's a hard bopper and was a protege of Dizzy Gillespie (best known as a vocal contributor to John Hubley).



Here's a Faddis clip from several years back.



So I haven't had the time to put together a proper post for today, but it throwing this together I found a great one for tomorrow.

Mail Call (#2)

Who amongst us doesn't the lament the slow demise of the postal system?

Casting aside the hourly mail calls of Stoker's "Dracula" which birthed a whole new genre of the undead, taking the GPO's sponsorship of Len Lye out of consideration -the removal of tactile communication from human relationships is great loss.

Yes, LOLcats are nice. "Poking" is a fine form of saying "hello".

The letter, stroke for stroke, offers unparalleled potential
.

Norman McLaren to a friend

"The Drawings of Norman McLaren" (Tundra Books: Montreal, 1975) publishes several of the filmmaker's letters.

Letters like these open the culture of an artist, the community they are part of and the way they relate to their peers.

I now want to know more about Wija Waworuntu. What did he do at the NFB? Did he keep up with McLaren while pioneering Indonesian tourism?

trains, boats, horses and more

These are reminiscent of Steinberg, for sure.

communication

Like Steinberg, only as much as they are part of an era.

These remind me of a story R. O. Blechman told me. In the 1950s he was friendly with Andy Warhol. They were both successful commercial illustrators and had similar circles.

Every couple of weeks Warhol would send out hand painted postcards to his peers. Bob would get one, read the back, and toss it into the trash.

Around the time he told me about this, a friend of his who had kept all the of the postcards (and gave Warhol his first polaroid camera) put his lot up for auction. I don't recall exactly how many zeros were in the sales figure, but it infinitely tops the value of even the most cherished email attachment.

This is all I could find for Warhol postcards:

Warhol post-cards, many post-50s

I look through "Andy Warhol: Drawings 1942-1987" and couldn't find anything that definitely a postcard. I highly recommend this book for students of design and illustration.

Warhol represents many things, his cipher nature becoming the seminal figure of post-modernism, but one thing he clearly was: a clever and sensitive illustrator.

Shoe with wheels, difficulty with the stitched line

Sunday Baseball with Bugs Bunny

Stopped by Economy Candy yesterday for some studio treats.

Found a few packages of Warner Bros. Baseball Cards from 1990.

click to enlarge

I think the art is very nice. It's loose pencil work, very expressive. It completely disregards "model" in favor of capturing the spirit. The backgrounds are crude water colors, but beautiful and effective.

There's a card that says this series was drawn and created by Chuck Jones. None of the drawings are signed, from the looks of the Bugs Bunny the Jones attribution seems accurate.

Old Experiments

I'm greatly enjoying "Animation in the Cinema" by Ralph Stevenson.

It's like a snapshot of world animation taken from a British perspective in 1967.

Each chapter gives a cursory review of a nation or region's history and "scene." Although there are some academic deficiencies -claiming "Krazy Kat", for instance, as derivative of "Felix the Cat" when Herrimans' character pre-dates Sullivan's by several years -there are more than enough "I didn't know that" gems to make this a very valuable little book.

He lists four unproduced feature films developed by UPA: "The White Deer" based on James Thurber, "Don Quixote", Ben Jonson's "Volpone" (spelled with an "h"), and "Helen of Troy". This short list conjures the greatest "What if?" imaginable for animation history.

Stevenson has a cynical stance on American cartoon animation. He decries the violence of Tex Avery as cliché and the evolution of the Disney product as hackneyed. For my interests, this is fine. There's more than enough history dedicated to the Warner Bros. and Disney output. His treatment of independents, especially internationally, more than makes up for his distaste of the mainstream.

Here's an excerpt:

Chuck Jones in one of his films "Now Here This", instead of the usual sound effects shows a notice: GIGANTIC EXPLOSION. This is fine. But in the long run the violence palls, the formula becomes stereotyped, we tire of the endless repetition of virtually the same situation, the absence of any plot, any subtlety, and relief from the bang-bang-bang of two characters chasing and bashing each other.

He spends several pages on the American avant garde.

Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger: "Allegretto", "Composition in Blue", "Optical Poem", "An American March" as well as collaboration with the Disney Corporation on a sequence in "Fantasia".

Mary Ellen Bute: "Sychronization", "Anitra's Dance", "Evening Star", "Parabola", "Toccata And Fugue", "Tarantella", "Spook Sport".



John and James Whitney: only listing five short "Exercises" and "Yantra".


Yantra

Douglas Crockett (a name I didn't know): "Fantasmagoria", "The Chase", "Glenn Falls", "Sequence". These are oil paint on glass. Google is no help.

Joseph Vogel: "House of Cards"

Chester Kessler: "Plague Summer"

Hy Hirsh: "Divertissement Rococo", "Gyromorphosis"

Carmen D'Avino: "A Finnish Fable" and "Pianissimo" (following)



D'Avino went on to make several films for "The Electric Company".



Morton and Mildred Goldscholl: "Envelope Jive" and "Intergalactic Zoo". The Goldscholls had a commercial production company out of the MidWest.

Robert Breer (who is still active today): "Frame by Frame", "Four Phases", "The Miracle", "A Man and Dog out for Air", "Horse Over Tea Kettle", "Jamestown Baloos", "Blazes".


A Man and his Dog out for Air

Eliot Noyes: "Clay"

Teru (Jimmy) Murakami: "The Insects", "The Top".

Science Fair

In case you've been missing it -like me. Because you've been working to "make ends meet"-like me. New York City has been hosting The World Science Festival 2009.

Last night I got to one event, Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness. The festival also plays to the cheap seats with "Wall-E's World: Design for an Invisible Footprint" which mixes the pop science of carbon emission control with the feel-good theatrics of the Pixar film. Although no one involved with the film was scheduled to be at the forum.

Nothing. At the Tishman Auditorium. John Hockenberry did a great job moderating.

Tishman Auditorium at The New School, not pictured: whisper chambers

Most panels are poorly run, ones in the animation industry are no exception. Often it's one guy pontificating on his own work while the other panels look at their shoes, often it's silences and awkward pauses. Sometimes the moderator is over his head, sometimes he overpowers the guests.

Mr. Hockenberry showed a fluency with the difficult ideas with belittling them. He asked clear, provocative questions and kept all four scientists involved. He also did one thing that's rarely done (to my eternal frustation) he repeated audience members' questions, distilling their essence so everyone understood them.

The photographer is communicating with the person on stage, IN WHISPERS

So much for the wrapping. The content, the content was -nothing. A Nobel Laureate and three other really smart guys trying to pinpoint the content of nothing.

Even in a vaccuum there are pairs of particles and particles within particles.

I'm not much of an artist, so animation doesn't come easy to me. But I like to think about it. And animation is scientific. Things move in waves, everything moves in waves. And the most powerfully charged spaces, as in nature, are "empty".

The Yoke of the Horde

Some works are beyond criticism.

It's not necessarily significant of "greatness" -although it can be. And most great films have plenty of room for criticism.

In animation, I can only think of a handful of works that fit this category.

Priit Parn's "1895" is one:




Martha Colburn's "Evil of Dracula":




Of course, Hubley's "Moonbird":




Perhaps the "gesamkunstwerk" nature of animation allows for even greatness to have it flaws. J. J. Villard's "Son of Satan", for instance, amongst the most powerful films of the decade, still has a thing or two that stick out -the dad's voice, for instance. His "Chestnuts Icelolly" may be more refined, may still be great, but doesn't have near the impact of "Son of Satan".

My old high school pal David Prior has just published a book which, in my opinion, is beyond criticism.

"The Yoke of the Horde"

Here's an excerpt that's off the narrative track of the book, but humorously pertinent to our profession.

'Well, heck, I know it's my logo but I wonder if that's enough. I mean, I wonder if we could somehow get the logo in that little movie with the old man and the truck.'

'You don't need a logo during that part. People are going to identify you with the old man and the truck. You just said so yourself.'

'I know that and you know that, but crazy as it sounds there are a lot of people out there that don't know the first thing about BFT&H. They're likely to see this here commercial and not make the connection between BFT&H and wholesome goodness. I don't need Bobby Beercans sitting at home saying to himself... Well heck, I don't know those kinds of people will say about all of this. He might like the truck but... oh hell. Can't we just the logo or a voice in there, something beside the spiritual music, so people know what its all about?'

'Of course people are going to know what it's all about, Mr. Susskind. That's why we add your name to the end of the commercial. Believe me, we test run commercials all of the time in order to see what the most effective ways for a company to get their point across is, and this approach always does very well. It's a tried and true performer, and if you don't mind me saying so, from your reaction just a minute ago, you thought the bit about the farmer was very engaging, and it was a very good, very effective commercial.'

'No. It needs something more. It's my company, and it's my commercial, and I say it needs a little something more.'

'Okay, fine. Look, maybe I can have some of my people at CPS&D make it so the hat the old man is wearing is a BFT&H hat. How about that?'

'No, someone might miss that. Uh-uh. I want something big, something major, so not even the damnedest fool imaginable would be able to miss it.... You know what I want, Miss Borimmer? I want the old man, when his grandchildren come running to him, that part that you described the people at the agency liking the most, I want that part to be the BFT&H moment. Pinpoint it. Right at that moment, right at that moment you get your marketing stat people to sit around with a bunch of stop watches, and you tell them to watch for the reactions on peoples' faces, you know, these test tube guinea pig people you have watching the new commercials, the...'

'The focus group.'

'Right, those people. See I want those people monitored. You got that? Strictly monitored, that's how we're going to have to do this. Now bear with me, Ms. Borimmer, because we're all on the same team now, BFT&H, CPS&D, we're all going to have to work together now. So what you guys and gals over there at CPS&D are going to do now is watch those little people and once they get to the part you said they all liked, you- no, better yet. Tape them. Yes, tape them and slow down the tape, right. And right at the millionth of a second when they first smile, weep, whatever the hell they do to show we've made them happy, that's when we have the BFT&H appear, and I don't mean I want to see on some fellow's hat. I mean appear. We're talking a crash of thunder, a bolt of lightening, whammo bammo sis boom bah, and then across the sky BFT&H.'

If you don't buy the book, you'll regret it for the rest of your life.

Animation In The Cinema

Last week I picked up a queer little book "Animation in the Cinema" by Ralph Stephenson published by A. Zwemmer, LTD, London in 1967.

almost pocket sized (still from George Dunning's "The Apple")

I've decided to keep a running list of the films he mentions.

Parasite - Vladimir Lehky, Czechoslavakia
The Wardrobe - George Dunning
The Insects - Fred [sic] Murakami (I guess he means Jimmy Murakami -there are several errors like this in the book)
Archangel Gabriel and Mother Goose - Jiri Trnka
Rythemetic - Norman McLaren
La Demoiselle et Violoncelliste - Laguoinie
Once Upon A Time - Jan Lenica



Neighbors - McLaren



Ondonnane - Arcady (Yugoslavia)
Justice - Ante Bajaja
City of Gold - Colin Low
Very Nice Very Nice - Arther Lipsett
House - Charles & Ray Eames
Death Day - Eames
Axe & The Lamp - Halas & Batchelor
The Duel - Janusz Majewski (live action)
Help! My Snowman's Burning Down - Carson Davidson (live action)

Unexpectedly excellent!

These are all mentioned in the opening chapter. Short films which the reader would have heard of, known about, or could access at the local library.

I've heard of maybe three or four. I've seen work from about half of the filmmakers.

Will the festival circuit films we know so well today be obscure curiosities in two generations?