keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

In this section, the pups and their parents spend some quiet time together before Horace and Jasper arrive to resume the chase. The Colonel, Captain and Sgt. Tibbs delay the Baduns, but are not capable of stopping them. As Peter Emslie points out in the comments to Part 16 , the delaying action gives the Colonel his brief moment in the sun. He finally gets to take action. It's an important moment because it shows that Tibbs and the Captain respect the Colonel for valid reasons and they're not simply indulging him. The story forces limitations on how successful the three can be, though, so as not to distract from the main characters. This is a sequence which is pretty much cast by animator. Frank Thomas has a major hand in animating the dogs, especially the adults. Blaine Gibson contributes some animation to Pongo and Perdita. Hal King takes care of the personality close-ups of the puppies while Ted Berman gets the their long shots. John Lounsbery animates the Colonel in...

Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written an article for the Harvard Business Review that can be read here. There is also a podcast you can find here . Both focus on organizational structure and the steps that Pixar has taken to prevent the mistakes that are all too common in business. Here are some excerpts from the article: "To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to re...

Didier Ghez, editor of the Walt's People series of books interviewing those who worked with and for Disney, goes into detail on the creation of each volume . It's a long and involved process, dedicated to bringing a wide variety of source material and a high degree of accuracy to the reader. Anyone interested in Disney or animation history should have these volumes on a nearby bookshelf.

Jaime Weinman has unearthed a 1960 interview with Michael Maltese from the New York Herald Tribune . Maltese, if you're unaware, was one of the writers of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. At the time of this interview, he was writing Quick Draw McGraw for Hanna Barbera.

I want to draw your attention to Stephen Rowley's review of Persepolis , which has only recently been released in Australia. It begins: "Even those who love animation are prone to dark speculation about its shortcomings as a medium. The lack of live actors and the associated hindrance to truly subtle performances, in particular, is often cited as limiting the potential for serious dramatic work in animated films. The fear is that the relative paucity of full length, adult-oriented dramatic features might not only be due to a lack of courage and imagination on the part of directors and studio executives, but might also reflect actual limitations of animation itself. Thank goodness, then, for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis ." Rowley goes on to enumerate the ways that animation is better suited to telling this story than live action would have been. Definitely worth reading.

With regards to animated acting, I've written that I don't believe the technique (meaning drawn, cgi or stop motion) is responsible for the quality of a performance. What I believe is that a character has to be conceived with an inner life and a certain measure of complexity before a good performance is possible. I'm going to start with some live action examples, though they're not particularly current. In the 1930's, Humphrey Bogart was almost always cast as a gangster. These characters were one dimensional, usually nasty and violent. Occasionally, the character would reveal cowardice when he was about to die. To use Dorothy Parker's comment about Katharine Hepburn in another context, in these roles Bogart ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. In 1940, Bogart was cast as a gangster in High Sierra . There are major differences in the way this character is conceived. Bogart is shown to be weary. He is disappointed several times in the film by the world...

Comicrazies has reprinted 22 examples of the comic strip Laura , drawn by Felix the Cat creator Otto Messmer, from 1932. Laura is the name of a pet parrot, though in this series of strips, she's one of 6 parrots. In the old days, famous comic strips would get an entire newspaper page on Sundays. Often, the creator would add a second strip to the page. In this case, Laura was the strip on top of Felix . Another example would be E. C. Segar's Popeye having a topper called Sappo . Messmer's design is heavily rooted in the 1920's. The poses are hardly naturalistic and the character construction is based on the "circles and hosepipe" animation approach of the time, though Messmer's characters are generally more angular. The style has definitely dated, but I always found it charming. Looking at these strips, I wonder if Messmer was an influence on Herge and his ligne clair style.

In this part of the film, Pongo and Perdita arrive at Hell Hall and attack Horace and Jasper, allowing Tibbs and the puppies to escape. Pongo and Perdita's entrance is interesting for several reasons. The breaking glass in shot 72 is in rather large chunks. I hate to say it, but it looks like Blaine Gibson (or possibly an uncredited effects animator) took the easy way out by limiting the number of pieces. Shot 75, with the dogs in front of the fire place, is one of the few expressionistic pieces in the film, where the backgrounds mirror the characters' inner emotions. That fire is an expression of the dogs' rage at anyone who would threaten their pups. This kind of thing was used extensively in Snow White : Snow White's flight through the forest where the trees are an expression of her terror, the storm as the dwarfs pursue the Queen expresses their anger and the candles "crying" when Snow White is in the coffin. Live action film continued with expression...

Today is Gene Deitch 's 84th birthday, so happy birthday, Gene! Gene worked for UPA and was the head of Terrytoons after Paul Terry sold it to CBS. Since the 1960's, Gene has worked in Europe where he did adaptations of many children's books for Weston Woods. Gene and his cartoonist sons Kim, Simon and Seth are the subjects of a joint interview in The Comics Journal #292, pictured above. That issue was apparently available at Comicon but has yet to hit comics shops or bookstores. Look for it in the next few weeks. Gene's online book about his life in animation can be found here . (Birthday link via The Comics Reporter )

There's no reason to believe that [computer animated] characters will ever live on the screen as the characters do in the best hand-drawn films; given the way that computer-animated films must be made, the vital connection between artist and character simply can't be strong enough. - Michael Barrier Working off of the above quote, I'd like to talk a little about "the vital connection." Mainly, I want to talk about the technical side of how animators work in various media. There's no question that different forms of animation have different strengths and weaknesses, but, if anything, computer animators have a level of control over characters that easily rivals other forms and in some ways exceeds them. In stop motion, the animator is limited by the puppet itself. If the puppet's movement is physically restricted by its construction, the animator must adapt to that. There are also limita...