keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Cartoon Brew pointed to this cartoon by Hans Fischerkoesen, made in Germany in 1943. I think that I became familiar with his three wartime shorts almost 20 years ago, and this is my favourite by far. There is much about this film that is clunky. The character designs and animation are behind the times; they resemble American cartoons from the mid-1930s. There are other throwbacks, such as imitating Max Fleischer's 3D process, where cels were photographed in front of a model on a turntable. While it's possible to criticize the drawings and animation in this cartoon (and the version above is slightly truncated at the start and end; if I remember correctly, the film ends with the rabbit wistfully eating the carrot), there are things about this cartoon that exceed what's being done today. There is a high level of invention; the section after the snowman falls through the ice and attempts to hold himself together while melting is wonderful imagery. What really makes this fi...

I'm only posting this as earlier today I said that Laika was perhaps the best positioned of what Fast Company referred to as the "Baby Pixars." An article at OregonLive.com states that the studio has laid off 65 people and canceled Jack and Ben's Animated Adventure , a cgi film that was slated to be Laika's second feature after Coraline . Other pictures are in pre-production and the company will announce its plans in the new year.

Last week, the NY Times ran an article by Brian Stelter on people who are now earning a living from their postings on YouTube. For some, like Michael Buckley , the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show , filming funny videos is now a full-time job. Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt. Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access....” Granted, building an audience online takes time. “I was spe...

After reading the entry on Delgo 's failure, Paul Teolis pointed me to this 2005 article from Fast Company on the "Baby Pixars." The companies profiled are Threshold ( Food Fight ), Vanguard ( Happily N'Ever After , Space Chimps ), IDT ( Yankee Irving - renamed Everyone's Hero ), and Laika ( Coraline ). The success of the Pixar and DreamWorks cgi feature started something of a gold rush into feature animation, but as the above list shows, the success rate was disappointing. Food Fight has yet to be released. Happily N'Ever After and Space Chimps opened but neither set the box office on fire. Happily earned approximately $16 million and Space Chimps earned approximately $30 million in North America. Everyone's Hero earned approximately $14 million and IDT sold off their animation business to Liberty Media. Coraline has yet to be released. While everyone tries to be the new Pixar, not enough people remember that Pixar started off making short...

According to Deadline Hollywood Daily , Delgo , an independent cgi-animated feature, opened in 2160 theatres this weekend and grossed $465,000. That means that, on average, each theatre took in less than $216 from Friday through Sunday. Assuming an average admission of $6, since some attendees were children, approximately 36 people saw the movie in each theatre over a three day period. That's 12 people a day.

Here's a lovely shot of Al Eugster taken by Harvey Deneroff in 1980 at Kim and Gifford Productions in New York. Al was 71, though he could pass for his fifties as his hair was still brown and he was trim. I knew Al at this time, working with him on a forgotten Saturday morning series called Drawing Power in the summer of 1980. Harvey was interviewing Al, who was a favourite interview subject for many young historians curious to know about the golden age at Fleischer, Iwerks and Disney. Here is Buster Keaton in 1965 on the set of Film , a movie written by playwright Samuel Beckett and directed by Alan Schneider. Keaton would have been 70 at the time. Alex Robinson's friend's grandfather shot this and other stills (visible here ) at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. The other shots are nice, but this is the keeper. Neither of these men were doing their best work at the time of these photos, but they were still bringing their talents to whatever projects they could fin...

Jeffrey Katzenberg was in Toronto last Monday, talking about DreamWorks' commitment to stereoscopic 3D and showing clips from the forthcoming film Monsters vs. Aliens . Katzenberg believes that in 5-8 years, all movies will be projected in 3D. He stated that there were 10 or 11 films (both live and animated) slated for release in 2009 and two dozen for 2010. All future DreamWorks releases are slated to be 3D, starting with Monsters vs. Aliens . Dreamworks' features currently cost $150 million, and 3D will add an additional $15 million to their price tag. Bloomberg news reports specifics about what 3D films are coming: Next year's 3-D releases include a version of the original "Toy Story" from Disney and James Cameron's "Avatar" from News Corp., the director's first feature film since "Titanic" in 1997. Disney plans five 3-D films, the most of any studio. In February, NBC Universal will release "Coraline," based on the book...

Even before the current economic situation, certain media industries were in trouble. In particular, TV and newspapers had both been losing their audience. The current downturn is probably going to accelerate that. There is the sense that anything that can be reduced to digital bits has changed in some fundamental ways. Here's Virgina Hefernon of the N.Y. Times on how writing for print is not just writing. Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to “tell great stories” or “make arresting images.” You don’t study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an “article” is ...

This isn't a doomsday scenario about there being only one customer left. It's about the fact that while people work for companies and companies work for companies, relatively few of them are the final customer, and that puts everyone at risk. When you get your hair cut, you are the final customer. You're not getting your hair cut so that you can somehow resell it to someone else. But many of us work for companies whose customers are not the final customer. If you work in animation, your company's customer may be another studio, TV broadcaster, film distributor, or retailer. They are the people who ultimately sell your work to the audience. If any of your customers misread the market, your company will suffer and you may be laid off as a result. The people working in animation production are helpless to control their fates. The Animation Guild Blog has some quotes from industry veterans. The whole thing is worth reading, but here is the heart of the matter: What...

I will, of course, remind everyone about this later, but Turner Classic Movies has an entire evening devoted to Chuck Jones next March 24. Included is the new documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood . You can read more about that documentary over at Cartoon Brew . In addition, they will show The Phantom Tollbooth , the feature that Jones directed based on the book by Norton Juster. Here's the schedule for Eastern time. Note that the last film of the night is 1001 Arabian Nights , the UPA feature starring Mr. Magoo and directed by Jack Kinney. 8:00 PM Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood (2009) 8:30 PM Night Watchman, The (1938) 8:40 PM Prest-O, Change-O (1939) 8:50 PM Sniffles and the Bookworm (1939) 9:00 PM Elmer's Candid Camera ...