keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues is the kind of film that a major studio would never make, and that's exactly why it's so valuable. On the face of it, a film that combines at least four different design styles, Indian mythology, a commentary on that mythology, 1920s jazz, and autobiography is a commercial train wreck. No one in Hollywood would ever give this a green light or even invest in developing it. That's because in a studio setting, the large number of people involved threaten to pull a film apart. Studios seize on the generic because it's the only thing that everyone can agree on; idiosyncracy rarely survives the Hollywood process. The jumble of elements that make up Sita work because they're all from the mind and hand of one person: Nina Paley. The story is inspired by her own experience of being dumped by a boyfriend, and the parallel mythological story reflects the misfortune that men often judge women by mysterious or impossible standards. T...

Nancy Beiman and Michael Sporn have posted that the complete Sita Sings the Blues can be watched online at the WNET site. I don't know how long this will be available and since there are still unresolved copyright issues, this film may never be released theatrically or on DVD. Watch it while you can.

The Museum of the Moving Image is located in Queens, New York, in a building that was once a working film studio owned by Paramount. During World War II, the building was used by the Signal Corps for the creation of instructional films (many including animation) for the military. The museum, which I've visited, is definitely worth the trip to Astoria. In addition to the brick and mortar building, the museum has a web presence that features many interesting articles and dozens of podcasts with movie professionals. There are three interviews that are animation related: two with Chuck Jones ( here and here ) recorded on successive days in December 1994, when he was once again working for Warner Bros. creating short films, and one from 2005 with Brad Bird , recorded after the release of The Incredibles . Jones was 82 at the time of these interviews and he tended to ramble. Several familiar Jones tropes are here, such as his quoting Mark Twain and his screeds against producers. ...

Ben Model is a musician who accompanies silent movies as well as a silent film historian. He's done some very interesting work taking silent comedies and demonstrating the difference between the speed at which they were originally projected and being projected at a realistic speed. It was standard in the silent era for films, and comedies in particular, to be undercranked. What that means is that if the film was going to be projected at 16 frames per second, it would be shot at 12 frames per second so that when projected, the images would be faster than life. The term "undercranking" comes from the fact that cameras were literally cranked by hand. There was no fixed projection speed during the silent era. Projection ranged anywhere from 16 to more than 24 frames per second. Initially, projectors were also hand cranked, but even when they were motorized, they were controlled by rheostats which could vary the speed within a single film. What's interesting in Model...

( UPDATE: Variety reports that Midway Games, makers of Mortal Kombat , filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Feb. 12.) Slate has an interesting article on the state of the videogame industry. While sales are rising, budgets are rising faster. That's leading to financial losses and layoffs. The development cost of a game is now in the area of $40 million, which is the cost of a mid-range animated feature. The gaming industry is pursuing a Hollywood model, hoping that blockbusters make enough money to offset losses on other releases. I'm not sure how smart it is for anyone to raise the stakes in a time of economic uncertainty. I'd love to know how many artists the gaming industry employs relative to TV and feature animation. It's possible that gaming employs more than the two of them put together. If that's true, I hope that the game producers know what they're doing.

The N.Y. Times is reporting that Nina Paley's animated feature Sita Sings the Blues will air on the New York PBS station WNET on March 7. It also reports that the copyright fees for the songs have been negotiated to a more reasonable level and that the film may soon be released more widely. I'm looking forward to seeing the complete film.

Above is the complete version of The Bandmaster , directed by Dick Lundy for the Lantz studio. It's available on The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection . There are several bits of animation I'd like to talk about. The first is Les Kline's trapeze artist, which is around 3:03 into the cartoon. When we think of animators who create funny movement, we tend to think of people like Rod Scribner or Jim Tyer - animators whose movements are very broad. The shot of the trapeze artist is the opposite; it's a quiet piece of motion that could actually be accomplished with a cut-out. The idea of a cartoon character defying gravity was already old by 1947, yet the way this character moves to the music is somewhat hypnotic and always breaks me up. There is something otherworldly about it; a loopy grace that glides along the clarinet solo. The second shot of her is an anti-climax that breaks the spell. The gag with her hair is not particularly good and the...

A few weeks ago, I ran an entry entitled Disney Snobbery . It used an anecdote given to me by Børge Ring, who did not anticipate or endorse how I used it. I've removed the entry to prevent people from stumbling on it in the future and I have apologized to Børge personally. The word "snobbery" was my addition, and any negative impressions of Art Babbitt a reader might have taken from the piece were wholly my fault and do not reflect Børge's opinion of Babbitt in any way.

(There are no spoilers below.) Coraline is a catalog of wonders. It has enough imagination for five feature films. Unfortunately, it only has enough story and characterization for a half hour special. While Henry Selick is a very gifted art director and director, he did himself no favours by writing the script. His understanding of story structure, scene construction and characterization is extremely weak. The plot takes forever to get started; the film relies on a parade of imaginative visual ideas to hold the audiences' attention until that point, but I found myself losing interest. Once the story does get started, the villain is poorly motivated. While the villain wants something, she has possessed it in the past and repeatedly abandoned it. There is no explanation for her previous loss of interest or why she wants it again. The film's climax, while exciting due to Selick's ability as a director, is contrived. Fantasy films are devilishly hard to do well; in an ...

What started out as Michael Sporn trying to identify a boy in a picture has developed (in the comments) into several lengthy reminiscences of the Dick Williams Studio in Soho Square in 1973. Commenters who were there include Greg Duffell, Suzanne Wilson and Børge Ring. At the time of the photo, Williams had veteran American animators Ken Harris, Grim Natwick and Art Babbitt working at the studio. Babbit spent weeks teaching classes in animation technique to the Williams crew. The people associated with Williams at this time went on to become leaders of British animation and Dick Williams deserves much credit for providing them with such a singular education.

Thanks to Turner Classic Movies, I've just seen the 1945 version of Brewster's Millions for the first time. I was surprised to find a small animated segment within it. The producer, Edward Small, was an independent who released this film through United Artists, a distributor that was not affiliated with an animation studio at the time. The moon's voice sounds like Billy Bletcher, voice of the Big Bad Wolf, Peg Leg Pete and other cartoon characters. That leads me to believe that the animation was done on the west coast. I have no idea who was responsible for this animation, which is frankly pretty crude. Does anyone know? The actor, by the way, is Dennis O'Keefe.

Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly ) is interviewed on monetizing internet content. The interview concludes with this advice. "A lot of people sit around and go, "How can I get this made?" The only answer is: By making it. By borrowing someone's camera. By buying a camera. They come cheap and they work well. And if you know where to point them -- and the person that you point them at is saying something interesting -- that's it! That's how it works. I can't stress enough that I believe the best thing in the world is for everybody who feels like they have a story to tell, to tell it. If they want to sell it, if they want to make a lot of money, they can do that -- and they can kiss their story goodbye. Because, in general, that's the last they're ever going to see of it, because somebody else will own it and they will either not make it, or make it very differently than that person hoped." (Link via Cinematech ...

I have an odd fascination with the Lantz studio. By all accounts, Lantz himself was a nice man who was pleasant to work for. I've never heard or read a bad thing about him, though Tex Avery and Jack Hannah both complained about the economics of the studio. While Lantz was a good boss, he didn't influence his cartoons the way other studio heads did. Because the Lantz studio only had one unit in the 1940s, the studio's output changed radically whenever there was a change of director. From Burt Gillett to Alex Lovy to Shamus Culhane to Dick Lundy, there's a wide variety of styles and approaches. Our impression of the Warner Bros. cartoons is based on the range of directors' styles, but imagine how we'd think of that studio if all the cartoons were directed by Bob Clampett and then later by Friz Freleng. That's a pretty big change, but at Lantz, it was the standard. Dick Lundy was a talented Disney animator who helped shape Donald Duck and later directed Du...

At Ralph Bakshi's website , there is a podcast where he remembers his time at Terrytoons in the 1950s when the studio was being run by Gene Deitch. Also mentioned are R. O. Blechman, Jules Feiffer, Connie Rasinski, Mannie Davis, Art Bartsch, Dave Tendlar and Jim Tyer. There are photos and artwork to accompany the podcast.