keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

(This information comes courtesy of Harvey Deneroff , who is one of the conference organizers.) The 21st Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference, “The Persistence of Animation,” will be held July 10-12, 2009, at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Held under the auspices of SCAD-Atlanta’s Animation Department, the conference features over 50 scholars and filmmakers from around the world who will present papers on a wide range of topics relating to animation history and theory; in addition, there will be workshops on teaching animation history and animation production. The conference itself will kick off with a keynote address Andrew Darley, the renown British media theorist, appropriately entitled “The Persistence of Animation.” In conjunction with the conference, the SCAD Library will be presenting a special exhibition, “Behind the Cels: Selections from SCAD’s Don Bluth Collection,” featuring art work donated to the school by Don Bluth and Gary Goldm...

Anthony Balducci has written a great (and lengthy) piece talking about the combination of comedy and pathos , using many examples from a variety of comedians and films. While no animated films are discussed, the combination is certainly present in animated films and the pitfalls that Balducci discusses frequently show up.

If you heard that a political candidate was supported by 11% of the electorate, would that impress you? If 11% of people chose a particular toothpaste, would you change your buying habits? How about if 11% of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected a film as Best Picture. Should it win? Well now it could. The Academy has decided to expand the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten. The Academy has been unenthusiastic about nominating films that do the best box office. The Best Picture nominees are films that only a minority of movie goers have seen. As a result, the Oscar telecast suffers in the ratings as few people watching know the films being considered. By expanding the number of nominations to ten, the studios hope that films that gross more than $100 million have a chance to get a Best Picture nomination. The public doesn't know how many votes a Best Picture winner receives. The numbers are as closely guarded as the votes in ...

Updated with a new link at the bottom. Walt Kelly started his career on the east coast in early comic books, pre- Superman . He then shifted to working at Disney, where he was initially in the story department and later moved to being an animator. His credits include features like Pinocchio , Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon and shorts like The Nifty Nineties . He left Disney at the time of the strike and returned to the east coast, where he spent the bulk of the 1940s creating comic book stories for Dell comics of various kinds. One of his strips in Animal Comics developed into Pogo . Starting in 1948, Kelly went to work for the New York Star as an illustrator and art director. He took Pogo along with him as a comic strip. When the Star folded, Pogo found a home in syndication and continued beyond Kelly's death. In 1966, something happened to Kelly to cause him to send his characters to Mars (though it turned out to be the Australian outback). Perhaps it was boredom or ...

I previously wrote about my curiosity over the changing media landscape here . I've already mentioned Clay Shirky for his article on how journalism is changing, and his book Here Comes Everybody . Now, here's a very recent talk from him that does a beautiful job of nailing down exactly how media have changed since the advent of the printing press. While I'm not into video games, it occurs to me that the only area of the animation industry that's taking advantage of changes, where users can respond to content and can organize themselves around content, is gaming. TV and feature films are still operating with the 20th century broadcast model, while something like World of Warcraft is allowing users to form their own societies and teams within an animated world. While I don't think that a classical approach to storytelling, where stories are created by one set of people and delivered to another, is going to disappear, I wonder if the TV and feature model is susta...

The Worldwide Short Film Festival is currently running in Toronto. I attended a program today that included Chris Landreth's new film, The Spine , as well as the latest Wallace and Gromit half hour, A Matter of Loaf and Death , directed by Nick Park. Both films are consistent with their creators' previous work. The Spine Landreth's approach to animation is a sort of German Expressionism. While the German films of the 1920s expressed their characters' emotions through their surroundings, Landreth uses the characters' own bodies as expressions of their mental and emotional states. This film has to do with a marriage, where the partners are deformed in ways that relate to their experiences and needs. The problem with this approach is that it requires that the characters be tormented in some way, and that makes each Landreth film an appointment with dysfunction. In addition, Landreth is more enamored of technique than he is of character. The husband and wife eac...

I am reading Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow, and Sragow discusses Around the World in 80 Minutes , a 1931 documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks and directed by Fleming. What's interesting is that the film apparently contains an original animated segment with Mickey Mouse. There is no mention of this in Disney biographies by Bob Thomas, Neal Gabler or Michael Barrier. There's no mention of it either in Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic or Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons . Here's what Sragow has to say about this film. While Fairbanks and company visit Siam, they watch a performance of a classical Siamese dance troupe; Fairbanks says that the rhythm beneath the exotic moves and music is the same as the fox-trot, then tries to demonstrate that notion by twirling a Siamese gal around a ballroom. Out of nowhere, he announces, "Now, here's Hollywood's most famous star dancing to Siamese music. C'mon, Mickey!" The fi...

Jack Bradbury worked at Disney from 1933 to 1941, starting as an inbetweener and working up to animator on films like Ferdinand the Bull , Pinocchio , Fantasia and Bambi . Laid off after the Disney strike, he later spent a few years animating for the Friz Freleng unit at Warner Bros. However, he is probably best known for his work as a comic book artist. Starting the 1940's, he produced thousands of pages of comic book art, writing many of the stories himself. His son, Joel, has set up a website that's an archive of over 1300 pages of Bradbury's comic book work. The site also includes other artwork, such as sketchbooks and gag cartoons. One of the highlights of the site for those interested in animation history is an unpublished memoir by Bradbury about his time at the Disney studio. "My years at Disney's developed what talent I had, into a drawing skill that enabled me to make a living with it, something I had always hoped I could do, and something for which I sh...

The Magic Cauldron by Andy Zeng This Tuesday at 7 p.m. (and repeated on Wednesday at 9:30 p.m.), a selection of this year's films by Sheridan animation students will be running at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. The program runs approximately 90 minutes and admission is only $5. You can see a trailer for the program here and a list of the films here . Below is a map of the Bloor Cinema's location. View Larger Map

Slate has an article on this year's E3 conference and the state of the gaming industry. "To the extent that games provide consumers with engaging interactive entertainment for $60—sometimes 100 hours' worth as in the post-apocalyptic Fallout 3 —it's an industry that deserves to fly high in the recession. But the game industry has fired nearly 12 percent of its work force since last July (8,450 folks), according to Wanda Meloni, an analyst at M2. There may be more to come, too. Beyond closing 13 game-development studios, video game publishers are tightening their belts while, at the same time, desperately trying to show how extravagant they can be by spending millions on parties with famous bands, fancy convention booths, and movie-award-like press conferences at E3, the lavish yearly games convention in Los Angeles that's more like a boisterous, barker-filled state fair midway than a business gathering." That layoff percentage above implies that the gaming ...

Michael Sporn , Keith Lango and Michael Barrier have all written posts expressing their reservations about Pixar's latest feature. All are articulate and their criticisms are worth considering.