keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

The New York Times has an article about the technology behind Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's animated feature My Dog Tulip , which opens in New York on September 1.

I'm going to start off with a plea. Hans Perk's documentation for Dumbo is incomplete in several areas, but never more frustratingly than in the "Pink Elephants" sequence. He only has credits for the first 9 shots. This sequence is a tour de force. It is graphically daring, using colour treatments, metamorphosis and shot transitions in ways that were out of the ordinary for Disney and every other animation studio of the time. The missing information is out there, I'm sure. If anyone can supply the information for the rest of this sequence, I would greatly appreciate it. I would be happy to give credit to whoever supplies it, or would be happy to keep the donor anonymous if that is the donor's preference. If you have access to a complete copy of the animator draft or access to the scene folders for this sequence, could you please supply me with the information? This sequence is an alcohol-induced joint hallucination of Dumbo's and Timothy's and e...

Arnie Lipsey is a Toronto animator who has worked in the local industry for years. He has also created two independent films, The Crow and the Canary (1988) and Almonds and Wine (1999) and has finally made them available on YouTube. You can see them below. The Crow and the Canary is a story from Arnie's childhood, narrated by his father. Almonds and Wine is a visualization of the Jewish experience from eastern Europe to Canada. Almonds and Wine inspired a mural, created by Cristina Delago, that's located on the west side of Bathurst Street, two blocks south of Lawrence Avenue. You can see the mural here and photos and video of the opening ceremony as well.

Thad has posted about Plight of the Bumblebee , a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the early '50s that was animated, but never finished. Included in Thad's post is the pencil test, something I've never seen before. Rather than steal Thad's thunder, I'll direct you to his site so that you can watch it.

Here's something that will make Jenny Lerew and many other animation artists happy: the Blackwing pencil will be manufactured once again . These pencils were standard in the animation industry for years. I first encountered them at Zander's Animation Parlour in the 1970s. According to the Boing Boing link, original pencils are going for as high as $40 apiece on Ebay, so you know that some people really value these things. Personally, I always found them impossible to erase, but they did make a beautiful dark line that worked really well when photocopying drawings onto cels, the technology of the time. No word yet on whether the new manufacturer is able to match Eberhard Faber's quality or when the pencils will be generally available, but Mark Frauenfelder promises to review the advance pencils he will be receiving.

Dumbo is still tearful after seeing his mother and gets the hiccups as a result. Timothy has Dumbo drink water from the tub the clowns knocked a bottle of champagne into and both of them inadvertently get drunk. Timothy challenges Dumbo to blow a square bubble, and before their eyes (it's a joint hallucination), the bubble metamorphoses into an elephant that starts to blow its own elephant bubbles. The use of alcohol and drunkenness is very cleverly handled. The clowns have spiked the water purely by accident. Dumbo is motivated to drink by the hiccups and the hallucinations that start here and continue in the next sequence are what cause Dumbo to fly for the first time. There has been no suggestion anywhere in the film that Dumbo's ears resemble a bird's wings, so Dumbo has no logical reason to attempt flight. It's only the alcohol-induced nightmare that provokes his actions and the audience doesn't find this out until after the fact. The innocent and acciden...

A short time ago, I linked to a Mark Evanier piece about hitting deadlines . I believe strongly in behaving in a professional manner when working on a project. I also believe strongly that professional conduct goes both ways and that studios have the same obligation to behave as their employees do. In that piece, I mentioned that "the people setting up the schedules or passing judgment on work are often ignorant. They create impossible schedules or ask for changes that will take enormous amounts of time." There are also cases where studios are dishonest with their employees because they have run out of money. The latest example of this is a studio with the unfortunate name Fake Studios in Montreal. They have yet to pay visual effects artists for their work on Piranha 3D . Variety has the details . The story was also reported and commented on at The Animation Guild's blog . Visual effects artist Scott Squires has posted an excellent list of actions employees s...

Left to right: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara and Claude Jarman, Jr. in John Ford's Rio Grande . Tomorrow, Aug. 17, is Maureen O'Hara's 90th birthday. As she is one of the few surviving members of director John Ford's stock company and the performer he most frequently cast as his female lead, I want to acknowledge the milestone by wishing Ms. O'Hara a happy birthday. Turner Classic Movies will also be celebrating the day by screening her films for 24 hours. They'll screen three directed by Ford ( The Long Gray Line , 9:30 a.m; The Quiet Man , 8 p.m; and Rio Grande , 10:15 p.m; all times Eastern). In addition, they will show The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton (noon), Our Man in Havana with Alec Guiness (directed by Carol Reed, Wednesday at 1:45 a.m.), Big Jake with John Wayne (one of the better movies in Wayne's late career on Wednesday at 4 a.m.), and Disney's The Parent Trap with Brian Keith and Hayley Mills (directed by former anim...

This will probably be old news to New Yorkers, but I moved out of the city before this was created and never managed to see it on my visits home. Bill Brand used the principles of a zootrope and the existence of an abandoned subway station (one which trains pass at full speed) to create the above animation. Here are some older news reports on the creation of the work. Toronto has a subway and there are stretches where this kind of thing could be done. However, I think it would be more interesting to do it outside the elevators of the CN Tower. How great would it be to see animation on clear plastic (cels!) of somebody falling and opening a parachute as you descend back to ground level? Or something totally surreal as people in rocking chairs or rowing boats in the sky, as Dorothy sees out her window during the tornado in The Wizard of Oz ? In any case, my hat is off to Bill Brand for finding this use for animation and for livening up the commute to work. (link via 37signals .)

Mark Evanier, who has written for many animated TV series as well as writing for comics, has posted some advice to a comics writer friend of his. An excerpt: There are also times when they can't [give you extra time]...or when to give you that two weeks means taking it away from your collaborators; i.e. , the artist is going to have to draw the comic in three weeks instead of the five he expected to have. You may also have harmed his income. He expected to have that script next Tuesday. He planned his life and maybe turned down other work so he could start drawing your script then, plus he counted on being paid for it by the time his next mortgage payment is due. But because of you, he has nothing to draw next week and no way to make money on the days he cleared to draw your script...and he may have to turn down the assignment he was going to do after he finished your script because he's now not going to be done with it when he expected to be. Ask anyone who'...

The clowns are still celebrating and decide to raise the platform that Dumbo jumps from. On their way out to ask for a raise, one of them knocks into the table, spilling a bottle of champagne into a bucket of water. This is a very curious sequence from a graphical standpoint. Like the previous clown sequence played in silhouette, the layouts are credited to Al Zinnen. However, that sequence was animated by Berny Wolf and this one was animated by Art Babbitt. This sequence is quite a bit busier graphically. The characters are not as well defined by the negative spaces around them and their silhouettes are not as strong. The clowns' hair is far more complicated here. There are more clowns on screen, which also clogs up the graphics. Did Zinnen lay out both sequences or was he supervising two different layout artists? Did Berny Wolf make a conscious decision to streamline the layouts he was given? Did Babbitt add more detail and characters? Personally, I find Wolf's seq...

This sequence, the song "Baby Mine," is the emotional center of the film. Looking at it by itself, it's surprising how little screen time there is of Dumbo and his mother. Obviously, what's there is very powerful, but this is a case where the film makers felt that less is more. The entire story has built to this moment. The bond between mothers and children is so primal and the injustices suffered by Dumbo and his mother are so appalling, that the audience's emotions are waiting for the release that this sequence provides. The music has a melancholy quality that tempers the joy of the reunion with an underlying sadness. A great deal of the power of this sequence comes from touch. All the animals except the ostriches are sleeping while physically touching each other. There is much physical contact between Dumbo and his mother. The rocking, in shots 1.2 and 12, though done with an elephant's trunk instead of human arms, is familiar to everyone in the audien...

The above charts come from this article which suggests that the novelty of 3D is rapidly diminishing. Clearly, people are choosing to see movies flat, either because they find the glasses uncomfortable or aren't willing to pay a premium for stereoscopic images. Supply and demand factors into this as well. One of the commenters to the above article suggested that more recent films are not able to find as many 3D screens as there are so many 3D films in the marketplace. It may also be that the increasing supply of 3D is simply overwhelming whatever demand there is. It will be interesting to watch this trend. Last year's box office gross set a record, but attendance was only average. Price increases made up the difference. If people start avoiding 3D in large numbers, Hollywood will definitely suffer at the box office.

John Canemaker has been contributing articles to Print 's online version. His latest is " Chuck Jones at the MacDowell Colony ," a speech that Canemaker made as the prelude to Chuck Jones receiving the MacDowell Medal. Jones was only the second filmmaker to receive it (the first was experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage). You may have seen video of Pixar's three dimensional zoetrope. If not, you can see it here . Gregory Barsamian is a sculptor who does something similar, creating sequential sculptures that he then films using strobe lights. Unfortunately, his site does not allow embedding or direct links to specific pages, but you can see his work here . Hogan's Alley is an eclectic magazine about all forms of cartooning. The 17th issue is out and the articles relating to animation include a career-spanning interview with the late Bill Scott conducted by Jim Korkis. Scott was a writer for Warner Bros, UPA and most especially, Jay Ward. There is also an or...

John Canemaker has become one of our leading animation historians for several reasons. As an artist and animator himself, he has an advantage over non-artists such as Bob Thomas or Charles Solomon in understanding the process. As someone immersed in animation history, he is familiar with the field in a way that dabblers like Stefan Kanfer or Neal Gabler never can be. As someone who has personal relationships with many of the people he writes about, he has insights that are not available to authors like Donald Crafton, who write about the remote past. However, all these qualities are trumped by Canemaker's honesty and, perhaps, his courage. Older books on animation tended to be scrubbed clean of studio politics and personal foibles. They were usually content to present chronologies of events and talk of technical and artistic innovations. Canemaker understands that artists are human and so are not wholly admirable and that studios are often battlegrounds where various aestheti...