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Showing posts from July, 2011

Kirby Estate Loses Copyright Battle

I am sure that this judgment will be appealed, but a Federal court has ruled that the work Jack Kirby did for Marvel was "work-for-hire." This is despite the fact that the legal term was not part of the copyright law at the time Kirby co-created characters such as The Fantastic Four , The Hulk , The Silver Surfer , Thor , etc. Here's the Associated Press story and here is Deadline Hollywood 's. While I am sure that there is a celebration occurring in the Disney and Marvel boardrooms as a result of this ruling, it's a questionable victory. When the artists at Marvel realized that the company was not going to compensate them beyond paying them by the page, they simply stopped creating new characters. Image Comics exists because a group of artists realized they would never be fairly compensated for their work at Marvel and so they formed their own company. Marvel's treatment of their artists has been consistently bad. See this article on the recently decea

Steven Spielberg Needs His Eyes Examined

"According to [Spielberg], the biggest challenge was 'getting it to look like the drawings in the Hergé books. We love the art so much that we used animation to get it as close to the art as we can.'" Full story here .

Robert Rodrigues to Remake Bakshi's Fire and Ice

Get More: Movie Trailers , Movies Blog As you'll see in the above clip, Robert Rodriguez is going to remake Fire and Ice using the approach he used for Sin City . Frank Frazetta was a designer and producer on the original film and Ralph Bakshi directed it. Rodriguez feels that he can now get closer to the look of Frazetta's art than was possible in 1983. That's probably true. However, I think it's a waste of time. Frazetta was certainly a strong draftsman and painter. His images are striking due to his sense of composition and colour. In addition, there's a healthy dose of sex present in most of his work. However, while Frazetta worked in comics before his career as a painter, he wasn't really known for his narratives. His paintings are striking images, but they are no more than moments. His themes are limited and his worldview is that of a hormonally-drenched fourteen year old male. While that might make him the perfect source for current Hollywood mo

Oh Bother!

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"Sixth place? YOU'RE FIRED!" It's noon on Saturday as I write this, but Deadline Hollywood is estimating that the Winnie the Pooh film will finish sixth for the weekend with a gross of $8 million. No sane person expected the Pooh film to outgross the Harry Potter finale, but it's interesting that films two through five are hold overs. Pooh couldn't outgross Transformers 3 , Horrible Bosses , Zookeeper or Cars 2 . Cars 2 is in it's 4th week and may still outgross the Pooh film. That's bad as both are aimed at similar audiences of young children. The final domestic gross for the Pooh film should be somewhere between $20 and $32 million, depending on how it holds up. That will undoubtedly put downward pressure on the budgets of any future drawn films to come out of Disney as neither Pooh nor The Princess and the Frog have gotten close to the grosses for cgi films. I would be the last to blame the grosses on the fact that the films are dr

Ward Kimball Biography Coming in 2012

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Caricature of Ward Kimball by Walt Kelly Didier Ghez's Disney History site has details of Amid Amidi's biography of Ward Kimball to come out in the latter half of 2012. "The Kimball family has generously granted me access to all of Ward's personal files, photos and diaries, and I've combined this with new research and interviews to present a thorough celebration of his life that acknowledges his impact on the art form." This is a book I very much look forward to reading.

The Elements of a Scene: Suspense and Surprise

This is the seventh and last in a series analyzing a scene from The Grapes of Wrath . This entry is about suspense and surprise. When people think of suspense in movies, they tend to think of film makers like Alfred Hitchcock or big set pieces where you're on the edge of your seat wondering what will happen. All sporting events are built around suspense. Who will win? Will there be any memorable plays or blunders? Game shows and competitions are the same. Who will be voted off the island or eliminated? While the above are certainly good examples of suspense, suspense is actually at the root of any kind of storytelling. Suspense is anything that makes you wonder what will happen next. If you've ever watched a story and guessed early on how it comes out, it's boring to sit through. Why bother to watch if you know what's going to happen? Audiences want to know what will happen, but not too soon . The audience is counting on the storyteller to keep it in suspen

Kim Deitch Continued

Kim Deitch's memoir continues at The Comics Journal . Part 4 covers rock and roll, but includes comments by animator Tony Eastman that supply information about his parents, both of whom worked at Disney on the early features, and what he's up to currently.

Growth, Maturity and Decline

I haven't seen Cars 2 (and won't), but the critical drubbing it took and Pixar's move into sequels has me wondering about the bigger picture. Companies, like individuals, go through a life cycle. They grow, they mature and eventually they decline. The only difference between companies and individuals is that because companies can outlive individuals or change their personnel, they sometimes revive. Growth is a phase where companies get larger but also expand their skills and discover their point of view. If we look at the Disney studio during Walt Disney's lifetime, we can see growth from 1923 to 1942. We can argue the exact dates or films, but the overall pattern is clear. During that time period, the skills and what exactly a Disney cartoon was supposed to be continued to evolve. After Bambi , the studio was mature. A Disney cartoon was a particular, identifiable thing . When the studio deviated from that, in The Three Caballeros or Toot, Whistle, Plunk and

John Celestri Blog

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Animator and friend John Celestri ( Rock and Rule , Space Ace ) now has a blog . John made some contributions to this blog early on, so it's nice to see that he's set up a blog of his own. I've added his link to my list of links.

Kim Deitch Remembers

Cartoonist Kim Deitch, son of animator Gene Deitch, is writing a series of reminiscences at The Comics Journal site. The first two ( one , two ) are mostly about jazz (but include some jazz related art by Gene), and the third is about early television and includes material about Gene, UPA and Tony Eastman. The series is ongoing.