keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Kaj Pindal is the lucky owner of this New Year's greeting from animation legend Norman McLaren. There's much more than the above photo shows, and you can see it all by clicking here .

Can this film tell us something about animation? I recently saw The Artist , the new silent film that has been picking up awards at festivals and is in the running for the major awards this season. It's clear that the film's creators have a genuine fondness for silent Hollywood cinema and I found it to be a very enjoyable experience. I recommend it. The film is silent, black and white and with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, taking on all the trappings of films of the silent era. It occurred to me, though, that at this point in time, it's all an affectation. Silent black and white films existed due to technological obstacles. Early sound and colour systems were unreliable, producing results that clearly failed to meet the audience's standard. Without sound and colour, films compensated with the use of orchestral scores in the larger cities, increasingly sophisticated photography and a style of directing, acting and editing that communicated characters' thoughts clearly ...

I keep an eye on politics, even though I've kept this blog free of it. However, today I saw this image of Ron Paul at Salon.com . Film history buff that I am, I immediately thought of this image from the 1910 version of Frankenstein produced by the Edison company. As I said, no editorial comment on Ron Paul intended, but the pose similarity is too strong not to note.

Howard Fine of the New York Film Critics Circle writes about why the group declined to give an award this year for the best animated feature. "To me, the key word in that award title is "feature." It's not an award strictly for animation -- it's for the whole movie, which happens to be animated. And I'm hard-pressed to think of an animated film this year that could make that claim, among the 18 recently announced as the animated titles that qualified for this year's Oscar. "Because it's not about the animation -- it's about what's being animated. If the script is dumb or flat or just plain not funny (and, like it or not, the vast majority of animated films are comedies aimed at children), I don't care how spectacular it is visually -- it's not cutting it."

I'm interested in this year's Oscar race for Best Animated Feature because my perception, right or wrong, is that it was a weak year. The various film critic organizations have begun to weigh in on their bests of the year, and Rango seems to be off to an early lead. The Boston , L.A. and S.F . critics have picked it as the best animated feature. The N.Y. film critics chose Tintin , though Richard Corliss of Time also picked Rango for his 10 best list. It's interesting that with critics from three major cities accounted for, there isn't a Pixar or DreamWorks film mentioned.

No, I'm not implying that Bird is ignorant. But a great many of the reporters who interview him about Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol , which Bird directed, definitely are. Here's an article in the N.Y. Times about Bird and it contains this paragraph: "Plenty of live-action directors have successfully taken on animated movies, including Gore Verbinski ( “Rango” ) and Tim Burton (“Corpse Bride”). But the flow almost never goes in reverse — if you can name a successful example you have movie historians beat — making Mr. Bird’s chance at bat a fascinating one for Hollywood to watch. A similar attempt will come in March, when Andrew Stanton, the director of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” unveils his live-action space saga, “John Carter.”" So the writer has no knowledge of film or animation history. He doesn't know that Tim Burton's first job was as a Disney artist. He has no knowledge of Walt Disney(!), let alone Frank Tashlin, Gregory La Ca...

The National Film Board of Canada holds an annual hothouse, where emerging Canadian animators are offered a 12 week internship at their facility in Montreal. The next hothouse will take place from March 5 to May 25, 2012 and submissions on the theme of sheep dreams must be in by January 24. The complete details are here . By following links on the left, you can see the films that have been created during previous hothouse sessions.

This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. The 1976 paperback collection, Dennis the Menace: Short Swinger , contains a flipbook that appears to be done by Hank Ketcham. The registration, however, is horrible. I bought a cheap copy of the book on Ebay and pulled it apart, registered it to the best of my ability and then shot it. The character is less than an inch and a half high and the pulp paper was surprisingly hard to see through on my lightbox, so the registration still leaves something to be desired. Here it is exactly as it is in the book, on 2's. Here it is with my retiming to make it read better: Ketcham got his start in the animation business, working for Walter Lantz and then Disney before he enlisted in the navy during World War II. After the war, he concentrated on magazine cartooning before selling Dennis the Menace to newspapers. After the war, Ketcham really blossomed as a designer. His style, using a pen, was expressive and elegant. With ...