keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

It's that time of year again. The Sheridan class of 2012 met the industry on April 26. Industry and faculty line up to register Sheridan President Jeff Zabudsky addresses the industry prior to the screening The students set up their areas in the Learning Commons prior to the industry's arrival. After the films are screened, the industry mixes with the students. L to R: Omar Al-Hafidh , Tony Song (way in the background) and Jeremy Bondy .  Omar's film, Out of Bounds , is a cautionary tale of child safety.  Tony's film, Just Remember Me , features a girl trying to download her late father's essence into a robot.  Jeremy's film, Pollen , is a chase with a twist ending. Victor Preto 's film, Theft , uses Flash in a very sophisticated way. Evee Fex-chriszt 's film, The Terrible Bandit , shows off her masterful drawing and animation skills. Garth Laidlaw 's film, Finally , anticipates the zombie apocalypse. Kirsten Whitely animated the opening for her T...

I find that many of the most interesting animated films these days are being made in the genre of animated documentaries.  Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, The Rauch Brothers, and Marjane Satrapi ground their films in every day life, rather than fantasy.  This isn't to say that their films don't take advantage of animation's ability to use exaggeration, symbol and metaphor.  It's just that their films illuminate real life instead of providing the audience with an escape from it. I am late in getting to John Canemaker's The Moon and the Son .  I never saw it in its original release and have only now caught up to it on DVD .  The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2005 and it deals with the relationship between John Canemaker and his father. There's been no shortage of father-son relationship issues in recent animated features.  Finding Nemo , Chicken Little , Ratatouille , and How to Train Your Dragon come to mind.  In each of these films...

The above animation is by Ron Zorman , who did it with TVPaint. I'm including it here because it is a clear reminder of the expressive power of motion. These days, motion is either limited and cliched or buried under textures and effects. Animation also veers between stylization with no resemblance to human behaviour or a leaden attempt at realism that fails to achieve the complexity of live acting. The above is stripped bare: no sound, no colour, no texture, no face, few details. Just line. Yet the way the four sack moves presents us with a character that is indisputably alive. We can read the character's mind. We can empathize with the character's experiences. All of that is accomplished purely through motion. The principles of animation are all here. Anticipation, stretch and squash, overshoot and recoil, line of action, follow through, overlapping action, drag, staggers, slow ins and slow outs, contrast in timing, etc. While an animator can pick them out, the...

I've been working my way through the UPA Jolly Frolics DVD collection. I had never seen any of the Ham and Hattie shorts, so I was naturally curious about them. They are bad, but specifically bad in ways that illuminate what went wrong with UPA. These films show all the things that UPA didn't care about, personality, humour and animation being three of the most prominent. Having lost key personnel such as John Hubley, Phil Eastman and Bill Scott, the studio was left with little more than design in these cartoons. While the design is sometimes attractive, it's not enough to sustain interest for seven minutes. Hattie is a little girl whose personality can only be described as bland. We get no sense of who she is, what she values, or how she could be expected to respond. The cartoons are free of conflict relating to her and the humour is so soft that the cartoons might be turned down by Sesame Street as too boring. Even pre-school shows have more bite than Hattie. Th...

The only way this book could be better is if the artists who worked at UPA were all still alive to be interviewed. Thankfully, many were interviewed before their deaths by animation historians such as John Canemaker, Michael Barrier, Leonard Maltin and Karl Cohen and author Adam Abraham has accessed this information as well as trade publications, studio records, letters, etc. to write the most detailed history of UPA to date. What struck me most while reading this book was how continually precarious UPA's existence was. There were, of course, the early days when finding any work was a life or death situation for the company. However, even when they got a contract to do theatrical shorts for Columbia, the first two contracts were only for two cartoons apiece. Other threats to the studio's existence had to do with the various partners. While some studios were owned by individuals, such as Leon Schesinger, or partnerships such as the Disney brothers or Harman and Ising, UPA s...