keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

Amid at Cartoon Brew has already pointed this out, but I wanted to also recommend Oswald Iten's blog Colorful Animation Expressions . Iten is analyzing the colour styling of 101 Dalmatians , something that is needed and that I am incapable of doing. I'd also like to make a general comment about comments. I'm all for spirited debate and not interested in censoring anybody. However, I would ask that comments restrict themselves to the films or media in question and not get personal. The best comments, even ones you disagree with, provoke thought. They force you to examine your own point of view. Mud slinging is a critical dead end that dilutes the value of any discussion.

While I'm not surprised that Michael Barrier and Michael Sporn found this summer's animated features lacking, I am surprised by some of the comments about computer animation. For instance, Barrier says this : What's clear from WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda , as never before, is that computer animation is a dead end, a form of puppetry even more limited than stop motion. There's no reason to believe that its characters will ever live on the screen as the characters do in the best hand-drawn films; given the way that computer-animated films must be made, the vital connection between artist and character simply can't be strong enough. And Sporn says this : When I first saw Toy Story , I realized that the possibility of computer animation replacing traditional animation might actually exist. Nothing prior to that point led me to think that. What I didn’t expect was that I was watching the high point of the medium. People concentrated on animating grass ( A Bug’s Life ),

Courtesy of Harvey Deneroff' s blog, here's a link to an interview with Nick Park from The Guardian . In the article, there are some interesting comments about the relationship between Aardman and DreamWorks, including the following: Aardman fought hard to retain the rights to [Wallace and Gromit], which left DreamWorks feeling uncomfortable about losing control of an area almost as important to the bottom line as the box office take. "They found it difficult working with characters they didn't own," says Park. "They were trying to respect that at the same time as trying to completely dictate to us. There was a sense of tension."

Two years ago, I wrote about Chris Anderson and his book, The Long Tail . A quick summary is that in a brick and mortar world, retailers want their shelves filled with their most popular items in order to maximize profit from the physical limitations of their stores. However, in a digital world, shelf space is essentially infinite and free, so offering maximum choice is a better strategy. An item may only sell once a year, but if you have enough of those items, they can generate enough profit to rival the income you make from more popular items. There are several well-known online companies that are built on this business model: Amazon, iTunes and Ebay. They each offer a wider selection than physical stores are capable of and have enlarged the market for their products as a result. These companies are often referred to as aggregators, as they pull together lots of products under their virtual roofs. The long tail has been criticized as a theory. Anita Elberse is a marketing prof

In this section, Horace and Jasper notice that the puppies have fled the room and start to track them down within the house. Pongo and Perdita meet the Colonel and head towards Hell Hall. Shots 4 and 7 are fairly simple from a narrative standpoint, but difficult for animators. In each shot, Horace and Jasper move in depth, changing size as they move. The benefit of shots like these is to provide a sense of the characters existing in a real space that they have to move through. The challenge for the animators (Bill Keil, Amby Paliwoda and Ted Berman) and their assistants (unknown, unfortunately) is to maintain the proportions of the characters as they shrink or grow. Even at the time, there were tools available to help the artists. The camera lucida (often referred to as the "lazy lucy"), an opaque projector with the ability to enlarge or reduce drawings, was often used. The artist would be forced to trace off the projection. As this film introduced the use of Xerox on

I want to call everyone's attention to a comment made by Andrew Osmond on the entry One Percent . He provides more details about the state of children's animation in the U.K. and it was Andrew who pointed to the above video, showcasing the culture issues that result from the lack of local production. If you're curious to see what the Wombles are actually like, go here (once again courtesy of Andrew.) Canada has many co-production treaties, which allow companies from different countries to collaborate with a Canadian company on a show and still have it count as Canadian content. It works economically as it makes it easier to get a show financed and provide local employment. Culturally, however, the show has to satisfy multiple masters and the result is almost always a watered down compromise. The show can't be too specific to one partner's culture or it ends up being incomprehensible to the other partner's. The result of all this is either imported childre

I haven't seen the film, so I have no opinion of it one way or the other. But I have to question the wisdom of opening any film the same weekend as the latest Batman film and the release of Mamma Mia . Batman: The Dark Knight will easily gross more than $100 million and there are predictions that it might go as high as $170 million. Mamma Mia is based on a huge Broadway hit with many successful road companies. There can't be a lot of money left in the pool after those two films suck up their share. The same article predicting the Batman gross is predicting Space Chimps to gross $6-8 million. While I have no idea when the Space Chimps DVD will be released, it's likely to be for Christmas, where it will be up against Wall-E , Kung Fu Panda and the latest Looney Tunes compilation. A strong theatrical marketing campaign and good box office gross would have helped the Space Chimps DVD release, but it doesn't look like that's in the cards. My sympathies go

The above dummies were a gift from Walt Disney to the Harris family at the time of the 1946 premiere of Song of the South . Here is a very interesting article on the life of Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus, and his continuing presence in the Atlanta area. His home, The Wren's Nest, is a museum dedicated to his work and to storytelling. The museum also has a blog , which covers material about Harris and preservation issues in Atlanta. While Song of the South has been controversial for years due to its racial content, Harris himself was targeted during the Civil Rights era for appropriating Black creations and commercializing them. The museum prefers to view Harris as a preservationist, someone who put the oral folklore of Black slaves in a permanent form and saved it for future generations. While the museum is trying to rehabilitate Harris himself, there's seemingly no interest in rehabilitating the Disney film. Click on the poster below for the museum's v

TV channels are suffering from declining audiences. That puts financial pressure on them to increase their viewership, which means that niche programs are often abandoned in favour of others promising larger audiences. Like it or not, the children's audience is considered a niche that broadcasters have been abandoning for years. Some, like NBC, have abandoned it completely while others (Fox, CBS) have just leased out their children's timeslots rather than bother to originate programming themselves. I recently spoke to a Canadian studio owner who said to me that while there are quotas for how much Canadian content a channel must broadcast, there's no requirement that the Canadian content be new. As overall audiences shrink (and the world heads into a recession), there's lots of incentive to avoid commissioning new children's programming. Here's an article from the Telegraph in the U.K. about the British situation. There are 26 channels available to satellite

The Colonel and Tibbs see Cruella's car head to Hell Hall and they go to investigate. Cruella aggressively bullies Horace and Jasper to kill the puppies that night as the police investigation is heating up. Tibbs smuggles the puppies out of the room where Horace and Jasper are watching TV. If Jasper was aggressive with Tibbs in the sequence before last, Cruella is far more aggressive here. She blows smoke in Jasper's face, yells at the two of them, throws Jasper's bottle into the fire and slaps both of them. Marc Davis pulls out the stops on Cruella for this sequence. She starts out frantic, but once she tosses the bottle in the fireplace, she loses control. Her dialogue about killing methods leaves little to the imagination and her rage makes it plain that she is fully capable of killing the puppies if her henchman won't. The follow-through elements of Cruella - her hair and furs - really get a workout as Davis has her thrash around the room as she yells. Eric Cl

I've been catching up with various sites since getting back from vacation and have found several articles that are thought provoking. Peter Emslie has done two very interesting posts about how generic designs often are. In this one , he shows how he redesigned some characters and explains his thought process. In the second part , he zeros in on how ethnicity has been handled in various places and offers an alternative to the Disney Fairies that are now Tinker Bell's sidekicks. I've known Peter for years and I've come to realize that behind his talented draftsmanship is a very perceptive and articulate artist. I have to admit to not being a fan of John K's work, but I check his blog regularly and do admire his ability to analyze the work of various artists and animation disciplines. As an example, here is an analysis of the work of cartoonist and animation layout artist Owen Fitzgerald and a follow up on Mort Drucker , both of whom illustrated the comic book bas

(There are spoilers galore here, so be warned.) The last thing I'm going to do is try to make a message movie! - Andrew Stanton Andrew Stanton may not be trying to send a message, but that doesn't mean that it isn't there. Unfortunately, it overwhelms the main character and the message itself is only half-baked. The half that's there describes the problem; the missing half has to do with responsibility and offering a solution. The film presents the audience with a monopoly capitalist economy gone mad. Buy N Large seems to be the only remaining business on the planet and it is so blind to the effects of its way of doing business that it finds it easier to transport its customers and system into space than to change its ways. The people who consume in this society are sheep. So long as they are entertained and distracted, they give no thought to the waste building up around th