A Linkorama August

Fleischer at the ASIFA Animation Archives ...

More links on a sultry August day ...

Director Henry Sellick holds forth on the making of Nightmare Before Christmas

How was your working relationship with Tim Burton?

Henry Selick: Working with Tim was great, he came up with a brilliant idea, designed the main characters, fleshed out the story, got Danny Elfman to write a bunch of great songs.

He got the project on its feet and then stood back and watched us fly with it. Tim, who made two live-action features in L.A. while we were in San Francisco making Nightmare, was kept in the loop throughout the process, reviewing storyboards and animation. When we completed the film Tim came in with his editor Chris to pace up the film and make a particular story adjust to make Lock, Shock, and Barrel just a touch nicer.

What was the most intricate scene (stop motion wise) to complete?

Henry Selick: While virtually every bit of the stop motion animation was challenging, there were several particularly difficult scenes to pull off , one began where Jack is shot out of the sky with his Skellington Reindeer flying over head and being shot down and lands in the arms of the angel statue in a graveyard and goes on to sing a song there while the camera continuously circles him.

The opening song of the film "This is Halloween" was monstrously challenging as it introduced all the Halloween Town monsters to the audience.

Overseas, the box office for animated features as bee robust:/p>

Warner's ... opened "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," the feature-length digital animation from the Lucasfilm factory, on 3,200 screens in 22 markets for an estimated $7.6 million. The title finished No. 3 domestically [see below], and its weekend global take stands at $23.1 million ...

Pixar/Disney"s "WALL-E" wound up fourth on the weekend with an estimated $13.8 million from 3,824 locations in 29 markets, pushing its overseas cume to $146.2 million. The animated title had six No. 1 openings with a Thailand bow registering $800,000 from 105 sites ... DreamWorks/Paramount"s "Kung Fu Panda" raised its overseas cume to an animated $363.5 million thanks to a $6.3 million weekend from 4,062 screens in 61 markets ...

So. We do a little back-of-the-envelope math and discover that KFP has a global gross of $575.5 million, while the Little Robot Wall-E has taken in $360.2 million.

Animated cartoons are now ... a century old?

On Aug. 17, 1908, Cohl released the cartoon “Fantasmagorie,” which amazed viewers and instituted a new form of art.

As long as we're on the subject of Golden Oldies, ASIFA Hollywood's Animation Archive has a fine overview of the work of the Max Fleischer Studio, circa 1929-1930:

... [W]hen Grim Natwick joined the [Fleischer] studio in early 1930, the look of the Fleischer films changed completely. A full range of gray tones was added to both characters and backgrounds. The animation became much more fluid and well-drawn, thanks in great part to Grim's expert draftsmanship. Along with his crew of kids... Jimmie Culhane, Willard Bowsky and Rudy Zamora, Grim Natwick proceeded to animate things that had never been seen before on the cartoon screen ...

Since we're skimming over "days of yore," we'll end with a Disney flow chart via DIGG. (And where it comes from before that, I've no idea.) But you can see that Walt filled the slot now occupied by Mr. Lasseter ...