Friday, July 30, 2010

The End-of-Week Linkage

And the start of muscular animated news and commentary.

We start with a bit of corporate tub-thumping: The Mouse puts one of its "behind the scenes" snippets about Tangled on the intertubes.

(This short documentary has been playing inside the Hat Building's entrance for a while now ....)

Exciting news for remake fans of old Arnold movies:

Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1990 film Total Recall is set for a remake, with director Len Wiseman in line to take control. ... The script is being written by Kurt Wimmer, who wrote the screenplay for the ... Angelina Jolie film Salt. ... The remake is being described as "computerized animation". ...

Hmmm. Computerized animation. Must be something like cgi, yes?

VFX Soldier writes of the wonderful world of film subsidies.

... [G]overnment subsidies only artificialize the price of vfx and they ultimately lead to negative returns and little economic spillover. When countries like the UK are dealing with huge debts, the first thing politicians love to target is any funding for the arts. It’s sad but Hollywood is a favorite target for conservatives. For VFX facilities in the UK that depend on clients looking to cash in on government rebates, it could be very painful if the subsidy is abolished. ..

It doesn't do our fine entertainment conglomerates much good to build a studio in a subsidy-rich locale only to see those subsidies taken away, now does it? But that's the price corporations pay for trusting the damn guvmint.

Bugs Bunny's first cartoon short appeared seventy years ago this week:

... There was little fanfare to mark the anniversary of the cartoon that’s considered the rabbit’s official debut: “A Wild Hare,” which premiered July 27, 1940. The lack of a celebration is a shame, but not startling given Bug’s slide down the rabbit hole of obscurity in recent years. ...

Universal and Illumination Entertainment are keen on a certain monkey:

Illumination Entertainment ... is developing a new version of "Curious George." ... The Illumination film is ... getting a script from Larry Stuckey, who wrote the upcoming "Little Fockers," the third installment in the "Meet the Parents" franchise, for Universal. Universal is very keen on Illumination, which with "Despicable" gave the studio a long-awaited family-friendly animation hit. ...

I'm not overwhelmingly timely with this, but it's a worthwhile link anyway. Mark Kennedy remembers Pres R.

... [Pres] was a rough inbetweener for Glen Keane and he enabled Glen to crank out massive amounts of footage of Aladdin. Glen would do the key poses and Pres would fill in the breakdown and "inbetween" drawings to flesh out the acting and motion and Glen could move onto the next scene. I remember Pres telling me that Glen was able to do 50 feet in a week once (an unbelievable amount for Disney - most animators dream of being able to do 5 feet a week consistently) because of Pres's help. ...

Goodbye, Mr. Callahan.

John Callahan, the quadriplegic cartoonist whose famously politically incorrect humor generated both praise and criticism, has died. He was 59. ... Paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident in 1972 at age 21 and a recovering alcoholic since he was 27, Callahan began selling cartoons in the early 1980s and went on to be internationally syndicated in newspapers and magazines ...

I thought what was refreshing about him was, in an age of political correctness, he was bucking the system," said Bill Plympton, a two-time Oscar-nominated animator who first met Callahan in the late '70s when he showed up in his wheelchair at a cartoon class Plympton was teaching at Portland State University.

"He showed me his portfolio, and every cartoon was genius, a very wacky, crazy humor," Plympton said.

Among his better-known efforts: Two Ku Klux Klansmen heading out at night in their white sheets. Says one: "Don't you love it when they're still warm from the dryer?"

A beggar in the street wearing a sign that reads, "Please help me. I am blind and black, but not musical."

Turns out the Russian cartoon business isn't as healthy as Russians would like it to be.

The cartoon “Smeshariki” is known by most Russian children. It has survived Russia’s troubled animation industry, which is mostly dominated by western cartoons. But today most Russian children watch western cartoons of the past, and a few modern ones. ... Russian animators say the industry desperately needs government support. It should incorporate the promotion of animation on television and update media technology.

Add On: I couldn't resist this, via Tom Sito and Henry Mayo:

Have a worthwhile weekend.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice Collection of news...

Anonymous said...

Boy, Tangled looks really, REALLY nice.

Anonymous said...

The lack of a celebration is a shame, but not startling given Bug’s slide down the rabbit hole of obscurity in recent years. ...

A), it's "Bugs", and B), what sane person in the outside world accuses the Looneys of "sliding into obscurity", apart from spin-doctoring Warner execs hoping to remake them, and trying to find scapegoats when the new versions don't take?

Anonymous said...

Rapunzel looks like a little plastic Barbie doll. Ecchhh.

Anonymous said...

All the footage in that video is very early tests. None of it is production. The trailer is a bit more representative, but compared to the breadth of shots in the film, it doesnt show anything yet, really.

Rapunzel might just very well be the best looking CG human ever. But feel free to prove me wrong with examples.

Anonymous said...

'what sane person in the outside world accuses the Looneys of "sliding into obscurity'
A ridiculous statement, as it is most obvious at this day and age, any and all icons in our society are celebrated with some note of recognition. For example, Carvagio this last week...dead 400 years. Big celebration in Italy. Mickey Mouse: every 10 years without fail. Bugs: Today? nothing.
Why come down on the reporter who has his finger on the pulse of our community unlike any others? The spotlight should remain on the company that treats their commodity like some bastard blacksheep stepchild who nobody talks about.....
And as for their occasional retries in reviving the character in new product, the character may someday be blessed by a group of artists and management that creates new cartoons as effective as the original ones. Perhaps not in our lifetime, but as long as copyright ownership lasts and is extended, the company is as good as any other to accidently put together such a team of talent.

Anonymous said...

How many times does Warner Bros. try to resurrect the rotting corpse of its Golden Age cartoon characters?

Let them die. Sorry, but seeing Coyote slam into a canyon wall got old 45 years ago. Let them die. Let them all die.

Good god, what if the only animation Disney created today was Donald Duck doing the exact same gags over and over again, for the last 70 years?

Let them die.

Steve Hulett said...

Me, I want to see them resurrected. Why the hell not? You want to see Scooby Doo go on forever?

Anonymous said...

Eventually, some group of creatives shall click and do the characters unique and fresh, if not authentic to what they originally were. Till then, jobs will be created in all the series where they dont do so good, and all will be assets of history that we can throw tomatoes at if we dare watch them on our big screen TVs. Chances are, we wont watch them, but be willing to plop our kids in front of when we dont want to give them any attention.

Anonymous said...

"Tangled" is pretty much a pass for me. The harder Diz tries to sell it, the more it turns me off. Still looks like the same old schtick, only it's not as good as the same old schtick (Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or even Aladdin...)

Anonymous said...

Go back and watch Beauty and the Beast or Snow White again. They arent as good or well animated as you remember.

Im not saying Tangled is necessarily better, but I suspect you respond more to the nostalgia of those movies, not the movies themselves.

Anonymous said...

**Go back and watch Beauty and the Beast or Snow White again. They arent as good or well animated as you remember.**

The animators of Snow White were still struggling with animating realistic humans, and yes, it shows. But the strength of the story, and especially the characters, easily overcome that.

As for Beauty, yes, there are some shaky moments (Disney had a habit back then of hiring young artists who could draw the human figure rather well but couldn't draw facial expressions worth a damn) and the same drawing weaknesses plague Aladdin as well. But again - STORY and CHARACTERS win the day.

Tangled had better have similar story/character strengths, or I won't give a damn about its technical virtuosity. Just sayin'.

Anonymous said...

Ive seen it. You'll love it.

A rabbi and a priest go to a bar and said...

Let's see..."Meet the Robinsons", "Bolt", that black princess movie...I think I'll pass.

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