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Posted on 03.03.09 by Widge @ 3:01 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Craig Kausen is a guy who's started a blog about his grandfather. Which is pretty cool considering his grandfather was Chuck Jones. He's sharing numerous goodies, including my favorite thus far--a tale of Jones' sixth birthday party...here's a snippet of how he tells it: The first surfacing of that part of my character that was later to show up in Daffy Duck occurred at the age of six. My sixth-birthday party, to be precise. I was immensely proud--it seems to me that all my life I have taken the most pride in things over which I have little or no control. Even though I had older sisters, it never occurred to me that anyone had ever become six years old before, and the splendid cake, candles bravely ablaze in salute to my maturity, was ample evidence that I had entered into manhood.
The story proceeds from there...here's the rest of it. And it comes with a recipe for Tiramisu Toffee Torte as well. Now this is a blog we can get behind for numerous reasons. Found via Misce-Looney-ous. Categorized as: Animation
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Posted on 03.01.09 by Widge @ 4:41 pm
Comments on this: just one. Add your own. Every frame of an animated film is a different work of art because somebody had to make that grimce, or eyeblink, or reaction shot...or the frame that leads into one of those things. I think about the time and effort it takes to create anything animated and think I was pretty sane to go into moving words around on paper. Still, I have a lot of respect for the sort of mad genius it takes to do animation. And here we've got a particularly mental case: Reza Dolatabadi, who decided to animate a film comprised of full-on paintings and spent two years creating over six thousand of them. Total headcase. Still, the results are fascinating: Direct link for the feedreaders. Categorized as: Animation
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Posted on 12.15.08 by Widge @ 11:42 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own. Since last year we were hanging out with The Grinch, we figured we'd go with a bit of animated fun this time around. First up, a 1936 Max Fleischer cartoon that addresses the question of what happens when you let an old man with Forge-like mutant powers break into an orphanage on Christmas Day. Categorized as: Animation
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Posted on 12.10.08 by Widge @ 4:13 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  So since I've posted my open letter to Mr. John Lasseter, I saw the ad about Bolt and the answer to my question of: where was the animated short? The answer is: it's being added this weekend. A short with Mater from Cars entitled "Tokyo Mater." I'll be interested to see what boost this provides to the Bolt box office--the last time I recall Pixar changing things after the film had opened were the "outtakes" that appeared at the end of A Bug's Life--if memory serves me correctly. I think they traded them out for new ones after a few weeks. I'm interested to see how well it works because I have no feel for what a draw the character of Mater is. Even though I appear to have liked the movie Cars more than most, I wonder how else everyone else feels. Maybe he's a hit with the kiddies, I dunno. But reading this made me think of something else--and again, I'm sure the Dixar folks are way ahead of me. You've got Digital 3-D now--and for Bolt it was stunning. Going back to the classic shorts for a minute, what if you reworked some classic Disney shorts for full-on Digital 3-D? Start with "Steamboat Willie." Hit us with "The Old Mill"--which was shot on the multiplane camera anyway. You want to get some people like me back in cinemas to rewatch a film? Bring some of that noise. And hey, where it's showing in 2-D? Show the short in 2-D. I think I might be up for watching it even in normal 2-D on the big screen...most Disney shorts have only been experienced by folks like me on video. So to see it big and bold like it was originally--would be stellar. Anyway, just some thoughts. This is what I do instead of sleeping. My rates are very reasonable. Categorized as: Animation
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Posted on 12.08.08 by Widge @ 6:30 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own. Dear John. I know, my alter ego gets Dear John letters all the time. It's just our cross to bear, isn't it? And now that I've bonded us over our very common name, I must say that while I was right to be apprehensive about the Dixar merge--things so far have worked out well. But I'd like to point you back to our list of suggestions for you...and I know you're probably hard at work on all of them, but: "Presto," the short that played in front of WALL-E, was genius. (Was reminded of this while watching the DVD.) And that reminded me: when are we going to see shorts in front of all Disney films? Where was the short in front of Bolt? I mean, you've got this huge stable of beloved characters you can draw upon. And people had said that Mickey Mouse was boring, for example. Below we see what happens when you put Mickey in the hands of some utterly mental animators. Direct link for the feedreaders. I know you're probably knee deep in it already. Just remember that we're all behind you. And I mean that in the supportive rather than the stalkerish sense. Categorized as: Animation
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