news of HAIR HIGH screenings

HAIR HIGH will be screening in New York and L.A! Here is the latest from Bill Plympton's website, Plymptoons:

The Plympton screenings at the IFC Center culminate in a special engagement
of "Hair High" on April 6-7. These are midnight shows, so there will be lots of
late-night fun! Bill will be there to present the film, along with special
surprise guests!
The following week, "Hair High" will be opening in Los
Angeles, at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theatre, 8000 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood.
Scheduled to screen from April 13-19, for more information contact the box
office at 323-848-3500. This is the L.A. premiere, so Bill will be at the
evening screenings on April 13-14. And since it's Hollywood, you never know
which cast members may make surprise appearances! Tell all your friends in L.A.
to come out and support independent animation! And yes, the film opens on Friday
the 13th!

I'm arriving in LA on the 19th, so maybe my friend Dean and I can take in a screening of HAIR HIGH in the afternoon before heading to the book signing that evening. And thankfully the ANIMATION SHOW, which includes Bill's newest short GUIDE DOG, is playing in Rochester on April 16. They're still working on bringing HAIR HIGH here.

Good animation does not have to come from the big studios!

HAIR HIGH is finally available on DVD!

I'm a Bill Plympton fan (and most of my friends are too.) Bill's the first person since Lotte Reiniger to animate feature films singlehandedly--and they have just gotten better and better over the years.
HAIR HIGH is a wonderful evocation of the 'mythological' America of the late Fifties and early Sixties. The design, animation, story, and characters are the best that Plympton's done to date.
So where can you see this movie?
Well, it's playing in New York City on April 4, but otherwise, there is no US distributor for this excellent film.
I had to buy a DVD and have it sent over from France. If you look up HAIR HIGH on amazon.com, there is a listing, and the disc won't cost that much when compared to much more highly publicized releases.
You can get a preview of the look of the film here.
Pictures speak louder than words. So go meet Cherri, Spud, and the other members of the cast, and marvel at the original and appealing design.
No, I would not run this for kids. But it's something that everyone over the age of 13 who's interested in animation should have a look at.
Here's hoping that it is either in theatres or on a Zone One NTSC disc sometime soon.

Not So Sweet 16

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post. A recently concluded survey of the animation industry found that just 16% of the 'creative' positions were held by women.

They stretched the definition to include modelers and other folk in the computer animation categories who are doing 'artistic' work but who might not actually be in charge of the decision making process. If you look to see how many women actually influence the story content of the films--the percentage would be a good deal lower. It's probably better than live action, though that is damning with faint praise.

Quick! Name a female director or studio head.
It's easier to find them when you are outside the USA, but here they may be counted on the fingers of one hand.
So 16% of the population will not be responsible for 100% of the bad decisions in filmmaking.

As it stands there have been many wonderful directors who happen to be female; Joanna Quinn's name is the first that comes to mind, but there are others, particularly in Eastern Europe, where the 'equal rights of women' appears to have been taken seriously for the duration of the old system.

Angrymation

A friend directed me to a website that featured an anonymous animator blogging about what he (I am sure it was a he) thought was wrong with the American animation industry.
The problem could be summed up in one word ~~women.
Entire columns lambasted the alleged deficiencies of 'feminists' or 'revisionists' or female producers and animators. Women--oh, excuse me, 'girls'~ as everyone knows, don't watch animation, don't create animation, and are responsible for all the bad animation ideas out there. This sentiment was enthusiastically seconded in many responses. Now, the blogosphere is open and anyone may post as they like. But this kind of stuff just makes my ass hurt. Why? Well, the majority of people complain about the situation in the field but don't do anything to change it. The problems are someone else's responsibility, or fault, never their own.
There is a humorless kind of animator who follows a Leader, or waits for him ('tis always a him) to lead him (it's always another him) and likeminded friends back to an alleged Golden Age of bliss and steady work and no girls allowed. The fact is that this Golden Age never really existed in the first place. I assure you that people complained about Walt (especially Walt,) and Chuck, and Shamus, and Friz, and Max, and all the people who ran studios or produced animated films in the Golden Age. The difference was,there WAS a lot more studio work then. There were women animators then too, though very few and far between. But they did work in the big studios, even in the Big D itself. There is, generally speaking, much more animation being done now. It's just not being done the same way or in the same places or by the same people. And in many ways that is a good thing.
Women like to do amusing cartoon characters just as the boys do. Some of us might like to do other types of acting, but we definitely don't like being called girls, or treated like second class humans at work, or denied jobs or promotions because of our sex, or blamed for faults in the industry that have nothing to do with gender. That goes for female producers, too--I've worked with some excellent ones.
We have to discriminate.
There's discrimination in our job searches--we must find studios and producers that will hire us as artists, not as women. We move to other jobs if we have to. I know men who have to move around when a job becomes tiresome, too. And believe me, it's even more interesting for the Black animators out there. We can all tell some stories. But there is an upside.
It's now possible to produce your own work and get it shown entirely outside of the studio system. So if one doesn't like one's day job, one can make a film for little cost and get it out there to a real audience. Amazing! And yet there are complaints.
There are a number of female students in my classes and while I won't generalize and say that one sex is superior to another (because it isn't), the female students often do have a very offbeat sense of humor. It's good to see that if they do incorporate traditionally 'feminine' subject matter such as children and fairies into their films, the characters are given a highly sardonic interpretation.
And these students are all very excited to be working in animation. All of the student contributors to PREPARE TO BOARD are in their first real studio jobs now and loving every minute of it.
I made damn sure that my new book contained work that was 50% produced by female artists since I am so fed up with the endless guy-centeredness of this industry. If you didn't look at the captions, you'd never know which sex did what. Some lyrical animation of a lovestruck woman was done by a male student; a female animator produced an excellent slapstick comedy with a tired man and his dog.
The whole point of animation is: no one sees you on screen, only your characters. You are not restricted by the limits of your own body, or gender, or species. That's the good news. And if your day job offends you, make something better in your own time. Then see if it will fly. The Internet and the abundant film festival circuit makes it easier to distribute an independent short now than ever before.
So put your pencil, or lightpen, where your mouth is. Don't like what's out there? Make a better movie.
But don't call me, or female artists and animators, Girl, or blame us for what's out there now.

West and Wewaxation

Tired, but excited....the tickets are ordered, and lots of friends plan to show up to the book signing next month. I'm going to design a suggestion for a flyer.
Here's the skinny:

Time: 6 PM to 10 PM on Thursday, April 19
Place:
VAN EATON galleries
13613 Ventura Blvd.Sherman Oaks, CA 91423

If any of you readers are in the L.A. area, I hope you can attend. I'll stay over the weekend, crashing on Dean Yeagle's Stickley sofa. He even promises to provide a cat to make me feel right at home.

Artists Helping Artists--Book Signing in L.A.

The multitalented Tina Price (formerly one of the top artists at Disney, now a line producer at JibJab!) organized a marvellous animation artists' cooperative last year.
The Creative Talent Network features animators, art directors, storyboard artists, and concept artists from many studios. Portfolio samples and biographies for over a hundred artists are posted on this beautiful site.
Tina also organizes book signings for Creative Talent members at the Van Eaton Galleries in Sherman Oaks, California (which specializes in animation art.)
The next one is scheduled for Thursday, April 19th, and I've agreed to attend to sign PREPARE TO BOARD! The gallery will apparently also have some copies available for me to sign for out-of-towners as well if you order it through their auspices.
If any readers of this blog are in the L.A. area, I look forward to meeting you there.

DREAMWORLDS

I got a copy of Hans Bacher's DREAMWORLDS today.
It's in Japanese.
I don't care. This is a gorgeous and brilliant book.

Here's hoping that there is an English edition soon!

Books In Print

Today is my book's birthday. Funny, I don't FEEL any different. But there's been a change on the amazon.com page for it; it's now shipping.
I've been working so hard for this day that it is difficult to know how I feel about the whole experience. Guess I'll find out when people start reviewing it.

Now here's a book I can really get excited about. Hans Bacher's DREAMWORLDS is probably the most important animation book published since THE ILLUSION OF LIFE. I am not kidding, either. No one, and I mean NO ONE, working in animation art direction has ever written a book on how it is done! This is a first!

John Canemaker's books (THE DISNEY THAT NEVER WAS, PAPER DREAMS, THE ART AND FLAIR OF MARY BLAIR) are superb histories of Disney studio methods.
Bacher was and is one of the top art directors in the industry; he and his work are well known in the USA, Europe and Asia. He's worked for Disney but also for Dreamworks and a number of other studios, including his own; and he's equally at home on paper or on computer (the box is an important new tool for the story artist.)
Hans even designed a set of brushes for Japanese Photoshop. (You can get it on Japanese amazon.com).

Oddly enough DREAMWORLDS was originally published in Japanese only. I suggested that my own publisher might be interested in putting out an English version; after all, it's all ready to go!
and so...
as the South Africans say, "hold your thumbs".

And before I go back to what I was doing (a film, for crying out loud...talk about a busman's holiday!) I want to post a link to an interview with Joanna Quinn, a woman who is LONG overdue for an Oscar. Her work is simply brilliant.
The ANIMATION SHOW is one of the better shows of its kind (it's not out simply for 'shock value') and so, if it plays in your town, go and see it. DREAMS AND DESIRES looks like one of the high points of an excellent compilation.

Show and Tell in New York City

I visited the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City, in May, 2006, while I was attending a screening of one of my Cal Arts projects at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Museum is a very neat and well designed little space in a landmark building in SoHo. So landmark, in fact, that it was impossible to find the Museum. They were not allowed to put a 'shingle' or flag, or sign out front to advertise their presence since it would mar the Landmark quality of the building.
After some fumbling around I got to the fourth floor and met director Matt Murray.

I had edited together an informal reel of senior projects produced by my 2006 advisees and asked if Mr. Murray would like to see some of it. Since it was a slow day, he agreed. Mr. Murray was duly impressed and readily agreed to my suggestion that a program of R.I.T. character animation be featured at the Museum at some time in the future. He decided to schedule a one-day event dedicated to the Rochester animators as part of their MOCCA MONDAY lecture series--a free lecture by visiting artists. Mr. Murray decided that January 29, 2007 would be the most appropriate date since an exhibition of television animation artwork would coincide with the animation show. (It was great seeing a cel of Wilma Flintstone smoking, from that infamous 1960 commercial; even more amazing to see that it was in color.)
I called the show 'THE R.I.T. STUFF" since I thought it had a nice ring to it. It was also easy to draw up a tiger logo featuring the mouse ears (see previous entry for the design.)

Mr. Murray requested that a student speaker be scheduled for the event, and that original framed artwork be included in the exhibition. At first he was averse to including any CGI artwork at all, since the museum features drawn cartoons; I assured him that that only films with a 'cartoon' quality in their story, design, and animation would be included.

Planning began in September, 2006. I requested Senior student Rebecca Haushalter as the speaker since she was articulate, available, and drew and designed excellent caricatures of past celebrities for her CGI films. Rebecca readily agreed.
Since little of the artwork for the student films remained at the school, and it would be impractical and expensive to frame Rebecca's rough drawings, I contacted Professor Skip Battaglia and asked if he would consent to have some of his original animation drawings displayed at the museum. Skip framed four drawings from one of his 'cartoon' shorts and these fulfilled Mr. Murray's request for original artwork.

I booked the hotel and plane tickets as soon as Mr. Murray confirmed the date for the show in December. The hotel (the Herald Square on 31st street) was once the headquarters of the humorous LIFE magazine, and was partly financed by Charles Dana Gibson. What an appropriate location for a cartoon lecturer to stay in. The rates were also reasonable and the rooms neat and well furnished, although much too hot in winter. And don't under any circumstances book the 'van' at the desk, since the service (from the van driver) was way too early and way too rude. Cabs to the airport actually cost the same amount and can be easily obtained by walking a few blocks to Sixth Avenue. We found this out the hard way.

The less said about the flight in the better. Delta Airlines was going through a takeover bid and was making sure that their clients knew all about it. I will take the train to Manhattan in future, at all times. Even if it is slow, it eventually gets there, and the scenery is gorgeous.

anyway, we eventually got to Manhattan in spite of everything Delta could do, and just in time for the show.

The program opened with the 2003 Oscar-winning PERPETUAL MOTION by Kim Miner--a freshman film! and proceed through one-quarter, two-quarter, and senior projects. Two graduate films were also included. The oldest film was from 2003; the most recent from early 2007. I arranged the titles so that 'drama' alternated with comedy. The show ran for approximately one hour.
One story reel for a senior project (Tristyn Pease's INVADERS FROM INNER SPACE) was included so that the audience could see how the films were produced. This particular reel reads extremely well even in storyboard and features amusing character design and voicework.

I hired grad student Jared Su to assemble the materials into an easily navigable disc, and designed and printed a program for the event.

My publicity poster was exhibited on the Internet and forwarded to the National Cartoonists Society, ASIFA East, and several New York based cartoonists and animators including filmmaker John Canemaker and Arnold Roth of the New York chapter of NCS.
Mr. Murray advertised the event in the local free weeklies and also on the museum's MySpace page.

Turnout was excellent. Arnold and Caroline Roth brought cartoonist Robert Grossman as their guest; John Canemaker made an appearance (but could not stay for the show; I gave him a copy of the reel to view at his leisure.) There were perhaps forty people in the audience, the maximum amount that the museum could accomodate. One film reviewer from VARIETY was present.

I introduced each film with a short preface. Rebecca Haushalter spoke about her project at the end of the Two Quarter section of the program. She brought some of the original caricature drawings for IT OCCURRED ONE EVENING, her two quarter film featuring Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, and Danny Kaye in CGI.
The audience was particularly interested in Rebecca's current caricatures of Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. This film is hilarious and features me as the voice of a ghost who makes really, really bad puns about automobile accidents. This was curiously appropriate.

2006 Graduate Jedidiah Mitchell was working at a studio near the museum. I contacted him just before we arrived in New York and asked him to attend as a special guest speaker. Jed was happy to help and ended the program splendidly with an exhibition of DANCE OF THE SEASONS, the hand-drawn 24-hour project he completed with co-director Joseph Daniels in 2006.

Feedback was extremely positive and there was a long question and answer session afterward.
The trip back was not quite as eventful though the plane was still late.

Sadly we did not get to see much of New York due to Delta's wretched service, but we did manage to see Grand Central, the Chrysler Building Lobby, and the Graybar building (the one with the stainless steel rats in front.) Rebecca had only been to New York once before in her life and had never seen these beautiful landmarks.

Anyway I was back teaching my heaviest class, History, that same afternoon and managed not t make too many mistakes due to tiredness.

Unfortunately the pictures taken of the event were very poor so there are none available here.

Do I Miss New York? Constantly. But the city has changed. I was surprised to get a copy of NEW YORK magazine and find that every article therein was a catalog of neuroses. The city did not used to be so full of insecure whingers. Maybe it's just that particular issue.

Off to New York City

I'm off to New York on Monday morning to present my show THE R.I.T. STUFF! at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art MOCCA Monday session. The poster is on an earlier blog entry, but I'll enclose it again anyway.

I'm flying down on Monday morning with one of the current seniors (who will speak to the audience) and staying in the Herald Square Hotel on 31st Street, a very appropriate one for cartoonists (but more about that later.)

I'll have a long entry once I'm back, so stay tuned. (I prefer this spelling.)

When you're up your up, and when you're down you're down...

And when you're only halfway up you're neither up nor down!

After some finagling and tweaking, the new site is up and running. You can view the shameless plug for PREPARE TO BOARD! here.

It doesn't run if you don't have Flash 8 installed, so I am going over it with my advisor Chris Jackson and reformatting in Flash 7.

The project was animated in After Effects 6.5. I've just bought AE7 since I have to make another movie to graduate, and the program's too different. I will be again working with Chris to make this thing look pretty good. Grand to hear that they have a 'fog setting' though I prefer to make my own in Painter and import the levels.

anyway, I'll have a good long post once I am back from New York next Tuesday. The "R.I.T STUFF" show premieres, and ends, on Monday night at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. If anyone is reading this, and wants to come, the museum show is free that night and I guarantee that you will like what you see. I curated the show and picked funny and entertaining films from three years of the RIT animation program.

The only other real news is the shocking lack of a nomination for Joanna Quinn's DREAMS AND DESIRES for a short animation Oscar. The woman is a BRILLIANT filmmaker and animator, she is long overdue for an award, and her work is so obviously better than anything else out there...what can I say except that there's something pretty scwoowy going on awound here.

Goofing off today

Now if this works, something called "Meez" from Java.com will load here.







It was an interesting experience. Most of the animation is not very good. I liked this dance, especially the way she appears to 'brush off' the snake.

H. L. Mencken and the Smart Set

Henry Louis Mencken could never exist in the 21st century. He would not approve of it. But he'd be proud to see that his most cynical Twentieth Century comments and analysis of the behaviour of the 'booboisie' reached full fruition in the new millennium.

Mencken's best known for the (misquoted) "No one ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the American public."

(He originally did not specify a nationality.)

Here's a Mencken quote from the 1920s that needs no commentary:
"The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre -- the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. "

One of Mencken's most famous articles proves George S. Kaufman's adage that 'satire is what closes on Saturday night'.
In 1917 a 'history of the bathtub' appeared in the NEW YORK EVENING MAIL. It was written by H. L. Mencken and intended as a humorous column.
It's still being quoted as fact ninety years later, despite all Mencken's protestations that he made everything up.

Satire today is on the level of Sascha Baron Cohen's Borat. This sort of ethnic satire is hardly new. Ethnic humor was popular in the early Twentieth Century as immigrants flooded the USA and attempted to learn American mores, manners, and the English language. Montague Glass' POTASH AND PERLMUTTER (1910) was an affectionate look at Jewish garment district workers, told in their own language by one who knew them. Finley Peter Dunne's Irish bartender MR. DOOLEY is still quoted by CNN a hundred years later.

Mr. Dunne/Dooley and Mr. Mencken would all have interesting things to say issues affecting the present century. It's instructive to note that so much of what they wrote about the last one still applies today.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Mambo

Killing with Kindness

My upstairs neighbour phoned me in tears yesterday afternoon. Even though we live one floor apart, this is frequently how we communicate. "Something terrible has happened," her voice sobbed in the tiny receiver.

I immediately thought that her husband, a young lawyer, had had a serious accident, or that her malaria (contracted in Uganda last summer) had flared up.
It seemed that the fine and unseasonable weather in Ohio this past month led the keepers of the rare bonobo chimpanzees in the Columbus Zoo to let the animals out of their winter enclosure for a bit of an airing. Zoo policy is to give the chimps as much sunlight as possible for their mental and physical health.

But this is Ohio in December, and the weather took a damp and chilly turn. All of the bonobos fell ill with colds. This rapidly progressed to pneumonia, and Monique feared that the entire troop was infected.

One bonobo, Mambo--a 26 year old male in the prime of life, and a great favorite of Monique's--he knew sign language and could talk to his trainers----died on Christmas Eve. Another chimp, a baby named Jo/T, was near death in the hospital from the same disease.

My neighbour studies bonobo chimpanzees (working with this troop and also in Africa) and has an impressive list of credits that would shame even the most well travelled animator. Monique displays pictures of famous chimps on her walls the way other people would display family portraits. For Monique, bonobos are family.

They are close family to all of us actually. The bonobo is the closest relative to the human being; far more human like in proportion and facial expression than the common chimp, pan paniscus.

And Mambo could talk to humans.

I did not know what else to do so I grabbed a yahrzeit candle from the cupboard. This simply means 'year's time' in German. The candle burns for 24 hours and is used on the anniversary of a death, starting at the first year. I didn't know the rule for nonhumans but decided that the psychological advantages outweighed the religious ones.
So I brought the yahrzeit candle to Monique's apartment. Her husband Eric answered the door gravely. At least he was all right. Monique was sobbing into a phone while sitting on the sofa.

The candle was set to burning and I invited the pair to dinner that evening to cheer them up and also to hear more about the matter.
When I got back downstairs I gave Gizmo a treat--some turkey and potato wet canned food. She ate it with avidity since it had the high smell that resembled tuna--and Gizmo is a tuna junkie.

To my horror I then heard the familiar and dreaded whee--gasp--whee--gasp sound that means Gizmo is having an asthma attack.
I was absolutely frantic when I saw her, in what is known as the 'meatloaf position' with her tongue sticking out of her open mouth.

This meant it was a very serious attack and could be fatal. I ran for the phone to call Monique to get us to the emergency hospital, but Gizmo would not survive in this condition for the time it took to get there.

Fortunately she recovered and immediately asked to play. I said No. I also said no more poultry, ever. It's an allergen, and I've learned my lesson. The treat nearly did the poor cat in. She will eat rabbit for the rest of her life.

Monique and Eric arrived for homemade Chinese food that turned out pretty well, considering. She was a bit more composed since one of her pupils had travelled to the zoo to see the chimps. Only Mambo had succumbed. The other chimps, save for Jo/T, had not developed pneumonia and were being treated. Jo/T was in hospital and very near death.

Now, Jo/T is only a baby. She is about four years old, and the love of life this little creature showed in the movies Monique ran on the computer would shame a human child. Jo/T loves to spin round and round til she is dizzy and do somersaults over her mama.
She, too, was a great favorite of Monique's but was too young to talk.

I did the only other thing I could do; get out my one remaining bayberry candle from Georgia and light it in one of the Roycroft candle holders. I explained that a bayberry candle was traditionally burnt on Christmas Eve but we'd make exceptions here. The saying was that ' a bayberry candle burnt to its socket puts luck in your life and cash in your pocket'.

It couldn't hurt.

So we toasted poor Mambo's life in some good French wine and wished for Jo/T's recovery. If you and I can think good thoughts about a young and very rare chimpanzee at this festive season, it could not hurt as much as the treats that the keepers --and I--thought we were giving our beloved friends.

the end of the year

2006 is winding down. It is time to take note of the good and bad things that happened in this interesting year.
Normally one does this in an attempt to better oneself. That is why there are New Year resolutions. But 2006 was a seminal year for the world of animation. Industries do not make resolutions, but studios do, and did.

A major studio made a major resolution--and like its human constituents, it made it at the end of the year. Most humans do not take the year's end ritual seriously and their resolutions, if they are observed at all, generally affect only a small coterie of friends . The resolution made by the studio will affect all of us in the animation field for a considerable time to come.

The animation community has rumoured that the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studio will now, once again, exclusively produce hand drawn animated films, while newly acquired Pixar (actually the dominant partner in the equation) would continue to produce computer generated films exclusively. This, if it is true, is the logical outcome to the merger of the two studios earlier this year.

Like most simple solutions, it is anything but. Projects already in development at Disney in CGI (by decree of the previous Chair, Michael Eisner, who recently declared '2D dead') would go into turnaround. LIFE WITH WILBUR ROBINSON, which will be released in March 2007, will be the last Disney Feature CGI film. Inevitably that means layoffs and downsizing until they get their headway again.

Some animators have reminded me of the Frogs who Wanted a King from Aesop's fable--they yearned for a strong hand, another Walt, and if only their leader would arrive, all would be blissful with steady jobs and interesting work for all, forevermore. They were unaware that a strong leader might want different followers.

Animators who came of age during the fat times of the Nineties have a harder time adjusting to the shifts and swings of employment than older artists who remember the seasonal and projects-end layoffs that were standard before.
Humans have a tendency to believe that good times will go on forever. It's as true in animation as in economics.

Disney 'Old Man' Frank Thomas was having none of that. Once, during one of the earliest layoffs, I wrote him to say that many people were worried about their job security.
"We never had any!" Frank said crisply. "My goodness, when a feature ended you had to call the Shorts department and ask if they had anything on a Goofy film or something so you wouldn't get laid off! I made myself 'indispensable' so they wouldn't fire me, but there was never any guarantee!"

The changes in the Disney studio's philosophy in the past few years remind me of the constant religious shifts in the court of Henry VIII as he courted a European sovereign or a wife. It is dangerous to be of the wrong persuasion when the king's mind has already been made up.

The king in this anecdote is John Lasseter, who is the most powerful man in animation right now. He is also the most powerful man who has ever been in animation. I wonder if anyone else has studied the deeper implications of the Disney-Pixar merger.

Lasseter is now head of Pixar, Disney Feature Animation, Disney Television Animation, and the animation board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even Walt Disney never ran two studios simultaneously.
The changes are just beginning at the older studio. Pixar remains more or less unchanged, since it is the one literally calling the shots.

Thirteen years ago it was Pixar who was the junior partner, the dubious spinoff with an untested product. Disney, the grand old lady of animation, now has to re-establish its reputation with new, hand drawn films that will bring back the old magic.

But, no matter how many 'd's' it has, animation is only motion on a screen if there is no intelligence directing it, no meaning to the movement---in other words, no story.
Pixar's people all trained with Disney veterans and they use storytelling methods that were originally developed at Disney in the 1930s. Artists are the kings there, but no one rules save one. Management keeps their distance and lets the artists make the movies.

Disney Features became a victim of corporatitis in the past few years. Artists were subordinate to executives who sometimes had no background in art, and who were sometimes Hollywood players.

True, this happens in live action as well, but animation IS the artists' work. It can't be saved with the voices or caricatures of big stars, or the latest rock music. It stands and falls on the performances of its artists--especially the story artists.

So Disney's resolution is to somehow resurrect their old spirit along with the older medium and get back to making fun, wholesome entertainment for a mass audience (no more 'targets' of fourteen year old boys, thankfully.)
I believe that they will keep this resolution, though there will be some rough patches at first. It is painful to read of old friends who are no longer there, or who are worried that they may no longer be there. Time will heal the wounds. After all, it is not the only studio in the world. But it is true that when Disney sneezes, the animation industry catches cold. The resolution will have a knock on effect with other studios if one condition is met.

All they need is a hit picture with a good story.

This is the Web version of my card. The drawing is also the 'half title' of my book. Never use a drawing once if you can use it twice.

And yes, I'm shamelessly exploiting my pet. But(1) She is way cute. And (2) perhaps she will help sell a book or two and therefore pay for the vet bills, gourmet cat food, etc. and (3) She is way cute.

Here's the poster for the show I'm curating early next year. I'll not be the main speaker--one of my Senior advisees will be doing the talking--but it will be fun showing some of the prizewinning films from past years.
One of them won an Oscar.

The Museum wants mainly cartoon art, so I'll ask some of the illustration students if they have any comic drawings that might be suitable for framing and exhibiting on the walls.

The animation and the speech will take about an hour, and it's free! So if anyone is reading this, and anyone is in New York City in January, come on by and see the films and say hello!

L to R: Tony White, Roy Disney, Nancy Beiman at the Everett Theatre

2D OR NOT 2D. Is that a question?

I've just returned from Everett, Washington, and I refuse to make the usual 'flying' joke. Even if it is funny.
Tony White proved to be a gracious host and a really fun guy to meet. His labor of love, the 2D OR NOT 2D ANIMATION FESTIVAL, was a great success.

There were some rough spots at the start, most of them having to do with cars. Seattle has weak public transit and some of the most impressive jams I've seen since leaving Los Angeles. One of Tony's cars broke down and there was a hasty reshuffle to get me from the airport to Everett, a distance of thirty miles. There was a wee bit of time to get out to Fremont to see the cement troll under the bridge. It holds a real Volkswagen. (The bridge is over an actual Troll Lane. I don't know if the name preceded the troll or vice versa.)

There is also a 20 foot high bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin standing on a Fremont street corner. A local man went to the Czech republic after the fall of the Soviet Union, saw the statue lying there, mortgaged his house to bring it to the USA, and then died. The heirs are looking for a buyer and put Lenin on a street corner in the meantime since he obviously did not fit in the house. Tony joked that the statue could possibly be presented as an award at the festival. How , or why, it got from the Czech republic to Fremont is anyone's guess.

RIT's character animators took all but one of the top prizes for student films at the 2D or Not 2D Animation Festival held in Everett, Washington from November 17-19.

Tony White originated the idea of giving awards to animation in a film as well as for the film itself, so that good animation could be judged independently of the story.

Most of the work I showed for my own presentation was from Cal Arts, Jack Zander's, and the Berlin studio--in other words, really really rare stuff. I did not show anything from Disney, Warners, or Amblin'.

I also did a powerpoint presentation on my book that got a good response. The old Everett theatre is a former vaudeville house, with a small intimate stage and good acoustics. I joked about being 'first on the bill'--in vaude days, that was reserved for a low ranking act since audiences were still sitting down while it was on.
The audience here was attentive and seemed to really enjoy all of the shows.

The festival featured screenings of restored prints of ANIMAL FARM, retrospectives of Tony White's work, a tribute to Halas and Batchelor, and many other surprises.

Keynote speaker Roy Disney stated that he wished to 'refute that ridiculous statement of Michael Eisner's that 2D was dead. It is not dead, and the statement is not true."

Mr. Disney presented a wonderful series of Disney short films inlcuding LORENZO, the last film designed by Joe Grant, and the Salvador Dali-Walt Disney coproduction DESTINO. Disney also generously paid for the audiovisual equipment used to screen the rest of the festival entries.

Roy was awarded the very first Roy Disney Award, a bronze three fingered hand holding a pencil. They decided not to go with the Lenin statue after all.

Eric Goldberg's animation for a Buddhist theme park, featuring greedy monkeys, was another high point of the festival.
Films in competition were sent from as far afield as Germany (Harald Siepermann was the advisor) and Wales, with East and West Coast animation schools well represented though Cal Arts and Ringling were surprisingly absent--we'll get them to participate next year!

Michael Sporn's lovely tribute to Philippe Petit, THE MAN WHO WALKED BETWEEN THE TOWERS won for Best Film (professional category.) There was also an hilarious film from Wales about a man who owned a huge dog and a huge car--but a normal sized house. The entries were generally of a very high quality.

"Golden Pencils" were won in the student category by RIT seniors Brittney Lee, Joseph Daniels, and Jedidiah Mitchell, with Merit Awards given to graduate student Adam Fisher and sophomore Wesley Storhoff. Lee, Daniels, and Mitchell were all my senior project advisees, and Storhoff completed his project in one of my classes.

Some of the prizewinning RIT films from the 2D or not 2D festival are available online.

Brittney Lee's THE MUSICAL GENIUS OF MOZART MCFIDDLE is available online at http://britsketch.blogspot.com/
(Winner, Best Animation in a Student Film with Special Merit for Art direction)
Brittney Lee and her boyfriend Dave are both employed--she's already working as a designer at a games company, and he's a rigger at another.
Merit Award winner THE BALLAD OF THE PURPLE CLAM, is (partly) here: Adam Fisher's advisor was Tom Gasek (of Aardman, now of RIT)
http://www.mainefishproductions.com/

Joe Daniels and Jed Mitchell won the Best Student Film award for THE WAY OF THE MANTIS, tied with A MANO (from VanArts) Even though MANTIS appears to be hand drawn, it is in fact a CGI film that is rendered to look like paintbrush work--the students designed the plug-in for Maya themselves. The art direction was inspired by the films of Chinese animator Te Wei.
http://artofjoe.blogspot.com/

Merit Award winner Wes Storhoff's hilarious THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM is not available online. A chimp in a lab sits at a computer and tries to write HAMLET while continuously being interrupted by Microsoft's Mr. Paperclip Office Assistant. It was particularly amusing to see this film win an award in Microsoft's home town.
Mr. Storhoff produced the film in Nancy Beiman's 'one quarter project' class, which lasted ten weeks.

One student sadly did not enter his film, but it's gorgeous. Here's Nathaniel's website. http://www.rit.edu/~nhh0365/ I brought a print along to the show and ran it for Tony White, who expressed regret that it was not in the competition. Then again, we had to leave some room for other schools to win...
Nathaniel also made a strange little film called DINNER (both it and PYGMALION DREAMS were made under my supervision)
http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/dinner_hubbell

All of these students save Adam Fisher have allowed me to use their preproduction artwork to illustrate sections of my book, which is now available for preorder on amazon.com.

A special Golden Pencil Award was also awarded to me, for training these kids. I was certainly not expecting that! Neither was airport checkin, who looked at the giant functioning pencil with appropriate awe when I checked in the next day.
The festival was well attended and we hope that it will be even 'bigger' next year.

So I'm getting ready for Turkey Day, which I'm spending with my upstairs neighbours and with several students from another country who had nowhere else to go for the day. I'm on break til December 4. I like teaching holidays; you get about four months vacation each year. Not that I had any this year or last winter; I was working sixteen hours a day on this book!

My book is now on amazon.com!

PREPARE TO BOARD is now listed on amazon.com!
Here 'tis....

Nice reviews from the blurb writers are included. Now all I have to do is see the thing actually on here...and realize that all that work actually LED to something.

Tony White has moved me from the Sunday Afternoon closer at the 2D festival to the Friday night opening act. I've got to DO something.

More later...

Walt Disney: The Triumph of American Imagination

Here is my review of Neal Gabler's book from amazon.com:

Walt Disney has become a legendary character of the twentieth century. So much was written about him, and so much was inaccurate, that the legends often attained a currency that was not deserved. How many times have we heard that he was frozen? Gabler (who was the first of Walt's biographers to work with rare Disney family records) opens the book with this statement (it's not true.) The truth is much more interesting than that.Disney was an optimistic, hardworking go-getter with an astounding capacity for concentration who fell in love with the early twentieth century's high technology--motion pictures. Motion pictures drawn by hand.He had the perseverance to start over again every time he failed artistically and financially. And fail he did. This is one of the most unlikely success stories ever told, since the Disney Brothers studio was working in a marginal field (animation) in a minor city (Kansas, then Hollywood, when the animation studios were all in New York), and attempting to make it as an independent producer just as the big studios were forming, eliminating independent competition in all but a few areas by 1928.He made it because he had the unfashionable idea that quality would out, he had a tremendous amount of luck and he knew how to make appealing entertainment(Mickey Mouse was NOT the first successful character he created). Disney also had a real genius for hiring talented people. A surprising number of remarkable artists started with him in Kansas City, others were trained right on the studio lot.Mr. Gabler's book is readable and contains much new information. Who would have thought that Charlie Chaplin was, at one time, Snow White's Prince? Chaplin, one of the few independent producers left by 1936, loaned his books for MODERN TIMES to the Disneys to help them ask fair prices for their landmark feature. For Disney's weak spot was running the business--he once actually forgot to add on the profit to the budget for a job in Kansas City, and was forced to work for cost of materials, with no salary for him or his animators! The 1941 strike by his artists was seen as a personal betrayal--but this strike can be predicted when you read about that early project. The Dream was the goal but (as an old cartoon states) coal is still somewhat important. Disney had his head in the clouds, and his brother Roy, who played the father's role to his sibling since childhood, was a major reason why Walt's feet were kept on the ground. It was a fine parntership and this is really a dual biography.The truth about Disney is not sensational or scandalous--just refreshing after decades of inaccuracy and outright fabrication that somehow passed for fact.The weakest part of the book is Gabler's attempts to psychoanalyze Walt's obsession with animation production as a desire to control his world. Of course he controlled his world. This is what all artists do. We animators love creating characters that APPEAR to think and move for themselves. They are really just an expression of our own sentiments and desires; we create life. That's what animation means. It's wonderful being able to control every aspect of the film's production-to be leading man, leading woman, and sets as well! Disney is hardly exceptional in this respect and the psychological insights don't ring true for me.As one other animator told me, Disney was remarkable because 'he was the only man in the world who ever got 500 artists to work together in one building without KILLING each other!"Buy this book.

"Look, Auntie! They're paying me to draw pictures! They're paying me to draw pictures!" --Walt Disney, 1922

A Brilliant Mind

Time and the elements (electricity and ISP charges) and SPAM cause me to occasionally change email addresses. I dropped an old one a year back but kept the freebie version as a junk mail filter. Other emailers may thank me for magnetically attracting the endless pleas for financial help from distraught Thingumbobbian princes. Though it's not very likely.

Somehow this dead account still retained emails sent by friends three or four years ago, including this marvelous piece of writing by John McCartney. Those of you who did not work with him or know him can get some idea of his really superior writing skills and brilliant mind from this short piece.

I only wish I'd thought of this obsolete account's 'saved' folder a few months ago when John asked me if I still retained a copy of this essay. Since I'd changed addresses the old files were quite naturally not there. My forgetfulness, in this case, was inexcusable.
The tale of the rat poison was located this morning. Here it is, in John's original English (far superior to the American). Enjoy.

==============================================================
Here's a short story, my first essay in about 40 years, and it concerns an incident that occured in another time; during my first marriage.
For about 3 years my wife Brenda & my 31/2 year old son James had lived in our fine Victorian semi in West London; she, a highly-qualified catering manager, and I, a musician, endured moderate prosperity.
Working mostly at night, it seemed common sense for me to look after our son, James, during the day.
Now, there are advantages to role reversal; e.g. most dads don't have the chance to spend that much time with their kids, pity, because you get to wear out the blade of a key-ring pen-knife digging up stones, chase seagulls across sodden fields, & convert a regular 10 minute round-trip for groceries into a 2 hour exercise in orientation... and here's the plus... your kids get out of coffee mornings.

Numbers 33 & 34, the semi-detached houses had been built for his family by our next door neighbour's grandfather, and he, when he married in 1927, had emigrated from our house to the one next door, where he had remained.

Solitary, tough old buzzard, that World War 1 infantry captain, had lived with his grey muzzled mutt pretty much alone since his wife had died a couple of years before we arrived.
Stone deaf. We knew what was on one of the other TV stations, because of the huge volume on his set thundering through the adjoining wall. When his grand-daughter came to collect him , the dog howled until he returned; the old man couldn't see... this duo was ill-equipped to deal with what was to come.

...mice; all that sound & fury wasn't going to put off these guys.

Across the vast waters of Fray's* river they had come in their thousands to pick clean the lean pantry that was our Rosecrucian neighbour's storehouse.
Once the mice had found that there was little to feed on; I suppose the old boy had been living out of tins & his dozy old dog couldn't waddle them away (the mice were safe but starving), their attention turned to our easy-access vegetable rack, and the battle was joined.
Impressive in its simplicity, their plan was to pilfer the supplies & relieve themselves in our house, whilst consuming the stuff in his. Soon at night we were to hear the shifting shale of their mass scamperings under the floorboards.

They're unhygenic, leaving their droppings all over the place & urinating at will, & when their activity naturally increased as Winter set in, I decided to wait up for the little bastards.
Rewards come to the patient it is said, & so it happened one night, mid-February, there I stood in the shadows of the kitchen, slightly pissed, small cylindrical waste-paper bin poised on my right hand, & the backing cardboard from an A3 sketch pad in the other.
With one deft & dare I say, rather elegant inversion of the bin, I nabbed one cheeky miscreant, as it dashed across the kitchen floor, & I slid the cardboard underneath to secure the fellow, then strode off, purposefully, to the local playing field through the snow.

....some quietetude comes to you from the gentle creak of your steps in freshly settled snow, especially in the early hours, the sound cannot escape & no other noise permeates the perfect acoustic to inerrupt the half-remembered sensations of childhood. Especially when you've just captured a small furry animal that you intend to dump into a totally hostile environment, in this case, the concrete base of a demolished changing room.

Mousey looked at me & shivered, I looked back & offered the cardboard, onto which the mite meakly climbed, and stayed until I had found it some suitable alternative accommodation. Soft as shit...these characters are threatening to destroy my family with cholera & Christ knows what else, & here I am, with one of them at my mercy, striking up some drunken understanding with the damned thing in the dead of night & the depths of Winter.

When I chucked the next one into the river, I had to remark on how aerodynamic they are, & how well they can swim.
Returning from a particularly late gig, alone on the sofa in the front room; a comfortable & wonderfully un- cluttered place, glass of Fleurie in one hand, bag of chips in the other, I became aware of the presence. Like mounds of small shingle being swept about under the floor they scuttled in concert. As I mellowed it occured that leaving the bag of chips in the middle of the carpet might be a jape, so I lowered the lights & waited. Not for long. Three of the little beggars put in an appearance within about 5 minutes & shot into the open bag, filling it with squabbling & snaffling. What a hoot, in the half-light the bag agitated, crinckled & rolled round the floor, tails flailing as these lumps machined their way through the contents. Yes, still chuckling, I realised that they had worked their way into my affections. It was at this point that I vowed to kill them all.

One of us bought some rodent poison, a sort of impregnated barley, dyed blue as a warning, which we left about the house in small trays on their most regular routes; my part was to prevent any of this ending up in the James.
We never saw or heard the mice again. We cleared up the poison, & thought no more about it, that is until just a few days later.

Shopping with James was always an exercise in patience; I must say that I found it therapeutic. Being an artist & musician, I'd always been an impatient, solipsistic sod & I found this business of constantly giving over to someone else an unexpectedly refreshing, if knackering, experience.
So it was that hot & hungry, we returned from Tesco. I went straight into the kitchen, filled the Le Creuset with tagliatelle, & began to unload the bags. Perhaps I should explain that the 'fridge-freezer stood alongside the gas cooker & that the top of it was a mass of clutter; there was a world of stuff up there, all above head height. Placed one of the two bottles of wine, together with a plastic bottle of oil on it with safety, but when I put the second wine bottle up there...I found the only remaining tray of rat poison. Of course as the mice had been climbing up the back of the freezer to get at the crisps on top, my wife had put a tray up there & we'd forgotten it. Wine bottle no. 2 was too much, pushing the tray of blue pellets off at the back towards the cooker.

It was perfect, showering the lunch, the cooker & the back of the 'fridge. This was an ideal time to panic, so I siezed the moment; first thing...throw away the pasta, where? how? this stuff is lethal, suppose James gets hold of any. No, get James into the back garden, then throw the lunch, damn, I was looking forward to that. What about that poison behind the freezer?
This is where mastermind here decides to waste no time & move the 'fridge/freezer away from the wall...with all the bottles still in place. The 'fridge, because the floor was eneven, stood on a thin wooden plank wedged underneath at the front to stop it tilting forward & to keep the doors closed. In moving, it came off the plank. The first bottle of wine fell & broke in half on the edge of the hob, spilling wine & broken glass into the well of the gas cooker, the bottom half continuing to the ground, where it sat with sharp pointy bits facing upwards, waiting for the bottle of oil which obligingly landed, sideways, on top of it shortly after. Two litres of sunflower oil now mixed freely with the wine & shards on the floor, soon to be joined by 75cl of a not indifferent Sainsbury's claret. The soup was coming together nicely; the poison now floated merrily from behind the 'fridge, around the cooker hob, while my jaw froze in disbelief. Leaning forward, the 'fridge door gently swung open as a full pint of milk slid out & crashed to floor, followed by an open pot of cole slaw, which inverted it's contents into the moat with a little plop. In the brief silence, as I paused for breath, I heard my son in the back garden telling old Charlie on the other side of the fence, 'my daddy's shouting'.

John

* In the early Georgian period, A man called Fray cut a spur from the ancient river Colne; no-one knows how old that name is, it preceeds the Romans, to power water mills, long since gone...

A Most Proper Vulture

This is Barf.
Barf is a Turkey Vulture. He resides at the WILD WINGS raptor rescue center near Rochester, New York, along with eagles, hawks, owls, and one lone, declawed bobcat.

Barf was also a model in my Gesture Drawing for Animators class. This is more of a comparative anatomy course, and we've had human, greyhound, ferret, cat, and now avian models moving around the room as students draw them in action.

Our administrative assistant at the Film and Animation department suggested that I book Wild Wings since they visited schools, and our Chair okayed the funds (pretty reasonable) and so I and a couple of strong male students met our presenter Terry Kozakiewicz and one barn owl, one sparrowhawk, and Barf the turkey buzzard at the campus entrance and carried the birds' cases to the classroom.

I was worried that Barf would live up to his name. Turkey buzzards show that they are stressed by...barfing. A vulture defends itself with its lunch, which is in a condition that would repel most other buzzards let alone predators.

There was nothing to worry about. Barf was a perfect gentleman. He was actually a most endearing bird; he was curious about his surroundings, interested in the movement of the pencils and the sound of my camera's shutter, and showed off for the video camera by displaying his very handsome wings. There was no sign of a round trip meal ticket.

"He's enjoying himself", we were told. Barf was raised as a pet by someone who then probably saw him barf...and who simply released him into the wild. In this case the 'wild' was downtown Rochester, and Barf was apprehended while stealing french fries from outdoor tables at McDonald's. Thankfully no one shot the poor bird, who was unable to locate food that wasn't associated with people. He is so firmly imprinted on humans that he thought Ms. Kozakiewicz is his girlfriend.

He played with her and apparently has a lot of toys to amuse himself at home. Vultures are much maligned birds that perform a useful service. They are neat (for birds), and have very pretty feathers when seen close up. They also do not eat living animals.; they do not kill. The Cherokee apparently called them the 'peace eagle' for this reason.

A six foot wingspan is also very impressive. Despite his size and appearance (equivalent to a large turkey) Barf only weighs four pounds.

Melinda the barn owl was beautiful but dangerous. She was bred for a captive breeding program but showed no interest in other owls, or people, and prefers to remain alone. Maybe they should have named her Greta Garbo.

The third bird, Quiver the American Kestrel or Sparrowhawk, was a bit of a dirty birdie. I figured that the vulture would be best-behaved since I'd had visions of vulture lunch all over the classroom floor ever since booking the birds for the class.

The students' drawings were very good. They have to create their own 'creature' as a final project (all 'furries' and pre existing mythological beasts receive an automatic failing grade) and I suspect that a number of them may have wings. But then we also had a ferret, two greyhounds, and an Irish Setter modeling this term so there are lots to choose from.

It's going to be difficult to top this term but fortunately the Wild Wings birds are not averse to traveling in snowy weather, as Barf's picture proves.

John McCartney's Birthday Present, 1988

John McCartney

John McCartney’s desk was situated just opposite mine in an area of the Amblin’ London animation studio known as ‘Little America” despite the physical and vocal presence of Spanish, Italian, German, American, and Irish animators and assistants.

The desks, constructed of finest Ikea Ivar modular parts, resembled small horse boxes. Occupants were known to neigh when in high spirits.

John was more nay than neigh—he was a 25-year veteran of the Richard Williams studio who had just quit the Disney London studio and come over to our show because ‘the other studio was a mess’. Little did he know that he was about to get into a much bigger one!

The animators, all young and in need of a stress release, had developed a taste for cheap, easily assembled toys from the Kinder Egg candy line. John’s lead, animator Roy Meurin, had purchased forty pounds’ worth with animators Uli Meyer and Rob Stevenhagen. You could get a LOT of Kinder Eggs for forty pounds in 1988. They got sick on the candy, assembled the toys, and created a triumphal arch in their area using the plastic eggshells—and every spare pushpin in the studio. John had to walk beneath this cluster of yellow globes (the end of which I adorned with a rubber frog) every time he picked up an assignment. He let us all know that this was a singularly demeaning aspect of his job.

Then he noticed the small animating plastic skeleton on my desk. This toy hung from a small bar and would perform gyrations and flips when you pushed two buttons on the side of the base. I called it an illustration of the Chaos Theory. John called it something else – in a notable Scottish burr.

“I can’t understand why a supposedly-intelligent woman such as yourself has all this crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrap on her desk.”

I’d made friends with another prank-and-toy-loving artist, Nina Haley, by that time. We agreed that if John was going to complain about the toys, it was only reasonable that he lament the condition of his OWN desk.

Since both of us arrived at work at the crack of dawn our plan was easy to implement. The next few months brought John a daily onslaught of “Find Mr. Smurf”. This most annoying articulated Kinder Egg toy could now be found on a daily basis hiding on his desk in a variety of interesting poses, whether committing suicide with its head in John’s pencil sharpener or hanging by the neck from the top of the desk-stall or (once) bouncing off John’s head. Animator Raul Garcia managed to make a ‘flasher’ Smurf by rotating the body and adding a tiny paper raincoat. This was the only addition John approved of.
At this time Nina and I decided to throw John a birthday party.
“You can’t. My birthday is in February.”
“You will have a birthday when we TELL you to have one, John.”

For the first time, he looked worried.

This operation required special assistance from Roy Meurin and the guys in the Kinder Egg crew. Three hundred toys (the spoils of the forty-pound splurge) and the arch of eggs including the rubber frog were relocated to John’s desk sometime around Halloween 1988.

We also ran a small and disreputable contest to find (a) the most wretchedly tacky card and (b) the most tasteless ‘birthday present’ for John. The gift competition, open to the entire studio, received a number of entries that were easy to come by in the tacky Acton stores. It was won by Cathy Kiss who somehow located a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Advent Calendar. I created a poorly designed card on a computer located in the off-license down the street featuring a rude inscription actually written by the computer. Other presents included elephant-diaper shaped marshmallows and some horrible stuffed toys.

Naturally the news of the prank spread throughout the studio. Our production manager took a look at the resulting mess. “I feel sorry for the poor bastard!” was his only reply. I am sorry to say we never photographed it.

John’s reaction was of stupefied silence, hilarious laughter at the Advent calendar, and extremely literate abuse chiding us for time wasted creating this ridiculous thing. But he did enjoy the attention.

Many other ‘birthday presents’ were left on John’s desk afterward on a near-weekly basis. All were British made and purchased locally by the usual suspects; the worst being a toilet paper roll insert that played God Save the Queen. John reacted with his usual acerbic appreciation.

I left Amblimation to work at Warner Brothers in New York City as a director in 1991. Shortly after I started there I received a long-distance phone call from John.
Here is the conversation in its entirety:

“You BITCH!!!”

“…John?”

“It’s the GOOSE!”

“What goose?”

“ The electric, ROTATING goose.”

“John, I….are you on something? What do you…”

“It’s ELECTRIC, it ROTATES, it plays MUSIC, and my children won’t let me turn it off!”

After some confusion it was discovered that Nina Haley had been saving all the American stamps from the letters I sent her, and pasting them on the ‘presents’ that she wrapped in brown paper and left on John’s desk, implying that they had been sent all the way from New York. This goose in fact originated in London. Nina owes me big time.

John never forgot that particular ‘present’.
Nina and I gifted John with a Californian ‘cup holder’ consisting of a headless female torso in 1999 when we visited London.

I last saw John in Paris in 2003, when I treated him and his family to lunch at Café Angelica on the Right Bank. He was his old acerbic self and we continued to correspond by email and phone until shortly before his passing.

A few of his lovely character designs grace my upcoming book. I was delighted to get them and John was, I hear, pleased to know that they would be published in something a bit more permanent than an e-message.
John McCartney was a man whose command of the English language (especially the invective) proved the inadequacy of an American education. I was pleased to have him as a friend and will miss him.

The Female Oscar Wilde

I have just gotten some new books from a hundred years ago. They were written by an American writer named Helen Rowland, who appears to have been the female Oscar Wilde. She is quite as cynical, caustic, and quotable as he is and is very unjustly forgotten.
I got interested in her when I read this quote in a book of Quotes by Women:

"When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living."

It took me a while to remember who said that, but luckily the quote turned up in a cheap anthology and through the miracle of the Internet I was able to track down a great many of Ms. Rowland's books. I am sure she would delight to be called Ms. although it is apparent from her notes that she was married--and probably divorced--at least once in her life.

Here are some more gems:

"Once a fool, twice married."

"One advantage of a bull-dog over a baby is that you are not haunted by the fear that he will grow up to be just like his father."

"Choosing a husband is like picking out the combination on a lottery ticket; your first guess is apt to be as good as your last."

"Variety is the spice of love."

"Home is any four walls that enclose the right person."

"The saddest thing about married live is the opportunity it gives two otherwise agreeable people for telling one another the disagreeable truth."

These epigrams date from 1909.

Rowland died in 1950, but otherwise I have been unable to find out anything about her. She may have written for newspapers in New York but other references state the Middle West.
Ebay is auctioning a glass slide advertising her newspaper column and I hope that I win it. Then I might be able to trace something about this remarkable woman.

Oh Frankie!

The best tour of the building is the evening 'special tour' which features a nice dinner on the Barton house porch and tours of the interior of the Martin compound. No two will be alike since the building is going so quickly; and a special Grand Opening is planned for November. I'd love to be there for it; it will feature period autos and an official dedication. The original Carriage House was designed for three automobiles and two horses.

Watch the (nonexistent) Birdie

This is the birdhouse for Martens at Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin Martin house.

WRIGHTING THE WRONGS

I made two trips to Buffalo in all with my neighbour. The first trip was an overview of the city, which improved my opinion somewhat from my original take that Buffalo was a city in severe industrial decline. There are plenty of signs of life, all of them associated with the local universities.
My second trip enabled me to take a special nighttime tour of an early Wright masterpiece, the Darwin-Martin compound.

Darwin Martin was an executive at the Larkin Soap corporation, and strange as this may seem to this century's ears, he made a considerable fortune selling soap mail-order. The concept of the coupon, the premium, and the 'sampler' were all invented by Martin's brilliant colleague Elbert Hubbard. When Hubbard quit Larkin to create the Roycroft, his friend Darwin Martin inherited his job and as mentioned before, made a killing in soap.
Wright was recommended to Martin and they tried him out first by having him design the Barton House for Martin's sister and brother in law. Before it was done Wright was building a mansion, a carriage house, a pergola, a gardener's house, and a conservatory for Darwin Martin. The whole compound connected to the Barton House via the pergola but words don't do it justice. The place was a true palace, built for a merchant prince, and it looked it.

Now I've never been a fan of Wright's Guggenheim Museum design. It's impractical, doesn't allow the art to be seen, doesn't allow most of it to be displayed, and is difficult to walk around. But his Prairie Style houses are divine.
Darwin Martin lost his fortune in the Depression and his widow abandoned the place just like that during the Depression. It was purchased by another architecht in the 1950s which probably saved most of it, but many of the buildings came down.
The Martin House is being restored in a unique fashion; since the Pergola and carriage house and other buildings are now being reconstructed from Wright's original plans. And they have gone a long way in a short period of time.
The Carriage House and Pergola are already rebuilt though the interiors are being worked on. After the structures are up, the next stage in the restoration is the interior of the old house. New foundations were put in in 2003.

Wright was asked to give the house 'a basement'. He created a ballroom with an amazing sunburst fireplace that originally had bronze dust in the grout to make the 'sun' flicker as the fire burned. I put my hand on this fireplace (not restored yet.)

The details in the house are also terrific--Wright built special birdhouses for 'marten's as a pun on his client's name. These were moved in the Fifties when the back buildings were demolished and at present they stand in front of the house--but not for long. Soon they will be put back where they belong.



The irony is that no martens or bird of any kind appear to have lived in the houses, which would be too warm for them. But what a design!

West and Wewaxation at Wast

Book's handed in, illustrations are handed in...so it's time to relax until someone else finds something for me to do. Bugs was always popping up with something else whenever Elmer Fudd said he was going to Wewax, and for once I sympathize with the foolish character.

It got hairy here for a few days in a very literal sense; Gizmo developed mysterious bare patches on her head and feline acne on her chin. A few days later, Gizzy's health records are much improved; she's lost a pound, her fur is like velvet, her heartbeat is normal, and the mysterious patches are responding to topical medication. I wish I could say the same for myself but now that I'm able to keep a more regular schedule I'm cooking more.

And my neighbour has promised to take me to Buffalo on Monday to show me that the city is in fact vibrant and alive, not the sad shell I saw when travelling from the central area to East Aurora where Roycroft is. And I hope to also get to Roycroft before summer ends.

Sad news

The West African Black Rhino is now assumed to be extinct.
The poor creatures were hunted to death for their horns.

This news is as sad to me as the damage that humans manage to do to one another.
Soon we will have a world without tigers, gorillas or polar bears.

Here she is!

well for some reason

I can't seem to publish the pic of Gizmo. But trust me, she loves the present.

coming down the home stretch

I'm delighted to say that the freelance illustration job I picked up just after my book ended is nearly over. Although it has been fun, I need a rest before classes start in September. I'm on schedule to finish up early next week and then it's West and Wewaxation at Wast (ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.)
Gizmo has been her usual sweet self while I worked up to fifteen hours a day at this computer. Focal Press loved the presentation (the other authors at that firm may be upset that I got it in eight weeks early, but them's the breaks.) A DVD insert has been nixed for this edition but I took the precaution of asking three RIT students whose work appears in the book whether I might also use their Leica reels, animatics, and previz with scratch track for a later edition. All three kindly agreed and so I have the paperwork and the film for the eventual update.
It's very hard to write about story reel and editing to scratch track and animatics and previz without showing it, so these chapters are necessarily a bit short. I have instead directed readers to specific DVDS that contain excellent examples, notably SHREK and THE INCREDIBLES.
Anyway, the publisher explained that new editions must legally have 25% new material in them; so the disc would be a good example of 'new' and chapter 19 will be expanded.
I just wish that something had been worked out earlier, but the deal for this book was: no DVD enclosure. They are already confident that there will be a second edition.
Tony White's ANIMATION FROM PENCILS TO PIXELS arrived last week and now I finally have time to read it. It's from the same publisher and I mentioned that it's one of the few books I've seen that had the artwork printed at a workable size. Focal is actually hiring the same design firm and production manager (yes, they have them in publishing too) so they obviously want to give me a first class sendoff.. This is very nice to know.
Of course I can lie awake at night wondering if I covered everything I needed to cover but I'm told that it is normal for authors to fuss and worry, and the book is really 'done' at least til I see some proofs. Sample pages should be forthcoming shortly and we're on track for the January publication date.
Speaking of Tony White, he is setting up a nonprofit called the Animaticus Institute which will help further the art of hand drawn animation. He plans a '2D or Not 2D' film festival that sounds really nice--I'll be announcing it in the blog and will also notify the RIT seniors of last year and those who are still in the college.
The Animaticus Institute is just a placeholder website now but things should be getting interesting now that Tony is at his new job at the Digipen Institute in Seattle.
In an unrelated incident I got Gizmo a nice new kitty palace for her unbirthday. Actually she was probably born around this time in 2001 since it's what is called 'kitten season' now--I had no idea there was such a thing but knowledgeable people say that this is so. Anyway, I got her a new perch since she was not happy that I gave away the second office chair that formely served in this capacity. Think of it as payment for her excellent editorial services on the book project. She had a very important job: keeping my head from exploding and reminding me that it was important to get up and play with mice every two hours. She also gets a thankyou in the book even if that sounds a little twee. I figured, hell, she worked on this nearly as hard as I did AND modeled for the cover.
Here she is enjoying her present.

The sign says it all.

This sign appeared recently on University Avenue in Rochester, not far from my apartment building. Mr. Dogberry was apparently a pseudonym for an early Rochester journalist.
Catchy slogan.