Tag: animation

Calendar: September 11

A Year: Day to Day Men: 11th of September

Packing Heat

September 11, 1972 marks the passing of Polish-American animator and film producer Max Fleischer.

By 1914 the first commercially produced animated cartoons started to appear in movie theaters. Max Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from live action film. This device, known as the Rotoscope, enabled Fleischer to produce the first realistic animation since the initial works of Winsor McCay. The patent to Fleischer and his two brothers was granted in 1917.

Max Fleischer started working with The Bray Studios, which had a contract with Paramount Pictures, after World War I. His initial series, the “Out of the Inkwell” films featuring “The Clown” character, was first produced at The Bray Studios. The films featured the novelty of combining live action and animation and served as semi-documentaries with the appearance of Max Fleischer as the artist who dipped his pen into the ink bottle to produce the clown figure on his drawing board. While the technique of combining animation with live action was already established by others at The Bray Studio, it was Fleischer’s clever use of the technique combined with Fleischer’s realistic animation that made his series unique.

It was during this time that Max Fleischer developed the Rotograph, a means of photographing live action film footage with animation cels for a composited image. This was an improvement over the method used by Bray Studios where a series of 8″ x 10″ stills were made from motion picture film and used as backgrounds behind animation cels. The Rotograph technique went into more general use known as “Aerial Image Photography” and was a main staple in animation and optical effects companies for making titles and various forms of matte composites.

In 1924, Fleischer partnered with Edwin Miles Fadiman, Hugo Riesenfeld and Lee DeForest to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio.  During this period, Fleischer invented the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique in his “Ko-Ko Car Tune” series of animated sing-along shorts. The series lasted until early 1927, becoming very popular with theater goers.

Max Fleischer’s most famous character was Betty Boop, born out  of a cameo caricature in the early animated films. The “Betty Boop” series began in 1932, and became a huge success for him. However, Fleischer’s greatest business decision came with his licensing of the comic strip character Popeye the Sailor, who was introduced to audiences in the 1933 Betty Boop cartoon, “Popeye the Sailor”. Popeye became a box office hit and was one of the most successful screen adaptations of a comic strip in cinema history. Much of this success was due the perfect match of the Fleischer Studio style combined with its unique use of music. By the late 1930s a survey indicated that Popeye had eclipsed Mickey Mouse in popularity, challenging Disney’s presence in the market.

Carl Burton

Carl Burton, Unknown Title, (Light Pulse)

Digital artist and animator Carl Burton creates subtly animated monochromatic gifs that blend surreal elements inspired by science fiction and occasionally real life into one hypnotic and perfectly looped animation. Burton works primarily on the 3D editing software Cinema 4D as well as Photoshop and After Effects to produce his gifs.

Calendar: August 21

A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of August

Dressed in White Cotton

August 21, 1906 was the birthdate of Isadore “Friz” Freleng, the American animator, cartoonist and composer.

Friz Freleng began his career in animation at United Film Ad Service in Kansas City, Missouri. There, he made the acquaintance of fellow animators Hugh Harman and Ubi Iwerks. In 1923, Iwerk’s friend, Walt Disney, moved to Hollywood and asked his Kansas City colleagues to join him. Freleng joined the Walt Disney studio in 1927 and worked on the “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” cartoons and the “Alice Comedies”, a series with a live action little girl named Alice and her animated cat.

Freleng teamed up with animators Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising to try to create their own studio. They produced a pilot film with a new character named Bosko. While trying to sell the Bosko film, Freleng moved to New York City to work on the “Krazy Kat” cartoons. The Bosko character was finally sold to producer Leon Schlesinger, who would produce the series for Warner Brothers. Freleng moved back to California and worked on the “Looney Tunes” cartoons for Warner Brothers. While there, he introduced the studio’s first true star, Porky Pig, in the 1935 film “I Haven’t Got a Hat”.

The Warner Brothers Studio’s hands-off attitude toward its animators allowed Freleng and his fellow directors almost complete creative control and room to experiment with cartoon comedy styles, which allowed the studio to keep pace with the Disney studio’s technical superiority. Freleng’s style quickly matured, and he became a master of comic timing. Often working alongside layout artist Hawley Pratt, he also introduced or redesigned a number of famous Warner characters, including Yosemite Sam in 1945, the cat-and-bird duo, Sylvester and Tweety in 1947, and Speedy Gonzales in 1955.

Freleng and Chusck Jones would dominate the Warner Bros. studio in the years after World War II, with Freleng largely concentrating on the above-mentioned characters, as well as Bugs Bunny. He won four Oscars during his time at Warner Brothers, for the films “Tweetie Pie” in 1947, “Speedy Gonzales” in 1955, “Birds Anonymous” with Tweetie and Sylvester in 1957, and “Knighty Knight Bugs” in 1958. Six of Freleng’s other films were Oscar nominees.

Besides animating and producing the cartoon films, Freleng also was a talented director. He directed all three of the vintage Warner Brothers cartoon in which the drinking of Dr. Jekyll’s portion induces a series of monstrous transformations; “Dr. Jekyl’s Hide” with Sylvester the Cat  in 1954, “Hyde and Hare” with Bugs Bunny in 1955, and “Hyde and Go Tweet” with Sylvester and Tweety in 1960.

Calendar: July 27

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of July

Hold

July 27, 1940 was the release date of the film “A Wild Hare”.

An early version of a Bugs Bunny-like character appeared in the 1938 “Porky’s Hare Hunt”. It was co-directed by Ben Hardaway and an uncredited Cal Dalton, who was responsible for the initial design of the rabbit. Porky Pig is cast as a hunter tracing his prey who is more interested in driving his pursuer insane rather than escaping. The white rabbit had an oval shaped head, a shapeless body, and was voiced by Mel Blanc.

This rabbit character appeared in “Prest-O Change-O”, directed by animator Chuck Jones and released in 1939. This version of the character was cool, graceful and controlled. He retained the laugh but was otherwise silent in the film. The third appearance of the rabbit was in the 1939 “Hare-um Scare-um” directed by Dalton and Hardaway. This time he was gray and had his first singing role.

“The Wild Hare” is considered to be the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is the first film where both Elmer Fudd and Bugs, both redesigned by animator and developer Bob Givens, are shown in fully developed forms as hunter and tormentor. The film is the first in which Mel Blanc uses what becomes the standard voice for Bugs, and says Bugs’ famous catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc”. A huge success in the theaters, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cartoon Short Subject.

Since Bugs’ debut in “ A Wild Hare”, Bugs appeared only in color Merrie Melodies films, alongside Elmer and his predecessors. Bugs made a cameo in the 1943 “Porky’s Pig Feet”, but that was his only appearance in a black-and-white Looney Tunes film. He did not star in a Looney Tunes film until that series made its complete conversion to only color cartoons beginning in 1944. “Buckaroo Bugs” was Bugs’ first film in the Looney Tunes series and was also the last Warner Bros. cartoon to credit Schlesinger, who had produced the film of the original rabbit. The Leon Schlesinger Productions studio was sold to Warner Brothers in1944 after the release fo “Buckaroo Bugs”.

The cartoon 1958 “Knighty Knight Bugs”, directed by Fritz Freleng, in which a medieval Bugs trades blows with Yosemite Sam and his fire-breathing dragon, won an Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject, becoming the first Bugs Bunny cartoon to win that award. Three of Chuck Jones’ films —“Rabbit Fire”, “Rabbit Seasoning” and “Duck! Rabbit, Duck!”— compose what is often referred to as the “Rabbit Season/Duck Season” trilogy and are famous for originating the historic rivalry between Bugs and Daffy Duck.

Chuck Jones’ classic 1957 “What’s Opera, Doc?”, casts Bugs and Elmer Fudd in a parody of Richard Wagner’s opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. This cartoon was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1992, becoming the first cartoon short to receive this honor.

Calendar: April 6

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of April

Wet and Heated by the Sun

On April 6, 1906 the first drawn animation film is copyrighted by J. Stuart Blackton.

J. Stuart Blackton was an Anglo-American filmmaker, co-founder of the Vitagraph Studios and one of the first to use animation in his films. ”The Enchanted Drawing” in 1900 is considered to be the first film recorded on standard picture film that included some sequences that are sometimes regarded as animation. It shows Blackton doing some “lightning sketches” of a face, cigars, a bottle of wine and a glass. The face changes expression when Blackton pours some wine into the face’s mouth and takes his cigar.

The technique used in this film was basically the substitution splice: the single change to scenes was that a drawing was replaced by a similar drawing with a different facial expression (or a drawn bottle and glass were replaced by real objects). Thus the effect is not considered animation.

Blackton’s 1906 film “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” is often regarded as the oldest known drawn animation on standard film. He later copyrighted this film on April 6 in 1908. It features a sequence made with blackboard drawings that are changed between frames to show two faces changing expressions and some billowing cigar smoke, as well as two sequences that feature cutout animation.

Blackton’s “The Haunted Hotel” in 1907 featured a combination of live-action with practical special effects and stop-motion animation of objects, a puppet and a model of the haunted hotel. It was the first stop-motion film to receive wide scale appreciation. Especially a large close-up view of a table being set by itself baffled viewers; there were no visible wires or other noticeable well-known tricks. This inspired other filmmakers, including French animator Émile Cohl and Segundo de Chomón, to work with the new technique. De Chomón would release the similar “House of Ghosts” and “El Hotel Electrico” in 1908.

J Stuart Blackton left Vitagraph to go independent in 1917, but returned in 1923 as junior partner to Albert Smith. In 1925, Smith sold the company to Warner Brothers for a comfortable profit. Blackton did quite well with his share until the stock market crash in 1929, which destroyed his savings. He spent his last years on the road, showing his old films and lecturing about the days of silent movies. Blackton died August 13, 1941, a few days after he was hit by a car while crossing the street with his son. At the time of his death he was working for Hal Roach on experiments to improve color process backgrounds.

Donal O’Keeffe, “Dead Ahead”

Donal O’Keeffe, “Dead Ahead”

‘Dead Ahead’ is a postcard animation to the world of the horror movie genre. Our intrepid travellers head out into the wilderness on their road trip only to find one nightmare scenario after the other. With each step forward a new monster emerges paying homage to such classics as Friday the 13th, Jaws and Pet Sematary.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

Spark

Artist Unknown, “Spark – 180126”, Computer Graphics, Endless Loop Gif

“Finally, the last point that can kill your spark is Isolation. As you grow older you will realize you are unique. When you are little, all kids want Ice cream and Spiderman. As you grow older to college, you still are a lot like your friends. But ten years later and you realize you are unique. What you want, what you believe in, what makes you feel, may be different from even the people closest to you. This can create conflict as your goals may not match with others. And you may drop some of them. Basketball captains in college invariably stop playing basketball by the time they have their second child. They give up something that meant so much to them. They do it for their family. But in doing that, the spark dies. Never, ever make that compromise. Love yourself first, and then others.”

― Chetan Bhagat

 

Calendar: February 23

Year: Day to Day Men: February 23

Brown Cable Knit Sweater

The twenty-third of February in 1940 marks the theatrical release date of the American animated musical fantasy film “Pinocchio”. Based on Italian author Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, it was Walt Disney Production’s second animated feature film. preceded by the 1937 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.

A translated version of Collodi’s novel was brought by animator Norman Ferguson to the attention of Walt Disney in September of 1937 during the studio’s production of “Snow White”. After reading the book, Disney commissioned storyboard artist Bianca Majolie to write a new story outline for the book; however, he found the outline too faithful to the original story. As “Pinocchio” was based on a novel with a very fixed, episodic story, the storyboard outline underwent major changes before its final form. 

In the original novel, Pinocchio was presented as a cold, rude and ungrateful personality. The Disney writers modernized the character for the film and depicted him similar to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy, a mischievous figure who made snide remarks and misbehaved. Originally drawn exactly like a real wooden puppet with pointed nose and bare wooden hands, animators slightly redesigned the figure of Pinocchio to make him more appealing. An animated test scene refined the final adjustments to Pinocchio’s appearance; he became a more innocent, naive, somewhat coy personality with a child’s Tyrolean hat and standard four fingered (three fingers and a thumb) gloved hands similar to those of Mickey Mouse. 

In the summer of 1938, Walt Disney and the story team established the character of the cricket whom Disney named Jiminy. At first only a minor figure in the film outline, the cricket became the character who would guide Pinocchio into making the right decisions. Animator Ward Kimball, who had spent two months animating two unused sequences for “Snow White”, was promoted by Disney to the position of supervising animator for Jiminy Cricket. For the final design of the character, Kimball did not use the characteristic toothed-legs and waving antennae of a cricket. He instead designed a well-dressed little man who had an egg-shaped head with no ears, essentially a cricket in name only.

“Pinocchio” marks the first time an animated film used celebrities as voice actors. Due to the huge success of the 1937 “Snow White”, Disney wanted more famous voices for the second animated Disney production. Popular 1930s musician and singer Clifton Avon “Cliff” Edwards was cast as the voice of Jiminy Cricket. Clifton had in 1929 a number one hit with his “Singin’ in the Rain”. Disney did not want an adult actor for the voice of Pinocchio. He chose eleven-year old child-actor Richard “Dickie” Jones, a B-movie Western star who had just appeared in the 1939 “Nancy Drew..Reporter”.

Austrian-born character actor Christian Rub was chosen for the voice of Geppetto the wood-carver. Comedian and character actor Walter Catlett played the con artist Honest John the Fox and Honest John’s mute, dimwitted feline partner Gideon. Gideon’s hiccups were separately provided by veteran voice actor Mel Blanc. Actor Charles Judels voiced both the villainous  Stromboli and The Coachman who takes all disobedient boys to Pleasure Island. The Blue Fairy who brings Pinocchio to life and transforms him into a real boy was played by actress Evelyn Venable.

Animation on “Pinocchio” began in January of 1938; supporting character animation began in April. After a brief hiatus on the project, revisions on Pinocchio’s character and the film’s narrative structure were completed in September and work resumed. “Pinocchio” took two years and required more than seven hundred and fifty artists and technicians to bring the animated characters to life. The film was a groundbreaker in animation effects. The team of artists gave realistic movement to vehicles and machinery as well as rain, water, lightning, smoke and shadows. 

“Pinocchio” was initially premiered on the seventh of February in 1940 at New York City’s Center Theater on Sixth Avenue. The theatrical release through the nation occurred on the twenty-third of February. Though not initially a box-office success, “Pinocchio” won two Academy Awards in 1941: Best Original Score and Best Original Song for “When You Wish Upon a Star”. Many film historians consider “Pinocchio” to be the film of all the Disney animated features that most closely approaches technical perfection. In 1994, the film was added to the National Film Registry and the American Film Institute, in 2008, selected it the second best film in the medium of animation, after Disney’s “Snow White”.

Insert Images: Directors Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, “Pinocchio”, 1940, Film Scenes, Producer Walt Disney, Walt Disney Productions, RKO Radio Pictures

Calendar: February 19

Year: Day to Day Men: February 19

The Coffee Table Book

The nineteenth of February in 1913 marks the birth date of Francis Frederick von Taschlein who was an American animator and filmmaker. Best known as Frank Tashlin, he worked on the Warner Brothers Studio’s series of animated shorts, “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies”, as well as many successful comedy feature films.

Born in Weehawken, New Jersey, Frank Tashlin left high school at the age of thirteen and began working through a series of various jobs. In 1930, he started working as a animator for film director John Foster on the “Aesop’s Fables” cartoon series. Tashlin joined producer Leon Schlesinger’s cartoon studio at Warner Brothers in 1933 as an animator; the studio had achieved its success with the production of the “Looney Tunes” and later “Merry Melodies” series of shorts.

Tashlin worked with Schlesinger for one year before he joined the Ub Iwerks studio in 1934. Iwerks had worked as a character designer for Walt Disney and refined Disney’s sketch for Mickey Mouse; he would do much of the animation on Disney’s “Silly Symphony” cartoons which included “Steamboat Willie” and “The Skeleton Dance”. Tashlin stayed with Iwerks until 1934 and then worked for one year with Hal Roach’s studio. 

In 1936, Frank Tashlin returned to Schlesinger as the head director for the animation department at Warner Brothers. With his knowledge of the industry and his diverse interest in animation, he brought a new understanding of camera techniques to the department. Animated shorts began to use montages, vertical and horizontal pan shots, and shots taken from different camera angles. From 1936 to 1938, Tashlin directed almost twenty shorts. After an argument with studio manager Henry Binder, he resigned and worked for a few years in Disney’s story department. 

Tashlin joined Columbia Pictures’s Screen Gems animation studio as production manager in 1941. He was effectively in charge of the studio and hired many former Disney artists who had left as a result of the Disney animators’ strike over pay inequities and unionization efforts. Tashlin launched one of the better products of the studio, “The Fox and Crow” series which ran until the studio closed in 1946. His stay at Columbia lasted only one year as he was fired after an argument with Columbia executives. 

In 1942, Frank Tashlin rejoined the Warner Brothers animation studio as a director. Among the cartoon shorts he directed were “Porky Pig’s Feat” in 1943 and two Bugs Bunny features, the 1945 “Unruly Hare” and 1946 “Hare Remover” which was Tashlin’s last credited film at Warner Brothers. Tashlin worked on the studio’s wartime shorts during the years of World War II. Before he left Warner Brothers, he directed some stop-motion puppet films for producer John Sutherland. Tashlin’s 1947 puppet animation film “The Way of Peace” was selected in 2014 for entry into National Film Registry.

From 1946 until 1951, Tashlin became a gag writer for such comedians as Lucille Ball and the Marx Brothers; he also worked as a screenwriter for Bob Hope and comedian Red Skelton. Tashlin began his career as a director of feature films when he was asked to finish directing Bob Hope’s 1951 “The Lemon Drop Kid”. His successful streak of box-office successes began in 1956 with “The Girl Can’t Help It” starring Jane Mansfield and Tom Ewell. This was followed by the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis 1956 “Hollywood or Bust” and the 1957 “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter” that starred Jane Mansfield, Tony Randall, Betsy Drake and Joan Blondell. Tony Randall received a Golden Globe nomination for his role and the film was selected in 2000 for entry into the National Film Registry. 

Frank Tashlin was the director for six of Jerry Lewis’s early solo films, among which were the 1958 “The Geisha Boy”, the 1960 “Cinderfella”, and “The Disorderly Orderly” in 1964. He also directed the 1965 “The Alphabet Murders” and the 1966 “The Glass Bottom Boat’ with Doris Day, Rod Taylor, Arthur Godfrey, Paul Lynde, and Dom DeLuise. Tashlin’s last directorial work was the 1968 comedy “The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell” with Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller and Jeffery Hunter.

Over the course of his career, Tashlin worked on four dozen animated shorts, including a dozen of Porky Pig’s earliest appearances, and forty-four feature films, either as director, writer, or producer. Frank Tashlin was stricken with a coronary thrombosis in his Beverly Hills home on the second of May in 1972. He died three days later on the fifth of May at Los Angeles’s Cedar-Sinai Medical Center at the age of fifty-nine. Tashlin is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.