History of Animation: 2

"THE BIG SNIT" (1985)

- Directed by Richard Condie - Even the backgrounds are funny and strange - Perfectly normal for the people that live there - Film won the Oscar

Alison Snowden and David Fine

"BOB'S BIRTHDAY" (1994) - Spoof of someone undergoing a midlife crisis on his 40th birthday - Funny, silly

Mr. Magoo

"GRIZZLY GOLFER" (1951) - Still the bitter, crotchety earlier version of Mr. Magoo - Nearsighted, self-satisfied, stubborn, volatile - Magoo originally created as a meanspirited McCarthy like reactionary, form of protest "When Magoo Flew" (1955) - 3 years later, Pete Burness scrubbed clean of politicized meanness - Mr. Magoo softened, becomes old, senile grandpa - Loses his edgy, roughness - Not nearly as exciting or entertaining

Nina Paley

"SITA SINGS THE BLUES" (2008) - One of the first woman to write, direct, animate and edit her own film - Made it for a budget of $200,000 - Graphically interesting - Stupidly took a whole series of recordings from obscure old jazz singer ("What I Wouldn't Do For That Man"), songs were copywrited, got into a lot of trouble as a result - Not only is she riffing on Indian art but also the films of Betty Boop - Certain simple charm

"THE JOLLY FROLICS" Series (1949)

- "RAGTIME BEAR" -- the debut of Quincy Magoo, a crotchety, near-sighted old man - Minimal, barely any scenery, unique sparse drawing style - Novelty of a human character, not an anthropomorphic talking animal - Well-animated, not trying to be realistic

United Productions of America

- 1943 3 veterans of the Disney strike Steve Bosustow, Zack Schwartz, and Dave Hilberman formed animation studio later known as UPA - "HELL BENT FOR ELECTION" (1944) directed by Chuck Jones, produced for the reelection campaign of FDR - Continued working with the US military to create training films "SWAB YOUR CHOPPERS," teeth cleaning training video - UPA a place where creativity flourished, stripped down, minimalist, modern, flat, innovative, stylized graphics

Nature Films

- 1947 Went to Alaska, filmed nature "SEAL ISLAND" (1949) - First True Life short - Won an Oscar for documentary short - Live action "TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA" (1954) "DAVEY CROCKETT AND THE WILD FRONTIER" (1955) - These two films established Walt as a live action director - Davey Crockett enormous, wildly popular, made a fortune off of it, sold a ton of merchandise

Columbia Contract

- 1948 UPA signed contract with Columbia - Columbia wanted to keep "The Fox and the Crow," UPA animators applied their stylistic concepts and storytelling to these characters

"BIG HERO 6" (2014)

- A world where people can get killed - Hero's brother gets killed, choice to make -- does he kill the man he think killed his brother - Most diverse cast of any animated feature: Asians, blacks, chicanos all working together - Beautifully designed - Got the property from Marvel, wanted to do something that set it apart, wasn't supposed to be a part of the Marvel universe - Some of the best animation Disney's done in quite a while

"BOLT" (2008)

- About a stunt dog who doesn't realize he works in television and all this stuff is manufactured - Not memorable - Nicely animated, nicely shot, great animation, great compositions - Too talky, goes on for too long for the amount of storytelling going on

"ALADDIN" (1992)

- Aesthetic comes from Al Hirschfeld -- great New York Times caricaturist - Less realistic, but works in animation - Stylized look required a stylized animation - Genie can change physically as Robin Williams voice does mercurially - Film broke box office records - First animated film to make over 200 million dollars - Won Oscar for best animated score

"FRITZ THE CAT" (1972)

- Directed by Ralph Bakshi - Idea that if you could make an X-rated animated film you would make a fortune - Something that wasn't the wholesomeness of fairytale or the mindlessness of kidvid - Caricature of student who talked about power to the people and seeking the truth but whose real interest was just getting laid - Funny, dark humor

"101 DALMATIONS" (1961)

- After Sleeping Beauty lost money at the Box Office Walt stayed away from animation, gave 101 Dalmations to Bill Pete to adapt - 101 Dalmatians the first film to have a screenplay - Modest film, set in contemporary times, definite place - Book more popular in England - Wrote a whole new opening, included the meet cute - Focused the narrative much more, made something terrific out of it that wasn't necessarily all in the book - Very stylized film, much more so than Sleeping Beauty - Bill Kahl usually finished the model sheets, very much under the influence of Picasso at this point - Pongo doesn't really look like a dalmatian, square head skinny legs right out of Picasso drawings - In animation you have to draw every spot in the exact same place on the dog as it's moving in animation, otherwise it will boil or shimmer - Not only are the characters stylized, the backgrounds are stylized to match them - Took tens of thousands of person hours to trace cells - Iwerks took a zerox copy machine and modified it, able to zerox and don't have to trace - Problem was powder from the zerox never clung perfectly to the cells, lines have broken quality to them

"THE GERALD MCBOING-BOING SHOW" (1956)

- Aired on CBS - Loved by critics, hated by children - Too tame, too sophisticated and artsy to be entertaining for kids - Proved to be too expensive, only lasted 3 months

"THE UNICORN IN THE GARDEN" (1953)

- Based on New Yorker short story by James Thurber - Directed by William Hurtz - Captures the lumpiness of Therber's lines - Playing with shadows, blinds, screens

"THE MASK OF THE RED DEATH"

- Based on the Edgar Allen Poe story - Quoting styles of George Delatoire, Rembrandt - Dark sensibility

"KUNG FU PANDA" (2008)

- Better animated, better designed, more likeable characters - Playing with time, scale - Spoofing martial arts training movies from Hong Kong - Sequence works - Audience much more invested, cares about these characters

"THE CEREMONY"

- Black humor, especially for a society that had such strong censorship - In both of these films there's no words - shown throughout the soviet empire - Had to specialize in a kind of wordlessness

"HERCULES" (1997)

- Borrowed a lot from Aladdin - The most unpleasant heroine in Disney history - Shrieking villain - Doesn't quite add up - Weird things with Hercules parentage - The rule enemy of Hercules is Juno, Juno's the one who unleashes terrible things on Hercules, Juno takes on disguise of her husband - Weird disjunction between CG and live action

"THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG" (2009)

- Brief return to drawn animation - A bit old fashioned, doesn't feel cutting edge - First African American heroine in a Disney film - Badly marketed - "Mama Odi" - Fun song, problem is the frogs aren't that interesting compared to Mama Odi

Frederick Back

- Came to Canada after WWII, worked as designer of stain glass for ballets, operas, illustrations - Found real artistic voice with "ALL NOTHING" (1978) - First Oscar nomination - Discovered technique of drawing on frosted cells - Texture like the glass in bathroom windows, drew on it in colored pencils "CRAC" (1981) - Won first Oscar "THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES" (1987) - Single assistant doing thousands of exquisite drawings - Believed in the beauty of nature, it's sacredness, our ties to it - Uses color as part of storytelling, in the beginning film is almost monochromatic, turns into a full pallet of beautiful color that reflects the growth and life around it

"WAY TO YOUR NEIGHBOR"

- Comment on international relations - Sadly pathetic

"THE IRON GIANT" (1999)

- Directed by Brad Bird - Film that broke every animator's heart - Bird's first solo effort at directing, solid story, graphic style - Used CG and drawing together very skillfully - Not many ppl saw it although it was the second best reviewed film of that year - Produced by Warner Bros.

"THE STREET" (1977)

- Directed by Caroline Leaf - Nominated for an Oscar - Technique she invented - Paint on Glass, put watercolors on glass, puts camera underneath the glass, moves the paint around - Allows paint to move in three dimensions - Requires careful storyboarding

"THE SECRET OF NIHM" (1982)

- Directed by Don Bluth - Bluth left Disney in 1979 - Films tend to be very talky - Very detailed, curious toughs of hair - Interesting animation but way too many effects - Too many sparkles, reflections, shadows and too much dialogue

"ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN" (1989)

- Directed by Don Bluth - First solo effort since NIHM - Story does not make much sense - Shows the same strengths and weaknesses - Lots of fussy details in the animation although the animation itself is not bad - Too much dialogue - Film made about $23 million, not exactly a flop but it came out the same time as Little Mermaid which blew it out of the water

"SAMURAI JACK RAVES" (2002)

- Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky - Also directed Dexter's Labratory - Flat, angular graphics, UPA style - Repeats same movements and presents them differently and at different speeds to create different effects

"MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO" (1993)

- Directed by Hayao Myazaki - 7 minute sequence: 100 words, eloquent, poetic, beautiful - Influenced American animators work heavily - Underplayed, get a feel for the characters and their relationships - Beautiful subtle animation

"PARADISE" (1984)

- Directed by Ishu Patel - Oscar nominated, might have done better if there was an actual storyline - Extremely difficult to make, a lot of the art exposed multiple times, layers building upon one another - Very beautiful, no storyline - For backgrounds took black cards and pricked designs with a needle - Number of exposures and way it had to be made ridiculously complex

"THE LOG DRIVER'S WALTZ" (1979)

- Directed by John Weldon - One of several films they did illustrating Canadian folk songs - Silly, a little trifle, charming film

"AKIRA" (1988)

- Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo - Landmark film, all time great anime feature about a bike gang - Conflict believable, real fight, sequence that's been very widely commented on

"NEIGHBORS" (1952)

- Directed by McLaren - Won the Oscar for best documentary - Pixellation - a process of posing full size props and live actors and taking individual shots of them and putting them together, difficult technique to do well - Sound is very strange, created completely artificially - Playing with timing, movements are slowed down or speeded up, nothing is quite what it seems - Powerful message

"WALKING" (1969)

- Directed by Ryan Larken - Inkwash on paper, no real storyline or plot, about observation and drawing - Alienated, striking film unlike what we're used to seeing - Exercise in observation, movement, animation - NFB a place where you could experiment with techniques that might be too personal or too difficult to use in a studio

"THE SWEATER" (1980)

- Directed by Sheldon Cohen - Reflecting on Canadian childhood - Using animation as a personal form of storytelling

"COWBOY BEBOP" (1999)

- Directed by Shinichirō Watanabe - Fight so much more powerful - Nothing going on in the background to distract from the fight, entire focus is on the two characters

"PIGS IS PIGS" (1954)

- Disney short, very clearly influenced by UPA style - Flat colorful UPA style - Includes melody of a traditional Irish jig

"SLEEPING BEAUTY" (1959)

- Disney's most lavish, opulent feature - Took 4.5 years to make - Modeled on a couple of very different sources: 15th c. art, French-illuminated manuscripts, and the work of UPA - Characters are much flatter, angular, more stylized than characters in previous films - Told his animators he wanted the film to be a moving tapestry - Lacks a story - Image of the ageless princess slumbering in a tower: romantic image, but there isn't a lot for the characters to do - As soon as the princess turns 16 she pricks her finger and falls asleep, not the most active character - Invented a lot to add things that weren't in the original story - A story we remember not for the main character, but for the side characters - Disney added the three good fairies - Maleficent: completely overshadow Aurora and Prince Philip - Beautifully animated, gorgeous film, animators compared it to Fantasia calling it another flawed masterpiece - Very expensive, cost $6 million, lost about a million - Horrendous amount of work, but a high point for the artists in terms of richness and opulence "THE OPENING" - One of the key models for this was a 15 c. book of hours from France - Idea of life as a grand pageant - Colors come from it -- rich royal blue, yellow-green, pink in Aurora's gown - Example of multi-play - In opening procession have 5 levels of characters all animated, moving in procession, such a sense of scale - Gothic architecture on steroids - So beautiful and they make ancestry very clear, go from the page of the manuscript that's the book at the opening to the procession - Clear this is a moving illustration - Prince Phillip's escape from Maleficent's castle and the fight with the dragon - The most powerful animation Disney had done since Munstro - The Dragon so well animated, see it climbing up the cliff and feel the muscles pulling this enormous form up - Much more interesting prince character than previous princes

"LADY AND THE TRAMP" (1955)

- Disney's response to having been criticized for tampering with classics of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland - Lady experiences sibling rivalry - Like Bambi, required very careful study of animal movements - To caricature an animal and its personality you have to understand how the real animal moves - Set film in conventional New England town at turn of the century - Camera set particularly low to match a dog's point of view and how a dog would see the world - Animals are animated in a sophisticated manner, humans are a bit cartoony - The last hurrah of the classic Disney style that we've seen since Snow White - rounded, elegant - Released in cinemascope - In the mid-50's movie studios were convinced no one would go to movies again and that people would only sit at home and watch TV - Cinemascope: enormously long screen - Made for problems because suddenly instead of dealing with a square frame you were dealing with a long rectangle

Walt Disney died in 1966

- Enormous national outpour of grief - People reluctant to let him go - the source of the rumor that he was frozen - Son in law, John Miller, took over studio - Wully took over producing and direction - a sameness that creeps into these films

Canada and the National Film Board

- Film board created by act of Canada - At the time Canada was a very divided country - John Grierson - first film commissioner - Brought in Scottish artist named Normal McLaren - Grierson promised him artistic freedom - McLaren always experimenting, took blank film stock and drew directly on it - Artists at NFB were technically civil servants - 1956 NFB moved to Montreal, became a magnet for talent from all over the world - Place where you could do artistic work, away from the commercial world - Animation got more unusual, experimental, diverse - Attracted Ryan Larken

"TREASURE PLANET" (2002)

- Film dismissed by Eisner less than a week after it's opening as a flop - Not that bad, wasn't much worse than Atlantis - Expensive use of combining CG and drawn animation - Trying for an anime type sensibility and sense of adventure but they're afraid of the story they're telling - Not believable

"1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS" (1959)

- First UPA feature - Not a success, undistinguished - Shortly after its release the studio was sold off

"GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE" (1986)

- First animated film that used extensive use of computer graphics - Could not yet combine drawings and CG backgrounds - Printed graphics, then traced them onto cells - Moving in 3 dimensions

"THE RESCUERS" (1977)

- First film that conjoined the older generation of artists with the new artists that would go on to continue the Disney legacy - Good sense of who the characters are, condensed story telling "RESCUE AID SOCIETY" - See that Bernard has aspirations, see that he's smitten with Miss Bianca - Starting to move beyond the stereotypes we saw in Aristocats - This is a more integrated mouse society

"POCAHONTAS" (1995)

- First film that failed to break the record the previous film had set (Lion King) - When Pocahontas and John Smith meet for the first time -- powerful because it's played against silence, no song - Pocahontas drawn so much more dimensionally - Not a flat, cartoony character - Animation much more subtle, little shifts in the angle of her head, focus of her eyes - Mythic feel

"MULAN" (1998)

- First film that the satellite studio established in Florida made on their own - Since Beauty and the Beast they had been doing sections and helping the main studio in Burbank - Film has energy, made by a group of artists who have something to prove - Interesting new kind of heroine - More women working as animators led to creation of more complex heroines that spoke to young women - Problems -- anachronistic wise cracks, songs that don't help the story much, Eddie Murphy's voice doesn't fit with ancient China - Gorgeous animation, the villain is powerful and strong, doesn't have to yell, knows everyone will listen to him - Many artists were Chinese, careful to preserve Chinese art - Design for horse reflects Chinese sculptures of horses - Worked carefully to get cranial and facial anatomy correct to ensure the characters looked Chinese

"THE LITTLE MERMAID" (1989)

- First of a string of smash hits - Directed by Musker and Clements - Upbeat contemporary romance with a happy ending - Original Hans Christian Anderson story is really dreary, kind of a christian parable - Ariel in particular is very different from earlier princesses and heroines we've seen - more assertive, independent, proactive - Music and Lyrics by Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman - Songs not only great but they also advance the plot "Part of Your World" - Up until that point we knew Ariel was independent, but this song crystallizes Ariel's character, knew she had her own ideas, now we see what those ideas actually are - Animation and camera work more polished, shots of her moving in 3 dimensions - A modern movie and it feels like one - Know Ariel better as a character, know who she is, know what she wants - Disney marketed this movie in 2 ways: a kid's movie, a date movie - Won Oscars for best score and best original song

Dreamworks

- Founded in 1994 with lots of Hollywood muscle and money - Founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen - Replaced Bluth as Disney's biggest rival

"TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE" (2003)

- French film - Directed by Sylvain Chomét - The opening an omage to the Fleischer shorts - Caricatures of Josephine Baker and Fred Astaire - First foreign film to be nominated for Oscar for Best Feature

Package Features

- Post war time needed a feature to earn money at the box office, but takes 3-4 years to make a feature - Produced package features: combination of shorts done as a package - Animation lavish, but could be turned out faster and cheaper than a full-fledged feature - Mixed bag, parts are charming and funny, other parts are bad, cheesey, kitch - Package features not breaking any new ground, don't engage emotions, don't represent the studio's best work - Didn't do terribly well at the box office "MAKE MINE MUSIC" (1946) - One piece of classical music - Designed to demonstrate to children an orchestra "ALL THE CATS JOIN IN" (1946) - More cartoony, no emotional impact, no depth of emotion - Well-animated "THE WHALE WHO WANTED TO SING AT THE MET" (1946) - More stylized, not nearly as lavish as we think of from Disney - On a budget, some characters all look the same - Still charming, you immediately feel for Willy "FUN AND FANCY FREE" (1947) - 2 segments tied together with live action - Bongo -- circus bare, has to learn to live on his own - Feels dragged out "HAPPY VALLEY" (1947) - Mickey least interesting character in the film - Voice sounds different, Walt didn't have time to go to recording sessions, chain smoking made him not sound like Mickey - Charm, but also a problem - Great radio star and dummy providing a commentary - Sarcasm is funny but also distancing, characters are being so hip and so cool they don't seem to believe the story their in - Can't generate sentiment for the characters with sarcasm going on in the background "MELODY TIME" (1948) - Best of the package features - Sequence about Johnny Appleseed that's dull "ONCE UPON A WINTERTIME" ("Melody Time" - Cute, victorian romance - In the style of Mary Blaire "PECOS BILL" (1948) ("Melody Time") - Bill -- very cartoony - Paired with Slue Foot Sue -- very polished - Interesting to see the two styles paired together - Gracefully animated, more elaborately done but still different than Disney's tone before the war

"THE SECRET OF KELLS" (2009)

- French-Belgian-Irish animated fantasy film - First film directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twommey - Set in 8th c. Ireland - Magical, beautiful color and design, richness in the animation that's breathtaking - Nominated for Oscar for best feature

"SONG OF THE SOUTH" (1946)

- Gave Disney the chance to do both live action and animation - Stories based on African folk tales - About Brother rabbit, brother fox, brother bear - One film that's never been issued on DVD, disk or laser disk in this country - Live action hard to watch, very much a hollywood steam cleaned depiction of the old South, received objections to the depictions of the slaves - 70% live action, 30% animation - Earned Disney a profit - Main character never changes, Toad stays Toad throughout the whole film, never learns or changes based on what happens to him - Cut down in length, paired with Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Oskar Fischinger

- German animator, Germany center of culture, artistic flowering "STUDY NO. 6" (1930) - One of his studies series - Drawn in charcoal - Synced to music - Feel that visually the ideas are presented, developed and solved - Problem doing this kind of art in Germany after Hitler came to power because all abstract art was anachronous to the Nazis - Fled to the US, didn't speak English well - Didn't fit well into American studio system, used to being an independent artist and doing every aspect of the animation himself - Worked at Disney for a while, but abstraction didn't bode well with the Disney vision "ALLEGRETTO" (1936) - One of his American films - Motion, image, color - Originally intended as an insert in a comedy film - Meant to be the personification of radio waves - Pure jazz age, art deco graphics

"ZOOTOPIA" (2016)

- Good voices - So much fur - Talky film - Strengths in the animation, the characterization, the voice acting - Weakness in that it's so busy and so talky

"THE BLACK CAULDRON" (1985)

- Had been in production for 12 years - Material there for a good film - Every good idea they had for the film they threw out and every bad idea they kept - Borrows heavily from Maleficent's appearance but less effective despite all the advances in technology - Supposed to be creepy but it's afraid of being too creepy, tries to be funny but not really funny - A lot of effort with not much result - Not a hit

"TANGLED" (2010)

- Had been in the works for more than 10 years - Story feels like a mashup of Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Road to El Dorado - Heroine is the least interesting character going on - Nice animation - Strange that there's the group of thugs which are really just a big pack of sissys, won't say they're gay but he knits, he bakes cupcakes etc. - Better at CG, not as good as Pixar counterparts

The Parks and TV

- Had someone designing what he was initially going to call Mickey Mouse Park - Used TV to finance Disneyland - ABC was one of the three networks that were essentially all of TV - Other producers and studios were running from TV, Walt realized he had an enormous library of cartoons that could be profitable in TV - Made a deal with ABC - 1954 Broke ground on Disneyland in Anaheim - In October of that year his Disneyland show premiered on TV, huge hit - The next year The Mickey Mouse Club premiered, also a huge hit - Showed old Disney cartoons, had new animation for it, serials with live action - Enormously successful partnership between Disney and ABC - Disney became rich for the first time, never cared about money except for what he could do with it - Mark Davis switched from animation to designing rides for a lot of the parks

"SHREK" (2001)

- Huge hit - Spoofed storylines of Disney fairytales - Animation not as good as Pixars, but definitely started a franchise - Characters purposely cartoony

"PETER PAN" (1953)

- In and out of production since the early 30's - Cut out a lot of hallmarks of the stage play - No "clap your hands if you believe in fairies" - Personified tinkerbell, not just a light - This Peter Pan an all-American boy type much more so than the british boy in the stage play - Beautifully animated, characterization beautifully acted - Not breaking a whole lot of new ground as the Big Five did

Bob Cannon

- Interested in motion, time, rhythm, saw animation akin to ballet - Aversion to conflict, at times created problems "GERALD MCBOING-BOING" (1950) - Began as a poem by Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) - Minimal backgrounds, way characters move through space that gives it dimmensionality - Clever, charming, using animation in ways we haven't seen before - Won Oscar for best animated short

"LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW" (1949)

- Interesting work with Bom Brones, big burly farmer - Big burly male, unlike princes in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty - Most interesting part is the part with the Headless Horseman - Both scary and funny, interesting balance to maintain that they do well - Lots of comedy coming out of the characters and their movements

"SAMURAI CHAMPLOO"

- Japanese anime series directed by Shinichirō Watanabe - Effective storytelling

Abstract Animation

- Presenting an idea through pure, abstract visuals that gives the viewer an a sense that they've seen an idea presented, developed and solved

Limited Animation

- Realized you couldn't move flat Picasso characters the same way you move round characters - Limited animation: movement stylized, fewer drawings, chose which drawings they used very carefully

John Hubley

- Uses contrast, shades, interested in textures - So interested in what was next occasionally grew sloppy about finishing projects "ROOTY TOOT TOOT" (1951) - Stylized design and movement - First film to credit an African American for a film's score - Nothing sloppy, simple or casual about this animation - Color handled not for realism but for emotion

"WRECK-IT RALPH" (2012)

- Very much like the beginning of Toy Story

John and Faith Hubley

- John had been at Disney, leader of the strike, leader at UPA - John and wife Faith won 3 Oscars, 4 more nominations, raft of festival prizes - Despite critical acclaim films not necessarily commercial successes - 1952 Began work on feature adaptation of Finian's Rainbow "FINIAN'S RAINBOW" (1968) - Had amazing cast lined up that included Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald - Film fell apart, largely because of John being blacklisted - John a restless creative figure, always wanted to push animation farther - Influences were people like Picasso, Matisse, strong tie to jazz "MOONBIRD" (1959) - Graphics innovative, so is the sound - Up until this point if you had a child character an adult would play the part and pretend to sound like a kid - They recorded the sounds of their own children playing - Feel the warmth in these films, feel a connection to their characters that was sometimes missing from UPA - Not all films as lighthearted, also have films about war, overpopulation - John died, Faith went on to make more films of her own, more graphic meditations, less structure and imagination

"MADAGASCAR" (2005)

- Kicked off their second franchise - A-list voices Dreamworks always went for - Playing with animal characters, more distorted, cartoonier, works better - One of dreamworks best series - Setting up dreamworks style -- one line sitcom writing, kick in the nuts jokes - Animation quite good, quite graphic

"THE JUNGLE BOOK" (1967)

- Last film Disney worked on personally - More so a movie with great animation than a great animated movie - Animation subtle, nuanced, funny, great fun - Movie has nothing to do with Kipling original stories - Animators playing with extravagantly weird steps that King Louis taking - Phil Harris the voice of Baloo - popular performer on night clubs and radios in the 40's, more than 20 years past his time, starting to sound like Grandpa music

"SINBAD" (2003)

- Last hurrah for 2-D - Characters so cool they're just sitting back and observing things, they're so uninvested that we can't be either, the audience doesn't care - Media mix between CG and drawing not terribly good

Late 80's and Early 90's

- Late 80's and early 90's Disney had a series of box office triumphs, reasserting the power of animation to create fantasy on the screen

"HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON" (2010)

- Learned how to use cartoony style of animation in humans to make them more believable - Fiona very waxwork, dummy like, stiff, same with humans in first 2 Toy Stories - By making the humans cartoonier they become more believable and more human - Gave the film feelings and warmth, like nothing Dreamworks had before - Amazing cinematography - How To Train Your Dragon movies about the only films that use 3-D as part of storytelling, makes flying sequences that much more magical - Myazaki big influence on this film

"BACK IN ACTION" (2003)

- Looney Tunes live action animation combination - Terrible live action, wonderful animation - Eric Goldberg (Genie in Aladdin) did animation

"HOCKEY HOMICIDE" (1945)

- Mickey's rank had fallen, more of a dull character - Most shorts they did were Donald's or Goofy's - Goofy became increasingly popular - Fun but also much more aggressive in humor than what we've typically seen from Disney

"THE PRINCE OF EGYPT" (1998)

- Odd choice for an animated debut film - Dreamworks went to a great deal of trouble to try and separate themselves from Disney - Instead wanted something very different - Up until this time Disney had dictated that when you drew an animated head the eyes were ⅔ of the way down, and mouth ⅓ of the way up - Stretched that measure so that their faces didn't look like Disney faces - Stylized movement - Powerfully staged, dramatic use of lighting, color - Skillful animation

"HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME" (1996)

- Odd choice for animated film - Kwazimoto isn't monstrous, more so cute - Happy ending - Give him sidekicks who are the first Disney sidekicks to give the hero bad advice - Afraid of the story they're telling, went to enormous amounts of money to build Renaissance Paris -- juxtapose that with Tex Avery jokes - Unsure if they're spoofing this or trying to depict a serious story

"CINDERELLA" (1950)

- Once again gambled everything on a single film - Like Snow White based on a brief fairytale that allowed them to develop the side characters in their own way - Enormously popular story - Shot pretty much everything involving the human characters in live action, used as reference for animation - Discovered that human emotions are much subtler - Looking at everything frame by frame they learned a lot - Feels earthbound, camera placed like it would be for live action whereas what's special about animation is that animation can do anything - Cinderella the most sophisticated early female character, does much more than Snow White or Sleeping Beauty - Enormous hit grossing million of dollars, saved the studio - Used story written by Charles Perrault - Perrault added the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach and the mice horses, and the glass slippers - In other versions of the story Cinderella asks for things, a whole variety of things that are granted to her as wishes, in this version Cinderella doesn't ask for things -- she deserves them and that's why she gets them - Disney's first unqualified success since Snow White

"BEAUTY AND THE BEAST" (1991)

- Original fairy tale very claustrophobic - Passive beauty became the intelligent feistier Belle - Older than Ariel, more intelligent, intellectual - Howard Ashman who suggested that this is Beast's story more than Belle's, like Pinocchio Beast is a complex character, the real villain is his own nature - "He conquers who conquers himself" - In animated films we tend to equate beauty and love, the idea that you could find a beautiful soul within a hideous exterior was something we hadn't seen before - One of the most widely told fairy tales, told in almost every culture - Central romance very powerful, now for the first time we had a beast who was really a beast - He's an animal in a way that was never possible before - Enchanted objects provide same background commentary and comedic relief that the dwarves do in "Snow White" - Touched people in a way nothing else has before or since - Advanced filmmaking - Nominated for Best Feature

"THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER" (1990)

- Overlooked - Disney's first animated sequel - Brought Bernard and Bianca back - Very good animation, interesting camera work - Not a terribly good movie - Interesting technically because it was the first movie made with Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) - Allows for more complex cinematography - Computer created special effects, didn't have to print out and draw - Made possible great multiplane shots, lots of layers

Pixar

- Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group - Became Pixar in 1986 with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs - Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 for 7.4 billion dollars

"WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT" (1988)

- Really excited people about animation, reminded them of the cartoons they loved growing up - Animation live action combinations go way back to early days of silent animation - Characters here interact more closely and intimately than they ever had before - Said they didn't want to make a film that looked anything like previous live action animations - Wanted the camera to be moving like contemporary cinema - Shot the live action, blew up frames of it and artists matched their drawings to the live action - Extensive use of puppets - Early time in the use of computer effects, had to draw shadows and highlights separately and print and draw them all - As difficult as technical materials were, legal complications even more restrictive, had to get rights for the characters - One character who they couldn't get the rights for: Felix the Cat

"HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2" (2014)

- Show dragon and characters have aged, difficult to do - Skillful animation and filmmaking - Complicated emotions showing complicated relationship between 2 characters but it's believable

"TRON" (1982)

- Significant without being good - First film to make extensive use of computer graphics - No story - 3-D graphics - Designs are snazzy, hired really good people -- Mobias, French graphic novel artist - Feels new, modern, different, exciting - Got a lot of attention in the press

Wendy Tilby

- Started out as student of Caroline Lead - Uses same paint on glass technique "STRINGS" (1991) - No words, done entirely in mime - challenging, experimental technique - New theme: unexpected romance - Idea that different kinds of people might find romance unexpectedly

"THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS" (1993)

- Stop-motion using puppets - Traditionally stop-motion is dull cinematically, the animation itself is so tricky the camera gets locked down, static shots - This was an exciting movie in terms of cinematography and direction - Doing things we had never seen stop motion do before - Jack in the cemetery - acting very subtle, very complex emotions, camera is panning around him, something no one had done before - Blending 2 and 3-D animation - Amazing piece of animation, grows out of "Vincent" - Not a perfect film, too many songs which are not terribly memorable, but excellent in terms of visual imagination - Part of it directed by Sellek -- came out of class at Cal Arts, amazing group of talent

John Canemaker

- Student of John and Faith Hubly "THE MOON AND THE SON" (2005) - Won Oscar in 2005 - About troubled relationship with his father - Very personal kind of filmmaking, one that deals with things we don't usually associate with animation - Semi-abstract shapes, stylized drawing shows Hubley influence

Simon Tofield

- Successful British commercial director - Had to learn to teach himself flash - Did an animation based on his cat "SIMON'S CAT" (2008) - Never more than one background, simple animation - Carefully observed, well-timed

"YELLOW SUBMARINE" (1968)

- Super hip graphics - Music was the Beatles when they were new "NOWHERE MAN" - No storyline, doesn't make any sense - Great musical numbers, incredibly imaginative animation - Still photos, printed live action, cut out live action - Doesn't make sense, but no one had seen anything like it before

"TARZAN" (1999)

- Superb animation of the characters, but you can tell the story has been pulled together from different versions because it never coheres - 3 levels of animation I. Tarzan and great apes -- incredibly animated, powerful 2. Cartoonier characters -- Jane, her father 3. Elephant that looks like a straight cartoon - Disney so many people they had to keep busy, number of executives was proliferating -They would put a film into production before a story was completely worked out

"THE ARISTOCATS" (1970)

- Take no story and don't tell it - Strange mish mash, set in turn of the century France but have Phill Harris singing jazz 20 years before Jazz came to France - Big number is "Everybody Wants to Be a Cat" - A good song can be an extremely effective way of storytelling - A bad song stops the story in it's tracks - Ask what do you know about the story and the characters in the beginning of the song, and what do you know after - Catchy, but does nothing to tell you about the characters or the story - Features appalling Asian stereotype despite it being the 70's - Leads into second harp song that also does no storytelling - Although these artists are 50 and 60 years old, it's the 70's and they're trying to be hip, saying groovy, green lamp shadows - not convincing

"MINDSCAPE" (1976)

- The pin screen: technique invented by Russian artist in the 1930's - A vertical square with 100,000 pins pressed into steel, shed light on pins, how far deep you pressed the tiny pins created tiny shadows - Directed by Jacques Drouin - Film looks like charcoal drawing, all created by pushing individual pins to create shadows to build a pattern, take a picture, alter them slightly then take another picture

"VINCENT" (1982)

- Tim Burton film - Incorporates stop motion - Overflowing with imagination, new ideas, new visions - Burton's style of animation so different Disney didn't know what to do with it - Didn't even enter it for the Oscar animated short that year

"THE LION KING" (1994)

- Troubled production, for a long time Disney was working on Pocahontas as main feature, meanwhile Lion King was seen as B film - High point is the stampede that ends the first act - One of the animators Rubin Akino did one step cycle of a wildebeest running, spent a year creating the stampede that has almost a thousand wildebeests in it, used CG to keep the animals running and create more characters than one could possibly draw - Powerful scene - Agonized over if they should actually kill off Mufasa, first time something like that happened since Bambi - Death needed dramatically for the story - Film was the pinnacle of this era, set a box office record that would stand for 10 years until it was eventually dethroned by Finding Nemo

"ATLANTIS" (2001)

- Trying to create Disney version of anime style film, Didn't work - Angular, potato feet on skinny legs, turning characters was difficult - So much of the storytelling is inept - Overkill -- villain character never shuts up, a million things going on in the background taking away from key fight, no set up or reason for what happens

"THE TELL-TALE HEART" (1953)

- UPA wanted to avoid "Disney cute" and "Warner Bros. funny formula" - Interested in artsy, graphic, minimal - Not a lot of movement, a lot of moving the camera over still artwork - Spoofing blinds and shadows from "Bird's Anonymous" - Effective, moody, unsettling animation - UPA artists influenced by Batiste, Picasso, Dali, The New Yorker cartoonists, Jazz - Wanted to infuse the spontaneity and energy of Jazz in their work

"FANTASIA 2000" (1999)

- Wanted to do a remake of Fantasia, but the old film didn't fit against the new cutting edge technology - Music they used extremely tame "Rhapsody in Blue" - Definite personal style - American music - The one sequence the artists fought to work on because it was so much fun to animate these characters - They're graphic, linear

"LILO AND STITCH" (2002)

- Warmth, pleasure - The characters speak for themselves as you get to know them, not one-liners - First time Disney dealt with relationship between siblings - Broken family, in need of something that they found - Yani feels like a real female character -- has thighs and hips - The fight between the sisters -- good, solid storytelling

"ALICE IN WONDERLAND" (1951)

- Was working on it for 20 years - Alice is a classic of English literature, you read not so much for it's storyline but because the prose is brilliant - Original illustrations so married to that text, can't really separate them - Animators complained that on this film Walt didn't really know what he wanted - He mixed parts of Looking Through the Glass and Wonderland - Film suffers from sequence-itis, you remember sections of it, but it breaks into parts that you remember rather than remembering the story as a whole cohesive narrative - Mad hatter's tea party and the cheshire cat very memorable - But Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dummer don't work well - A lot of Alice in Wonderland is spoofs of victorian literature children were made to read, Carol making fun of that - Alice not treated well by other characters, not a particularly interesting character - Alice has to be real which isn't as fun, can't play with her in the same way animators can exaggerate the hatter and the hare - Not a big success, not well-liked by critics

"THE FOX AND THE HOUND" (1981)

- Young artists had a much bigger part - Last movie the old animators worked on - Story weak, padded - First real animation by Glen Keen - Not the greatest film Disney has ever made but it feels modern, much more in keep with contemporary film making - Certain power in the animation

"ERSATZ"

- Yugoslavian animator first animator to make a foreign film that won best animated short - Greatly simplified, minimal, inflatable shapes that undermine and transform nature and reality - Clever film, very clearly a minimal film, as simple in designs as you can get - Clear influence of UPA - Passed artistic torch on to new generation whose films are funnier, more western in tone, dark side to humor