August 2009
7 posts
The Raven Steals the Light
The Raven Steals the Light is a collection of stories by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst. There are ten stories all about ravens. I have never really read raven myths before, but I found them to be pretty interesting. Ravens and crows are generally seen as pests in our society. They are a little scary looking and loud. They have also been known to kill weak lambs on farms. In mythology they...
Struwwelpeter
Of the stories in Struwwelpeier, I think that Struwwelpeier itself was my favorite. It was short and sweet. I was immediately struck by the peculiarity of the illustration of the cover because I couldn’t tell if he was electrocuted or if his fingers were growing (both turned out to be wrong). I also think it is a great introduction to the stories to come. It sort of puts you in the...
Grimm Fairy Tales
I read several of the Grimm fairy tales from their collection. I found it interesting to read these classic stories that I only knew from Disney movies. I liked seeing the darker side to the fairy tales that are often left out in the movies or more popularized versions of the stories. For instance, in the first tale in their collection The Frog Prince, the frog does not transform until the...
Eric Carle
I read/looked through the book The Art of Eric Carle written and put together by Carle himself. The book is full of writings from other people, including his German and American editors. Perhaps the most interesting part was the photo essay of his process while doing collages. His most famous work is The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has been translated into over 47 languages. His style is...
Edward Gorey
Edward St. John Gorey was born on February 22, 1925 in Chicago, Illinois. After spending a couple of years in the army, Gorey enrolled at Harvard University where he studied French and was roommates with poet Frank O’Hare. After graduating, he worked as an illustrator for Doubleday Publishing in New York City. Known for his dark and sometimes morbid illustrations, Gorey worked on anything...
July 2009
5 posts
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is one of my all time favorite books. It follows the adventures of Milo, a young boy who is bored with his life. When he is going to school, he wants to be going home, when he is going home, he wants to be going to school. Then one day he goes into his room to find a curious phone booth with a rule book and map. He takes his toy car and journeys to a far...
The Graveyard Book
The Graveyard Book, written by Neil Gaiman, follows the story of Nobody Owens who became an orphan when his parents were murdered. Luckily he escaped to the safety of the graveyard. The ghosts grant him Freedom of the Graveyard, which comes with a certain amount of protection from the ghosts and from his guardian Silas. The book focuses on his upbringing in the graveyard, his first adventures...
The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written and illustrated by Brian Selznick, follows the story of orphan, thief, and clock keeper Hugo Cabret. Hugo is the time keeper at a Paris train station; he takes up the position after his uncle disappears. Hugo spends his days fixing up an old automaton his father had been working on before he died. He followed the plans in his father’s old journal and...
Miss Rumphius
Miss Rumphius, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney, is the cute story of the life of Miss Rumphius from childhood to old age. Miss Rumphius learns from her grandfather as a child and he tells her to live by the sea, travel to far a-way lands, and make the world a more beautiful place. So, Miss Rumphius spends her adult life traveling from Islands, to mountains, to deserts, to forests,...
The Girl Who Cried Flowers
The Girl Who Cried Flowers and Other Tales by Jane Yolen is a wonderful collection of 5 of Yolen’s best works. The Girl Who Cried Flowers starts the compilation off; it is a tale of a girl, Olivia who weeps flowers. She is the wonder of the land and people come from all over to get her to make them garlands and bouquets, but all this work means she has to be sad all the time in order to...
April 2009
4 posts
Plympton films I watched
Your Face
25 Ways to Quit Smoking
How to Kiss
Eat
Guard Dog
Guide Dog
Kanye West Heard Em Say music video
Bill Plympton
Bill Plympton was born April 30, 1946, in Portland Oregon. He graduated SVA in 1968 and began doing animated shorts right away, starting with The Great Turn On. Plympton is credited with being the first animator to draw every frame of a feature by themselves. Besides having completed over 26 animated shorts and 5 animated features, he has also published a comic book called The Sleazy Cartoons...
Chuck Jones films I watched
Now Hear This Duck Amuch How the Grinch Stole Christmas Tom and Jerry Collection Often an Orphan The Dot and the Line Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheep Dog
Siggraph 2008
I watched all of the Siggraph animated shorts on the two disks and each time one finished I had decided that was my favorite. They were all so good and impressive. From the second disk I would have to say that my favorites were Tarboy, Chump and Clump, Shatter, and Mauvais Role. On the third disk my favorites were Mister Sandman, Oktapodi, and Jungle Jail. Tarboy is the story of a Grandfather...
March 2009
4 posts
Chuck Jones
Chuck Jones was an animator from early on. His father would bring home pencils and paper from work and Jones would spend hours drawing with them. He graduated from Chouinard Art Institute and immediately started working in the animation industry. While he had several low level jobs, he did gain a lot of experience and met his wife Dorothy Webster while at Ub Iwerks Studio. In 1933, Jones...
Rocky and Bullwinkle's I Watched
Jet Fuel Formula (40 shorts, did not watch all of them) Upsidaisium (36 shorts, did not watch all of them) Rue Britannia (8 shorts) The Three Moosketeers (8 shorts) Painting Theft (6 shorts) Pottsylvania Creeper (6 shorts) Louse on 92nd Street (6 shorts)
Jay Ward
J Troplong Ward was the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle and several other television shows in the mid twentieth century. He was well known for his big personality and silly sense of humor. Everything he created he would stamp as “J-rated” meaning that it had his approval. Ward’s first venture into the world of television animation was with his friend Alex Anderson. Together...
Rocky and Bullwinkle
The television show Rocky and Bullwinkle has been on television for over forty years, loved by countless adults and children around the United States. The show first aired as Rocky and His Friends in 1959 on the ABC network, but moved to NBC in 1961 and became the Bullwinkle Show. The syndicated packages are still played on television today. Originally, the episodes were played in three and a...
February 2009
7 posts
On Tim Burton
Tim Burton grew up in Burbank, California with one younger brother. He describes himself as a peculiar child, who was very imaginative. When he was a teenager he and his brother staged an axe murder in their house which cause the neighbors to call the police. He got a scholarship to Disney’s California Institute of the Arts where he studies character animation. When he left school he got...
Cracking Animation
Cracking Animation, by Peter Lord and Brian Sibley, is like an animator’s bible. The first chapter goes through a brief but thorough history of animation. It begins with things like the Phenakistiscope and the Praxinoscope, which are machines that were built mainly as children’s toys. They take a dozen or so images and by spinning them around an axis, create the illusion of...
More Wallace and Gromit
Nick Park:
Nick Park was born on December 5, 1958. He always had a passion for cartooning and made his first stop-motion short when he was 13 called the Rat and the Bean Stock. In graduate school he began creating the first Wallace and Gromit short, A Grand Day Out. In this short, Wallace and Gromit commit to building a rocket ship because they want to go to the moon to get some of their...
“Gromit, were you a bit peckish in the night?”
– A line I really liked from “A Close Shave”
On Wallace and Gromit
Wallace and Gromit are a classic example of stop-motion clay animation. Wallace, the oblivious inventor, is practically taken care of by his precocious dog and companion Gromit. They have a window washing business, but, of course, Wallace’s true passion is inventing machines. His contraptions are usually unnecessary, but add a level of personality and fun to the films. Although Wallace...
December 2008
1 post
Pixar's First Shorts
Pixar’s first ventures into making animated films began with a series of short films written, directed, and animated by John Lasseter. With his training from CalArts and his experience with Disney, he led the way into character animation with computers. His main concern was that the computer animation not lose the feeling and believability that Disney had. He had a gift with bringer...
November 2008
6 posts
“Character animation isn’t the fact that an object looks like a character...”
– John Lasseter, 1994
Illusion of Life: Disney Animation Overview
As animation progressed into the late 30’s and 40’s, the so called Golden Age of Animation, Walt Disney pushed his team to be more cutting edge and more innovative than anyone else in the business. Disney brought in professors from local colleges to teach anatomy classes and movement drawing. He insisted that the animators go to vaudeville shows to study live action and continually...
October 2008
8 posts
Silly Symphonies + Fantasia
Walt Disney’s early cartoons were captured in a series called Silly Symphonies, which began in 1929. This was the first place that Disney and the Disney animators began to explore the different techniques in the budding art. They were all self contained short stories that brought inanimate objects to life and captured audiences for years. They were a great way for the artists to practice...
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, was the first animation feature film to be produced by Disney. It was an incredible testament to the animators’ talents at Disney studios as well as Walt Disney’s remarkable vision. This is one of the finest examples of character animation in history. While the dwarfs are named after each of their primary feelings, it is easy to...
The 12 Principles of Animation
(From The Illusion of Life) 1. Squash and Stretch: One of the most important discoveries that the original Disney animators made was the concept of squash and stretch. In early animation, there was a “marked rigidity” as the characters moved around and did actions that are not similar to the dynamic movements of real life. By squashing and stretching characters, they were seemingly...
Frank and Ollie
Frank and Ollie Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston were 2 key member of the team Walt Disney named “the 9 old men.” They were the original Disney animators. Frank and Ollie met in college and both pursued art and animation. One of the things that made them both incredible animators is that they were both also amazing character actors, which helped them to plot out how they would...
September 2008
4 posts
“i made ten thousand cartoons,- each one a little bit different from the one...”
– Winsor McCay. I just watched a bunch of his old animations today and they are pretty incredible for having been done entirely by hand (and just his hand) in the early 20th century. It is clear that he had an interest in circus themed animation. For example in Little Nemo in Slumberland he draws...
Who is this Winsor McCay?
When I discussed this independent study with my advisor we decided that the best place to start from would be a with man named Winsor McCay. He did animated short films before anyone else and essentially all on his own. He was a prolific comic strip writer, but preferred to be on the vaudeville stage doing chalk drawings of people in record time. What set McCay apart from his contemporaries at...
The Beginning!
This semester at NYU I am doing an independent study on the history of animation. I decided to start at disney (even though there was some animation around before that) and end at Pixar. Specifically I am going to be looking at character development and style throughout this period. The purpose of this course is for me to learn more about animation in an effort to give myself a better base. I...