Tagged: animation

Review: ‘Red Colored Elegy’ by Seiichi Hayashi

red-colored-elegy-8097679Red Colored Elegy
By Seiichi Hayashi
Drawn & Quarterly, July 2008, $24.95

[[[Red Colored Elegy]]] is like no other manga you’ve ever seen, a blast of pop art- and film-inspired storytelling from 1971 that was hugely influential to a generation of Japanese youth but has never been published in English until now. It’s like the American underground comics of the same era in being a break from the mainstream comics of its place and era, but unlike them – and unlike anything else I’ve seen before [[[RAW]]] in the ‘80s – in its style and visual language.

Sachiko Yamaguchi and Ichiro Nishimoto are a young couple, both connected to the manga/anime world, living together in Tokyo but unsure of what to do with their lives, in the way of all restless young people everywhere. Ichiro wants to be an artist of some kind: he abandoned painting when he couldn’t make a living at it, and quits an animation job to work on a graphic novel that he can’t sell. Sachiko is a tracer for another animation company; she has only the ambitions of a girl in a story by a man: to get married, to have kids, to run a house, to have a life.

(more…)

Online Animation: An Olympic Train Wreck?

  • News
  • August 7, 2008

Cartoonist / animator / musician Joe Fournier has been doing some sweet stuff online, including this clever black-and-white cartoon about Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics… something about a… train wreck?

Joe’s illustrations have appeared in all sorts of places – Playboy, Forbes, Premiere, and all sorts of newspapers – and he plays a vital role in the burgeoning online animation field. His cartoons have been seen on the Sci-Fi Channel, at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and the National Gallery of Art.

It’s good stuff. Check him out. 

Stan Lee and Hioryuki Takei’s “ULTIMO” Manga

  • News
  • August 6, 2008

Attention, true believers! Next month’s issue of manga magazine Shonen Jump will feature the premiere of Stan Lee and Hioryuki Takei’s Ultimo, which was announced back in April during New York Comic Con.

While the series is old news for readers in Japan (the issue has already been out for a few months over there), North American readers will get their chance to pick up a copy of the debut story in September.

Here’s what to expect from the series, according to the press release (which is posted after the jump):

High above Farmless City, citizens are stunned by the sudden appearance of two floating figures. Are they human boys, monolithic robots, or something much more strange? As the battle ensues between them, destruction and devastation falls on the hapless city. One figure is Vice, and seems to be as evil as his name implies. The other is Ultimo, intent on trying to stop Vice from wreaking more havoc. But who are Vice and Ultimo really? Where did they come from? A new mystery begins with the fate of the world possibly hanging in the balance!

My favorite part of the PR? The quote from Stan Lee about the project that is so very, well… Stan Lee. Check it out:

“Wow! This is just what I’ve been waiting for!” says an excited Stan Lee. “For the very first time I’m able to create superheroes in the fantastic Japanese manga style thanks to my lucky partnership with the great Hiroyuki Takei. What a kick it’ll be to join Hiroyuki-san in offering brand new, action packed stories to an army of readers in both the Eastern and Western worlds!”

Can’t you just hear him saying it in your head? Keep an eye out for the September 2008 issue of Shonen Jump for the first chapter of Ultimo. (more…)

Foo Fighters to Develop ‘The Amazing Joy Buzzards’ Music?

  • News
  • June 13, 2008

The Amazing Joy Buzzards has been an under-the-radar favorite of mine for quite a while now, so it was nice to see the series’ name appear on this week’s list of releases. Apparently, Image Comics is publishing a new "director’s cut" of the first volume of the superhero rock band’s adventures, titled "Here Come the Spiders."

Matt Brady has posted an interview with Mark Andrew Smith and Dan Hipp, who write and provide the art for the series, respectively.

During the interview, Smith drops this piece of information that made me even more fond of the series — and its (potential) future:

We’re always quiet on what the Amazing Joy Buzzards sound like because every reader plugs their own favorite band into the spot. But soon we might have an Amazing Joy Buzzards cartoon in the works with the Foo Fighters involved developing their sound so eventually for film and animation they will actually have a sound if all goes well.

Foo Fighters, eh? Here’s the part when I say, "Rock on."

For the rest of the interview, head over to Brady’s website.

[UPDATE – June 19, 2008: Mark Andrew Smith recently contacted ComicMix to clarify that nothing is finalized regarding the Foo Fighters or the band’s involvement with anything related to Amazing Joy Buzzards. The text of the interview on Matt Brady’s website has been edited to remove any reference to the band’s involvement, as the terms of any agreement with Foo Fighters or other entities are still under discussion. We have preserved the excerpt of the original interview here, in the interest of maintaining transparency. -RM]

Review: ‘Popeye’ on DVD

Next January, E.C. Segar’s cartoon creation Popeye turns 80. That’s a good run, especially for a character who still wasn’t showing many signs of his age in the 2004 TV special Popeye’s Voyage: The Quest for Pappy.

While Popeye might not have aged over the years, he certainly has changed, which is clearly evident in the contrast between two new DVD collections of [[[Popeye]]] cartoons recently released from Warner Bros. Video.

The first, as mentioned in Michael H. Price’s latest column here at ComicMix is Popeye the Sailor 1938-1940 Vol. 2 ($34.98), which contains 31 remastered theater shorts. Created by the Fleischer family’s studio, these are some of the earliest animated Popeye adventures.

One can quickly see why the shorts became a phenomenon, as big or bigger than Disney’s toons (pointed out in an excellent documentary on the Fleischers that’s included). Popeye and the gang are essentially Vaudevillians, pinwheeling through one pratfall after another.

While that means there’s not much narrative richness and little language-based humor (most the characters are unintelligible), the Fleischers were masters of the gags, setting them up as curvaceous rows of dominoes, one slapping down another in orchestrated patterns.

(more…)

‘Batman: Gotham Knight’ Trailer Posted

  • News
  • April 15, 2008

A trailer just came online for this summer’s Batman: Gotham Knight, the animated DVD accompanying the Dark Knight release. It’ll be released on July 8.

In short, it looks amazing, with some intense action and very slick animation. But don’t take my word for it, watch for yourself.

(via Blog@)

$100 Million Earmarked for Chinese Comics/Animation

  • News
  • January 26, 2008

The People’s Daily Online is reporting that the Chinese province of Guangzhou has announced plans to spend nearly $100 million over the next four years on developing the local comics and animation industry.

According to the report, more than 120 comics and animation companies are located in Guangzhou, generating nearly a fifth of the nation’s total revenue in these industries. The plan would devote 180 million yuan (approx. $24.9 million) each of four years to development of domestic comics and animation projects, with 50 million yuan directed toward nurturing, recognizing and promoting new talent, and the rest toward new "development parks" for companies.

"There is a promising market for the comics and animation industry as the city has introduced a series of preferential policies to support and develop the industry," Fan Xu, director of the Guangzhou press, publication, and radio and television (copyright) bureau, said earlier this week.

 

Slightly Belated 110th Birthday, Hans und Fritz

  • News
  • December 13, 2007

Our favorite role models, The Katzenjammer Kids, turned 110 years old yesterday. In case you weren’t aware, the newspapter strip is still being published each Sunday.

Created by Rudolph Dirks and first appearing in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal on December 12, 1897, the strip was among the very first to be regularly published and endure. It also helped establish the language and format of the comic strip and, therefore, the comic book.

The Katzenjammers also helped establish intellectual property copyright and trademark law. Dirks left Hearst to work for the even-scivvier Joe Pulitzer and his New York World, taking his characters with him. Hearst sued. The courts ultimatey ruled that Dirks had the right to continue his feature, but so did Hearst. However, only Hearst owned the name "The Katzenjammer Kids." (more…)

Spike and Mike, Sick and Twisted

  • News
  • August 3, 2007

Warning: Not necessarily office-friendly words abound.

Unless you go to an animation festival, and you should go to an animation festival, the only way to see independent animation is to look out for the traveling cartoon programs.  For a while it was Fans Only.  We clustered in this or that museum auditorium for the International Tournee of Animation, now defunct.

 

This was the traveling hothouse for the short cartoon, where animation lived on as an art form, not a commercial proposition.  The films came mainly from studios run by a government or a college mixed in with a few made by individuals.  And the individuals almost always had a grant.  Civilians in the audience were always surprised that at least half of these pictures are serious, not made to make you laugh; quite often a meditation on unpleasant things or a non-linear succession of disturbing images.

 

That’s show biz.

 

Then came Spike and Mike.  They were into animation, going to a festival or a traveling program now and again.  As showmen, they were dismayed that only, say, 20 percent of these films, on a bad day, would be what you would call entertainment.  They were all worthy of contemplation by the prepared, patient mind, but keep ‘em in their seats, keep ‘em hollering for more?  No.

 

Spike and Mike made change.  Their Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation began with a core of cartoons from the museum shows that were fast, stupid jokes or slightly slower jokes that were quite filthy.  They packed the rest of the program with other funny or gross films too low for the museum crowd.  They marketed it to regular theaters, to be shown as a regular attraction, not the weekend midnight slot.

 

They’ve been at it so long they have created their own sub-genre (and I certainly don’t mean than in a derogatory way, unless that would make you more likely to attend, then yes, I mean “sub” in the most demeaning, degrading sense possible).  Spike and Mike is now a learning tool, like a video game, that teaches you how to do something very specific, in this case to make a cartoon that can get past the gauntlet.

 

Consider if you will an audience.  An audience of mostly men, like what you used to see at the San Diego Comic-Con.  If the center wasn’t dry, a lot more of these people would be working on a cheap high, a perfect attitude for the gauntlet.  They’ve been whipped up by having free t-shirts thrown at the crowd.  They say, “Fuck Stoners,” or “I Fucked a Backstreet Boy;” a few are kind of rude.  Then they’re ready for the gauntlet.

(more…)

UPA: Inventing the Future

  • News
  • August 3, 2007
“…To anyone dismayed by the artlessness of television’s ‘limited animation,’ it is difficult to realize that the trend began on the highest note of artistic endeavor.”

Leonard Maltin, in Of Mice and Magic

 

three-horned-flink-4681615Nothing pleases writers and readers trying to understand the arts like a clean break.  Styles and periods have a messy way of melting into each other at each end as artists and audiences push and pull, sometimes for decades, before the old is no longer visible, and the new is just what is.  Animation readers and writers are glad they have UPA.  While Disney’s “trusted” artists were away trying to draw every leaf in the Amazon, the radicals back home were working up a way to suggest that jungle with a line and two areas of different color, maybe not even green.  “Illusion of Life” was a great style for a walk through a landscape. To race to the moon a method as different from walking as rocket science was needed.

 

As impressionism came along when the machine age was changing the rules.  The vision we now call UPA in honor of the studio most identified with its art and politics came along, conveniently, and inevitably as the Second World War.  Walt may have thought it was the Army contracts or the tentacles of the Comintern that were the main changes he was witnessing in his line of business.  If you look at what ended up on the screen, the big change was in the way people began to draw.  Gone was the realism left over from the nineteenth century.  Finally the air of the modernists was let in.

 

Walt loved the older styles and pursued them as far as possible.  Producers who tried to compete head to head in Illusion of Life all went bankrupt.  His visual statement was so coherent and powerful that his is the only name of the movie pioneers still in common usage, and standing for both a style and a personality.  Illusion of Life and Walt’s dedication to it can’t be denied or explained away.

 

When people talk about UPA today, as they did at a San Diego Comic-Con panel last week, it is impossible not to mention Walt Disney early and often.  You can’t talk about up without down.  Walt Disney, more than he ever imagined or intended, stands today for the visual establishment, going back to the French Academy and their yearly, binary selection for the salon.  Those chosen had it made, those excluded might as well go back to painting signs.  For some time in animation it was: do it Disney’s way, fail, watch your business dwindle away to nothing.

 

At the core of UPA were artists who had made the cut at Disney but would push the envelope artistically and politically in ways that ended with their exile from his studio.  For some there was a disconnect between the glorious product and the rigid production protocols, which fit Disney’s personality perfectly but ran counter to many other people’s ideas of logic or fairness.  Some people had more to say than could be said in a studio with someone else’s name on it.  Some people were just ready to move on.

 

Leonard Maltin nails it:  “If there hadn’t been a UPA, someone would have had to invent it.” (more…)

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