Links Of Interest - Prelude to Holiday Shenanigans Edition!

Man, there's a ton to catch up on here.

* - First off, all the cool artists are doing it so everybody reading this draw and submit a happy partying creature for the Party Bueno project!  The deadline's November 30'th so get to it.  Details and submission instructions here.  My little guy is Party Member 359!

* - Second off, go download All Your Yesterdays if you haven't already.  Make a donation and download lots of copies!  Give them to all your impossible-to-buy-for people this holiday season!

* - Third off, I hate being kind of a shill but TODAY ONLY if you use the promotional code BLKFRIDAY983 over at my Zazzle Store, you can get half-off mugs and t-shirts! Go get an Awesome Overload shirt for all your other impossible-to-buy-for friends!

* - Fourth off, Mental Floss managed to score an interview with Bill Watterson!?

* - Fifth off, Dr. Bob Bakker is blogging for the Huston Museum of Natural Science and wrote a lovely tribute to the classic "World We Live In" issue of Life.

* - Sixth off, now we know what Deinocheirus looked like!  Now we know what Deinocheirus looked like!  NOW WE KNOW WHAT DEINOCHEIRUS LOOKED LIKE!!!???!!!

* - Seventh off (I will stop doing this), I spent much of the summer catching up with the lovely Tobolowsky Files podcast and lo and behold there is a new episode fresh on the feed.

* - A sobering message from DinoGoss: We're all drawing dinosaur feet wrong.  Probably.

* - If you met R. L. Stine, would you think to ask him about his involvement in the Nick Jr. show "Eureeka's Castle"?  Well, thankfully, the Onion AV Club did, and everyone is the better for it.

* - The entire series of essays from the Dissolve's Movie of the Week features for both "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" and "Kirikou and the Sorceress" are terrific, but my favorite parts were the staff's reminiscing of favorite strange movies discovered at the video store and favorite unusual animated features.

* - And for fans of the late, lamented "My Year/World of Flops" series at the AV Club, Nathin Rabin's new series "Forgotbusters" (basically, movies we all assumed were flops but made the top 25 of their year) is outstanding, especially the "Space Jam" and "Jack" entries.

* - Danny Horn of ToughPigs traveled to Japan in search of unique Muppet-related stuff and discovered, among other things, that somebody at Universal Studios Japan learned about Duffy the Disney Bear and evidently thought, "We need something just like that -- but how can we make it more unintentionally unsettling?"

* - Forbes ruminated on the long, strange history of Dreamworks animation.

* - I got a serious Where the Wild Things Are vibe from this Hyperbole and a Half comic.

* - The way Disney markets its animated films these days is pretty confusing, but at least it isn't as insane as this promotional song for "Robin Hood".

* - Tony DiTerlizzi reminisced and posted a gallery of the Joanne Scribner cover art for the Dell Yearling editions of Beverly Cleary's books.

* - And Tim Brayton finished his review of every single direct-to-video Disney sequel and managed to come out the other end (mostly) in one piece!  All of his Disney reviews, including those for the sequels, are listed here.

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Sketch of the Day! I thought, "Hey, everybody else is drawing Deinocheirus, why aren't I?"

Kinda-Sorta-Semi-Annual Animated Trailer Post!

Got a pretty crazy variety of animated films coming out in the next year and a half. Let's judge their trailers in rough chronological order.



One of the most unusual trailers I have to share today is "Arjun the Warrior Prince". Apparently Disney has been doing several co-productions with animation studios in India and this is one such film. Sadly, there's no indication whether or not there will be an American release. And there are no subtitles, if that bothers you, but it's pretty easy to figure what's going on.



There are four "Ice Age" movies now. And they have gone long past the point where they should have asked themselves, "WHY are they even set in the Ice Age anymore?"



"ParaNorman" is from the studio that brought us "Coraline", and the stop-motion animation looks similarly jaw-dropping. The fact that it reminds me of "The Goonies" and "Monster Squad" is a plus. Also, it means I am old.



By far the most interesting thing about "Hotel Transylvania" is the fact that Genndy Tartakovsky is involved. And if you are familiar with his work, it'd be basically impossible to tell.



"Frankenweenie" is an extended dance remix of an old Tim Burton Disney short, this time in stop-motion and, in so many words, more Tim Burton.



"Despicable Me" was a nice surprise, and I'm curious to see where they take the characters from there. Not sure if I like this "Here's more! More of that one thing everybody liked!" approach the teaser takes.



Some years ago, there was talk of an animated adaptation of William Joyce's The Leaf Men and the Brave, Good Bugs. Apparently, that mutated into Blue Sky's "Epic". The teaser is a cavalcade of mood whiplash (frisson all up and down my arms and then BAM, goofy-ass chatterbox snail), but at least this is guaranteed to be better than that other "Epic".

And finally, here are the four teasers for "Monsters University"!

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Sketch of the Day!

Thoughts on "Waking Sleeping Beauty"

Disney has produced many behind-the-scenes documentaries before. They are often very informative, but fluffy pieces packed with smiling talking heads and footage of animators happily working and maybe a segment showing early concept art or rough animation or something. Granted, I am not saying they are bad; they are often fascinating. "The Making of 'Beauty and the Beast'", which ran on the Disney Channel years and years ago, is fairly typical:

When I watched such specials as a child, I thought it must be great fun to work at Disney. Animators like Glen Keane and Andreas Deja were the stars of the movie just as much as -if not more so than- Robbie Benson and Page O'Hara. Plus, they had a studio right in Disney World! How awesome would it be to make Disney animated features right in Disney World? Well. If you grew up with the Bronze Age of the Disney Animated Canon and want to know what happened *behind* behind the scenes, you owe it to yourself to watch "Waking Sleeping Beauty". The best way to learn what was really happening at Disney Feature Animation during the Bronze Age is straight from the mouths of the animators who worked there. Produced by Don Hahn, "Waking" is a fascinating and incredibly poignant look at the ten years between 1984, when the animation studio was just about to go belly-up, and 1994, right before the record-setting release of "The Lion King". I'm stating the time-span this movie covers right away to forewarn you: This movie is amazing and you should watch it, but overall it feels like the prologue to a much longer and equally incredible story. "Waking" ends before Michael Eisner left (or, depending on who you believe, was kicked out), before Jeffrey Katzenberg kissed off for DreamWorks, and before the full impact of Frank Wells' tragic death became really clear. Walt's poor nephew Roy E. Disney must have felt that he was left alone to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic before John Lasseter pulled Disney animation out of it's long, long Dork Age. Part of me really, REALLY wants to hear that story (really, just what thought-process leads to something like "Home on the Range" or "Chicken Little" or all those dang-blasted DTV sequels?) I suppose I can wait. Remember how I said that it is a genuine miracle that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" even exists, and an even greater miracle that everyone working on that movie, which had so many things that could go wrong, just knocked it out of the park? Turns out that's pretty much the case with each and every Bronze Age Disney Animated Canon movie. "Part of Your World" was nearly cut from "The Little Mermaid" (as an aside, one of the most moving scenes in the DVD special features is archival footage of Jodi Benson and Howard Ashman singing the song together -- and then she nails it in the first recording). Both "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin" had to be scrapped and rebooted entirely because they had such awful pacing problems in their first iterations. And the film -way too briefly- covers one of my favorite ever surprising pieces of Disney trivia: After "Beauty and the Beast" won the Golden Globe for Best Musical/Comedy Film, and received a surprise nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the highest-ups at Disney demanded more serious Oscar-baiting films. Thereafter, "Pocahontas" became the movie *everyone* wanted to work on -- but they let the other animation team finish their silly little movie about animals singing Elton John songs. Which went on to be the highest-grossing animated Disney film of all time. One of the coolest things about "Waking Sleeping Beauty" is the format. It's not people sitting down and giving interviews; though we do get lots and lots of narration from all the animators. Instead, we see all the archival footage like home movies and photographs and caricatures and other fun stuff we've never had a chance to see before because Disney squirreled it away in the Vault. This alone is worth watching the movie for, though it's odd to recall that Warner Bros. has been making animation documentaries like this for years and years. The aforementioned special features on the DVD are also fascinating (I was especially geeking out over the uncut Studio Tour home movies), and add a great deal more to the story. Now, how likely is it we'll ever see "The Sweatbox"? ---- Festive Thing of the Day! Speaking of Disney, it doesn't really feel like winter until I see Donald and the three nephews' impossibly awesome snow forts. ---- Sketch of the Day! It's hard out here for an artist.

October is... NOT going to be Traditionally Animated Dreamworks Month

Yeah, I'm going to do more blogs about old dinosaur art and other things. Because I have watched the five (only five!?!) hand-drawn animated features by Dreamworks. And, well...

First off, I made the mistake of watching three of them in one night. My dreams -those awful way-too-vivid dreams that leave you more exhausted than you were before you fell asleep - were a blur of weird character designs, pop-composer songs, and random celebrity voices.

I feel as though the Dreamworks "Tradigitals" (their term) are not nearly as interesting as the story behind them. This old, old, old Entertainment Weekly article describes the world in which Dreamworks animation was formed quite well. It's The Land Before Pixar, really, and Jeffry Katzenberg is ready to show up his old bosses at Disney by making the most EPIC animated feature film ever made.

That would be "The Prince of Egypt", and all things considered, it's the only one of these movies that's worth a damn. OK, that sounds mean. It really is every bit as awesome as Katzenberg wanted it to be. There are some moments in it that are among the best pieces of animation ever created. It stayed with me for a long time after viewing and is one of my favorite religious films.

Even so, it suffers from the one problem that brings down each of these movies: They tried way too hard to make this film, "Everything that we assume people loved in 'The Lion King' -- but MORE." And that means more random and distracting celebrity voices, more big damn epic ballads (this movie's Obligatory Disney-Style Oscar-Baiting End-Credits Ballad has Witney Huston and Mariah Carey, which was a huge deal back then), more musical numbers, more action scenes, more big special effects showpieces, and more people falling off of high places. (And it is worth noting here that for the longest time, the Dreamworks/PDI animated films were "Everything that we assume people loved in 'Shrek' -- but MORE." If I ever get around to making my list of "Movies That Are Good But Have A LOT To Answer For", "Shrek" would be almost guaranteed to be at the top of that list.)

Even with these flaws, "Prince of Egypt" is very, very good. It is well worth a revisit if you haven't seen it in a while. The same cannot be said for "Joseph: King Of Dreams"; probably meant to be a follow-up film and dropped onto the direct-to-home-video market instead. It's instantly forgettable aside from the very bizarre casting of Ben Affleck as Joseph.

"The Road to ElDorado" starts out fun. And then it feels more and more like a cute little box stuffed with everything the directors ever pitched during the production. By the end, it just wound up being confusing and annoying. It also shows how quickly something that appears to be a can't-miss premise a few years ago ("Timon and Pumbaa stole the show during 'The Lion King', so why don't we just cut out the boring lead characters and make the cute funny sidekicks the main characters?") can come across as weird and dated.

And that brings us to the movie I dreaded having to watch again for the purpose of this project: "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron". I went ahead and wrote a long review of this beautiful disaster over at The Realm of Madness. Even so, I will sum "Spirit" up with the following macro:



Lastly, we have "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas". It has some fun action scenes. The designs of the monsters are awesome and very creative. I want to say they are by Nicholas Marlet, based upon the sketches that can be viewed in the DVD special features. And there is some fantastic effects animation whenever Eris shows up. And it is otherwise boring as hell, coming across more like a half-hearted "Pirates of the Carribean" cash-in than a movie the studio had real faith in.

So it's hard to decide exactly what to say about Dreamworks' traditionally animated films. I guess I'm glad I watched them all just to say I did.

More Animation Marathons

* - The Chronological Disney Animated Canon

* - Don Bluth Month

* - Dreamworks' "Tradigitals"

* - The Short Animation Blogathon

* - My Summer of Sequels

* - Random 90's Animation

* - The Princess Project

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Sketch of the Day! Bit of a grab bag on this page:

You know, I often wonder what the Olympics were like 1,000 years ago in the land of dragons and vikings...

Yeah. So about those "How to Train Your Dragon" commercials that have so far been ubiquitous during the Winter Olympics.
1) I now no longer want to see this movie. Like, ever. Which is too bad, as I was genuinely intrigued when I read that Chris Sanders was involved.
2) I can tell the announcers hate having to segue from the biathalon or whatever to these commercials.
3) Open letter to Dreamworks. If I ever see a poster or watch a trailer where you remind us that you are the studio that made "Shrek" again, I will... do... *something* ludicrous. Point is, we get it. We know who you are; you can stop reminding us.
4) I read the book How to Train Your Dragon a while back. What the hell book did the writers of this movie read?
5) The dragon is cute. :/

Don't get me wrong; I've been more into the Winter Olympics this year than I have since "Skategate" (ask your mom. Or Wikipedia.) Indeed, most of the commercials they've premiered during the Games have been better than the Superbowl commercials. I love the Coke snowball fight ad.
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I seem to recall that Disney ran an ad or something saying that, if you've never seen "Lost" before, you'll still be able to follow the story. This writer has decided to take this statement on. The result is... it is truly a thing of beauty.
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Sketch Of The day! Yet more Great Backyard Bird Count cuteness!

Unexpected Opportunities.

This helps to illustrate the advantage of being able to schedule when your posts are to be published. While Monday's post was going live, I was waking up sick as a dog, and while Wednesday's post was appearing here, I was getting an x-ray of my torso.
Here's your title significance: Me being the kind of person I am, I naturally asked for a copy of the images. To draw from. Of course.
Now of course I don't want anyone out there to have to get an x-ray; I'm just saying that if you happen to be an artist who's about to get intense about anatomical studies, and if such an opportunity pops up for you, don't be afraid to ask. (Worst case scenario, the radiologists will probably assume it's only the lack of eating talking.) They were nice enough to give me a CD and I have already done a really cool quick sketch based on one of the images of my lower torso.
I'm debating whether to upload it to Flickr. I think it's awesome, and it isn't graphic or anything; not everyone might agree. I can also see where it might be a little too personal (after all, it'd literally be my guts up onscreen for all to see.) I probably will end up not posting it anywhere, but until I decide for sure, have some pretty Unicorns (click for big):

Did anyone else catch "Secrets of the Furious Five" last night? I did, thanks to... channel surfing and finding out that it was on. I can now say that there is a direct-to-DVD animated sequel that I actually like better than the original film. (I'm not too proud to say that Tigress' story made my eyes rain.)
Feederwatch Friday
Eh... not much that I was able to notice, I'm afraid. The storm this weekend might bring more customers.