It may still technically be summer, but there's a cold chill in the air at night, the pumpkin beers are out, and the Big Party (I refuse to call it iParty because, come on) is stocking it's shelves with Halloween Costumes! Hooray!
I haven't decided on who/what/where I want to be this year. I briefly entertained the idea of somehow assembling a Neytiri costume and... that plan still seems reasonable. Because the officially licensed "Avatar" costumes, to my astonishment and self-kicking lack of camera on hand, look like crap.
I'd like to say that this is some kind of cash-in. That somebody took a generic bodysuit, sewed whatever leftover tails they had lying around to it, and spray-painted the whole thing blue. But no, this thing right here is apparently the official Neytiri costume,and it retails for $72.00.
It's not the most upsetting women's costume available, however. That award would have gone to this little number here. What you are looking at is called the "Sexy Cookie Monster Costume". It is real and I have seen it for myself. It reminded me why this old, old, old Infographic from The Onion is getting less and less funny and more and more horribly prescient every year. However, it isn't the worst. Because in searching for a picture of the Sexy Cookie Monster, I found the worst ever Halloween costume for women. And it is the worst ever, because somebody went ahead and stole The Onion's idea. Ignoring the brain-breaking reality of an actual non-satire real life Sexy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume for now, here are a few new animated film trailers that... broke my mind for other reasons. (You can read previous trailer reviews here.)
And here is the new trailer for Dreamwork's "Megamind", which is, of course, in three-effin'-dee. I wasn't all that excited about and looks... well, it looks like the very definition of "m'eh":
This thing is called "Alpha and Omega", from a brandy-new studio called Crest Animation, and it is -of course- also in three-effin'-dee. I am going to go ahead and pretend that this is, in actuality, "The DeviantArt Movie" (to go along with "The Social Network" "The Facebook Movie":
But really, the only bad things I can say about "Megamind" and "Alpha and Omega" is that they suffer from lack of imagination. Uninspired animation, boring music choices (it says a lot that the music cue at the 1:50 minute mark of the "A&O" clip made me groan instead of cheer), and generally reminding me of older, better films. And I say that because this next trailer is for "Quantum Quest". It is "a sci-fi action film set in a scientifically accurate rendering of our solar system in 3-D stereoscopic (that) blends computer animation with billions of dollars of fantastic images captured during recent NASA space explorations". While I hate celebrity voices as a selling point in an animated film, it is worth noting that the promotional material proudly boasts that the cast includes "two Captain Kirks, two Darth Vaders, two Jedi Knights, and Neil Armstrong" OMG WTF LOLers!!! So with all this in mind, it's kind of a tragedy that "Quantum Quest" looks like this:
The Maine Wildlife Park in Gray, Maine is another of my absolute favorite places to sketch. There's no real substitute for sketching from life. Especially when you run into a good model like this porcupine:
And this moose:
The Park is run by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and started out as a facility for raising game birds like pheasants and turkeys. Formerly known as the Gray Game Farm, it expanded it's purpose to rehabilitating injured animals of all species.
Today, the Wildlife Park serves as a shelter and rehabilitation center for wild animals who, for some reason or other, cannot survive outside the zoo. Representative species of most New England mammals are one of the Park's highlights. (Though you will probably run into some Hazards of Sketching In Public, like I did. See the quote I overheard in the page below. And the dreaded All Animals are Domesticated trope affects this park like no other...)
A few days ago, I had a teeny tiny flight-capable maniraptor with a beak sized and shaped very like an embroidery needle who subsists on a diet of straight-up sugar water hovering and feeding just a few inches from my squishy, easily-injured big clumsy primate eyeballs. It looked like this:
(I apologize for the blurriness, but it's a wonder I got this photograph at all. If you look close, you can see the very beginnings of the namesake sparkly red throat feathers, meaning this little guy is a young male.) Yes, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds are showing up en mass at my feeders. I had just one up during much of the summer, but I now have three, of varying sizes and shapes. They're all the standard kind you can get for under ten bucks at Evil Big Box Store, but honestly they work quite well. They seem to enjoy the little feeder that looks similar to this design best (mine has many more feeding ports). But the Opus Oriole Feeder (which the Orioles have staunchly ignored, go figure) is gaining in popularity, especially after I made smaller hummer-friendly perches with garden wires as seen here:
I never know what the consensus is on store-bought nectar mixes. Every spring it seems as though we get a warning not to use red dyed food, even though I've never heard any circumstantial reports that such food is dangerous. But I stopped using store-bought food last summer just in case -- and also because homebrew nectar mix is so ridiculously easy. Here's what you do:
1) Put three and a half to four cups of water in a teapot (the less water you use, the sweeter the mixture will be; my hummers seem to like the 3.5 cups best). Bring this to a boil. 2) Put one cup of sugar in a heatproof container. A large-ish saucepan works well, just as long as it can contain the water you are currently boiling. 3) When the water is boiled, remove it from the heat, then pour it in with the sugar and mix it together. Set it aside to cool and fully dissolve for a while, then refrigerate it in a pitcher or repurposed iced tea bottle. And you're done!
Some notes: No, it isn't dangerous for humans if they accidentally drink this; it's just sugar water. Yes, you must use sugar, not honey and certainly not fake sugar/Splenda/Sweet-N-Low/whatever. Nor shall you use brown sugar, confectioners sugar, or powdered sugar. Just ordinary table sugar will do. My rule of thumb: if I wouldn't put it in my coffee, I wouldn't make the Hummingbirds drink it either.
Wikkid Important Edit: Sheri Williamson of the lovely "Life, Birds, and Everything" blog commends my use of homemade sugar water because the dyes and preservatives used in store-bought nectar mixes are linked "with DNA damage (oh God, WHAT?), abnormal behavior, abnormal sperm, reduced reproductive success, reduced body and brain weight, and... increased hyperactivity symptoms." The idea of a hummingbird suffering from increased hyperactivity is going to be tonight's nightmare fuel.
And please brew some nectar and set up a feeder. It's been an unusually dry summer and these little guys have a hell of a lousy trip ahead of them.
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Sketch of the Day!
You haven't had enough of Hummingbirds have you?
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There's a new teaser trailer for "Tangled" "Rapunzel" out and...
I've said before that if you go back and watch old trailers for the Disney classics, NONE of them inspire confidence. But this... this is like a "Scott Pilgrim" level of boneheaded advertising (and I say this because if "Rapunzel" bombs, it'll be for the same reason "Pilgrim" did: the wildly misaimed and utterly baffling marketing campaign.) Between this and the loathed "BLAM!!!" -uh- things, this is why you can't have nice things, Disney.
WARNING: Uncharacteristic vitriol and some naughty language ahead.
Consider this another episode of Things I Need to Catch Up On Because They Happened During Don Bluth Month.
So around the middle of July, my wonderful regular reader/commenter Zach Miller posted this article on his blog: Toroceratops. I suggest you read it and his other two posts on the subject before we go on.
My reaction was, essentially, "Huh. So John "T. rex was an obligate scavenger" Horner proposed that Torosaurus is actually just a really, really old Triceratops and therefore all Torosaur fossils should be renamed Triceratops? That's... interesting, I guess. I, like most of the commenters, will buy it if we ever find an unmistakable transitional 'Toroceratops' skull."
And then I pretty much forgot about it.
Until I was well into the Don Bluth reviews and learned, via FARK.com, that the mainstream press had got a hold on this story. Ladies and gentlemen, the poor former (maybe) Torosaurus is unwittingly at the center of a fine demonstration of every single thing I cannot f***ing stand about the way the mainstream press reports on science, animals, nature, and... f*** it, everything.
Choice headlines:
"The Triceratops Never Existed!" - Yes it did. It's Torosaurus who would be getting the name change. Please learn how scientific nomenclature works. Also, changing an animal's name doesn't magically make it disappear. Seriously, WTF?
"Triceratops 'never really existed but was just a young version of another dinosaur'" - Same points as above, and just who the hell are they quoting? Honestly, this might be my favorite of the reports because you've got that headline and then, buried deep within the body text of the report itself: "All torosaurus specimens will now be reclassified as triceratops, the scientists said."
"Morph-osaurs: How shape-shifting dinosaurs deceived us" - 1) Christ in a hot rod, I didn't pass five MTELs to see an affix used as a verb in a newspaper. 2) I don't know if this offends me more as an armchair paleontologist or as a sci-fi fantasy fan (by those "physically changing as you age" standards, aren't we all shapeshifting?) But at least it prompted this stupid thing which is hopefully funny:
Rest assured, dear readers, that the "nonexistence" and "shapeshifting" (I seriously couldn't type that without cringing) of dear old Triceratops has been highly exaggerated. But you wouldn't know from these articles. They have utterly failed to understand how scientific nomenclature works, have happily reported this theory -which many have called into question- as a universally accepted fact, and seem to be of the opinion that Triceratops (who doesn't give a sh*t what name us puny humans call it by anyway) has somehow vanished from the fossil record altogether.
Well, first of all, I have to share a very proud and awesome moment in case you missed it.
I woke up from the hangover after finishing Don Bluth Month to see a new comment on the last entry. It was from Kip Goldman, associate producer for Don Bluth Films -- and he said "We've" been reading my "nice blog about Don" the whole time.
My hands managed to type out a nice "thank you" response, while the rest of me was doing this:
I just... I'm still in fangirl-awe. So happy!
Speaking of things that are crazy and awesome. It's crazy and awesome to think that I was sitting at my desk about a year ago throwing in my hat as an illustrator for the Comicbook Artist Guild's then-untitled "Prose Project". And it's pretty hard to remember the process of creating my contribution to the project, now known as Worlds Beyond. Thankfully, I took some photographs of the various steps in the making of the illustration for the short story, "It All Started With a Mouse", by Joe Sergi:
Here's the layout sketch. It's the outcome of several days worth of finding every retro-Walt Disney World / Disneyland promotional poster I could find just so I could get the style down (the story is set in an affectionate parody of Walt Disney World where some strange stuff is going on). A few of the characters would be eliminated and some of the more elaborate designs in the background would be streamlined, but as you'll see, there is a very direct line from this drawing to the final.
Here's the final line drawing. I now had to imitate the colorful look of Disney posters - using only high-contrast black-and-white ink washes. Quite the challenge, I must say.
And here is what I'll call the "almost-final". The biggest and most obvious differences between this and the printed version are the lack of text on the banner and that the image hasn't been cropped yet. Other than that, it is very, very close to the final.
And here is the final version as it appears in the book. I hope this kind of thing never stops being emotional for me. Worlds Beyond may be purchased at eCrater. Get yourself a couple of copies and spread the love around.
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Cartoon Brew recently dug up this Disney promotional literature from circa 1989. And it is deeply bizarre and fascinating in a way that I have a hard time describing without spoiling things. I'll just say that it's the starkest evidence for the Disney/Warner Bros. rivalry I've ever seen.
Now the story of a animator who worked for Disney and went out to found his own studio, which had a series of hits in the 80's, and several flops in the 90's. And the fan who decided to watch each of his directorial credits in chronological order over the course of a month. It's Don Bluth Month.
A quick, easy-to-link-to list of every post from Don Bluth Month, for those who would like to read them in order (which you should, as they wouldn't make sense otherwise.) In August of 2010, I watched every readily available Don Bluth film in chronological order and shared my thoughts.
It sucks beyond all manner of sucking that Don Bluth Month had to end on such a low note, because this overview began on such an emotional high. When you go back and watch Bluth's early films, they are absolutely beautiful. Hell, I even appreciate the animation [if not the story content] of "All Dogs Go to Heaven" now. When you watch "Anastasia" or "Titan A.E.", they have moments of absolute beauty as well. So that brings us to the unspoken, awkward question that I'm sure is on the mind of a lot of Don Bluth fans including myself:
What happened?
What went wrong in-between "The Land Before Time" and "Thumbelina"? (The answer is probably "Rock-A-Doodle", but I have a hard time picking on a film I didn't get to watch. Yes, "GET to"; at least it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting than "The Pebble and the Penguin".) How could the man who so hated "baby talk" and sh**ty animation possibly go on to make "The Pebble and the Penguin"? How could a person sound so excited in the commentary track about the new technology he got to play with in "Titan A.E." go on to make... *nothing*? How does the director who made the movies that shaped the childhood of every person around my age, even more so than Disney, seemingly vanish without a trace? Where the hell is he know that we need him?
We do. We need Don Bluth to come back, and we need more people to pick up his "animation is an art form and should be treated as such" mantle. Because right now, the world of animated films is a grim place indeed. My heart goes heavy when I wonder if there's even a place for a hand-drawn, totally analogue animated feature film in today's "Eh, let's make another 3D live-action/CGI movie based on a beloved -or not- vintage cartoon" environment.
(Addressing another sauropod in the room: Yes, I know the next Toon to get this treatment will be Bugs Bunny. And as a fan of classic Looney Tunes, after years and years of things like "Space Jam" and "Loonatics" and other monstrosities of that ilk, I'm just too exhausted to muster as much outrage as I should about this. I can only heave a sigh that sounds suspiciously like this: "Goddammitsomuchwarnerbrothers...")
I don't want this to end on a total bummer. So I should note that "Bartok the Magnificent" isn't the last we ever saw of Don Bluth, thankfully. He has a very nice website, and he has made several books and CDs about art and animation principles. And there is this little oddity called "The Gift of the Hoopoe", which was apparently directed by Don Bluth. Sadly, there is hardly any information outside of IMDB and those storyboards about this short film.
I also need to finally share what I was working on during the month:
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Painting of the Month! Click for huge:
It's called "There Had Never Been Such a Herd Before". It is my humble tribute to "The Land Before Time" and my entry in Art Evolved's "Pop Culture" gallery. I figure that when I ever feel the need to do fanart, I better go big.
