Aardman`s First Feature - Animation World Network

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Table of Contents
JUNE 2000
VOL. 5 NO. 03
5 Editor’s Notebook
Time to hit the theaters…
6 Letters: [email protected]
PBS Outrage…
JUNE 2000
Summer’s Films
SUMMER’S
FILMS
8 Aardman’s First Feature Egg-stravaganza!
Watch out Feathers McGraw! Aardman’s got a whole new flock. Andrew Osmond visits
Aardman Animations as they put the final touches on Chicken Run, the studio’s first feature film.
15 A Chat With Gary Goldman And Don Bluth (Part I)
Larry Lauria starts his two-part series with a conversation with Gary Goldman, co-director of
Fox Feature Animation’s summer release Titan, A.E. and industry veteran.
19 The Remarkable June Foray
Mark Evanier profiles the career of legendary June Foray, voice actress, ASIFA supporter and
Governor of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.
22 Disney Takes a BIG Departure from Formula with Dinosaur
Wendy Jackson Hall takes a look behind the scenes at the animators of Disney’s Dinosaur.
Commercials
COMMERCIALS
26 Ads Are Animating the Internet
Just how are these Internet animation companies making ends meet? Karen Raugust investigates a few ways that clever companies are placing advertising into our favorite Webisodes.
29 100% Digital Cars Are Up To Speed
In a world where image is everything, why has it taken advertising so long to embrace digital
cars? J. Paul Peszko finds the answer and why Digital Domain was the company for the job.
34 Election Fraud
The United States has a long history of political comics, so how come animation isn’t used in
Presidential advertising campaigns? Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman queries the wisdom…
Other
OTHER
38 Harvey Entertainment Takes Control
Heather Kenyon talks with Rick Mischel, President and COO of Harvey Entertainment, about
the company’s transition from a licensor to a producer/distributor with the current production
Casper’s Haunted Christmas.
© Animation World Network 2000. All rights reserved. No part of the periodical may be reproduced without the consent of Animation World Network.
ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
June 2000
2
Table of Contents
JUNE 2000
VOL. 5 NO. 03
FOCUS
ON…
Focus On...
44 The Zagreb World Festival Of Animated Films: On The Eve Of Zagreb 2000
Of the mighty ASIFA sanctioned festivals, Zagreb is perhaps the hidden gem that has survived
through some terribly tough times and blows. Borivoj “Bordo” Dovnikovic supplies us with a
history and look at Zagreb today.
JUNE 2000
The Student
Corner
THE
STUDENT
CORNER
49 Let’s Sketch on Location
Renowned drawing instructor Glenn Vilppu begins a new series of articles that discuss sketching on location.
INTERNET
Internet
54 Dotcomix: Capturing Animated Motion on the Net
Using proprietary motion-capture software and creative partnerships, Protozoa’s DotComix is
quickly becoming a force on the Internet. Lee Dannacher offers an inside peak.
Gaming
GAMING
60 Gundam Wing: America’s Next Pokemon?
Cartoon Network and Sega Dreamcast are bringing Gundam Wing to America from Japan
where it is already a smash success. Jacquie Kubin reports.
Events
EVENTS
64 The Graying of E3
Gaming isn’t just for kids anymore. It is now a multi-billion dollar business and it shows. Eric
Huelsman reports from the Expo floor.
68 ASIFA-East’s Festival Makes New York Even Hotter
Elizabeth Shin talks with ASIFA-East’s president Linda Simensky about the way ASIFA celebrations
are done, New York style!
Films/Video
FILMS/VIDEO
70 Which Is The Real Kimba?
Due to a series of legal problems, Kimba, the White Lion, has had numerous enumerations.
Fred Patten tracks them all down for us and discusses the latest release – the truly original,
much loved 1966 television series.
June 2000
3
Table of Contents
JUNE 2000
VOL. 5 NO. 03
BOOKS
Books
74 The Anime Trivia Quizbook: Fun Fan Fare or More?
Fred Patten takes Ryan Omega’s Anime Trivia Quizbook test and finds it rises well to the challenge.
JUNE 2000
News
NEWS
76 Animation World News
Pinky & The Brain Take Over The Daytime Emmys, Cinar Sued By HighReach, Stuart Little’s
Dykstra Swings With Spider-Man, DEN Is Done, Web Thugs Hit The Tellie, Tom Snyder Joins
Shockwave, Actor Hamilton Joins Stan Lee Media As President, Honkworm Unveils New Toons
At Cannes, and much, much more.
78 Next Issue’s Highlights
7 This Month’s Contributors
Cover: Chicken Run will be flying into theaters everywhere this summer. © Dream Works
Pictures.
June 2000
4
Editor’s Notebook
by Heather Kenyon
Time to hit the theaters…
t is summer again and time to
beat the heat and hit the theaters for Hollywood’s (and
Bristol’s) best animated offerings.
Again it is an exciting summer with
some very unique and interesting
features being offered.
DreamWorks’ Chicken Run looks to
be an early favorite as the inside
buzz is that the film is wonderful,
full of Aardman Animations’
delightful magic. Kudos to
DreamWorks for taking the risk of
bringing a stop-motion feature to
the big screen in the U.S. I hope it
pays off for them big time, rewarding their efforts and spirit.
DreamWorks is indeed a studio
that started with the promise of
bringing different animated stories
to the big screen and I believe
they are living up to their promises
well. The Road to El Dorado was a
delightful buddy romp; Antz was a
fun blend of animation and adult
humor; and Chicken Run is bringing Aardman and stop-motion to a
wider audience. We should all
hope that it proves successful and
increases the general public’s
appetite for different forms of animation.
I
Fox Feature Animation is
back with Titan, A.E., directed by
veterans Don Bluth and Gary
Goldman. In Larry Lauria’s two
part interview with the directors
we will be hearing about their
approaches to filmmaking and
story. This is Fox’s first outing after
the very hopeful Anastasia. Once
again Fox is promising an adventure out of the animated ordinary,
and I have heard good responses
to the film’s trailer. With Henry
Selick’s
stop-motion
feature,
Monkey Bone, finishing up in San
Francisco, it seems like puppetry is
indeed becoming a viable option
to big studio execs. Perhaps more
importantly, Monkey Bone, signifies that Fox Feature Animation is
still a player in the animated feature game, despite the division’s
gap between their first and second features. What is even more
exciting is the varied subject matter and style of the two projects.
Rocky and Bullwinkle are
coming to the big screen in style
this summer. With big names
attached and effects by Industrial
Light & Magic and Wild Brain,
Rocky and Bullwinkle may be a big
screen adaptation that is a delightful off shoot of an original vs. a “remake.” Nostalgia and potential are
running high and I can’t wait to
see it. Congratulations to June
Foray, a.k.a. Rocket J. Squirrel and
numerous other characters, on
receiving a star on Hollywood’s
Walk of Fame on July 7, 2000.
What a marvelous way to celebrate a legendary voice-actress
and the voice over craft. In addi-
tion to her acting expertise, June’s
efforts over the years to promote
animation has benefited us all,
especially her tireless work to promote the Academy of Motion
Pictures Arts & Sciences’ short film
category. Every year on Oscar
night our community’s animated
shorts are put on display in front of
the world, helping gain attention,
recognition and distribution
opportunities. We can thank June
for helping to protect this, our
moment in the sun. It is this sort of
community service that makes
June, not only a star, but a true
treasure.
Finally, the film everyone is
talking about is Dinosaur. What a
controversy! Is it the future of animation as we know it? Or is it a
well-hyped re-play of Jurassic Park?
I have heard it all. However, no
one can deny the amount of time,
energy and money that went into
bringing these prehistoric beasts
to life. Indeed, during a tour of
Disney’s state-of-the-art facility, Rick
DeMott, Associate Editor, and I
wondered if it might have been
simpler to re-generate the creatures from fossilized DNA – but
then we thought about the
amount of acting training it would
take and decided they had probably taken the safest route.
We couldn’t wait for there
to be a smorgasbord of animated
feature films in a variety of technique and storytelling styles. It
looks like 2000 is the summer
where this wish has been granted.
From classic 2D cels, to cool looking 2D/3D hybrids, to CGI and
live-action mixes to the purely digital, this summer has it all. Good
luck to everyone and save some
popcorn for me!
Until Next Time,
Heather
June 2000
5
[email protected]
PBS Outrage
Recent news reports, including
Rick DeMott’s “Picketing In Front of
PBS! Just Blame It On Canada?”
(DeMott, 5.02) in the May
Animation World Magazine, point
out that PBS is denying any federal funding of foreign labor for animated cartoons. Further research
demonstrates that these programs
are, in fact, funded by the federal
government, through the auspices of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting and the Department
of Education, into a program
called “PBS Kids Ready to Learn.”
Recipients of these funds are
Nelvana, CINAR and CineGroupe.
Nelvana announced this
deal with PBS with the following
online press release. Note the
mention of the “Ready to Learn”
service:
“Through this strategic relationship, Nelvana will produce
and deliver six book-based children’s series for the U.S. public network’s Fall 2000 program season.
As part of the agreement, PBS is
committed to commission for subsequent seasons a minimum two
of the six series as daily strips (40episodes) for its weekday PBS KIDS
Ready-to-Learn Service. The production commitment for the
Saturday morning block and the
two stripped series totals approximately U.S. $40 million.”(http://
www.newswire.ca/releases/Augu
st1999/03/c0142.html)
From the August 16, 1999
issue of the online magazine
Current:
“Nelvana Ltd., one of the contiANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
nent’s largest animation studios,
will produce six new children’s
series for PBS’s fall 2000 schedule.
The shows will air as the network’s
first-ever Saturday morning children’s block, and at least two of
the series, yet to be selected, will
live on as stripped shows as part of
PBS’ weekday Ready to Learn programming.”(http://www.current.org/ch/ch915c.html)
The following links provide
further information on Ready-toLearn, as funded by the
Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, as funded by the
federal government, as funded by
your taxpayer dollars:
l http://www.cpb.org/learning/rtl/
l http://www.cpb.org/atwork/
media/pressrelease/archive/1998/
980515pr.htmlhttp://www.pbs.or
g/kids/home_readytolearn.html
01.08.96.html
1997/fy2000.statement.html
980515pr.html
l http://www.cpb.org/atwork/annualreports/1995/Ready_to_learn.html
The PBS Kids’ show Dragon
Tales, a production of Children’s
Television
Workshop
and
Columbia/TriStar Television, was
actually animated overseas. This
was partially funded with a $4.2
million grant from the U.S.
Department of Education, which
can be confirmed at:
http://www.cpb.org/atwork/medi
a/pressrelease/archive/1996/01.0
8.96.html
To promote PBS Kids, the
network hired London-based
Passion Pictures to make
“strings, bumpers,” and
“idents,” as reported in Animation
World Magazine’s February 2000
issue (DeMott, 4.11) in the
Television News section.
It’s interesting that when
PBS announced its deal with the
Canadian studio CineGroupe to
make 40 half-hour episodes of
Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat,
they did not mention its budget
nor source of funding, even
though it is part of the PBS Kids
Ready to Learn service. The press
release can be found at:
http://www.pbs.org/insidepbs/ne
ws/sagwa.html
In addition to Ready to
Learn, the C o r p o r a t i o n f o r
P u b l i c Broadcasting funds programming through other initiatives:
“CPB is a major source of
funding for programming on public broadc a s t i n g . O p e r a t i n g
within
Congressionally-prescribed guidelines, CPB awards
grants for the production of innovative, educational and informational radio and television programs for national distribution.”
(http://www.cpb.org/program/)
“CPB provides funding support to more than 1,000 public television and radio stations nationwide. The annual grants from CPB
help stations meet operating and
programming costs. CPB’s support
to stations guarantees universal
June 2000 6
access to public broadcasting’s
educational services and programming, and ensures that stations
can exchange program materials
through a national system of interconnection. Through the Future
Funds and other grant initiatives,
CPB seeks to help public television
and radio stations serve their communities more efficiently and effectively.” (http://www.cpb.org/stations/)
For PBS to deny taxpayer
involvement in funding foreign
labor to produce cartoons is
absurd. Write to PBS, to your
newspaper and TV s t a t i o n s ,
a n d t o y o u r Congressional
representatives.
The
Motion
Picture Screen Cartoonists Local
839 has provided contact information at:
http://www.awn.com/MPSC839/
PB200004.HTM#PBSflyer
Please continue to cover
this issue. PBS’s back-stabbing of
American animators should be
exposed.
“Outraged.”
Editor’s Note: Creative Planet has
recently launched a series of discussion forums. If you’d like to
continue this discussion you can
join the Animation Café!
ANIMATION WORLD NETWORK
5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Phone : 323.634.3400
Fax :
323.634.3350
Email :
[email protected]
[email protected]
PUBLISHERS
Ron Diamond, President
Dan Sarto, Chief Operating Officer
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Heather Kenyon
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Rick DeMott
EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR
Elizabeth Shin
CONTRIBUTORS
Lee Dannacher
Rick DeMott
Borivoj “Bordo” Dovnikovic
Mark Evanier
Maureen Furniss, Ph.D.
Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman
Wendy Jackson Hall
Eric Huelsman
Heather Kenyon
Jacquie Kubin
Larry Lauria
Andrew Osmond
Fred Patten
J. Paul Peszko
Karen Raugust
Elizabeth Shin
Glenn Vilppu
Paul Younghusband
OPERATIONS
Annick Teninge, General Manager
DESIGN/LAYOUT
Alex Binotapa
WEBMASTERS
Jeremy Keller
Alex Binotapa
ADVERTISING SALES
Dan Sarto
June 2000
7
Aardman’s First Feature
Egg-stravaganza!
by Andrew Osmond
tandfirst:
Aardman
Animations does The Great
Escape. With chickens. For
some readers, that will be all they
need to know. For others, read on...
Let’s get the bad news out
of the way first. All the chickens in
Chicken Run are bona fide fowl.
There are no penguins stalking the
shadows with strategically placed
rubber-gloves on their heads. This
is not Wallace and Gromit IV,
though that may come in a few
years’ time. Sorry, Feathers
McGraw fans.
S
The Characters
The good news is that
Chicken Run, directed by Peter
Lord and Nick Park, introduces us
to a packed cast of Aardman newcomers, feathered, furry, nice and
nasty. It’s the 1950s in the North of
England, and in the confines of
Hut 17 on Tweedy’s chicken farm,
one fowl has had enough of her
dark and dreary life. Ginger has a
vision of escape to a better world,
beyond the tyranny of cruel, chicke n - h a t i n g M r s . Tw e e d y.
Unfortunately, she’s no leader and
can’t convey her urgency to her
apathetic fellow captives. These
include the deeply dippy Babs, a
featherbrain who asks, ‘Have you
had a nice holiday?’ each time
Ginger returns from solitary after a
failed escape attempt. Then there’s
Bunty, stoical and realist, whose
attitude amounts to: ‘Our mothers
were egg-layers, our grandmothers were egg-layers, what’s the big
deal?’
Mr. and Mrs.Tweedy take roll call at Tweedy’s Egg Farm, where any chicken who doesn’t
make her egg-laying quota can meet a “fowl” fate. © Dream Works Pictures.
Old Fowler is the farmyard
cockerel, an ex-RAF mascot and
military bore, whose life is a litany
of his former glories in the service.
(Naturally, the chickens ignore
him.) Ginger’s only initial ally is
Mac, a mad genius inventor and
the brainbox who implements her
escape schemes. Mac is a fast-talking Scot, but unlike a not too dif-
Ginger shows her fellow flock a plan
of escape with the help of heroic Rocky,
the ultimate flying rooster.
© Dream Works Pictures.
ferent Star Trek character, she has
a good Scots accent. The rats Neck
and Fetcher operate the black
market economy, trading stolen
goods in return for eggs. Presiding
over all is the fearsome Mrs.
Tweedy, scheming about how she
can dispatch the loathsome chickens and make a buck in the
process. The henpecked Mr. Tweedy
(sorry) is a simple soul, with a
slightly barmy belief that the chickens are up to something...
One of the most important
characters makes a dramatic entry.
Early in the film, Mrs. Tweedy disposes of a non-egg-laying chicken
named Edwina. (Note to British
readers: Aardman denies the
name has any connection to a certain egg-phobic Tory politician.)
The other fowl are traumatised,
and Ginger, in utter despair, offers
up a forlorn prayer for help, from
June 2000
8
nervous how audiences would
react to some of the American
jabs, until they heard the laughs in
preview screenings.
Longtime Aardman fan Mel Gibson
voices the character of Rocky.
anywhere. At that moment, there’s
a distant boom, a flash and a
character drops out of the sky. It’s
Rocky the Flying Rooster — at least
that’s what the poster with him
says. Rocky is an all-American
hunk, to the delight of the womenfolk and the dismay of Fowler.
Unfortunately, as Ginger finds,
Rocky is also an all-American
sweet-talking total fraud. Or is he?
It’s the friction between
Ginger and Rocky which drives
the story. After considering several
movie couples, the creators decided to model the pair on Katherine
Hepburn and Spencer Tracy,
whose volatile screen chemistry
delighted audiences from their first
team-up in Woman of the Year
(1942). The cross-generation culture clash was inspired by films like
Rock Around the Clock (1956),
while the Anglo-American theme
— with plenty of digs at both sides
of the Atlantic — is in the tradition
of pics like A Fish Called Wanda.
The directors confess they were
The Voices
Rocky is voiced by Mel
Gibson, in his second animated
feature role following John Smith
in Pocahontas. According to Nick
Park, “Peter Lord and me already
knew Mel was a fan of Wallace
and Gromit. We met up with him
in Los Angeles a couple of years
ago and he invited us out for
lunch. We went wondering what
it was about and it wasn’t about
anything really! But we knew we
had a good contact. By the time
we saw Gibson in Maverick we
had created the character of
Rocky, and made him as a model.
So we took a bit of Gibson’s dialogue from Maverick, animated
Rocky to his lines, and it fitted perfectly.”
“Working with a studio like
DreamWorks gave us the opportunity to use someone who was
already a star,” Park continues. “For
a long time we knew Rocky was
going to be an ‘outside’ chicken
but we couldn’t decide what to
Julia Swalha voices all of Ginger’s joys and
tribulations. © Dream Works Pictures.
make him. Then after Maverick it
all seemed to fit: the proximity of
the war, how the GI’s came over to
Britain... It made sense to have an
American among these very
English backwater chickens, who
have no life. It reminded us of films
where new music comes in and
livens up the fuddy-duddies. With
Rocky, we were thinking of a
happy-go-lucky, loveable rogue,
extremely likeable but very unreliable. We didn’t just want the
American to come in and be the
hero!”
The female lead Ginger,
perhaps the true ‘hero’ of the film,
is voiced by Julia Swalha, wellknown to British TV comedy fans
as the long-suffering Saffron (the
daughter) in Absolutely Fabulous.
She’s also appeared in TV dramatisations of Pride and Prejudice and
Martin Chuzzlewit, plus Kenneth
Branagh’s film In the Bleak
Midwinter. Swalha is joined by
AbFab co-star Jane Horrocks. In
fact the chicken Babs is very close
to Horrocks’ dimwitted Bubble in
the live-action series. The actress is
best known for her extraordinary
multi-vocal performance in the
stage and screen versions of Little
Voice. The sinister Mrs. Tweedy is
voiced by Miranda Richardson,
recently seen in Tim Burton’s
effects-laden Sleepy Hollow. Her
past films range from Damage and
Tom and Viv to Interview with a
Vampire and Spielberg’s Empire of
the Sun.
The Directors
Directors Peter Lord and
Nick Park need little introduction
to stop-motion fans. Lord cofounded Aardman with Dave
Sproxton, though as Lord puts it, it
was a matter of “Two schoolboys
picking a name, little dreaming it
would hang around so long.” The
June 2000
9
Director Peter Lord. © Dream Works Pictures.
pair’s inspirations included Ray
Harryhausen, Terry Gilliam’s Monty
Python animations, and stopmotion TV shows such as The
Wombles and Magic Roundabout.
Aardman was the name of an
inept hero in one of the teenagers’
early cel sequences, bought by
the BBC in the late ‘60s.
Subsequently, Lord and Sproxton
focused on plasticine/clay animation, mainly because no one else
was working in the medium. The
duo have animated numerous
acclaimed shorts, many now available on Aardman video collections, while Lord was Oscar-nominated twice for Adam (1991) and
Wat’s Pig (1996).
It was Aardman’s films that
in turn inspired Nick Park, who
invited Lord and Sproxton to give
a lecture at the National Film and
Television School where he was
studying. At the time, Park was
working on his first Wallace and
Gromit adventure, A Grand Day
Out, in which the duo go to the
moon. After Park left school, he
was invited to complete the film at
Aardman (it was released in 1989).
A wild success, it was followed by
Park’s short Creature Comforts
(1990) and the Wallace and
Gromit sequels The Wrong
Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave
(1995). All three won Oscars, with
Comforts beating fellow nominee
A Grand Day Out. Park subsequently joined Lord and Sproxton
as company director of Aardman.
(A common mistake, even promoted by the UK press, is that Park is
sole manager or founder of
Aardman, which is like saying Lord
created Wallace and Gromit!)
“The idea for an Aardman
feature came up after The Wrong
Trousers,” says Lord. “It seemed a
logical ambition, the next summit
for Aardman to climb.” There was
discussion with Jeffery Katzenberg,
who was with Disney at the time,
but then things went cold until
after Close Shave. The seed of
Chicken Run was a doodle in one
of Park’s notebooks, showing a
chicken digging under a wirefence with a spoon, plus the idea
of The Great Escape with chickens.
“Armed with that, we started writing the story,” says Lord. “Nick and
I worked on it for the best part of
a year before it became widely
public. In that time we took the
idea to sundry American studios
and touted it around Hollywood
style.”
Ginger (center), Mac (in glasses),
Babs (right) and Bunty (far right) plan
their escape from Tweedy’s Farm.
Gripping a large, metal spoon, Ginger attempts to ride her way to freedom on a
locomotive drill machine. © Dream Works Pictures.
And
why
chickens?
“Chickens are perhaps the most
humble creatures on our planet,”
says Park simply. “Just think how
often they’re ridiculed in our language. It seemed natural to make
a film about them.”
June 2000
10
DreamWorks
By now, Lord and Park
were working with Jake Eberts,
founder of Allied Filmmakers and
former founder and chief executive of Goldcrest Films. Eberts has
been involved with two past animations. In 1974, he arranged the
development finance for Mortin
Rosen’s Watership Down; two
decades later he executive produced the stop-motion James and
the Giant Peach (1996). “Jake was
our contact with Hollywood,” says
Lord. “He helped us stay independent until we had a film in
place that we wanted to make,
which was very valuable. By the
time we did the DreamWorks deal,
we had the film treatment quite
developed.
At
that
point
DreamWorks came on board for
the pre-production, serious modelbuilding, the scripting, storyboarding... all that was three years ago.”
More recently, of course,
DreamWorks announced a $250
million ‘long-term affiliation’ with
Aardman,
committing
the
Hollywood major to not just
Chicken Run but four future
Aardman movies. “It’s an incredible
deal,” says Lord. “We have full creative control. We can choose our
projects, stars, subject-matter...”
Park and Lord have nothing but
praise for Jeffery Katzenberg,
DreamWorks co-founder and contact. “He lands here in his private
jet every month or two months,”
says Lord. “What amazes us is his
commitment, which not many studio bosses have to a single film. He
doesn’t tell us what to do — he’s
said this is an Aardman film first
and foremost — but challenges us
to get it better. The important
thing is that we deal direct with
him, not with a bunch of department heads. He’s accessible, experienced and the only person we
need to listen to.” A smaller bonus:
if Aardman produces 90 seconds
of animation in a week, Jeffery
Katzenberg pays for staff lunch.
(Which is why this visitor can truly
say he had lunch on Katzenberg.)
Park says of DreamWorks,
“They respect what we do; they
seem to love our shorter films, the
comedy in them. It’s a learning process
both ways. DreamWorks learned
about the kind of films that suit us,
but at the same time we learned
so much about making a long-format film. Keeping an audience
hooked for 80 minutes is a very
different ballgame from making a
short film. Once upon a time, we
were making films primarily for
ourselves, for our own enjoyment.
But if you want to work with
Hollywood, you need regimentation.”
More recently, of
course, DreamWorks
announced a $250
million ‘long-term
affiliation’ with
Aardman...
The Challenge
Given that Aardman are
known for shorts and mid-length
films, what are the challenges in
going to feature-length? “I always
thought making a feature film
would be about two-and-a-half
times harder than a 30 minutefilm,” says Park. “But the amount of
work and mental effort, the manhours everyone puts in... it’s easily
twenty times as much. The story is
the most difficult thing, getting it
to work over eighty minutes. It’s
harder to hold in the head than a
thirty-minute story, and you’ve got
the audience attention span to
consider; you have to take the
viewer on a journey of ups and
downs, fasts and slows. It’s difficult
to calculate, which is why we
ended up making the film in storyreel form, basic moving drawings,
which we use to judge how it’s
playing before we shoot.” (More
on this later...)
There have been excellent
stop-motion features over the
years, from Ladislas Staewich’s
French classic Tale of the Fox
(1938)
to
the
charming
Norwegian film The Pinchcliffe
Grand Prix (1975), directed by Iva
Caprino. Yet only two have ever
received international distribution:
The Nightmare Before Christmas
(1993) and James and the Giant
Peach (1996), both directed by
Henry Selick and distributed by
Disney. Nightmare was a hit, but
James barely broke even in
Stateside theatres. And with computer animations like Dinosaur
and Toy Story 2 grabbing the
headlines, won’t audiences find
stop-motion passé?
“Computer animation is a
big deal now,” Lord agrees. “It’s
gone from a marginal, specialised
area to a mainstream brand in ten
years. Stop-motion’s never really
been mainstream since the days of
Harryhausen, but I feel it’s having a
resurgence now. Chicken Run isn’t
spectacular in the blow-you-away
sense of computer animation,
where it’s easy to have twenty
thousand warriors rushing across
the plain. It’s more subtle than
that, on the level of character. I
think it’s nice what we do is more
human; you get tired of effects
movies after a while.” A rough version of the film’s opening bears out
Lord’s point. It’s a montage of
Ginger’s failed escape attempts,
becoming increasingly outlandish
and desperate. There are no jawdropping effects, at least to an
June 2000
11
Rocky makes a daring attempt to rescue Ginger from the Tweedy’s new pie machine.
audience used to Aardman’s
impeccable animation. What grips
is the urgency, the pace, the
atmosphere — in short, the story.
“But we like spectacle too!”
adds Park quickly. Indeed, the new
film promises plenty of whiteknuckle thrills, including a
sequence in the tradition of
Spielberg with conveyer belts,
giant rollers and lots of blades. On
new technologies, Park comments, “Computer animation
would mean nothing if it didn’t
have good ideas, stories, direction
and characters. Anyway, I think
there’s something very appealing
about the use of plasticine. Every
child has handled plasticine and
relates to it — it’s so tactile, you
can see the fingerprints. To see
plasticine characters moving
round in full animation is in some
ways more impressive than computer animation, I think. It has an
extra kind of appeal.”
The Production
The final screenplay was
written by Jack Rosenthal and
Karey Kirkpatrick. Rosenthal has
written for numerous UK film and
TV titles, as well as co-writing the
Barbara Streisand picture Yentl
(1983). Kirkpatrick’s credits include
the cel Rescuers Down Under and
the stop-motion James and the
Giant Peach. The writer is now collaborating with Mark Burton on
Aardman’s second feature, The
Tortoise and the Hare. The music
is by John Powell and Harry
Gregson-Williams, who scored
DreamWorks’ computer-animated
Antz. They’re supervised by Hans
Zimmer of Lion King fame.
The directors agree there’s
“distinctly more dialogue” than
past Aardman films (think how
many of the studio’s past stars
were mute). Asked whether the
script was complete before filming, Lord admits, “You could say
without great inaccuracy we’re still
working on it. We intended it to
be complete before filming. That
was the plan. We thought, ‘We’ve
got a long time, we’ll get it all
sussed, the script will be ready,
ready, ready!’ But it doesn’t work
that way. Even now, about three
weeks before the end of the
shoot, it’s possible a line or two will
change. Certainly some shots
have changed. The structure was
tightly in place before the filming,
but details and spoken words
have changed a lot. It’s a very fluid
process.”
At the time of writing (midApril) the film is in its last weeks of
production, with just a few shots
to be filled. To house such an
enormous production, Aardman
took on new premises in the ‘Aztec
West’ Business Park, eight miles
from Bristol centre. The building is
devoted to Chicken Run, while
Aardman’s regular output of
shorts, commercials and TV work
continues at its other sites. Neither
Lord nor Park are doing any physical animation themselves. Instead
their days are packed with approving rushes, consultations with individual animators and generally
holding the film together. “A lot of
the animators were quite inexperienced when they came,” says
Lord. “But now we learn from
them, and some are quite brilliant.
They’re not technicians, but actors,
performers. It’s very collaborative
in that sense.” Not that a director’s
job is easy. “On a bad day we
might cover ten sets,” says Lord.
“We’d be directing an action
scene, a love scene, a slapstick
scene — it’s mindboggling.”
Scavenger rats Nick (left) and Fetcher
(right) try to entice Ginger with their
latest collection of goods.
June 2000
12
When the Tweedy’s are away, the chickens dance! © Dream Works Pictures.
The pair have split duties
down the middle: Park handles
the chicken scenes, while Lord
deals with the Tweedys and the
‘spiv’ rats. They see their skills as
complementary. “The film would
be impossible if one of us was
doing it alone,” says Lord. “It’s
been very interesting from the
point-of-view of ideas and techniques. Nick and I come from
slightly different backgrounds, and
we’re interested in slightly different
techniques, which come together
in this film. Nick is brilliant with
facial stuff, while I enjoy more fullbody animation.” Viewers who’ve
seen Lord’s creations Morph and
Adam, both built around gesture
and mime, will know what he
means.
As in cel animation, the animators ‘act out’ planned character
moves before making a series of
test animations leading up to the
final product. Computer monitors
give instant playback, a great aid
to checking continuity. The workin-progress storyboards the animators follow are stored in an AVID
editing system, producing a rough
animatic film that can be tweaked
and reworked at will.
Despite all this, the directors stress it’s never a computer-led
operation. Instead it’s an extremely
manual process, requiring both
space and a lot of time. There are
vast hand-painted skies, depicting
every kind of weather, on canvasses stacked sideways from floor to
ceiling. Motion-control cameras sit
on huge mobile arms, perched
above scale farmyards and green
rolling hills. The cameras and lighting take two days to set up for
some shots. Character models are
only partly plasticine. The nonmoving sections are made of silicon, while the humans’ clothes
are foam rubber (watch out for
minor details, especially the hidden chickens on Mrs. Tweedy’s
clothing). However the heads and
hands are certainly plasticine and
few viewers should notice the difference.
Park says, “When our films
were first introduced into America,
one festival presenter introduced
them as, ‘This is the smoothest
claymation you’ve ever seen.’ It’s
odd, because the one thing we’ve
never aimed for is ‘smooth.’
Sometimes we even go for character above smoothness. The acting
you get in this film is like nothing
ever seen before in stop-frame animation. We’ve pushed the animators and they’ve risen to the challenge. When we started out, creating and working on our own
characters, we always thought if
we industrialize this process,
there’s a danger we’d lose the personality, and the feel and the style
will change. But you can’t see the
joins.”
Chicken Run premieres on
June 23rd in America, and June
27th in Britain. DreamWorks is distributing in America, and Pathe in
Europe. Four more Aardman features will follow, all distributed
w o r l d w i d e b y D re a m Wo r k s .
Contrary to previous reports, a
Wallace and Gromit feature is not
confirmed, but here’s hoping.
Andrew Osmond is a freelance
writer specializing in fantasy
media and animation.
Note: Readers may contact any
Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to
[email protected].
June 2000
13
RUNNING
CHASING
NO
NO
YES!
COW IS FOUR DEXTERS TALL
LAUGHING
YELLING
TM & ©2000 Cartoon Network.
SULKING
A Chat With Don Bluth And
Gary Goldman (Part I)
by Larry Lauria
Don Bluth. © 2000 Twentieth
Century Fox.
first met Don Bluth on May 1,
1981, at the Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts in
Washington, DC. He was giving a
presentation at the American Film
Institute about his latest picture
Secret of NIMH. Don had just
returned from the United
Kingdom where the London
Philharmonic had recorded music
for the film. What Don showed
that day was little more than a progression reel with some scenes in
color, some in pencil test and still
others in storyboard form. During
his talk he referred to some of the
up and coming young animators
as “hot shots from Art Center.”
Having graduated from Art Center
only a couple of years before, I
took the opportunity to introduce
myself as “one of those hotshots...”
We exchanged pleasantries and
he was gone.
I
Fast forward to circa 1989.
I was president of Washington,
DC’s ASIFA chapter, and we happened to be hosting Don Bluth at
a local animation gallery. It was a
great night. About 300 people
showed up to view and buy artwork from his films and have their
pictures snapped with Don. I was
one of them!
Fast forward again to 1991
— Dublin, Ireland. At that time,
the Sullivan/Bluth Studios were
supporting the classical animation
program at Senior College,
Ballyfermot. I had just come on
board as Coordinator/Animation
Instructor for the course. My first
official meeting was with Don
Bluth and Gary Goldman; and
Gary, as things turned out, was
our program/studio liaison
throughout my entire 4 years with
the college...and a good time was
had by all!
As I glance back over the
years, I like to think that Don and
Gary began what I term their
“great experiment” when they
chose to leave Disney Feature.
They have continued to create
“outside the system.” To date, they
have directed 12 animated feature
Gary Goldman. © 2000 Twentieth
Century Fox.
films — far more than any other
animation team.
Recently, we had a chat
about their upcoming feature film
from Fox Feature Animation, Titan,
A.E., which will be released June
16th...
Larry Lauria: Gary, can you tell me
about the “look” of Titan, A.E.?
Gary Goldman: The look is similar
to a graphic novel or dark comic
book. The opening is softer pastel
colors, almost pastoral. The computer graphic imagery [CGI] and
animation are some of our best,
ever. The CGI work is in about
80% of the film....in 3-D backgrounds, spaceships and the villains. The villains have a gelatin or
glass-filled look.
LL: As compared with other Don
Gelatinous villains seek out fresh prey.
© 2000 Twentieth Century Fox.
Bluth/Gary Goldman films — what
would you say is different, visually,
about Titan...other than the comJune 2000
15
GG: They [Fox] just wanted more
and more CGI as we went along.
We actually contracted out to
Dobee, which is David Sorenson’s
group that does George Lucas’
animatics for him. They animated
all of the Ice Crystal sequence from
Don’s storyboards. We used Blue
Sky Studios for the creation of The
New World sequence. Our guys
here, twelve of them, did everything else.
An intimate moment occurs in the blue shadows of night.
puter work and the pallets?
GG: Our style. It’s probably darker
with a lot more dark silhouettes
used in the backgrounds. All of the
detail is there...it’s just a different
look. The animation is comparable
to Anastasia because the characters are human. We use a lot of
live-action reference. And there are
aliens — some have live-action reference, some don’t. You won’t be
able to tell — it looks so good. We
didn’t use a lot of holds in the animation. It’s a very fast-paced film.
We have a key group of animators
who are very good. The film is 91
minutes long plus 8 minutes of
credits. I’m real pleased with it —
especially with the pacing of it.
And I’m pleased with the audience
test results. The fact is, it was made
for young adults — a young male
audience, specifically. But the
recent test screenings showed the
appreciation levels were as high
for females as for males in the
young adult group. I’m not sure
what to attribute that to other
than some edits and some relationships within the story.
ture. We had only 19 months to
complete the whole thing. People
who have seen the picture —
even the color timer at Disney —
have said that they can’t believe
that it was done in such a short
time.
LL: What were the most challeng-
ing aspects, artistically?
GG: Well, originally we started out
planning for about 40% CGI. With
the time constraints and budget,
there was just no way we were
going to have a lot of CGI. But we
ended up with far more CGI than
we’ve had on any other film —
about 87% of the film is some
form of CGI.
LL: Was that something that hap-
pened throughout production?
LL: From what I hear, you all
weren’t originally slated to direct
Titan...when you were put on this
picture you were developing
something else at the time...Is that
right?
GG: No, we had just finished
Bartok [The Magnificent]. They
didn’t have a picture for us at the
time.
LL: But I thought you were in
development on something else.
GG: Titan, A.E. originally, was a
live-action movie, and [Fox Filmed
Entertainment Chairman and
CEO] Bill Mechanic thought it
might be good in CGI. So, we took
a look at it, and the only thing we
could think was...it was really science fiction...probably like something Moebius did...Most of the
LL: What were some of the challenges on the film?
GG: I think the biggest challenge
was the limited time on the picANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
Titan A.E. launches on a mission to outer space. © 2000 Twentieth Century Fox.
June 2000
16
see Gary Goldman going?
GG: Eh, I don’t know! I think I have
achieved our goal. I would say
that I want to hang in here for the
next couple of pictures to help
train people to do what we do.
There’s a lot of information, a lot of
things people need to learn.
LL: Is there anything you would
like to do that you haven’t done?
GG: I would really like to do
An explosive budget! © 2000 Twentieth Century Fox.
people who have looked at this,
internationally, have asked the
question: ‘Have you been influenced by anime?,’ and we
weren’t. I take that as a compliment because anime has become
quite popular. I think they feel that
the color, style, the look, the pacing, the subject matter, all feel like
anime. It just kind of evolved.
Originally, two other directors had
started the project. Pre-production
was completed, but Don and the
folks in animation re-designed a lot
of the film.
dio now that Titan is finished?
What about the lay-offs?
GG: We’ve got four projects in preproduction and Fox is trying to
decide which ones go forward.
There have been a lot of lay-offs
because the next project was not
developed. The same circumstances occurred after Anastasia.
Don came up with Bartok the
Magnificent and they let us do it. It
kept the studio alive for fourteen
months until Titan came along.
LL: The movie has a PG rating?
LL: What was the budget on Titan
A.E.?
GG: Yes, they are targeting young
GG: It was $55 million.
adult males, 12-17 years old. The
accompanying music is rock ‘n roll.
LL: I heard you were doing some-
LL: Compared to films you’ve
thing with Space Ace — is that
true?
worked on in the past, Titan is
“edgier?”
GG: I’d say it’s not a ‘mother friend-
ly’ movie. Although we haven’t left
the mothers and children out.
There is some swearing, some sexual innuendo, it’s intense...there’s a
lot of violence. I don’t think anybody under 8 years old should see
this film.
LL: What is happening in the stuANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
GG: No, it’s Dragon’s Lair. We
have been waiting to do something with it for over ten years. We
made it part of our presentation to
Fox. The four productions in development have over 70 people contributing to them at various stages.
Don has been overseeing development while I’ve been finishing
Titan.
LL: At this point, where do you
Dragon’s Lair. Derk is a funny
character and he has an attitude
and personality that we established in the video games. It’s still
one of the most popular video
games — ever — on the “all time”
list.
LL: What do you think of the criti-
cisms you have received for your
stories and films, or for the fact
that you and Don left Disney?
GG: Well, if they want to try it —
try to carry 400 people on their
backs; go out and raise the rent
for a studio, and get talent... in 15
years of being independent...let
them try it and then ask questions.
You know, we’ve only had two
down times...one in ‘84 and
another in ‘91.
LL: How does Gary Goldman after
28 years keep his passion for what
he’s doing?
GG: I think it’s the people. The
crew has passion. They really want
to make it work. They really want
to learn more...that teaches me.
My whole goal, besides trying to
get more production value back
into animation, was really to provide an environment like there
was at Disney at one time, where
you felt secure as an artist, filmJune 2000
17
Next month we will feature Part II,
which will be with Don Bluth.
“It’s all about having the passion to learn and daring to take on any challenge!”
maker, contributor, animator. You
could plan your life, have a place
to raise your family, have a home
and not worry about living like a
gypsy. Personally, I can say I’ve
been in the business for 28 years
and have never been unemployed...though sometimes not
paid. We’ve done our best to try to
take care of our people. We’ve
done our best to try to make good
stories. How many people have
gone out and hired sometimes
over 500 people and come up
with over $450,000 a week in
salaries and still tried to create a
quality product? It’s not an easy
thing to do...but it gives a great
feeling of accomplishment.
LL: Gary, it’s been great. Thanks
for taking the time to chat. All the
best with Titan.
Stay current with all the
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F or F ree !
Larry Lauria is an animator/educator with 25 years in the industry. When not working on his
current millennium animation
project, 2KJ, Larry keeps himself
busy working as a freelance
animator and classical animation
instructor. He can also be found
designing animation curricula,
or traveling around the world
giving animation workshops and
master classes. His Web site “The
Toon Institute” is part of the
AWN family.
[email protected].
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June 2000
18
ere’s a moment you
doubtlessly recall from
many a Rocky and
Bullwinkle cartoon: Arch-villain
Boris Badenov ambles up in some
sort of disguise...only it’s usually
not much of a disguise. Usually, it’s
a different hat. Still, though his
masquerade wouldn’t fool Quincy
Magoo during a total eclipse, it
fools Bullwinkle J. Moose.
Not only that but it also
fools Rocket J. Squirrel — and he’s
the smart one in the team. Rocky
hears Boris introduce himself as
someone other than Boris. Then
Rocky says, “That voice...where do
I know that voice?”
Viewers might well be asking themselves that when Rocky
talks. As it is no secret, Rocky is the
most famous of countless characters who have been given a voice
by the Queen of Voice Performers,
the legendary June Foray. For a
time, it was not uncommon for
people to refer to her as “The
female Mel Blanc.” That prompted
her friend (and frequent employer)
Chuck Jones to correct folks...
“June Foray is not the
female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc was
the male June Foray.”
H
The Remarkable
June Foray
by Mark Evanier
“June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc.
Mel Blanc was the male June Foray.”
– Chuck Jones
The Beginning of a Legend
One can make the case
either way. Less arguable though
is that June is one of a select
group of voice legends that
includes not only the immortal Mr.
Blanc but two of her other frequent co-stars — Daws Butler and
Paul Frees. Put any of them in a
room with a microphone and you
had a cast of hundreds...
But put June and any of
those men (or Stan Freberg or
Don Messick, etc.) in that studio
and the possibilities were infinite.
It isn’t just that June can
portray so many different people
June 2000
19
but that each is a fully-rounded,
well-delineated characterization.
The folks she becomes don’t just
sound funny; they breathe and
laugh and cry and run the gamut
of emotions without you ever feeling, “Oh, that’s just somebody
doing a silly voice!” Small wonder
she has worked so much...ever
since age 12, to be precise.
That was when she first
performed a role in a radio play
back in her native Springfield,
Massachusetts. Three years later,
she was a regular player in the rep
company
of
WBZA
in
Springfield...and by the time she
was 17, she was ensconced in
Hollywood and landing roles in
radio programs of the day —
everything from The Jimmy
Durante Show to the prestigious
Lux Radio Theatre. She even had
her own kids’ show for a time,
telling stories as Lady Makebelieve.
“Radio was the greatest
training ground,” she says. “You
had to be very quick and you had
to be very versatile...and you were
surrounded by such wonderful
actors.”
Hitting Her Stride
Then it was on to cartoons.
In the 1940s, producer Jerry
Fairbanks brought out his
“Speaking of Animals” shorts
which featured live-action footage
of animals with cartoon mouths
superimposed on them. June was
one of the actors engaged to dub
in the bon mots “spoken” by the
critters.
It was on those jobs that
she met and formed lasting relationships with two other voice performers — Stan Freberg and Daws
Butler. Soon after, June joined
Stan, Daws and Mel Blanc, among
others, recording children’s records
for Capitol...and that led her to
just about every cartoon studio in
existence.
“Someone at Disney heard
one of the records and called me
in to do the sounds of Lucifer the
Cat in Cinderella.” (For Disney’s
next animated feature, Peter Pan,
she played a mermaid — but did
not do any voices. They put her in
a bathing suit and filmed her performing actions to serve as reference for the animators.)
She also performed —
before a microphone — for Tex
Avery at MGM and for dozens of
Walter Lantz cartoons. But her
best-known work in theatrical animation was for Warner Bros.
where she quickly became the star
female voice, performing in countless films. Her roles included
Granny, the feisty owner of
Tweety and Sylvester, and the Alice
mouse in the Kramdenesque
Honeymousers series.
Her favorite? No contest: “I
started playing witches...for
Disney in Trick or Treat and Witch
Hazel for Chuck Jones in several
films.” Her witches were classic —
and oft-imitated. Even today, casting agents will tell you: They rarely
hear a female voice demo tape
that doesn’t include some approximation of a June Foray witch
voice.
During the Fifties, June performed on such radio shows as
remained, including the last-ever
network comedy radio program
— The Stan Freberg Show. She
had performed on many of Stan’s
best-selling comedy records,
including “St. George and the
Dragonet” and “Sh-Boom.” Says
Stan today, “She was, quite simply,
the best in the business. I could
write anything, confident in the
knowledge that whatever the age,
whatever the accent, June could
do it.”
She also did a bit of oncamera acting, appearing on several TV shows and in movies. (If
you want to see her cringe,
remind her of her role as the sexy
High Priestess in the film, Sabaka.)
At some point though, she bowed
to the inevitable: Hollywood was
loaded with actresses who could
emote in front of the camera...but
put her at a microphone and June
Foray was in a class by herself. To
date, her last on-camera acting
was in the mid-Sixties, playing a
Hispanic telephone operator in
several episodes of Green Acres.
It’s great to meet
a performer and
discover that
you love the
person just as
much as you love
the performances.
Lasting Stardom
By then, she was well into
her best-known body of work —
her stint for Jay Ward, performing
almost all the female roles (and the
The
occasional
male)
on
Bullwinkle Show (ne Rocky and His
Friends),
Dudley
Do-Right,
Fractured Fairy Tales, Fractured
Flickers and many more. She can
barely venture anywhere these
days without someone imposing
on her to speak a line or two as
Rocky (usually the line about “That
trick never works”) or perhaps
Natasha Fatale and/or Nell
Fenwick.
It was not just that the
Ward cartoons were wittily written
— which they were, largely under
the supervision of Bill Scott — they
were also brilliantly performed.
Working with a fine stock compaJune 2000
20
ny that included Scott, Paul Frees,
sometimes William Conrad, Daws
Butler or Hans Conried and others, June was part of the highwatermark of cartoon voice acting.
“They were recorded very
quickly,” she recalls. “When they
came to you for your line, you had
to be ready and you had to get it
in one.” Surviving tapes of recording sessions prove she nearly
always did just that.
June appeared concurrently and after in hundreds of commercials and countless other TV
shows. Just a few years ago, she
brought Granny back to life on
The Sylvester and Tweety
Mysteries and has been heard on
The Smurfs, Garfield and Friends
and many more.
She has also, unbeknownst
to many of her fans, been heard in
dozens of live-action movies, dubbing other actors. Listen for her
(and Paul Frees) throughout Bells
Are Ringing or The Comic, to
name two of many. She can also
be heard in dolls (the original
Chatty Cathy) and around
Disneyland (The Pirates of the
Caribbean), and if there’s any
other place a person can be called
on to deliver a vocal performance,
June has been there.
Community Service and Its
Rewards
Of special note are her
many contributions to the film and
animation community, including
service as a Governor of the
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts &
Sciences, and also the National
Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences. She has been such a fixture of ASIFA — The International
Animated Film Society — that
ASIFA-Hollywood even named an
award after her.
And just when you think
she’s taken home every honor for
which she’s even remotely eligible,
along comes another one: On July
7, a star bearing the name “June
Foray” will be unveiled on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It roughly coincides with the
release of the big-budget, Robert
DeNiro-produced feature film of
Rocky and Bullwinkle ...starring
you-know-who as the voice of the
former.
On July 7, a star
bearing the name
“June Foray”
will be unveiled
on the
legendary
Hollywood
Walk of Fame.
On a personal note, I have
to add that it has been a pleasure
to know and work with June
Foray. When I was a kid, her voice
could be heard on darn near
every TV show and record that I
loved. It’s great to meet a performer and discover that you love
the person just as much as you
love the performances.
Mark Evanier made the long,
hard struggle to Hollywood all
the way from West Los Angeles.
He’s been writing comic books
since 1969 (when he apprenticed
with the legendary Jack Kirby),
live-action TV since 1976 and
animation since 1978. His comic
book credits include his own
co-creations, The DNAgents,
Crossfire and The Mighty Magnor,
along with fourteen years of collaborating with cartoonist Sergio
Aragonés on Groo the Wanderer.
Mark has also worked on preexisting characters including
Superman, Blackhawk, The New
Gods, Tarzan, Mickey Mouse,
Super Goof, Bugs Bunny, Daffy
Duck, Tweety & Sylvester, Pink
Panther, Woody Woodpecker,
The Flintstones, Scooby Doo,
Yogi Bear and dozens of others.
In animation, he wrote, voicedirected and co-produced 121
half-hours of Garfield and Friends
for CBS, and can also claim credits on Mother Goose and Grimm,
CBS Storybreak, Dungeons and
Dragons, ABC Weekend Special,
Scooby Doo, Thundarr the
Barbarian, The Wuzzles, Richie
Rich, Yogi Bear and many more.
In the arena of live-action television, he has written for Welcome
Back, Kotter; The Love Boat,
Cheers, Bob, That’s Incredible,
The Richard Pryor Show, plus
dozens of variety shows and specials. He has three Emmy nominations (no wins) and lives in Los
Angeles in a big house full of
comic books.
[email protected].
June 2000
21
B I G Departure
Disney Takes a
from Formula with
Dinosaur
by Wendy Jackson Hall
Iguanodons Aladar (left) and Neera (right) develop a special bond as they face the
hardships of trekking across the desert together. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
he history of animation is
filled with films about
dinosaurs; from short films
such as Winsor McCay’s Gertie the
Dinosaur (1914), Willis O’Brien’s
Dinosaur and the Missing Link
(1917), Will Vinton’s Dinosaur
(1980) and Phil Tippett’s Prehistoric
Beast (1983) to features such as
The Land Before Time films, and in
recent years to CG effects in films
like Jurassic Park (1993) and T-Rex:
Back to the Cretaceous (1998). So
why in the world would Disney
T
Bloodthirsty carnotaurs threaten
the herd of migrating dinosaurs.
© Disney Enterprises, Inc.
want to go and make another
dino flick?
Six years in the
(actual) making
and with a budget
of approximately
$127 million,
Dinosaur is one of
Disney’s biggest
animated films.
The origins of Disney’s
Dinosaur actually date all the way
back to 1988, when the studio’s
live-action division acquired a
screenplay called “Dinosaur” by
Walon Green. At that time, Paul
Verhoeven and Phil Tippett were
interested in making the film, but it
never got off the ground. Then in
late 1994, Walt Disney Feature
Animation adopted Dinosaur and
began shooting various tests, placing CG characters in miniature
model backdrops before deciding
to take the unprecedented route
of combining live-action scenery
with computer-generated character animation.
Six years in the (actual)
making and with a budget of
approximately $127 million (some
reports have it as being much
higher!), Dinosaur is one of
Disney’s biggest animated films. It
is also one of its biggest risks. The
film, co-directed by Ralph Zondag,
who also co-directed We’re Back!
A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) and Eric
Leighton, a stop-motion animator,
is only the second PG-rated animated feature the studio has ever
released (the first one was The
Black Cauldron in 1985, which
many define as the low point of
animation’s down-cycle in the
1980s). There is no singing in the
film, other than the earth-shaking
roars of the dinosaurs, and the
Directors of Dinosaur: Eric Leighton (left)
and Ralph Zondag (right).
June 2000
22
the film,” explains visual effects
supervisor Neil Krepela.
A total of 48 animators
worked on the film, one-third of
who were already versed in computer animation, while the other
two thirds came from traditional
hand-drawn animation and stopmotion animation backgrounds.
Early on, co-director Eric Leighton
recruited several animators he
knew from being a supervising
animator on The Nightmare
Before Christmas including Mike
Belzer, Joel Fletcher, Angie Glocka,
Owen Klatte and Trey Thomas.
Two lemurs, the elder statesman Yar and his daughter Plio, watch a baby dinosaur
hatching from its egg. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
character design is extremely realistic. Disney is hoping the actionpacked film will draw teenage and
adult audiences.
Strength in Numbers
One of the key themes of
the film is also a description of the
production process: it’s not about
one individual but rather the
strength of the group. The credit
sequence says it all: In addition to
the two directors, the production
crew included over 500 people.
The artists were organized in
teams according to the stages of
production: Visual Development &
Character Design, Workbook,
Look
Development,
Model
Development, Digital Image
Planning, Animation and Scene
Finaling, aided by production staff
and several teams devoted to
technology, software implementation and rendering.
From the storyboards, a
“3D Workbook” was created to
give all of the department supervisors an idea of what each scene
will look like. Using the 3D workANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
book as reference, a film unit shot
background plates in beautiful
and exotic locales around the
world, including Australia,
Venezuela and Samoa. This
footage was digitized and composited to create fantastic settings
that never existed in the real
world. “I like to think of our backgrounds as being a character in
A total of 48
animators worked on
the film, one third
of who were already
versed in computer
animation...
From Stop-Motion to CG
“It’s a new place and a new
technique but there are lots of similarities to stop-motion,” says Joel
A pteranodon carrying an Iguanodon egg swoops through a herd of grazing dinosaurs.
June 2000
23
Supervising animator of characters
Baylen and Url, Michael Belzer.
Fletcher, “Working on a stage with
a little puppet is all three-dimensional. On the computer, it’s a virtual three-dimensional world. The
characters are on a virtual stage
with virtual lighting and are essentially a puppet. The big difference
is that with stop-motion, each performance is a one-of-a-kind thing
that you have to live with even if
you make a mistake. On the computer, if you don’t get it quite right
you can keep refining until you
get a more perfect result.”
Mike Belzer, whose stopmotion work runs the gamut from
Gumby to James and the Giant
Peach, agrees, “The biggest similarity is you are working in 3D
space. I missed the tactile nature of
it, but the tools were created with
that in mind, because we had so
many different kinds of animators
working on the film.” Belzer had
worked briefly at Pixar before joining the Dinosaur production as
supervising animator for the characters Baylene, the brachiosaur,
and Url, the ankylosaur. But learning the ropes at Disney was like
starting from scratch because of
differences in the proprietary software at both studios. The animators worked mainly in Softimage,
but the Dinosaur software group
wrote 70,000 lines of code to finetune the controls for the animators. They animated fleshed-out
skeletons (Model Development
Supervisor Sean Phillips compares
the rough model parts to Tootsie
Rolls) for the first run, then after
rough animation, the Model TDs
(technical directors) added muscles according to the animators’
directions.
“One of the biggest challenges was key-framing,” says
Belzer. “With stop-motion you start
with frame one and animate
straight ahead.” He had to learn to
animate in stages, for instance
“first just the legs and body, then I
would animate the shoulder and
other parts later.” The extreme realism in the animation of the
dinosaurs was achieved by taking
this layering technique very seriously. “With stop-motion, you take
it one frame at a time and you
pray a lot,” says Belzer. “One of the
highlights of computer animation
is the fact that what you do is
enhanced so much more by other
people’s efforts with the muscle
and skin, the compositing and
lighting.”
One of the animation principles Disney always adheres to is
‘secondary action,’ which in this
film is mainly the rippling skin and
jiggling flesh of the dinosaurs as
well as the fur of the lemurs.
Baylene, the biggest dinosaur in
the bunch, is a prime example of
secondary action in animation.
When she stomps her foot on the
ground, several complementary
motions accentuate the action: a
ripple rises through her body and
a rotation twists her leg slightly.
Baylene’s foot alone contains four
types of controls for distributing
weight. A fascinating simulation of
these controls is available on the
Dinosaur web site
official
(www.dinosaur.go.com), where
users can load a model of Baylene’s
foot and toggle controls for its animation attributes: “hang” causes
the sole to droop when the foot is
lifted off the ground, “squish” controls the degree to which the
fleshy regions of the foot spread
out when weight is applied, and
“heel” and “toe” controls indicate
weight placement toward the rear
or front of the foot.
Drawing From Life
Throughout the produc-
Brachiosaur Baylene and the other “misfit” dinosaurs find an alternate route to the
lush, green nesting grounds. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
June 2000
24
Eamonn Butler, supervising animator of
Kron. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
tion, the directors and animators
did a considerable amount of
research. The animators met with
paleontologists, including Stuart
Sumida, who lectured to the artists
about dinosaur locomotion and
anatomy. (Sumida is writing a
book
called
Anatomy
for
Animators.) They took frequent
trips to the L.A. zoo to observe
elephants, rhinos, ostriches and
giraffes, but zoo animals are
remarkably sedate, recalls Belzer. “I
said to [the producer] Pam
Marsden — I know they brought
in deer for Bambi. So…Can you
get us an elephant?” A week later
the animators headed up to a
ranch to study and videotape
Nellie, the famous Hollywood elephant walking and running. “One
of the easy things about the
Baylene character was the trunk of
the body was very similar to that
of an elephant. We were really
able to study the skin and the
muscle inertia. But with the long
neck and the tail we had to wing
it!”
After animation was completed, intricate skins were painted
on using a technique that
matched points on the skin to the
muscles underneath, creating a
believable effect. Hundreds of
shaders were written to create the
unique look of surfaces, lighting
and shadows. Additional effects
such as dust and splashing water
were filmed in live-action then
Bringing Dinosaur to life required
3.2 million processing hours...
applied to the characters.
Integrating the CG and live-action
elements proved to be quite a
challenge.
Mammoth Technology
Bringing Dinosaur to life
required 3.2 million processing
hours and the film’s total elements
occupied 45 terabytes of disc
space (45 million megabytes)
stored on 70,000 CD-Roms. The
studio’s render farm consisted of
250 dedicated computer processors and another 300 desktop
processors at the workstations. On
average, 30,000 processing hours
per week were devoted to rendering and compositing the film.
At the conclusion of production on Dinosaur, the digital
studio joined with Disney’s effects
division Dream Quest to form a
new entity called the Secret Lab,
now co-located in a modern building near the Burbank airport. The
name accurately portrays Disney’s
closed-door policy about projects
in development. Even family members are not allowed in the studio.
Mike Belzer and other animators
are currently working on several
new CG films at Disney, which are
of course under wraps.
Wendy Jackson Hall is an independent animator, educator,
writer and consultant specializing
in animation. Her articles have
been published in Animation
Journal, Animation Magazine,
ASIFA News, the Hollywood
Reporter, Variety and Wired. She
was previously associate editor of
Animation World Magazine.
A group of thirsty dinosaurs on their journey across the arid desert.
[email protected].
June 2000
25
ADS
ARE ANIMATING THE
INTERNET
by Karen Raugust
Advertisers and sponsors look for
creative ways to get their message
across to web users…
orporations are increasingly looking toward the
Internet as an advertising
vehicle, especially to reach target
markets such as young males and
urban dwellers that tend to be frequent Internet users. But many
question the effectiveness of banner ads — the initial standard for
Internet advertising — and, as a
result, are experimenting with
new ways of getting their message across. These tests often
focus on animation.
C
Altoids’ Little Devil
Altoids created an online
animated spokesperson to support
the launch of its new line extenSindy, Altoid’s new cinnamon babe, is hot
enough to make the Devil jealous!
© Callard & Bowser-Suchard.
Bond, convinced that Sindy is too hot for
most viewers, warns all who dare to
enter the site. (He, on the other hand,
wouldn’t dare to be without her.)
© Callard & Bowser-Suchard.
sion, Cinnamon Altoids. “We
asked, ‘How do we generate buzz
with our Altoid consumer and
consumers in general about this
new flavor launch?’” said Andrew
Burke, Altoids brand manager. The
answer was to create a racy, animated
spokescharacter
that
embodied the “heat” of cinnamon
and send users to a Webster featuring that character, in order to
introduce them to cinnamon as an
Altoids flavor.
The site, Toohot.com,
launched October 1, 1999, and
was the focal point of the
Cinnamon promotional campaign.
Burke says the company drove
traffic to the site through “print ads
in our core urban markets, where
our target consumers live,” magnets placed on street signs and
subway cards, personal ads in
local newsweeklies, postcards and
posters. The teaser message featured the Cinnamon spokesperson
and the Toohot.com URL on a
light green Altoids background;
there was no mention of the
Altoids brand name. The campaign ran through December and
generated strong traffic over the
three-month period, according to
Burke. “It far surpassed our expectation.”
Traffic dropped off a bit
after December, when the campaign ended, as was anticipated.
“It wasn’t meant to necessarily live
on its own after the mainline campaign,” Burke explains, noting that
Toohot.com incorporated a link to
Altoids’ main Web site,
Altoids.com, driving traffic there
and building awareness for that
site as well as for Cinnamon
Altoids.
The objective of the campaign was more to spread the
word about the new product
launch over the Internet rather
than to drive a certain number of
sales of Cinnamon Altoids, Burke
explains. Feedback from the site
was overwhelmingly positive, with
comments indicating that viewers
thought its design was pushing
the envelope for Flash animation.
(The WDDG created the animation.) “It was designed to get buzz
going with our target, which happens to be very web-savvy,” says
Burke. He adds that Internet sites
such as Macromedia featured
June 2000
26
Herschel Hopper is ready to get fueled
up on Jelly Bellies. © Rumpus.com.
Toohot.com as a cool site, as did
several print magazines and television programs. “It did all the things
we wanted it to do,” Burke concludes.
The company is now focusing its Internet efforts on
Altoids.com, which launched in
March 1999. “We put the URL on
our Altoids ads, but there’s no special campaign to drive consumers
there,” Burke says. “We want [the
site] to be fresh and relevant to our
consumers and let it spread
through word of mouth.”
Product Placement’s New
Realm
Another avenue for boosting brand recognition is through
product placements within online
animated films. Rumpus.com integrated product placements from
The Body Shop, a health and
beauty products retailer, Jelly Belly
jelly beans, Krispy Kreme donuts
and New York-area newspapers
for its animated children’s film,
Herschel Hopper New York Rabbit,
which debuted in April. Tanner
Zucker, director of new media at
Rumpus.com, an online toyseller
that plans to introduce more children’s animation series, notes that
Rumpus.com decided to eschew
banner advertising for creative reasons. “It’s like bringing a foreign
object into our design,” he says. “It
doesn’t look great and it’s kind of
obnoxious.” Instead, the company
opted for 15-second interstitials
within programming and for product placement as advertising vehicles. “[Product placement is] a
unique and customized opportunity [for advertisers] to be seen by
our viewers,” Zucker says, noting
that users do not click away from
the site during the advertising
message.
Product placements are
somewhat like character endorsements. For example, the character
Herschel Hopper was shown eating Jelly Belly jelly beans and taking a bath with bottles of The
Body Shop-branded products visible on the side of the tub. As part
of the plotline, his picture
appeared in newspapers such as
The New York Observer and The
New York Post. All told, there were
five to 10 placements within the
film. Both Krispy Kreme and The
Body Shop promoted Herschel
Hopper in their stores with signage and literature, which drove
traffic to Rumpus.com. The newspapers ran movie ads for the production.
Zucker notes that since
viewers could see the movie for
free (thanks to a partnership with
Lycos), Rumpus.com was unable
to track how many viewers came
to the site as a result of individual
promotions, but he reports that
traffic was greater for the film than
is normal on a daily basis, suggesting that the promotions helped.
(Originally, Rumpus.com had
intended to charge $3 per view.)
Chad Little, PR coordinator
for The Body Shop, says that the
retailer’s target consumer includes
both adults and children, so it
made sense to tie in with a vehicle
that appealed to families.
“Herschel Hopper was presented
to us as the first online children’s
feature-length animated film,” says
Little. “There was a warm excitement about it.”
“We would have liked to
track the results of this promotion
but we were unable to monitor
e x a c t f i g u re s , ” s a y s L i t t l e .
“However, we definitely received
positive feedback from customers
around this promotion.”
Starting in early June,
Rumpus.com will offer interstitials
both in its future entertainment
properties as well as in its online
games. They will continue to
incorporate product placements
into thier productions as well.
Selling Out The Thugs
Mondo Media produces
animated online programming
including Thugs on Film and The
God and Devil Show, which it syndicates to 15 to 20 Web sites with
a total potential audience of 60
million to 70 million viewers and
sells mini-commercials as well as
sponsorships. Steve Ledoux,
Mondo’s SVP syndication and ad
sales, describes the online commercials as “a TV-like experience.
Instead of a flat graphic you have
rich-media content to tell your
story. But, unlike TV, you also have
the ability to immediately transact.” Viewers can stop the show at
the point of the commercial, click,
and directly purchase the product
advertised.
In Thugs on Film, the two
characters review a movie and
then recommend a related film
available on video, which viewers
can purchase at that time from
advertiser Reel.com. For example,
during the Thugs’ review of
Mission Impossible 2, they recommend the video of the first Mission
Impossible film. “It’s clearly not a
product placement,” Ledoux
explains, noting that while the
June 2000
27
Thugs on Film. The cost per thousand viewers (CPM) for a mini-ad
alone ranges from $40 to $80; a
typical ad buy brings 1 million to 3
million impressions per month.
The click-through rate for Reel.com
(the number of viewers who link
to Reel.com while watching Thugs
on Film) has exceeded 8% — a
very high level — based on one
month’s worth of data. “[The ads
are] compelling, entertaining and
allow for immediate clickthrough,” Ledoux emphasizes.
The Thugs will tell you what’s up and
where it’s at. © Mondo Media, Inc.
Thugs stay in character, viewers
are aware they are looking at a
commercial message. “We’ve had
people tell us, and this is a direct
quote, that ‘This is crass commercialism done at its best,’” says
Ledoux.
Mondo also offers traditional TV-style commercials where the
entertainment fades to black
before and after the advertisement. The choice depends on the
product and the entertainment
vehicle; some characters would
never hawk a product while others would. In addition to
Reel.com, other Mondo Media
advertisers include Eyada, a chat
site, which advertises on The God
and Devil Show, and the cable
network BBC Americas, which will
advertise its Friday night British
humor line-up during Thugs on
Film. (The latter is part of a broader alliance that will eventually lead
to Thugs on Film being aired as a
television program on the cable
outlet.)
Mondo Media usually sells
one sponsorship plus one mini-ad
per segment, sometimes both to
one advertiser, as is the case with
Reel.com’s involvement with
The cost per
thousand
viewers (CPM)
for a mini-ad
alone ranges from
$40 to $80…
Harry Bernstein, VP of corporate development at Reel.com,
notes that the company’s relationship with Mondo Media has two
prongs. Reel.com airs Thugs on
Film on its site, which features
both entertainment content and ecommerce, as well as running ads
within Thugs on Film; the ads are
seen by viewers of all of Mondo’s
syndication affiliates. “We were
impressed with the strength of the
content and the strength of their
affiliate network,” says Bernstein.
“We were interested in getting rich
media content on our own site
and to use [the Mondo Media
series] as a vehicle to drive traffic to
our site.” Bernstein notes that traffic to Reel.com due to the Thugs
on Film advertising compares
favorably with other methods of
customer acquisition.
To date, many online
These Thugs sure know where to get the
“reel” thing. © Mondo Media, Inc.
advertisers associated with animation content are either dot.coms
or entertainment companies —
which value the synergy between
on-screen and online entertainment and branding — but other
consumer goods companies are
also involved. In addition to
Altoids’
activity,
M&M/Mars’
Starburst brand was featured in an
ad before Sho.com’s Whirlgirl
series last year, while retailer Tower
has sponsored animated programming on Spumco.com.
Karen Raugust is the author of
several books and reports on
licensing and entertainment,
including The Licensing Business
Handbook, International
Licensing: A Status Report (both
available from EPM
Communications, New York) and
Merchandise Licensing for the
Television Industry (available from
Focal Press, Newton, Mass.). She
also writes about licensing, animation and other topics for publications including The Hollywood
Reporter, Publishers Weekly and
Animation Magazine, and acts as
a consultant to the licensing and
entertainment industries. She is
the former Executive Editor of
The Licensing Letter.
[email protected].
June 2000
28
100%
Digital
Cars Are
Up To
Speed
by J. Paul Peszko
A high-tech steel machine otherwise known as the Pontiac Grand Am eats up
the pavement of “Metal City’s” streets. © General Motors. Images courtesy
of Digital Domain (Pontiac).
hile the clash
between the Old
Economy and the
New Economy continues on Wall
Street, in corporate circles the contrast between old styles and new
has reached even greater proportions. With dot-coms springing up
faster than you can download the
latest browser and brick and mortar retailers quickly trying to learn
the clicks of the e-trade, Madison
Avenue finds itself embroiled in an
old versus new controversy of its
own, namely live-action or digital
animation. This, too, is an outgrowth of another battle that has
been going on for years: film versus videotape.
Though animation of one
kind or another has been a mainstay of television commercials
since the early days, it had always
played second fiddle to live-action.
Since a photo-real box of cereal or
can of cleanser could hardly
dance across a counter, sing a jingle or smile with delight, production houses integrated live-action
with animation more out of neces-
W
sity than choice. But even Tony the
Tiger and the Pillsbury Doughboy
would be the first to tell you that
live-action was where the prestige
and big bucks were to be found.
A few years ago, I represented a Denver production company that worked with several liveaction directors. One of these was
a superstar of soda and beer commercials. After seeing his reel, a
prestigious East Coast agency
asked for a bid on a dog food
commercial. When I called for his
availability, he told me quite bluntly, “I don’t do dog food.” Sorry,
Rover. How about washing down
those beef chunks with a six pack
of Bud?
The Best is Required
Advertising agencies have always
craved live-action film directors
who could give their products that
winning edge — even if it is dog
food. So, when it comes to products that are bought especially for
their style and looks, it is no wonder creative executives have
fawned over hot niche directors
for years. They want the real product, and they want it shot on film
with subtle lighting and a riveting
style that lends itself to trendy, fastpaced editing usually around a
catchy jingle or slogan. There may
be an animated logo or a CG starburst, but the product itself has to
be one hundred percent photoreal and filmed at its creative best.
Automobile commercials
were a perfect case in point. Until
recently, one might have expected
electric cars to replace gas-guzzlers
before any of the Big Three national ad campaigns ever replaced a
real car filmed live with a digital
one created on tape. It just wasn’t
done. Car spots had always featured slick, live shots, fast cutting,
awesome backgrounds whether
on a butte overlooking the Grand
Canyon or on a winding mountainous road bordered by tall
pines. Then along came BBD&O
in Detroit. They came up with a
Plymouth campaign that called for
a Neon on a trampoline. Not the
easiest location to place a car —
even a subcompact. Enter Digital
June 2000
29
an example of a live-action director
having the confidence of the
agency already,” Barba points out.
“The spot was already in his
hands.”
A black roadmaster admires her steel
kingdom in the commercial spot “Steel
Desert.” © General Motors. Images courtesy of Digital Domain (Pontiac).
Domain (D2) of Venice, California.
They showed how the spot could
be done with a one hundred percent digital Neon.
Digital Domain …
showed how the spot
could be done with a
one hundred percent
digital Neon.
Although it became a
groundbreaking
commercial,
“Trampoline” was originally conceived and bid as a live-action spot
and Terry Windell, a noted car
director at A Band Apart, was
selected to shoot it. But after
exhausting all the possibilities, the
creative team could not come up
with a relatively uncomplicated,
inexpensive way to rig the car to
make it bounce up and down on
a trampoline.
“It was going to be a long,
expensive shoot,” states Eric
Barba, a visual effects supervisor at
Digital Domain. “So, one our other
effects supervisors pitched Terry to
do it as a CG car. We did some
tests to show him we could do it.
Then we moved ahead and did
the spot.”
But ad agencies were still
not thinking digital cars. “This was
Proving Digital Might
Right after “Trampoline,”
BBD&O produced a live-action
spot entitled “Time” to show off
the new line of Dodge vehicles
including the Viper GTS, a sleek,
high-powered sports car. All the
vehicles were the same color —
red — so one could dissolve into
the other as it passed through a
glass wall. But the red Viper also
had two white racing stripes.
When Dodge decided not to produce Vipers with stripes, the
agency had to find a way to
remove them. But it was impossible to paint the stripes out. Pleased
with the results of “Trampoline,”
they once again called on Digital
Domain, which in turn did away
with the original Viper completely
and replaced it with a digital one.
BBD&O loved it. When they decided to do “Time 2,” adding the
Durango and the Intrepid to the
original spot, they had Digital
Domain do the honors rather than
incur the expense of shooting the
new models.
“That was really the breakthrough usage of digital cars in
advertising,” Barba emphasizes.
“That got them [ad agencies] to
In “Metal City,” it’s metal that’s mighty!
© General Motors. Images courtesy of
Digital Domain (Pontiac).
buy that we could do fully photoreal digital cars, and from then on
we’ve been pitching the idea.”
Next came the two impressive Pontiac Grand Am spots,
“Steel City” and “Steel Desert,” produced by D’Arcy, Massius, Benton
and Bowles, which have a Grand
Am maneuvering deftly through a
virtual all-steel environment. The
idea was to show that the Grand
Am was built stronger and
tougher and is more solid than
ever before.
“Last year’s Grand Am was a
brand new vehicle,” explains Mark
Zapico, group creative director at
DMB&B. “It was really new from
the ground up. It had a space
frame design made out of hydroformed steel. It was built to be a
lot more rigid and a lot stronger
[than previous models]. So the
idea of the steel world manifested
itself out of the brand and the
product, itself. We wanted a way
to truly bring the steel landscapes
to life.”
Working with D2
Why did the agency decide
to go all digital and why did they
choose Digital Domain?
“It was not an easy decision,” Zapico admits on both
counts. As to the first question, the
agency had seen a lot of digital
cars, but they were static. They
had not seen a digital car move
along the road like a photo-real
one. What changed their minds?
Again, the answer was the brand,
itself, the Grand Am. According to
Zapico, “Since the technology for
Grand Am was to build a car that
was cutting edge it was worth a
try to see if we could make digital
cars work.”
As to the second question,
the agency team had to educate
themselves about the world of digJune 2000
30
ital production. They looked at the
work of several digital houses
including Digital Domain. “After
talking with them [Digital Domain]
a number of times, we felt confident that the full brunt of their
artists, animators and designers
could bring it to life, and we had
the backing of our clients. Digital
Domain had done work before for
General Motors...So, we felt it was
a risk worth taking,” continues
Zapico.
DMB&B sent an agency
team to Los Angeles to work closely with Digital Domain and their
in-house director, Ray Giarratana.
And the results were very encouraging. “We put every one of our
best people on it,” Giarratana
states, “...and when it was all said
and done, the clients got something that really showed off their
product well and in a very interesting manner that was different
in many ways.”
From the very start,
Giarratana felt to achieve the creativity demanded in the clients’
storyboard the spots would have
to be produced digitally. But while
creativity may be enhanced using
digital effects, what about quality?
Besides putting their top people
on the spot, to insure a quality
equal to live-action, they hired Bill
Bennett, a top live-action director
of photography for auto commercials, to consult with Ray and Eric
and their team. They wanted to be
able to match the angles that have
proven over the years to show an
automobile at its finest.
“I knew this was going to
look different from the viewer’s
perspective because you don’t see
a desert...or a city completely
made out of metal ever,”
Giarratana explains. “So, one of
the things I really set out [to do]
from the beginning was to make
sure that we photographed the
automobile using somewhat
established photography. There
are angles that look good on a car
and have been used before. Lots
of very talented [live-action] directors have shot cars before and
have come up with a visual language that is beautiful on an automobile. Just because we could
move our camera anywhere and
in any way without the limitations
of a live-action production didn’t
mean we should.”
Being Sensible
Though early on his clients
may have thought that with animation you can move the camera
anywhere you wanted and go
zipping through everything,
Giarratana felt otherwise. “It still
needs to be beautiful, and there
needs to be reasons to motivate
moves...I was very much of the
opinion that, wherever possible,
to try and use the camera in a way
that we could almost do [the shot]
in live-action. I wanted to stay
within some realm of believability
from a photography point of
view.”
While the spots would
have been impossible to produce
in live-action, they were by no
means an easy order even digitally. “In the city spot one of the chal-
Blackmobile cruises through “Metal City”
at sunset. © General Motors. Images
courtesy of Digital Domain (Pontiac).
lenges was the sheer magnitude
of information,” Giarratana admits.
“Just to present a city with that
much detail was certainly a challenge. The desert spot, that wasn’t
quite that big of a deal because it
was a lot more sparse and, therefore, not as populated. But they
both presented very tough lighting challenges because it’s metal
on metal on metal, and it needed
to look really beautiful and yet realistic as well.”
Both spots have been heavily rotated and have received
remarkable acclaim. So much so,
that when Pontiac wanted to
emphasize their solid frame design
in this year’s ad campaign, DMB&B
did not hesitate to go back to
Digital Domain. The idea was to
keep the original spots running
but to pass the Grand Am through
an x-ray showing its chassis and
edit that in. D2 responded quickly
and economically.
A Trend?
Does this mean we can
expect to see a lot more digital
cars replacing real ones in the
future? It depends on the creative
team at the agency and the director they select.
“We just finished another
spot in the same campaign...and
we shot real cars in a CGI environ-
“X-ray” reveals explosive colors under
metal surfaces. © General Motors. Images
courtesy of Digital Domain (Pontiac).
June 2000
31
ment,” states DMB&B’s Zapico.
“And, the feeling that we’re getting is it’s even a better looking
marriage between a real-looking
car and this [digital] environment.
So, we’ll probably go in that direction next.”
“Each creative guy has his
own feeling,” Barba explains.
“Most of them, because they’ve
been in the business for a while
and have been shooting cars for a
while, prefer to shoot cars with a
camera and lens, the old-fashioned way. They feel they get
what they want. The digital thing
is kind of new to a lot of them, and
they don’t really warm up to it until
you show them repeatedly that
you can make a digital car look
every bit as photo-real as you can
with a real car. And then after a
while, they warm up to it, especially when you compare the
expense involved in shooting a car
on a motion-controlled stage with
multiple passes versus doing it digitally.”
Good point! How much
did DMB&B save altogether on the
three spots? A bundle. D2 used a
total of ten artists and two compositors on the “Metal City” and
“Steel Desert” spots and only two
artists and one compositor on the
“X-ray” segment. Compare this to
renting a stage with a turntable,
hauling a couple of Grand Ams in
and out, hiring a DP, a gaffer, a
legion of grips, prop people, carpenters, painters and the like. Not
just once but three times. And
afterward, they would still have to
go in and edit all the footage.
This is another instance
where digital production pays off
big time. It gives one more flexibility and freedom in the editing
room, where one can quickly alter
a scene or add nearly anything
that is wished. How about a new
set of wheel covers? Or a sports
rally package? No problem.
“One of the endings we
did with these new spots for “Xray,” we changed the wheels and
added a sunroof to the vehicle. So,
we could render it with two different wheel packages,” Barba states.
“Well, once you’ve shot with liveaction, you’re kind of stuck with it.
You can’t change it unless you go
back and reshoot. However, we
have taken live-action vehicles and
added CG components to them.
We did that for a Blazer spot,
where it was originally shot in liveaction, and the next year they
wanted to come back and have us
replace the headlights and
bumper parts with CG ones, so
they could continue to use the
commercial.”
This is another
instance where
digital production
pays off big time.
On the negative side,
DMB&B had the expense of keeping their creative team in Los
Angeles for nearly four months
while the first two Grand AM spots
were being produced. This may
change, however, as agencies
grow more comfortable with fully
digital productions.
Should Have Gone Digital
Ironically, the most complicated vehicle spot that D2 has
done used a photo-real vehicle
instead of a digital one. It was their
“Off Road” spot for Dodge Trucks.
Nick Piper of Plum was picked by
BBD&O to direct the spot. The
idea was to see an entire forest
actually spring up around a
Dodge Truck. So, Piper and the
production company decided to
shoot a live truck on a turntable.
They propped it with a small
stream and a smattering of plant
life in the foreground. From that
point, D2 took over and grew an
entire alpine environment around
the truck. In the spot, we see trees,
ferns and plant life, a mountain
and a sky growing from scratch.
“Up until that point, it was
something we hadn’t done in CG
— actually grow a forest,” Barba
states. “We had done plenty of CG
plants and CG trees and a CG sky,
but to grow one was a whole new
ballgame.”
Although the truck, itself,
was originally photo-real, D2
made so many changes to it that it
was virtually digital. In order to get
the effect they wanted, they had
to layer the truck with over forty
composites. “We did all the work
and could have replaced it if we
wanted to,” Barba admits,
“because, to match all the reflections and get it set up properly, we
had to create an essentially full CG
vehicle and then only render the
parts and then composite the
parts we needed. So, we did all
the work but we didn’t really get
to use it to its fullest. In fact, it
would have saved us a lot of compositing time had we done it that
way.” Aside from getting another
great looking spot to add to their
reel, all that work on “Off Road”
enabled D2 to come up with
some valuable proprietary software that they are using in-house
right now.
But what about D2’s
future? Does Barba think that
there will be more national auto
campaigns coming their way?
“Ultimately it’s up to the director.
Most live-action directors would
rather shoot (a photo-real car)
because that’s what they’re familiar
June 2000
32
with. But, if they get something
from an agency that’s real expensive to shoot or they won’t get the
flexibility they need or they can’t
quite figure out how to shoot it,
then we offer them the flexibility of
being able to get the quality they
want and still get the creativity the
agency wants.”
In the battle between quality and creativity, when it comes to
national advertising, quality wins
out time and again. It has been
this very lack of quality in some
digital cars that has caused
Madison Avenue to throw out a
caution flag. But at Digital
Domain, where they have stressed
quality along with creativity, their
photo-real digital cars are at present lapping the competition and
look primed to get the checkered
flag.
Remember to search the
Animation World Magazine
Archives to find more articles on
commercials, digital production
and related topics.
J. Paul Peszko is a freelance writer
and screenwriter living in Los
Angeles. He writes feature
articles, interviews and reviews
for regional publications. He
currently has two scripts under
option and is working on a
feature comedy, in addition to
just completing his first novel.
When he isn’t writing, he teaches
communications courses.
[email protected].
“ The Animation Flash is my number
one contact with what's going on
in the world of animation. I often
quote whole passages from it in
my official reports to
DreamWorks. ”
THEANIMATION
FLASH
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European Representative for Feature Animation
DreamWorks
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Animation World Network, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 600, Los Angeles, CA 90034, USA, tel (1) 323 634 3400, fax (1) 323 634 3350, email at [email protected]
June 2000
33
You like Ike
I like Ike
Everybody likes Ike!
Hang out the banner, bang the
drum
We’ll take Ike to Washington!
- Eisenhower TV ad, 1952
Election
Fraud
here was nothing very different about the spot’s animation; it was simple, stylized, and presented in black and
white, quite typical for a commercial of its time. There was nothing
notably controversial in it; true,
some Democratic politicians were
caricatured as donkeys, but vicious
smears were likely not intended.
The above ditty, sung by a peppy
chorus, was no challenge to
Gershwin. Political historians
would never ascribe Eisenhower’s
resounding victory over Adlai
Stevenson to this ad’s influence; in
fact, this spot was probably
among the lesser weapons in
Dwight David’s campaign arsenal.
Yet, this cheerful campaign ad, run
on national TV during the 1952
Presidential election year, remains
to this day one of the most unusual animated commercials ever
broadcast to the American public.
In fact, it’s safe to say that in nearly
T
Father of American political cartoons,
Thomas Nast.
by Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman
Eisenhower made history with his decision to use animation for his Presidential
campaign of 1952. Good going, Ike!
Anything
imaginable can
now be sold more
creatively than
ever...with the
exception of
candidates for
the Presidency.
half a century there has never
been another one like it. What
makes this ad so unusual? Simply
this: It is virtually the only animated
spot ever used to help sell a candidate for the Presidency.
True, there was a film called
Hell Bent for Election produced in
1944; this 14-minute film was
made in support of President
Roosevelt’s campaign at the behest
of the United Auto Workers. The
UAW hired a firm called Industrial
Films and Poster Service, the progenitors of United Productions of
America (UPA). The film (directed
by Chuck Jones) was extremely
successful but it, too is an isolated
example of animation used in the
service of a political campaign.
Why should this be? The reasons
for the lack of animated campaign
ads must surely be cultural, and
specifically American. Or are they?
Animation Can Sell Anything
Since the advent of television in the 1940s, advertising
agencies and animators have
been comfortable bedfellows.
With the appearance of affordable
TV sets in the early 1950s, audiences made acquaintance with
the Hamm’s Beer Bear, the Muriel
Cigar Lady, Bert and Harry Piel,
Markie Maypo, and sundry other
ink-and-paint pitchmen who entertained us during breaks in
Playhouse 90 and Our Miss
Brooks. Some of these ads were
made by famous animators such
as Tex Avery and Shamus Culhane
after they had assumed independent status from their respective studios. The next three decades witnessed a deluge of animated commercials, and they were used to
sell every conceivable product that
free-market capitalism could cram
into our homes, garages, bodies
and psyches. During the past ten
years, the technological whirlwind
known as computer graphic imaging took animated advertising up
several levels, making it possible
Thomas Nast’s famous cartoon of the
“Inflation Donkey.” 19th Century
History of Cartoons.
June 2000
34
for 3D Goldfish crackers to cavort
in a simulated environment or a
kid’s face to morph into a slice of
watermelon. Anything imaginable
can now be sold more creatively
than ever...with the exception of
candidates for the Presidency.
Since the advent
of television
in the 1940s,
advertising
agencies and
animators have
been comfortable
bedfellows.
This tendency is puzzling
indeed. After all, this country does
have a rich, often hilarious history
of representing its politics in cartoon form. Thomas Nast (18401902) is credited as the father of
American political cartoons. Nast
made his reputation during the
Civil War and created our rudimentary cartoon symbols; Uncle
Sam, the Republican elephant,
and the Democratic donkey all
flowed from his imaginative pen.
Nast was followed by visual commentators such as Bill Mauldin, Pat
Oliphant, Herbert L. Block, Jeff
McNelly and Garry Trudeau, to
name but a few. Even the smallest
of hometown newspapers makes
room for a daily editorial cartoon,
and frequently one good panel is
worth a thousand filibusters.
So...after 140 years of political cartooning, 100 years of animation,
and 60 years of creative animated
advertising only Citizens for
Eisenhower and the UAW saw fit
to run an animated cartoon spot?
The first assumption we
Roosevelt’s rugged image is played up in “The Champion Rough Rider of the World.”
Political cartoon by Albert W. Steele (1898).
could logically make is: Animated
spots have been proven to lead to
a candidate’s defeat. Not! Both
FDR and DDE won their respective
elections in ‘44 and ‘52; if anything, animated commercials
would seem to boost a campaign.
Dead end here. Could it be that
the Presidency is too serious a subject to be associated with animation? That might have made a
more valid point; historically, the
President was rarely shown in
American cartoons. The aforementioned FDR was caricatured several times (he even sang in the 1933
Walter Lantz cartoon Confidence),
but by and large the Chief was
shown from behind, sitting imperiously at his desk or depicted in
shadow, suggested only by the
presence of an arm or hand. Even
the great iconoclast John Kricfalusi
(in his 1992 short Powdered Toast
Man) did not opt to depict Ronald
Reagan nipped by his own pants;
a generic stand in took a zipper for
the Gipper.
The New Presidential Image
On the other hand, over
the next few years Presidents were
recognizably animated, especially
after Steven Spielberg got into the
cartoon game. Not only did Bill
Clinton play the sax for the enjoyment of Wakko, Yakko and Dot
Warner, but rivals such as Ross
Perot got the ink-and-paint treatment as well. Spielberg was following the Warners tradition of
celebrity caricature and these
actions certainly did nothing to
damage or belittle the Presidency.
Today’s Presidential candidates do
the late night talk show circuit,
yakking it up with ex-comedians.
Besides, from the halls of the Hasty
Pudding Club to the set of
Saturday Night Live, the Oval
June 2000
35
ly damaged, by that old fave of
Gen X, Schoolhouse Rock. It was
proven to thousands of children
and parents that the Constitution,
the Declaration of Independence,
female suffrage, and the passing
of bills into law were fitting subjects for animated discourse. If
government, civics, and political
history can be taught in such a
sprightly and memorable manner
(Schoolhouse Rock has remained a
favorite through five Presidencies),
why can’t candidates and their
issues be as indelibly presented?
Here Roosevelt has a flag draped around him, looking convinced that he is in fact heroic.
Political cartoon entitled “I am Heroic” by Rollin Kirby (1916).
Office has been the subject of
hearty lampoonery for decades.
How could a simple animated spot
with a positive spin on the candidate hurt any ambitious pol? No,
the reasons we seek must lie elsewhere.
Well, if not the candidates
themselves perhaps the bugaboos
are the Presidential campaign platforms and the weighty decisions
we are asked to make about them.
One should be well-informed, take
these national issues seriously, and
then make sensible and sober
choices for the good of one’s
country, right? This stance still
does not preclude an animated
pitch. Didn’t the public respond to
such crucial matters as supporting
the nation during WWII...even
when it was Bugs Bunny who
enjoined us to buy war bonds?
What about the response from the
American people when they were
asked to pay their income
taxes...by Donald Duck?
According to Time magazine 37%
of those questioned after seeing
the Donald Duck short The New
Spirit (1942) said that the film
increased their willingness to pay
“Taxes...to beat the Axis!” It has
been reported that after these two
spots hit the theaters during the
war years Americans bought more
bonds and paid their taxes in
greater numbers than ever. John
McCain and Bill Bradley should
have had such luck.
Any contention that animation and politics simply don’t
belong in the same boat to D.C.
can also be dented, if not serious-
My “devil’s
advocate”
arguments
against animated
election spots are
growing fewer,
but are not yet
exhausted.
Just Plain Silly
My “devil’s advocate” arguments against animated election
spots are growing fewer, but are
not yet exhausted. A final rationale
might be that the political realities
of a Presidential election call for
more reserve and dignity than a
cartoon spot could lend them. This
is also nonsense, since there has
been no shortage of tasteless and
embarrassing live spots over the
years. Does anyone remember the
1964 Johnson campaign ads in
which a vote for Goldwater
equaled blowing up a little girl in a
nuclear explosion? Or the hilarious
spot aired during 1988 in which
candidate
Michael
Dukakis,
arrayed in full battle gear, sheepishly poked his preppy head out of
a tank? Anyone who remembers
June 2000
36
column, “Toons in Training,” that
animation is a powerful medium
for training because information
which is encoded in novel form
tends to gain more attention, reinforces verbal messages and results
in better memory retention. These
are neuropsychological facts and
are not likely to be altered by the
so-called gravity of a Presidential
election. The candidate is robbed
of a powerful campaign tool, the
animation industry misses a
chance to demonstrate its powers
in a new medium of advertising,
and the electorate loses out on the
possibility of examining a candidate’s platform through a novel
mode of presentation. Talk about
government waste!
Ah, but what might have
been! Would it not have been
entertaining, at least, to have
turned on the TV and seen the following (with all due apologies to
Dave Frishberg and Schoolhouse
Rocky):
Uncle Sam molds himself a center spot in the world of political cartoons.
“Strictly In It” by Cunningham (1909).
the 1968 election campaign will
recall the efforts put forth by Frank
Shakespeare and Roger Ailes of
the Nixon campaign team, brilliantly described by Joe McGiniss
in his book The Selling of the
President 1968. It was they and
their associates who presented us
with one flag-draped Rockwellian
campaign spot after another,
proudly showing This Great
Nation and Its People while an
unseen Nixon droned uninspired
platitudes in the background. This
sort of presentation has become
so cliché that the Cartoon
Network was able to do a sidesplitting parody of them for their
Cartoon Campaign 2000. It is
uncertain if Ailes (who is now on
the Bush team) could have gotten
Scooby-Doo into the Oval Office,
but one thing is certain — the
Nixon spots were little more than
hollow shills, more fit for selling
lawn care products or smoked
turkey than our national leader. If
dignity was the point, these ads
fell far short.
All right, then, let’s admit it.
There are no good reasons why
animation can’t be used to promote candidates, and it is in fact
negligence on the part of campaign handlers that keeps the animated election spot off our
screens. What these sultans of spin
don’t seem to realize is, an important tool is being discarded almost
without consideration. In issue 4.8
of Animation World Magazine
(November, 1999), I noted in my
I’m just a Bush
Yes, I’m only a Bush
Can’t you give my campaign
a push?
Well, it’s a long, long journey
To Pennsylvania Ave
It’s a long, long wait
For those votes I’ve gotta have,
But I know I’ll be the Prez
someday...
Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman
is a longtime student and fan
of animation. He lives in
Anderson, Indiana.
[email protected].
June 2000
37
Harvey Entertainment
Takes Control
by Heather Kenyon
Harvey Entertainment brings
Casper back into action.
© Harvey Entertainment.
he Harvey Entertainment
Company, best known for
such characters as Casper,
The Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich,
Baby Huey, Wendy the Good
Witch and others, and Animation
World Magazine are teaming up
to bring our readers a series of six
in-depth articles that will explore
different aspects of one production. From over-all company business plan, to production to advertising, licensing and merchandising and distribution, we will learn
about Harvey Entertainment’s all
CGI film, Casper’s Haunted
Christmas. This film is interesting to
focus on as it represents one company’s shift from licensing product
to seizing control and producing
product, thereby keeping all the
rights in one profitable bundle. To
T
start the series we are going to talk
with Harvey’s President and Chief
Operating Officer, Rick Mischel.
First, however, let’s learn a little
about Harvey.
Harvey was founded in
1939 in New York City as a comic
book company by brothers Alfred,
Leon, and Robert Harvey. In the
early 1950s, Harvey acquired the
right to publish comic books based
on Paramount Pictures’ cartoon
characters. Later, they acquired
the proprietar y rights to
Paramount’s cartoon characters
and its cartoon film library.
Throughout the 1950s and early
1960s, the golden age of comic
books, Harvey was considered
one of the leading comic book
publishers in the United States.
By 1982, the family vision
for Harvey was blurred. The pro-
duction of new comic books and
the exhibiting of Harvey’s cartoon
library on television had substantially declined. In 1988, when the
founder’s heirs were unable to
agree on the management or
future direction of Harvey, the
company was sold for $7.5 million. Through a series of strategic
moves, Harvey has been changing its focus from a licensor to a
producer and distributor of quality
family entertainment. In 1999, a
new management team, led by
experienced entertainment industry professionals, Roger A. Burlage,
Ron Cushey and Rick Mischel, took
the helm to further this charge.
Prior to joining Harvey, Rick
Mischel served as President of The
Mischel Company, an entertainment company specializing in the
production of feature films, the
Casper will be paying friendly visits to all the international television markets.
June 2000
38
representation of completed films
in the acquisition marketplace,
and the advising of foreign-based
companies on the acquisitions and
sales of feature films and animated
product throughout the world. He
has also been a producer of feature films, like The Specials, starring Jamie Kennedy and Rob
Lowe, which is currently in postproduction. Prior to The Specials,
Mischel served as Executive
Producer on the feature film
Suicide Kings, starring Christopher
Walken and Denis Leary. Suicide
Kings was released in April, 1998
by Artisan Entertainment.
Prior to August of 1997,
Mischel was the Senior Vice
P re s i d e n t , A c q u i s i t i o n s a n d
Production of LIVE Entertainment,
a position he held since
September of 1994. While at LIVE,
Mischel was responsible for acquiring all product for LIVE
Entertainment, including feature
films and specials for both theatrical and television release, and animated, episodic and long form
product for the Family Home
Entertainment (FHE) label. Mischel
also supervised the productions of
feature films co-produced or cofinanced with other companies, as
well as supervising the production
of original films, animated features
and specials for FHE. His responsibilities also included the supervision of the marketing and distribution of FHE product.
While at LIVE, Mischel was
the production executive on several LIVE feature films, including
Aberration, a LIVE/Grundy co-production, No Way Home, which
premiered on Showtime, and on
the animated specials The Littlest
Angel, The Musical Adventures of
Tom Sawyer and the Australianp ro d u c e d S c r o o g e K o a l a ’ s
Christmas.
With past video successes, Casper and friends have come into homes everywhere to
spook and scare. © Harvey Entertainment.
Prior to LIVE, Mischel
served as Vice President of Electric
Pictures Corporation, where he
was responsible for the development of feature film projects, the
supervision of productions, including Jersey Girl, starring Dylan
McDermott and Jamie Gertz, and
Zandalee, starring Nicholas Cage
and Judge Reinhold. Plus, he also
oversaw business affairs for both
domestic and foreign production
and distribution.
As an entertainment attorney at O’Melveny & Myers, Mischel
negotiated and drafted agreements relating to the production,
financing and distribution of
domestic and foreign motion pictures and television programs for
such clients as Paramount, Castle
Rock Entertainment, Disney and
HBO.
Mischel received his J.D.
degree from Stanford Law School
in 1987, where he was President
of his graduating class, and an
M.A. in International Affairs from
The Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy in 1984. He graduated
Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in
International Relations from Tufts
University in Medford, MA in 1983.
Heather Kenyon: Since Harvey
Entertainment was purchased
from the family in 1989, the company has been making a string of
strategic moves. What have these
moves been leading up to?
Rick Mischel: The company
began as a place where they controlled certain proprietary, intellectual property rights, rights to certain characters, Casper, Richie
Rich, all these classic characters.
The company first started out as a
licensor. They licensed the rights to
make movies or create goods or
make television shows to other
entities that would then produce
those shows and Harvey would
get some participation. What has
gone on in the last ten years is that
the company has moved from
being a licensor to a producer and
distributor. We have taken control
of our own destiny. Now we produce our own product. We conJune 2000
39
have you been facing taking these
classic characters in new directions?
This fall, Christmas ghosts will roam about at night. © Harvey Entertainment.
trol the distribution of our product.
We fund much of the production
costs of our product in order to
maintain quality control and the
control over distribution. That’s
really the big change in the company.
The company went public
in 1993, and that created more
capital for the company to grow.
In the last year, financially, the
company went through a re-capitalization with the new management team. My CEO Roger
Burlage and I came in and put in
$18 million of capital in order to
take these properties and exploit
them in all media.
HK: And move them into new
directions. Would you like to talk
about any of the specific moves
the company has been through
that you think are key?
RM: The key things that have really contributed to the company
growth are, of course, the success
of the first Casper theatrical movie.
The rights were licensed to
Universal and Steven Spielberg’s
company Amblin and they produced the movie. The movie was
a big success and that drove the
company’s licensing and merchandising success. Harvey, with
Universal, produced the new
Casper series which is very successful on television. The company
also produced under a license to
Warner Bros. the Richie Rich
movie. That brought Richie Rich to
a whole new audience and
spread the word. These moves
helped drive our licensing and
merchandising around the world.
These decisions and productions
really contributed greatly to
Harvey getting on the worldwide
stage, it is now more of a known
player.
HK: We just reported that you
posted some really nice quarter
figures, so it is working, which is
nice, isn’t it?
RM: We are very focused on keeping our overhead low and driving
up our revenues. We are getting
there.
HK: Harvey has a portfolio that
contains many classic characters
— Casper, the Friendly Ghost,
Richie Rich, Baby Huey, Wendy the
Witch, Hot Stuff. Are you updating
these characters? What challenges
RM: Well, it is a challenge. When
you look at classic characters the
challenge is, you don’t want to
alienate the audience that loves
them, that makes them classic, but
you do want to refresh them and
take them to new audiences and
expand your audiences. With
Casper, which is our most popular
character, we are obviously very,
very careful on any changes we
do. We update Casper in the
sense that we use the same image
of Casper that was in the Universal
movie, but we are very careful to
maintain our family friendly audience for Casper and keep the
jokes on a family level.
With our other characters,
we sometimes have more flexibility. With Richie Rich for example
we’re developing a script where
Richie Rich goes to public high
school. He’s now sixteen years old.
We are trying to reach a broader
audience; trying to reach the kids
that know Richie Rich from the
Macaulay Culkin movie that have
grown up and are now fifteen, sixteen and we are trying to reach
the kids that are six to twelve that
still know the character. We are
also trying to reach the nostalgic
parents. So we take Richie, we
make him a little older and we put
June 2000
40
RM: Television is tough. There is
no doubt about it, but we try to
align ourselves with studios and
creative people that will bring a
really fresh look to our characters
and that is the way we think we
will be able to penetrate the market. With originality and freshness
and humor – all the things that
will make the property better.
HK: Quality will always make it I
think.
RM: That’s right.
True to Harvey’s promise of family entertainment, Casper takes care of his friends.
him in a different situation. With
Hot Stuff we are developing a liveaction film where Hot Stuff is mischievous but not malicious. He
definitely gets into trouble. It is a
film that parents and kids will want
to see. Again the imagery is a little
updated. We have considered
with some of our other characters
– Little Audrey, Little Dot – really
aging those characters up or looking at them in different situations.
You have more flexibility with your
lesser-known characters, but we
look at each character and we
decide what is the best way to go.
HK: I am sure it applies for the
medium as well. A feature film
needs to appeal to a broader
group of people than perhaps a
Webisode that is on your Web site.
RM: You are right.
HK: Will we be seeing any new
Harvey characters or are you really
focusing on the classics?
RM: Well we are focused on our clasANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
sic characters but we are a company
that has brand value in the family
audience, in family friendly entertainment. We do look for other characters that we can bring into that fold,
either through completed feature
films or television shows that we can
acquire and distribute here under
the Harvey label or creating new
Harvey characters through the
acquisition of book rights, and pitches from writers and creators that
come and see us. We have a property called Minerva Louise, a book
property, that has been very successful, selling 750,000 copies in the
U.S., and we are developing that as
a pre-school animated series. We
have some prime time animated
shows that we are looking at as well.
We are definitely open to it.
HK: Are you finding it difficult?
Direct to video you already have
distribution with Universal which is
great, you have access to the market, but television is tough. Are
you finding it difficult to sell into
television?
HK: Are you really looking to position Harvey as a family entertainment company, or is it, “Yes, we
are going for family entertainment
with our classic characters, but
with our new characters who
knows? Maybe they’ll be edgier
prime time type properties.”
RM: We stay true to the family tradition. If we were going to venture outside of that we wouldn’t
do it under the Harvey label.
HK: You have made several directto-videos that have performed
well. Casper, A Spirited Beginning
sold over 3 million units worldwide. But, I get the feeling that
Casper’s Haunted Christmas, isn’t
just another of a string of videos. I
have a feeling that this is in fact a
sort of turning point for the company?
RM: It really is. It is the first Casper
movie that this company has produced itself. It really represents
that turn from being a licensor to a
producer. It is our property and it is
our movie, soup to nuts. We
found the writers; we worked on
the script; we found the studio,
Mainframe Entertainment, to do
the production; we found the
June 2000
41
recording artist to record the
Casper theme, Randy Travis. It is
our production and that’s big for a
company. It is the first one that we
will own and control all rights to. It
is our lead property when we go
into the international market. We
can now sell a very successful
franchise property. The other thing
that makes it different is that it is all
computer animated. It is the first
Casper movie that is computer animated so that is a real turning
point for Casper.
HK: How did Harvey come to the
decision of joining forces with
Mainframe and approaching this
version of Casper using all CGI vs.
2D? This is quite a daring move.
A sample of Mainframe’s handy work . © Harvey Entertainment.
RM: We did that for a number of
reasons. One we felt that there
was a new found popularity in
computer animated movies. Toy
Story 1 and 2, Antz, A Bug’s Life
have all been very well received by
kids. They like the medium. The
second reason was we knew we
were going to have to go out and
compete with our other direct to
videos because we don’t distribute
the other two Casper videos –
Saban and Fox do. So we wanted
to create something that was different and new and distinctive
from the live-action movies. This
was a way to do that.
HK:
Mainframe
is
great.
Congratulations on working with
them.
RM: They have been terrific. They
have been a great, great partner
to have on this production. They
really have been very supportive.
They’ve done everything on time.
I have nothing but good things to
say about them.
HK: You touched on this, but how
does this video specifically play
into Harvey’s long term business
goals?
something we can be proud of
and publicize and really use to
help in our other distribution
efforts.
HK: Which markets will you be
attending?
RM: NATPE, MIP, MIPCOM – all the
television markets.
Mainframe is the production house
working on Casper’s Haunted Christmas.
RM: It helps us when we go into
the international marketplace and
the distribution marketplace. We
now have a product that commands the buyer’s interest. We
have our library of the classic
Harvey cartoons called Harvey
Toons, which is 65 half-hours that
we are selling internationally for
the first time. Casper is a brand
new product. It is ours and is
HK: I think that Harvey has a real
advantage because you are a
smaller company, with resources,
but you can really focus on the
project, keep the budget in check,
make sure all your departments
are working for it – as opposed to
a bigger company where sometimes the projects don’t turn out as
well, despite the resources, due to
a wide number of different initiatives.
RM: We are very focused on maintaining our level of quality. It is
very important to us. We never
take too much on that would
affect anything else we would do.
Very careful on that. We would
June 2000
42
company is doing its own production. It is great to see a company
say, “This is our goal,” and in a
course of time, actually do it. A lot
of companies don’t get there.
RM: Well, thank you! We certainly
have great assets for the animation community so you will be seeing a lot more product coming out
in the next three years in computer, 2D and Internet animation.
Heather Kenyon is editor in chief
of Animation World Magazine.
There’s Christmas spirit in every room of the house. © Harvey Entertainment.
rather have fewer things on our
development slate and devote
more of our time and effort to
making those things really great
product.
HK: I have been sitting here for
three years, getting Harvey press
releases, and it is interesting to
have watched the company
evolve to the point where the
[email protected].
PAUL FIERLINGER’S DRAWN FROM MEMORY
NOW AVAILABLE ON VIDEO !
“Drawn From Memory is an
extaordinary reminiscence
about an improbable but true
life, rendered in pen-and-ink
images as whimsical as those
of James Thurber and words
as piercing as those of Milan
Kundera. The work, which
could be called The Movie of
L a u g h t e r a n d F o r g i v e n e s s, u s e s
the lighthearted medium of
animation to heartbreaking
e f f e c t .”
--Carrie Rickey
The Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.awn.com/awnstore/acme/drawn.html
June 2000
43
The Zagreb World Festival Of Animated Films:
On The Eve Of Zagreb 2000
by Borivoj “Bordo” Dovnikovic
he purpose of international festivals of animated film
is to evaluate recent production in the field throughout the
world, to look back on the history
of animation by showing relevant
national, personal or thematic retrospectives, and to organize meetings, discussions, lectures, exhibitions and similar events, all with as
wide an audience as possible in
mind. The aim is to promote and
improve the art of film animation
and animated film in general. This
involves encouraging creativity
which eschews pre-set patterns
and ideas/notions/conceptions,
and finds new ways of exploring
the possibilities of film animation.
T
Zagreb’s Place
Competitive festivals of animated films first appeared in 1960
following the foundation of ASIFA,
the International Association of
Animated Film. The first occasion
was the biennial festival in the
French town of Annecy, beneath
the Alps. This soon became the
cult meeting place of world animators. In the mid-Sixties, the
international festival on the Black
Sea in Mamaia, Romania, was
founded, followed, in the
Seventies, by a festival in Varna,
Bulgaria. Neither lasted very long.
Today there are many international festivals of animated films, and
the biggest ones, beside Annecy
and Zagreb, are Hiroshima,
Ottawa, Stuttgart, Espinho and
KROK, the Russian-Ukrainian festival that takes place aboard a ship.
Festival participants of Zagreb 1980.
In the late Sixties Zagreb
ran as a candidate to hold the festival. Armed with the artistic reputation of the Zagreb School of
Animated Film and new, fresh
ideas, Zagreb won the license at
the ASIFA board meeting in
London in 1969 to organize a
Logo for Zagreb’s first festival in 1972.
biannual international festival of
animated film. The same year, at
the annual ASIFA assembly at the
Mamaia Festival, Zagreb’s pledge
to introduce an international selection committee, along with an
international jury, was warmly
welcomed. Until that time, national committees selected the films for
festivals and this often led to
biased decisions. Furthermore,
Zagreb authors decided, as hosts
of the festival, not to include their
films in the competition, seeking in
this way to maximize objectivity.
Consequently, in 1972 Zagreb
received a friendly letter from
ASIFA representative Alexandre
Alexeieff in Paris: “Finally it is your
turn to host the festival. We are
coming to be taught. You have
generously renounced the opportunity to compete, which would
have been a bit dangerous for us;
therefore we will applaud you as if
June 2000
44
Bug’s Bunny knows what’s up at
Zagreb 1972!
we were your equals.” (The next
festival did include domestic
authors in the competition, at the
insistence of the international
community.)
From next year on,
Zagreb will have to
move from its
traditional June slot
to early spring…
Firsts and Set-Backs
The First World Festival of
Animated Film in Zagreb was held
in June 1972. Since then, for
almost 30 years, it has been alternating every other year in springtime with the Annecy festival. The
Annecy festival has grown in line
with France’s economical strength
and aspirations. When Annecy
realized that the biennial rhythm
was insufficient (especially in view
of its commercial fair), it moved to
an annual cycle and thus entered
the timeframe of the Zagreb festival. This decision was made withANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
out consulting Zagreb or ASIFA.
This year both festivals will be held
in the same month, only ten days
apart! From next year on, Zagreb
will, of course, have to move from
its traditional June slot to early
spring, with the bitter feeling that
the claims of well to do France as
the protector and leader of small
European countries (fighting
against American cultural imperialism) are just a fairy tale.
The Zagreb festival has survived for all these years in spite of
many national economic difficulties, even the recent war. It has
relied on the budgets, often not
big enough, of the city of Zagreb
and the state. Even in the former
Yugoslavia, the festival was
financed exclusively from the
resources of the Republic of
Croatia, and so the tradition has
continued in the newly formed
state. Since the very beginning of
the festival, its main characteristic
has been that the artists of the
Zagreb School of Animated Film
have had the main role in creating
the festival programme.
Whichever company was officially
Post festival parties animate the scene.
in charge of the festival organization, the artists themselves created
the artistic conception and the festival’s programme. The presidents
of the programme committees
have been directors Dusan
Vukotic, myself, Borivoj Dovnikovic
and Josko Marusic. Indeed, from
1985 to 1991, I was the Festival
Director. This undoubtedly guarantees that in all segments of the festival paramount attention is given
to filmmaker artists and animation
as an art form.
In 1986, the Zagreb festival
introduced a Life Achievement
Award, and since then it has been
regularly awarded to people
whose creative work has made a
considerable contribution to the
From the left: John Hubley, Frank Thomas, Fedor Khitruk, Dusan Vukotic, Zelimir
Matko, Bob Godfrey and Bretislav Pojar.
June 2000
45
Vatroslav Lisinski Hall in Zagreb where the World Festival is held.
development of art animation
throughout the world. Up to now,
the laureates have been: Norman
McLaren, Chuck Jones, John
Halas, Bob Godfrey, Dusan
Vukotic, Caroline Leaf and Bruno
Bozzetto. In June, the Zagreb
2000 Prize will be awarded to the
Czech animation master, Jan
Svankmajer.
Our History
In the 28 years of the festival’s history, a great number of
famous authors from world animation have been guests.
At the first festival, Walter
Lantz, Friz Freling, William Hanna,
Joseph
Barbera,
Stephen
Bosustow and Chuck Jones took
part in their retrospectives. The
members of the first selection committee were Gianni Rondolino
(Italy), Daniel Szczechura (Poland)
and Pavao Stalter (Yugoslavia). The
members of the first jury were Jiri
Brdeka (Czechoslovakia), Fyodor
Khitruk (USSR), David Hilberman
(USA), Marcel Jankovics (Hungary),
Zagreb ‘74.
Manuel Otero (France) and Dusan
Vukotic (Yugoslavia).
The second Zagreb Festival
(1974) was held in the newly-built
Concert Hall Vatroslav Lisinski (with
2000 seats), which still serves as
the festival’s location. The special
event of that year’s festival was the
big Walt Disney retrospective,
which brought one of the veterans of animation, Frank Thomas,
to Zagreb.
In 1976 the Zagreb World
Festival of Animated Film was not
held due to changes in the ASIFA
festival calendar. After having
decided that the main animation
festivals in Annecy, Mamaia and
Zagreb should be held triennially,
Mamaia organizers decided not to
continue, so none of the three festivals were held that year. In 1977
the spring biennial cycle of Annecy
and Zagreb was continued, but
without Mamaia.
Zagreb 1980 will be
remembered as the world’s first
film festival to host an official delegation of Chinese film artists (The
Shanghai Studio) after the infamous Cultural Revolution.
In spite of the strict rules
that all prizes must be awarded,
Zagreb’s 1982 jury came to the
bold but objective decision not to
award the Grand Prix, which set a
kind of precedent among the
world’s film festivals. Special attention was given to the world promotion of the book Disney
Animation: The Illusion of Life,
whose authors, Frank Thomas and
Ollie Johnston, Disney studio veterans, were guests of honour at
the festival.
The seventh festival —
Zagreb 1986 — will be remembered for the inauguration of the
Life Achievement Award. At that
time, it was logical for the first laureate to be Norman McLaren who,
according to many, is the greatest
name in artistic animated films.
Due to old age and illness, he was
unable to attend the festival, so
the prize was handed in his
absence to his lifelong associate,
Grant Munroe. On the last night of
the festival, a direct telephone link
to Montreal was established. Josko
Marusic, the president of the
Programme Board, talked to the
laureate (McLaren) from the stage,
which was transmitted to the audience and hall guests. McLaren
greeted all those present and
saluted Zagreb, which he unfortunately was never able to visit as he
died half a year later.
In 1988, the festival took
place for the first time in two cinema halls in the very centre of
town, which created a change in
the festival atmosphere. That year
the Life Achievement Award was
given to the laureate Chuck Jones
in one of the city squares, in front
of a great number of people. Karel
Zeman, a Czech cinematography
veteran, and Jim Henson, the creator of Sesame Street and The
Muppets, were both on the official
jury. The latter had come to
Zagreb in 1972 to receive his first
international prize for Rocks
Number 12. Both of them died
shortly after the festival.
Zagreb 1990 was probably
June 2000
46
A shot of 1988’s successful festival.
the world’s only film festival that
was prepared in one state
(Yugoslavia) and held in another
(Croatia).
The tenth world festival of
animated film — Zagreb 1992 —
was held in a new state, organized by a new team and with a
new Festival Council. It was held
in unusual war conditions after
the break-up of federal Yugoslavia.
Many
international
guests
declined their invitations, but not
Bob Godfrey, who has been a regularly attendee of the festival. That
year he came to receive his Life
Achievement Award.
At the eleventh festival in
1994, the participants experienced the howling of an air-raid
alarm during an afternoon screening. It was soon learnt that the
alarm had been set off by mistake.
This was the last Zagreb wartime
festival.
A New Life
In 1999,
the
Festival
Outdoor shots of the lush greenery
surrounding the festival locale.
Council handed responsibility for
organizing the festival back to its
founders, Zagreb Film, which,
after 8 years, has hired back some
of its former leaders to prepare for
Zagreb 2000.
This year’s films for the festival competition were selected by
Clare Kitson (UK), Steve Montal
(USA) and Dr. Hrvoje Turkovi
(Croatia). The official awards will
be presented by a jury consisting
of Garry Bardine (Russia), Tsvika
Oren (Israel), Bill Plympton (USA),
Fusako Yusaki (Italy) and Vatroslav
Mimica (Croatia).
The 14th World
Festival of Animated
Film — ZAGREB
2000 — will be held
June 21 to 25,
2000.
The International Jury will
present the following Festival
Awards:
l Grand Prix (Best Film at the
Festival) — a money award of
20,000 Kuna
l Category A (30 sec. to 6 min.) —
First Prize, a money award of
10,000 Kuna, and a Second Prize
l Category B (6 min. to 15 min.) —
First Prize, a money award of
l Category C (15 min. to 30 min.)
— First Prize, a money award of
l Best First Production “Zlatko Grgi”
(Film Debut) — a money award of
10,000 Kuna
The Jury may decide, at its
own discretion, to award another
five special distinctions for films
with outstanding qualities.
The 14th World Festival of
Animated Film — ZAGREB 2000
— will be held June 21 to 25,
2000. The Festival programme
consists of:
l 4 screenings of films in competition
l 3 screenings of films out of competition or in Panorama
l Retrospectives of Indian and
Israeli animated films
l A retrospective of contemporary
Spanish independent animated
film
l A retrospective of the works of
Jan Svankmajer, Life Achievement
Award laureate
l In Memoriam: A selection of
Dusan Vukotic and Nikola Kostelac
films
l The 50th anniversary celebration
of the first professional Croatian
animated film, The Big Meeting
l The 40th anniversary of ASIFA
and two programmes of animated
films from the ASIFA Film Archives
l 25th anniversary of SAF, a children’s workshop of animated film
in Cakovec, Croatia
l “New Ideas, New Technologies:
The Future of Film and the
Internet,” a lecture held by Steve
Montal, director of Educational
and Special Program Development
for the American Film Institute
International traditional competitive cartoon exhibition, organized
by the Croatian Cartoonist Society
Plus, there will be other
exhibitions as well. We look forward to welcoming you.
Special
thanks
to
Vesna
Dovnikovic and Cvetana Matko.
You can now own many of
Zagreb Film’s master works. Take
this opportunity to view these
works for the first time, or have old
favorites at your screening disposal. They are available for sale in the
AWN Store.
June 2000
47
The joy of presenters as well as
winners is captured in this shot of
winning moments.
[email protected].
Borivoj “Bordo” Dovnikovic (1930) is a film director, animator, cartoonist, illustrator and graphic designer located in Zagreb, Croatia. Bordo is
one of the pioneers of Yugoslav (Croatian) animation and belongs to
the well-known Zagreb School of Animated Films. During his 40-year
career he has received a great number of international awards
(Columbus, New York, Chicago, Annecy, Berlin, Leipzig, Zagreb,
Varna, San Antonio, Krakow and Treviso among others). In 1995 he
received the Life Achievement Award Mister Linea at the International
Animation Festival in Treviso. Bordo has had special presentations and
retrospectives held in: Paris (Cinematheque Francaise), Montreal
(Cinematheque Quebecoise), New York (Museum of Modern Art) and
15 other cities in the U.S., Moscow, Ottawa, Barcelona, Prague, Lucca
and Erevan. In 1985 he published his book How To Make Cartoons.
Bordo has been participating in the organization of the World Festival
of Animated Films in Zagreb since its beginning (1972) and from 1985
to 1991 was the festival director. Since 1994 he has been the ASIFA
Secretary General.
F e a t u r e d i n t h e A n i m a t i o n Wo r l d S t o r e :
Richard Condie, Sally Cruikshank, Bill Plympton, Raoul Ser vais,
Best Of Festival tapes, Classic Limited Editions, and more...
www.awn.com/awnstore
June 2000
48
Let’s Sketch on Location
by Glenn Vilppu
Glenn Vilppu.
standing and appreciation of
artists of the past. The lessons are
not only “how-to instruction,” but
are actually a series of visual tools
that help you organize what you
see in ways that create drawings
that are interesting to look at and
express your feelings for the subject at hand.
All drawings in this article are by and
© Glenn Vilppu.
his is the first in a new
series of bi-monthly articles
about sketching on location. The articles are based on my
Sketching on Location Manual.
The manual was developed as a
series of lessons that I use on my
guided sketching tours of Europe,
and that I use as material in my
regular drawing classes. As such
the lessons can be part of a regular course or can be used by individual students as a practical learning guide.
These lessons are meant
not only for the beginner. More
advanced students and possibly
professionals will also find useful
tips, new approaches and
reminders of old ones neglected.
Each
lesson
in
this
Sketching on Location Manual is a
practical approach that will help
you get more enjoyment out of
your sketching, improve your skills,
and give you more of an under-
T
I also have in mind the many students around the world that have
the Vilppu Drawing Manual and
have asked not only for material
related to sketching figures, but
landscapes as well.
As a professional artist the
approaches that I develop in this
series of lessons are the same as
those that I use in drawing from
imagination, the first lesson being
the exception. The rough quick
indications, the use of ink and
wash, the contrasting of textures,
and all of the other elements that I
discuss are methods that have
been used by artists for centuries.
You will see a variety of
materials and techniques used.
There is no one correct way to
sketch, as there is no one correct
kind of individual. There are no
rules, just many tools that can be
used in as many ways as there are
artists using them.
These eleven lessons are
organized so that each lesson
builds upon the skills of the previous one.
Initially, these lessons were
developed for the students that
accompany me on my sketching
tours and regular classes of eleven
or twelve weeks that I teach. Now
June 2000
49
drawing your object there are several levels that you can approach
the drawing from. You could draw
the total ear as a simple shape or
you could start with just a line
showing a fragment of the ear.
Regardless of which degree of
detail you decide upon, the
approach is the same.
Point to Point
Point to point is one of the
most fundamental developmental
and useful skills for sketching anything, be it a still life or the interior
of an airplane.
The main skill you are
developing is being able to reduce
what you are looking at to a simple two-dimensional image that
can be drawn. In doing this, you
sharpen your perceptive skills by
having to judge angles and
lengths two dimensionally from
three-dimensional objects.
Since this is the first lesson,
and much of what follows is based
upon it, I will give several different
examples explaining and demonstrating the approach.
I am presenting this
approach in the context of making
a sketch where you are trying to
capture a specific subject before
you. The experienced artist may
approach his subject using the
exact same method, incorporating
concepts of design and composition. The selection of what elements to put in or leave out
becomes the element of individual
expression. In later lessons you will
also make these considerations,
but now I wish to concentrate on
the point to point method.
On a sketching tour the first
place you generally find yourself is
at the airport, in planes, trains and
coffee shops.
Step One
Pick a specific point of what
you are looking at. In this first
example I am starting with the ear
of the passenger in front of me. In
Look at your subject as if it
were a photograph that you were
tracing. You need to see each line
that connects to your original line.
Look carefully at line two to see its
relationship to line one. In teaching students who have never
drawn before, I sometimes ask
them to look through clear plastic
sheets, and with grease pencils,
draw on them as if they were tracing a photograph. In chapter nine
of the Vilppu Drawing Manual, I
give a basic historical discussion of
June 2000
50
port on one of my sketch tours.
The important point in this
approach to sketching is that you
pay careful attention to the angles
of your lines and their attachment
to the previous ones. Continuously
compare each line by either holding up your pencil horizontally
and vertically, or use a convenient
line of comparison in the subject
itself to help you see the angles
you are drawing.
The drawing may look
complex, but the process is simple.
Some More Tools
Below is a simple check off
list that will help to remind you of
the points you should be looking
for. In time, these points become
second nature as you draw, in the
same way as driving a car
becomes a normal process. (In
chapter nine of the Vilppu
Drawing Manual there is a more
complete discussion of the use of
these reminders.)
All of the following drawings were done using the basic
approach of this chapter.
While doing these drawings, I never knew how much time
I had to do them. People, cars and
any number of unforeseen situations arise, from curious observers
standing in front of you to see
what you are doing, cars moving
or simply lack of time for drawing.
I try to approach the drawing with
the attitude that the point that I
start with is what I’m after and any
additions I can make to it are frosting on the cake. Getting the scale
of objects is a critical element in
the drawing, so it is always important to keep looking at the lines
you draw comparing any object in
relation to the objects that it is
touching two dimensionally.
the process related to drawing the
posed figure.
In the drawing above I
started with the ear of the seated
figure on the left. The numbered
drawings on the right and next
page show the steps that I went
through in doing this drawing
while we were waiting for the
plane to depart at the Rome airANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
June 2000
51
In the drawings on this
page, the point to point method
that we have been using has been
changed; as I was drawing, I
extended each line as I went, so
that I got a more general feeling
for the whole. In doing this, my
main concern was to try and
understand the flow of the rhythm
that Michelangelo had gotten in
his sculpture. I was trying to capture the feeling of the sculpture
rather than a pictorial duplication
of a group of figures. In a sense, it
was like a gesture drawing with
my subject holding still.
In looking at these drawings, keep in mind that they were
done while standing in a crowd.
Glenn Vilppu teaches figure
drawing at the American
Animation Institute, the Masters
program of the UCLA Animation
Dept., Walt Disney Feature
Animation and Warner Bros.
Feature Animation, and has been
sent to teach artists at Disney TV
studios in Japan, Canada and the
Philippines. Vilppu has also
worked in the animation industry
for 18 years as a layout,
storyboard and presentation
artist. His drawing manual and
video tapes are being used
worldwide as course materials for
animation students.
Glenn Vilppu first wrote for
Animation World Magazine in
the June 1997 issue, “Never
Underestimate the Power of Life
Drawing.” His drawing manuals
and video tapes may be
purchased in the
Animation World Store.
[email protected].
June 2000
52
June 2000
53
Dotcomix:
Capturing Animated
Motion On The Net
by Lee Dannacher
orne out of the innovative
talents of 3D animation
company Protozoa,
DotComix is fast becoming a stylish and diverse production-destination voice’ on the Web. Using
performance animation as its cornerstone, dotcomix.com is a
whirlpool of contemporary animated content with approximately
14 episodic titles now online.
These zany, irreverent cartoons all
showcase the Web potential for
deep, rich real-time programming.
By successfully marrying a passel
of characters with their awardwinning motion-capture software
Alive!, DotComix can boast of
bringing new animated series to
life faster and at a lower cost than
anyone else on today’s Internet
domains.
Launched in March of
1999 from their headquarters in
San Francisco, the entertainment
company’s array of online shows is
an eclectic mix of original fare
alongside animated productions
based on comic books and radio
series. Targeting the early adopter
Internet crowd of 18-34 year olds,
the site’s comedy writing is satirical
and cheeky — with the added
B
Virtual Bill is the man! © Protozoa, Inc.
Sister Randy offers Van Gogh a drag at Dotcomix.com. © Protozoa, Inc.
attraction of being able to offer
dead-on topical stories drawn
from headline news, made possible by the incredibly fast turnaround of their unique production
process.
Dotting the Net
Two of the site’s most popular titles are Gates Of Hell, a madcap parody starring the beleaguered Microsoft chairman, and
Virtual Bill, another real-life celebrity lampoon featuring a digitized
President Clinton. Initially created
in 1998 for MTV on-air broadcasts,
Virtual Bill has been the first major
property to underscore the creatively successful and technically
seamless transference of a
DotComix show between the
broadcast and Internet mediums.
Although photo-realistic humans
are very hard to achieve in CGI,
especially when animating recognizable figures, DotComix did their
homework with these two properties by first clocking the real-life
characters’ expressions and mannerisms, carefully casting both the
motion and voice actors, then skillfully animating them within their
special blend of motion sensor
and computer artistry.
Other current Net productions include: the original series
Sister Randy, an uproarious course
in art history conducted by a cigarette-puffing nun (having gained
immense popularity, the series was
just recently licensed by BBC
America)…. Mr. Cranky, a disembodied face and hands spouting
angry yet timely reviews on the latest video releases (the series motto
being: “He never met a movie he
June 2000
54
A bottle of Jack Daniels, cigarettes and a pair of shades put Duke in the mood
to rock-n-roll. © Protozoa, Inc.
didn’t loathe!”)…The Dr. Science
series, based on the long-running
NPR program, is currently airing
on entertaindom.com, along with
the original DotComix series
Floops…. and Tom Tomorrow,
This Modern World which utilizes
a flat, cut-out style of animation
that is, nonetheless, also produced
with a motion-capture underpinning to achieve a quicker production schedule. For community
play, the site offers up a SPAM-OGRAM section which gives the
viewer a revolving selection of
toon favorites that can be personalized with messages, then forwarded swiftly through e-mails
around the online world.
DUKE 2000 – An Animated
Quest for the White House
A major company effort
(and source of great fun) surrounds DotComix’ newest collaboration with Gary Trudeau on the
production of the Duke2000
Presidential campaign. The company first worked with Trudeau on
a 3D animated rock video, which
was webcast during NetAid’s live
international event to fight hunger
on October 9th of last year. The
on-going Duke2000 campaign,
unquestionably the first transmedia event of its kind, entails the fictional Ambassador Duke running
for President in the real world.
Animated and produced by
DotComix, written by Trudeau and
a team of writers working together with the dotcomix staff, Duke
has been appearing in multiple
media locales since his candidacy
was announced earlier this year.
Venues include: online (with new
content going up each week at
dotcomix and the Excite sponsored duke2000.com), on television (a one hour Larry King Live
interview featured the animated
Duke interacting in real-time with
celebrities Al Franken and Bill
Maher, with a number of other TV
appearances coming up soon); on
radio (a 30 city drive-time interview tour was just completed last
month); and in print media
(including Duke’s regular visits to
Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip, and
published interviews such as the
one in the May issue of George
magazine). As the company
describes it: “With Duke’s subversive campaign, the walls between
the various media are crumbling.”
It feels almost sacrilegious
to describe the behind-the-scenes
production of Duke in fear of busting his seemingly real persona.
One technical footnote, though, is
that this is the first DotComix production to use QuickTime as its
Internet media player. It was vital
to the reality of this series to integrate live action actors and backgrounds with the 3D created
Duke, so the animation-only Pulse
Entertainment Player — the technology presently downloaded by
the viewer to power all other
DotComix shows — wasn’t suitable. Partnering with Apple has
given DotComix the QuickTime
technology necessary for those
creative purposes, and additionally
brings onboard Apple’s infrastructure and servers to handle the
huge amount of traffic amassing
around the online campaign. The
company will continue producing
Duke2000 ’s cross-platformed
media all the way through inauguration and, only half-jokingly,
they suggest that in the event
Duke actually takes the Presidency,
we’ll have four more years with
him!
Alchemy in the Company’s Mix
Brad deGraf (CEO and
Chairman) co-founded DotComix
in early 1999 along with long time
colleagues Eric Gregory (Chief
Technology Officer) and Marc
Scaparro (Head of Production).
Together, the trio has a substantial
history in leading performance
and computer animation in new
June 2000
55
directions. DeGraf’s pre-computer
life included designing sculptural
furniture and studying architecture
at Princeton, which he later combined with a degree in
Mathematics from the University of
California at San Diego. After stints
designing programs for the US
Army National Training Center and
as Head of Technical Direction at
Digital Productions, he founded
deGraf/Wahrman. The beginnings
of his collaboration with Scaparro
and Gregory took place in deGraf’s
basement where they co-authored
the architecture of the proprietary
software they named Alive!. Taking
it with them to Colossal Pictures,
they formed that studio’s in-house
Digital Media Group, using their
nascent technology in the creation
of Cartoon Network’s digital
emcee “Moxy” (the first real-broadcast motion-capture character)
and Peter Gabriel’s Grammy
Award-winning music video
“Steam.” In 1994, the three spun
off to form Protozoa and jumped
headlong into television production, software sales and the thenburgeoning market of 3D animated games. In late 1996, with the
advent of the Internet’s 3D player
technology VRML (Virtual Reality
Modeling Language), the group
began producing their first online
characters, designing the wellknown Spider and Alliskator properties — work that deGraf feels
was “the first really non-video animation on the Web.” Next came a
series for SGI entitled Floops
which, deGraf believes, “can really
claim to be the first episodic cartoon on the Web.”
The Internet soon became
the trio’s primary focus and for
their transformation into the
DotComix of today, deGraf recruited Damon Danielson as President
and CEO. Since January of ‘99,
A 3D duck and ant as featured in Floops.
© Protozoa, Inc.
Danielson’s talents have been
directed toward building the
team, modeling the relationships
and marshalling the financing necessary to position the company as
a leader in its new Internet space.
The Yale educated Danielson has
had a wealth of creative and business experience ranging from
work
with
Sony
New
Technologies, b-to-b Internet company Music One and Silicon
Entertainment
where,
as
CEO/President, he rode herd over
the diversified company engaged
in highly interactive games and
NASCAR themed simulators.
Executive Producer Buzz
Hayes, with his extensive film production and new media background, was brought in to create,
produce and assemble the cluster
of original programming needed
to make up DotComix’ new dotcom identity. With a Masters in
Film Production from USC, Hayes
first spent around 10 years as head
of research and development at
LucasFilm’s THX. He then started
his own independent company,
Stone’s Throw Films, where he produced the smash Indy film
Swimming With Sharks starring
Kevin Spacey. Next came his cofounding of Robert DeNiro’s
Tribeca Interactive which created
the critically successful CD Rom
entitled “IX.” This adventure
game’s art design and irreverent
tone attracted the attention of
deGraf who later enlisted Hayes to
incubate the DotComix world.
Jane White, having joined
deGraf and company in 1996,
was already in place and primed
to continue her work as Sr. VP of
Development and Executive
Producer for DotComix’ new
adventures. From the roots of the
six people deGraf, Scaparro and
Gregory had at the beginning,
today’s DotComix mix of talent
modelers, animators, writers, producers and directors numbers
around 35. That work-force is
expected to double in the next
four to six months as the floodgates for new production swing
wider each day.
Sister Randy’s all about entertainment!
© Protozoa, Inc.
Mapping Future Motion
In discussing the future,
DotComix is taking what
Danielson calls the “sneaker
approach” in syndicating their
shows to outside partnerships
while simultaneously building
their body of work into a magnetic Web destination. He states, “All
of the entertainment that you
would find on our Web site, we
would work with other distribuJune 2000
56
tion partners on the Web — and
now on television, as well — to
syndicate the properties and to
generate revenue through doing
that.” In the process, he continues,
“Those relationships, we think, will
bring us traffic and keep our eyeball acquisition costs very low in
terms of driving people back to
our own site.” DeGraf jokes that,
“The whole issue of being a portal
vs. syndication — we’ve been too
wimpy to choose!” But the reality is
that they have a very savvy business plan in place. Having just
completed a Series C financing
round, they can now shoot forward with plans for a rapid expansion on both the company’s production and business fronts.
Although creatively and
financially satisfying, DotComix
has backed off producing for-hire
entertainment projects (such as
last year’s highly regarded series
The Dog & Dinosaur Show for
BBC Choice and the creation of
the successful “M&M’s” live Crispy
character for its national media
tour). The exception would be,
Danielson notes, if “something so
stupid and so good walks in the
door that you just have to do
it…something that may be strategically relevant or we think it’s
going to make a big splash in the
marketplace.” Otherwise, they are
staying focused on their own intellectual properties while remaining
open to joint productions involving equity and ownership positions.
With ambitious goals to
reach a more diverse Internet audience, DotComix is prepping an
agglomeration of community-targeted channels. Up first will be the
launch of its broadband venue
sometime this month. Bringing on
name-brand directors, DotComix
has developed a clever strategy of
stringing their immense 3D library
of productions together with original fare into a network-type format that will exhibit richer programming for the high bandwidth
audience. Next to hit the Net will
be a channel targeting the
younger woman’s audience which
is expected to be up within a couple of months. At the same time,
PolkaDotcomix, a kids destination
channel, is in significant development for an expected launch
sometime next Fall.
Megadude struts his stuff
“Just Stayin’ Alive.” © Protozoa, Inc.
Staying Alive!
Located in an old mayonnaise factory, DotComix has three
motion-capture stages, a blue
screen set-up, plus a portable performance animation stage for producing certain live events out-ofhouse. They are in the process
now of retrofitting their space to
accommodate the brisk expansion
of programming and requisite creative personnel. Hayes is keen on
ramping up to an even greater
series output, confident in relying
on the fast turnaround of
DotComix’ production style. “The
advantage to the speed within
which we work is that if a show is
not working, we can acknowledge that and go on to something
else that does work or we can
craft it to the point where we’re
happy with it,” he explains. “I think
our model is we can do a whole
series in the amount of time and
effort it takes most people to do a
pilot.” From an audience’s point of
view, however, he believes strongly that it’s important to “not put
technology in the forefront and
just make entertaining cartoons —
however they get made.” He goes
on, “The important thing for us is
that we get the chemistry going,
get the writing to gel, get everything to work because that’s what
it’s all about, entertaining and
good writing and character
designs. It’s not about pixels and
digibytes.”
What makes their Alive! system shine in the industry, Hayes
advocates, is the fact that they can
adapt their programming so readily to achieve simultaneous lifeforms on the Web, television,
cable and live events. “We’re trying
to do shows that filter out into all
those areas but bring people back
to the Web where they can catch
up on the episodes they missed.
Plus, they can find out more information about the shows and all
that kind of stuff rather than try
and force the Internet to somehow be a television station.” He’s
also stimulated by the high-speed
capabilities of producing with
Alive!, “in terms of how we can
make stories that are very reactive
to what’s going on in the news
and in the world…and the flip
side of that is that the fan base let’s
us know right away whether they
like it. So it’s a very nice feedback
loop.”
Capturing Transmedia Appeal
Danielson is enthusiastic
about converting more of their
original properties into transmedia
action and strategizing their performance into solid and repeatJune 2000
57
to produce, what the writing is. It’s
not so much that we’re better
than anybody else, we’re just different. And I think that’s where the
real success will be — the longterm success depends on having a
good voice and telling stories that
people want to hear.”
This assorted mix of personalities whipping up a spectrum of
distinctive transmedia fare will
surely bring a future filled with
entertaining productions at the
proliferating DotComix’ dot-com.
“Honey, let’s stay home tonight and get Dotcomixed…” © Protozoa, Inc.
able business models. He also
refers to the Duke campaign as a
powerful example of getting their
shows “in multiple mediums that
help to drive traffic back to the site
and create a broader interest on a
national level that you can’t do as
a micro-site on the Web.” Adding
to that, deGraf states, “The biggest
challenge is spreading out — producing more but without diluting
it and actually, the other part that I
am really excited about is going
up a level in our production quality. Up until now its been fast-andfurious just to get as much up
there as we can and now we feel
like we have a large enough volume that we can be more selective. We can take longer writing
our stuff and we can filter out
shows that don’t work as well so
that the overall density of really
funny stuff is much higher.”
Widening The Reach
Danielson feels the international expansion of dot-com animation is definitely the next big
opening. “There’s so much going
on right now in terms of the multichannel world,” he states. “We’ve
already formed a great strategic
relationship up in Canada with
Rogers Communications and we
see a lot of opportunity in Europe
and in South America and Asia.”
DotComix shows are easily re-purposed into different languages
and production of localized tracks
is now in the center of on-going
work. “When I sit here and think
about what we could be doing in
a couple of years in terms of how
broad our reach could be,” he
muses, “it’s very exciting.”
deGraf is also highly motivated by the scope of today’s
Internet audience. “We’re broadcasting worldwide right now, and
our potential audience is about as
big as The Cartoon Network’s.” He
says, “We definitely want to go
into more interactivity and more
community based stuff. We’ve
now got the resources to actually
get programming out to that audience so to me, what will be exciting is building it, getting well
known, having people appreciate
what we do, getting the feedback
and making a real business out of
it.” He realizes the importance of
garnering strong name recognition for themselves and believes
that, “ultimately, it really comes
down to voice and, you know,
who we are and what we decide
“If it’s character you want, we’ve got
lots of that!” © Protozoa, Inc.
Lee Dannacher is an animation
producer/sound track director of
over 300 half hours of television
films, as well as numerous network and video holiday specials.
Currently based in New York,
she is freelancing in audio,
project development and new
media productions.
[email protected].
June 2000
58
aming studios have a history of borrowing from
established cartoon properties that first jumped from the
funny page to the comic book to
the silver screen and then on to
Saturday morning cartoons to create instantly branded video
games. Since its earliest days,
game developers have turned to
established cartoon characters
that already share a history with
the consumer.
“Superman for the Atari
2600 was probably the first branded cartoon character turned video
adventure game,” says Jayson Hill,
manager of public relations for
Hasbro Interactive. “By the time of
the cartridge’s 1978 release,
Superman had been in comic
strips, books and in various cartoon incarnations for many years.”
The present day animation
bastion, The Cartoon Network has
looked far East from its Atlanta
home to Japan, importing anime
programming for its after school
Toonami time slot.
“Toonami combines the
word cartoon with the Japanese
word Tsunami, meaning tidal
wave,” explains Sean Akins, Senior
Writer/Producer for Cartoon
Networks Production
Development. “Three years ago
we started showing anime not to
get on or start any bandwagon,
but looking at all the shows that
are out there, these were the
shows that I thought had the best
stories, looked the best, were the
most interesting.”
For 1999, the network
reported being in nearly 60 million
households with its all-animation
programming being the second
highest-rated basic cable channel.
And it is packed with anime shows
like Thundercats, Ronin Warriors
and Dragonball Z.
G
Gundam
Wing :
__________________
America’s Next
Pokemon?
by Jacquie Kubin
A Gundam hero envisions himself emerging victoriously in the gaming outlets
of America. © Bandai America, Inc
June 2000
60
A Gundam warrior aims for explosive success! © Bandai America, Inc
A Japanese Hit
The latest anime hit for the
network has been Gundam Wing,
a television series based on the
extremely large, multi-layered
Gundam Universe that is more
than twenty years old. In Japan
the universe includes eight television series, eight feature films, four
direct to video releases, a toy and
model line and numerous video
game releases. The Cartoon
Network is broadcasting the show
as pure to its original Japanese
showings as it can.
in the U.S. The reason is they get
cut to pieces and they make the
plot lines goofy. They underestimate the audience, the kids, who
are sophisticated enough to follow
a story with multiple characters
and in-depth plot lines.”
Created
by
Yoshiyuki
Tomino, who worked with Dr.
Osamu Tezuka on the development of the cult classic Tetsuwan
Atom (or Mighty Atom, which
became Astroboy when licensed
by NBC), Gundam Wing takes
place in the future when mankind
has moved into space, establishing five space colonies that have
evolved into their own nations, or
countries. The tale begins during a
time of revolution in space and on
Earth with each faction having
built its own robot “suit,” a giant
mobile weapon that is piloted by
legions of young teenage boys.
Made of a new material
Gundamian, the Gundam warriors are the dominant fighters in
this battle.
The show revolves around
the lives of more than thirty continuing characters, almost forty different types of mobile weapons
and numerous vehicles bringing
children back every day to find out
what happens next.
The latest anime
hit for Cartoon
Network has been
Gundam Wing…
“Working with these shows
is an honor and dream come true
and I feel Gundam Wing is the first
time that anyone has been able to
take an imported anime show and
really do it right,” says Akins. “You
read stories about the different
anime properties that, while huge
hits in Japan don’t perform as well
Cover shot of Gundam Side Story 0079. © Bandai America, Inc
June 2000
61
“These cartoons are continuing sagas. It’s an epic, sweeping
tale and it is a great show that is
very complicated and if you miss
one you can get totally lost,” says
Akins. “It is a serial, which is
against the grain of the traditional
thought process of children’s programming that normally you want
heroes within a whole story that
you can tell in twenty-two minutes
and that ends every day.”
The Cartoon Network
is broadcasting the
show as pure to its
original Japanese
showings as it can.
Production Notes
The Cartoon Network is
working with the original films
imported from Japan. Though
some changes need to be made
for the American youth audience,
including cutting more violent or
adult scenes, adding or subtracting vocal tracks, and re-laying the
vocal tracks from Japanese to
English. For any paint work needed done, the Atlanta-based group
uses Discreet Logic’s smoke*,
flame* and flint* softwares.
Tracking is accomplished using a
motion picture compositor that is
of the same size and power as the
kind used in Hollywood on major
motion pictures. Shows are mixed
on a Fairlight, a sophisticated digital audio workstation, which is the
standard production tool in its
arena.
Bring on the Game
Coming to the United
States the show brings with it all
the merchandising, film and video
elements already in place in
States from its original Japanese
release form with minor changes
including English voice-overs and
some scene changes for the
American audience.
Cartoon Network and Sega are
confident that these Gundam warriors
will make a killing in the States.
© Bandai America, Inc
Japan. The universe has regularly
supported two to three new video
game releases per year in Japan
over its two decade history.
The television network is
working with Bandai America
Incorporated to create a new line
of models, toys, figures and to
release an adventure video game
for the new Sega Dreamcast,
Gundam Side Story 0079.
The video game story
begins in the year 0079, making it
a pre-quell to the television series
and, like the cartoon series, is
being transported to the United
The television
network is working
with Bandai America
Incorporated …
to release an
adventure video
game for the new
Sega Dreamcast…
“Gundam is very successful
in Japan and each time a new system is released, Bandai Japan
leverages the introduction of these
new platforms by launching a
Gundam game for that system,”
says Ken Nakata, VP Electronics,
Bandai America. “With Gundam’s
tremendous popularity, it is a
A view from inside the battle mech in Gundam Side Story 0079. © Bandai America, Inc.
June 2000
62
More scenes from 0079! © Bandai America, Inc.
guaranteed sale.”
This Dreamcast title is a single player mission based 3D shooter. As battle mech pilots, players
don a virtual 50-ton mobile warrior suit. Player perspective is from
within his mech, though players
can switch into a first person sniping mode during battles.
At other times, visual obscurity, such as heavy fog, allows the
player’s vision field to be inside the
battle mech only. Bandai America
has included some marvelous fully
voiced pre-mission briefings and
gorgeous real-time cinematic
movies that intersperse the missions.
“Sega’s Dreamcast is a very
user-friendly system on which to
develop games and it was a simple decision for them to produce
the game for the Dreamcast
because of the ease of use for the
developers,” explains Nakata.
“Because Dreamcast is so much
more advanced than the existing
platforms, it seems they can do so
much more.”
Anime often carries with it
extremely violent scenarios and
though the Cartoon Network
series has been adapted for a
youth audience, Gundam Side
Story 0079 is being released with
an ESRB (Entertainment Software
Rating Board) rating of ‘Teen with
Animated Violence’ with a target
audience age of 13-19.
“The Gundam saga is
based on futuristic warfare and by
its very nature, it is inherently violent,” explains Nakata. “However, it
is animated mobile suits that are
under attack from animated robots
and other mobile suits, which
while relatively violent, is not the
same as seeing violence acted out
on human beings.”
While previously popular
with a cult audience and college
students, Japanese anime (animated cartoons) and manga (comic
books) are gaining increased popularity in the United States with a
more mainstream and ever
younger audience, as proven by
the continuing popularity of Sailor
Moon, Princess Mononoke and
Pokemon.
“Gundam has always had a
strong following in the States
whether it be the snap together
model kits, collectible cards, videos
or wall scrolls,” reports Nakata.
And surely Bandai America and
the Cartoon Network are looking
for Gundam Wing to reach tsunami levels of popularity here in the
United States.
Gundam Wing can be seen
weekdays at 5:30 pm (EST) during
Toonami (4:00 to 6:00 pm nightly.) The show also re-broadcasts
uncut each evening at Midnight.
Saturday morning cartoon fans
can catch Gundam Wing at 10:30
and 11:00 am.
A Washington, DC-based freelance journalist, Jacquie enjoys
writing about the electronic
entertainment and edutainment
mediums, including the Internet.
She is a frequent contributor to
the Washington Times and
Krause Publication magazines.
She has won the 1998 Certificate
of Award granted by the
Metropolitan Area Mass Media
Committee of the American
Association of University Women.
Jacquie is a fan of animation and
video games!
[email protected].
June 2000
63
E3
The Graying of
by Eric Huelsman
ll right, call me a
cynic…but first of all (and
not regrettably so), I don’t
get paid much for writing articles
about trade shows. Therefore, I
feel no affinity for writing “up” articles if I think the event I attended
wasn’t very good. I write this stuff
purely for my enthusiasm and love
for all things connected to animation, and those are the only reasons.
Which is why I am not
pained much about panning this
year’s Electronic Entertainment
Expo, which was held at the Los
Angeles Convention Center May
10 – 12, 2000. Furthermore, and
despite the inducements of being
comped for the exhibition floor
admission, given a free lunch,
quaffing free beer and spending
time on a lot of cool games, on
the whole of it, no amount of love
and enthusiasm for the game
industry would soften my view
that this year’s E3 exhibition
sucked…and I don’t mean in the
good way.
A
The Thrill Is Gone?
Why would I think the
biggest, most popular trade show
of its kind anywhere in the world
sucked? Especially given all the
truly great stuff I got to play with
(like Video System’s truly groovy
“F1 World Grand Prix,” or the Sega
Dreamcast version of “Dead or
Alive 2”)? Mainly because it was
boring. Okay, call me sentimental,
but I’ve been to four of these
shows now and what I liked about
the first E3 shows was that I could
count on a few things — like having fun. Pure, unadulterated and
visceral have-at-it-ness. Being a kid
again. Or maybe it was being surrounded by kids having fun that
made me feel like a kid again.
First of all, this year’s event
was so corporate. I mean DisneyInteractive buttoned-down kind of
corporate. The Microsoft booth,
for example, despite the very sexy
X-Box stuff, wasn’t a fun place to
be. Of course, anti-trust judges
can make you this way. Geez, and
Interplay’s booth was muy serioso;
in fact, the only smiles at the
whole exhibit were on the faces of
the Barbie-doll expo girls that
passed out CDs. And then there
were loads of conspicuous-looking
folks wearing the “Hello, I’m
Susan” kinds of corporate smiles at
Activision. The kind that really say,
“Let’s get down and exchange
dinero.” Guys like me were looked
straight through and into the soul
to see if green were at our cores.
No green, no scene. I didn’t even
get a T-shirt.
Secondly, the people I saw
on the exhibitor floor were not
there to have fun. Hey there, E3
event organizers, have we forgotten how much fun this event used
to be? Where are the kids in sneakers? Maybe in the past E3 was fun
because of the free T-shirts and not
some jacked-up exec yelling
potential profit figures for Blizzard’s
“Diablo II” into a tiny Nokia. Or
could it be the free beer in plastic
cups of previous shows had its
own primitive kind of charm? (Do
I really need the cocktail lounge
effect of a leather couch in Dolby’s
booth and the Dos Equis to go
with it? I’m there to play “NHL
Hockey” for chrissakes.) Or perhaps it was playing the newest
games (like the now-aging flight
sims like “Mig Alley”) or picking up
the occasional demo and/or toy
that I miss (like last year’s LEGO
stuff, which this year failed to be a
major interest). No, this year if I
wanted to have “fun” I had to a.)
perform a public strip to get the Tshirt or b.) make an ass of myself at
the Nintendo booth (or was that
Sega’s?) as hundreds of event
goers watch some hack magician
make me his unwitting “assistant.”
At previous year’s shows, if I
got shoved aside by the occasional overgrown juvenile trying to get
their hands on something, like
3DO Company’s “Army Men Air
Tactics,” it was okay, because this
kind of rudeness left me none the
worse for wear. After all, weren’t
those kids, like I, having fun? I dug
the whole scene, the atmosphere.
Very carnival-like. E3 was fun
because the event was geared to
us kids; who are, you know, the
people who BUY these products.
The Kids Are Alright
I was not alone in noting
that almost everyone at this year’s
June 2000
64
The Expo Floor. Courtesy of IDSA.
show was, if not the corporate
types or the mini-skirted models
mentioned above, the gone-topot, graying, middle-aged person
that I have become. I went to this
event with my publisher (who is
also bulging, graying and plunging headlong into middle-age —
sorry, Dan) and we both observed
that, although all three halls were
jam-packed with companies, there
were very few real kids (I’m talking
less than 25 years old) anywhere
to be found.
Now you know an event
like E3 is in trouble when most of
the show goers haven’t the slightest clue how to play a computerbased first-person shooter, let
alone a fast-moving console game
like those being ported to the latest Internet-game marvels
Dreamcast or Playstation 2. What I
saw this year was a drastic reduction in the amount of young blood
playing with the wanton abandon
that I observed at previous shows.
Are you catching my drift
here? All things considered, E3 has
been a blast in the past because I
could go and be a kid surrounded
by other kids, which is more of a
spiritual thing than a chronological age sort of thing. Go watch
Disney’s Pinocchio again…the part
where he runs away to Pleasure
Island. E3 used to be like that. I
remember the ‘95 show had a
Thunderseat Technologies exhibit
with a real cockpit and a soupedup version of “Fighting Falcon” on
it… WOW! Too cool! This year?
Nada. Zilch. Not a single “ride”
game in sight! Not even half the
first-person-driver games of ‘99!
Which pretty much sums
up what love’s lost for me and
E3…the whole notion of games
and what they’ve meant to me
and others who like the occasional diversion (like Simon and
Schuster Interactive’s “Amateur
League Golf” or the Playstation
version of Namco’s “Ms. Pac-Man”).
The pure, unadulterated enthusiasm for electronic entertainment
that made E3 the show what it
was because it was based on a
youth culture that cannot survive
without, well, youth! Over 30 or
otherwise.
Speaking of being over 30:
This year, by count, your kindly old
journalist here got shoved aside
no less than three times not by the
beloved kids I’ve been pining on
about but by fellow “media journalists” who were trying to score a
June 2000
65
T-shirt or operational demo that I
should have gotten. This happened at the Acclaim, Raven
Software (by the way, you need to
check “Star Trek: Voyager,” it looks
great) and Eidos booths. In fact,
one particular a**hole who wrote
for some Japanese manga magazine was out to destroy my day
because, imagine this, he was
blocking my way to the coolest Tshirts of the whole event just to
find out what frigging SIZES the
Barbie passing out the T-shirts had!
(At this point I felt imbued with
such Russell Crowe-like rage I
almost ripped the guy’s head off. I
dive-bombed past our manga
friend for the last T-shirt, only to
come up empty-handed.)
All right. Enough of this
whining and bitching… Here are
some of the highlights (and lowlights) of this year’s Electronic
Entertainment Expo.
E3 2000 Exhibitors of Note
Games
3DO Company – “Army Men”
series. I had a good time at this
booth mainly due to my love of
the Toy Story inspired Tan versus
Green “Army Men” series. Their
“Air Tactics” spinoff was very fun,
with Captain Blade heading up a
helicopter assault team. And there
is a Game Boy Color version! Did I
say I want to buy a Game Boy? I
want one! I want one! Those cute
little handhelds are slick.
Acclaim – “South Park.” Yuck-o.
This game is a deliberate (but to
me, unfunny) knockoff of a movie
that was hilarious and best left
untouched. I found nothing about
the game appealing. By contrast,
however, I am a sports fan and
thought “All-Star Baseball” was
very cool. It’s pretty scary how realANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE
istic these games are getting. Now
all they need is a heckling mob
yelling at the players and running
on to the field from time to time
(and I don’t mean from the
General Manager’s office).
Activision – “Dark Reign 2.” I
played just enough of this to find
it slick-looking but somewhat awkward to handle. A unique feature
was unit control from anywhere
on the map. But the building manager itself, while a good thing, is
far too much to manage. I didn’t
play any other titles at the booth
but some looked kinda neat, especially “Star Trek: Armada.”
EIDOS – “Legacy of Kain: Soul
Reaver II.” This gothic vampire classic returns with more graphic
graphics (sorry) but also some
amazing CG. Impaling nemeses
has never been more fun on an
RPG. There was also a really neat
game called “Fear Effect: Retro
Helix.” Jesus H. Christ! Some of
these games are getting to be better CG than movies! Incredible,
incredible movie sequences.
Game play is intriguing too. I really like this company. They never fail
to deliver… “Tomb Raider” is still a
favorite of mine.
Midway – “Ready 2 Rumble:
Round 2.” Afro Thunder and
friends return this November in
one of Midway’s most successful
boxing/martial
arts/wrestling
games for 1999. It is incredible
how much development has been
put into this year’s release. The
bounce of Afro’s hair alone is
amazing to watch. The duck and
punch moves are so real as to
make your jaw drop. Only trouble
is: I got tired of it even quicker
than last year’s game! How much
ass can one person kick? Or
punch? How about a Cosell-like
interview after the match? That’d
be more worth your efforts.
Platforms
Microsoft/Nvidia – X-Box. Okay,
my question is: when is this thing
REALLY available? If you can
believe this, by November a
graphics engine with more than
three times the graphics performance of the newest-generation
game consoles will be offered! Codeveloped with experts at Nvidia,
the custom-designed graphics
chip will deliver more than 200
million polygons per second.
However, the video engine being
developed for generation two is
going to handle a fill rate of 3 billion polygons per second, or
roughly ten times (that’s 1000
thousand percent) more graphics
playback ability than the first generation model. Or 10,000 percent
what the average PC player has
available to them today. If true, the
X-Box is about to turn the interactive/Internet game world on its ear.
Nintendo – On the game scene it
is very tough to ignore a force like
Nintendo. They own seven out of
the top ten selling titles for 1999.
When you consider the heady
combination of their consoles like
Game Boy Color (I’m getting one)
and N64 and enhanced versions
of games like “Pokemon” or
“Donkey Kong” being ported to
their product, they are to the
game industry what GM is to the
auto industry. A giant with which
to be reckoned. Which is precisely
my point. I have come to view
these guys with the sentiment I do
GM. Lumbering, bloated. Stodgy
and middle-of-the-road. Unwilling
to take big chances. Oh, well, let
us just say they are comfortably
numb. They may be formidable,
June 2000
66
but they are not necessarily innovative. And that can be death in
this industry. Watch out for Game
Boy Color, though. Nobody can
compete. With Sega Game Gear
dead, they are alone in the handhelds for now.
Sega – Dreamcast. Very interesting
platform. Most games ported to
this format are smooth. By all
means own one if you are an
Internet gaming freak. With the
$50 rebate, the price point on this
device drops to $149 to get into
the game (provided you do a twoyear signup with your friendly ISP).
Genesis and Saturn continue to
have interesting games ported to
them, but this company suffers
from wanting to do too much too
often. Say goodbye to Sega CD.
Sony Playstation – Playstation 2 is
nothing short of a breathtaking
marvel of technology. Argue what
you will about Sony and its irascible sense of “being above it all,”
but these guys have made some
serious inroads in the console
game industry that up to now has
been
primarily
Sega
and
Nintendo. I saw a game called
“Fear Effect: Retro Helix” (by Eidos
Interactive - see above) played on
the Playstation and I wanted it
REAL BAD. I’m sure the PC version
is gonna be very neat, but seeing
it made me want a Playstation, not
just the game.
Let’s Go Home
Well, this about wraps up
what is useful and newsworthy,
though it’s reasonable to say that I
could only cover a tenth of what
really went on at the show. I didn’t
Animation
World
stick around for anything else
mainly because my publisher, forever the curmudgeon, wanted to
get out of there. I couldn’t blame
him this time. I too had had
enough.
Needless to say, I got my Tshirts. I got lucky and snagged a
few on my way out to the car.
Someone outside the Convention
Center was handing out some
bitchin’ orange and yellow ones.
Eric Huelsman is the over-paid,
underworked er — that’s underpaid, over-worked — guy in
charge of the Friedman 3D computer animation program.
[email protected].
Store
http://www.awn.com/awnstore
Never before
available!!
Original Production
cels from the Oscar
nominated film
The Big Snit by director
Richard Condie
June 2000
67
ASIFA-East’s Festival Makes
New York Even Hotter
by Elizabeth Shin
veryone who went to the
Canter Center at New York
University to celebrate this
year’s ASIFA-East animation festival
experienced some heat. Held on
Sunday, May 7, 2000, the festival
united more than 250 talented
animators, producers and fans
from all over the east coast to
enjoy its festivities. With most of
the attendees in shorts and Tshirts, the ambiance of the festival
was both “fun” and “casual” in a
very “New York” kind of a way, as
Linda Simensky describes it. The
event was spread out over a total
of five nights, one evening for the
award presentations and 4 nights
for the judging. Somewhere
between 50-75 jury members
were present per evening to evaluate the submissions.
E
Signe Baumane (left center) and Bill Plympton (right center) cool off with exotic-looking drinks and an entourage of friends. All images courtesy of Linda Simensky.
really grown. There’s a little bit of
everything going on…2D, 3D,
series and independent film people were all there.” The audience
was a creative powerhouse with
directors like Bill Plympton, George
Griffin, Ward Sutton and Mo
Willems heating up the arena.
Coupled with the humidity, the
actual temperature of the event
was sizzling.
One of the gems of this
year’s productions is Life by Mo
Willems, winner of the
Independent Film Category. It is
“an animation jam,” as Simensky
describes it, “the New York anima-
Animator Fran Krause (left) and
Linda Simensky, President of
ASIFA-East (right).
Linda Simensky, President
of ASIFA-East and VP of Original
Programming at Cartoon
Network, opened up the final
night’s presentation with a brief
speech, thanking the people who
helped make the evening possible
and then proceeded to hand out
the awards. “The talent pool has
Animators Maria Scavullo (left) and
Shawn Atkins (right).
tion community had an opportunity to honor its own people”
through both the production and
celebration of this film’s achievements. The film features vignettes
from numerous New York-based
artists all revolving around the central theme. Another highlight of
the evening was when Oscar-winner Frank Morris won with Frankly
Caroline for Best in Show. “It was
exciting to see Frank Morris give
his speech when winning…it was
the first time that an American festival had recognized this film.”
All in all, the festival as compared to previous years was not
only warmer (in the literal sense,
as festivals were often held in the
winter months), but it was also
more “well-rounded” according to
Simensky. Historically known as a
center for commercial production,
New York wasn’t considered to be
a hot spot for the animation community. However, now home to
numerous companies such as
Curious Pictures, MTV Animation,
Nickelodeon Animation Studios
June 2000
68
Dave Levy (left), Dan Nord (center)
and Toni Tysen (right).
and Buzzco (just to name a few),
will New York become a central
breeding ground for animation
production? One thing for certain
is that the influx of animation companies to New York is helping to
establish it as a place for creative
individuals to thrive in animation
series, as well as Web production,
in a community that is making an
effort to support, and celebrate, its
artists.
Elizabeth Shin is the Editorial
Administrator of Animation World
Magazine. She holds a master’s
degree from U.C. Irvine and
speaks four languages including
French, Korean and Japanese.
Previously she served as Romance
Administrator for New Times and
Advertising Coordinator for
LA Weekly.
She also acts as a facilitator for
the University of Phoenix, giving
lectures on written communications and has had short stories
published in the Berkeley
Campanile.
Vincent Cafarelli of Buzzco (left), Alex Gorlin, a.k.a. Mr. Debby Solomon (center),
and Candy Kugel of Buzzco (right).
Dave Levy (left), Nancy Keegan (center) and Jen Oxley (right) of the
ASIFA-East Festival committee.
[email protected].
Oscar-winner Jimmy Picker greets friends.
June 2000
69
Which Is The Real
Kimba ?
by Fred Patten
Kimba the White Lion is always ready to take on his next challenge!
© The Right Stuf International.
imba, the White Lion was a
popular TV cartoon series
during the late 1960s and
the 1970s. Based upon a
Japanese 1950s cartoon-art novel,
Jungle Emperor by Osamu Tezuka,
and later produced by Tezuka’s
Mushi Production animation studio in 1965-1966, the 52-episode
series was licensed in America by
NBC Enterprises for syndication for
twelve years from its initial
American airdate on September
11, 1966. NBC closed its syndication division in 1971 and sold its
syndicated properties to National
Telefilm Associates. Mushi Pro
declared bankruptcy in 1973 and
lawsuits were filed in Japan over
Mushi’s assets. The litigation lasted
K
for over two decades. Therefore
there was nobody in a position to
renew the Jungle Emperor/Kimba
license when it expired in 1978.
Blurry bootleg Kimba videos taped
off TV (mostly showing the station
logo of Los Angeles’ Channel 52,
KBSC-TV, which showed one of
the last broadcasts from August
1976 through July 1977) have
been popular sellers at animation
and comic book fans’ clubs and
conventions since then, but Kimba
has not been available legally. As
far as the general public was concerned, Kimba was forgotten.
Versions of Versions
Meanwhile, variants of
Kimba developed outside of the
American public’s notice. Tezuka’s
original 500-plus page Jungle
Emperor cartoon novel told the
life story of his lion hero, Leo
(Kimba). The TV series was based
upon the first part of this only,
showing Leo as a young cub.
Tezuka produced a 26-episode
sequel in Japan, showing the further adventures of Leo as an adult.
This was not picked up by NBC
and was never shown as part of
the Kimba series in America. It was
eventually shown as a separate
children’s program, Leo the Lion,
on the Christian Broadcasting
Network during 1984. The adult
lion retained his original Japanese
name, so most Americans did not
realize the two programs’ relationship. Further, the litigation in
Japan over the ownership of
Mushi’s 1960s TV series did not
prevent Tezuka, as the author of
the story, from creating new adaptations of his novel. Tezuka started
a new animation studio in the
1970s, Tezuka Productions. He
was planning a new Jungle
Emperor TV cartoon series at the
time of his death in February
1989. His staff completed it as a
50-episode weekly prime-time
series which was shown in Japan
from October 1989 through
September 1990.
Kimba the White Lion’s 1990 U.S.
appearance had some unfortunate
changes. © The Right Stuf International.
June 2000
70
The final variant almost
degenerated into farce. One of
the litigants in Japan, Fumio
Suzuki, tired of the endless trial,
unilaterally declared himself the
owner of Kimba. He offered Kimba
for sale in America in 1990. The
Right Stuf International, a video
company in Des Moines, was
ready to buy when it learned that
the rights were still in question in
Japan. The Right Stuf began new
negotiations with the reorganized
Mushi Pro as the original owner.
This led to an understanding that
Mushi would license Kimba to The
Right Stuf if it won the litigation
(which was expected).
Meanwhile, Suzuki went looking
for new customers.
Then in June 1994,
Disney’s The Lion King was
released. A controversy hit the
news that summer as to whether
or not the Disney blockbuster had
consciously copied from the 1960s
Kimba cartoons. Disney went on
record that none of its Lion King
production crew had ever heard
of Kimba or of Tezuka. This
brought publicized hoots of derision from animation professionals,
including a “Kimba...I mean
Simba” gag in an episode of The
Simpsons. This made Kimba newsworthy, but still not available to a
curious public.
Fuel to the Fire
Other
video
versions
stepped forward to take advantage of this publicity. First was a
July 1994 release of eight videos
(sixteen episodes) of the Leo the
Lion series with Leo/Kimba as an
adult. A distributor’s announcement read: “As any hep person
knows, the hit Disney movie The
Lion King was inspired by
Japanese animation great Osamu
Tezuka’s Kimba The White Lion,
which appeared on U.S. TV in the
mid-‘60s. In this sequel series, the
lion cub has grown up, gotten
married, sired two cubs, and
changed his name to Leo. Go figure.” (Advance Comics, October
1994, pg. 288) The video box
logo, Leo the Lion: King of the
Jungle, combined the American
TV title with a translation of the
Japanese title in a way that suggested the Disney feature. Despite
the acknowledgement that this
was a sequel, the promotion
implied that anyone who wanted
to see what Kimba was like would
find out in these videos.
Kimba, the Lion Prince.
© MCMXCV UAV Corp.
In January 1996 four
videos (eight episodes) appeared
titled Kimba the Lion Prince. The
video boxes emphasized that,
“Kimba, the Lion Prince is the original lion adventure that started it
all!”, with synopses that were closer to The Lion King than Kimba
had actually been. (“It’s action and
adventure as Kimba battles the evil
hyenas and his father’s wicked
brother!” In the original program
there was never any suggestion
that the brutal adult lion whom
Kimba must defeat was a relative.)
This release did present the original 1965-’66 Mushi animation, but
with new dialogue, music and
sound effects. The new English
credits named a Toronto production studio. The original Japanese
credits for Osamu Tezuka and his
staff were gone, replaced by a
card reading, “Special Thanks To
Fumio Suzuki.”
The third and best promoted series was a six video release
from October 1998 through July
1999 of the first thirteen episodes
of the Japanese 1989-1990 50episode Jungle Emperor, as The
New Adventures of Kimba, the
White Lion. This was a production
of Pioneer Entertainment USA, the
American subsidiary of the
Japanese entertainment giant.
Although the “New Adventures” in
the title signified that this was not
the original series, the larger
Kimba, The White Lion logo
implied that this was a part of that
series, in the sense that a 1990s
Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoon
can be considered to follow directly from the famous 1940s and
1950s theatrical cartoons.
Finally…
Now the original Kimba is
finally available. In early 1997 the
Japanese litigation over the 1973
Mushi Pro bankruptcy was
resolved in favor of the reorganized Mushi studio. Mushi eventually signed a license with The Right
Stuf International for an authorized American release produced
from the original NBC masters.
This release began in April 2000. It
is scheduled to consist of thirteen
June 2000
71
Kimba the White Lion and Polly Cracker try to figure out what all the
confusion’s about! © The Right Stuf International.
monthly video releases of four
episodes per video until all 52
episodes are out.
However, The Right Stuf is
encountering market confusion
between the different Kimba versions, especially over
P i o n e e r ’s N e w Adventures
since that has been t h e m o s t
w i d e l y p r o m o t e d . Shawne
Kleckner, President of The Right
Stuf International, recently said,
“We have received a number of
calls stating confusion between
the Pioneer product and the original. To avoid confusion, we are
planning marketing which will
focus on the fact that this is the
‘Original, Uncut 1966 Television
Series’ and the packaging will also
reflect this. Also, the releases previously [of Kimba, the Lion Prince]
and Leo the Lion were really of
poor quality. The perception that
they represent the quality of the
original Kimba will have to be
overcome.”
The Good and the Bad
Actually, all four versions
have some points in their favor.
The 1966 series is, above all, the
original. It established the name
Kimba, the White Lion. It is the version for nostalgia fans who
enjoyed it in their childhood and
who want to own it now, or who
are curious about the Kimba/Lion
King controversy and want to see
what may or may not have influenced Disney’s animators.
But Kimba was an uneasy
compromise between NBC and
Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka wanted to
produce a faithful dramatization of
his cartoon novel, which showed
Leo fighting for the rights of animals throughout his life and dying
a martyr’s death. NBC insisted that
the story had to be less tense and
violent for American viewers. The
hero should remain a young cub
with whom children could more
easily identify, and should have
more animal friends to interact
with instead of being such a grim
lone idealist. (NBC also arbitrarily
changed all of the character
names in the American dub.)
Tezuka’s Leo the Lion sequel was
produced on a much lower budget and lacks the high production
values of Kimba. But it does show
his lion hero’s later adventures the
way Tezuka wanted the story to be
told.
Similarly, Pioneer’s The New
Adventures of Kimba the White
Lion is not a sequel. It is a blend
between a remake of the original
TV series and a more faithful adaptation of the beginning of Tezuka’s
cartoon novel. Most of the supporting cast who had been added
for the 1960s TV series are missing, and the remaining characters
(except Kimba) retain the original
names that Tezuka gave them.
There is less humor and a more
somber, even tragic, mood. Those
curious to see how the original
Kimba might have looked if Tezuka
had not been constrained to tailor
it to American TV standards should
see this. There is also a more modern character design.
The 1990s Canadian ver-
The animals of Kimba’s domain
stand behind him all the way!
June 2000
72
matter of taste, but NBC’s producer-director, Fred Ladd, and his
crew of writers and voice actors
(Cliff Owens, Billie Lou Watt,
Gilbert Mack and Hal Studer) were
among the top veterans in the
profession, producing the 1960s
and ‘70s American versions of
such fondly-remembered TV cartoons as Astro Boy and Gigantor,
and animated features like The
Little Norse Prince, Jack and the
Witch and (Animal) Treasure
Island. On the other hand, the
new translations for Kimba the
Lion Prince again have the virtue
of retaining more of the original
character names (except, obviously, for Kimba himself).
But whether one happens
to prefer the 1960s dubbings or
the 1990s dubbings, the fact
remains that the 1990s remake is
not “the original lion adventure
that started it all!” That is the original 1966 Kimba, the White Lion.
And now, thanks to the ending of
a 20-plus year bankruptcy trial in
Japan and the patient waiting of
The Right Stuf International, the
real Kimba is available in America
once again.
Kimba’s mom appears in the stars, reassuring him that she is with him always.
sion of Kimba the Lion Prince is
actually quite compatible in quality
with 1990s TV cartoon standards.
(The quality of the video production, however, leaves much to be
desired!) It has the misfortune to
be compared with the exceptionally good original version. The animation itself, of course, is identical.
But Tezuka spent extra money to
impress the American TV market.
The original background music is
by composer Isao Tomita (better
known for his serious electronic
music in the 1970s and 1980s)
and scored for a full symphony
orchestra. The new synthesizer
music in Kimba the Lion Prince
may compare well against most
1990s TV cartoon scores, but not
against the rich tonalities of a full
orchestra. (The beautiful music in
Kimba is one of its best-remembered aspects by nostalgic fans.)
Whether the new scripts match
the witty 1960s scripts may be a
anime
and related
topics.on anime
Fred Patten
has written
for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s.
[email protected].
June 2000
73
The
Anime
Trivia Quizbook:
F UN F AN F ARE
OR M ORE ?
book review by Fred Patten
annish party fluff or a serious
reference book? The Anime
Trivia Quizbook Episode 1
does not aspire to be any more
than the former, but it has enough
aspects of the latter that libraries
F
looking for primers on Japanese
animation as related to current
American popular culture may find
this a handy purchase.
Ryan Omega has been
active in anime fandom in the
Berkeley, California area all during
his college days. He began writing
these questions as the host of an
“Anime Game Show” at the annual Fanime Convention in San Jose
each winter. The book reflects this
TV game-show format; full of
snappy patter and wisecracks. But
it is also designed for the full spectrum of fans, from the neophytes
to the veterans.
The Quizbook is divided
into seventeen categories covering such themes as Boys’ Anime,
Girls’ Anime, Video Games,
Romance, Science Fiction &
Mecha, Cultural, Gender
Confusion, and the like. Each has
five sets of five questions of
increasing difficulty.
The Japanese animation
covered in these questions are
generally those movies and TV
programs most popular in the
American anime fan community
during the past five years. This
does not mean only anime titles
released in America. Fans are
notorious for obtaining video
copies of new anime directly from
Japan and spreading them around
to their friends, and for keeping
up with the latest news in the
untranslated Japanese anime fan
magazines. Most of the easy questions are based upon the most
popular titles in American TV and
video releases. The harder questions are as likely to require a
knowledge of the differences
between the original Japanese
and the American releases of these
same programs (such as referring
to rice balls as “doughnuts”) and
to popular new titles in Japan
which have not been released in
America at all, as to more obscure
titles. Or to news from the
Japanese fan magazines about the
most popular anime artists and
voice talent.
June 2000
74
Anime has developed a
stereotype in America as pandering to adolescent obsessions with
sex and violence. Since this trivia
quiz is aimed toward those mostlyadolescent fans, some of the questions are a bit risqué or show a fascination with some of the more
bizarre (to Americans) aspects of
Japanese culture. An example is a
question about a popular voice
actress, Kikuko Inoue, which identifies her as having told her fans
she believes that she was a fish in
her past life, and whose roles
include
Boku
no
Sexual
Harassment, an adult office comedy in which she plays an office
employee who is frustrated
because all the handsome men
are gay and dating each other.
To help make this Quizbook
more informative for neophyte
fans, Omega has scattered numerous brief explanations of Japanese
cultural aspects that are often puzzling. For example: “When biographies of anime characters are
made, one of the things that is
always mentioned is the character’s blood type. Why? Americans
could care less that dedicated
Street Fighter Ryu has blood type
O, but the Japanese use blood
types (ketsueki-gata) to analyze
personalities. If you knew nothing
about Ryu except his blood type,
you would at least know he is
inclined to be a determined young
man with a strong sense of purpose [...]. This blood-type trait
assessment [...], like horoscopes, is
used in Japan to determine a person’s disposition and personality.”
(pg. 82)
For anyone with an interest
in anime, neophyte or knowledgeable fan, the Quizbook is fun
to browse through. For those who
want to actually use it to organize
party anime trivia contests, there
are speed rounds and a rating
scale. There is a good title index so
all the questions related to any
specific title may be easily located.
Anyone looking for a basic primer
on anime should go first to Dr.
Antonia Levi’s Samurai from Outer
Animation
World
Space: Understanding Japanese
Animation (Open Court Publishing
Co., 1996), or Gilles Poitras’ The
Anime
Companion:
What’s
Japanese in Japanese Animation?
(Stone Bridge Press, 1998), but
Anime Trivia Quizbook Episode 1 is
a worthwhile additional title.
Anime Trivia Quizbook Episode 1:
From Easy to Otaku Obscure, by
Ryan Omega. Illustrated. Berkeley,
California: Stone Bridge Press,
2000. 176 pages. ISBN: 1-88065644-2 (trade paperback $14.95).
anime and related topics.
Fred Patten has written on anime
for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s.
[email protected].
Store
http://www.awn.com/awnstore/vilppu
Never before
available!!!
Glenn Vilppu’s drawing
techniques manual
and video tapes,
used worldwide as
course material for
animation students.
June 2000
75
Animation World News
Compiled and written by Rick DeMott
Technology news by Paul Younghusband
Get your headline news first every day on-line at
http://www.awn.com/headlines
Plus, have industry news delivered to your e-mail every week in
the Animation Flash, AWN’s weekly industry newsletter.
Subscribe today at www.awn.com/flash/
Awards
TPinky & The Brain Take Over The Daytime Emmys
l Daytime Emmy Tech Awards Announced
l Webbies Name Best Sites Of The Year
l Interactive Awards Announce Winners
l ASIFA-East Awards Excellence
l Viola & King’s Shirts Top Nordic Fest
l The Age of the Interactive Awards
l BAFTA Says Beautiful Eyes Is Best
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Awards
l
Call for Entries
Flash! Anima Mundi Wants Web Toons
l Ajijic Asks For Animation Submissions
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Call%for%Entries
l
Commercials
Sedelmaier Helps Griffey Try New Sportz
l Quiet Man Raps On Barrons Ad
l SimEx’s Sixth Froot Loop Spot
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Commercials
l
Business
Cinar Sued By HighReach
l Harvey Hatches Better Results For 1st Quarter
l Time Warner & Disney Draw Truce
l Marvel Sends 15 Heroes To Artisan
l Mounting Fines For Time Warner & AOL
l Marvel Sees First Quarter Decline
l Nelvana Offers 3.75M Shares
l Report Calls For Canadian Television Fund Revamp
l Quebec Animation Adds Oscar Winner
l Founders’ Renovate Home With Cinar Funds?
l Filmmakers Call Foul To Canadian TV Fund
l Project: Messiah’s New Reincarnation
l Cinar Employees Barred From Trading
l Harvey Goes PM
l Ollin Studio Opens Office In Canada
l Humongous Donation To Make-A-Wish Foundation
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Business
Events
l
Frederic Back Retrospective
l Zagreb 2000
l Outer Limits
l The First Bristol Animated Encounters
l CalArts Showcase 2000
l Singapore Animation Fiesta 2000
l AnimeOnline Festival
l Annecy International Film Festival
l Swatch & AtomFilms Launch Flash Talent Search
l Bill Plympton’s Guilty Pleasures At WAC
l World Animation Celebration
l L!censing 2000
l Nashville Independent Film Festival
l Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering
Symposium
l Toronto Short Film Festival
l Plympton On Broadway
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Events
l
June 2000
76
Films
People
Dino Soars To The Top Of US Box Office
l Stuart Little’s Dykstra Swings With Spider-Man
Gladiator Slays The International Box Office
l Former TriStar Chairman Joins Film Roman Board
l Gladiator Reigns Over The US BO Battlefield
l Call, Macaluso Promoted At Digital Domain
l Gladiator Rules While Mars Lands At Top Of Global BO
l Grasso Named Will Vinton Exec VP
l Web Toon Undercover Brother Turned Into Feature
l Stan Lee Media Lands Top Animation Talent
l Gladiator Works As Dream Maker At US BO
l Aries New VP At Nick Studios
l Stuart Little & Pokemon Fade From International BO l Roth & Bird Fly To Pixar
l Pokemon & Stuart Struggle For International BO
l DEN’s Programming VP Vamooses
l It’s Raining Stars For Cats & Dogs
l Tsujihara Takes Over Entertaindom
l U-571 Sinks The New Recruits At US BO
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=People
l El Dorado Falls To Five
l U-571 Undeniable Box Office Victor
l Spike & Mike Invade Cannes
Technology
l NFB’s Upcoming Animation
l Alias|Wavefront Bring Maya To The Mac
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=In%Passing
l AFX Release SceneGenie 1.2
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Technology
l
l
In Passing
l Warner Bros. Director Arthur Davis Passes
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Licensing
Television
Pokemon Pumps Up European Deals
l South Park Is iN DEMAND
l Cartoon Network To Air Lost Cartoons
Internet and Interactive
l The PJs Movin’ On Up To The WB
l VanHook Ventures On Cyberspace
l Cartoon Network Navigates 10 New Pilots
l DEN Is Done
l Phil Roman Rides With Soap On The Range
l Web Thugs Hit The Tellie
l Nick After Hours
l Dr. Katz Producer Tom Snyder Joins Shockwave
l Parker & Stone’s 3 Year Deal
l Actor Hamilton Joins Stan Lee Media As President
l Marx Brothers Toon Stopped By Heirs
l Honkworm Unveils New Toons At Cannes
l Wildbrain Creates Content For Cartoon Network On-line 4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Television
l Digital Entertainment Network Version 2.0
l King Of The Hill Puts Foot Into Net
Video
l Two Nova Scotia Guys Net Spielberg Deal
l Best Of Zagreb Video
l Bunny Grenade Explodes Onto Web
l Anchors Aweigh Sails Onto DVD
l Ben Stein Wins With Shockwave
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Video
4 http://www2.awn.com/magt/news.php3?item=Internet%and%Interactive
l
Licensing
Disney Lands A More Golden Book Deal With
Random House
l Mattel Lands Nick Toys Deal
l Hasbro Builds With Bob
l Power Puffed Soundtrack
4 http://www2.awn.com/mag/news.php3?item=Licensing
l
June 2000
77
Next Issue’s Highlights
Comic Books and Adult Animation
July 2000
nimation World’s July issue is focusing on Comics and Adult Animation. We are going
to be featuring stories on Fox’s upcoming feature film, The X-Men, and superstar Todd
McFarlane. We will also be remembering the careers of Charles Schultz, Dale Messick
and Edward Gorey. Joseph Szadkowski will be going behind the scenes and taking a look at
the tools of comic book production. We are also going to look at the sophisticated themes of
Jiri Trnka’s films and Martin Goodman is going to investigate why some folks still won’t accept
animation as an art form.
A
Lee Dannacher is going to continue her profiles of Internet companies by taking on
Rumpus.com Media, and Jacquie Kubin is going to continue with her gaming column as well.
As for events we will be getting film reviews of the best films direct from the Annecy International
Animation Festival by Maureen Furniss. We’ll hear from the busy MIFA floor as well!
Upcoming Editorial Calendar
Adult Animation
Computer and Internet Animation
Feature Films
Licensing and Merchandising
July 2000
August 2000
September 2000
October 2000
June 2000
78

Aardman`s First Feature - Animation World Network

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