animation

Hanna-Barbera turns 70 this year, and although the skies are, alas, still free of Jetsonian flying cars, the Paley Center for Media is celebrating in a Grape Ape-sized way. "Yabba-Dabba-Doo! A 70th Anniversary Salute to Hanna-Barbera" explores the history and creative legacy of limited animation pioneers Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who first collaborated in 1939 on Tom and Jerry cartoons. An exhibition on view through September 10 at the Paley Center's Los Angeles outpost is a treasure trove of cartoon history, including Iwao Takamoto's first doodles of the Scooby-Doo gang, early designs for The Jetsons, and photos from voice recording sessions of shows such as The Flintstones and Johnny Bravo. If there is any justice in the world, Laff Olympics, Space Ghost, and Snorks are also prominently featured. Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera's big 7-0 is also a perfect opportunity for us to call your attention to this clip of Snagglepuss, as portrayed by Bobby Moynihan on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. It's terrific, hilarious even.

Today Tate Modern and London gallery Concrete Hermit debut a swell range of t-shirts, prints, and postcards featuring artwork by a talented trio of British designers and illustrators: Anthony Burrill, Andrew Rae, and Ian Stevenson. While we can't make it across the pond to celebrate the launch of this exciting collaboration, we've got just the thing for your summer Friday viewing pleasure in Stevenson's latest animated short film, "Stare Into the Sun," which he describes as "revealing the world of a strange small man, who spends his days away from the world. While divulging in strange pleasures, he is suddenly thrown into a fantastical journey." With a bopping cast of warped forest creatures and a color palette that recalls those of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1980s, the film has the dizzily didactic feel of Sesame Street interstitia gone off the rails. Betcha can't play it just once.

Animator extraordinaire Bill Plympton's newest films—the feature Idiots and Angels and the short Hot Dog—are now on the film festival circuit (this week, Hot Dog hits Belgium, Germany, and the Bahamas; find a full screening schedule here). Featuring the music of Tom Waits, Moby, and Pink Martini, Idiots and Angels is "much darker and more mysterious film than his previous comedies," according to Plympton. The dark comedy about a man's battle for his soul sounds a bit like the process of creating it. "I'd say it took about 25,000 drawings for Idiots and Angels," Plympton told The New York Times' John Anderson recently. "I do about 100 drawings a day, which is about 10 an hour, and if I can do that times 250 or 300 days, that's a feature film."

It is, he said, a "zen thing."

"You're so focused. You don't do e-mails or phone calls. I get up at 6, don't shave or shower, just start drawing. It's like a ride. I hear that novelists do this too. They're so focused for a year or whatever that afterwards they just collapse for two or three weeks. Sleep. Or drink."

Collectors may not have been clamoring for his work at the fall contemporary sales, but Takashi Murakami isn't planning Damien Hirst-style layoffs. Instead, he's announced the further expansion of Kaikai Kiki, his global art empire. Next stop? Hollywood, where Murakami will open an animation and film studio. "This studio represents a great step in the evolution of Kaikai Kiki and gives me a closer proximity to the community of artists with whom I hope to collaborate as I continue my explorations of animated and live-action film," said Murakami in a statement. Among the most anticipated and labor-intensive works shown in the retrospective that debuted last year at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) was kaikai & kiki, Murakami's first major animated film.

The new West Coast arm of KaiKai Kiki, which currently has operations in Tokyo and Long Island City, New York, will employ approximately 30 people. The Los Angeles Times got the scoop on the new digs: a two-floor building on North Highland Avenue that will offer nearly 9,000 square feet of space. "The studio's first project will be a feature-length animated film based on Planting the Seeds, the shorts that premiered at Murakami's mid-career retrospective at MOCA," notes the LAT. "The digitally animated works feature Kaikai and Kiki, the company's cartoon-character namesakes, traveling the world in a spaceship and learning to grow watermelons with the help of fertilizer, or 'poop' as they gleefully call it." Click "continued" for a video of the dynamic duo in action.

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When Ratatouille received an Oscar nomination for best animated picture this morning, we remembered an interesting yet unconfirmed rumor embedded very deep in our brains. We heard that when the Pixar animators needed inspiration for the film's legendary food critic Anton Ego, they looked to none other than legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser. Laugh if you must, but contrast how Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole) talks cooking, above, with how Glaser talks about designing, below (in the Hillman Curtis film). Wikipedia says Ego's likeness was modeled on French actor Louis Jouvet, but note Ego's distinctive cadence, that ever-present scarf, and those large, graceful hands. Hmmm...

Although we're still bummed out by the absence of Duff at our local Kwik-E-Mart, we're still pretty psyched to see the Simpsons Movie. Turns out someone we know already did:

I went to a special private screening of the long awaited Simpsons movie. As Homer says, "Why would anyone come to something we give away free on TV?"

The answer is, it's fun. It's also great to see all those wonderful camera perspectives that you can only see on the silver screen.

And you thought Saul Bass only made film titles. Here's a clip of the 1968 Oscar-winning short film Why Man Creates, directed by Bass and his wife Elaine. Apparently the entire 29-minute film is available, but very expensive to procure.

Update: Our friend Christopher Simmons writes to remind us of this: "Saul Bass often gets credit full credit for Why Man Creates, though it was written by Mayo Simon."

Interesting story by way of Tropist about how Gregg Spiridellis, one of the founders of JibJab about creating a viable content providing brand. It's a great, lengthy pieced from Blog Critics, a transcription from his appearance at the Branff World Television Festival, wherein Spiridellis talks about the ups and downs of creating the popular site, from their pre-dot-com-bust foundations to their rebirth and overnight success in 2004. Even if you don't particularly care for the particular content they're slinging, it's a terrific bit of information about the workings of an online venture that, thus far, has made a real go of this whole internet hooplah. Here's some :

Working in Los Angeles, the brothers are confronted by the reality of a system of agents, managers, executives, and lawyers that was designed long before anyone thought of the Internet, never mind creating video content for it.

"It's so hard to get anything done," Spiridellis complains. "The whole system was created to produce a small number of really big investment productions, but with the web you've got to be able to produce a very big number of small productions."

"One of the problems we're trying to solve is how do we scale our production, because I can't make a production for a few thousand bucks if it's going to cost me five thousand to deal with the lawyers and everybody else."

If you've had a bad week, or even if you've had a good week, be sure to watch this video for The Whitest Boy Alive before you pack it up. Your feet will be tapping well into the weekend. Geoff McFetridge creates a surreal and somber universe of skateboarding, suburbia, and a little bit of Where the Wild Things Are with nothing more than a few strokes of his pencil. Magic.

File this under Awesome: An intrepid reporter points us to two street team promoters arrested for plastering Boston with Adult Swim animated series "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" ads. The problem? The ads were illuminated lightboards and deemed "bomblike" by authorities.

Huh? Yeah, that's what we said, too. We think we'll go with the opinion of the Parsons student interviewed in the piece who said they looked as harmless as Lite Brites. Also, even though they've been placed in cities across the country for 2-3 weeks, no one else has complained. And don't you think it's a pretty obvious riff on these little buggers?

Anyway, the ridiculousness of the whole thing makes this exchange between the suspects and reporters all the more appropriate:

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, "We're taking it very seriously." Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.

Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, "That's not a hair question. I'm sorry."