All posts tagged: Animation

Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation (1911-1914)

Watch Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Gertie the Dinosaur, and Witness the Birth of Modern Animation (1911-1914)

Published by José

“Con­sid­er­ing that, in a car­toon, any­thing can hap­pen that the mind can imag­ine, the comics have gen­er­al­ly depict­ed pret­ty mun­dane worlds,” writes Calvin and Hobbes cre­ator Bill Wat­ter­son. “Sure, there have been talk­ing ani­mals, a few space­ships and what­not, but the comics have rarely shown us any­thing tru­ly bizarre. Lit­tle Nemo’s dream imagery, how­ev­er, is as mind-bend­ing today as ever, and Win­sor McCay remains one of the great­est inno­va­tors and manip­u­la­tors of the com­ic strip medi­um.” And Lit­tle Nemo, which sprawled across entire news­pa­per pages in the ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, pushed artis­tic bound­aries not just as a com­ic, but also as a film. When first seen in 1911, the twelve-minute short Lit­tle Nemo was titled Win­sor McCay, the Famous Car­toon­ist of the N.Y. Her­ald and His Mov­ing Comics. A mix­ture of live action and ani­ma­tion, it dra­ma­tizes McCay mak­ing a gen­tle­man’s wager with his col­leagues that he can draw fig­ures that move — an idea that might have come with a cer­tain plau­si­bil­i­ty, giv­en that speed-draw­ing was already a suc­cess­ful part of …

Destino: The Salvador Dalí – Walt Disney Animation That Took 57 Years to Complete

Destino: The Salvador Dalí – Walt Disney Animation That Took 57 Years to Complete

Published by José

In 2003, Dis­ney released a six minute ani­mat­ed short called Des­ti­no, final­ly bring­ing clo­sure to a project that began 57 years ear­li­er. The sto­ry of Des­ti­no goes way back to 1946 when two very dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al icons, Walt Dis­ney and Sal­vador Dalí, decid­ed to work togeth­er on a car­toon. The film was sto­ry­board­ed by Dalí and John Hench (a Dis­ney stu­dio artist) over the course of eight months. But then, rather abrupt­ly, the project got tabled when The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny ran into finan­cial prob­lems. Now fast for­ward 53 years, to 1999. While work­ing on Fan­ta­sia 2000, Walt Dis­ney’s nephew redis­cov­ered the project and 17 sec­onds of orig­i­nal ani­ma­tion. Using this clip and the orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards, 25 ani­ma­tors brought the film to com­ple­tion and pre­miered it at The New York Film Fes­ti­val in 2003. Des­ti­no would receive an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for the Best Ani­mat­ed Short Film, among oth­er acco­lades from crit­ics. The clip runs 6+ min­utes and fea­tures music writ­ten by Mex­i­can song­writer Arman­do Dominguez and per­formed by Dora Luz. In our archive, we also …

The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the Greatest Animations (1965)

The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the Greatest Animations (1965)

Published by José

For obvi­ous rea­sons, most art pro­duced under oppres­sive regimes comes off as painstak­ing­ly inof­fen­sive. For equal­ly obvi­ous rea­sons, the rare works that crit­i­cize the regime tend to do so rather oblique­ly. This was­n’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion ani­ma­tor Jiří Trn­ka, “the Walt Dis­ney of East­ern Europe.” In its cen­tral con­flict between a hum­ble har­le­quin who just wants to sculpt flower pots and a giant, inva­sive gloved hand that forces him to make rep­re­sen­ta­tions of itself, one sens­es a cer­tain alle­go­ry to do with the dynam­ic between the artist and the state. “Trnka’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence of total­i­tar­i­an­ism under the com­mu­nist regime is pro­ject­ed and reartic­u­lat­ed in the mean­ing and knowl­edge he trans­mits through his short,” writes Renée-Marie Piz­zar­di in an essay at Fan­ta­sy Ani­ma­tion. “The state-run stu­dios had the pow­er to approve or cen­sor cer­tain top­ics and con­trol fund­ing accord­ing­ly. Trn­ka was thus depen­dent on their fund­ing, yet resis­tant to their pol­i­tics, and this ambi­gu­i­ty lim­it­ed the free­dom of expres­sion in his work.” In the …

Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation

Revisit Episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s Showcase of Funny, Irreverent & Bizarre Animation

Published by José

MTV stands for Music Tele­vi­sion, and when the net­work launched in 1981, its almost entire­ly music video-based pro­gram­ming was true to its name. With­in a decade, how­ev­er, its man­date had widened to the point that it had become the nat­ur­al home for prac­ti­cal­ly any excit­ing devel­op­ment in Amer­i­can youth cul­ture. And for many MTV view­ers in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, youth­ful or oth­er­wise, noth­ing was quite so excit­ing as Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion, whose every broad­cast con­sti­tut­ed a ver­i­ta­ble fes­ti­val of ani­ma­tion that pushed the medi­um’s bound­aries of pos­si­bil­i­ty — as well, every so often, as its bound­aries of taste. Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion’s orig­i­nal three-sea­son run began in the sum­mer of 1991 and end­ed in ear­ly 1995. All through­out, its for­mat remained con­sis­tent, round­ing up ten or so shorts, each cre­at­ed by dif­fer­ent artists. Their themes could vary wild­ly, and so could their aes­thet­ics: any giv­en broad­cast might con­tain more or less con­ven­tion­al-look­ing car­toons, but also stick­men, pup­pets, ear­ly com­put­er graph­ics, sub­vert­ed nine­teen-fifties imagery (that main­stay of the Gen‑X sen­si­bil­i­ty), Japan­ese ani­me, and even live action, as in the …

Behold a Creative Animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Behold a Creative Animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Published by José

In pre­vi­ous cen­turies, unless you were a mem­ber of the nobil­i­ty, a wealthy reli­gious order, or a mer­chant guild, your chances of spend­ing any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time with a Medieval tapes­try were slim. Though “much pro­duc­tion was rel­a­tive­ly coarse, intend­ed for dec­o­ra­tive pur­pos­es,” writes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, the tapes­try still com­mand­ed high prices, just as it com­mand­ed respect for its own­er. And as oth­er dec­o­ra­tive arts of the time pre­served his­tor­i­cal memory—or cer­tain polit­i­cal ver­sions of it, at least—tapestry designs might embody “cel­e­bra­to­ry or pro­pa­gan­dis­tic themes” in their weft and warp. “Enriched with silk and gilt metal­lic thread,” writes the Met, “such tapes­tries were a cen­tral com­po­nent of the osten­ta­tious mag­nif­i­cence used by pow­er­ful sec­u­lar and reli­gious rulers to broad­cast their wealth and might.” Such is one of the most famous of these works, the Bayeux Tapes­try, which com­mem­o­rates the 1066 vic­to­ry of William the Con­queror at the Bat­tle of Hast­ings. The famous wall hang­ing, housed at the Bayeux Muse­um in Nor­mandy, was “prob­a­bly com­mis­sioned in the 1070s” by Bish­op Odo of …

He Made a Movie About Humans Rising Up Against AI. Now He’s Doing the Real Thing

Published by skeptic

When I interviewed writers and actors at the picket lines of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, there was a mix of sentiment around AI, which, while largely negative, encompassed anxiety, uncertainty, equivocation, and anger. The crowd in Burbank was the most uniformly and passionately anti-AI I’ve ever witnessed. Asked for his thoughts on how AI was impacting his industry, one animator said, “AI can fuck right off.” I asked the storyboard artists Lindsey Castro and Brittany McCarthy for their thoughts on AI, and both simply booed. A year after the WGA strikes, AI was not, to the animation workers I spoke with, something to be questioned or experimented with—it was something to be opposed. An animation worker walked by with a sign referencing the master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s comment that using AI in the arts is “an insult to life itself.” It was sweltering, even at 5 pm, as Rianda took the stage to emcee. He introduced a series of writers, directors, and animation legends like Rebecca Sugar, Genndy Tartakovsky, and James Baxter, …

Sashya Subono Halse: Indonesian animator who helped bring Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes to life

Sashya Subono Halse: Indonesian animator who helped bring Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes to life

Published by Sam

Planning to catch Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes in cinemas this weekend? Don’t forget to pay close attention to how realistic the ape characters are.  Indonesian animator Sashya Subono Halse literally had a hand in that – as well as plenty of other movies and TV shows you’re probably very familiar with. The 36-year-old Subono is an animator at Weta FX, a digital visual effects and animation company based in Wellington, New Zealand.  In her four years with Weta FX, she has worked her animation magic on the Marvel Cinematic Universe television series Hawkeye and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, and Disney movies Avatar: The Way Of Water and Kingdom of the Planet Of The Apes.  Her expertise includes matchmoving, which involves making computer-generated elements appear as if they were recorded in the real world, and facial motion animation, which brings a character’s face to life by recording the movements and expressions of a human face and transferring them to a digital character. Subono told CNA Women that for as long as she can remember, she has …

A Bicycle Trip: Watch an Animation of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

A Bicycle Trip: Watch an Animation of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Published by José

On August 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hof­mann was syn­the­siz­ing a new com­pound called lyser­gic acid diethy­lamide-25 when he got a cou­ple of drops on his fin­ger. The chem­i­cal, lat­er known world­wide as LSD, absorbed into his sys­tem, and, soon after, he expe­ri­enced an intense state of altered con­scious­ness. In oth­er words, he tripped. Intrigued by the expe­ri­ence, Hof­mann dosed him­self with 250 micro­grams of LSD and then biked his way home through the streets of Basel, mak­ing him the first per­son ever to inten­tion­al­ly drop acid. The event was lat­er com­mem­o­rat­ed by psy­cho­nauts and LSD enthu­si­asts as “Bicy­cle Day.” Ital­ian ani­ma­tors Loren­zo Veraci­ni, Nan­di­ni Nam­biar and Mar­co Avo­let­ta imag­ine what Hof­mann might have seen dur­ing his his­toric jour­ney in their 2008 short A Bicy­cle Trip. The film shows Hof­mann rid­ing through the Swiss medieval town as he sees visions like a trail of flow­ers com­ing off a woman in red, cob­ble­stones com­ing alive and scur­ry­ing away, and a whole for­est becom­ing trans­par­ent before the mar­veling scientist’s eyes. The film also shows Hof­mann slam­ming into …

Apple snuck new interactive animation to ‘Let Loose’ promo, teasing a new feature

Apple snuck new interactive animation to ‘Let Loose’ promo, teasing a new feature

Published by skeptic

We’re ready for the Apple “Let Loose” event to start now. No more teasing. But it looks like Apple wants to keep dangling carrots in our faces. Just a day before it’s slated to livestream the announcements of some new iPads, Apple updated its homepage with some new teaser artwork for the event, which still depicts an Apple Pencil — but something different happens when you place your cursor over it. SEE ALSO: Wild Apple rumors for 2025 and beyond: Foldable devices, new ‘Slim’ iPhone What could the new interactive logo be hinting at? If you move your mouse over the logo, the graphic will begin to erase itself. The current-gen Apple Pencils still don’t have a way to erase across all apps, so according to MacRumors, that could be one new feature coming to the device. Mashable Light Speed The inclusion of an Apple Pencil at all seems to suggest that this event could feature a refresh of the popular iPad stylus, which hasn’t gotten a high-end update since 2018. There was a “new” …

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: latest film looks to a future adventure in the sci-fi franchise

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: latest film looks to a future adventure in the sci-fi franchise

Published by Sam

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest instalment in the sci-fi franchise, is both a sequel and a prequel, its director, Wes Ball, said. The action-adventure is the 10th Planet of the Apes movie and follows the reboot trilogy, which debuted in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes and includes the 2014 film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes. “It’s certainly big shoes to fill,” Ball, known for the Maze Runner movies, said at the new film’s London launch on Thursday (Apr 25). “We had to really decide if we had something good here. And I think we do. We have a reason to exist, we’re not just a part four, we’re kind of our own thing. We try to honour what came before with the previous trilogy, but also the original 1968 movie,” he said. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set several generations after the events of the 2017 film and centres on a young and …