A History of Computer Animation

Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation by Tom Sito is a sprawling chronicle of the development of cgi.  That sprawl is both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is that Sito makes it clear how many people, institutions and companies each contributed to the development of computer animation over decades.  He has interviewed many of the pioneers and looked at many of the individuals, institutions and companies that doggedly pursued the dream of images and animation created on computers.

The curse is that this wide-ranging approach has made the book's organization clumsy.  Rather than work chronologically, Sito devotes chapters to contributions by government, academia, business, gaming and individual artists, so the book keeps doubling back on itself.  Certain films, people and events pop up repeatedly, muddying the historical sequence.  A timeline in the appendices would help clarify the history.

Hearing the pioneers speak about their own ambitions and accomplishments provides an intimate look at an art and technology as it was struggling to be born.   The path was not a smooth one; the failures were as common as the breakthroughs.  There's a cgi graveyard filled with people and companies who chased their dreams before the hardware, software and economics were in place to make those dreams come true. 

While certain well-known figures, such as George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, are present, so are many who are unknown to the general public in spite of their importance: Alvy Ray Smith, Jim Blinn, Charles Csuri, Alexander Schure, John Pennie, Robert Abel, Bill Reeves, David Evans, Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Cray, and James Clark.  Each of these people and the others chronicled in the book made contributions that changed the course of the field.  Each worked to create better looking images or to make computer animation flexible enough to communicate ideas and entertain audiences.

While Tom Sito is a traditional animator who has also done storyboards and directed, he has no hands-on experience with cgi.  That lack of familiarity shows in various ways throughout the book.  The development of hardware, particularly the rise of Silicon Graphics followed by the development of video cards for consumer PCs, had huge a impact on the proliferation of cgi and its ability to produce more complex images.  Similarly, viable off-the-shelf graphics software put cgi into the hands of artists who didn't know how to write software.  Sito doesn't fully recognize the impact that each of these things had on the growth and success of the industry.

He also doesn't fully grasp cgi concepts.  His description in the glossary of forward and inverse kinematics is "formulas used in 3D animation," which says nothing about their most common use in moving characters' arms and legs, let alone defining the difference between them.

Historical errors also creep in.  The TV series ReBoot ran on the ABC network, not the Disney Channel.  The animation for the TV series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was not produced by Omnibus.  The studio did a sample to try to land the project, but lost it to Arcca Animation.

There will undoubtedly be more histories of computer animation written in the future, some that will go into greater depth on certain topics.  However, in Moving Innovation, Tom Sito has begun to map the territory, making it easier for those future authors to understand how the pieces fit together and who the important players were.  While not perfect, Moving Innovation is a good introduction to how computer graphics grew and have spread throughout almost all areas of computing and our daily lives.

Visualising The Rite of Spring

May 29 marks the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring."  That's a piece that should be familiar to animation professionals and fans as it was one of the segments in Disney's Fantasia.

The above video is by Stephen Malinowski, a musician and computer programmer who has been attempting to visualize complex musical scores.  Watch it full screen for the best effect.

Here is an NPR interview with Malinowski, where he talks about his process.

"People usually respond to sound in a unitary way. It's the reason why you can't follow more than one conversation at a time at a party, for example. But with vision, your brain is trained to comprehend multiple things at once: you can take in many more elements simultaneously. In music, there's often much more going on than you can grasp in that moment of hearing. When you have a visualization, your eyes lead your ears through the music. You take advantage of your brain's ability to process multiple pieces of visual information simultaneously."

Bing Crosby's 110th Birthday

May 3 is Bing Crosby's 110th birthday.  While most people these days only know Bing Crosby for singing "White Christmas" or the duet he did with David Bowie, he was unquestionably one of the leading figures of popular culture for a good 30 years.  He was a success in recording, radio, movies and TV.  He was parodied in animation in cartoons like Bingo Crosbyana, Swooner Crooner, and Catch as Cats Can, but he lent his voice to animation on several occasions.  He sang for Paul Whiteman in the animated segment of the feature King of Jazz in 1930.  As well, he narrated Disney's version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and as spokesman for Minute Maid orange juice he voiced an animated caricature of himself.

Who Are the Next Inspirations?

Sheridan College was lucky to host Disney writer-director John Musker last week.  There's some coverage here.  In addition to talking to students about their work, Musker gave a two hour presentation about his career, where he generously included the work of animators.  The names were no surprises: Glen Keane, Eric Goldberg, Mark Henn, etc.

Musker also talked about the early days of his career, particularly his time with Eric Larson and being taught by Jack Hannah.

Listening to Musker and staring at the young students in the audience, I started wondering about the next animators who would serve as inspiration.

Animators were pretty much invisible through the greatest part of what we call the golden age.  Bill Tytla got some publicity in Time magazine at the time of Dumbo's release and many of the Disney crew were anonymously featured in the live action portions of The Reluctant Dragon, but it really wasn't until Disney moved into TV that behind-the-scenes material started to appear.  When Disney was publicizing the initial release of Lady and the Tramp, there were segments with Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Woolie Reitherman, etc.  Those shows, and Bob Thomas's book The Art of Animation were really the public's first view of the people who made the characters move.

The TV audience for those shows (as well as Walter Lantz's copycat segments on The Woody Woodpecker Show), was the generation that grew up to enter the animation business in the '70s and '80s.  At the same time they were entering the business, others in their generation were writing about animation history, further publicizing animators, and not only those at Disney.

In the '90s, the TV generation had risen to prominence  in animated features.  Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, etc. were all used to publicize the films on their release and then appeared in DVD extras.  These are the people that the Sheridan students were familiar with and who were featured in John Musker's talk.

But who are the animators who have risen to prominence in animated features in the last 15 years?  I'm not talking about directors (though only Pixar has really publicized them to the point that they have independent reputations).  Since cgi has taken over feature films, are there any cgi animators whose work is known to the general public? The same question can be asked about stop motion animators.

At Sheridan, it's been clear to me for years that the students seem to gravitate more to design than to story or animation.  There are relatively few who have stories they're desperate to tell or characters they want to bring to life.  I wonder if the flood of "Art of" books is responsible for this in some way.  It's one of the few places where animation artists get credited, but the books are mostly pre-production art. 

Whatever the reason, I think that the writing of history and publicity is having an impact on students' career aspirations.  Without animators as examples, there are fewer who aspire to follow that path.  There are fewer "ignition moments," when someone sees an animator bring a character to life and is struck by the desire to do the same thing.

This may be happening at the various online animation schools where students are interacting with working animators.  That's all to the good, but it doesn't reach the same number of people who see a DVD extra or work credited in a book.

In thirty years, when the audience for John Musker's talk is firmly established in animation, will there be any star animators known outside the studios?  While there were always star animators even if the public didn't know about them, I'm convinced that the lack of publicity does impact their number.

If I'm right, then that's something that animators can do to maintain the health of the field.  Animators, publicize yourselves!  What shots have you done?  What moments have you given audiences?  The more that human faces can be attached to performances that audiences remember, the more likely that we'll get more of those performances in the future.

Sick Little Monkeys

The story of the making of Ren and Stimpy is one of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.  The irresistible force was John Kricfalusi, a veteran animation artist who was disgusted with the quality of TV animation.  He was determined to push the art and humour closer to the Warner Bros. cartoons he admired, though with a decidedly personal twist.  The immovable object was the TV industry, specifically cable channel Nickelodeon.  Like all channels, it was dedicated to budget restraint, regular air dates, and bland content that wouldn't provoke attacks.  From the start, this relationship was a disaster in the making.  The surprise, though, is that it produced a hit show.

Thad Komorowski's book, Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story, exhaustively examines the behind-the-scenes goings on.  He starts with John K's career in Saturday morning cartoon factories and details his relationship with Ralph Bakshi.  Together they made The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, a sort of precursor to Ren and Stimpy.  Even before Ren and Stimpy, Kricfalusi was butting heads with broadcasters, as his experience on the short-lived Beany and Cecil revival shows.

For those not familiar with the history of Ren and Stimpy, it was one of Nickelodon's first three original animated series and the one that attracted the most attention.  There was no question that John K's sensibility was a success with audiences.  However, right from the start, the show developed schedule problems due to a mismatch between what the artists wanted to make and what Nickelodeon was willing to air. John K. was another factor delaying production, as he wasn't willing to approve things until they met his standard.  When the delays continued during the second season, Nickelodeon fired John K. and his studio.  Nickelodon created its own in-house studio to continue production and Ren and Stimpy lasted for another three seasons without John K.

While that might have been the end of the story, John K. was reunited with his characters when another cable channel, Spike TV, revived the series for an adult audience.  Unfortunately, Kricfalusi's insistence on meeting his vision at any cost doomed the revival.  While the order was for just six episodes, only two made their air dates and the last delivered a year late.  Spike lost interest in the show and didn't bother to play three of the episodes.

John K. is a controversial figure who divides artists and fans into those who support him and those who think that he is responsible for his own misfortunes.  Komorowski walks the middle ground, showing that all parties made mistakes and refused to consider the others' point of view, but he does not excuse Kricfalusi's behavior.  Komorowski talked to many artists who worked on the show and quotes many Nickelodeon executives on the problems they faced getting episodes on air.  While I don't doubt that people involved in the production could quibble with Komorowski's version of specific events, it strikes me that the book is even-handed in apportioning credit and blame.

Fans of the show will enjoy comparing their opinion of each episode to the author's and learning of material that was cut and censored.

If you are not a fan of the show, this book is still worth reading for the light it sheds on the workings of the TV animation business.  There is always tension between artists and business people over resources and content.  People working in TV animation and those with ambitions to create shows need to understand the pressures and the pitfalls that shape the business.   Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story is a cautionary tale about walking the fine line between artistic ambition and the reality of the marketplace.

Gone But Not Forgotten

How do you follow up an animation hardware history?  With a look at The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies.

Hardware History

J.J. Sedelmaier has written an interesting history of animation disks for Imprint magazine.

People who entered the animation business in the recent past have  lived totally within a digital world.  But before computers, animation had its own set of very specific hardware, developed from the 1910s onward to facilitate the creation of cartoons.

There were studios with their own peg standards as well as Acme pegs (which dominated the California business) and Oxberry pegs (which dominated in New York).  There was even another standard, not mentioned in the article, that came from the U.S. Signal Corps from World War II and made it into the animation industry as war surplus.

The picture above is a Fleischer set-up.  Note the goose-neck lamp for top lighting.  Fleischer used top pegs, where Disney used bottom pegs.  There's a wire coil at the top right to hold pencils and brushes and the holder on the left for ink and paint.  The disk rotates on rubber rollers (pictured in the article).  As the Fleischers were inventors and very mechanically minded, they put a lot of effort into creating equipment that would make production efficient.

The article shows a great many disks and set-ups.  It's a walk down memory lane for many of us and a history lesson for those who grew up more likely to be manipulating a mouse than a pencil.

Who's Afraid of Song of the South?

Disney historian Jim Korkis's latest book is Who's Afraid of the Song of the South? and Other Forbidden Disney Stories.  The main section of the book is an in-depth look at the production of the film that Disney has chosen to suppress.

While Korkis deals with the current controversy surrounding the film, he traces the film's origins and shows that the controversy started even before the film was released.  In the period after World War II, when the U.S. had defeated a fascist power that claimed it was racially superior, Black Americans felt strongly that it was time for the United States to abolish its own discriminatory practices.  That included the portrayal of Black people in popular culture.  Black audiences were no longer satisfied with stereotypical screen portrayals of porters, maids and lazy or frightened comedy relief.

In the post-war years, Hollywood began to tackle discrimination in live action films such as Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which dealt with discrimination against Jews, and Pinky (1949), where a Black woman passes for White before returning to her own community.  But it wouldn't be until the 1950s and the rise of Sidney Poitier before Black performers were cast in leading roles that were dramatically respectable.

Song of the South (1945) sits at the cusp between pre- and post-war racial attitudes and as Korkis shows, that's one of the things that makes the film hard to deal with.  The various screenwriters included a southerner with typical racial views as well as a left-leaning victim of the blacklist.  Black actor Clarence Muse was hired as a consultant, but left the project over the film's racial attitudes, yet Muse himself later appeared in films like Riding High (1950) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), neither of which could be considered racially progressive.  The reviews of the time also straddle changing racial attitudes, with some wholly praising the film while others expressing reservations on its treatment of race.

Korkis covers the writers, the cast, the production of the live action, the animation, the music, the reviews and the controversy surrounding the film.  Beyond the race issue, the film is important for other reasons.  It was Disney's first foray into a feature dominated by live action.  It was photographed by Gregg Toland, cinematographer of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Citizen Kane (1941), and this was Toland's first film in colour.  Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, the child stars in the film, went on to other star in other Disney films, making them the first live performers under contract to the studio.  It was also the first Disney live action film to receive an Oscar, albeit an honorary one for James Baskette, who played Uncle Remus.

Korkis also writes about how the animated characters were used in other Disney projects such as Splash Mountain and various comics and other publications.

The balance of the book is a bit of a hodge podge, lacking the strong focus of the first 100 pages.  Some of the material is related, such as the deleted Black centaurette in re-releases of Fantasia.  While the material covered is interesting, such as Disney's failed attempts to craft films based on the Oz books and John Carter of Mars before the films that were eventually released, this material could hardly be described as "forbidden."  Korkis is a thorough historian and the material is interesting, but as a book, it doesn't hang together as strongly as it might.

Be that as it may, there's a wealth of interesting Disneyana here.  Korkis's dedication to shining light into the nooks and crannies of Disney history always produces surprises for the reader and fills out the picture of Walt Disney and the company he created.   As the current Disney management would prefer to forget the existence of Song of the South, this book serves as the closest the film is likely to get to a "making of" book.

Kimball Christmas Cards

If you aren't visiting Amid Amidi's site 365 Days of Ward Kimball, you're missing out on some beautiful art. Currently, there's lots of Christmas related artwork.

During his talk on Kimball at the Ottawa International Animation Festival last September, Amidi made it a point to say that Kimball's style was evolving towards more modern graphics in the 1940s. The above cards (1945 on top and 1946 on the bottom) are great examples of the turn Kimball's style was taking. Both are, of course, well drawn. But while the 1945 card is conventional in its use of perspective and structure, the '46 card breaks away from realistic perspective and revels in flattening out shapes.  While UPA would animate this stylistic approach a couple of years later, Kimball was prepared to do so but wouldn't get the chance until Melody, Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and the TV episodes he directed for the Disneyland series in the 1950s.

Darrell Van Citters Interviewed

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, the first animated TV special.  Darrell Van Citters has written the book on the making of the show and film historian Frank Thompson interviews Van Citters on his podcast The Commentary Track.

Thompson has also interviewed Cartoon Brew's Jerry Beck but those of you interested in film history in general will be interested in other Thompson podcasts, which include interviews with character actor L.Q. Jones (talking about working with John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Budd Boetticher), and film historians Rudy Behlmer, Kevin Brownlow, Robert S. Birchard, John Bengston, Randy Skredvedt and Joan Myers.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Sean Howe's book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story could just as easily have been subtitled The Never Ending Story.  It's never ending as Marvel's fictional characters die, are brought back, change their powers, get replaced, get cloned, make deals with the devil, but still go on and on.  It's also never ending because the creators behind these characters leave in disgust, get fired, sue the company and sometimes die on the job.

This book is a warts-and-all telling of the people and business behind the creation of the Marvel universe, known for characters such as Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and the X-Men.  While it is only tangentially related to animation, it shares the problems of work-for-hire and the callous way that corporations treat the very people who create the wealth.

For those who haven't followed the comics or the company, this book may be a maddening read, as the cast of fictional and real characters runs into the hundreds.  The size of the cast prevents Howe from going into depth on more than a few people, mainly the owners, editors and to a lesser extent, writers.  The artists, as usual, get short shrift.  Anyone interested in learning more about artists John Buscema, Gene Colan and similar mainstays of the company will be disappointed.  The artists are mostly bystanders while the dance of power and money goes on above their heads.

Martin Goodman was a publisher of pulp magazines, a now extinct breed of publications that focused on genre fiction with detectives, cowboys, aviators and similar action-oriented characters.  They were named pulps for the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on.  After the success of Superman in Action Comics in the late 1930s, Goodman was convinced to add comic books to his list of publications.  Within the first few years, he published The Human Torch (created by Carl Burgos), The Sub-Mariner (created by Bill Everett) and Captain America (created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby).  He hired his wife's cousin, 17 year old Stanley Leiber to work in the comics division and in 1941 when editor Joe Simon left (with Kirby) after Goodman screwed them out of Captain America royalties, Leiber writing under the pseudonym Stan Lee inherited the post of comics editor.

With the exception of his stint in the military during World War II, Lee continued running the division and created nothing of value until 1961.  At that point, partnered with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, newly successful characters appeared for about a decade.  However, both Ditko and Kirby walked away from Lee and Marvel, angry over their lack of control and compensation.  Once that happened, Lee spent the next 40 years promoting Marvel and himself but failed to create anything similarly successful.  His greatest accomplishment was keeping himself front and center as the ownership changed repeatedly, garnering millions for himself while not lifting a finger as President and Publisher of Marvel to compensate the artists beyond paying them by the page.  He even colluded with his competitor, DC Comics, to make sure that freelancers couldn't play the two companies off each other for higher pay.

It's fitting that Disney now owns Marvel as the companies have similarities in their histories.  The business people who have taken over both companies after their founders have earned far more than the creative people who built the company in the first place.  Eric Ellenbogan, a Marvel executive who lasted just seven months, walked away with a $2.5 million severance package, more money than Jack Kirby made from Marvel in his entire career.  That's hardly different than the $140 million in severance that Michael Ovitz walked away from Disney with, more money than all nine old men made over 40 years.  John Lasseter is rapidly becoming another Stan Lee, agreeing to corporate moves he formerly disdained (like sequels) and becoming a kibitzer of other people's work rather than remaining a creator himself.  For both companies, the '90s were an anomaly where artists actually shared in the money their work generated.  Marvel went bankrupt and Disney abandoned drawn animation and the artists who created it.  In both cases, the good times didn't last.

The book contains just two illustrations: an ad for the first issue of Marvel Comics and a photograph of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965.  Undoubtedly, the publisher didn't want to deal with Disney's well-known reluctance to grant the rights to images it owns (see the delay in Amid Amidi's biography of Ward Kimball).  However, Howe has a tumblr blog which includes many illustrations and documents that should have appeared.  Somehow print attracts the copyright cops while the web escapes unscathed, more proof that the copyright laws are dysfunctional in the digital age.

Anyone who aspires to work for a leading comics or animation company and thinks they'll be entering a magic kingdom where creativity reigns supreme and the fun never stops should read this book.  Large media corporations share many of Marvel's problems. Artists are routinely taken advantage of, and the more artists realize this on the way in, the less likely they are to be disappointed.

Funny Feet: The Art of Eccentric Dance

I've always loved dance animation.  Whether it is Mickey in Thru the Mirror or Donald in Mr. Duck Steps Out or the dancing in Rooty Toot Toot, when expressive movement joins with music, you get an energy that leaves ordinary animation in the dust.  Dick Lundy, Les Clark, Ken Harris, Preston Blair, Ward Kimball, and Pat Matthews are just some of the animators with a genuine flair for dance.

Animated dance built on what was happening in live action films, and that was built on what had been done in Vaudeville and the English music hall.  Chaplin, Keaton, Stan Laurel, Groucho Marx, and James Cagney all used dance in their stage performances.  Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ray Bolger, Buddy Ebsen, and the Nicholas Brothers were all influenced by the same tradition.

Betsy Baytos has worked as an animator and dancer and is making a documentary called Funny Feet: The Art of Eccentric Dance.  Her promo is below:

She's using Kickstarter to fund a trip to England to research music hall performers who fall into the eccentric dance category.

In addition to interviewing performers for the last 20 years, she has also interviewed artists Chuck Jones, Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston, Ward Kimball, Myron Waldman (Betty Boop/Popeye) , Joe Barbera, Joe Grant and Al Hirschfeld (NY Times caricaturist).

Here's a clip from a Buster Keaton two reeler for Columbia.  Keaton and Columbia were not a good fit.  The studio was much more at home with the lowbrow knockabout of The Three Stooges than it was with Keaton's deadpan irony.  Elsie James, the woman in this clip, is a pretty crude performer with a tendency to mug.  However, I'm including this clip because after the three minute mark, there's about 20 seconds of sublime dance by Keaton, where he transcends Columbia's limited view of comedy.


I'm excited about the subject matter of Baytos's documentary and looking forward to seeing it.  Read more about it on her Kickstarter page.

Animation on TCM Reminder

If you receive Turner Classic Movies, remember that this Sunday, October 21, they will be screening an evening of animation co-hosted by Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew.  Films include the two Fleischer features Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town; a selection of UPA Jolly Frolic cartoons; a selection of silent animation provided by historian Tom Stathes; and The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which is the oldest surviving animated feature as well as the first animated feature directed by a woman, Lotte Reineger.  You can find the complete schedule here and Beck has posted artwork associated with Gulliver and Mr. Bug on his site.

If you are interested in hearing about how Beck connected up with TCM and learning more about the early days of film collecting, you can hear him on a podcast called The Commentary Track.

100 Years of Chuck Jones

September 21, 2012 is the 100th birthday of Charles Martin Jones, arguably the greatest director of animated shorts in history.  While there will be justifiable celebrations of his life and work this day, his career strikes me as a very curious thing.  There was a period of brilliance, but there was also a period of decline which lasted much longer.

I've wrote about Jones' career back in the '90s and while my knowledge of Jones has been augmented by many interviews with his co-workers (see Michael Barrier's site for many of these), my opinion has remained constant.

Whatever your opinion of Jones, there are worse ways to spend the day than to watch some of his films.

R. Crumb on Ward Kimball

Amid Amidi recently posted this picture of (L to R) Robert Armstrong, Ward Kimball and R. Crumb on the blog 365 Days of Ward Kimball.  If you're interested in Crumb's thoughts on Kimball, you can go here and scroll down.  Crumb also comments on Matt Groening and Ralph Bakshi on the same page.  You'll have to scroll down to find them, but he also talks about Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, among many other people of note outside animation.

Upcoming Animation on TCM

 Update: Jerry Beck, who will be co-hosting with TCM's Robert Osborne, has more details at Cartoon Brew.

Sunday, October 21 is still a distance away, but Turner Classic Movies will be devoting their evening block to animation.  It starts with the two Fleischer features, Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town.  That's followed by six UPA cartoons (all available on the Jolly Frolics DVD set).  Sundays at midnight, TCM regularly schedules silent films, and for this day they're showing 11 silent cartoons, including The Artist's Dream (an early J.R. Bray), Trip to Mars (with Koko the Clown), Bobby Bumps Goes to School, and Fireman Save My Child (with Mutt and Jeff).  The next slot is for foreign films, and their animated example is Lotte Reineger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

The schedule can be accessed here, and I'll be reminding everyone as the date approaches.

Animation Before Movies

In the period between the discovery of the principle of persistence of vision and the invention of flexible film stock, animation was born.  It was made with a variety of toys, all given impressive Greek names like Thaumatrope, Phenakistoscope and Zootrope (see the comments for the derivations of these words courtesy of Daniel).  These toys combined drawn or painted images in ways to give the illusion of movement.  The technology behind animation has become a lot more sophisticated, but it's all built on on the same principles exploited by these toys.

Richard Balzer is a collector of these toys and the images they used and he has a site where the images are animated via Flash.  This means that if you're browsing on an iPhone or iPad, you will not be able to see the motion.  He also has a blog that deals with these toys as well as other 19th century amusements such as the Magic Lantern.

While the animation is necessarily cycled and limited in duration, we have a modern equivalent in the form of animated gif files.  The more things change...

Super Complicated

Readers of this blog will know how interested I am in creators' rights.  Some of the most famous characters of 20th century pop culture were created under dubious legal and financial conditions.  The copyright to Superman was transferred from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the writer and artist, to their publisher for the sum of $130.  That was $10 per page for their first 13 page Superman story.  In order to get paid for their work, they lost control of their creation.

The latest U.S. copyright law allows for creators who sold their copyrights to regain them during specific time periods.  If the creators are deceased, their heirs have the right to pursue the copyright.

Jerry Seigel's heirs have filed to regain their half of the Superman copyright.  Joe Shuster's heirs are eligible to file in the near future.  Both are represented by attorney Marc Toberoff.

On the face of it, it's a nice, clear story.  Two little guys were taken advantage of, lost millions of dollars as a result, and now their families are going up against a large multinational corporation to get just compensation.  A David and Goliath story with an ending that should be a foregone conclusion.

However, the story is a lot more complicated and I urge you to read this entry by Daniel Best.  Even if you skip over the actual legal documents and just read Best's commentary (scattered throughout the documents), you can see that the families have made some poor decisions and done some questionable things.  Their lawyer appears to be working for himself as much or more than for his clients.  While I am not a fan of large corporations, Paul Levitz, a comics fan who eventually became publisher of DC Comics, acted more ethically than others in this dispute.

If nothing else, this situation just emphasizes the importance of owning creative properties.  It is important for creative people to understand the problems that can result from giving up ownership.  While the animation business doesn't perfectly mirror the comics business, the issues are the same and stakes are equally high.  If you have created something on your own and are looking for somebody else to finance it or market it, make sure you understand the repercussions of transferring copyright and allowing someone else to establish the trademark.  If not, the result might be several lifetimes of pain and legal squabbling.

R.I.P. Andrew Sarris

This has nothing to do with animation, so skip it if you like.

There was a time when Hollywood movies were treated as nothing more than commercial entertainment.  (Sound familar?)  They were a product, not an art form.  In the years after World War II in France, a group of cineastes started looking hard at Hollywood films.  Perhaps, due to their cultural background or perhaps due to their lack of English skills, they saw things in Hollywood films that no one had bothered to notice.  They formed a magazine called Cahiers du Cinema and many of them, besides being critics, grew to become film makers.  Some of you will be familiar with the names Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and others of their generation.  Collectively, they were known as the Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave.

Critically, they championed what they referred to as Les Politiques des Auteurs.  They saw directors as the ones who shaped what was on screen and noticed recurring themes and motifs in directors' films.  They not only championed film makers who had some critical standing, such as Orson Welles (though at the time Welles' stock was pretty low), but directors who were completely below the radar like Howard Hawks and those considered mere entertainers like Alfred Hitchcock.

Their approach to film history and criticism might have gone unnoticed in the United States except for Andrew Sarris.  Sarris was aware of French film criticism and was a lone voice fighting to establish what was known as the Auteur Theory in American criticism.  He was opposed by critics like Pauline Kael and during the 1960's, film criticism was on the cultural map with the Auteur Theory being one of the main points of contention.  Was the director the author of a film or not?  Was a weak film by a great director automatically better than a good film by a weak director?  Was a director's style integral to how a story was communicated or was it something layered over the top of a script?

While the Auteur Theory may have overplayed its hand in claiming authorship, it firmly established the legitimacy of the concept of directorial style.  Earlier film critics had been mainly literary in their approach, judging a film based on plot, characterization and dialogue and basically blind to the notion of a visual style or recurring themes in a director's work.

If we take for granted now the idea of a Martin Scorcese film, a Wes Anderson film, a Ralph Bakshi film or a Brad Bird film, we do so because of Sarris.

Sarris's book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 was a Rosetta stone for understanding the work of Hollywood directors.  He placed them in somewhat frivolous categories (Pantheon Directors, The Far Side of Paradise, Expressive Esoterica, Less than Meets the Eye) and his descriptions of directors were sometimes frustratingly short and hard to decipher.  However, the more films I saw by a director, the more I understood what Sarris had written and the majority of the time, I was amazed at how perceptive and concise he was.  The American Cinema was a map book; it showed you the terrain and pointed out the highlights.  Prior to the trip, it made little sense but once there, the reader could only be impressed by what Sarris had written.

I saw Sarris only once in person.  He gave a talk at Queens College with his wife, critic Molly Haskell.  However, he absolutely shaped my value system when it comes to film.  Sarris was much more a champion of John Ford than the French critics, and for that I am eternally grateful.  His books, the aforementioned The American Cinema; The John Ford Movie Mystery; and You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927-1949, are still taken off my shelf when I've seen a film and wonder, "What did Sarris say about it?"

The heady days of film criticism are over.  No longer does a review provoke controversy or demand attention.  We've passed through the "thumbs up-thumbs down" era and are now reduced to a Rotten Tomatoes meter reading.  Many of us who love film have little to be happy about in this era of tentpoles and sequels.  I'd rather spend my time staring at the work of Ford, Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, Gregory LaCava, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, etc. trying to perceive these directors through their films.  It's a rewarding way to spend time and I have Andrew Sarris to thank for it.

(The New York Times obituary can be found here.  Those of you who might be interested in the views of cinephiles and published film writers on Sarris should look at Dave Kehr's entry on Sarris's passing.  Kehr regularly writes about new DVD releases for the Sunday edition of The New York Times and his site is an ongoing discussion about various topics of film appreciation.)

Goodbye Film

According to Deadline Hollywood, distributors will no longer make movies on film available to theatres in North America by the end of 2013.  International theatres will be done with film by the end of 2015.  It's all going to be digital.

I fully understand the economics behind this move.  Film prints are expensive to make, expensive to ship and easily damaged when projected.  They contain silver, a substance whose cost varies widely due to market forces.  Digital prints can be made faster, the drives that hold them are reusable and they shouldn't degrade over multiple showings.  They won't need splicing.

Still, for anyone who has handled film, it's a sad moment.  There was something magical about being able to hold a ribbon of celluloid up to the light and see the images.  Seeing the squiggle of the optical soundtrack and knowing that the squiggle could be turned into an orchestra or an actor's voice was amazing.  Comparing the sides, one the celluloid base and the other the emulsion, said something about the film's manufacture.  The knowledge of edge numbers, negative and reversal, hi-con and panchromatic, internegs and interpositives, workprints and release prints, will vanish with film.

The artifacts of film are what we accept as the look of movies.  Film grain is an imperfection, yet we take it as normal.  Observant people notice the marks in the upper right corner to signal reel changes to the projectionist.  (Those marks have disappeared in recent years due to improvements in projectors).

It is because projectors used to be mechanical that sprocket holes, one of the most common graphic identifiers of movies, exist and why all movies were projected at the same rate.

The new digital systems are not restricted to 24 frames per second.  Peter Jackson will release The Hobbit at 48 fps.  James Cameron will release the Avatar sequel at 60 fps.  Some people are wondering if these films won't look like soap operas or sitcoms shot on video.

Finally, think how this will affect Tex Avery's cartoons.  Old cartoons already labour under handicaps because their contemporary references aren't known to modern audiences.  Voices that imitate radio performers or gags spoofing hit films of the past don't register.  Avery, in particular, loved to riff on the nature of film itself.  The wolf runs past the sprocket holes in Dumb Hounded.

Two hunters cross a boundary where Technicolor ends in Lucky Ducky.

A singer pauses to pluck a hair from the film gate in Magical Maestro. 

It's only a matter of time before these gags will mystify audiences instead of making them laugh.

The world moves on.  Some future Tex Avery will probably do gags about file formats.   Films will soon have the same status as cylinder recordings; only specialists will know what they're looking at and have the equipment to play them.  I'm going to miss film.