Miyazaki's Starting Point

This book, a collection of articles and speeches by director Hayao Miyazaki as well as interviews with him, is one of the most important books on animation ever published. It contains almost no pictures; instead it is a book of philosophy and observations that reveal Miyazaki to be as perceptive and articulate as anyone who has worked in animation.

It isn't necessary that creators be able to write or speak intelligently about their work. I greatly admire director John Ford, who actively disliked interviews; he would take sadistic pleasure in abusing interviewers and left no writings of any consequence. Anything Ford wanted to say he put on the screen and that was more than enough to earn him respect.

However, when a director reveals himself in words as well as films, it can lead to an enhanced appreciation of the person and the work. I have admired Miyazaki for quite some time, but I have to say that my respect for him increased enormously after reading this book.

Miyazaki has a broad range of interests. Of course, he talks about animation (with interesting perspectives on Disney, Dave Fleischer and Tezuka), but he also talks about politics (Marxism and Yugoslavia), history (particularly Japanese history), technology, children, audiences, mentors, economics and the environment.

I can't do better than to extensively quote Miyazaki to give you a flavour of the thoughts that this book contains. Here he is on the relative importance of content and technique:

Having said all this, if someone were to ask me what the most important thing is when creating a new animated work, my answer would be that you first have to know what you want to say with it. In other words, you have to have a theme. Surprisingly, perhaps, people sometimes overlook this basic fact of filmmaking and overemphasize technique instead. There are innumerable examples of people making films with a very high level of technique, but only a very fuzzy idea of what they really want to say. And after watching their films, viewers are usually completely befuddled. Yet when people who know what they want to say make films with a low level of technique, we still greatly appreciate the films because there is really something to them.

I was particularly taken with this paragraph on running. There are many animation textbooks that will explain how to do a run, but this single paragraph says more about why you would have a character run than any animation book I've read.

The running of surging masses on fire with anger, the running of a child doing his best to hold back tears until he reaches his house, the running of a heroine who has forsaken everything but the desire to flee -- being able to show wonderful ways of running, running that expresses the very act of living, the pulse of life, across the screen would give me enormous delight. I dream of someday coming across a work that requires that kind of running.

What Miyazaki is talking about here is the emotional heart of animation -- the emotions that literally animate a character -- not simply the path of action of a foot or the spacing between drawings.

Miyazaki takes a dim view of the production conditions for television.

What does seem to be a big problem to me, however, is that both the film and TV worlds are always desperately running after whatever carrots are dangled in front of them. The carrots for the TV world are particularly small, truly piddling overall, and for both TV and film projects that pass muster tend to be low risk and highly disposable. For TV today, the biggest problem is the huge increase in the number of shows being made. Everyone's confused about what is being done. No one knows who is making what, or where. And no one is watching what others are making. If you watch something for three minutes, you feel like you know everything about it, even what went on backstage, and then you don't feel like watching the rest.

In reality, it's impossible for creators to keep working at the same pace year in and year out. The harder it is to try to make one good program, the more difficult it is to achieve that same level of quality over and over again. If you really want to create good shows year in and year out, you have to create an organization or system that makes this possible. But in the world of TV animation, it's physically impossible to create a series where each episode is like a theatrical feature. Since we have to cram shows into a system of mass production and mass marketing -- and keep pumping episodes out in such a tight cycle -- it's only natural that the works eventually become anemic. I think that's the point where the industry is now.

Miyazaki considers the appeal of animated films.

I like the expression "lost possibilities." To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, and a life. To exist here, now, means to lose the possibility of being countless other potential selves. For example, I might have been the captain of a pirate ship, sailing with a lovely princess by my side. It means giving up this universe, giving up other potential selves. There are selves which are lost possibilities, and selves that could have been, and this is not limited just to us but to the people around us and even to Japan itself.

Yet once born,there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy worlds of cartoon movies so strongly represent our hopes and yearnings. They illustrate a world of lost possibilities for us. And in this sense I think that the animation we see today often lacks the vitality of older cartoon movies. Economic constraints in production are often said to be the main reason, but it seems to me that something spiritual is also missing. It would be stupid to turn my back on the times in which we live and act arrogrant about it all, but I always find myself thinking that the old cartoon movies were indeed more interesting and exciting that we have today.

But while animation can serve a spiritual purpose, it's also tainted by commercialism.

After working in cel animation for so many years, I've recently become more away of the things I have been unable to do, rather than the things I have been able to do. I still think that encountering wonderful animation as a child is not a bad thing. Yet I'm also acutely aware that this profession is actually a business, targeting children's purchasing power. No matter how much we pride ourselves in being conscientious, we produce visual works that stimulate children's visual and auditory senses, and whatever experiences we provide them are in a sense stealing time from them that otherwise might be spent in a world where they go out and make their own discoveries or have their personal experiences. In the society in which we live today, the sheer volume of material being produced can potentially distort everything.

Miyazaki's view of life is nuanced.

I think there is is no way we can live and "not cause difficulties for others," as the saying exhorts us. I have come to think that even when we are overflowing with love and goodness, the world of human beings is one in which we cast our shadows onto each other, giving each other troubles as we grow and live.

The question then becomes, what it is hope? And the conclusion I'd have to venture is that hope involves working and struggling along with people who are important to you. In fact, I've gotten to the point where I think this is what it means to be alive.

As I said above, it isn't necessary for a director to say anything beyond what's on the screen, but reading Miyazaki, I'm convinced of the intelligence behind his films. I wish that intelligence was more widespread in animation today.

Disney and Marvel: Two Creative Failures

Disney's purchase of Marvel has generated a lot of discussion about the specifics of the business deal and the potential synergies, but what I see is one creatively bankrupt company buying another.

This is Robert Iger's second major purchase for Disney. The first was Pixar at a cost of $7 billion. Marvel went for "only" $4 billion. These purchases have defined Iger's tenure as head of Disney, but not in a way that speaks well for him. While business writers are taken with Iger's boldness, what we have here is someone who doesn't believe that his company is able to compete.

When Walt Disney moved into live action, he didn't buy an existing studio. When he went into television, he didn't buy an existing production company. When he went into distribution, he didn't buy a distribution company. When he went into theme parks, he didn't buy an amusement park. In each case, Walt Disney grew his own company and built its expertise in these areas until the company could compete, and in some cases lead, the particular industry. When Walt Disney was interested in accomplishing something, he did it from the ground up.

By contrast, when Robert Iger needs to compete in computer animated features or to capture a larger share of the young boys audience, he pulls out the corporate wallet and buys what he needs.

Consider the numbers involved. Let's say that it costs $250 million to make and market a cgi family feature. For the $7 billion Iger spent on Pixar, he could have made 28 feature films. With 28 kicks at the can, a company could try a wide variety of approaches and techniques in trying to succeed with audiences.

One of the areas that the Marvel deal is supposed to help is the Disney XD cable channel. Let's say it's going to cost $15 million to create 13 episodes of a TV series (a very generous budget for cable). For $4 billion, Disney could create 266 TV series in an attempt to attract the boy's audience.

With those kind of resources, it's appalling that the company never made a serious attempt.

And what exactly has Disney bought in buying Marvel?

While Marvel recently celebrated it's 70th anniversary, the truth is that the company was creative for approximately 10 years of that time (1939-40 and 1961-68). If you were to remove six people from Marvel's history -- Carl Burgos, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko -- you would remove the majority of the characters that define Marvel and the ones that are left are based on examples created by these six.

Marvel has had success recently in creating films based on its characters, but the characters are all more than 30 years old. The company's attitude towards creators guarantees that no new characters will be forthcoming. Marvel took ownership of the work of its writers and artists (even when those people were independent contractors and not employees), but the bigger blunder was to withhold profits or royalties from those creators. As the characters gained popularity and began to generate real money, the creators finally figured out that they would see none of the wealth they created, so they stopped coming up with new ideas.

Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko both left the company as a result of broken promises for compensation. Steve Gerber and Marv Wolfman both sued the company to regain ownership of Howard the Duck and Blade, respectively (and lost). In the '90s, a group of artists split from Marvel to form Image Comics precisely because they realized that they would never receive a fair deal there. Marvel's history of dealing with creators has guaranteed that the very characters that Disney covets are finite in number.

When Disney bought Pixar, they were buying a future: Pixar was still generating new films and characters. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, two people responsible for Pixar's success, were still with the company and still attracting audiences. By contrast, buying Marvel is buying the past. The characters are already decades old and the people who created them are no longer with the company. In this sense, the purchase of Marvel is closer to the purchase of the Muppets than the purchase of Pixar.

Time will determine if the purchase of Marvel was a good one or not. However, the pattern that Iger has established doesn't speak well for Disney's future. Creators need places where they can try things free from a corporate bureaucracy and where they can share in the wealth that they create. Disney would prefer to let those things happen elsewhere and then buy them after the fact.

The Filmation Paradoxes

The new issue of Flip is online and the lead article is a look back at Filmation by three artists who worked there: Tom Sito, Bronwen Barry and Tom Mazzocco. The piece highlights two paradoxes that are common within the animation industry.

The first is that it's possible to work at a studio that has a comfortable environment and a friendly crew while turning out work that is, to put it charitably, of little value. Filmation is best remembered for shows like He-Man, She-ra and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. While those series may produce a nostalgic glow for a generation of children, a dispassionate look at them shows them to be low budget formula cartoons. While artists would prefer to work on good projects, the truth is that a comfortable environment is perhaps as valuable as the quality of the finished work when the project takes up most of an artist's waking hours.

The other paradox is that artists tend to be judged by the projects they work on, and that's a false standard. A great many of the Filmation crew migrated to Disney, where they were major contributors to the success of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. While resume credits are a handy way to pigeon-hole someone, they don't accurately reflect the skills of an artist. The intelligence and taste of the management, the size of the budget and the length of the schedule have more to do with the results on screen than the abilities of the crew.

Pondering Ponyo

(There are spoilers below.)

When I first watched Hayao Miyazaki's latest feature Ponyo, I thought it was another of Miyazaki's ecological fables. Based on Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke, it wouldn't be surprising to once again see Miyazaki dealing with humans' relationship to the environment. However, a second viewing and much thought has led me to the conclusion that the ecological elements are something of a MacGuffin, Hitchcock's term for an excuse to set the characters in motion when the director's real interest is somewhere else.

Miyazaki's subject here is love, though not romantic love and certainly not sexual love. What the characters in this film are missing is devotional love. Just about every character in this film has been abandoned in one way or another.

The nursing home that Sosuke's mother Lisa works at is next door to a school (or is it a pre-school?). In each case, the old and the young have been isolated from the world of adults. The old women in the home are, I presume, widows, and their children are not taking care of them. The children in school are not being looked after by their parents. In each case, the group is being looked after by somebody collecting a paycheque, not family. Humanity's past and future are not integrated with the present.

Both Sosuke and Ponyo have two parents, but those parents are not together. Sosuke's father is captain of a ship and over the course of the entire film, he never gets off it. There is always a geographical gulf created by work between the father and his family, which leads to an emotional gulf between husband and wife. Ponyo's mother is a goddess who is not present in Ponyo's home and who only interacts with Ponyo once during the entire film. The parents that are present, Lisa and Fujimoto, Ponyo's father, are so wrapped up in work that they abandon or ignore their children in favour of their jobs. Ponyo and her sisters don't like Fujimoto and Sosuke sees him as a threat at the end of the film and flees from him.

It is significant that Sosuke is the only character to pass between the nursing home and the school and that he does it through a hole in the fence. He breaks through boundaries that adults have set up and his need to connect is the same need that connects him to Ponyo when he finds her. His renaming of her is transformative, much the way that Chihiro being renamed in Spirited Away is. Ponyo's need to connect is so strong that she transforms herself from a fish into a girl and in a bravura sequence runs along the tops of fish and waves to reunite with Sosuke. Her repeated transformations bring to mind Sophie's changing age in Howl's Moving Castle. In Miyazaki's world, characters change physically as they change emotionally.

Ponyo running atop the fish, an absolutely astounding sequence

It is Ponyo's actions that release the magic that results in the flood. This flood is the catalyst for everything that follows and the reintegration of what has been separated. Extinct fish once again swim in the ocean, uniting past and present. The old women are able to walk again and rejoin the adult world. The goddess and Fujimoto are brought together. Sosuke's father is able to bring his boat back home.

When Ponyo and Sosuke set off in Sosuke's toy boat, it is significant that they are the first in the film to encounter a complete family. It is the only time we see a man, woman and child together. Ponyo is fascinated with the baby and attempts to give it food. When the mother explains that the child is too young to eat it, but if the mother eats it she can produce milk for the child, Ponyo is happy to let the mother have the soup and then loads her up with sandwiches. The father returns the favour as best he can by giving Sosuke a candle. This is the moment in the film when the world begins to regenerate.

Sosuke's acceptance of Ponyo, regardless of whether she is a fish or a girl saves the world because it acknowledges no boundaries. The devotional love between them has no limit. The boundaries that people have erected -- between nature and humans; between the past, present, and future; between water and air -- are dissolved by Sosuke's declaration.

The plot elements of humans hurting the environment and the world being out of balance are there as outgrowths of the film's central problem: the gulf between people. Ponyo is an argument for us to reconnect with each other more strongly in order to bring the world back into balance.

(There are many brilliant visual things in this film, and I just want to point out two small ones that stood out for me. I greatly admire Miyazaki's detailed observation of human behavior. When Sosuke first sees Ponyo, he kicks off his shoes before wading into the water to pick her up. This still, lacking motion, doesn't do the moment justice, but what caught my attention was how Sosuke was totally focused on what he saw. Sosuke's concentration was portrayed beautifully by not moving his head as he kicked off his shoes.)

(Another thing that struck me was Lisa's pose, below. At this point in the film, her husband has called to say that he will not be coming home and then used light signals in an attempt to make up. Lisa's anger prevents her from accepting his apology. Her despair over the state of their relationship is beautifully captured by her pose on the bed.)

A Sunshine Makers Mystery

Issue 88 of Alter Ego, a magazine devoted to comic book history, has a lengthy article on Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, an early comic book publisher whose company was taken over and eventually became DC comics.

What's interesting from an animation standpoint was this page from the first issue of New Fun Comics published in 1935. The illustration is credited to Dick Loederer.


When I saw this, I instantly recognized the character from The Sunshine Makers, a 1935 cartoon directed by Ted Eshbaugh that was released by Van Beuren. Here's a poor frame enlargement, but hopefully it makes the resemblance plain.


Both images are from 1935, so it's not obvious which came first. While there is some information about Dick Loederer, it doesn't mention any animation experience. There is no mention of Loederer on Alberto Becattini's index of animators. Neither is there a mention of Loederer in Talking Animals and Other People, Shamus Culhane's autobiography which includes his time at Van Beuren during this time period. While many animation artists also worked in cartoon illustration, I can't tell if Loederer was responsible for both designs, if he originated the design, or if he swiped the design. Swiping was extremely common in early comic books, so that might be the most likely answer. However, it's still interesting that the design made enough of an impression at the time to inspire a swipe.

Can anyone shed any light on Dick Loederer or the origin of this design?

The complete cartoon is included below for your enjoyment.

Bill Plympton in Toronto

Independent animator Bill Plympton will appear at The Royal Theatre (608 College St, 5 blocks west of Bathurst) on Friday, Aug. 14 to screen his latest feature Idiots and Angels. The screening is at 7 p.m. The film, without Plympton, will continue to screen through Aug. 20.

Iron Giant Art Show

Dan Merisanu, proprietor of Labyrinth Books in Toronto, devotes part of his store space to exhibiting art of various kinds. His latest project is inviting people to contribute art inspired by Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, which was released 10 years ago this month. If you'd like to know more about this exhibit, or perhaps contribute, you can find out the details here. You can see sample artwork and follow the progress of the exhibit as it comes together here.

Sheridan Workstations For Sale

I'm posting this for Ken Walker, the technologist of the post-grad CGI program. Here are the details:

Hey All,

Three years have gone by so fast!!! It is time again to sell off all of our current workstations to make room for the new ones for the next 3 years. We are only selling the workstations not the monitors. We are using the Monitors for next year so we can have Dual monitors to work with for all machines in the lab.

Note: These workstations have been very well cared for. They have been cleaned every 6 months. All the dust bunnies blown out. They have been the most reliable equipment we have used to date.

Here is the config of the workstations we are selling: IBM model: 6217-pju

IBM A-PRO series IntelliStation

Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 video card - is open GL and Direct X compatible
(works great with Maya and for playing Games)
4 gigbytes RAM
2 - Dual Core AMD Opteron model 280 @ 2.4 Ghz
80 Gbyte SATA Hard Drive - note the mother board is a server mother board and has RAID built in and has connectors for SCSI, IDE and SATA all built in.
DVD Multiburner - Burns DVD's and CD's - will burn Dual Layer DVD's as well.
Comes with optical mouse, keyboard, powercord and the original OEM disks for device drivers.
Windows XP Pro 64bit editions installed and a valid windows OEM license/serial # for WInXP 64 bit.

The price for a workstation is $995.00 which includes the tax. You get a workstation, keyboard and optical mouse and the OEM device driver disks, Win XP Pro 64bit Edition installed and updated to service pak 2 and the Nvidia video card drivers updated and installed. While suppies last we are also throwing in a RGB monitor.

If there are any questions or you want to make arrangements to buy a workstation just contact me either by email ken.walker@sheridanc.on.ca or by phone at 905-845-9430 x8724

Myron Waldman's Eve Reprinted

I wrote about Eve, a 1943 pantomime graphic novel by Fleischer/Famous animator/director Myron Waldman here. It's going to be reprinted in The Comics Journal #299 with an introduction by cartoonist Mark Newgarden. The reprint will be reduced in size compared to the original, but it's great that this hard-to-find work will be in print once again.

The Comics Journal #299 should be in comics shops on August 19 or you can order it here.

The Past and the Future

Sheridan student Andrew Murray interned this summer at Ireland's Cartoon Saloon. While in Ireland, Andrew saw Bugs Bunny on Broadway, where Warner Bros. cartoons are accompanied by a live orchestra. While this production is not new, Andrew's experiences while watching it caused him to think about the future of drawn animation. Here are his thoughts:

I was in Dublin this weekend and saw Bugs Bunny on Broadway and I just wanted to share my experience regarding it. Because I was blown away by its reception. I wasnt sure what to expect but the show was sold out and litterally every age group was there. Where I was sitting, to my left there were a group of 90 year old women and my right, there was a family whose kids were in their 20s. Smaller kids were there and just adults in their 20s, 30s, 40s were out on dates and of course the single people like me.

But what was amazing was how well received these shorts were. They played Baton Bunny, Feed the Kitty, kill da wabbit ( I cant recall the proper titles of each short), The High Note, even a Bob Clampett short among all the Jones cartoons. But as I looked around, everyone had this HUGE grin on their faces during the show, and people were laughing their heads off. When the March of the Valkrie's started to play you heard the audience mumbling 'Kill Da Wabbit'. and to see that happening it was a real eye opener regarding animation. For the past 4 years I've heard nothing but "where is animation going? what will happen to 2-D?" and last night I was shown that people still really love these shorts. So much so that they came out in droves of all ages to watch them with a live orchestra.

Now Im not going to have the answer as to what the fate will be with 2-D animation but to see the audience react the way they did was amazing and I guess there shouldn't be any concern regarding the fate of Cartoons but perhaps there should be other avenues explored as to how to present them. Those Looney Tunes and MerrieMelodies were really meant to be shown like that with an orchestra. It has such an impact on people.

In a follow up message, Andrew added:

I forgot to mention this before, but as I left, there was a line up to get to the front door and I quote this, because there was a mother asking her son who was about 7ish, how he liked the show and he responded with, "that was the best 2 hours of my life."

I think there are a lot of conclusions to be drawn from this, and not all of them will be popular. The first is that people came out for this because they knew what they would be getting. It was a pre-sold product. While animation professionals and fans have complained about the proliferation of sequels or how The Princess and the Frog looks old fashioned, the fact is that people often like to know what they're buying in advance. A sequel or a straight-down-the-middle Disney feature is a known quantity and these things have a measurable audience.

Nostalgia also plays a part. The Warner Bros. cartoons shown were about 50 years old or more, so for any adult in the audience, it was a chance to revisit a childhood favourite. Just as Disney's Cinderella appealed to adults in 1950 who had seen Snow White as children, The Princess and the Frog will appeal to adults who saw Beauty and the Beast when they were younger.

You could argue that what brought the people to Bugs Bunny on Broadway was the quality of the animation and music. While they are both excellent, I think it misses a larger point. The success of shows like Family Guy and South Park proves that production values are not what audiences primarily respond to. What they respond to is entertainment. Just as one funny person on a bare stage can entertain an audience, so can a good script and soundtrack accompanied by crude visuals.

What distinguishes the Warner Bros. cartoons is their use of funny drawings, funny motion and sophisticated music as their means of communication, but they are not the be-all and end-all of their appeal. The characters, the gags and the dialogue come before anything else and if those things are not working, production values are not going to save them. There are Harman-Ising and Disney shorts that have far more lavish visuals than the Warner Bros. cartoons and music tracks that are the equal of the Warner shorts, but these cartoons are dull and nobody is hiring live orchestras to accompany them.

Animation artists (and especially animation managements) often can't see the forest for the trees. They confuse the motion, the colour, and the music with what entertains audiences. Bugs Bunny on Broadway proves that an audience will still respond to those things when they're in the service of entertaining characters and stories. There's nothing wrong with drawn animation as a medium, so long as film makers understand that entertainment comes first. Craft is no substitute for content.

Princess and the Frog Pencil Tests

(Thanks to Behram Khoshroo for pointing this out to me.)

Walt's People Volume 8 Released

Didier Ghez informs me that the 8th volume of Walt's People, a book series featuring interviews with people who worked with and were associated with Walt Disney, has now been published. Here's a list of the contents:

Foreword: Paula Sigman-Lowery

Dave Smith: Ruth Disney Beecher

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston: Les Clark

Richard Hubler: Harry Tytle

Milt Gray: James Bodrero

Robin Allan: Theo Halladay about Sylvia Holland

Robin Allan: Retta Scott

Jim Korkis: Retta Davidson

Floyd Norman : Retta Davidson

Steve Hulett: Mark Kirkland about Moe Gollub

Richard Hubler: Ben Sharpsteen

David Tietyen: Lou Debney

David Tietyen: Jim Macdonald

David Tietyen: Charles Wolcott

Richard Hubler: Bill Cottrell

Richard Hubler: Herb Ryman

Richard Hubler: Donn Tatum

Richard Hubler: Card Walker

Richard Hubler: Bob Sherman

Richard Hubler: Dolores Voght

Richard Hubler: Tommie Wilck

Richard Hubler: Welton Becket

John G. West: Bill Anderson

Richard Hubler: Robert Stevenson

Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz: Don Griffith

Jim Korkis: Floyd Gottfredson

Tony Fischier: Floyd Gottfredson

Jim Korkis: Al Taliaferro

Jim Korkis: Jack Hannah

Jim Fanning: Carl Barks

Paul F. Anderson: Blaine Gibson

Scott Wolf: Harriet Burns

Charles Solomon: Roy E. Disney

Göran Broling: Correspondence with Frank Thomas

Didier Ghez: Bud Hester

Didier Ghez: Ken Southworth

Didier Ghez: Dale Baer

If you are in the United States, you can order this book from Xlibris. The book will be available though Amazon eventually for those who are outside the U.S.

Somebody is Computer Illiterate

I use Google Alerts to see if this blog is referenced elsewhere. Today, I received an email pointing to this link. It appears to be a government of Ontario site, though on the web you can't really be sure. One thing is for sure, whoever or whatever referenced my original did an amazingly poor job. It looks like automatic translation software has taken the original into some other language and then re-translated it back to English. Here's my original paragraph:

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article about the state of the videogame business in Canada, including a detailed look at the Ontario government's actions to bring a game publisher to Toronto.

And here's the government of Ontario version:

The Globe and Mail has an captivating article here the delineate of the videogame guinea-pig in Canada, including a unconditional look at the Ontario government’s actions to in a mangle publisher to Toronto.

For your enjoyment, here's another comparison. The original is from the Globe and Mail article:

Like Ontario today, Quebec in 1996 introduced significant subsidies to spark growth and, with the tax breaks, lured Ubisoft in 1997. Electronic Arts arrived in 2004.

And here's how the government of Ontario relates it:

Like Ontario today, Quebec in 1996 introduced pregnant subsidies to trigger excrescence and, with the charge breaks, lured Ubisoft in 1997. The good of Vancouver in the 1990s attracted admonish absent. Electronic Arts arrived in 2004.

Videogame Production in Canada

The Globe and Mail has an interesting article about the state of the videogame business in Canada, including a detailed look at the Ontario government's actions to bring a game publisher to Toronto.

The Vancouver video game business began organically. Distinctive Software Inc. was founded in the early 1980s and scored success, and in 1991 was bought by Electronic Arts. From this foundation, about 60 companies – employing 6,000 or so people – now call the city home, according to numbers from an industry association report published in March.

Video games aren't a particularly big business, with about $1.7-billion in annual revenue in Canada, a fraction of what Royal Bank of Canada or Research In Motion Ltd. generate. However, the industry captures the imagination of politicians, who see high-paid, high-tech jobs. Ontario has been specifically inspired by the “creative cities” thesis of Richard Florida, a University of Toronto professor and consultant to Queen's Park.

The success of Vancouver in the 1990s attracted attention elsewhere. Like Ontario today, Quebec in 1996 introduced significant subsidies to spark growth and, with the tax breaks, lured Ubisoft in 1997. Electronic Arts arrived in 2004. There are now about 4,400 people working in the business at more than 40 firms in the Montreal area. Quebec City has another 600 people at five companies. Ubisoft, with 2,200 employees in the province, mostly in Montreal, plans to add another 800 in the next four years.

Toronto, even with specialized video game education at colleges like Humber and Seneca, has only about 1,300 people working in the business, though at more companies, 65. A plane ticket to Vancouver, Montreal or California after graduation in Toronto isn't unusual.

Steven Spielberg Admires Animators

(Thanks Paul Teolis.)

Destination Woody

July 20 is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. To commemorate it, Turner Classic Movies is running films relating to the moon for the entire day. At 1 p.m. Eastern time, they are running Destination Moon (1950), which is of interest to animation fans for an original segment where Woody Woodpecker demonstrates rocket propulsion.

The segment is available on YouTube, so if you're not interested in the entire film, here's Woody.

Human Resources

Updated below.

There was a time when companies owned the resources they used to produce their products. A company was its factories. However, in more recent times, companies have rebelled against the idea of overhead, so they simply contract out their needs to suppliers. In the past, the onus was on the company to keep factories and workers busy or they faced the possibility of financial losses. With subcontracting, companies only pay for the work they need when they need it, and it is the subcontractor's problem to meet overhead. You could say that companies have downloaded their overheads to subcontractors.

When companies owned the means of production, they were not necessarily better behaved. The movie studios of the 1930s treated their employees so poorly that they unionized in self-defense. The concentration of production in Hollywood, with its high overhead of buildings, cameras, lights, props, costumes, etc, gave workers some degree of leverage. It was not financially viable for studios to relocate any time there was a labour problem.

Subcontracting has been a financial boon to the studios. Where they once owned everything themselves and were stuck with fixed costs, they now have several companies bidding to supply what they need and the competition forces prices down. Subcontractors have their own overheads to meet, so they cut their margins as low as possible to attract work.

Subcontracting has allowed studios to do business over a larger geographical area, which has reduced worker leverage. While it was difficult to relocate a movie studio to escape a labour problem, it is simple to redirect work to a subcontractor somewhere else.

The Los Angeles Times has an article about local suppliers who are suffering as the studios redirect work to other places in order to save money. By no longer employing these people directly, the studios feel no obligation to insure their survival. Governments outside California want to attract film and television production to their locales and Hollywood studios are only too happy to take advantage of financial incentives governments offer them. If that results in hardship for local suppliers and workers, that is not the studios' concern.

Still from Live Music

The New York Times has an article about a 5 minute cgi animated short called Live Music, produced by Mass Animation. The short was crowd sourced. Mass Animation supplied software to interested contributors, who competed to get their shots accepted for the film. Each accepted shot earned $500. The short has been picked up by Sony for release in front of their feature Planet 51 on November 20.

(You can see the trailer here. The story looks to me like a rehash of the Silly Symphony Music Land.)

17,000 people downloaded the software but only 51 people had shots accepted. The Times doesn't report how many of the 17,000 actually submitted a shot. It is impossible to know how many uncompensated hours were spent to create the film or how many minutes of footage were created to arrive at the final five.

(If only 5% of the 17,000 submitted a shot, that's 850 people. Subtracting the 51 who were accepted, that leaves 799 people who worked for free and it means that roughly 85 minutes of animation was created and 80 minutes was thrown away.)

The Times also reports that the budget for the short was $1 million. Unfortunately, the Times doesn't say how many shots are in the finished film. If we assume that the average shot length is 3 seconds, that would be 20 shots per minute or 100 shots in the film. At $500 per shot, that's a total of $50,000. That figure does not cover overhead, script, board, soundtrack, modeling, rigging, or any post-production costs, but I'm a little suspicious that animation and lighting cost only 1/20 of the budget. That suggests to me that the animators were underpaid.

Where studios once had subcontractors competing for work, they now have individuals competing. Furthermore, while a subcontractor only had to create a bid (and perhaps a sample), the individuals have to create finished shots.

I'm in favour of artistic collaboration and the idea of crowd sourcing a film over the internet is exciting. However, the long term trends disturb me. Animation production, which was already too fragmented for my tastes, is now more fragmented than ever. The 51 animators who worked on Live Music come from 17 different countries. Corporations continue to use their leverage (the fact that they have money that other people want) to externalize their costs and disperse work ever more widely. The one constant is the drive to pay as little as possible. In this case, the majority of the animation created was done for free.

I haven't seen Live Music. I have no idea how good it is or how the people who competed to work on it feel they were treated. While the internet presents unprecedented opportunity for creative collaboration, it is also the ultimate tool to divide and conquer. I worry that individuals won't have the knowledge or the strength to protect themselves from companies focused so singularly on the bottom line.

Update: A former associate of mine had a meeting with Yair Landau, the founder of Mass Animation, and was given different figures than the N.Y. Times used. Here's what he told me:

2,500 Maya downloads (vs NY Times 17,000). This was 60 day license
200 different animators (vs your 850 guesstimate)
107 shots (winners) pared down to 97 in final edit (vs your 100 guesstimate)
50 different winners (vs 51 NY Times)
Obviously the winners did an average of 2 shots each.
He said the average number of submissions per shot was about 4.
(so about 400+ submissions) Cutting ratio of 3:1
Other: animators did NOT do lighting.
Lighting, rendering, compositing and editing was all done at ReelFX who didn’t get a mention.

The above figures make the production a lot less wasteful than what the N.Y. Times implies. It also looks like typical Hollywood hyperbole is at work here in terms of the number of downloads. It's interesting that fewer than 10% of the people who downloaded software actually submitted a shot. I wonder how big a pool of downloaders would be necessary in order to do a feature?

I would also point out a comment by gregizz, who was a contributor to Live Music and who offers his thoughts on the process.

The Astonishing World of Tezuka Osamu

Kino Video will be releasing a collection of Osamu Tezuka's work on DVD on July 28 to customers in the U.S. and Canada. The DVD contains the following films:

1. Tales of the Street Corner / 1962 / 16:9 / 39:04 / English Subtitles
2. Male / 1962 / 4:3 / 03:09 / English Subtitles
3. Memory / 1964 / 4:3 / 05:40 / English Subtitles
4. Mermaid / 1964 / 4:3 / 08:17 / No Dialog
5. The Drop / 1965 / 4:3 / 04:18 / No Dialog
6. Pictures at an Exhibition / 1966 / 16:9 / 32:56 / No dialog
7. The Genesis / 1968 / 4:3 / 04:02 / English Subtitles / B&W
8. Jumping / 1984 / 4:3 / 06:22 / No Dialog
9. Broken Down Film / 1985 / 4:3 / 05:42 / No Dialog / B&W
10. Push / 1987 / 4:3 / 04:16 / English Subtitles
11. Muramasa / 1987 / 16:9 / 08:42 / No Dialog
12. Legend of the Forest / 1987 / 16:9 / 29:25 / No Dialog
13. Self Portrait / 1988 / 0.13 / No Dialog

Also includes:
Interview with Tezuka / 1986 / 4:3 / 18:19 / English Subtitles

The pre-order price is U.S. $20.97 with the eventual price to be $29.95. You can see two minutes of excerpts (from Jumping and Legend of the Forest) at the above link.

Kino is also releasing a DVD of Phil Mulloy's work. Details here.

Ubisoft Opening in Toronto

(Updated. Here's an interview with Yannis Mallat, who will be in charge of the Ubisoft Toronto facility. Thanks to Alan Cook for the link.)

This will only be of interest to those working in animation in Toronto, but Ubisoft, the French videogame company, will be opening a studio in Toronto.

I personally don't have much interest in games, but I do have a strong interest in the Toronto industry. For years, it has been anchored by Nelvana, which not only employed people but also subcontracted work to smaller studios in the city. More recently Starz has been working on features and has managed to keep a steady stream of work for its crew.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with several industry people and they asked me how I saw Toronto's future for animation. I wasn't optimistic. The TV industry is shrinking and budgets are being pushed lower as a result. While there is also visual effects work for features being done locally, that business has notoriously low margins and studios are quick to underbid each other for work.

My thinking was that Vancouver was better positioned than Toronto for several reasons. It has a big geographic advantage in that it's in the same timezone as California and is a shorter flight for executives and directors than the flight to Toronto. Most importantly, though, it has video game company Electronic Arts in addition to TV, feature and VFX work. Vancouver's greater diversity of work made it stronger than Toronto.

Now, Toronto will be at least as diverse as Vancouver. Should Nelvana, Starz and Ubisoft remain strong anchors for employment, it will keep talent in the area rather than have it wander off to greener pastures. While this announcement may not have the public relations value of Pixar opening in Vancouver, it is as important in stabilizing the local industry.

Unfortunately, two of the three anchor companies are not Canadian. What would really solidify things would be for Toronto-owned studios to create intellectual property that's sold around the world. Should that happen, the industry would be much better positioned for growth.

(Thanks to Paul Teolis for the link.)

Some Links

Steve Stanchfield of Thunderbean Animation is profiled at Greenbriar Picture Shows. Steve has lovingly put together a series of DVDs of public domain material from various studios. Where most public domain releases are done on the cheap, Steve puts enormous effort into finding the best materials and creating extras. I heartily endorse his products.

Spline Doctors has posted a podcast with Pete Docter and Bob Peterson of Pixar.

Brad Bird is interviewed by Nancy Cartwright at AWN.com.

The ASIFA Hollywood Archive presents artwork from Ray Patterson's time at the Mintz studio in the 1930's.

A Time and a Place

I've been catching up on some movies lately and three of them have helped sharpen my thoughts on an aspect of animated films.

The Commitments (1991), directed by Alan Parker based on a novel by Roddy Doyle, is set in Dublin and is about a band that meshes well onstage but can't mesh off stage. A Soldier's Story (1984), directed by Norman Jewison based on the play by Charles Fuller, is set in Louisiana in 1944 and is about a murder that takes place on an army base that is home to black soldiers. Mean Streets (1973), directed by Martin Scorcese from a screenplay by him and Mardik Martin, is set in Manhattan's Little Italy and is about young people on the edges of the mob.

What these films have in common is how thoroughly they evoke a milieu. The visuals are obviously a part of it, but the characters' patterns of speech and more importantly their attitudes, place the stories in very particular times and places. You could not drop a character from one of these movies into either of the others and have the character fit. The characters in these films experience the world in different ways and have very different expectations of themselves and their surroundings. Watching these three films is to visit three very different worlds.

The part of milieu that animated films usually get right is the visuals. It has become common for animation studios to send staff on field trips to do research so that the art direction captures the feeling of an environment. However, animation usually stops there. The characters' speech patterns and attitudes are transplanted from California and dropped into a world that looks different, but ends up feeling the same.

How much does Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame have to do with Paris beyond the art direction? How much does DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda have to do with China beyond the choice of local animals and architecture?

While artists are sent on field trips, has any animated feature ever gone on location to record voice tracks? Does the creation of animated stories by committee dilute any sense of a time or place? Does the necessity of making films understandable to children prevent the films from straying too far from what children know?

There are animated films that are successful in evoking a milieu. Bakshi's Heavy Traffic has a lot in common with Scorcese's Mean Streets in evoking lower class New York. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis probably does a better job of evoking Iran through its story and characters than it does through its visuals, the reverse of the typical animation approach. Mike Judge's King of the Hill could only have been created by a Texan. Miyazaki's work is thoroughly Japanese. Each of the animated examples above comes from a director's personal background and while that might seem like an argument for more personal films, it isn't a necessity. Norman Jewison, who has made several films about the American south and its racial tensions, is Canadian.

For live action films, setting is a foundation that the story and characters are built on. For too many animated films, setting is just a way of dressing a story up, like a kid in a Halloween costume. No matter how good the costume is, it doesn't really convince anybody.

(Posting here will probably be sporadic over the next 6-7 weeks as I'll be away at various times.)

Society for Animation Studies Conference

(This information comes courtesy of Harvey Deneroff, who is one of the conference organizers.)

The 21st Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference, “The Persistence of Animation,” will be held July 10-12, 2009, at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Held under the auspices of SCAD-Atlanta’s Animation Department, the conference features over 50 scholars and filmmakers from around the world who will present papers on a wide range of topics relating to animation history and theory; in addition, there will be workshops on teaching animation history and animation production. The conference itself will kick off with a keynote address Andrew Darley, the renown British media theorist, appropriately entitled “The Persistence of Animation.”

In conjunction with the conference, the SCAD Library will be presenting a special exhibition, “Behind the Cels: Selections from SCAD’s Don Bluth Collection,” featuring art work donated to the school by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman; Goldman will introduce the exhibit during the conference on Saturday, July 11th, and will also be present at a free reception, which is open to the public, Thursday evening, July 9th, from 6:00-8:00 pm.

Finally, ASIFA-Atlanta, in conjunction with the High Museum of Art, is organizing “Georgia Animation on Our Mind: A Retrospective of Peachtree State Animation,” which will screen at the nearby Woodruff Arts Center’s Rich Auditorium. The program features short animations, including experimental shorts, TV commercials and Avery Matthews, a never-aired Cartoon Network pilot.

For details on the conference, including registration fees, check out the conference blog at http://blog.scad.edu/sasc. You can also sign up for free tickets to the Friday night screenings at the ASIFA-Atlanta website, http://www.asifa-atlanta.com.

Comedy and Pathos

Anthony Balducci has written a great (and lengthy) piece talking about the combination of comedy and pathos, using many examples from a variety of comedians and films.

While no animated films are discussed, the combination is certainly present in animated films and the pitfalls that Balducci discusses frequently show up.

The 11% Solution

If you heard that a political candidate was supported by 11% of the electorate, would that impress you? If 11% of people chose a particular toothpaste, would you change your buying habits?

How about if 11% of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected a film as Best Picture. Should it win?

Well now it could.

The Academy has decided to expand the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten. The Academy has been unenthusiastic about nominating films that do the best box office. The Best Picture nominees are films that only a minority of movie goers have seen. As a result, the Oscar telecast suffers in the ratings as few people watching know the films being considered. By expanding the number of nominations to ten, the studios hope that films that gross more than $100 million have a chance to get a Best Picture nomination.

The public doesn't know how many votes a Best Picture winner receives. The numbers are as closely guarded as the votes in an Iranian election. Right now, it's possible that the winner receives 21% of the vote, which is still pretty flimsy. Doubling the number of nominees makes it less likely that a majority of the voters will choose the same film.

Will this be good for animated features? I suppose that with 10 slots, it's more likely that an animated film will get a Best Picture nomination. You can be sure that Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks will lobby hard for the chance. However, the Academy voters have already shown their indifference to animation the same way they've shown their indifference to big box office. We'll have to see what the Academy nominates next year. While the studios are hoping for more mainstream nominations, the Academy may not cooperate. Even if it does, splitting the votes among more films is liable to produce a result that nobody is happy with.

Prehysterical Pogo

Updated with a new link at the bottom.

Walt Kelly started his career on the east coast in early comic books, pre-Superman. He then shifted to working at Disney, where he was initially in the story department and later moved to being an animator. His credits include features like Pinocchio, Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon and shorts like The Nifty Nineties.

He left Disney at the time of the strike and returned to the east coast, where he spent the bulk of the 1940s creating comic book stories for Dell comics of various kinds. One of his strips in Animal Comics developed into Pogo. Starting in 1948, Kelly went to work for the New York Star as an illustrator and art director. He took Pogo along with him as a comic strip. When the Star folded, Pogo found a home in syndication and continued beyond Kelly's death.

In 1966, something happened to Kelly to cause him to send his characters to Mars (though it turned out to be the Australian outback). Perhaps it was boredom or perhaps Kelly was inspired by something, but the 14 month sequence in Prehysteria became the artistic highlight of his time drawing Pogo. The setting allowed him to create fantasy characters and landscapes more elaborate than anything he'd previously done in the strip.

Thomas Haller Buchanan, with the help of Ger Apeldoorn, has created a blog that intends to reprint the entire sequence (with some related sidetrips). The place to start is at the bottom of this page and continue upwards.

Kelly is not to everyone's taste. However, even if you don't share his sense of humour or interest in politics, you have to admire his cartooning chops. His use of the brush is universally admired by cartoonists and his poses are highly influenced by animation, using a character's whole body to communicate the character's emotional state. If you are unfamiliar with Kelly's work, I urge you to take a look.

(Specifically, look at this Sunday page. If that isn't a thing of cartoon beauty, I don't know what is.)

More Peering Through the Fog

I previously wrote about my curiosity over the changing media landscape here. I've already mentioned Clay Shirky for his article on how journalism is changing, and his book Here Comes Everybody. Now, here's a very recent talk from him that does a beautiful job of nailing down exactly how media have changed since the advent of the printing press.

While I'm not into video games, it occurs to me that the only area of the animation industry that's taking advantage of changes, where users can respond to content and can organize themselves around content, is gaming. TV and feature films are still operating with the 20th century broadcast model, while something like World of Warcraft is allowing users to form their own societies and teams within an animated world. While I don't think that a classical approach to storytelling, where stories are created by one set of people and delivered to another, is going to disappear, I wonder if the TV and feature model is sustainable in its current form. As the world becomes more social, what are TV and feature animation doing to keep up?

Two New Shorts

The Worldwide Short Film Festival is currently running in Toronto. I attended a program today that included Chris Landreth's new film, The Spine, as well as the latest Wallace and Gromit half hour, A Matter of Loaf and Death, directed by Nick Park. Both films are consistent with their creators' previous work.

The Spine

Landreth's approach to animation is a sort of German Expressionism. While the German films of the 1920s expressed their characters' emotions through their surroundings, Landreth uses the characters' own bodies as expressions of their mental and emotional states. This film has to do with a marriage, where the partners are deformed in ways that relate to their experiences and needs.

The problem with this approach is that it requires that the characters be tormented in some way, and that makes each Landreth film an appointment with dysfunction. In addition, Landreth is more enamored of technique than he is of character. The husband and wife each have their own Rosebud, something that explains their mental and physical distortions, but the result is somewhat schematic. Landreth's previous film, Ryan, is superior because Ryan Larkin was complex enough to justify Landreth's technique. Larkin is far more interesting than any character that Landreth has created from scratch.

Wallace and Gromit are bakers this time

Wallace and Gromit function the same way as classic comedy teams. Once a team's personalities are established, they are placed into different settings or occupations as the only way to add variety to their endeavors. The Marx Brothers were on an ocean liner, at a college, at the opera, at the races, etc. while remaining true to their characters. The Three Stooges spent time as bootleggers, exterminators, firemen, riveters, census takers, etc. while slapping each other silly. This time, Wallace and Gromit are bakers and they are surrounded by the expected mechanical gadgetry, a dastardly villain and a slapstick climax.

Once again, Wallace is a fool for love and blind to the threats that face him. Gromit, as usual, is smarter than Wallace and does what he can to protect Wallace from harm.

I think that The Wrong Trousers is still my favourite of the W&G half hours, but this one is satisfying. Wallace and Gromit have not hit a new peak, but neither have they disappointed. Having graduated to features with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it's nice to see them in a short again. Aardman is right to maintain that flexibility. Regardless of length, Wallace and Gromit continue to uphold the tradition of slapstick comedy.

For those of you in Toronto who would like to see these films, the program I saw today will be repeated on Friday, June 19 at 7 p.m. at the Cumberland Cinema, on Cumberland near Avenue Road.

Another Mickey Mystery

I am reading Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow, and Sragow discusses Around the World in 80 Minutes, a 1931 documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks and directed by Fleming.

What's interesting is that the film apparently contains an original animated segment with Mickey Mouse. There is no mention of this in Disney biographies by Bob Thomas, Neal Gabler or Michael Barrier. There's no mention of it either in Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic or Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons. Here's what Sragow has to say about this film.

While Fairbanks and company visit Siam, they watch a performance of a classical Siamese dance troupe; Fairbanks says that the rhythm beneath the exotic moves and music is the same as the fox-trot, then tries to demonstrate that notion by twirling a Siamese gal around a ballroom. Out of nowhere, he announces, "Now, here's Hollywood's most famous star dancing to Siamese music. C'mon, Mickey!" The film turns into a cartoon and Mickey Mouse prances out from a doorway on the right side of the screen. Against a temple backdrop, the mouse pulls off a mix of traditional Oriental choreography and American folk dancing. His hands try to pull off elegant courtly gestures, but his feet can't help tapping or clogging. He slants his eyes for a second or two, in a mixture of frustration and homage -- no slur intended, all in good fun -- then does a series of keep-on-truckin' clogs that would make R. Crumb proud.

It's a genuine novelty: the rarest Mickey Mouse cartoon. How it ended up in Around the World in Eighty Minutes remains anybody's guess. United Artists (of course) released the movie, and UA had agreed to distribute Disney's cartoons after the animator had fulfilled his still-running contract with Columbia. But no Disney cartoon received an official UA release until the summer of 1932; Around the World opened in December 1931. And Disney kept no record of any contract or correspondence between him and Fairbanks. Disney must have known that Fairbanks and Fleming were big fans of his. By then Doug had told the press that only Mickey Mouse fully exploited the capacity of the sound film: "These cartoons get their tremendous appeal from the perfect rhythm, in comedy tempo. of the little characters and of the accompanying sound. It is not merely synchronization; it is more than that; it is a rhythmic, winging, lilting thing, with what musicians call the proper accent-structure." So Disney might have simply done Doug a favor and cooked up that Mickey cameo for a renowned, vocal supporter.

Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney reports that Disney signed with United Artists in December of 1930, so while Around the World in 80 Minutes predates the start of releasing his cartoons through UA, the deal was already in place at that time. Furthermore, my assumption is that because the animation was included in a feature, it fell outside the shorts distribution contract that Disney had with Columbia, as did the animation in MGM's Hollywood Party, made while Disney was releasing through UA.

The Museum of Modern Art has a print of Around the World in 80 Minutes and there is another copy at the Library of Congress. To the best of my knowledge, the film is not available on VHS or DVD. Has anyone seen this sequence or have more information to add?

UPDATE: You can read more about this clip thanks to Didier Ghez and JB Kaufman.

UPDATE 2: If you want to see the animation from the film, go here.

Jack Bradbury Site

Jack Bradbury worked at Disney from 1933 to 1941, starting as an inbetweener and working up to animator on films like Ferdinand the Bull, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi. Laid off after the Disney strike, he later spent a few years animating for the Friz Freleng unit at Warner Bros.

However, he is probably best known for his work as a comic book artist. Starting the 1940's, he produced thousands of pages of comic book art, writing many of the stories himself.

His son, Joel, has set up a website that's an archive of over 1300 pages of Bradbury's comic book work. The site also includes other artwork, such as sketchbooks and gag cartoons. One of the highlights of the site for those interested in animation history is an unpublished memoir by Bradbury about his time at the Disney studio.

"My years at Disney's developed what talent I had, into a drawing skill that enabled me to make a living with it, something I had always hoped I could do, and something for which I shall always be grateful to Disney's. They made it possible for me to animate, not only on Disney pictures, but on Bugs Bunny for Friz Freleng at Warner's as well. And later to do the comic books I drew for so many, many years.

At the same time, however, I do not regret for one moment, having left Disney's when the situation became too unpleasant to live with. Had I stayed, I might have become a better animator and enjoyed a nice retirement pension, something I do not now have. But life has its little trade-offs. With the Disney job and its retirement fund, came much stress and often ulcers for many. At Warner's and for years later doing comic books, I did not get retirement pay, but I did get a less stressful, more healthy and certainly happier way of life. I chose the latter because it suited me best."

Bloor Cinema Reminder

The Magic Cauldron by Andy Zeng

This Tuesday at 7 p.m. (and repeated on Wednesday at 9:30 p.m.), a selection of this year's films by Sheridan animation students will be running at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. The program runs approximately 90 minutes and admission is only $5. You can see a trailer for the program here and a list of the films here.

Below is a map of the Bloor Cinema's location.

View Larger Map

The State of the Gaming Industry

Slate has an article on this year's E3 conference and the state of the gaming industry.

"To the extent that games provide consumers with engaging interactive entertainment for $60—sometimes 100 hours' worth as in the post-apocalyptic Fallout 3—it's an industry that deserves to fly high in the recession. But the game industry has fired nearly 12 percent of its work force since last July (8,450 folks), according to Wanda Meloni, an analyst at M2. There may be more to come, too.

Beyond closing 13 game-development studios, video game publishers are tightening their belts while, at the same time, desperately trying to show how extravagant they can be by spending millions on parties with famous bands, fancy convention booths, and movie-award-like press conferences at E3, the lavish yearly games convention in Los Angeles that's more like a boisterous, barker-filled state fair midway than a business gathering."

That layoff percentage above implies that the gaming business recently employed over 70,000 people. Not all of those would be artists, but has the gaming industry surpassed features and TV series as the largest employer of animation artists?

The Downside of Up

Michael Sporn, Keith Lango and Michael Barrier have all written posts expressing their reservations about Pixar's latest feature. All are articulate and their criticisms are worth considering.

Up

(Mild spoilers below.)

I was beginning to worry that Pixar had passed its peak. Cars and Wall-E were both, in my opinion, weaker than their directors' previous films. As so many animation directors seem to do their best work early on and then repeat themselves to lesser effect, I wondered if Pete Docter would fall into the same pattern. That isn't the case. It's nice to see that Brad Bird is not the only director at Pixar who is at the top of his game.

Carl Fredricksen and Charles Muntz have both have made commitments to the past. Both are trying to do something they failed to do in their youth. Muntz is trying to prove his discovery of a giant bird and Carl wishes to follow in Muntz's footsteps, exploring a remote area of South America. Carl is the only one of the two to realize that the present is more important than the past and that opening himself up to others is more satisfying than pursuing a solitary goal.

Carl is introduced as a child and a lovely sequence takes us through his married life with Ellie, a girl he meets when both are young and both fans of Muntz. It's essential for showing us that Carl's state of mind after Ellie's death is justified but that he is capable of more. Over the course of the film, he wakes up to the truth.

Charles Muntz is fixated on revenge for being branded a charlatan by the scientific establishment. While he seems to be a scientific genius, his choice is not to engage the world until he can reassert his prominence. He has apparently resorted to murder to prevent others from stealing the glory he feels he is owed. His megalomania never waivers; anyone with the potential to upset his plans becomes an enemy.

Carl's marriage is the basis for the rest of the film. People are at their best when they take others into consideration. Carl forgets this after his wife dies, but learns it anew during the events that follow.

The film beautifully balances humour, adventure and emotion. It has echoes of Winsor McCay's The Flying House and The Wizard of Oz. Unlike Wall-E, it doesn't raise issues that it can't, or won't, resolve. Up has a statement to make and makes it without pulling the film out of shape.

Do I have nits to pick? A few. I wish that Russell had been a girl. Ellie is a wonderful character, but when she leaves the film, there isn't another female in sight except for the bird. Even the dogs are all male. As an exercise, Pixar should start a story off with nothing but female characters and only make them male if the story demands it. That may be the only way there will ever be more than one memorable female in each Pixar film.

I wonder if this film could have been done without a villain? King Vidor said, “You know, villains are few and far between. The drama of life is not dependent on villains. They don’t have to be present to have a story. Divorce, tragedy, sadness, and illness are not dependent on villains.” Miyazaki has made films without villains such as My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. Up may have been more difficult to write without the convenience of a villain, but it might have been stronger for it.

Charles Muntz's age is treated pretty cavalierly. He's got to be at least 93, and the Teddy Roosevelt reference would make him a minimum of 108. Carl Fredricksen also does some unbelievable things for a 78 year old who uses a cane and who can't climb stairs. We should all be so spry at their ages.

It may be a while before I like a Pixar film as much as this one. While I'm trying to keep an open mind on Toy Story 3, I'm afraid that it's driven more by business than by a story demanding to be told. Cars 2 will be the first Pixar film that I won't bother to see. I can't imagine anything done with those characters that would convince me to give up two hours of my life. For now, Up is enough and it will have to sustain me until somebody can make an animated film as good. It may be a long wait.

The Vendor Client Relationship

If you have ever worked in production, you'll understand this video. And if you've never worked in production, you may be surprised to learn that this is how business is done.


The teacher in me wants to explain things about this video and why something that looks ridiculous is actually just about economic leverage.

All of the above examples are from the world of retail. There are several important things to realize about this. First, items are relatively inexpensive. I don't know how much that meal or hair styling cost, but let's say $100 or less. Second, the market of potential customers is large. These two things give the retailer the right to tell a customer to take a hike. There are lots of other customers and the loss of a sale of a $20 CD or a $100 meal is not going to make much of a difference to the bottom line.

Let's amp it up a notch and talk about kitchen renovators. A reno is going to cost $10,000 and up. If the reno company is in a fairly large city (500,000 plus), there's no shortage of customers so they can still afford to tell a customer to take a hike. However, the length of time it takes to do a reno means that a company can only do so many in a year. This is fundamentally different than retail. A restaurant or hair stylist is capable of doing dozens of transactions in a single day, so time is not really an economic constraint for them.

Let's say the renovation company is able to do 20 renovations in a year and they need 15 to break even. It's now December and they've only done 14. They've got a possible client, but the client refuses to pay the price and wants a healthy discount. The reno company is faced with taking a loss or taking a smaller loss, so the cheap client has leverage and the reno company is likely to give in.

When you get to the film and television business, the clients have even more leverage. People with money to finance a project are rare. Each job represents a large chunk of money and your facility can only handle so many projects a year. Since clients are rare and each job is worth a lot of money, you can't afford to offend anyone. Losing a client in a retail situation is a petty annoyance. Losing a rare client client with an expensive job can be the difference between life and death for a company. Taking a hard line with those clients often means that the client won't come back. Both the client and vendor know it, and the client takes ruthless advantage of that fact.

While the video above looks ridiculous at the retail level, it makes economic sense based on supply and demand. There's a huge supply of retail customers, but there's a short supply of film and television customers. In film and television, production company demand for jobs outstrips producer supply. When the equation is so uneven, the scarce side inevitably takes advantage.

Canadian Business

In my post about Pixar opening in Vancouver, I spent some time talking about the nature of Canadian business. Today's Globe and Mail has an article about Canada's problems with innovation and productivity. Here is a quote that elaborates on what I'd written earlier, dealing with the small national market and the branch plant mentality that is satisfied to make things that are created elsewhere, as the forthcoming Vancouver Pixar shorts will be.

Canadian businesses just don't innovate enough. Too many don't have an internal culture of innovation. The domestic market is small and fragmented; not enough firms think internationally. International, for many, means the U.S., period, a rather dangerous myopia since that country is going to be economically crippled for a long time.

The report doesn't say so directly, but foreign ownership is a drag. Yes, a few Canadian branch plants get “world-product” mandates from head offices for certain products, but most don't. It's a scandal - and the blame is on the Canadian business class, too many members of which dream of getting rich by selling out to foreigners - that most mining companies are foreign-owned, the brewing business is gone, high-technology firms such as Cognos and Newbridge were swallowed up, and so on.

UPDATE: And further emphasizing the branch plant mentality, only in Canada would a government invest $23 million tax dollars in an American company that's going to make a film based on an idea from Britain and consider it a win for Ontario industry. I'm glad for the additional jobs, but this is not the way to strengthen Canadian animation in the long run. It's just more of the same.

Pete Docter Podcast

The Museum of the Moving Image, as part of its Pinewood Dialogues, has posted an interview with Up's director Pete Docter.

(I earlier pointed to interviews on their site with Chuck Jones and Brad Bird. You can find out about those interviews here.)