How to Train Your Dragon

(No spoilers.)

While I haven't seen all the DreamWorks animated features, I've seen most of them. How to Train Your Dragon is my favorite so far. While I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda, I didn't find Po's transformation from loser to warrior convincing. The arc for Hiccup, the boy pictured above, is better constructed and the plot points are all in place.

The story has elements of E.T. and is pretty predictable, but it is well told and emotionally satisfying. There's a good balance of humour and suspense. The film is built on a father-son relationship that works within the context of the film and resembles Disney's Chicken Little. The dragon designs are nicely balanced between caricature and menace and the Vikings are fun to look at.

There are things that I could criticize in the film, but they don't detract from the overall experience. I saw the film flat, not in 3D, as I was more interested in judging the story elements than I was the technique. I still found the camera moves too busy in the early part of the film and wonder if I would have suffered whiplash had I watched it in 3D. The children, except for the male and female leads, are one dimensional, which often happens with supporting characters in animated films. It's a bit of a stretch to have Vikings talking with Scottish accents, though I guess it is plausible. The relationship of the largest dragon to the others is not clear and probably unscientific. I can't say more without spoiling something.

I couldn't help thinking while watching the film that should it outgross Disney's Bolt (and it deserves to), it will be vindication for director Chris Sanders, who was removed from the Disney film by John Lasseter. Dragon also seems to me to be the DreamWorks film most dominated by it's directors (Sanders and Dean Dublois). With DreamWorks now set on releasing 5 films every two years, I think it would be all to the good for Jeffrey Katzenberg to loosen the reins a little and let directors put their stamp on films.

Miscellaneous Links

Kris Graft of Gamasutra writes that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment will be opening a gaming studio in Montreal that will gradually grow t0 300 employees by 2015.

Bhob Stewart writes about The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air, a 1938 radio series which initially featured Walt Disney himself as host and the voice of Mickey Mouse. Stewart provides a player for seven episodes of the series.

Fantagraphics will soon publish the fourth volume of Our Gang comics by Walt Kelly. A complete 14 page story from the book in PDF format can be found here.

Farhad Manjoo of Slate reviews Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, about creating an online business with minimal start-up costs. You can read excerpts from the book here.

(Gamasutra link via James Caswell.)

The Great Canadian Migration

Two articles in The Globe and Mail caught my eye this week. They clearly point to the future and they have repercussions for Canadian animation.

A survey from Ipsos Reid shows that Canadian viewers are now spending more time on the internet than they are watching TV. The average now is 18 hours a week vs. 17 hours of TV watching. Time spent online has been growing annually, and there is no sign that it will stop.

The other important item was that the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, in charge of regulating TV, has dithered yet again. There's been a battle going on over whether broadcast networks would receive money from cable and satellite companies for their signals. Until now, the cable companies have retransmitted those signals for free. Rather than make a firm decision, the CRTC asked the Court of Appeals to decide whether the CRTC had jurisdiction. Should the court rule that it does, the CRTC says that broadcasters should receive compensation, but declined to say how much. The figure should be negotiated between broadcasters, cable companies and satellite providers.

No one knows how long it will take for the court to rule and if negotiations will produce any results. Everyone's assumption is that cable fees will increase to cover the compensation.

What we're left with is an audience that is walking away from television and a government bureaucracy that is ignoring that fact. The media landscape is changing rapidly and the government can't move faster than a crawl. Even if a decision is made quickly, any increase in cable rates for subscribers is only likely to drive people away from TV that much faster.

Canadian TV is in a death spiral. As the audience leaves, advertising revenues will go down. As revenues drop, so will TV budgets. Cheaper shows will drive more of the audience away, resulting in still lower revenues.

Those working in Canadian TV have never had it easy. Those animation studios depending on Canadian TV for their livelihood would be smart to start diversifying immediately. I'm betting that in five years, we won't recognize what Canadian TV has become and the CRTC will be powerless to stop the changes.

Rare Mickey

Last June, I posted about Michael Sragow's biography, Victor Fleming: American Movie Master. One of the films that Fleming directed was Around the World in 80 Minutes (1931), a documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks. The reason for my post was that the film contained original Disney animation of Mickey Mouse. I was not aware of this and a quick scan of the animation history books on my shelf didn't lead to any information.

Over at Didier Ghez's Disney History site, JB Kaufman was able to provide some information, as he had screened the film at the Library of Congress.

I recently learned that the film is now on DVD from Grapevine Video. I purchased a copy, and below you'll see some extremely rare Mickey animation. I have no idea who animated it, though I might guess Dick Lundy. Enjoy.

ImageMovers Digital to Close

The Wrap is reporting that Disney is closing down ImageMovers Digital, the studio responsible for the production of the motion captured films directed by Bob Zemeckis, including The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. Disney purchased the studio in 2007. The article implies that Disney is still interested in going ahead with the Yellow Submarine remake, though it's unclear if the closing means that they will subcontract future motion capture or use other techniques instead.

UPDATE: There are some interesting comments from the industry perspective at the Animation Guild Blog.

Copyright and Creators

"What we have now is you can get paid for craft. You don’t get paid for art. You get paid for craft. Every animator that I know, or almost every animator that I know, works at a studio, working on shit. They know it’s shit. They do their best to not think about it, but it’s god-awful commercial shit.

Which is not to say that commercial stuff is bad, I’m not anti-commerce. But it’s devised by some idiot, it’s lowest common denominator, and this is what really talented people do. They do crap work. And it’s not just in animation; it’s at all levels."

The above quote comes from an interview (part 1, part 2) with Nina Paley that covers her personal history and issues revolving around copyright. It's part of a larger roundtable discussion on copyright that can be found here and includes composer Jonathan Newman (who rebuts Paley) and an attorney who summarizes the history of copyright.

Tomm Moore Interview

Tomm Moore, director of the Oscar-nominated The Secret of Kells, is interviewed by Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com. The interview delves into the historical roots of the film and talks a bit about how production was split up between studios.

There's also an article in the N.Y. Times about Moore and the making of the film and A.O. Scott reviews the film for the Times.

"Brendan’s busy adventures load the film with a bit too much narrative for its brief running time, but the sometimes hectic plot ultimately serves as scaffolding for Mr. Moore’s extraordinary visual brio. Using the vivid colors and delicate lineations of the Book of Kells for inspiration, he establishes a surprising and completely persuasive link between the ancient art of manuscript illumination and the modern practice of animation. Like the crystal lens that is a crucial element of Aidan’s craft — an enchanted eye that refracts and renews his, and then Brendan’s, perception — “The Secret of Kells” discloses strange new vistas that nonetheless seem to have existed since ancient times."

Everyone, including Moore, expects Up to win the award for best animated feature, but this is a case where the Oscars have still done something positive. Up has finished its theatrical run and the bulk of its DVD sales have already occurred. An Oscar will give Pixar a piece of hardware and some bragging rights, but will not materially affect their bottom line. For Cartoon Saloon, the studio behind Kells, the nomination will solidify their reputation and make it easier to finance future projects. In this case, even a loss will be their gain.

Be Careful What You Wish For

I'm a little surprised at Cartoon Brew's insistence than Avatar be considered an animated film. I don't know if the reason is because it is the highest grossing film in history and they want animation to have some of the glory or if it's because James Cameron is so insistent that Avatar should not be tainted with the 'A' word. In any case, there are reasons (beyond whatever anyone thinks of Avatar) why I don't think considering it an animated film is a good thing.

Those outside the film business may not be aware of the distinction between production and post-production. In a live action film - one with no animation or special effects - production is the shooting of the film. Post-production is what happens after the film is shot. Those things typically include editing, music, sound effects, dialogue looping, the sound mix and titling.

When a film does include special effects, unless they are done in camera during the regular shoot, they are considered post-production. In the past, certain effects like in-camera matting, hanging miniatures and glass shots were done during production, but most effects were done during post.

In what we would all acknowledge as typical animated films (Snow White, Toy Story), animation is production, not post-production. In films that have animated elements added (Jurassic Park), animation is done in post-production. This may seem like an esoteric distinction, but it's the difference between what is central to a production and what sweetens a production. I am not in any way dismissing the importance of post-production. A film's music score has a huge impact on how the film affects audiences and certainly Jurassic Park's impact depended tremendously on the quality of the dinosaur animation, but in each case, the post-production elements are driven by what has already been shot.

Animators may have worked over Avatar's motion capture and added creatures, but their work was driven by what had been shot (or in this case, recorded). To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. There is no question that Jack Pierce's Frankenstein make-up added to the audience's perception of Boris Karloff as the monster. However, many actors at Universal played the monster (Bela Lugosi, Glen Strange), yet Karloff is generally considered the definitive performance. While Avatar's animators supplied more than digital make-up, it's still the underlying motion captured performance that counts.

I've written extensively on how fragmented the process of making an animated film is and how so many of the acting decisions are made before the animator starts work. The character designs, the storyboard and the voice performance all make acting decisions that constrain the animator's interpretation. There is no question that motion capture is yet another constraint, probably larger than all the others. To insist that Avatar is an animated film is to marginalize animators even more than they are in what are generally considered animated films. Is this the direction we want things to go? Better to agree with James Cameron and focus our attention on films where animators create, not enhance, performances.

Disney's New Strategy

Robert Iger's free-spending ways have caught up to him. Having purchased Pixar and Marvel for a combined total of $10 billion, the studio has to start making some serious coin in order to pay off the purchases.

The strategy is to focus on $150 million films that can be heavily merchandised or films that cost less than $30 million. Anything that falls in the middle of those two budget neighborhoods is out, even if it's a proven money maker. The Proposal, a Sandra Bullock film that cost $40 million and that grossed $315 million worldwide won't have a sequel as a result of this policy.

New York magazine reports:

The franchise-intensive mantra came after Disney CEO Robert Iger admitted publicly and unflinchingly that 2009 had been "awful": Having started the year with Confessions of a Shopaholic (domestic gross: $44 million) in the worse recession of all time, it then summered with the costly $150 million rodent flop G-Force (domestic gross: $119 million), and spent the end of the year eating turkey upon turkey: The Bruce Willis action flick Surrogates (domestic gross: $38 million) was laughable; the comedy Old Dogs (domestic gross: $48 million) was not.

To help pay for the whopping $10 billion Disney spent acquiring Pixar and Marvel in recent years, Iger decreed that s the world's largest licensor of consumer products, Disney needs its film not to merely succeed in theaters, but to sell gobs of spinoff merch, as well: In 2008, the company sold some $30 billion worth of licensed consumer products, and suffice it to say, exactly none of that came from Sandra Bullock hand towels.

The problem, as I see it, is that this is a high risk strategy. G-Force proves that. It's at exactly the budget that Iger thinks is going to save the company. Flops at that budget level will hurt badly.

If Eisner's tenure was defined (at least initially) by how successfully he capitalized on Disney's brand, Iger's tenure is going to be defined by how his purchases affect the bottom line. He's dug himself a $10 billion hole and now he has to climb out of it.

Forgotten Firsts

Often, a first isn't really the first. It's simply the first that people remember. Steamboat Willie isn't the first sound cartoon, but it's the one that made a difference, so it's the one that enters the history books.

If a first isn't very good, it tends to be forgotten. That's the case with Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, the first TV series to include computer animated characters. It ran only 22 episodes in syndication in 1987-88. I wrote the article below as production on the series was ending.

It's ironically fitting that the article appeared in the first and only issue of Cartoon Quarterly, edited by John Cawley and Jim Korkis and published by Gladstone in the fall of 1988. The magazine had a fannish slant, but the roster of writers is one that readers of the blogosphere will recognize. Besides Cawley, Korkis and myself, the authors included Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck, Floyd Norman, Will Finn, Scott Shaw! and Mark Kausler. The magazine showed a lot of promise and this 22 year old issue is far more interesting than any recent issue of Animation Magazine. Unfortunately, the magazine is as forgotten as Captain Power.

Ed Hooks on Avatar

Ed Hooks is the author of Acting for Animators. While his own background is not in animation, he's identified many things that animators need to be thinking about while doing their work.

One point that he's made is that the quality of a performance is based on the script supplying the necessary foundation for building a character. In his February 2010 newsletter (scroll down for the relevant material), he talks about the shortcomings of Avatar's script from an acting standpoint.

Zoe Saldana is Neytiri, the Na’vi female lead. She has been raised in a kind of New Age Garden of Eden. The Na’vi spend a lot of time tuning into trees, plants and their spiritual vibes. But what are Neytiri's personal values? The script really doesn’t say. In her first scenes, she's helping chase off those pesky humans. But then, in the second act of the script, she befriends the fake Jake avatar and gets romantic. And, at the very end of the story, she slays the dragon, Col Quaritch. You look through the script again and again, searching for clues about Neytiri's values, childhood, former love life…anything at all that might help. Not much there. She’s a Na’vi princess, that’s all, and she does what Na’vi princesses do. She is reactive to the events that happen to her. It is difficult to find her objectives. The transitions in her character don’t really work.

I found this essay particularly interesting in light of James Cameron's complaints that the actors in Avatar were passed over for Oscar nominations. Cameron specifically mentioned Zoe Saldana as being ignored. Cameron's view was that the technology involved was somehow seen as cheating, but as Hooks points out, the problem was not the technology, it was the script.

Hooks criteria could, and should, be applied to recent animated features, many of which suffer from the same shortcomings. While animation artists are constantly asserting "story, story, story!" the truth is that their understanding of story is lacking. Too many animated films have a disconnect between personality and plot, where characters do things based on the needs of the plot rather than the needs of the character.

Ink and Paint

Patricia Zohn writes about the women of ink and paint during Disney's golden age over at Vanity Fair.

Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”—the all-male assembly line—once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25—a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes—who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism—Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors—but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.

The article includes original interview material with some of the women, one of whom was Zohn's aunt.

(link via Mark Evanier.)

Mindy Aloff Interview

Mindy Aloff, author of Hippo in a Tutu, is interviewed by Kent Worcester of The Comics Journal.

"Both animation and theatrical dancing are labor-intensive activities that benefit from a benevolent visionary at the helm. Animation today could learn much from what Walt Disney arranged for his staff to do: to visit the ballet and sketch the dancers. And dancing could benefit from Disney’s appreciation of melodic, song-based music with a clear pulse as a floor for dancing. Unfortunately, the simple pleasures of dancing that asks the performer to use a comprehensible vocabulary of steps and expressive gestures, which relate moment by moment to music, are exactly what most students of both animation and choreography want to evade now. Balanchine, in fact, once wrote about how dancing could learn about the elaboration of fantasy from cartoons. Artists globally, though, don’t want what these historical animated films are equipped to teach – joy as the text and complication as the subtext; instead, they want complication, edge, as the text and more complication as the subtext. I think the culture is going to have to change for either group to learn from one another, and I just don’t see that happening in my lifetime. Perhaps a few individuals will take this as a challenge and prove me wrong. I certainly hope so."

Payton Curtis Interview Part 2

Chris Walsh has put up part 2 of his interview with stop motion animator Payton Curtis. Part 1 is here.

Henry Selick Podcast

The Museum of the Moving Image has posted a 76 minute audio interview with Henry Selick that was recorded on November 18 and 19 of last year. You can also download an mp3 of the interview at the link.

Payton Curtis Interview

Chris Walsh is one of my fellow instructors at Sheridan College. While he lectures on story and animation history, his main area of expertise is teaching stop motion. Over at his blog, Walsh-O-Matic, he has the first part of an interview with stopmo animator Payton Curtis. Curtis recently worked on Coraline and The Fantastic Mr. Fox and talks about the process of animating on a stop motion feature.

Hothouse

The National Film Board of Canada periodically runs a program called Hothouse, where they offer emerging animators the paid opportunity to create short films at the NFB. The program is only open to Canadian citizens or landed immigrants and the call has just gone out for the sixth edition, for which all films will be made in stereoscopic 3D.

The deadline for submissions is February 19 and the program will run from April 5 to June 25 in Montreal. Anyone interested can find out more details here.

Cordell Barker Master Class Part 2

"This Is Not An Animated Film"

As a follow up to my earlier post, here's James Cameron's take on what he's doing.

Cordell Barker Master Class

Cordell Barker talks about The Cat Came Back.

(link via Jim Caswell.)