Dumbo Part 4

(Revisions down below.)




It's a shame that the Dumbo draft that Hans Perk has posted (and it's all available now on his blog) is missing many animator identifications. We can guess that Art Babbitt handled the stork in this sequence, but it remains just a guess. We're fortunate, however, in knowing what Bill Tytla animated in this sequence.

This sequence keeps the audience in suspense over Mrs. Jumbo's baby until the baby is finally revealed. It's a two stage reveal, first showing us a cute elephant child and once he sneezes, showing us the ears that are his curse and finally his blessing.

The female elephants are never named onscreen, but are named in the draft. They are Matriarch, Prissy, Catty and Giggles. They are successors to the seven dwarfs in that their names describe their personalities and that they look similar, so must be differentiated by the way they move. Needless to say, Tytla is up to the task.

No explanation is ever given as to where Jumbo, Sr. is. The lack of a male role model for Dumbo or a male counterbalance to the female gossips leaves the role open for Timothy when he later enters the film.

Revision: I think that the use of space in this sequence is very important, and my previous writing about it didn't do it justice. All space on film is constructed. Even if a film is a single shot, there's a frame around it that excludes things. Once you add cutting and camera movement, a film maker is either carving up space or implying relationships by connecting things in space.

It's a cliché, and a useful one, to start a sequence with an establishing shot, showing the audience where everything is. It would be unsurprising to follow shot 11 of the stork looking into the elephant's car with a wide shot showing how many elephants are present and what their spatial relationship is. Instead, the sequence director or the layout artist made the decision to keep the space fragmented. At screen left, we have the four elephants. In the center, we have the stork and Dumbo. On the right, we have Mrs. Jumbo. Center stage is logically where the most important action occurs, and we have the stork concerned with procedure, getting a signature, speaking his poems and singing "Happy Birthday."

Once the stork is gone, Dumbo is center stage. At this point, the left and right become two poles of a magnet. At first, they have an equal attraction for Dumbo. Both sides express obvious pride. In shot 60, Dumbo looks from his mother to the others, and is equally pleased. Interestingly, it is the matriarch, not Mrs. Jumbo, who is the first to actually touch the child. Once his ears are revealed, those on screen left radically change their view.

This results in shot 62, the only shot in the entire sequence to show all the characters at once. Mrs. Jumbo slaps one of the others and removes Dumbo to her side of the screen. For the rest of the sequence, Dumbo is always shown with his mother in the frame. The only other shot with Mrs. Jumbo and the four is 77, where she pulls the pin to shut them away.

The cutting communicates the gap between Mrs. Jumbo and the others. Dumbo begins suspended between the elephants but ends connected spatially to his mother with the four excluded from their space.

The cutting is basic. There are no bravura layouts here, but clearly a lot of thought went into how this key moment -- the revelation of Dumbo's ears and the reaction of the community to it -- was to be staged. That's typical of so much of this film. It doesn't dazzle like Pinocchio or Fantasia, but within its tight budget, the creative choices are invariably effective.

Gene Deitch Interview

Brian Heater begins a four part interview with Gene Deitch. Here is part two. Here's part three. Here's part four.

Dumbo Part 3

In this sequence, we learn that the stork carrying Mrs. Jumbo's baby is running behind schedule.

The entire sequence is animated by Art Babbitt. The acting does not require flashy animation, but what's there demonstrates Babbitt's skill. During shot 1, a flying cycle, the stork's entire body stretches and squashes with the beating of his wings. The wing upstroke takes 12 frames while the downstroke takes 8 frames, giving the downstroke a definite accent that is timed to the music.

The rest of the sequence is all about weight. While we haven't seen the contents of the stork's bundle yet, we suspect that it's Mrs. Jumbo's baby and the way that Babbitt handles the weight of the bundle reinforces our belief. The bundle appears heavy when the stork drops it on the cloud. Babbitt also gets great contrast in timing in shot 3 between the stork's slow scanning of the earth below and his fast lunge to prevent the bundle from falling. That's contrasted with the slow lift, emphasizing the weight of the bundle yet again. The bit is repeated twice within the shot.

Shot 8 is another that's all about weight. For a third time, the stork has to stop the bundle from falling. There is a slow lift. The stork grabs the bundle with this beak, uses his wings to hold the bundle from the bottom and then waddles over to the edge of the cloud. That waddle is a very expressive piece of movement clearly showing how difficult it is to move this bundle. At the clouds edge, the stork leaps, and the weight of the bundle rapdily pulls him downward.

Incentives and Motivation

Daniel Pink is the author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It's an excellent book and I recommend it. The above clip is a summary of some of the book's findings and obviously has repercussions for creative fields like animation. It also ties into the bottom-up vs. top-down aspects of comics and animation that I mentioned in the addendum to my post about TCAF and Animation.

(If the text is too small to read on your screen, you can either hit the fullscreen button at the bottom right of the video, or you can watch the video on YouTube here. And doesn't this presentation beat the heck out of Powerpoint?)

Dumbo Part 2

This sequence is pretty much just exposition. The circus is leaving its winter quarters and the animals are being loaded onto Casey Jr. However, the sequence still emphasizes the parent-child relationships. The babies we have seen delivered in the previous sequence are with their parents and all are quite happy to be together and to be boarding the train.

Shot 9, animated by Hugh Fraser, appears fairly straightforward, but actually conveys an enormous amount of story and character information. The lead elephant is as happy as all the other animals we've seen boarding the train. Then comes Mrs. Jumbo, looking depressed. She stands out from all the animals due to her contrasting emotional state and facial expression. She once again looks up at the sky, echoing movements from sequence 1, shot 27, so we know that she's still looking for her baby. The elephant behind her taps her rump. After her surprise reaction, Mrs. Jumbo looks annoyed. Don't they understand what she's going through? Her melancholy returns and the following elephant pushes her into the railroad car. These last bits of animation set up the self-centered nature of the other elephants. Their lack of support will later manifest itself in the ostracism of her child, Dumbo.

It's interesting that Casey Jr. is anthropomorphized. He (it?) is the only object in the film brought to life. The fire engine used by the clowns later in the film is not alive. This could be due to Walt Disney's own fondness for trains or could be due to the popularity of the children's story The Little Engine that Could, a story that went through various incarnations between 1906 and 1930.

The stills below are from shot 19, animated by Poul Kossoff. It's a beautiful layout, with the overlapping hills contributing to the sense of space and perspective. The movement of Casey Jr. travelling down the track does nothing to draw attention to itself, but the animation is devilishly hard. The winding path and the reduction in size need to be carefully done so that the perspective and relative sizes of the cars stay consistent. The drawing problems are of a mechanical nature, but that does nothing to lessen the effort behind them. This is one of those shots whose success renders it invisible, but don't doubt the animator's skill or perseverance.


In the comments to Part 1, Steven Hartley asked about effects animator Cy Young. I know that Young was Chinese-American. According to Alberto Becattini, Young was born in 1900, worked at the Bray Studio from 1924-1934, at Disney from 1934 to 1941 and then finished his career working for the United States Air Force until 1962. He died in 1964. Below is a two-colour cartoon Young made in 1931 of Mendelssohn's Spring Song.

TCAF and Animation

Last weekend, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival was held at the reference library at Yonge and Bloor. The picture at left is only a portion of the festival. There were three more rooms of exhibitors and three rooms to house panels on various subjects.

The enthusiasm and productivity in the comics field these days is staggering. Besides publishers who are specializing in graphic novels, there are hundreds of individuals who are creating work that they self-publish in print or on the web. The work, of course, is of variable quality, but the energy level is high. No one attending could doubt the health of the field or its prospects for the immediate future.

Animation artists are some of the people who are gravitating towards comics. Certainly, at Comicon International in San Diego, artists from studios like Disney and Pixar have been publishing and selling personal work. Canadian animation artists are also moving in that direction, including some Sheridan graduates.

Sam Bradley (at left) and Nick Thornborrow were there selling The Anthology Project, a collection of work by 15 artists (several of them Sheridan grads) in a full colour hardcover collection similar to the Flight volumes. Copies can be ordered here (and are available in these stores) and you can see art samples here. A second volume is already planned.


Paul Rivoche, comics artist and designer for many WB superhero animated shows was once again at TCAF, meeting fans and selling collections of his artwork. Paul is currently working on a graphic novel adaptation of The Forgotten Man: A New History of The Great Depression by Amity Shlaes.

I had the pleasure of meeting Graham Annable for the first time. Graham is currently doing story work at Laika (he helped board Coraline) but has been doing is own comics and animation for years. His YouTube channel has 10,000 subscribers and Dark Horse has recently published The Book of Grickle, a compilation of much of his comics work.

Graham's animation work is minimalist and his humour is deadpan. Both work well with the limitations of being an independent animator. His work on YouTube is the basis for a videogame that will be available come June.

While it was great to see animation people taking advantage of the possibility of comics, the vibe on animation was not all good. I ran into a veteran storyboard artist, who told me that he called several management-type folks he knew and suggested they attend TCAF, looking for properties. Of the four he called, only people from Starz, an American company, said they'd be attending. Hollywood regularly treks to San Diego to look for ideas, but Canadian producers and broadcasters can't be bothered to look in their own back yards.

The panel Indie Comics and Indie Animation (from left: Jay Stephens, Faith Erin Hicks, Troy Little, Meredith Gran and Graham Annable) came down firmly on the side of comics over animation. Hicks and Gran are both working on comics full time now and not sorry to be out of the animation industry. Hicks is working on a graphic novel for First Second, Friends with Boys, and Gran has done some animation to promote her web comic Octopus Pie. The general feeling was that the freedom in comics was preferable to the assembly line nature of the service work that Canada seems to specialize in. As Stephens, Little and Annable have all gotten animation projects off the ground based on their comics work, it's clear that the animation industry in Canada is ignoring the talent it employs and in some cases actually driving it away.

Comics are definitely ascending at the moment and Canadian animation, at best, is standing still. Talent will flow towards the greater promise and unless Canadian animation can figure out a way to generate some excitement and provide greater creative opportunities, its long term health doesn't look promising.

Addendum: Something I've realized is that comics right now are a bottom-up phenomenon. Because the barrier to entry is low, the field is being driven by the large number of people who expressing themselves through comics. It's been this work, dating back at least to the 1980s that's allowed the field to hit a critical mass where mainstream publishers and bookstores are now invested in the field.

By contrast, due to the high cost of production, animation is a top-down phenomenon. As there are always fewer people at the top than at the bottom, and as business people are generally conservative --preferring to imitate proven successes rather than take chances-- animation has much less variety. It's more difficult for individual artists to have an impact on the wider field.

However, in the 1960s and '70s, comics were a top-down field as well. The field was dominated by just a few companies (Marvel, DC, Archie, Harvey) who turned out a narrow range of material and imitated themselves and each other. In the 1970s, newsstand sales tumbled and eventually the direct market and comics shops were born. The changing economics of the shops vs. the newsstands left some room for niche comics like Cerebus, Elfquest, Hate, Eightball and Love and Rockets and publishers like Fantagraphics. It was from these roots (and the earlier underground comix of the '60s) that produced the graphic novels of today.

The urge for self-expression was always there, but only when the economics of comics changed did the artists have room to begin pushing up from the bottom.

My hope (which might be a vain one) is that now that the economics of film and TV are beginning to change due to the web, animation artists will get the same chance as comics artists to start pushing the industry from the bottom up.

Love & Theft

Metamorphoses animation isn't as common as it once was. It's tough to do in cgi and so much other animation consists of moving around digital cut-outs. Shape changing, whether it's stretch and squash or metamorphoses, is one of animation's strengths, as is synchronizing to music.

This film is one of 10 shorts competing at the Cannes Film Festival. The NFB and YouTube have partnered to put them all online. Several of them are animated, with this one being my favorite. It's directed by Andreas Hykade and comes from Germany. You can register and vote for the films here or just watch them here.

(Link via Jim Henshaw.)

Dumbo Part 1

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here we go again. I'm hoping to complete this mosaic by September, before my teaching load increases.

For me, the two crowning achievements of the Disney studio are Pinocchio and Dumbo. That's not to say that I don't admire other films in whole or part, but I don't think that the studio ever bested these two.

I enjoy creating these mosaics because they force me to take a closer look at the film. Rather than get caught up in the story, I'm seeing the cutting continuity and getting a much closer look at the animation, not only learning who animated what but also seeing the poses and the spacing between drawings.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the generosity of Hans Perk, who has collected these studio documents at his own expense and is unselfishly sharing them with us on his blog.

The stories that Disney based his early features on were well known. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a famous fairy tale and Pinocchio and Bambi were well-known novels. Dumbo's origins are murkier. While the film credits a book by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, nobody knows the book. Animation historian Michael Barrier has researched the authors, the book and how it found its way to the Disney studio in a fascinating article that can be found here.

The film of Dumbo gets off to a rousing start with its credit sequence. In 1941, most movie credit sequences consisted of some kind of background motif and a choice of font. There were exceptions to this (the titles for Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941) include animation), but titles were fairly conservative at this time. Dumbo's titles are a riot of colour and combined with the musical fanfare definitely suggest a trip to the circus.

The opening sequence is heavy on special effects. The rain in the early shots is live action superimposed on painted backgrounds. The multiplane camera was probably used to get a sense of depth in the clouds. The effects animators continue to deal with the parachutes even when character animation is present. For instance, in shot 22, Harvey Toombs takes care of the bears while Miles Pike deals with the parachute. The same is true for shot 27. Bill Tytla animates Mrs. Jumbo while Cy Young animates the falling parachutes.

Storywise, the titles and the opening tell us that we're in Florida, the winter home of the circus and that Spring, with its new offspring, is here. With the exception of the sleeping hippo, all the other mothers are thrilled with their babies. This strengthens the disappointment Mrs. Jumbo feels when her child fails to appear.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival

If you are in Toronto this coming weekend, get to the reference library at Yonge and Bloor for TCAF, a gathering of independent and alternative comics artists who will show their work and participate in many panel discussions. Admission is free. Guests include Daniel Clowes, James Sturm, Seth, Chester Brown, and Jim Woodring.

There are several panels that relate to animation, including:

The Spirit of Indie: Where Comics Meet Video Games
Saturday, May 8th, 2:00 – 2:45pm, The Pilot

There’s more to the game industry than blockbuster, multi-system titles just as there’s more to comics than Batman. This panel
seeks to explore the ways in which independent comic artists and game developers have influenced each other and spurred each other on to explore the possibilities of their medium. Cartoonists/game contributors and creators Scott Campbell, Jamie McKelvie, Jim Munroe, and Miguel Sternberg will be interviewed by games journalist Matthew Kumar.

Spotlight: Graham Annable’s HICKEE
Saturday, May 8th, 12:30 – 1:15pm, Novella Room

Join Graham Annable (creator of Grickle, storyboard artist, Coraline) and frequent collaborator Scott C. (Double Fine Action Comics) in a multimedia exploration of his career in pleasantly twisted visual storytelling, ranging from comics to feature film storyboards to indie animation and illustration.

Indie Comics and Indie Animation
Sunday, May 9th, 3:30 – 4:30pm, Learning Center 1

Four cartoonists who are also animators discuss the ins and outs of the interplay between the two mediums. What’s different? What’s the same? How do the two affect each other and what’s the difference between working on independently-driven animation and comics and corporate pursuits? Featuring Graham Annable, Meredith Gran, Faith Erin Hicks, Troy Little, and Jay Stephens. Moderated by Matt Forsythe.

Walt's People Volume 9

If you live in the United States, the ninth volume of interviews of people who worked with and for Walt Disney is now available from Xlibris. The book will be available through Amazon in a matter of weeks. This volume, edited by Didier Ghez, contains interviews with Berny Wolf, Art Babbitt, Bill Melendez, Ken O'Connor, Thor Putnam, Art Scott, Ken Anderson, Les Clark, Joe Grant, Walt Peregoy, Frank McSavage, Jack Bradbury, Burny Mattinson, correspondence with Ollie Johnston, and more.

Volume 10 is already in the works. These books overflow with history, technique, and opinion and each works as a stand alone volume if you're intimidated by the thought of trying to catch up.

Fourth Anniversary

Just a note to acknowledge that today is the fourth anniversary of this blog.

Sheridan Industry Day 2010 Addendum

Kevin Parry has posted the opening title to Sheridan's industry screening last week. Besides Kevin, Andrew Murray, Andrew Wilson, Allison Neil and Adam Pockaj were responsible for the concept and execution of this piece, including the voices. It has a playfulness and a spontaneity that exceeds many of the films produced over the course of the full year and it's a reminder to all of us that if we have fun making a film, the odds are that the audience will have fun watching it.

Sheridan College Animation Intro 2010 from kevinbparry on Vimeo.

Sheridan Industry Day 2010

Another school year gone. Another group of graduates stepping out into the world. Another industry day. What's below just scratches the surface of what went on.

Second and Third year student volunteers prepare for the crowds.

The graduates of the four year program get set up to meet the industry.

Veteran story artists Jim Caswell and Warren Leonhardt.

Left to right: Paul Teolis of Nelvana; Michael Carter, President of CASO (Computer Animation Studios of Ontario) and Jim Caswell.

Frank Falcone of Guru Studios.

A view of the post-graduate computer animation program workspace.

Steve Schnier of Vujade and John Lei of Noodleboy Studios.

Kevin Parry with his characters from the stop motion film The Arctic Circle.

Carla Veldman with her characters from her stop motion film The Scarf.

Allesandro Piedemonte (A Cut Above) and King Mugabe (Red Snow).

Andrew Murray (Blind Date) is interviewed by a reporter from CHCH TV.

Advice to Graduates

This was a comment I contributed to a December, 2008 post called The Final Customer. As graduation time once again approaches, I'm giving it its own entry.

Here's some basic advice I'd give to graduates from any year. Network aggressively. If you know people in the business, start talking to them now and keep talking to them. It's good to touch base with people when you're not looking for work, just so they don't think that the only time you get in touch is when you want something. If you're lucky, you'll learn what studios are busy and you can target them.

Apply to any animation-related job you can find. Knock on studio doors and if you are lucky enough to talk to people, get their business cards and send them a thank you email. Stay in touch with them once a month.

If there are any industry associations, join them. [I would add that you should join business networking sites like LinkedIn .] If there any industry events, attend them. Bring business cards and introduce yourself to strangers. Sometimes artists are shy and don't want to push themselves, but nobody has a reason to seek you out this early in your career. You've got to do the work.

Be prepared to relocate. At this point in your career, you need resume credits and experience. The sooner you get them, the sooner you can position yourself for the jobs you want. Sometimes, the only jobs are at small studios in out of the way locations, because nobody with experience wants to work/live there.

If you're not working, keep producing new art. That way, you can revisit studios once a month and have new things to show. That will convince the studio of your commitment. There's no reason for a studio to see you more than once if your portfolio/reel are exactly the same as last time.

Stay upbeat when talking to people, no matter how discouraged you are. No studio wants to listen to an applicant complain, especially if the studio is struggling to stay in business. Stay enthusiastic and be willing to do whatever they ask, even if it's not what you really want. There will be lots of time to reposition yourself in the future.

Job hunting is a skill. The sooner you start applying for jobs, the sooner you'll learn the ropes. Do not sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. Keep putting out feelers and keep producing new work. Sooner or later, you'll catch a break.

When you do, live below your means. Don't assume the job will last as long as promised. Don't assume that the studio will have another project when the current one is done. Save your money because you will spend time unemployed.

If you're working, keep networking. Let the other studios know that you've been hired. They will take you more seriously if other studios want you. Keep talking to friends in the business, monitoring the situation wherever they are working. That way, when you're out of work, you can hit the ground running in order to find your next job.

While you're working, keep your portfolio and reel up to date. When a project is finished, ask for samples of your work from it, even if you can't show the samples until the project is released. You don't want a studio to shut down and leave you with no access to the work you've done. It's happened.

Graduating in tough times could turn out to be a blessing. Those people who manage to make it through the recession are going to be smarter and tougher than those who don't (though luck does play a part in it). When the business goes through other slow periods, you'll be more ready to deal with them while others disappear.

Something I would add is the concept of a "best-before" date. When you go to the grocery store, perishable items have a best-before date stamped on them. After that date, an item is no longer fresh. Graduates, too, have best-before dates. Their freshness expires one year after graduation. At that point, if people have not yet worked in the industry, they are competing against a new crop of graduates whose skills and enthusiasm are fresher. Someone who has gone a year without being able to break into the business raises questions in the mind of a prospective employer.

For this reason, I always tell grads to take any job offered, even if it's not a preferred studio or task. Getting that first job immediately separates a grad from all the people who have yet to find work. It also provides a grad with a new network of co-workers who may be able to provide future employment or a reference.

Grads have a tendency to look at their first job as the culmination of their educations, but it isn't. It's merely the first step in a career. Just as you go from knowing everything about your high school to knowing nothing at all about your college or university, you're now going from knowing everything about the school you are leaving to knowing nothing (or very little) about the animation industry. It's no fun to start again at the bottom, but that's where you are and over the course of your career, you may find yourself starting over several more times. Recognize your position for what it is and accept it. With luck, it's only temporary.

Luck and timing play a major role in a career. If John Lasseter had been born 10 years later, he would not be where he is today. Someone once asked actress Lillian Gish what it took to succeed. She responded that it took talent, persistence and luck, though she thought a person could get by with two out of three. Since you can't control luck, focus on the other two and hope for the best.

Drifting Off Course

I know that business has dominated art on this blog lately. For reasons that I don't understand, this school year has been a lot busier for me than previous years and the business stuff is faster and easier to write about than the art.

Things should slow down for me in the next few weeks and I hope to restore some balance over the summer. I'll be doing more mosaics and hope to take a close look at the work of specific animators like Bob Cannon.

Two Approaches to Creating

Paul Graham is a software engineer and a venture capitalist. His latest essay talks about two approaches to creating software.

"There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants.

"Our own startup, Viaweb, was of the second type. We made software for building online stores. We didn't need this software ourselves. We weren't direct marketers. We didn't even know when we started that our users were called "direct marketers." But we were comparatively old when we started the company (I was 30 and Robert Morris was 29), so we'd seen enough to know users would need this type of software.

"There is no sharp line between the two types of ideas, but the most successful startups seem to be closer to the Apple type than the Viaweb type. When he was writing that first Basic interpreter for the Altair, Bill Gates was writing something he would use, as were Larry and Sergey when they wrote the first versions of Google."

Graham might not be aware of this, but he's described the difference between art created to satisfy the artist and commercial art. Note that he says that the most successful start-ups seem to come from the first approach, not the second.

There was a time in the recent past when that first approach seemed to dominate. It was the case at Disney in the early '90s, at Pixar and in TV in shows created by John K, Matt Groening, Craig McCracken, Genddy Tartakovsky, Joe Murray, etc.

These days, the trend seems to be going the opposite direction. One of the companies that's bucking the trend, surprisingly, is DreamWorks. With Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, the studio seems to be moving more towards films that have a strong connection to the creators. Ironically, Pixar seems to be moving in the opposite direction with its slate of sequels and Disney's rehashes-to-come like Pooh and the Tinkerbelle DVDs. It would be ironic if these two studios traded places or even if they met in the middle.

As audience members, we instinctively know when a work is personal and when it is not. While the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks revival has made money, everyone knows those films are being pushed by business people and not artists.

This is not to say that films made to satisfy an artistic need are inherently superior. There are a lot of artists who fail to master their craft or engage audiences, but it's interesting that in an unrelated field, Graham has come to a conclusion that we would all probably endorse: a personal need as opposed to a perceived market need is more likely to produce a better result. Unfortunately, the media conglomerates generally don't see it that way.

Death of C.O.R.E. Still a Mystery...

...according to this article in The Globe and Mail.

UPDATE: This comment at Canadian Animation Resources lists dollar figures from the Ontario Superior Court as to C.O.R.E.'s assets and debts.

Industry Lessons

As the school year is drawing to a close and students will be heading out to summer placements or graduating and looking for jobs, it's a good time to read and remember these tips from Steve Hulett, business agent of The Animation Guild.

Complexity and Collapse

Clay Shirky is one of the most perceptive people I'm aware of when it comes to analyzing the changing media landscape. He doesn't blog often, but when he does, it's something that is widely linked to and discussed.

His latest entry is about how complex systems are unable to react to changing environments in any way except to collapse. Basing his piece on The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, Shirky says:

"Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

"The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

"In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

"When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification."

Tying this into media and journalism, Shirky says:

"...last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

"“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

They don't know how to do that because there are too many vested interests in their management and financial structures as they currently exist. This corroborates the point of the book The Hollywood Economist that I recently reviewed. Hollywood's economic structure is built on multiple revenue streams as well as finding investors, merchandising partners and tax incentives. Where once 90% of a film's revenue came from the theatrical box office, now it's only 20%. Hollywood is now more about the deal more than it is about the film.

Shirky's point also ties into Malcolm Gladwell's idea about a tipping point. In Gladwell's view, small changes in a system build up without apparent effect, but then one more small change causes the system to tip. In other words, the system's lack of flexibility doesn't appear to be a problem until it is a big problem and everything is forced to change.

Shirky concludes with this:

"When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future."

Simple in this case means cheaply. Shirky refers to Charley Bit My Finger, a YouTube video that has been watched 175 million times and was made for nothing. That video's success was an accident, but it's only a matter of time before a team of animation people, using cheap tools and web platforms, is able to create an ongoing success with drastically lower costs than established media.

Should complex systems collapse, there will inevitably be new complexity in the future, but it's in the spot between complexities where opportunity lies, because that's where established media can't compete as they can't cut their costs fast enough.

This 2008 article talks about live action web series that are earning their creators a living. Who in animation will be the first to succeed at this?

The Hollywood Economist

(Updated at the bottom.)

If you are someone who wonders why movies are the way they are today, this book is essential reading. Edward Jay Epstein (site and blog), who has written about the economics of Hollywood for several years in various publications, explains in great detail where the money comes from and where it goes.

It is common now for media to report the box office grosses after every weekend, and except for establishing the relative popularity of films currently in release, the information is completely lacking in context.

For example, Gone in 60 Seconds cost $103.3 million to make and grossed $242 million. On the face of it, that looks like a success. However, the distributor (Buena Vista) only realized 40% of the world wide box office, amounting to $102.2 million. The rest of the money stayed with the movie theatres. From Buena Vista's gross, they deducted $67.4 million for advertising, $13 million for prints, and $10.2 million for insurance and other expenses. After these deductions, what was left was $11.6 million.

But of course, there are aftermarkets such as DVD. In this case, the film garnered $198 million in sales, but there's an industry standard that the film distributor only gets a 20% royalty. So Buena Vista Home Entertainment took $158.4 million of it and then Buena Vista the film distributor took $19.7 million for expenses and fees. Nicolas Cage had 5% of the gross and received $3.9 million, leaving just $16 million credited to the film itself. At this point, the film had grossed $440 million and was in the red for almost $80 million.

There were other markets, such as pay TV and free TV. However, at the end of 2008, eight years after the film was released, it was in the red $155 million.

This is typical of Hollywood accounting. On paper, the film ran a loss, but the film's theatrical distributor and home video distributor both made a lot of money off this film. In this case, since Disney ultimately owned the film, the theatrical distribution company and the home video company, the money all flows back to one place. However, it's a kind of shell game. Hollywood gets investors to put up money for the film itself, giving the investors part ownership of the film, but Hollywood takes all the money at the distribution stage, leaving the film itself with little or no profit to split with the investors.

This is what happens to independent productions. The producers are stuck raising all the money to make the film. They may get an advance from the distributor, but that money plus prints and advertising costs have to be paid back from the distribution gross before the distributor takes a fee. The distributors vacuum up all the cash, including their profits, leaving the producers to take a loss. These are worse odds than Las Vegas.

Epstein goes into great detail how Hollywood works every tax incentive it can to cut its own costs; how it raises money from investors and then skims the investment before putting the money into a picture; how it aims films at teenage males because they are the easiest group to attract to theatres and because they consume the most food from the concession stand; why sex and nudity are avoided; why stars are no longer necessary; how Hollywood appeases Wal-mart, which sells one third of the DVDs in the U.S; how Hollywood gets free advertising from merchandising partners; and why the Oscars are a complete deception.

It is possible for an individual to rise within this system to become a writer or director, but it's plain that unless that person is happy to be creating exactly what Hollywood is already churning out, there's little chance of getting anywhere. The book is fascinating but also somewhat sickening.

While the audience is distracted with the box office horse race or Sandra Bullock's marital problems, this is what movies are really about and anyone in the business or aspiring to enter it needs to know it.

(Update: You can hear a podcast with Edward Jay Epstein discussing the book here. Link courtesy of James Caswell.)

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."