3D Mandy...

Dean Yeagle is one of my favorite ‘sexy girl’ artists. His character Mandy is even hotter than my adolescent crush, Little Annie Fanny, done by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder for Playboy. So imagine my joy in finding this very cool 3D picture of Mandy! To see her in glorious 3 dimensions you must cross your eyes and focus on the image in the middle. Thanks Dean. See more of lovely Mandy here: http://www.cagedbeagle.com/

Before the Digital Age…

Colin Giles posted this on his site: http://cartooncolin.blogspot.com/
It shows what a labor of love and dedication it took to make an animated film. Now things are banged out in weeks with little care except keeping in budget.

What The ...?

Generally the topic is animation but anyone who knows me well knows I love the Beatles. So what does McCartney do in his off times, you might ask? Appear on cooking shows apparently. Here he is making mashed potatoes. Bizarre!

Jim Tyer

I thought I would show more Jim Tyer work. Here’s some screen grabs by CLARKE (CSNYDE) from the Mighty Mouse cartoon A Cat's Tale (1951.) These images are sequential and show the wild distortion of the characters anatomy.

Many people including John Kricfalusi hold him in high regard. I still haven’t reconciled my feelings about his work. Sometime it has a unique sparkle to it. Other times it’s just totally jarring and not in keeping with the rest of the cartoon. Sometimes it’s totally appropriate as when Gene Deitch used him on Tom Terrific and other works tailored to his style. Jim was a very good draftsman as his comic book art shows but he was an iconoclast animator.

You can see more stills here: http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/05/jim-tyer-animation-cats-tale.html

And actual clips here: http://www.strangetoons.com/strangetoons%20root%20folder/shows/Jim%20Tyer/jimtyer.html

Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy

I still love these guys. Look how graceful Oliver is. These guys were the real thing.

Going Off Model

It’s nice to see so much interest on the internet in animation. It’s also nice that others are doing the ranting for me about why today’s animation is so poor. But one thing I’ve run up against time and again is people who don’t know or care that much about the media controlling a project. They inevitably demand a retake because they have single framed through and see a squash or stretch as the character being off model. Played at speed, the scene works, but they insist you stay true to the design and have those offending frames removed. Of course things can be pushed to crazy extremes such as what Jim Tyer was doing in the examples from Heckle and Jeckle. But even his stuff has a charm to it. Thanks Kevin Langley for the great screen captures.

Frame by Frame

Another favorite site for animation is Kevin Langley’s Goober Sleave. This is his posting of a frame by frame look at a dance sequence from ‘The Greatest Man in Siam’ animated by Pat Matthews. You can see the whole toon, at speed and other cool stuff here: http://klangley.blogspot.com/
Siam-Pat Matthews
Uploaded by klangley