Possible Villains for The New Bremen Town Musicians

 I'm playing with the idea of getting the band back together, as if they ever were, and was thinking of possible villains they might confront.

Here's some ideas...

Old School Animation Table

 I have this custom made collapsible portable animation stand that I'm not using these days.  Now that everything is digital, my poor drawing table sits idle.  I had it built with two lawn-chair hinges so I could raise and lower it for a comfortable drawing angle.  I added a removable copy stand rostrum for a digital or film camera and used it for pencil tests and full production work.  It's still cool and I have it set up in my office just for kicks right now.

CLAYDREAM..Documentary about Will Vinton

 This is the trailer for the finished film started in 2017 originally called "Welcome to My Daydream " about Will Vinton and his studio.

 CLAYDREAM_Follow link for the Tribeca premiere screening: TODAY Sunday, June 13th @ 4pm pst https://www.tribecafilm.com/films/claydream-2021

This is a still from the documentary of Will and myself discussing a scene

 Will and I discussing a scene

 

Music and Mood in Animation_ The Two Jinn's

 

I made Jinn Jinn Meets Sadiqi over the CoVid lock-down purely as a distraction.  During the making, I fell in love with the scratch track by Ravi Shankar because it captured the playfulness and spirit of what I was trying to do in animation.  As it usually happens, I couldn’t get the rights to use the music in its entirety and had to find free music that fit the flavor and action but it changed the whole level of energy and mood.  It works, and you can see it here: https://vimeo.com/447473057    But, I still missed the Shankar tribute version, so I put this version of the Ravi piece here on my blog just to show how much music can influence the feel of an animated cartoon.  Sorry for the poor quality, (go to the linked version above for better image quality and the alternative sound track), but this way I won’t get any strikes or violations…

Jinn Jinn

It's the Corona virus self quarantine here, and I’ve decided to spend my time working on another ‘homegrown’ cartoon from my home studio.  I'm expanding on something I wrote about earlier in a posting called Seeing Things that goes over the same discovery process talked about here.

The origin for this film is unique in that it wasn’t inspired by a book or my attempt to create an original character, it came from a tablecloth! There is a phenomenon called Pareidolia where the brain tries to make sense of chaotic information presented to it.  This is how we see pictures in clouds and faces in patterns.  My wife has a tablecloth we use often and in the pattern I saw this extraterrestrial flying in his aircraft, and in another section of the cloth was his alien friend or pet. 

I’ve named the ET Jinn Jinn because he might have been confused as a genie because he rides in a Vimana: a Hindu flying chariot.  His friend Sadiqi, (which means friend), is also an inter-dimensional spirit buffalo, or something.

Originally I had envisioned Jinn as a time traveler flying around looking for fun in different historical events and accidentally altering history.  He's the one who put the crack in the Liberty Bell and tipped over the Tower Of Pisa.  Anyway, I settled on an origin story of how Jinn meets his pal Sadiqi, it gives me an opportunity to figure out who these guys are and what they look like moving.

Like The Yellow Submarine, this film is becoming a mixture of cultural styles, and turning psychedelic pretty fast.  I know this is not going to be liked by everyone or maybe anyone, but with the quarantine going on; it’s a nice way to spend some time.

Here are three tests strung together with a scratch audio track added, (it might not play too smoothly).
Jinn Jinn doesn't have pupils yet in these tests which makes him look more evil than he is...

STAY HEALTHY!  

Design test with Stand-in Jinn Jinn and Sadiqi

Title Card Idea_01

Title Card Idea_02

Trying to find expressions with this design

More expression exploration

More exploration with a 3/4 head turn and a happy Jinn Jinn

A hungry Sadiqi design

Sadiqi expression test

The original tablecloth that inspired Jinn Jinn

Jinn Jinn against the tablecloth Vimana

Rough version of the Vimana & Jinn Jinn over the original tablecloth

A harder to see Sadiqi, which I modified quite a bit, from the tablecloth.

Fox Hunt and The Yellow Submarine

It’s taken sometime to process the graphic impact of Heinz Edelmann’s The Yellow Submarine.  George Dunning is credited for directing this Beatles feature film but the design was singularly birthed by Heinz Edelmann.  Unfortunately both men have passed away, but even so, I believe history has left a trail that might account for how this style developed.

The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a fusion of contemporary rock & roll and Victorian influences, including the British survival of two World Wars and the teachings of Aleister Crowley.  Producer George Martin further sweetened the mixture with classical orchestrations.  This touch of old and new sensibilities was simultaneously happening in the graphic arts of the time too.

Artists like Milton Glaser reached back into the past, recycling vestiges of Art Nouveau and the later Art Deco to create a contemporary style for the 60’s commonly called Pop Art.  Heinz Edelmann also used this template to the design the world of Pepperland for  The Yellow Submarine and caricatured the current designs with the fashionable bell-bottoms and boots of the day blown up to ridiculous proportions.  This style was pirated by lesser talents like Peter Max through out the Psychedelic era.

Now, in the world of animation Walt Disney had impacted the field to the point that everyone was becoming a clone of Walt’s graphic style which tried to emulate nature more and more.  Two filmmakers, Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin, choose to experiment with the radically different aesthetic backlash Art Deco and the Modern Art movement was to the traditional classical representation.

 

Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin made the Art Deco film Fox Hunt and being a British film that gained some notoriety, it’s not unreasonable to think that a young Heinz Edelmann or George Dunning might have seen it as impressionable youths.  Graphically The Yellow Submarine owes a debt to Art Deco but there are a few scenes which might point to a direct influence.  Fox Hunt has equestrian riders coming down Art Nouveau staircases very similar to the ones Ringo drives his red car down in The Yellow Submarine.  It could all be coincidental I suppose, but…  

  

Riders descending staircases in Fox Hunt

Ringo's car descending  staircases in The Yellow Submarine

I did an earlier article on Gross and Hoppin speculating that their film La Joie de Vivre may have influenced the 1940 Disney classic Fantasia.  You can find it here: https://joelbrinkerhoff.blogspot.com/2011/10/la-joie-de-vivre-influencing-fantasia.html

Richard Williams Troubled Masterpiece

The sad news of Richard Williams passing on Aug. 16^th 2019 rocked the animation world.  It caused many to reflect on his brilliant career and contributions to animation as a teacher and master animator.

Part of his legend was the attempt to make the greatest animated film in history. The Thief and the Cobbler was going to be his masterpiece.  With a long troubled history spanning 3 decades the film  never accomplished Williams’s vision having been wrestled away by Warner Brothers.

The film existed in three different versions; the first was distributed in South Africa and in Australia as The Princess and the Cobbler on 23 September 1993. Then in December 1995, Miramax Films, released the second version entitled Arabian Knight featuring newly written dialogue, songs, and a celebrity voice cast that was added months before the film's release.  And the third most faithful version known as The Recobbled Cut is Garrett Gilchrist's fan restorations which follows the Williams work print very closely.

You can read the films checkered history in full here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_and_the_Cobbler

So why was this masterpiece so problematic, and why hasn’t it been seen by more people?  Mr. Williams did not like to discuss its because the failure hurt him deeply, but we can look at it today with our highly politicized social warrior eyes and see what spectacular things he was able to accomplish and also get away with, things that would never fly today.

 The film is an amazing feat of animation done before computer assistance and never intended only for children.  There are truly astonishing visuals and adult themes that may have more meaning than a casual viewing might yield.  What motivated Williams and why he shaped this story as he did may never be fully know.  But as glorious and amazing as the animation is, the film does have its flaws.

The story-line is paper thin, and the ending foretold right in the opening narration.  An unseen Narrator spills the beans by saying a threat can be stopped by the simplest of things while his disembodied hands conjure the Golden City and then frame it with a border shaped like a ‘tack’.  Later the king’s advisor Zigzag steps on a tack and accuses the cobbler, who just happens to be named Tack, of all things, had attacked him.  The whole film is built on this rather obvious wordplay of a tack and attack.  

The Narrators hands forming the tack clue

In the cast we have King Nod who seems oblivious to all that's happening in his kingdom, because he is, well, asleep.  The kings daughter is saddled with the horrible name Princess Yum Yum and, as her name implies, she looks yummy.  She is the love interest, and desire of the wicked Zigzag advisor to the king, who is voiced wonderfully by Vincent Price with the right degree of humor and oiliness.  Zigzag, probably the most developed character in the film, has six fingers on each hand, and wants to get them all over the princess by buttering up the king. Then, there’s the Thief, a silent figure, (unless you watch the Arabian Knight version with Jonathan Winters providing a nonstop internal dialogue that becomes annoying pretty fast).  This shifty guy has no character ark whatsoever and remains the same throughout the film never having learned a thing.  Last is the Cobbler, another mute figure who only speaks at the very end, the unlikely hero. He is kind to animals and clever with his hands.

 The film has wildly politically incorrect moments by todays standards, that were problematic even during production then and are the chief reasons for modifying the film with its different releases.  Garrett Gilchrist's Recobbled version is the closest we have to Williams original vision. We find inappropriate behavior, which may have actually been acceptable for the culture and time period the story is set in, like the feminized, castrated eunuchs who announce the arrival of Zigzag in their high pitched women voices.  Then there’s Zigzags gift to King Nod of a woman in a curtained structure, (a cage?), named Mombassa, who we never see except for one eye peeking coyly out of the curtains.  Now concubines and courtesans were historical rolls for women but this is particularly disturbing because as her name implies, she may be a black woman kept naked and caged only as a plaything! The scene is even creepier as the king puts his hand into the curtains and we hear her giggling inside while his daughter Yum Yum is standing there watching it all.  He even takes the cage with him to watch a public Polo match while sitting next to Yum Yum with his arm still in the cage! Then there are the gymnastic slave women of the evil king of the One Eyes who tumble and contort to form a throne for him to sit on! He is literally sitting on a chair made of women! These adult gags shine a light on Williams sense of humor, and one wonders if there is symbolism to the One Eyes. Were they a representation of the All Seeing Eye, the evil secret controlling power that exploit women in sex trafficking?  Perhaps that’s going too far. 

Eunuchs announcing the coming of Zigzag

Zigzags gift to King Nod as Yum Yun looks on

Mombassa peeks out of her cage

Yum Yum watching in disgust

King Nod, Mombassa, and Yum Yum at a Polo match

King of the One Eyes sitting on his throne of women

The Witch who has an obvious prophesy

The Thief and the Cobbler maybe exhausting in it’s totality with its long complex moving perspective shots and thin character development. It may take a long way to tell the story with incidental figures like the witch who reveals an obvious clue by uttering “A tack, attack!” in a vision that we knew about from the beginning.  But even with its flaws, it’s worth seeing over and over again for its wonders.

Find it here:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL18B0CA620B61D076

Philo

It's been forever that I have posted to this site, and the last thing was about my personal short animated piece called Philo.  It was a cathartic experience that let me recapture the joy of animation and find the things that attracted me to the art form originally.

Since childhood I watched cartoons and was moved emotionally by the imagery and the music.  I  saw the potential to touch people in a way that live action movies could not.  Animation seemed then, and now to be the culmination of all the arts: Cinema, music, dance, painting, writing, etc.

As I was making Philo I tried to pay homage to the studios and individuals who influenced me.  I am an admirer of Walt Disney of course, but also the renegades, who broke away from the emulation toward realism, that birthed the stylized look of UPA.  Artists like Art Babbitt, Jim Tyer, Chuck Jones, and writer Michael Maltese, along with John and Faith Hubley, Ward Kimball, Bobe Cannon, were and still are reasons why I became an animator.  Another early influence for these people as well as myself were the works of the early silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin and the great Buster Keaton.

If you are familiar with any of these, you will immediate see the influence.   

Philo from Joel Brinkerhoff on Vimeo.

Will Vinton Turned 70

I don't know how I forgot to post this but my old boss, Mr. Will Vinton had a 70th birthday celebration this year that I was not able to attend.  I did however paint this portrait for Will with a sculpture of Mark Twain from the celebrated Claymation feature film The Adventures of Mark Twain as my present.

Will is one of the nicest people I've been fortunate enough to meet and so many opportunities were given to me at the Vinton Studios.  I hope Will enjoys many more happy birthdays!

  UPDATE: Unfortunately this was Mr. Vinton's last birthday: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/will-vinton-dead-oscar-winning-legend-claymation-was-70-1149596

New Short and the Graphic Influences

I’ve been working on some pretty stylized character designs for another personal project.  Why I do these things is not rational and is the same reasons, I suppose, an artist does anything.  But, I’m learning what I’m doing is heavily influenced by what I enjoyed as a child and the awe I felt watching animation: moving drawings, imagine that!  My films are stylistically different from each other, each having a graphic look I discovered while growing up in a family of artists.

I can point to individual artists that imprinted me, and with this new project I can see this style grew from the work of designer Ed Benedict who populated Hanna Barbera Studios cartoons from the late 50’s.

The backgrounds are influenced by the rebellion, that sprang against Disney’s realistic literalness, that began with the UPA studio and their embracing of modern art. The high styling of both characters and backgrounds was so popular that even Disney had to incorporate it to appear fresh and relevant.

The animation style I’m trying to work in comes from the Disney artist Art Babbitt who was able to mesh the fluid motion of classical drawn animation with the high stylized designs that was happening at the time. Unlike the limited animation that Ed Benedict's designs were subjected to at Hanna Barbera, Babbitt frequently animated on ones, meaning 24 drawings for every 24^th of a second film required, instead of the 12 drawings shot twice which is a common practice, ( it is still recommended that ones be used on very fast actions).  A great example of Babbitt’s integration of fluid classic animation and high styled characters would be his work in Richard William’s The Thief and the Cobbler.

This new project may take some time to finish because I don't have any help on it,but I am having fun drawing just as crazy as I want.  Animation has become play again instead of work.

Below is a clip setting up the conflict between characters.  It's nothing too original but I hope it gets the story going.

Animation clip with scratch track and no sound effects.  

Ice-Peter

The trouble with doing a personal film is they can take forever to do.  Real work and real life have a way of eating time and energy from projects that you may want to do, and this short film is one I never thought would be stretched out over years.  The short was fraught with troubles which made it easier to shelf and neglect.  But technology progressed and I was able to solve some of the problems I couldn’t when I first started.  One I’ve never quite fixed is the narration which was completely unusable.  I tried rerecording many times and never could match the inflections and feel of the first tracks.  After filtering the heck out of them, this is the end result.

I’ve always loved Wilhelm Busch and his quirky style.  He reminds me of Edward Gorey to some degree but Busch pioneered some visual jokes which have become cliché standards in cartoons from the golden age of animation.  I wrote about them in this earlier post:  http://joelbrinkerhoff.blogspot.com/2006/08/cartoon-inspiration.html    

Here is my faithful adaptation of Wilhelm Busch’s Ice-Peter.

"Welcome To My Daydream" a New Documentary

At last, the whole story of Will Vinton and Claymation is going to be told by filmmaker Marq Evans in the new documentary “Welcome To My Daydream”

This link from Cartoon Brew goes more in depth about the film and its importance in animation history: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/documentary-2/exclusive-first-look-will-vinton-documentary-welcome-daydream-153840.html  

I’m not sure where I first saw “Rip Van Winkle” but it touched me emotionally with that strange beauty good animation has.  I remember these surreal moments in the film where Rip is dancing in the sky with pulsing color blobs set to the beat of the music, and how affecting the song Rip sang to his friend at the end was.   Later, I ran across a 16MM print of the early documentary made in the 70's about Claymation and saw a young Will Vinton with long hair and a full beard, along with Barry Bruce, and I think, Bill Fiesterman, and Joan Gratz.  It must have been during the shooting of “Martin the Cobbler” because it had this great scene where a clay crew of stage hands is frustrating the clay actor playing Martin. The door to the miniature set opens and the giant head of Will himself peeks in to ask how things are going on set.  I knew then and there these were people after my own heart and wanted to work for them one day. 

Not only is Will one of the sweetest people I know, but so many good things have come from the opportunities he made possible for me and many others.  Thank you Mr. Vinton, I look forward to seeing your story continue.  

Best Workstation Yet

It's been awhile since I've posted anything which means I've been busy, but here's an update on my search for ergonomic working in the digital age.

I ran across a workstation that is very similar to mine using the same software, Cintiq and monitor configuration.  The big difference is that I don't have to reach over my drawing to get to my keyboard and that surprisingly makes a real difference.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

You can see my system, on the left with the yellow sub on the monitor, can dock menus on the large monitor and leave the Cintiq free for drawing.  My Cintiq is elevated and at a comfortable height and angle for drawing and my keyboard is mounted underneath which is ergonomically better and keeps me from stretching over my drawing to get to.
  

Dino Floss

I was sent some old memories.  My daughter grew up watching a children’s show called Adventures in Wonderland on the Disney Channel that had animated stories done by the Will Vinton Studios.  Here’s a piece I did called Dino Floss that John Ashley Pratt designed the characters for.  These stories were some of the most fun I had at the studio and I ended up doing over twenty of them.  Good times!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ergonomically Improved

I did this awhile ago but my work-space has been ergonomically improved by Velcroing the keyboard onto my riser holding the mini-Cintiq. No more weird twisting. Here's a side by side picture for comparison.

Stop Motion in the Digital Age #5: The Hybrid Film

           "Kubo and the Two Strings", Laika's latest film, is about to be released.  It looks fantastic.

 

In past postings on this blog about stop motion in general, and in the digital age, (type Stop Motion in the search bar to see all the posts), I’ve personally wrestled with the reasoning behind this hybrid style because it seemed as though everything could have been done with computers.  Now, I think the penny has finally dropped, and I’m beginning to understand the logic behind it.

Personally, as an animator who has done both stop-mo and c.g., if I were given a puppet that was well built and allowed me to get the gestures I wanted, and having the same character built as c.g., I would choose the puppet anytime.  Let me explain.  The interface of a  c.g. character is not as immediate or intuitive as touching and moving a puppet.  I could move much faster, and keep my focus on performance by not having to pick through menus and processes that are found in computer animation.  Somewhere in this blog are posts about input devices that would allow a person to manipulate a puppet that moves a c.g. figure, so you can see the idea of 'if only I could just grab this thing and move it around', has been thought about in computer animation.

True, the computer allows you to embellish and improve the animation through a process of refinements, but with the new frame grabbing software programs like Dragon Stop Motion, you can see your scene as you are animating, and play it back at real time, and make changes to your animation without re-shooting your whole scene, similar to the computers allowing refinements.  Both styles of animation are time consuming and take great skill, so where's the advantage?

Here’s the logic:  By building your character as a stop motion puppet you have the speed and intimacy of stop motion, plus the new power of digital assistance while animating, in rig removal, facial replacements. And by building a c.g. character, it can be manipulated with no restrictions, (armatures, support rigs,) for facial animation, special effects, populating crowd scenes, and it would interface with particle programs and other c.g. dynamics making the best of both worlds.

We’ve already talked about computers used to export or rapid proto type printing of props and full color replacement heads, and we talked about computers for sets and environments where characters are added into it through green screen. 

The computer has changed the way films are made in every way. Live action movies are loaded with effects no one would know were there until shown.  Computers have change the way animated films are made, people no longer using paper and pencil, paint or even film. So, I think I finally get it.

Kudos to Laika and “Kubo and the Two Strings”.

   

Heavy Metallurgy

I was asked to do a music video that featured heavy metal music.  I've stopped foaming at the mouth but my ears are still bleeding.

Dream Project

While my children were growing up, I came across the book "The Boy Who Could Sing Pictures" by Seymour Leichman.  I thought it would make a wonderful animated film and pitched the idea to the studio I was working for at the time.  It's a simple story of a kingdom lead by an inattentive ruler who is kept in the dark by his advisers. The overall atmosphere and mood are excellently captured by the illustrations and I wanted to keep the anthropomorphic sadness the architecture of the peasant township intact.   There are some changes I think would make the story stronger and more dramatic but I still think the book would make a magical animated musical.

Here are my interpretations of the kings advisers Pomp and Circumstance.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Maggie and Her Painting

I just received a lovely notice that Maggie MacLean is well pleased with her portrait and so is her owner Kevin. I'm so pleased they both are too. Kevin is a Disney animator now and has many screen credits under his belt. I first met him at the Will Vinton Studios where he was the youngest animator barely out of High school. Go Kevin, go Maggie!