Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I must say I was happy with a couple of the posts this past week. The John Wilson piece on Monday can only be bettered by this coming Monday’s piece on Irma La Douce. On Tuesday, the 1953 magazine article on Geoffrey Martin‘s designs for Animal Farm made for an excellent piece. Many thanks to Chris Rushworth for that. I also have wanted to combine all four of the walk cycles from 101 Dalmatians and have thought about it for over a year. I’m glad I finally got around to doing it. And, naturally, the fine posts from Bill Peckmann‘s collection rounded out the week. So, in all, I was pleased with what I got to post. Sorry to boast, just thinking aloud. It’s day to day here, so I’m often surprised with what shows up.

The BAFTA nominations were revealed on Tuesday morning. The award for Best Animated Short includes the following three nominees:

Abuelas (Grandmothers) by Afarin Eghbal, Kasia Malipan & Francesca Gardiner is a mixed-media short.

Bobby Yeah by Robert Morgan is a stop motion animation film that looks like it came out of the hands of David Lynch.

A Morning Stroll by Grant Orchard & Sue Goffe is a film that’s been out there for a bit, seen at many film festivals and on the Oscar short list. (This is the film I like most.)

Congratulations to all the film makers.

The BAFTA nominees for Animated Feature include: TINTIN, ARTHUR CHRISTMAS and RANGO. Let’s hope for RANGO to win, but I expect the Brits to give it to ARTHUR CHRISTMAS. (Please, not TINTIN!)

- Speaking of nominations, I learned on Thursday that I was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Children’s Program. My show, I CAN BE PRESIDENT, was nominated. This is big for me, and I’d love to win it.The show had such a low budget and was such a problematic schedule that it was a terror to get through production. I’m pleased it came out so well. Congratulations also to the guys that helped make it: Matt Clinton, Katrina Gregorius, and Christine O’Neill.

Outstanding Children’s Program
A.N.T. Farm – Disney Channel
Dora the Explorer – Nickelodeon
Go, Diego! Go! – Nickelodeon
I Can Be President: A Kid’s-Eye View – HBO
My Family Tree – Disney Channel

- The Oscar watch was down to the last (and I do mean the last) animated feature. MARS NEEDS MOMS was better than Hoodwinked and Chipwrecked, and I also think it was better than TINTIN – another MoCap film. Simon Wells directed MARS, and his work is reliably stable. (He directed PRINCE OF EGYPT, BALTO and WE”RE BACK.) He and Wendy Wells also wrote the script from Berkeley Breathed’s book. Like TINTIN, the film had a breakneck pace, but unlike TINTIN it didn’t ignore some of the basic rules of cinema. No annoying swooping spins around the characters, with an endlessly moving camera; it also didn’t feature lots of busy work (as if to prove it was animated)l nor did it have a breathless pace (as if to create Action! Adventure! and Tedium!). No, unlike TINTIN, MARS NEEDS MOMS was more craftily observant of the audience’s reaction. It knew when to stop the action, then go back to the danger. It knew when to add humor instead of just running, running, running.

However, like TINTIN the dead eyes were hard to get into, and the graphics were horrible to look at. Sure, it’s MoCap and tied to the live action, but does it have to have a faux-realistic look to it? Couldn’t it have been more cartoon? (Couldn’t TINTIN have been flattened to look like the comic strip, despite the MoCap?) The lead boy looked to have 5 o’clock shadow on his face in all the scenes on Earth.

The filmmakers want it to be called animation, but under the end credits they include footage of all the live actors doing key lines and being shot with all the tennis balls and helmets. Maybe it should have been live action with just the martians and sets done with MoCap. The film didn’t work, but it worked better than the Spielberg’s animation effort, TINTIN. Unfortunately, it won’t get an Oscar nomination or a Golden GLobe, like TINTIN. Neither film deserves one.

In voting for this award, I sat through:
PUSS IN BOOTS,
CARS 2,
RIO,
WINNIE THE POOH,
TINTIN,
HOODWINKED TWO,
HAPPY FEET 2,
RANGO,
ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS: CHIPWRECKED,
WRINKLES,
A CAT IN PARIS,
CHICO & RITA,
ARTHUR CHRISTMAS,
KUNG FU PANDA 2,
ALOIS NEBEL,
GNOMEO & JULIET and
MARS NEEDS MOMS.

The only one I couldn’t sit through to the end was HOODWINKED.
It was worth it to see CHICO & RITA, A CAT IN PARIS and even WRINKLES.
I also didn’t mind RANGO, KUNG FU PANDA and HAPPY FEET 2.
None of them compared to Sylvain Chomet’s THE ILLUSIONIST.

- Gene Deitch has added two pieces to his blog, his first arrival in Czechoslovakia being met by “Lulka” the emissary from the Czech studio. Then the second post details the meeting with Zdenka, who soon became the love of his life and his wife.
They’re both warm and wonderful reads.

The surprise and the gem of the Zdenka piece is a long video (scroll all the way down) which gives the history of their studio and their relationship. It’s quite a sweet film that’s well worth watching to see if only to see what changes the animated studio has undergone in the years that Mr. Deitch has been in charge. You also get to feel more at home with this great animation director and almost feel as though you know him by the end of it. It’s a really good piece that I don’t think you’ll regret viewing. (I was surprised at how quickly the one hour video downloaded.)

- John Dilworth reported this week that his last film, Bunny Bashing, is now available on YouTube. So I’ve embedded it, above.

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