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Since 1933, the Disney Golden Books has been one of the most popular children’s books series of all time. The classic stories matched with beautiful artwork…

The post The Art of The Disney Golden Books Art Book Review appeared first on RABBLEBOY - The Official Blog of Kenneth Kit Lamug.

The Art of Epic Mickey is a 160-page hardcover landscape coffee table book written by Epic Mickey co-writer Austin Grossman and features a forward by Game Director…

The post The Art of Epic Mickey Book Review appeared first on RABBLEBOY - The Official Site of Kenneth Kit Lamug.

The obesity epidemic takes its toll on cartoon characters in a new book and exhibition.

Disney parodies are becoming harder to distinguish from real Disney films.

After a difficult week for DreamWorks in which they announced their largest layoff ever, the studio dominated the Annie Awards tonight.

Finding the perfect book for the beloved animation fan in your life can be a big challenge, but these gift-book ideas will inform and inspire anyone who loves animation and drawing.

Here's a heartwarming moment of corporate cooperation as cartoon characters owned by four different entertainment conglomerates—Mickey Mouse (Disney), Bugs Bunny (Warner Bros.), Scrat (20th Century Fox), and SpongeBob (Viacom)—team up to beat the living crap out of a real-life human being.

Last night was a night of cartoon firsts at the 2014 Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards as "Bob's Burgers," "Disney's Mickey Mouse" shorts, and "Simpsons" voice actor Harry Shearer each won an Emmy Award for the first time.

"Drunk History," the Comedy Central series in which drunk celebrities explain real history, set their inebriated sights last night on Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, and the creation of Mickey Mouse.

A look at animation history via Cartoon Brew's archives.

A look at animation history via Cartoon Brew's archives.

A second season of Mickey Mouse shorts will begin airing April 11th at 9pm (ET/PT) on the Disney Channel. Each new short will be available the day after its cable premiere on WATCH Disney Channel, Disney.com, iTunes, and YouTube.

Disney’s Mickey Mouse short Croissant de Triomphe picked up another Emmy—its third one—for Outstanding Short-format Animated Program. The award was announced during the 65th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards, held on Sunday, September 15.

The short had already won two Emmys in the juried Individual Achievement category. The large number of Emmys won by the short does not necessarily mean that it is the best of the new Mickey shorts, but only that it was the short chosen by Disney to be submitted for Emmy consideration.

In the Outstanding Animated Program competition, South Park won for the episode “Raising the Bar.” It is the show’s fourth Emmy Award in that category. The series was competing against episodes of Bob’s Burgers, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Regular Show, and The Simpsons.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced the juried winners for the 65th Emmy Awards. Among the winners are six artists for Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented in a ceremony on Sunday, September 15, and the show will be televised on September 21st on FXX (a spinoff-network of FX). Congrats to the winners!

• Adventure Time “Puhoy”
  Cartoon Network/Cartoon Network Studios
  Andy Ristaino, Character Design

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced the juried winners for the 65th Emmy Awards. Among the winners are six artists for Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be presented in a ceremony on Sunday, September 15, and the show will be televised on September 21st on FXX (a spinoff-network of FX). Congrats to the winners!

• Adventure Time “Puhoy”
  Cartoon Network/Cartoon Network Studios
  Andy Ristaino, Character Design

The new Mickey Mouse short Yodelberg premiered on the Disney Channel last night and is now online. The next new short New York Weenie will debut Friday, July 5th.

A second new Mickey Mouse short, No Service, has been made viewable (for American viewers) on Disney’s website. This short is night and day from the first one they made public, Croissant de Triomphe. It has a solid setup, fast-paced but clear direction, character-driven conflict and gags, and most importantly, it’s funny.

A couple weaknesses stood out. As with nearly every other contemporary cartoon, the short is padded with unnecessary dialogue. What does the audience gain from hearing Donald Duck say, “That’s not funny,” after we already see him fuming from being dissed by Mickey? The bigger issue is the backgrounds. As lovely as they are as illustrations, they don’t fulfill their primary purpose for the shorts, which is to stage the characters and gags. There are random background textures and details that distracted from the main action in nearly every scene. The backgrounds even obscured the jokes. For example, there’s a gag with Mickey’s tail in the framegrab below that I completely missed on the first couple viewings because of the random dark shadow area placed exactly where the gag takes place:

I don’t know the production order of the shorts, but No Service is a huge improvement over the first offering. These could end up being some of the funnier takes on classic cartoon characters, and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the series.

Here’s the first trailer for the new series of Mickey Mouse shorts that will debut on the Disney Channel on June 28.

(Thanks, Axel D Camacho, via Cartoon Brew’s Facebook page)

Walt Disney Animation Studios released the poster today for its new short Get a Horse! that will debut next week at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. The directors of the film, Lauren MacMullan and Dorothy McKim, as well as animator Eric Goldberg, will attend Annecy to unveil the short, which features a vocal track by Walt Disney himself as the voice of Mickey.

Click on the poster below for a super-big version!

Among the most important things an animator must keep in mind when animating is making sure that drawings read clearly to the viewer. By using strong keys, solid staging, and clear silhouettes, the audience can understand the actions that a character performs onscreen.

Legendary Disney animator Fred Moore, known for his broad yet overwhelmingly appealing drawings, took that idea one step further in his animation. Not only did he have strong silhouettes in his keys, but he ensured that his animation had strong silhouettes throughout a scene. The clarity of his silhouettes remained even in the breakdowns and inbetweens.

In this scene from Pluto’s Judgement Day, Moore animates Mickey struggling to regain order after Pluto, covered in mud, chases a kitten into his house and wrecks havoc:

Despite how frantically Mickey is moving around in this shot, as well as being obscured by Pluto and the mud effects, his action is still clear because Moore kept the silhouettes intact from drawing to drawing for most of the scene. The negative space between Mickey’s limbs, head and ears as well as the kitten’s paws, ears and tail help bring out the poses. Further, he exaggerates his poses for readability, especially during anticipations. Moore also uses strong arcs, both in Mickey’s torso and his arms, to visually guide the viewer where the actions is going next.

I went over the whole scene and blacked out Mickey and the kitten to show their silhouettes more clearly:

Disney story artist Mark Kennedy talks about silhouettes in greater detail on his blog.

The fashion sphere can’t seem to get enough of Mickey and Minnie these days, and not just the expected corporate collabs like OPI cosmetics or Barney’s Electric Holiday, but actual couture showstoppers stomping the runways in fashion capitals and captured in the pages of high fashion editorials (like the above Peter Phillips mask for 2005 US Vogue). And even after having revisiting the subject a dozen times over the last five years, designers are still finding new inspiration to cut and sew a pair of mouse ears into their fashion stories.

Marcel Gerlan’s spring 2013 collection “Gerl Power” for Gerlan Jeans featured a girlie assortment of bow-veralls, polka dots and Minnie-maxi skirts as means of alleged expression of feminism for the current generation of young women.

Fashion photographer Prasad Naik’s severe and somewhat abstract analysis of the subject was the star in his 2012 fashion editorial.

Iceberg’s spring/summer 2010 collection brought impractical play suits and gimmicky mouse eared shoulders to Milan fashion week in 2009.

And Jeremy Scott, who arguably began this specific cartoon-y trend with his fall 2009 ready-to-wear collection showcased head-to-toe tributes to the cartoon icon, including his now famous Mickey Mouse sneakers for Adidas.

Most animation fans know that Ub Iwerks co-created Mickey Mouse. But he contributed a lot more to animation than people think.

1. Ub Iwerks was a workhorse

While the rest of Disney’s studio was toiling away on the last few “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” shorts that they were contractually obligated to finish for Universal, Ub animated the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, alone and in complete secrecy. During work hours, Ub would place dummy drawings of Oswald on top of his Mickey drawings so nobody would know what he was doing. At night, Ub would stay late and animate on Mickey. He animated the entire six-minute short singlehandedly in just a few weeks, reportedly averaging between 600-700 drawings a night, an astounding feat that hasn’t been matched since. When the success of Mickey Mouse propelled the Disney studio to new heights, Ub continued his efficient streak by animating extensive footage on Silly Symphonies shorts like The Skeleton Dance and Hell’s Bells.

2. Ub Iwerks was a mechanical marvel

When not animating with a pencil, Ub loved to build and create inventions. He was intrigued by the inner workings and mechanics of machines, and loved to delve into what made things work. Supposedly he once dismantled his car and reassembled it over the course of a weekend. With this mechanical knowhow, Ub invented devices that incorporated new techniques into his cartoons. After Iwerks opened the Iwerks Studio in 1930, he heard that Disney was attempting to develop what later became the multiplane camera. Ub one-upped his old partner and made his own version from car parts and scrap metal, and incorporated the multilane technique into his cartoons, like The Valiant Tailor:

3. Ub Iwerks was a jack of all trades, and a master of every one

Besides being a skilled animator, mechanic and machinist, Ub constantly expanded his creative and intellectual pursuits through hobbies and sports. Being the ultimate challenge-seeker, he excelled at every single thing he attempted. And when he felt that he had mastered something and it was no longer a challenge to him, he’d quit. When Ub bowled a perfect 300 game, he put his bowling ball in the closet and never bowled again. When he took up archery, he became such a skilled archer that he got bored of getting bulls-eyes and quit that too. Even as an animator, Ub felt he perfected his craft and after his studio closed in the mid-1930s, he never animated again.

4. Ub Iwerks created movie magic

When Ub rejoined the Disney studio in 1940, Walt Disney gave his old partner free reign to do as he wished. With Disney’s resources, Ub developed special effects techniques for animation, live-action films and Disney’s theme parks, much of which is still in use today. He helped develop the sodium vapor process for live-action/animation combination and traveling mattes, which he won an Oscar for in 1965 after utilizing it in Mary Poppins. He adapted the Xerox process for animation, which eliminated the tedious task of hand inking every cel. For Disneyland, Ub designed and developed concepts for many of the park’s attractions, including the illusions in The Haunted Mansion and the animatronics for attractions like Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and Pirates of the Caribbean. Disney even loaned him out to Alfred Hitchcock to help with the effects needed to create flocks of attacking birds in The Birds.

5. Ub Iwerks made animation what it is today

If Winsor McCay laid he foundation for character animation, then Ub Iwerks built a castle on top of it. He took the didactic rigidness of what animation was in his era and made it loose, organic, appealing and fun. Building upon what Otto Messmer did before him with Felix the Cat, the characters Ub animated were packed with personality. Characters like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse were creations that audiences could relate to as no characters before. They thought, breathed, emoted and were infused with life.

What Iwerks designed and animated in shorts like Steamboat Willie and Skeleton Dance contained the principles (squash and stretch, appeal, anticipation, etc.) that became the genesis of the “Disney style”, which animators like Fred Moore and Milt Kahl later fleshed out. His work reached out and influenced animators all over the world, and they took the ball and ran with it. Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman, who worked under Ub at Disney, brought his sensibilities to Warner Bros. and developed the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes series. Many animators got their start at Ub’s studio in the early 30′s, including UPA co-founder Steve Bosustow and Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones. Manga and anime pioneer Osama Tezuka was also greatly influenced and inspired by Ub’s work.

To learn more about Iwerks’ life and work, read the biography The Hand Behind the Mouse.

Disney announced today that they will release a ‘lost’ Mickey Mouse short called Get A Horse! featuring Walt Disney himself as the voice of Mickey Mouse. The hand-drawn short “follows Mickey, his favorite gal pal Minnie Mouse and their friends Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow as they delight in a musical wagon ride, until Peg-Leg Pete shows up and tries to run them off the road.”

The never-before-seen work will be presented at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France on Tuesday, June 11. Lauren MacMullan (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Wreck-It-Ralph), Dorothy McKim (Meet the Robinsons) and animator Eric Goldberg (Winnie the Pooh, Princess and the Frog, Aladdin) will be on hand to present the film.

Disney unveiled a new Mickey Mouse short today called Croissant de Triomphe, that can be watched HERE. It is one of 19 new shorts that will begin airing on Friday, June 28, on the Disney Channel, Disney.com and other Disney-branded platforms.

Paul Rudish (Dexter’s Laboratory, Sym-Bionic Titan, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic) is exec producing and directing. Aaron Springer (SpongeBob SquarePants, Korgoth of Barbaria) and Clay Morrow (Dexter’s Laboratory, Chowder, Camp Lazlo!) are also directors. Joseph Holt is art director and Stephen DeStefano did character design.

If the first short released Croissant de Triomphe is any indication, this is a handsome and distinctive series, featuring a mixture of Cartoon Modern-styled backgrounds and loose, expressive cartoon animation. The three-and-a-half-minute running time of the first short is perfect. I’m glad that studios are awakening to the fact that there can be other lengths besides 7- and 11-minute episodes.

If I have any observation about the first short Croissant de Triomphe, it’s that it struggles to find the humor in its set-up, which is Mickey driving around Paris on a scooter. Outside of a couple half-hearted attempts at gags (nuns knocked into the air like bowling pins who then float down, an appearance by Cinderella), the cartoon emphasizes frenzied non-descript action sequences over slapstick. Even obvious gag set-ups—for example, Mickey dressed as a knight and lancing croissants—have no comedic payoff. Hopefully as the crew finds its footing, they are able to balance the accomplished action sequences with a more spirited comic sensibility.