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The perfect way to celebrate the 100th birthday of Kirk Douglas? Animation, of course.

The post In Honor of Kirk Douglas’ 100th Birthday, Here’s the Greatest Animated Short Ever Made About Kirk Douglas appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Everyone was at Annecy this year, from Guillermo del Toro to the president of France.

The post Annecy 2016 Review: Rainy, Crowded, Star-Studded, And Unforgettable appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The annual mega-animation festival is happening in a few weeks, and we're here to help guide you through it.

The post 9 Can’t-Miss Events At Annecy 2016 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The world's largest gathering of animation artists reveals more of its 2016 programming line-up.

The post Annecy Announces ‘Zombillenium’ and ‘Samurai Jack’ Previews, Plus John Kricfalusi Masterclass appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The outspoken animation legend speaks with Cartoon Brew about his new film "The Last Days of Coney Island" and other topics.

The "Ren & Stimpy" creator makes an unlikely promo for an Adult swim show.

Over a fifty-plus-year career as a voiceover artist, Gary Owens appeared in thousands of animated TV episodes.

Festival by Pixelatl begins today in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in what promises to be the largest-ever animation industry event that has ever happened in Mexico.

Ralph Bakshi pulled himself away from his drawing desk in New Mexico to chat with Cartoon Brew about his legacy, his latest project "The Last Days of Coney Island," which he recently funded on Kickstarter, and what he really thinks about the computer’s role in animation these days.

After a relatively quiet stretch, John Kricfalusi ("Ren & Stimpy") is popping up everywhere nowadays: at the front "Simpsons" episodes, behind Miley Cyrus, and now, in your milkshake machine.

"Ren & Stimpy" creator John Kricfalusi attended the Dallas International Film Festival this weekend to accept the Texas Avery Award.

Miley Cyrus's new "Bangerz" concert tour launched in Vancouver on Valentine's Day, with the concert's opening number featuring animated visuals by John Kricfalusi.

Whether it be for lack of budget or a desire to take center stage, series creators lending their own voices to their animated television shows has always been fairly commonplace – Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill), John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy), Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) and Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park) immediately spring to mind. However, in recent years, more and more feature directors have started getting in on the trend. From throwaway one-liners to continuous roles throughout entire franchises, here is a list of some animation directors and the characters they brought to life in their own films.

1. Eric Goldberg

As the animation director for Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Goldberg not only supervised the animation of the WB’s classic characters but he voiced some of them as well. Goldberg recorded the dialogue of Marvin the Martian, Tweety Bird and Speedy Gonzalez.

2. Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud

The distinctive sputters, spurts and high-speed mutterings of The Minions in Despicable Me (2010) and Despicable Me 2 (2013) belong to the films’ co-directors Pierre Coffin (above left) and Chris Renaud. And as the character’s popularity grows, so does their vocal commitment, as the two will reprise their roles in next year’s prequel Minions.

3. Ralph Bakshi

In his debut film Fritz the Cat (1972), director Ralph Bakshi voiced one of the boorish antagonist Pig Cops, who is also referred to as “Ralph” multiple times in his scenes.

4. Brad Bird

Agnes Gooch, Edith Head, Patricia Highsmith, Linda Hunt – when it comes to figuring out who inspired the character of Edna Mode, people love to toss out many names, but in the end, the cutthroat designer of superhero fashion was brought to life by The Incredibles (2004) director Brad Bird.

5. Rich Moore

Rich Moore, director of Wreck-It Ralph (2012) provided the dreary monotone of acidic jawbreaker Sour Bill, the henchman to the bombastic King Candy.

6. Richard Williams

Even to this day, the toon celebrity cameos in Who Framed Roger Rabbit(1988) remain some of the best nods to the golden age of cartoons, especially that of Droopy Dog, who gets his opportunity to best Eddie Valiant with some traditional ‘toon high-jinks as a tricky elevator operator, sluggishly voiced by the film’s animation director Richard Williams.

7. Chris Wedge

What began as the high-strung snivels and snarls of Scrat in Ice Age (2002) has become a second career for director Chris Wedge who has gone on to vocally personify the prehistoric rodent in 3 sequels, 6 short films, 2 video games and in a walk-on role in an episode of Family Guy.

8. Chris Miller

Royal messengers, tower guards, army commanders, friars and penguins, story artist Chris Miller has lent his voice-over skills to numerous animated films, most notably his returning roles as Geppetto and The Magic Mirror in the Shrek franchise, including Shrek the Third (2007), which he co-directed.

9. Mark Dindal

The often ignored and underrated animated film Cats Don’t Dance (1997) features some beautiful hand-drawn work and stellar vocal performances, including that of director Mark Dindal as the tight-lipped bodyguard/butler Max.

10. Joe Ranft

Pixar story artist, the late Joe Ranft, brought a handful of memorable animated characters to life, including Heimlich (A Bug’s Life), Wheezy the Penguin (Toy Story 2) and Jacques the Cleaner Shrimp (Finding Nemo). But it was in Cars (2006), which he co-directed, that he voiced three characters including the semi-truck Jerry Recycled Batteries.

11. Chris Sanders

In Lilo & Stitch (2002) co-director Chris Sanders takes on the nuanced role of Alien Experiment 626, aka “Stitch,” who escapes from an intergalactic prison only to find himself trapped on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

12. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard

Nathan Greno (above right) and Byron Howard not only paired up as co-directors of Tangled (2010) but also doubled as duos of Thugs and Guards in the animated picture.

13. John Lasseter

With five features under his belt, John Lasseter has had plenty of opportunity to throw himself behind the microphone, however upon review of his filmography, you’ll find he has chosen his roles very carefully, as the role of John Lassetire in Cars 2 (2011) and the hilariously bug-zapped Harry the Mosquito in A Bug’s Life (1998).

IDW Publishing and Yoe Books are set to release John K Presents: Spumco Comic Book in June. The 160-page book reprints the original run of four Spümco Comic Book issues from the mid-90s, which were published by Marvel and Dark Horse. In addition, the book will include an unpublished 25-page story called “Jimmy the Drooling Numbskull in Nutty the Friendly Dump,” which is dedicated to Chuck Jones “for the decades of warmth he’s brought to lovers of cute cartoons everywhere.” The book features the drawings of John Kricfalusi, Jim Smith, Vincent Waller, and Mike Fontanelli, inking by Shane Glines, and stories by Rich Pursel.

IDW provided Cartoon Brew with an exclusive preview of the book including a couple pages from the never-before-published “Nutty” story. Pre-order on Amazon for $22.98.

“Animation is a young man’s game,” Chuck Jones once said. There’s no question that animation is a labor-intensive art that requires mass quantities of energy and time. While it’s true that the majority of animation directors have directed a film by the age of 30, there are also a number of well known directors who started their careers later.

Directors like Pete Docter, John Kricfalusi and Bill Plympton didn’t begin directing films until they were in their 30s. Don Bluth, Winsor McCay and Frederic Back were late bloomers who embarked on directorial careers while in their 40s. Pioneering animator Emile Cohl didn’t make his first animated film, Fantasmagorie (1908), until he was 51 years old. Of course, that wasn’t just Cohl’s first film, but it is also considered by most historians to be the first true animated cartoon that anyone ever made.

Here is a cross-selection of 30 animation directors, past and present, and the age they were when their first professional film was released to the public.

1. Don Hertzfeldt (19 years old)
   Ah, L’Amour

What is the most funded animation campaign currently running on Kickstarter? Is it:

• A short film by animation legend Ralph Bakshi

• An animated game by Oscar-winning Moonbot Studios

• A proof-of-concept film by Celebrity Deathmatch creator Eric Fogel

The answer is none of the above.

The most successful live animation campaign at the moment is Cyanide and Happiness, a long-running webcomic that aims to branch out into a series of long-form animated episodes. In the eleven days since the campaign was launched, over 7,300 backers have contributed $362,000, easily surpassing the project’s original goal of $250,000. It is already the third-highest funded animation campaign in Kickstarter’s history, and could break more records before it’s all over.

The four twenty-something creators of Cyanide and Happiness—Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, Matt Melvin, Dave McElfatrick—are no strangers to animation. Before coming together to make the comic in 2004, they met each other as teenagers doing animation on Newgrounds. In 2009, they began creating brief animated segments based on their comic. Their YouTube channel has amassed neary 200 million pageviews with short-form bits and pieces of animation.

Now, they aim to do something more ambitious: a series of 10-12 minute episodes. Initially, they attempted to negotiate a TV series deal with cable networks. They wrote about the fruitless effort on their blog:

We walked away from the first two [networks] due to rights and creative control issues. We thought that we could settle those issues in the third deal, but things didn’t quite work out as we hoped. We’re starting to realize that TV as an industry just isn’t compatible with what we want to do with our animation: deliver it conveniently to a global audience, something we’ve been doing all along with our comics these past eight years. That’s just the nature of television versus the Internet, I suppose.

Now they’ve turned to Kickstarter to appeal directly to their fanbase:

We firmly believe the entertainment industry is changing, and the Internet will eventually become the only way people watch shows. Especially the people that make up our awesome fanbase. The Internet is already the largest network, available when you think about it. Why go anywhere else? By reading our comics over the years, you folks have given us the careers we dreamed of having as kids, and turned our silly cartoons into something much, much bigger than ourselves. The prospect of doing an uncensored, unaltered Cyanide & Happiness Show and giving it directly to the fans is an incredible opportunity. We’re really excited to see how far we can take things.

Besides the amount of money raised so far, there’s another noteworthy aspect, and that’s that the C&H artists developed their careers entirely online. This is different from many other high-profile animation projects on Kickstarter launched by mainstream artists whose reputations were established in entertainment mediums outside of the Internet.

It still means something to be Ralph Bakshi, John Kricfalusi or Bill Plympton—that is, being the director of numerous theatrical features, the creator of a groundbreaking TV series, or the king of American indie animation has an incalculable advantage over being an upstart. But as the Cyanide & Happiness campaign has shown, lofty reputations from other mediums can’t match the support of a well-established online following.

The C&H Kickstarter already has more backers than the combined totals of the three aforementioned animation legends, and will also achieve a higher pledge dollar amount before the campaign ends. With this success, as well as the success of webcomic campaigns like MS Paint Adventures and Penny Arcade, the once-maligned webcomic is re-emerging as the unlikley foundation of entertainment empires.

I may be risking my 30-year friendship with John Kricfalusi by saying this, but Thad Komorowski’s new book, Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story, is a really great read. Beyond that, Thad went to great lengths – without the cooperation of John K or anyone at Nickelodeon – to research the history of the show and its participants, and to tell a compelling and cautionary tale of rags-to-riches cartoon success in contemporary Hollywood. The story is woven together through extensive interviews with key players including Bob Camp, Billy West, Bob Jaques and a dozen others – Komorowski also traces Spumco’s roots from John’s early days with Filmation and Bakshi, with extensive critiques of the Ren & Stimpy cartoons themselves (a complete episode guide is included in the appendix), through to the latter day excesses of the Spike shows. The whole story is here, meticulously researched, clearly justifying the show’s important role in the recent history of animation. There’s no question Spumco changed the face of television animation – and still influences series, students and independent animators today. Love it or hate it, this book explains how it all came to be – and for that, it’s a must-read.

Call it “McKimson-palooza!” Next Friday December 7th, in Santa Monica, California, in celebration of the critically acclaimed book, I Say, I Say….Son! A Tribute to Legendary Animators Bob, Chuck, and Tom McKimson, the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre is presenting a tribute the McKimson’s landmark Warner Bros. animation.

The lineup includes these classic cartoons in 35mm: Hillbilly Hare, Devil May Hare, Rabbit’s Kin, Hot Cross Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, Bedevilled Rabbit, Bill of Hare, Tabasco Road, The High and the Flighty, Falling Hare and Walky Talky Hawky.

Robert McKimson Jr., John Kricfalusi (Spumco) and Darrell Van Citters (Renegade Animation) will sign copies of the book I Say, I Say….Son! at 6:00PM in the Aero theatre lobby. There will be a discussion following the screening with Kricfalusi, Van Citters and McKimson Jr. moderated by yours truly, Jerry Beck.

Where: Aero Theatre 1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA
(310) 260-1528

When: Friday, December 7th, at 7:30 p.m. (booksigning begins at 6:00 p.m.)

Ren and Stimpy creator (and my former boss) John Kricfalusi made this 3-minute commercial for Stussy to advertise four new T-shirt designs he created for them. John talks production process on his blog.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: John K, John Kricfalusi, Stussy, Toonboom

I occasionally receive emails asking something along the lines of, “Whatever happened to that John Kricfalusi/Spumco coffeetable book you were working on?” Recently, however, I’ve noticed that there have been some unflattering rumors about my involvement. That’s why I feel it’s time to set the record straight about what happened to the project. I should point out that this is a personal story written from my perspective, and you may get different versions from the other key players involved. My story, however, comes from first-hand involvement in the project and direct conversations with all the main players. To the best of my knowledge, it’s an accurate account of what happened.

I was asked in 2008 by PictureBox to work with John Kricfalusi and serve as the editor for a book celebrating his work and that of the studio he co-founded, Spumco. The publisher Dan Nadel assured me that, “You and John will have complete control over how the book is marketed, packaged, and presented. You know the audience and I know you, so that’s good enough for me.”

I worked closely with John throughout 2009 on the manuscript. I didn’t write a single word of the book, but came up with the book structure and molded the manuscript into shape. For those who aren’t aware, John is a terrific writer. I didn’t have to do much other than nudge him in the right direction. We ended up with an entertaining, educational and fun manuscript that I look at with pride, filled with new information even for those who think they already know all there is to know about the history of Spumco and John Kricfalusi.

During the time I worked on the book, PictureBox ran into financial problems. The reason Dan told me was due to disappointing sales of a huge two-volume coffeetable book about Gary Panter. As a result, Dan sold the John Kricfalusi book to Abrams ComicArts, a fantastic imprint started by the able Charles Kochman, who is now the executive editor of Abrams. PictureBox remained the book packager, and fundamentally, nothing changed in the production process, except that we gained a bigger publisher with deeper resources.

I was heavily involved on the visual side as well, and sequenced some early versions of the book. Unfortunately, the book began to unravel once it was handed off to the designer Norman Hathaway. It was almost immediately clear that he was a poor match for the book and didn’t understand John’s artwork or the presentation it needed. Dan, however, insisted on keeping Norman onboard because they were personal friends.

I was happy to end my duties on the book because I could see the whole project going south. On February 27, 2010, I sent an email to Norman where I expressed concerns that he was harming the book. In it, I wrote:

After multiple meetings about design and your phone discussions with John, I was all but certain that we’d arrived at some sort of a consensus of what John wants the book to look like. John admittedly hasn’t been clear about certain aspects of the design, but he’s been adamant about one issue: the use of white space. Your layout seems to purposely defy him on this essential point which, regardless of its importance to you, is a make-or-break issue for him. There is tons of wasted white space and columns that are filled with nothing or with a tiny piece of art. This process will not go smoothly unless you build and improve upon John’s ideas. John is asking for excitement for the eyes, a “visual blowjob” in his terminology. This current approach is tame, respectful, and completely at odds with wha

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Last year, The Simpsons commissioned an opening couch gag from British street artist Banksy that contained a cockeyed look at the working conditions of overseas animators. This year, which marks the show’s remarkable 23rd season, the producers of the mustard-family went a step further and debuted a new couch gag last night by Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.

Banksy mocked the idea of mass-produced corporate art, but his message was muddled because it was made using the same system he was satirizing. There’s no such confusion in John’s approach, which he produced on his own. John’s opening is, in fact, far more subversive because he focuses almost exclusively on making a pictorial statement, relegating the show’s dominant literary elements to the back seat. In 35 short and sweet seconds, he liberates the animation of The Simpsons from years of graphic banality. The visual look of the show, which has been so carefully controlled by its producers, becomes a giddy and unrestrained playground for graphic play, and the balance of creative authority is shifted from the writers’ room to the animators in one fell swoop. Now that’s revolutionary.

On a personal note, I worked on the revival of Ren and Stimpy nearly ten years ago, and artistically, this is not the same John Kricfalusi that I remember from that time. Like any painter or filmmaker worth their salt, John doesn’t stay still, constantly evolving, growing, experimenting, and challenging audiences with new graphic concepts. He continues to be, in my book, one of the most exciting and influential artists working in animation today. Whether everything works perfectly in this opening is besides the point. As John says in our interview, “The day I make a perfect cartoon is the day I’ve run out of creativity.”

In our interview, we talk about how the opening came about, Matt Groening’s reaction to it, how his style has evolved in recent years, and his switch from Flash to Toon Boom. (Note: This is an edited version of an interview that was conducted via email this past weekend. Click on any of the images for a larger version.)

Question: First things first, how did you end up animating an opening for The Simpsons?

John Kricfalusi: Matt Groening and Al Jean [executive producer] asked me to do it. They showed me an opening that Banksy did that satirized the animation production assembly line system in Korea and told me it was really popular, so they wanted to do something similar with me.

At first they just wanted me to do a storyboard and have their regular crew animate it. If we had done it that way, no one would even have known that I had anything to do with it because it would have ended up on model and all pose to pose. I showed them the Adult Swim shorts I had been doing and pointed out that the way things happened was even more important than what was happening in my work. You can’t write visual performance. You have to actually draw it.

This project was the most fun I’ve had in years. It has really hammered home (to me) the importance of animation in animation. I think it’s possible to bring animation back to this country and make the core of it fun again, not be a mere tertiary addition to some high concept or executive’s “vision.” The pure act of animating is the most fun part of animation. I am so grateful to Matt for letting me have some real fun this summer.

A new episode of The Simpsons just premiered on the East Coast, and the opening contained an unlikely surprise. The reaction on Twitter says it all:

More to come…

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: John Kricfalusi, The Simpsons

John K. has several new pieces of animation coming up – bumpers for Adult Swim – that explore a more abstract style. I have no idea if these have aired yet, but John is posting clips and discussing them on his Stuff blog

Eddie Fitzgerald thinks this (below) is “one of the funniest walks in the history of TV animation“. He might be right.

UPDATE – Here’s one that did air:

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | 3 comments | Post tags: John Kricfalusi

John Kricfalusi and Gary Panter speak about their collaboration with clothing line Stussy to create Marvel comic-related merchandise.

(Thanks, Jason Groh)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Gary Panter, John K, John Kricfalusi, Marvel, Stussy