How to use this Page

Olga Stern is a visual development artist based in Toronto who also illustrates books. You can visit her website, blog, other blog, and portfolio blog to see her work.

Besides her character and environmental designs, you can see landscape studies that Olga draws in pastels. She initially learned to “paint” with pastels during a class taught by Bill Cone that was part of her three-month internship at Pixar. See her work from that class here.

Add a Comment

Olga Stern is a visual development artist based in Toronto who also illustrates books. You can visit her website, blog, other blog, and portfolio blog to see her work.

Besides her character and environmental designs, you can see landscape studies that Olga draws in pastels. She initially learned to “paint” with pastels during a class taught by Bill Cone that was part of her three-month internship at Pixar. See her work from that class here.

Add a Comment

Over on question-and-answer website Quora, someone posted a very simple question: Which is the cutest cartoon character ever created? The answers from Quora members cover a broad spectrum, some more obvious (Tweety, Pokemon, Pooh) and others less so (Gertie the Dinosaur, Night Fury from How to Train Your Dragon).

So what makes a cartoon character cute? You could reduce the answer down to a few basic characteristics: big eyes and head, fluffiness, warmth and chubbiness. “Cuteness is based on the basic proportions of a baby plus the expressions of shyness or coyness,” wrote Preston Blair in Advanced Animation. According to Blair, other cute traits include:

• Head large in relation to the body.
• Eyes spaced low on the head and usually wide and far apart.
• Fat legs, short and tapering down into small feet for type.
• Tummy bulges—looks well fed.

But cuteness is far more complex than even Blair’s set of rules; some consider E.T., Yoda and WALL·E to be the epitome of cute, despite their furless, odd appearances. Cuteness and a character’s perceived hugability aren’t always determined by aesthetic appeal. “Cuteness is distinct from beauty,” wrote Natalie Angier for The New York Times. “Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap.”

In essence, any creature deemed cute is one that speaks to our nurturing instincts. The cuteness of an infant can motivate an adult to take care of it, even if the baby is not a blood relation. Even more, studies have found that humans transfer these same emotions to animals (or even inanimate objects) that bear our similar features. Finding Nemo combined all of these psychological elements perfectly—you can’t hug or cuddle a fish, yet adorable Nemo, with his fin damaged from birth and his human-like facial features, appeals to our caregiving instincts. In fact, every character in Pixar films, whether it’s a clownfish or a car, features forward-facing eyes, the most crucial feature for achieving an emotional connection with the audience.

But with any extreme comes another. If a character is too cute and sugary sweet, the audience can develop skepticism. “Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, ‘Let’s not worry about complexities, just love me,’” philosopher Denis Dutton told The New York Times. It is for that very reason cuteness stirs uneasiness and sometimes feels cheap.

After all, the adorable, smiling face of a child can hide the havoc he just wreaked by breaking all of his toys. “Cuteness thus coexists in a dynamic relationship with the perverse,” writes Daniel Harris in his book Cute, Quaint, Hungry And Romantic: The Aesthetics Of Consumerism. You could call this the Gremlin Effect—a character with an underlying creepiness. Troll dolls (which were recently acquired by DreamWorks Animation) and Cabbage Patch Kids are the inexplicable result of this paradox.

There’s no denying a cultural need to pigeonhole and perfect the attributes that could be popularly deemed cute. In his fantastic short essay on Mickey Mouse, biologist and historian Stephen Jay Gould asserts that Mickey’s changing appearance over time is a physical evolution that mirrors cultural attitudes toward cuteness. As the Benjamin Button of animated rodentia, Mickey’s eyes and head have grown larger, his arms and legs chubbier. Mickey has become more childlike and, most would say, more cute and less rat-like. Mickey isn’t the only character to undergo this transformation. The teddy bear, first sold in 1903, started out anatomically similar to a real bear, with a long snout and gangly arms. Today’s teddy bears more closely resemble the Care Bears, with pudgier features and colorful fur.

Audience don’t always need Mickey’s goofy grins and huge eyes to connect with a character’s cuteness. Pictoplasma, the artists’ network and conference that celebrates characters extracted from context, reveals how sometimes it’s our own invented narrative that blasts a character into hall-of-fame cuteness. As Pictoplasma co-founder Peter Thaler said explains, “It’s a horrible example, but Hello Kitty has no facial expression. You don’t know if she’s happy or sad; you just see these two dots. You’re projecting all the narration, the biography.”

Our ideals of cuteness continue to evolve, a trajectory in visual culture that has birthed Hello Kitty and Japan’s kawaii movement, Giga Pets, Furby, Elmo and Slimer. Often the most exciting, memorable cute characters are the ones who bear negative traits that reveal the vulnerability. Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from Ice Age, is adorable and loved by audiences even more for his greed. Cuteness, perhaps then, is not just about an objective set of physical features—it’s also about a behavior that compels audiences and connects us emotionally to the character.

Add a Comment

Google is celebrating the birthday of graphic designer Saul Bass (1920-1996) with a classy animated tribute on their homepage to Bass’s famous film title sequences including Vertigo, The Man with the Golden Arm, Around the World in 80 Days and West Side Story. The piece was designed and directed by Matt Cruickshank who offers some behind-the-scenes production details on his blog.

It’s a busy time for Cruickshank, who is also the illustrator of the new Monsters University Golden Book that will be released next week. It’s available as a pre-order on Amazon for $3.59.

Add a Comment

The confetti from Merida’s Royal Coronation at Cinderella’s castle in Walt Disney World has barely been swept up and she’s already learning what it means to be a real Princess. When it was announced that the star of 2012’s Brave would be crowned Disney’s 11th Princess on the morning of May 11th, they unveiled her new look for the product line.
The makeover, which apparently happened to all the Disney princesses when no one was looking, involved dropping 20 pounds, caking on some mascara and giving Merida a Keratin hair treatment. “There’s the hot hair, the coy expression,” wrote Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter. “Also the obligatory exposed shoulders, slimmer waist, and the bow and arrow replaced by… what is that, a low-slung belt?…Because, in the end, it wasn’t about being brave after all. It was about being pretty.”

The new look has caused such an uproar with the female empowerment website, A Mighty Girl, that they started a petition on Change.org to “Keep Merida Brave!” The appeal, which has already picked up over 100,000 signatures, states:

“The redesign of Merida in advance of her official induction to the Disney Princess collection does a tremendous disservice to the millions of children for whom Merida is an empowering role model who speaks to girls’ capacity to be change agents in the world rather than just trophies to be admired. Moreover, by making her skinnier, sexier and more mature in appearance, you are sending a message to girls that the original, realistic, teenage-appearing version of Merida is inferior; that for girls and women to have value — to be recognized as true princesses — they must conform to a narrow definition of beauty.”

The film’s original director, Brenda Chapman, has also blasted the makeover, telling the Marin Independent Journal that it is “a blatantly sexist marketing move based on money.” Chapman continued:

“There is an irresponsibility to this decision that is appalling for women and young girls. Disney marketing and the powers that be that allow them to do such things should be ashamed of themselves. I think it’s atrocious what they have done to Merida. When little girls say they like it because it’s more sparkly, that’s all fine and good but, subconsciously, they are soaking in the sexy ‘come hither’ look and the skinny aspect of the new version. It’s horrible! Merida was created to break that mold — to give young girls a better, stronger role model, a more attainable role model, something of substance, not just a pretty face that waits around for romance.”

Add a Comment

Last week after word got out that Disney was seeking to trademark “Día de los Muertos” in preparation for its 2015 release of a Pixar animated feature inspired by the traditional Mexican holiday, several online communities were outraged. The backlash kicked into high gear when cartoonist and illustrator Lalo Alcaraz shared a poster of a Godzilla-like Mickey Mouse under the words, “It’s coming to trademark your cultura.” [image above]

Social media has always kept Disney in check, and this time is no different. Latino Rebels, an online community that has done a terrific job of tracking Disney’s depiction of Latino culture, helped handle and report on the groundswell of public outcry over the last few weeks. After several petitions and pressure, Disney announced last Tuesday that they would withdraw the trademark filing, claiming that it was no longer necessary since they had changed the title of the fim.

In an interview with Cartoon Brew, William Nericcio, a scholar specializing in the representation of Latinos in American pop culture and author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, said, “[Hollywood's] attitude towards culture is like a pelt hunter from the 19th century. They need the skin that people recognize and value in order to sell a project that will yield predictable profits.”

Nericcio acknowledges that Pixar and Disney face an uphill battle in producing their Day of the Dead feature, which is to be directed by Toy Story 3 helmer Lee Unkrich: ”I think it’s wonderful that Pixar is working on a Mexico, cultural-based project. But it’s a public relations nightmare. They’re not really equipped to talk about other cultures in a way that shows even the slightest sensitivity.”

While Nericcio supports the critical eye cast by social media, he does express concerns over extreme backlash. “The downside of it is, companies like Disney could get scared off of projects that might be focused on Latin American culture, just because they got burned,” he explains. Ultimately, the appeal of a Dia de Los Muertos film is undeniable; the imagery connected to the celebration is so lush, providing a palette that would inspire any moviegoer. “It’s good business to green light a project on la cultura Mexicana. Everybody’s loving the wrestlers, the icons, the color, the exoticness,” Nericcio says. “But when you have the patent lawyers involved, they come off looking terrible.”

Nericcio, a self-admitted Pixar fan would love to see a Dia de los Muertos animated film, as would so many others. Fortunately, there’s another film on the horizon—Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez are currently producing and directing (respectively) their own Day of the Dead-themed feature at Reel FX called The Book of Life, to be released through Fox in October of 2014, more than a year before the Disney-Pixar feature. There’s no word yet whether Mexico-born del Toro and Gutierrez will seek trademarks of their own.

Add a Comment

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts presented their awards today in London. Pixar’s Brave took home the BAFTA award for Best Animated Film; it was up against ParaNorman and Frankenweenie.

Interesting note: Brenda Chapman, the original director of Brave, accepted the award with the film’s second director, Mark Andrews:

Life of Pi was the winner in the category of Special Visual Effects.

The award for Best Animated Short went to The Making Of Longbird, a mockumentary by Will Anderson, 23, produced at the Edinburgh College of Art. Ainslie Henderson (I Am Tom Moody), who co-wrote the film, shared the award with Anderson. This is the trailer for the short:

Add a Comment

Here it is, the brand-new “official” full length trailer (#2) for Pixar’s summer release, Monsters University.

Add a Comment

After Pixarifying (is that a word?) the universes of Marvel/DC comics, Doctor Who and Star Wars, cartoonist Phil Postma has directed his attention toward the characters of Star Trek. In a post on his blog, Postma explains that he didn’t render any of the images:

“Yes, these are characters from Pixar films and it is just a photo mash-up of images I find on the Internet using Photoshop. No, they are not meant to be a caricature of the actors who played them. Rather a character from the Pixar universe that resembles in some small way the character I am doing. It is just a fun simple project I picked to help me learn more about Photoshop since I am far from an expert at it.”

Reimagining “X in the style of Y” isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking venture, but it’s a common creative exercise done by artists to help better perceive the design tropes of certain styles and studios. In that light, Postma’s exercises are fun to look at. Incidentally, the best reimagining by Postma has nothing to do with Pixar—it’s a Fleischer-ization of Spider-Man.

Add a Comment

A writer couldn’t have scripted a more Hollywood ending to the saga of Brenda Chapman, Pixar’s first female director. Cartoon Brew broke the story when Chapman was unceremoniously dumped from her film Brave back in October 2010. Last night, Brenda made history after becoming the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a prize shared with co-director Mark Andrews.

It took only twelve years of the Best Animated Feature award before the Academy recognized a film directed by a woman. By comparison, it took 82 years before the Academy awarded an Oscar to a live-action film directed by a woman. That happened in 2009, when Kathryn Bigelow won both Best Picture and Best Director for The Hurt Locker. Let us hope that Hollywood continues to embrace diversity and encourage fresh perspectives on storytelling.

Add a Comment

The trailer announces “From above the world of Cars…Disney’s Planes.”

Now that Disney owns Pixar, the calculated blending of brand identities has begun. Note, however, that Pixar’s name isn’t mentioned in the trailer—even though Planes is rooted in their style and creative universe. There’s a reason for that: nothing in the Planes trailer suggests the originality or artistry associated with the Pixar brand. To be fair though, quality filmmaking appears to have hardly been the motivation for this licensing and merchandising money grab.

The film, directed by TV vet Klay Hall (King of the Hill, Father of the Pride), will be released theatrically on August 9. Here’s the synopsis:

From high above the world of Cars, flies Planes, Disney’s upcoming animated action-packed comedic adventure starring Dusty (voiced by Dane Cook), a big-hearted, fast-flying crop duster who dreams of competing in the most exhilarating around-the-world air race in history. There’s only a couple of not-so-small problems—Dusty is not exactly built for racing and he also happens to be afraid of heights.

Despite his fear and with encouragement from his mentor, a naval aviator named Skipper, Dusty narrowly qualifies for the big competition. Dusty’s sportsmanship and speed begin to rattle the defending champ of the race circuit, Ripslinger, who will stop at nothing to see Dusty fail. When disaster strikes during the climax of the final race, Dusty’s courage is put to the ultimate test. With the support of friends old and new, Dusty reaches heights he never dreamed possible and in the process, gives a spellbound world the inspiration to soar.

Add a Comment

Daniela Strijleva is a character art director for Pixar. Her blog is where you can find more of her personal projects like the collaborative Round Robin book that she participates in. Below are some more studies of the sheep characters from her Round Robin project illustrations and a few other humorous images from her personal pursuits.

Add a Comment

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres announced on her show today that Disney-Pixar will make an Andrew Stanton-directed sequel to Finding Nemo called Finding Dory.

Of course, Ellen’s fans went crazy:

Reactions outside of her studio audience were somewhat different:

Add a Comment

Over on question-and-answer website Quora, someone posted a very simple question: Which is the cutest cartoon character ever created? The answers from Quora members cover a broad spectrum, some more obvious (Tweety, Pokemon, Pooh) and others less so (Gertie the Dinosaur, Night Fury from How to Train Your Dragon).

So what makes a cartoon character cute? You could reduce the answer down to a few basic characteristics: big eyes and head, fluffiness, warmth and chubbiness. “Cuteness is based on the basic proportions of a baby plus the expressions of shyness or coyness,” wrote Preston Blair in Advanced Animation. According to Blair, other cute traits include:

• Head large in relation to the body.
• Eyes spaced low on the head and usually wide and far apart.
• Fat legs, short and tapering down into small feet for type.
• Tummy bulges—looks well fed.

But cuteness is far more complex than even Blair’s set of rules; some consider E.T., Yoda and WALL·E to be the epitome of cute, despite their furless, odd appearances. Cuteness and a character’s perceived hugability aren’t always determined by aesthetic appeal. “Cuteness is distinct from beauty,” wrote Natalie Angier for The New York Times. “Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap.”

In essence, any creature deemed cute is one that speaks to our nurturing instincts. The cuteness of an infant can motivate an adult to take care of it, even if the baby is not a blood relation. Even more, studies have found that humans transfer these same emotions to animals (or even inanimate objects) that bear our similar features. Finding Nemo combined all of these psychological elements perfectly—you can’t hug or cuddle a fish, yet adorable Nemo, with his fin damaged from birth and his human-like facial features, appeals to our caregiving instincts. In fact, every character in Pixar films, whether it’s a clownfish or a car, features forward-facing eyes, the most crucial feature for achieving an emotional connection with the audience.

But with any extreme comes another. If a character is too cute and sugary sweet, the audience can develop skepticism. “Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, ‘Let’s not worry about complexities, just love me,’” philosopher Denis Dutton told The New York Times. It is for that very reason cuteness stirs uneasiness and sometimes feels cheap.

After all, the adorable, smiling face of a child can hide the havoc he just wreaked by breaking all of his toys. “Cuteness thus coexists in a dynamic relationship with the perverse,” writes Daniel Harris in his book Cute, Quaint, Hungry And Romantic: The Aesthetics Of Consumerism. You could call this the Gremlin Effect—a character with an underlying creepiness. Troll dolls (which were recently acquired by DreamWorks Animation) and Cabbage Patch Kids are the inexplicable result of this paradox.

There’s no denying a cultural need to pigeonhole and perfect the attributes that could be popularly deemed cute. In his fantastic short essay on Mickey Mouse, biologist and historian Stephen Jay Gould asserts that Mickey’s changing appearance over time is a physical evolution that mirrors cultural attitudes toward cuteness. As the Benjamin Button of animated rodentia, Mickey’s eyes and head have grown larger, his arms and legs chubbier. Mickey has become more childlike and, most would say, more cute and less rat-like. Mickey isn’t the only character to undergo this transformation. The teddy bear, first sold in 1903, started out anatomically similar to a real bear, with a long snout and gangly arms. Today’s teddy bears more closely resemble the Care Bears, with pudgier features and colorful fur.

Audience don’t always need Mickey’s goofy grins and huge eyes to connect with a character’s cuteness. Pictoplasma, the artists’ network and conference that celebrates characters extracted from context, reveals how sometimes it’s our own invented narrative that blasts a character into hall-of-fame cuteness. As Pictoplasma co-founder Peter Thaler said explains, “It’s a horrible example, but Hello Kitty has no facial expression. You don’t know if she’s happy or sad; you just see these two dots. You’re projecting all the narration, the biography.”

Our ideals of cuteness continue to evolve, a trajectory in visual culture that has birthed Hello Kitty and Japan’s kawaii movement, Giga Pets, Furby, Elmo and Slimer. Often the most exciting, memorable cute characters are the ones who bear negative traits that reveal the vulnerability. Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from Ice Age, is adorable and loved by audiences even more for his greed. Cuteness, perhaps then, is not just about an objective set of physical features—it’s also about a behavior that compels audiences and connects us emotionally to the character.

Add a Comment

The best part is when John Lasseter asks the kid if it knows about E tickets, which haven’t been used at Disneyland in thirty years:

A close second is watching Lasseter get whipped around by a tractor:

---

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Cars Land, John Lasseter

Add a Comment

From the No-Big-Surprise Department: Brenda Chapman, who developed Pixar’s Brave and was its original director before being replaced by Mark Andrews, officially ended her Pixar employment at the end of July. Pixar Portal reported on Monday that, “She is now working as a consultant for Lucasfilm animation, but wasn’t able to share any details about the project.” Chapman had been with Pixar since 2003. Prior to that, she co-directed the first DreamWorks animated feature The Prince of Egypt and served as story supervisor on Disney’s The Lion King.

---

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: Brenda Chapman, Lucasfilm

Add a Comment

This is the story of Pixar, John Lasseter and three of the most important animated features of the last 20 years. It’s also one of Charles Solomon’s best books – and that’s saying something. The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey is one of those oversized art books – loaded with great graphics that alone would be worth the purchase – in which the text is equally important (and possibly more significant) than the images accompanying it. Solomon begins with the story of Lasseter at Disney and his journey to into CG, Lucasfilm and ultimately to Tin Toy, the short that inspired the Toy Story films. Three chapters detail the making of the Toy Story films in-depth (and lavishly illustrated with production art and photographs I’ve never seen before – a photograph of John Lasseter holding his childhood Casper The Friendly Ghost doll on page 45 is worth the price of this book alone). A chapter called Buzz and Woody in Limbo goes into the years between Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, when the characters were part of TV’s Buzz Lightyear of Star Command and the ill-fated Circle 7 version of Toy Story 3. His final chapter on the making of Pixar’s triumphant Toy Story 3 brings the book full circle and cements Pixar’s place in animation history.

I didn’t see this one coming – it’s one of the best animation books of the year (and this is a pretty good year for animation books). It compliments the other books on Pixar’s history with ease, by focusing on three of their greatest films with new insights and fresh perspective. Hayao Miyazaki penned an affectionate Foreword, John Lasseter explains how personal these films are to him in the Afterword. This one’s the real deal, a great read – and I sincerely urge all of you who collect animation history to get this one. That goes double for you Disney, Pixar and Toy Story buffs.

---

Charles Solomon also pens the Introduction for Sketchtravel, an exciting book project just published by Chronicle Books. French Illustrator Gerald Guerlais and Pixar art director Dice Tsutsumi passed a sketch book to over 70 artists around the world over the past 5 years. This book reproduces the artwork collected and tells the incredible story behind the project. It’s a gorgeous collection of material and great way to celebrate the artists represented. These include Hayao Miyazaki, Frederic Back, Bill Plympton, Enrico Casarosa, Bill Pressing, Peter DeSeve, Ronnie Del Carmen, Glen Keane, Nicolas Marlet, Mike Mignola, Lou Romano and many many others. It’s truly inspirational stuff. Highly Recommended!

---

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | 0 Comments on Two New Books You Gotta Get: “The Toy Story Films” and “Sketchtravel” as of 1/1/1900