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We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the holiday classic with a gallery of rare artwork from the film.

The post ‘How The Grinch Stole Christmas!’ is 50 Years Old Today—And It’s Still Great appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Morphing has been an important part of vfx for quite a while. Here's 10 memorable morphs that made us go wow!

The post 10 Unforgettable Morphs in Film, TV, and Music Videos appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain. 1876. 225 pages. [Source: Bought]

First sentence: “TOM!” No answer. “TOM!” No answer. “What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!” No answer. The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them.

Premise/plot: Tom Sawyer is a mischievous young boy who almost always finds himself at the center of adventure. He's joined by other boys in the town, most notably Huckleberry Finn. Tom may be young, but he's not too young to "fall in love" with a certain Becky. Will that love last? Maybe, maybe not. After all, before Becky moved to town, he was in love with another little girl. So Tom may be a small-town Romeo in the making. One thing about Tom: he loves to fool everybody and even when fooled himself likes to make you think he is cleverer than anyone.

My thoughts: I read Huckleberry Finn earlier this year. I really do prefer Huck as narrator. But Tom can be charming when he chooses. (And if you can forget the way he treats Jim in Huckleberry Finn, he's fun to spend an afternoon or two with. But having just read the other book this year, I can't help seeing some of Tom's flaws!)

I would recommend both books. This one is definitely less weighty than Huckleberry Finn. There are at least three or four adventures in this one. And the book moves at a very steady pace!

© 2016 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

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What have they done to poor Woody?

The post Woody Woodpecker Has Seen Better Days Than The Teaser for His New Feature appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Jim Hillin, the cg supervisor of "Beauty and the Beast," reveals the making-of an iconic moment in Disney animation history.

The post 25 Years Ago: The CG Secrets of the Ballroom Sequence in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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This week, Oxford University Press (OUP) and The Reader announced an exciting new partnership, working together to build a core classics library and to get great literature into the hands of people who need it most, with the Oxford World’s Classics series becoming The Reader’s "house brand" for use in their pioneering Shared Reading initiatives.

The post What do the classics do for you? appeared first on OUPblog.

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The Disney studio in 1956—in glorious color!

The post 15 Rare Color Photos Of Walt Disney And Artists You Probably Haven’t Seen Before appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Miró, Matisse, Picasso, and...Woody Woodpecker?

The post Must-See Los Angeles Art Show: ‘Woody Woodpecker & The Avant-Garde’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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A must-see screening series of Spanish animation, past and present, is coming to New York City.

The post MoMA To Present ‘From Doodles To Pixels,’ An 8-Part Retrospective on Spanish Animation appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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What happened in Montreal in 1967 has never happened before or since.

The post Rediscovered Photos Of The Greatest Animation Cocktail of the 20th Century appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Early digital effects were mixed in with breakfast cereal and matzo crackers to create one of the iconic sequences in contemporary cinema.

The post Making A Nuclear Apocalypse: How The Iconic Sequence In ‘Terminator 2’ Was Created appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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"Dragonheart," released twenty years ago this week, was a live-action film that had one of the first digital characters you could believe in. We talk to the ILM artists who created it.

The post An Oral History of ILM’s ‘Dragonheart’ On Its 20th Anniversary appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Watch these personal stories about the making of the Disney classic "Beauty and the Beast."

The post Watch: 25th Anniversary ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Panel That Took Place in LA appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Forty-three years after its release, one of the weirdest Japanese animated features is receiving its due recognition in the United States.

The post ‘Belladonna of Sadness,’ 1970s Anime Erotica Masterpiece, Gets A U.S. Theatrical Release, Blu-Ray, and Art Book appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Over 100 classic Popeye cartoons on one poster.

The post Every Popeye Fan Needs This Free Popeye Poster appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Rare classic cartoons are coming to Blu-ray at an affordable price.

The post Ant and the Aardvark, The Inspector, and Crazylegs Crane Coming To Blu-Ray appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Hanna-Barbera characters like you've never seen them before.

The post DC’s ‘Hanna-Barbera Beyond’ Will Remix and Reimagine Classic Characters appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Here are a couple of princess images I created.  One was for a Halloween book and features my daughter with her friends and cousin. The other is a spread from A Little Princess which I stepped in to illustrate for another illustrator when she could not meet the deadline...I'm glad I took the job!

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Sixty years ago on this day — December 31, 1955 — a short masterpiece was released into movie theaters: Chuck Jones’ One Froggy Evening. No one said anything at the time because hardly anyone ever said anything about animation at the time.

Eventually the short gained its due recognition. “The Citizen Kane of animated shorts,” Steven Spielberg once called it, and even if Spielberg had said nothing, this wordless wonder would still qualify as one of the finest of Jones’ couple of hundred Warner Bros. shorts.

Before we proceed any further though, let’s watch the film:

Let me admit: as many times as I’ve watched this film, I still cannot understand how it was made. Technically, I get it, but there’s something else going on that is impenetrable. Every member of Jones’ team is operating at the peak of their craft, a level achieved through decades of toil and refinement, yet their collaboration appears so seamless and absolute that it does not seem possible for the cartoon to have been created by mere mortals. As the skies above us and the ground below us, this cartoon is a perfectly formed natural wonder that cannot be improved upon.

The credit is due to just a couple handfuls of key individuals: Michael Maltese’s story structure reveals just enough but not all of the mystery; Abe Levitow, Richard Thompson, Ken Harris, and Ben Washam bring the characters to life through perfectly timed and funny animation (it’s funny because it’s perfectly timed); the layouts of Bob Gribbroek and background paintings of Phil DeGuard drop us into the middle of a believable mid-20th century American metropolis. And let’s not forget the musical stylings of Milt Franklyn, the sound effects of Treg Brown, and certainly not the voice of Michigan J. Frog himself, Bill Roberts.

And consider this: Jones’s crew made a new short every three weeks or so. These guys didn’t labor over this film for years, and they certainly didn’t have time to reflect or be precious about it. They simply churned it out, as they did countless others, over and over again. Lather, rinse, repeat, and eventually retire.

But it is director Jones himself who reminds us why he is considered one of animation’s greats. The presence of Jones, who created more layout drawings per film than almost any other Golden Age theatrical short director, can be felt in every expression and pose of One Froggy Evening. Jones doesn’t rely on pre-existing stock poses or expressions. He is a cartoonist who is a master of his universe, and he effortlessly creates custom poses and expressions for each and every scene, in his inimitable style that can only be described as Jonesian.

Jones’ advantage is that he has something that most comedy animation directors, then or now, don’t have, which is an obsession for detail. When he couldn’t find the proper ragtime tune for his singing frog, he wrote his own from scratch with the help of Maltese, resulting in “The Michigan Rag.” The song sounds so authentic that to this day people wonder which songs in the film were pre-existing and which were created specifically for the film (this site explains it all).

His gift for observation extended to his amphibian star. As a frog owner myself, I’m routinely annoyed when animators don’t take the time to get frogs right. When a frog swallows his food, his eyes sink deep into his head. Few animators seem to notice this. But there is no such laziness in Jones’s work. “I remembered from when I was a kid,” Chuck Jones once explained. “Any boy that’s ever picked up a frog knows how the body sits and the limbs hang down. So we had to be certain, in those first few seconds on the screen, that when [Michigan] appeared he looked like a frog. Even that his eyes blinked upward.”

Perhaps audiences didn’t notice every single directorial choice that Jones made during the course of the production. Eyes blinking upward certainly won’t make or break any cartoon. But those hundreds of directorial choices in an animated film eventually add up. And audiences always notice one thing: does the director care? Jones cared. He obsessed. And in this rare instance, he made all the right choices, resulting in a perfect cartoon gem.

Frankly, I’m content with the fact that I’ll never understand how he and his crew made it.

The post An Appreciation of Chuck Jones’ ‘One Froggy Evening’ On Its 60th Birthday appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Blame it on the yams!

The post Happy Thanksgiving! appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

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Discover five of Cartoon Brew's favorite creepy classics, based upon the literary works of Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, and more.

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A dedication ceremony, open to the public, will take place on October 1st.

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The footage is from a 1981 Disney tour to dozens of colleges.

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Bugs Bunny's life explained by a true animation fan.

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