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Fun stuff.  Looks a lot like Harry Potter to a certain extent (mood, lighting, music, etc.).  It’s the trailer for Roald Dahl’s The BFG.

Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the link!

A bit of an older video here.  In my travels recently I discovered that the entirety of the Oliver Jeffers short film version of his book Lost and Found is apparently online.  Bonus!  I never got to see it.  For your viewing pleasure then (and it’s 24 minutes long, FYI):

Shoot. Christmas is over but only now have I learned about this new collection of Walt Kelly’s Fairy Tales.  Well, there’s always next year, I guess.

Cool. I’d heard that there was a children’s theater adaptation of Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, but didn’t know it had a little trailer too. Eh, voila.

And for the off-topic video, we’re not entirely off-topic.  After all, Mary Poppins was a children’s book originally.  Ipso facto a flash mob for Dick Van Dyke’s 90th birthday is . . . well it works for me.

Ranging from the technical to the quirky to the essential, these holiday electives make great presents for animation pros and fans.

The post Cartoon Brew’s Last-Minute Animation Gift Guide appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

…and there’s more development around McCormick Place! Read on… Curbed Chicago reported on the recent votes by the Chicago Plan Commission approving the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, held October 16. There are two points of controversy: the actual design (likened to Jabba the Hutt) and the actual parkland, which is as hallowed as New York’s […]

Keeping things short, and sweet this week. Enjoy this art by the King of Christmas Comics, Walt Kelly.

You can check out some recent collections of Walt Kelly’s classic Pogo strips here.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com - Andy Yates

For the past few days on Cartoon Brew's Instagram account, we've been running a series called 25 Cartoonists You Should Know. The entire series is below, and yes, the list could easily be twice as long and still incomplete.

Here’s a little added-bonus to the recent post about Walt Kelly’s self-animated Pogo short.. Before he began animating, Walt Kelly laid out a complete storyboard of his planned Pogo special. He then made a Leica reel and recorded his voice over it.

Of course, there is a lot more here then what ended up in the final short. Because of his poor health, he had to leave out a great deal of material. Sadly, it makes the final piece feel unfinished.  Albert’s hallucination sequence especially would have been marvelous to see fleshed out in animation. Fortunately, not all of his hard work went to waste. His storyboard for this special laid the foundation for his final Pogo book, Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.

As much as I love seeing Kelly’s animation, watching and listening to the storyboard is a much more enjoyable experience. His storyboard panels have as much time and care put into them as his comics, with full color, fleshed-out poses and backgrounds. Each panel is expertly laid out, making every action clear and easy to read.

But I think the most enjoyable aspect is Kelly’s mostly ad-libbed narration. You can tell what kind of person he was just by his vocal delivery. At times he’s full of bravado, belting out lines in a bombastic tone. Other times he can be soft-spoken, sincere and passionately poetic. And sometimes he makes absolutely no sense at all, talking in almost complete gibberish, fumbling over words and mumbling nonsensical sounds. Most of all, what stands out is his unparalleled wit, which is on display throughout the entire 25-minute presentation. I especially love his impromptu descriptions of scene transitions and camera movements.

With this storyboard, Walt Kelly has come full circle. Starting at Disney in the mid-30s, working for five years refining and strengthening his drawing abilities, leaving animation to pursue a lengthy career in comics, and finally returning to animation once again, this time with the added benefit of decades of experience.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Walt Kelly had had a regrettable experience making The Pogo Special Birthday Special (1969) with Chuck Jones.

“How did you ever okay Chuck’s Pogo story?,” Ward Kimball asked Walt Kelly shortly after the special aired on TV. “I didn’t, for Godsake!,” Kelly cried out. “The son of a bitch changed it after our last meeting. That’s not the way I wrote it. He took all the sharpness out of it and put in that sweet, saccharine stuff that Chuck Jones always thinks is Disney, but isn’t.” Kimball, who was dining with Kelly at the Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood, pressed further. “Who okayed giving the little skunk girl a humanized face?” he asked. Kelly was so angry he couldn’t answer. His face turned red, and he bellowed to the waiter, “Bring me another bourbon!” In Kimball’s words, Kelly wanted “to kill—if not sue—Chuck.”

Shortly after that debacle, Walt Kelly took matters into his own hands and decided to personally animate his popular Pogo characters. With the help of his wife Selby Daley, he planned on creating a fully-animated half-hour special for television, with the characters expressing a strong stance on taking care of the environment. But due to his ill-health, he was able to complete only thirteen minutes of We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us, which you see below.

The finished portions are absolutely charming and beautifully crafted. Much like his character P.T. Bridgeport, Kelly is a real showman here. Although he hadn’t animated since Dumbo thirty years prior, his animation skills are still top-notch. While the animation can be a bit choppy at times (mostly keys and some breakdowns with no in-betweens), his drawings are solid and appealing with some real flourishes of fluid animation throughout.

The color, though muddy in the existing prints, also appears to be as vibrant as his Sunday pages, and the backgrounds are as intricately detailed as his splash panels, if not more so. And the voices, humorously performed by Kelly himself, fit the tone and mood of his characters.

Besides Winsor McCay, I can’t think of any other mainstream comic artist who animated their comics to such a painstaking degree. While many comic strips have been adapted for film and television before and since, none of them have met or surpassed the charm and quality of the original artist’s work. Here, the animator and the creator is one and the same, and the drawings are pure, unfiltered and straight from the artist’s hand.

It’s December. Holiday gift-giving time. Prepare for several posts in the next few weeks about new books and DVDs you must own – or give to your toon-headed loved ones. But first up, above all else, are these two:

How can you resist any book with Horace Horsecollar on the cover? How many books even have Horace Horsecollar on the cover? This one does. Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Vol. 2: “Trapped on Treasure Island” is the latest edition in a series of magnificently produced hard covers reprinting vintage Mickey Mouse comic strips by Floyd Gottfredson from the 1930s. Specifically from January 1932 through January 1934, this book gloriously reprints six classic continuities (The Great Orphanage Robbery, Mickey Mouse Sails For Treasure Island, Blaggard Castle, Pluto And The Dogcatcher, The Mail Pilot, Mickey Mouse And His Horse Tanglefoot and The Crazy Crime Wave), each strip restored from the best possible archival materials. Uncut, uncensored and politically incorrect – these tales are from an alternate Disney universe, where Mickey is a red-blooded, two-fisted adventurer; they are fun to read and a delight to view. Gottfredson’s comics are as classy, funny and as slick as the Disney shorts from the same period. And as usual, co-editor David Gerstein provides a plethora of “bonus materials”: galleries of rare art and merchandise, character histories, essays about scripter Ted Osborne and collaborators Webb Smith and Merrill De Maris, aided and abetted by noted Mouse historians Alberto Becattini, J.B. Kaufman and Malcom Willits – and over a half-dozen pieces are penned by Gerstein himself! A fine package, a full meal, and a perfect follow-up to volume 1, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Vol. 2: “Trapped on Treasure Island” fills a gap long-neglected in animation history. Buy it.

I think I’ve been waiting for this book my entire life. I’ve always enjoyed the artistry and wit of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, but the historian in me always wanted to read the entire thing, strip by strip, from day one. At long last the complete Pogo has been compiled, lovingly, by Fantagraphics Kim Thompson and Kelly’s daughter Carolyn Kelly in the miraculous new hardcover, Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Wonder. Buy this book. It wasn’t the first newspaper comic strip by an former Disney animator, but it’s the best – and the first I’d encountered to have an animators aesthetic in the layouts and character poses. This fascinated me no end as a child. Kelly’s drawings are just magnificent, and his sophisticated writing style was far ahead of its time. Its time has come – and Fantagraphics has gone out of its way to ensure the best possible copies of these rare strips were found, restored and preserved perfectly here for all time (BTW, I&rsqu

Used to be that a kid who “didn’t like to read” could be found perusing the newspaper every Sunday for the colored comic pages come rain or shine.  Now thanks to a host of different factors the comics page is no longer the go to place for kids to get their comic fixes.  That honor now belongs to the world of webcomics, where kids can find all their favorite funnies in one easy-to-locate spot. The golden age of the funny pages has passed, but comics will always be there for kids in one format or another.

Thinking about all of this got me to considering those comic strips souls who over the years have tried their hands at picture books.  Though I would have thought the transition from one to another would be intuitive, oddly few folks have ever gone for it.  So out of curiosity I thought I might try to round up those cartoonists who have made bold stabs at also conquering the world of small fry book publishing to (as you shall see) various degrees of success.

Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County, Outland, Opus)

Of all the author/illustrators on this list, Breathed seems the most dedicated to trying a wide variety of children’s fare.  Rather than limit himself to picture books, he has also gone so far as to pen the occasional novel for kids as well (Flawed Dogs).  The problem is . . . well . . . doggone it, I love the man.  I do.  I consider early Bloom County to be a stroke of genius that twisted my young reader self in the perverse woman I am today.  But the simple fact of the matter is that he’s not particularly good at children’s books.  There are far worse writers than him out there.  Of course there are.  But when all is said and done his books don’t wind up on that many Best of the Year lists for a very good reason.  Even when they’re turned into films (Mars Needs Moms) they flop.  Though, to be fair, Hollywood credited that flop to the fact that folks don’t want to see films with the word “Mars” in the title.

Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse)

There are two ways for a cartoonist to make a picture book.  The first is to come up with original ideas and characters.  The second is to take already existing beloved characters and just give them more space.  Breathed has done both (his characters from his strips have appeared in the books Goodnight, Opus,  The Last Bassalope, and A Wish for Wings That Work).  Johnston, to the best of my knowledge, has only written one picture book so far called Farley Follows His Nose.  Starring characters from For Better or For Worse it’s actually not half bad.  Were it not for its prominent creator, of course, the book would not stand out in any particular way, but it’s a nice extension of her talents.

Wal