Major Post 2: Winsor McCay

Posted on by Sammy Liu

Winsor McCay; a man of detail and precise craftsmanship, with reminiscences of stylistic art nouveau. 🙂
By chance, during my journey to the massive library in Causeway Bay (HK Central Library), I saw, sitting in the specially book stand…
“Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice and Further Adventure and Further Adventure”

Much to my joy, I could say I know the name because of ANIM223!
In this comic, the plot is based on the DREAMS of Little Nemo, where he explores different worlds and stumbles into problems with the Princess of Slumberland.

To my surprise, it seemed like the comic caught Japan’s interest and Film Director, Masami Hata, collaborated with America’s William Hurtz to transform the comic into an American-Japanese animation in 1989.
(Side note: Masami Hata also directed one of the episodes in “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” in 2016!)

We’re jumping further ahead here in the timeline of animation, however this is such a good opportunity to see how American Cartoonists/Animators influenced worldwide – to Japan, another country known for their iconic animations, and vice versa.
However, despite having many talented creatives involved in creating “Little Nemo”, many came and left, leaving the project unstable. To further complicate it, there were language barriers as well. Bet they learnt a lot and overcame many different obstacles as some still carried on and persevered.

Another side note: Before Little Nemo, Masami Hata also directed “Ringing Bell” (1978) and “The Sea Prince and the Fire Child” (1981), both of which were accomplished in their own right.
This is def a personal note, because it’s super cute, with magical yet ‘dour’ tones, and has Little Mermaid (1989) vibes, or rather, Little Mermaid has Sea Prince and the Fire Child vibes.

Sammy Liu

Major Post 2 – The Adventure of Prince Archmed

Posted on by marissatso

The Adventure of Prince Achmed is an animation I really enjoyed to watch during the class. It was the first animated films that took a period of three years.

The story was based on legends from the One Thousand and One Nights, Lotte Reiniger used silhouettes, which was accomplished by cutouts cardboard. She hand-cut out very detailed and complicated silhouettes in this film, marvellous animated with shapes transformed seamlessly into another beautifully, especially seen in the battle between the Witch and the Magician while they morph into animals. Although black silhouettes offered limited perception, the characters still remained highly distinct by their shape and movement.
How she managed to cut out such delicate silhouettes really impressed me. She was able to take care every decorative design or the architecture behind or the clothes the characters wear, astonish me as I can never cut even there a straight line for me to follow. ;(

Marissa Tso

Major Post 2: Persistence of Vision

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

In class 2, we discussed artists that learned to work with the “persistence of vision” that our eyes have. Emile Reynaud’s optical theater was quite and amazing creation. It surpassed the ideas of the thaumatrope, phenakistocope, and zoetrope. Reynaud hand painted over 500 drawings to make a short 15-minute film. I would love to see an optical theater in action with the live orchestra and try my hand at operating the hand cranks.

Other artists whose work I enjoyed were Georges Melies and Winsor McCay. Melies’ “The Untamable Whiskers” used an interesting technique to give the appearance that the man is changing form. Melies overlapped his strips of film to create the gradual transitions. I also enjoyed “A Trip to the Moon” by Melies. He built out the more important props in 3dimensions and created painted backdrops for the rest of the settings. This creates dynamic visuals and depth without needing full sets. The paintings almost trick the viewer’s eye and they’re so well painted that it just works.

A film by Winsor McCay that I enjoyed was “Gertie the Dinosaur”. McCay made 10 thousand drawings and it took him 6 months., however it was worth the work because the animation is fluid and beautifully drawn. I like that McCay interacts with Gertie using the text and uses a simple story to develop Gertie’s personality.

Sydney McPherson

Major Blog Post 3: Max & Dave Fleischer

Posted on by Wendy Kong

Max & Dave Fleischer is Walt Disney Animation Studio’s very first competitor in 1930s. Some of their most recognizable characters are Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, Bimbo, Popeye the Sailor. We watch animations of all of this character during class. I think Bimbo’s Initiation (1931) is funny and the ending is quite surprising as Bimbo said yes to a thing that he resisted a lot after he saw Betty Boop. The design of Betty Boop is sexy and unique. I did a little research on her, it said she “combing in appearance the childish with the sophisticated—a large round baby face with big eyes and a nose like a button, framed in a somewhat careful coiffure, with a very small body of which perhaps the leading characteristic is the most self-confident little bust imaginable”. I like the Snow White (1933) played by her because her personality stands out a lot. When I was a kid, I used to watch Popeye the Sailor every day. I love how he gets strength from eating spinach and beat the big guy. I am sharing a clip from Popeye the Sailor. Hope you guys will enjoy it!!

Wendy Kong

Major Blog Post 2: Felix the Cat

Posted on by Wendy Kong

For class three, Professor talked about Felix the Cat which is one of the most famous characters in the early age. He is created by Pat Sullivan and Otto Mesmer in 1919. We watched a few animations of Felix the Cat in Class including Felix Pitches the Pole, Feline Follies and Felix in the Hollywood. I enjoyed all of them very much but my favourite one is Felix in the Hollywood because it is hilarious, and the actions of Felix is so dynamic. I can understand why Felix the Cat became a mascot or even a popular icon. His design is simple and cute, his personality is clearly shown through the animation. I love how he did silly stuffs, but it was effective and helpful to the situation like how he put the gums on the road to trick passenger to buy new shoes. I also love he is mischievous but good hearted at the same time. Felix the Cat is a big success of Pat Sullivan and Otto Mesmer. I wish I can go to Felix Chevrolet one day to purchase his merchandises. (I bought a box of gums with Felix the Cat packaging when I was in Japan last year accidentally. )

End with a Felix the Cat I drew in class. (\^^/)

Wendy Kong

Major Post 5: The Role of Music in Disney Studios

Posted on by Eunhae Mary Park

Disney Studios’ main turning points in history can be seen to first be the creation of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, and second the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). The Mickey Mouse cartoons became immensely popular for its portrayal of its hero as an imperfect mouse who has to face the humorous consequences of his actions. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves became iconic after being the first 2D (hand-drawn) animated feature film.

One of the reason both became turning points, I think, is because of the storytelling its interaction with music. For both works, the main character moves to the music and the music, in turn, changes with the characters actions and emotions. Mickey Mouse’s actions and movements move on beat and with a repeating rhythm to create coherence in the many back-to-back actions that occur across the screen. The soundtrack in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves becomes iconic in that the music is almost continuous throughout the whole film and changes with major plot points.

As these two works changed the industry standard at the time they were made, Disney Studios’ works and choices still mark significant changes in animation today. This can especially be seen with the swift change from 2-D to 3-D productions that occurred after Disney’s Toy Story 1 in 1995.

Eunhae Mary Park

Major Post 4: The Effects of Abstract Animation

Posted on by Eunhae Mary Park

Abstract animation shows how animation, known for stories and plot, like the fine arts, can be used to simply display and/or incited certain feelings and emotion. It is because artists and animators of the early 1900s wanted to properly have their feelings be reflected in the animation they create, that more dynamic techniques of animation were created especially in special effects. Animators found and created new methods to fill in for techniques in animation that had not been evolved enough to properly create the intended effect.

I also think that because visual music lacks the conventional means of a story, animators used design elements of line, shape and color to push, instead, the musical narrative. This led to the dynamic movements seen in Oskar Fischiger’s works. The push for a musical narrative in animation leads into animated stories and films that are heavily supported by continuous music, as they are in a lot of the films produced by Disney Studios.

Eunhae Mary Park

Project 2-WIP 1-Pre-production

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

             Julia and I will be working together once again and this time we feel that we want to shift the tone of our animation and make something rather scary for the paper cut out assignment. We will be leaning toward making paper dolls and trying to establish some kind of depth and perspective with the backgrounds and the puppets themselves. Currently, we are trying to decide if we should use the down shooter to capture out animator or get creative with it and see if we can rig up something ourselves.

             We have also decided that for our materials we are sticking to merely black, white, and grey paper, some pens to add detail and pegs to give the puppets some movement.

Content wise, we have settled on the monster and three shots we would like to accomplish.

We would like to have the monster be all black and have most of the terror come from twitchy uncanny character acting. Linked with this post are some rough boards of the shots we have settled on as well as a rough break down and notes of the puppet for the monster.

Julia Reymundo and LeAnn Schmitt

Major Post 5: Disney and Rotoscoping/Live Action Reference

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Major Post 5: Disney and Rotoscoping/Live Action Reference

             Walt Disney did more than just animate, he worked to make his audience believe that they were part of the worlds he would create. To achieve this immersion Disney Studios used live action reference and rotoscoping to inspire and create many of their most memorable scenes and characters. Linked below is a shot of early live action footage of Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of Alice from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, which was referenced and rotoscoped by animators.

             Rotoscoping is when an animator will draw over live-action footage of an actor for an animated film. This technique was created by Max Fleischer, the creator of the Out Of the Ink Well series. Originally, it was referenced to as the Fleischer Process when it was first implemented into animation. Rotoscoping can be a good way to make a character feel much more realistic since you are able to capture fine details and emotional shifts that can be hard to see when you are merely looking at references. However, sometimes rotoscoping can have an uncanny and creepy feel to it since it can walk the line between realistic and over exaggerated.  

LeAnn Schmitt

MP2.5 | Miscellaneous Achmed-related thoughts

Posted on by Claude Lau

Because I had a lot of left over material from research for my last post on Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and can’t stop stressing how great and important Lotte Reiniger is. Being the first feature animation is sure to make Achmed become a source for many of its successors.

By deduction I imagine it was a very early film produced in the Western world using ‘Arabia’ or Orientalism as its only visual and narrative theme. It was adapted from two stories of the ‘Middle Eastern’ fairytale collection Arabic One Thousand and One Nights, one of which is the now very familiar story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, made popular by its circulation in book form and by Disney’s adaptation in 1992. There is actually a ‘Prince Achmed’ in at the very beginning of the film, and I’d like to think the name is a reference to Reiniger’s Achmed, even if it isn’t confirmed.

This Achmed is definitely not Aladdin’s friend.

The harem is a common Orientalist theme, and I think we were all not expecting that scene with Achmed and the servant/entertainer girls entertaining each other in a room. It is worth mentioning that European countries never had an equivalent of the systematic Hays Code that banned ‘immoral’ content. But it seems that Reiniger just has a penchant for racy or sexual more-than-undertones, as also seen from her later short film Papageno (1935). In the handout interview Reiniger admits as much when asked directly about that Achmed scene. What a lady.

Horniness aside, this is a very cool adaptation of Papageno’s story from Mozart’s The Magic Flute; in the original opera the character Papageno is more a sidekick than a main character.

Though I have not surveyed a list of the earliest films (including live action), Achmed might be the earliest feature with a wizard or magic duel sequence, and is most definitely the earliest example of a duel that shows the characters shapeshifting. According to the TVTropes page on ‘Shapeshifter Showdowns’ as it is titled, this is a theme that has existed in human myths and folklore even before the printing press was invented. I was reminded of the Disney film Sword in the Stone (1963) which also involves a witch and a wizard/sorcerer throwing down in magical animal transformer style. Something about turning into different creatures, especially because of our associations with certain animals being good/evil or more or less powerful than other animals, is very entertaining to watch. At least it was the case for child-me, who still re-emerges when to relive watching this sequence.

A duel for the ages (of animation).

It’s noteworthy that the animation technique for changing between animals in Achmed makes more use of morphing, perhaps because of the limitations that come with cutout/silhouette. In Sword in the Stone, and also in another Disney example of a shapeshifting sequence, The Emperor’s New Groove, there is more use of special effects like sparks and jump cuts to show a character has changed animal. Arguably it makes for more interesting pacing and varied rhythm, and as we saw in today’s class (Class 6), synchrony with music was established early on as a Disney trademark method. In the promised future post on Michel Ocelot, I could talk about how this lively rhythm/music accompaniment was brought back to silhouette morphing in Princes et Princesses, but it will be for another day.

Claudia Lau