Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they’re two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you’re always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there. And when you make a comic it never happens that you have 500 or 1,000 people reading it in the same place at the same time, all reacting.Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persopolis, talks about how she found success in adapting her acclaimed two-part graphic novel into an animated feature.
Bonus tip: cast Iggy Pop.
(Via Mayerson on Animation)
Tag: film
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Marjane Satrapi on Adapting Comics for Animation
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Fleischer Popeye 3d Backgrounds
Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios demos the distorted-architecture-on-a-turntable that his studio pioneered for creating compelling 3D backgrounds in their animated shorts. You can see it in motion in a number of their Popeye cartoons (like Popeye Meets Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) or in their originals like Mr. Bug Goes to Town (PS: check out that awesome title card typography!)
If you happen to be in L.A. this week, you can catch some classic Fleischer shorts in pristine 35mm prints as part of Jerry Beck’s animation series at the Cinefamily. Do it!
(Via Cartoon Brew)
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“There’ll Always Be a Place for Me at the Dairy Queen”
[Alas, my best GIF has disappeared after MLKSHK shut down…]
As I said before, Parker Posey grilling a single chicken wing is one of my favorite funnysad scenes committed to film. And now I’ve committed it to an animated GIF.
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Paper Moon
Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, an enjoyably bleak con artist road movie comedy set in the Great Depression. I’ll agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment that 9-year-old Tatum O’Neal “somehow resembles Huckleberry Finn more than any little boy I can imagine.”
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Frank Zappa on “What‘s My Line”
[Video no longer available]
Frank Zappa as the mystery guest on What’s My Line. Pretty dry, to be honest, although some might find interest in hearing him go into surprising detail about the video-to-film process used in filming 200 Motels (it was shot and edited in PAL video then upconverted to 35mm, a novel process at the time).
So why do I post this? Because at the 2:50 mark he references the awesome Time Life photo of him and his parents, confessing that it was “too purple.”
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Paris Qui Dort
[Video no longer available]
Paris Qui Dort (Paris Which Sleeps, aka At 3:25), an early short film by René Clair: a mad scientist uses a time-freezing ray on Paris, pausing everyone in their day-to-day life throughout the city. Everyone except for a random handful of people who happen to be up in the air at the time, who decide to take advantage of the perfectly still city. Proto-surrealist sci-fi with a dash of percolating social commentary.
I learned about this one from The Invention of Hugo Cabret, an excellent children’s historical fiction novel about early cinema, magic, automata, and Georges Méliès. Worth reading if you’re into any of those things.
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Woody Pinocchio
From Bat, Bean, Beam’s essay The Unmaking of Pinocchio on the difficulties Disney and Pixar both faced, decades apart, in creating lovable puppets, contrasted with the original source material from Carlo Collodi’s dark fairly tale of self agency and society:
When John Lasseter and his colleagues at Pixar set about making their first animated feature, they struck the exact same trouble that had beleaguered old Walt: two years into production, whilst presenting an early draft to Disney’s producers, they came to the realisation that their central character, Woody the Sheriff, was a sarcastic and unlovable brat. ‘A thundering arsehole’ were co-screenwriter Joss Whedon’s actual words. And so again the work of animation was halted, the production team regrouped and a major rewrite ensued, to ensure that Woody would be warmed to and therefore that the film could succeed. And in this case too I have little doubt that it was the smart thing to do; besides, there was no fidelity to be compromised in the process, no book to betray, unless one were somehow inclined to regard Pinocchio as an implicit ur-source, the ghost of puppets past haunting Woody from beyond the grave.
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Objects of Play
From an insightful entry on the Toy Story trilogy on Bat, Bean, Beam:
Of course the toys aren’t really toys, they are allegorical figurines that we are supposed to read human meanings into, but I want to try to be literal for a moment. There is one irrefutable truth that we learn through the films about the toys’ psychology, one trait that all of them except a pair of scarred deviants – Stinky Pete and Lotso – have in common: what they like best is to be played with by children. But it so happens that at those times they are limp and inanimate; as is the case whenever they are in the presence of people, their spark abandons them, their eyes become vacant – a point that is further underscored in Toy Story 3 by the otherwise extraordinary capacity for expression of those eyes. So what the toys derive the most pleasure from is also what flicks their off switch, reverting them to the base status of mass produced consumer objects: every Sheriff Woody, every Buzz Lightyear totally identical to any other, therefore totally interchangeable, Andy’s marker-pen branding notwithstanding.
That is curious, from a philosophical point of view. More unhappy/unheimlich psychoanalysis of the Toy Story fiction over at Frieze Magazine.
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Mon Oncle
Les lignes géométriques ne rendent pas les gens aimables [geometrical lines do not produce likeable people].
Filmmaker Jacques Tati on Villa Arpel, the comically painful modern house depicted in his satire Mon Oncle. You can watch a nice video of the house being reconstructed piece by piece for the recent Tati exposition at the Cinémathèque Française.
(Quote found on Wikipedia)
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Solaris
Solaris (1972). Something of a lyrical Russian follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a story of personal grief and longing set aboard a space station hovering over an abyssal alien ocean. Great use of understated sets and on-Earth scenery with allusions to the style of the Old Masters. Between Solaris, Alphaville, and Children of Men, I’m discovering that my favorite cinematic dystopian futures are the ones that make little or no effort to appear futuristic.