Author Archive

Tuesday, March 12th, 2024

Bonus009: Kurtzman’s Folly, Columbia Oscar Nominee, Russian Featurette!

Bonus Archive

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Today we are sharing the current Bonus Archive. If you are an annual member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Bonus Archive page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! You’ll get six new RefPacks a year. Sign up for a General or Student Membership and you’ll get access to the special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

These downloads will expire May 1st.

What are you waiting for?
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PDF E-BOOK:
Harvey Kurtzman

Trump
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Edited by Harvey Kurtzman

Hugh Hefner employed Harvey Kurtzman from April 1956 to edit Trump Magazine. The slick, full-color humor magazine appeared on newsstands in January 1957. Cartoonists who contributed to Trump included Mad regulars such as Will Elder, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, and Russ Heath, as well as newer artists such as Irving Geis, Arnold Roth, and R. O. Blechman. Writers Mel Brooks, Roger Price, Doodles Weaver, and Max Shulman also made contributions. The fifty-cent magazine was a luxurious, more risqué version of Mad, and sold well. Unfortunately, Hefner began to have financial problems, and canceled Trump after its second issue. The magazine had been a success in the market, but had already accrued $100,000 in expenses, to which Hefner said, “I gave Harvey Kurtzman an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it.”

Hefner delivered the news in person to Kurtzman— in the hospital where his third child, Elizabeth, was being born. His wife Adele said it was the only time she had seen her husband cry. Kurtzman later said that Trump was the closest he ever came to producing “the perfect humor magazine” —Wikipedia.org

This PDF e-book is optimized for display on the iPad or printing two sided with a cover on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper.

REFPACK025: Harvey Kurtzman’s Trump
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Adobe PDF File / 130 Pages / 459 MB Download


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HD QUALITY VIDEO:
Match Girl

The Little Match Girl
Columbuia / Arthur Davis / 1937

Animation Resources Advisory Board Member Steve Stanchfield writes…

I recently acquired a 35mm Technicolor print of this cartoon, and we showed it at the Redford Theatre cartoon show a few weeks back. Watching it with an audience unfamiliar with the film was a surprise, and more than a few people commented to me about the emotional tone of the film.

It’s one of my favorite cartoons, but is far from perfect. I think if the Columbia crew had more experience with serious subject matter that some of the things that detract from making it was powerful wouldn’t have been included.

In the 30s, the Mintz studio sometimes used film transition techniques in strange ways; the use of some are confusing and to the detriment of the short, while other times they work just fine, but seem unusual. The overuse of cross dissolves and wipes for seemingly no reason is a great example of this. In a pivotal moment in Little Match Girl, the use of these transitions lessens the seriousness of the moment, making the timing of the sequence seem more cartoonish. At other times, the techniques work beautifully.

As always, many thanks to Steve Stanchfield for sharing his treasures with us. If you haven’t already, check out the videos at his Thunderbean Animation Store at Amazon.

REFPACK025: The Little Match Girl
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M4V Video File / 8:20 / 468 MB Download


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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
Fisherman and his Fish

The Tale of the Fisherman and his Fish
Soyuzmultfilm / Aleksandr Ptushko / 1950

The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish is a fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin wrote the tale in autumn 1833 and it was first published in the literary magazine Biblioteka dlya chteniya in May 1835. The tale is about a fisherman who manages to catch a “Golden Fish” which promises to fulfill any wish of his in exchange for its freedom. The storyline is similar to the Russian fairy tale The Greedy Old Wife (according to Vladimir Propp) and the Brothers Grimm’s tale The Fisherman and His Wife.

In Pushkin’s poem, an old man and woman have been living poorly for many years. They have a small hut, and every day the man goes out to fish. One day, he throws in his net and pulls out seaweed two times in succession, but on the third time he pulls out a golden fish. The fish pleads for its life, promising any wish in return. However, the old man is scared by the fact that a fish can speak; he says he does not want anything, and lets the fish go.

When he returns and tells his wife about the golden fish, she gets angry and tells her husband to go ask the fish for a new trough, as theirs is broken, and the fish happily grants this small request. The next day, the wife asks for a new house, and the fish grants this also. Then, in succession, the wife asks for a palace, to become a noble lady, to become the ruler of her province, to become the tsarina, and finally to become the Ruler of the Sea and to subjugate the golden fish completely to her boundless will. As the man goes to ask for each item, the sea becomes more and more stormy, until the last request, where the man can hardly hear himself think. When he asks that his wife be made the Ruler of the Sea, the fish cures her greed by putting everything back to the way it was before, including the broken trough. —Wikipedia.org

This video is newly restored and has no English subtitles But I think you will be able to follow the story. There is some remarkable effects animation and design, and some skillful rotoscoping. If you would like to see more animation by the legendary Soyuzmultfilm studios in Moscow, let us know.

REFPACK025: Fisherman and his Fish
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M4V Video File / 30:11 / 493 MB Download


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Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!

It’s easy to join Animation Resources. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…


JOIN TODAY!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

PayPalAnimationAnimation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.


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Monday, March 11th, 2024

Thanks To Our Loyal Members!

Thanks

We’ve reached the conclusion of our 2023 Animation Resources Members Appreciation Month. I’d like to thank all of the loyal members who resubscribed for 2023, and I’d like to welcome all of the new members who joined in the past few weeks. We are very fortunate to have so many faithful supporters.

Our members stick with us. Very few people who stepped up to support us when we started ten years ago have fallen away. Our membership is steadily growing. That really tells us that we are making a difference for you. We greatly appreciate your faith in us.

Animation Resources is an organization run BY artists FOR artists. That’s what makes it so unique. There are plenty of groups related to the animation BUSINESS, but we are entirely focused on the ART of animation. No corporation is subsidizing the dues of our members. Our members reach into their own pockets to support us because they believe in what we’re doing. Together, we’ll work to reinvigorate animation one artist at a time. Stronger artists mean a stronger artform. Just returning to the “golden age” isn’t good enough… Let’s invest in our own creativity to build a future that is MORE exciting, entertaining and expressive than ever before.

Volunteers are the heart of any great non-profit group, and Animation Resources is lucky to have a wonderful group of people coordinating our social media, running the scanner and cataloguing the collection. All of us owe them a great debt of gratitude for their generosity and hard work.

If you aren’t a member yet, please JOIN. We will leave all the downloads up through the weekend. If you are a member share how great Animation Resources is with your friends and peers. More members mean we can bring you more useful material for your self-study.

Wanna be a member?
WANNA BE A MEMBER? WANNA BE A MEMBER?

With the bi-monthly Reference Packs curated by our Board, the Bonus Archive and the podcasts, you will have a great start at building a personal library of reference material that will serve you for your entire artistic career… and it’s a drop dead bargain. But the best part is that you’ll be supporting a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that is run by artists and for artists. If you are a creative person, you should be a member of Animation Resources. You owe it to yourself and your muse.

FREE SAMPLES!

Not Convinced Yet? Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month! That’s 560 pages of great high resolution images and nearly an hour of rare animation available to everyone to download for FREE!

Sample RefPack


JOIN TODAY!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

Members Appreciation Month

PayPalAnimationAnimation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.

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Thursday, March 7th, 2024

Curation and Creativity: Work In Progress

I’m going to chat for a minute about some of our work in progress at Animation Resources…

Curation

The other day, I was talking with a friend about what was important about what we do at the Animation Archive, and he said that the collection was the most important thing. We’ve amassed a huge archive of digitized films and scanned artwork. But I disagreed. Google search has a massive collection too, as does archive.org. The thing that sets us apart is CURATION.

You can have all the treasures in the world, but if you aren’t putting them into context, they’re just specimens in jars of formaldehyde sitting on a dusty shelf. Great objects exist all over. Museums and warehouses are full of them. The trick is to put them to use for a purpose. That takes a deeper understanding. With every Reference Pack and article we share with our followers, Animation Resources is encouraging and supporting our members to engage in that sort of self study and application of principles.

Creative Process

The job of Animation Resources is to bring “the good stuff” to working artists, so they can analyze it, process it, and apply the fundamentals they uncover to their own work. Learning to be creative is a process like any other constructive process, but a lot of artists have never stopped to think of how they go about it. I was chatting with a great artist about this once, and he swore up and down that creativity couldn’t be learned, either you have it or you don’t. I started listing off the ways that you foster and develop creativity. As I listed them, he replied, “I do that.” “I do that.” “I do that.” He thought he had been born creative, but he was actually born doing the things that make a person creative. He was working to become more creative without even knowing it.

Curation is a similar process. Part of it is straightforward research. That’s the easy part. There are lots of librarians and historians who can catalog and document. It’s easy to look at the surface and say, “Disney made ‘Brave Little Tailor’ in 1938.” but that is just a statement of fact, not real understanding. The more difficult and intuitive part of research is discerning the connections between things that reveal the universal truth beneath. Yeah, I know… that sounds “hippy-dippy” and I apologize for that. But it’s the easiest way to describe it. The products of human creativity have cultural differences, and technique is dependent on technology. This makes them all look different. However once you dig beneath the surface, you start to see the invisible connections that make up the way humanity thinks, feels and creates. There are patterns that we all follow. If you want to be an artist, you may express those patterns and choices without even knowing it.

Tenggren and Dulac
Tenggren and Dulac
Connections: Tenggren, Dulac and Japanese Woodcut

Lately, with COVID rapidly shrinking in the distance behind us, I’ve dived into several projects that are all linked, but the connections weren’t initially obvious. I’ve got a long list of projects on my “to-do list” that I haven’t gotten around to developing yet. One of those was investigating international animation. I read the Bendazzi book from cover to cover and it excited me about these films, but I had no way of accessing them. When a batch of Russian DVDs turned up on the greatest archive known to man— eBay— I jumped on it. It was a collection of over 75 DVDs of rare Russian animation. I started digitizing them and I was blown away at the diversity and quality of the work. Their approach to the art form is unique and pure. There’s so much to learn from these films! I’ve begun sharing the riches of the Eastern block in the Reference Packs.

Russian Animation

Russian animation led me to thinking about the other great culture for animation— anime. I’m familiar with the usual suspects… “Akira”, “Kimba the White Lion”, the feature films by Miyazaki and others. But I never felt that Animation Resources needed to focus on that. It’s all readily available, and most animation students today know all about those films. But Animation Resources’ treasurer, JoJo Baptista showed me that there’s a lot more to Japanese animation than just the films we all know. Together, we started researching early Japanese animation. I discovered that before animation became standardized and institutionalized in Japan, there was a wide range of styles and ideas. I traced the history of animated features in Japan from the WWII propaganda film, “Momotaro’s Sea Eagles” through the 1960s, while JoJo focused on early television animation. He discovered some rarely seen series that are models of expressive economy. These TV programs addressed and solved the problem of how to keep limited animation lively- the same problem that independent internet animators face. We’ll be sharing that in upcoming Reference Packs as well.

Early Anime

My research into the early history of Japanese animation led me down a rabbit hole similar to one I explored early on in the Animation Archive Project. Back in the mid 2000s I started tracing the lineage of Western cartooning backwards step by step, from the golden age cartoon films to newspaper comics to the earliest sequential cartoons to caricature magazines to British printmakers to woodblock carvers and ultimately all the way back to Leonardo daVinci’s grotesque caricatures. I learned that animation was just a part of the story. The history of Western cartooning is a continuum that extends back far beyond Winsor McCay. I discovered that on the other side of the globe, in near complete isolation, the same thing was happening in Japan. I’m now in the process of tracing anime back to manga to ukiyo-e and perhaps its earliest origins in Chinese painting. That research is just getting started.

Hans Holbein Dance of Death

Those who have read my article on “Dances of Death” (included in the ebooks in our sample reference pack: https://animationresources.org/join-us-sample-reference-pack/) know the similarities I’ve found between late 15th century woodblock artists like Holbein and Durer and modern commercial cartooning. The EXACT same aspects are shared by Japanese woodcuts known as ukiyo-e or “The Floating World”. And the Japanese woodcuts led to manga, just as woodcuts led to comics. And you already know where comics and manga led!

This has been a very long post, and perhaps only a few have read this far. But Animation Resources has never been aimed at the typical followers of social media. 99% of the people who see and share our posts are just reacting to a pretty picture. That’s fine, but that isn’t why Animation Resources exists. Our real target audience is the small specialized number of creative artists who are actively analyzing and making the connections in their head to develop and hone their own creativity. If that describes you, I want to let you know that I’ll be sharing more about these projects in the near future. Keep your eyes peeled and your mind open. Come along on the journey with us.

JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES

If you aren’t a member of Animation Resources yet…

JOIN Animation Resources TODAY!
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Members Appreciation

For the past decade, Animation Resources has been serving artists working in the fields of animation, cartooning and illustration. Our volunteers and members have pulled together to raise the bar for our art form, and it’s time to celebrate… It’s Members Appreciation time again!

During the month of February, Animation Resources expresses our appreciation for to members with a very special Reference Pack, and we invite you to become a member too. For the next 30 days, we will be sharing reasons why you should join us. Our benefits of membership far exceed the cost of our annual dues.

Dollar Days

This year, we are trying something new to encourage new memberships. You can join for a one week trial membership for only A DOLLAR! Yes, you get access to everything our annual members get for seven days for only a buck. (Click here for the details on our Dollar Days.) What are you waiting for?

You can find out what our members get at the Member Appreciation Page. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…


JOIN TODAY!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

Members Appreciation Month

PayPalAnimationAnimation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.


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