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Project Angels
John Kricfalusi, Mike Van Eaton, Rita Street, Jorge Garrido, Andreas Deja, John Canemaker, Jerry Beck, Leonard Maltin, June Foray, Paul and John Vinci, B. Paul Husband, Nancy Cartwright, Mike Fontanelli, Tom & Jill Kenny, Will Finn, Ralph Bakshi, Sherm Cohen, Marc Deckter, Dan diPaola, Kara Vallow
Project Heroes
Janet Blatter, Keith Lango Animation, Thorsten Bruemmel, David Soto, Paul Dini, Rik Maki, Ray Pointer, James Tucker, Rogelio Toledo, Nicolas Martinez, Joyce Murray Sullivan, David Wilson, David Apatoff, San Jose State Shrunkenheadman Club, Matthew DeCoster, Dino's Pizza, Chappell Ellison, Brian Homan, Barbara Miller, Wes Archer, Kevin Dooley, Caroline Melinger
Project Volunteers
Gemma Ross, Milton Knight, Claudio Riba, Eric Graf, Michael Fallik, Gary Francis, Joseph Baptista, Kelsey Sorge-Toomey, Alexander Camarillo, Alex Vassilev, Ernest Kim, Danny Young, Glenn Han, Sarah Worth, Chris Paluszek, Michael Woodside, Giancarlo Cassia, Ross Kolde, Amy Rogers
THIS DOWNLOAD IS A BONUS FOR NEW MEMBERS AND WILL ONLY BE AVAILABLE FOR THREE DAYS! DOWNLOAD IT NOW! AND PLEASE SHARE THIS POST WITH YOUR FRIENDS… MORE MEMBERS MEANS ANIMATION RESOURCES CAN DO MORE TO SERVE THE WORLDWIDE ANIMATION COMMUNITY.
Every other month, members of Animation Resources are given access to an exclusive Members Only Reference Pack. These downloadable files are high resolution e-books on a variety of educational subjects and rare cartoons from the collection of Animation Resources in DVD quality. Our current Reference Pack has just been released. If you are a member, click through the link to access the MEMBERS ONLY DOWNLOAD PAGE. If you aren’t a member yet, please JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES. It’s well worth it.
DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
Gran’Pop Monkey Cartoons Cartoon Films Ltd. (1940)
When Ub Iwerks decided to end his contract with Columbia Pictures and turn the reins of his studio over to Paul Fennell, there was initially a scramble to drum up work to keep the studio afloat. The result of this effort was the creation of three of the rarest and most obscure cartoons in the history of the studio… "A Busy Day", "Baby Checkers" and "Beauty Shoppe". The films were based on the popular monkey illustrations by Lawson Wood that adorned magazine covers and calendars in both the US and the UK, and were part of a brief period where the newly renamed Cartoon Films Ltd. had co-production deals with producers in Britain. (See the "This Changing World" series in our last reference pack for more films that were trans-Atlantic co-productions.)
Iwerks had decided to return to Disney, so it’s likely that he had no hand in these films- Fennell took on the directors’ duties. These three shorts were mentioned in trade magazines at the time, but for many years they were thought to be lost. Animation Resources Advisory Board member, Steve Stanchfield discovered several fragments of prints, in both two color and B&W and reconstructed the complete cartoons from the fragments. Because of the ephemeral nature of these films, these prints may be the last surviving copies of these films in existence. Animation Resources thanks Steve Stanchfield for sharing these with us.
THIS DOWNLOAD IS A BONUS FOR NEW MEMBERS AND WILL ONLY BE AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED TIME! DOWNLOAD IT NOW! AND PLEASE SHARE THIS POST WITH YOUR FRIENDS… MORE MEMBERS MEAN ANIMATION RESOURCES CAN DO MORE TO SERVE THE WORLDWIDE ANIMATION COMMUNITY.
Every other month, members of Animation Resources are given access to an exclusive Members Only Reference Pack. These downloadable files are high resolution e-books on a variety of educational subjects and rare cartoons from the collection of Animation Resources in DVD quality. Our current Reference Pack has just been released. If you are a member, click through the link to access the MEMBERS ONLY DOWNLOAD PAGE. If you aren’t a member yet, please JOIN ANIMATION RESOURCES. It’s well worth it.
PDF E-BOOK:
Hans Holbein’s Dances Of Death ca. 1520s (Edition Bohn 1858)
In 1833, a scholar named Frances Douce partnered with the greatest engravers of the day, John and Mary Byfield and George Bonner to produce a definitive facsimile edition of Holbein’s “Dance of Death”. By this point, the original woodblocks had been long since lost to time, and the myriad of later recuts and imitations made it difficult to know which cuts were by Holbein and which were later copies. Douce spent many years examining surviving prints and fragments of woodblock books to compile a complete set, then Byfield and Bonner undertook making precise duplicates of the original wood blocks without the inevitable damage the original prints had suffered.
In 1858, Henry J. Bohn combined into a single volume Douce’s book and a reprint of Holbein’s Bible cuts, recreated by Byfield and Bonner in 1830. These careful copies after Holbein have pretty much replaced the surviving original woodcuts because of the poor condition of the nearly five hundred year old paper. Animation Resources has digitized these images from an extremely rare first edition of Bohn’s publication, and we are proud to bring them to you as a downloadable high resolution e-book. This PDF e-book is optimized for display on the iPad or printing two up with a cover on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper.
REFPACK007: Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death Adobe PDF File / 161 Pages
249 MB Download
When the history of animation is taught in schools, the course generally starts with Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay and moves on from there. But animation is just a subset of a larger subject- cartooning, and the history of cartooning goes back hundreds of years.
The definition of the word “cartoon” originally meant a preliminary sketch for a painting. But with the introduction of printing around 1300, the purpose of cartoons began to change and evolve into what we know it to be today. When trying to trace the origins of cartooning, it is important to define what cartooning is. The basic elements of a cartoon are…
LINE DRAWING: The essence of a cartoon is the stylistic refinement of an image into a simplified rendering in line.
CARICATURE: Cartoons employ exaggeration, which illuminates truth and crystalizes a specific point of view.
SUBJECT MATTER: Usually, the subject matter of cartoons are humor, political or social satire, adventure or fantasy.
ECONOMICS: Cartoons are usually mass-produced using an inexpensive, ephemeral medium aimed at an audience of common people.
Some of these elements may exist more or less in specific types of cartooning; but in general, these are the definining elements.
The Knight
GROUND ZERO FOR THE ART OF CARTOONING: THE WOODCUT
In earlier times, a line sketch existed primarily as a preliminary design. It wasn’t valued as a work of art in itself. It was simply a by-product from the creation of a bigger work. Because they weren’t seen as important, very few line drawings before 1300 have survived. But with the introduction of printing, all that changed.
In the mid-15th century in Europe, woodblock printing began to emerge. The carving of the blocks didn’t allow for gray scale rendering, and because the wood and paper surfaces were uneven, solid areas of black did not print cleanly. The woodblock engravers developed a system of line hatching to both simplify and stylize images, and to indicate gray tones. As time went by, the hatching began to wrap around the volumes of the subjects, defining mass. By the beginning of the 14th century, inexpensive woodblock books were being produced, aimed at an audience of common people, both literate and semi-literate.
Around this time, Albrecht Dürer began producing elaborate woodblock prints depicting the Apocalypse, famous Saints and other religious themes. These prints were mass-produced and sold as souvenirs to pilgrims at religious shrines. Printed on cheap paper, these were among the first “broadsheets”, the publication format that spawned both newspapers and comics. Dürer’s prints were so popular, they were widely duplicated and published without his permission. He began putting a “trade mark” consisting of his initials on his own prints to identify them, but crafty plagiarists just duplicated his mark along with the image. Finally, Dürer petitioned the court in Nuremberg and in Venice and succeeded in getting an injunction against the copiers. This was the birth of our modern day copyright law.
The Pope
HANS HOLBEIN AND HIS DANCE OF DEATH
There are many questions about the origin of Hans Holbein’s “Dance of Death”. Experts estimate that they were produced in Basel, Switzerland sometime between 1522 and 1526. They were uncommissioned, so Holbein was free to express his personal point of view about the subject matter. The engraving was done by Hans Lüzelburger Formschneider in Basel, under the supervision of Holbein. The political, religious and social criticism embedded in these woodcuts probably prevented their publication for over a decade.
The Friar
Holbein evidently was highly critical of Church officials, from the Pope all the way down to the local monk and nun. The Pope is depicted with the Emperor kissing his feet, while devils hover around him. The Friar is dragged away by death, clutching his donation box, and the Nun is more interested in a handsome troubadour than she is with her prayers.
The Nun
The King
Political figures don’t escape Holbein’s critical eye either. The King is a caricature of Francis the First of France. The Judge is about to pass judgement on a poor man in favor of a rich man, and the Lawyer receives cash bribes on the street. A devil perches on the shoulder of the Senator who has turned his back on the poor. The Knight (higher up on this page) is foiled by his own vanity only to be impaled on his own lance, and the Soldier is in a fight for his own life with Death, but doesn’t stand a chance even with the best armor.
The Lawyer
The Gambler
Moral infractions are criticized harshly. Death and the Devil have a tug of war over the Gambler as another card player deftly scoops the money off the table, a lone woman is rescued from the Robber by Death’s interception, and the Drunkard is served by Death as his companions cavort with women and throw up all over the ground.
The Drunkard
The Old Woman
Most telling is the way Holbein depicts common people. The Old Woman is welcomed by Death as another spirit plays music to lead her on her journey, Death aids the Farmer at his plow., and Death gently leads the Old Man into an open grave as he plays music on a dulcimer for him. It’s clear on which side Holbein’s allegiances lay.
The Farmer
The Old Man
HOLBEIN’S MASTERPIECE AS AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF CARTOONING
Now that you know a little bit about these woodcuts, let’s apply it to the four basic elements of cartooning…
LINE DRAWING: The medium of woodblock printing prompted the development of stylized representation of image and mass in line.
CARICATURE: Holbein expresses his pointed opinions about religious, political and social issues by exaggerating and criticizing them through his drawings. He even creates a caricatured likeness of King Francis the First.
SUBJECT MATTER: Holbein’s black humor cuts like a knife, satirizing and lampooning people familiar to his readers. The fantastic element is represented with Death personified as a skeleton and dramatic adventure is included with knights impaled by their lances and soldiers fighting for their lives with swords.
ECONOMICS: Woodcuts of religious themes were cheaply printed and sold as souvenirs to pilgrims to religious shrines, widely distributed and copied, and sold to both literate and semi-literate common people.
When you first started reading this article, I am sure you were wondering what a 15th century set of woodcuts have to do with animation. Well, they provide an excellent example of cartooning at its most basic. By studying Holbein’s technique using the material on the Animation Resources website, you will quickly see how the fundamentals of drawing are beautifully employed in these images.
I’ll leave it to you to take a look at these webpages and analyze the images in this e-book for the principles outlined.
Preston Blair’s “Advanced Animation”
In particular, look at line of action, facial expressions and movement of body masses in the characters in Holbein’s works.
Composition: How To Make Pictures
Apply the four elements of composition (picture area, depth, line and value) to Holbein’s woodcuts, especially the Bible cuts.
Leviticus X: Nadab and Abihu Overcome by Fire
First Chronicles X: The Overthrow and Death of Saul
Daniel III: Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego Cast Into The Fire
DOCUMENTS – Paul Anderson, Secretary/Director of Documents
Over the past year, Animation Resources has seen significant growth. By now the organization has established visibility within all of the major animation studios in the area. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, we have continued to live up to our mission statement, serving both our local and international membership communities with invaluable resources. Throughout this period of steady growth, the Board of Directors has met regularly, kept accurate minutes, and kept up with all necessary paperwork and legal filings to ensure continued stability and success as we continue to expand our reach, both online through our website and social media and in person through networking events and screenings.
TREASURY – JoJo Baptista, Treasurer
As new members continue to enroll and renew their dues, the funds available for Animation Resources are growing steadily. This aids towards the establishment of new projects. The website, server space, and day to day operations of the organization are all currently self sustaining, due to the generosity of our members and valued donors. We are forecasting a gradual but steady increase in our membership rolls, and as the support increases, we will be able to offer more and more services to the worldwide animation community.
MEMBERSHIP- Taber Dunipace Director of Membership
Since establishing ourself as a membership supported non-profit organization at the beginning of last your, we’ve managed to reach our projected goal of 100 members in our first year of operation. During that time my primary duties have included welcoming new members and communicating with them using Facebook and email. In addition, I’ve spent some of my time interacting with members directly both online and in person at our live events, acting as an ambassador for the organization.
My plans for the coming year primarily concern the recruitment of new members. I plan to step up outreach to existing schools and creative organizations, and continue the outreach established in our February membership drive. I also plan to author more articles for the archive website on the topic of learning and practice habits. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to reach membership population of approximately 300 by the end of next year, and to hopefully retain as many repeat members as possible by continuing to provide them with excellent membership benefits and services for their dues.
ADVISORY BOARD- Michael Woodside, Liason to the Advisory Board
During our first year, we at Animation Resources have been accomplishing great things with our screenings, website and animation archive project. My main responsibility was to inform the Advisory Board of all of the information and events Animation Resources has offered to its membership and to report any of their expert feedback to our Board of Directors.
For the next year, I plan on taking all that we have learned from this past year and presenting it to our Advisory Board for their invaluable advice. I hope to gain their insight on how we can constantly improve our message and outreach methods. I also hope to find more professionals who would be interested in supporting Animation Resources with their advice and feedback.
EVENTS / PUBLICITY- David Hofmann, Director of Communications
As Director of Communications for Animation Resources, this has been a learning year for me. I successfully built a relationship with the director of programming at the American Cinemateque, leading to our first large scale screening this last spring. I have continued to be in contact with them to plan additional events during the coming the year. Of course, we also plan to continue having smaller scale screenings, networking parties and events right here in what we call the Animation Resources Clubhouse. To spread the word about our organization, I have also been working on getting Animation Resources into local conventions. We had our first networking party following CTN in November of last year. It was a great way for Animation Resources to introduce our organization to our target audience. Plans are in place for a presence at WonderCon this year to introduce our goals and mission statement to an even larger audience of prospective artists.
As for the goals for coming year, I would like to do more events with the American Cinemateque. I hope to connect with more conventions that we can use to get our name out there and recruit more members. I also would like to to do some non-screening events that allow us to show off our archive collection. One of my ideas is to create a liason with art galleries to make fine art prints available from the remarkable treasures in our collection.
TECHNOLOGY- Eric Jiang, Director of Technology
This year our website was refitted with WordPress plugins to allow special members only downloads by our former Director of Technology, Alex Vassilev. Our immediate goals for the future involve updating the online store and building two automated email lists, one for the general public, and one for Animation Resources Members.
When ASIFA-Hollywood and ASIFA-International informed us that they would no longer be able to sponsor our digital archive, our project was in peril of ending for good. But the volunteers who had benefitted from the Animation Archive (and had gone on to careers in the animation business because of it!) rallied behind the project and helped establish the 501(c)(3) non-profit status that was required to continue it. That took nearly two years of submitting forms and waiting for responses. But we were finally granted a charter two years ago. It took us another year to re-establish our web presence, gain visibility in social media, build the technical infrastructure to take dues and organize membership data online, and create benefits of membership that justified the membership dues. In the beginning of 2015, we were finally ready to start soliciting memberships, and I am proud to say that we have reached our initial goal of 100 members in our first year of operation. The membership dues for our first year were used to cover the legal fees involved in establishing the non-profit status, and to back up and upgrade the data servers which were at risk of hard drive crashes. That has now been accomplished, but it was a big job, because our disk arrays contain about 75 TB of data.
In the coming next few years, we have very big plans. We have never thought small around here! When I first started with ASIFA around 30 years ago, the intent of the organization was to create a network of small animation groups all over the world, which would exchange ideas and share their films. The idea was to encourage the communication of creative people all over the world. Of course, 30 years ago, the internet didn’t exist, so creating that kind of network was very difficult. ASIFA focused on creating festivals and events in various locations that were designed to draw the artists to them. But now we live in a different world, and just like Bill Scott envisioned an Animateque long before the digital technology existed to create it, ASIFA envisioned a worldwide community of animators before the online technology existed to be able to pull it off. With the help of enthusiastic support from young artists with much more technical savvy than old goats like myself, I hope to be able to finally bring this noble idea to reality. I would like to establish satellite Abimation Creative League groups all over the world, linked by the internet to share screenings, artwork, information and educational seminars. The first step towards accomplishing this, which we hope to put into operation by the Fall, is to establish a video podcasting system capable of live streaming our events, as well as sharing lectures, seminars and drawing classes across the internet to the worldwide animation community.
If I can digress into a story here for a moment… One of my most vivid memories of running the Animation Archive in Burbank was when I received a telephone call from the State Department letting me know that some dignitaries from Kazakhstan would like to pay a visit the archive. I had no idea why they chose my little project, but I let them know they would be welcome. They arrived with an entourage of government officials and interpreters, speaking no English at all. I showed them what we were doing, and explained our project, stopping after each and every sentence for the translator. They nodded with serious expressions and long beards… but I had no idea if they actually understood what I was saying. When I finished my nickel tour, we sat down and I asked the interpreter to translate for them so they could tell me about themselves. They explained that they were puppet animators and followed the website every day. It meant a lot for them to have access to the information that I was sharing with the world. They asked me why I did it. I wasn’t expecting that particular question, but I replied, “It takes a lot of energy and I have very little money to work with, but I have to do it… I love the art of animation.” The translator told them what I had said and they broke into big smiles and shook my hand. They said that it was the same for them. Since Russia had pulled out of their region, there was no money for puppet animation in Kazakhstan, but their art and tradition demanded that they continue it. Those of us in animation around the world really aren’t all that different.
The next goal for our organization after establishing a worldwide internet umbrella organization is to take our archive project to the world. Currently, we have over 150,000 high resolution images, 1,000 artists’ biographies and 7,000 digitized animated films. All of these treasures are housed in a database, which is keyword searchable like Google. The goal I have had from the beginning for this project is to get this database online for the reference of our members. We intend to house the material in a cloud server, and serve the database itself from our website. Storing this much information online is very costly, and obviously with 100 members, we are a long way from even being able to pay the server bills for such a mammoth undertaking. But I believe if we take it one step at a time, ultimately, we will reach our goal. With the support of our loyal members, and the unflagging energy and dedication of our incredible volunteers, I think we will achieve all of our goals much sooner than we think.
CERTIFICATE OF MERIT HONOREES
Beatrice Guo James Sanders Benny Mercader Nicholas John Pozega (Accepted by Paul Anderson)
Our organization wouldn’t exist without the faithful support and hard work of our volunteers. This year, four volunteers stood out because of their skills, dedication and accomplishments. James Sanders, Beatrice Guo and Benny Mercader tirelessly digitized and catalogued tens of thousands of images, and organized and processed our video collection for inclusion in the Archive Database. Nicholas John Pozega curated an invaluable Flickr gallery of animation reference and promoted our presence in social media. The Board of Directors of Animation Resources expresses our appreciation to these remarkable volunteers and thanks them for their wonderful work.
Special thanks to our good friend Antran Manoogian for manning the iPhone to capture these reports on video!
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Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
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