some stories are best told without any words

This silent black and white film tells more of a story in six minutes than many two hour movies manage. Paperman was created by Disney's John Kahrs (The Incredibles) who was inspired by the time he spent in NY, commuting to Grand Central. To create soft black and white animation (the only color is lipstick) Kahrs and his team used new software called Meander which merged hand drawings with computer-generation to create the look of Disney animations of yore. It's up for an Oscar and made its debut on youtube Tuesday where it's already gotten 3 million votes.

the drama behind dancing cereal boxes

Follow-up to a post on vintage cereal box illustrations:

An animator for Cap'n Crunch cereal commercials honed her skills at an unlikely institution: Auschwitz. Dina Babbitt (nee Gottlieb) was a teenaged art student who was incarcerated there, and a fellow inmate asked her to decorate the cheerless walls of the children's barracks. She complied, pilfering paint to enliven walls with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and other whimsical creatures. Which brought her to the attention of Josef Mengele. He guaranteed her life if she'd work for him to document his experiments. She agreed⎯if he'd agree to save her mother, too. She spent the rest of the war doing portraits for the Angel of Death who felt that the genetic inferiority of his prisoners wasn't captured well enough by photography.

After the war, she and her mother moved to Paris where she was interviewed for a job as an animator for Warner Bros. Coincidentally, her interviewer had worked on Disney's "Snow White". Soon, they were married and moved to LA where she became an animator working on films, cartoons and commercials. Her favorite project, she said, was Cap'n Crunch cereal because she loved drawing kids.

Babbitt passed away last week  at age 86. Sadly, she spent her last decades trying to retrieve her paintings from the Auschwitz Museum. Museum directors claim that the paintings' historical and educational value supersede the her rights of ownership. In answer to pleas bolstered by a Facebook fan page (!)-- they sent her reproductions; the originals remain on display.

bugs in his shorts

Obsessed as I am with stop-motion photography, I can't believe I've only just discovered the work of Wladyslaw Starevitch whose turn of the century (last century) animation is what computer animators attempt to imitate today.

A childhood passion for entomology inspired Starevitch to film insects. Under the heat of the only shooting lights available in Moscow in 1909, the insects died. But no matter. He used the bugs anyway, wiring the legs to the thorax with sealing wax and employing stop-motion photography to show them in action. After the British screening of one of his films, London journalists, convinced the insects were alive, praised not only the film, but the talent of the "unidentified Russian scientist who can train insects to act." (Those amazing Russians.) 

Starevitch also directed films in which leading actors of the day appeared, but he preferred working with dolls and (dead) insects because "actors never did what you wanted them to." In 1920, he moved to Paris to escape the Russian Revolution, anglicized his name to Ladislaw Starewicz and made over forty films casting inanimate objects, including dolls, branches, rocks, insects and puppets of his own creation. His The Tale of the Fox, a film that took him over ten years to produce, is still considered one of the best stop-motion films ever made.

In celebration of the season, here's a Starewicz short about Father Christmas. Entomologist viewers will note that the cast of insects include a Dung Beetle and a Grasshopper, not a Ladybug and a Dragonfly as indicated by the English captions which were added much later.

Other Starewicz films can be viewed here, including The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), a gripping drama about infidelity among insects.


Tip of the director's visor to Casey. 

take a break from the hot air around you

And watch balloons over Casablanca. Galactica. Oz. Jerry Rees, film animator and balloon fanatic, spent god knows how long digitally inserting a balloon into key scenes of 18 film classics. The least you can do is spend 6 minutes to enjoy. Trust me, it's worth it.


Note for techies: He lit a real balloon to match each scene, shot it against a green card, then key-framed all the movement with After Effects - motion blur activated.

via Very Short List