Culture Making Articles items tagged animation

My kind of body art

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Christy: ?The human imagination never ceases to amaze and astound me. Give a creative person a blank (body) canvas, a Magic Marker, a camera and a Tom Waits song, and you get this marvelous stop-motion message of hope and invitation.?

"Come On Up To The House," by Tom Waits, directed by Anders Lövgren :: first posted here 20 November 2009

The Plastics Inventor

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?I was delighted to find online this short animation, which is discussed at length in Jeffrey L. Meikle's book American Plastic: A Cultural History. It's a wonderful reminder of how the associations with a cultural good—particularly one as plastic as, well, plastics, change over time: in 1944, plastic was mockable as shoddy, junky, and—here's the real surprise—the realm of do-it-yourselfers and backyard alchemists. It was hyped as the product of the future, but "such visions melted away as quickly as Donald Duck's plastic plane when exposed to the reality of shoddy home-front plastics. By portraying plastic as a so-called miracle material that dissolved in contact with water, Disney animators relied on the audience's familiarity with similar catastrophes—with plastic sink strainers that melted in hot water or buttons that became greasy blobs at the dry cleaners." (The book's introduction is also fascinating: for some reason I'd never thought to hear the famous line from The Graduate—"Just one word...Plastics..."—as anthing more than just good solid late–'60s career advice.)?

"The Plastics Inventor" (1944), directed by Jack King, animated by Paul Allen et al, produced by Walt Disney :: via Boing Boing

Modelling Snow White

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?Evolution of a cartoon heroine.?

In addition to making Snow White fashionable, Grim also “began to absorb more and more of the actual live model” into his drawings, writes Johnson, who happened to be a 14-year-old girl named Marge Belcher, who was 16 when they finished filming. Take a look at that face—it’s not exactly the childlike countenance Disney princesses have these days, is it?

Look at Snow White on the Disney Princess official website, Sure she’s been hipped up a bit to fit into modern times and, apparently, that included her waistline—it’s smaller than Barbie’s! (Go download Snow White’s wallpaper and then ask yourself, are the dwarfs even feeding her?)

from "When Did Snow White Get So Dirty?," by Paige Phelps, Deep Glamour, 13 November 2008

The paper wins

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy
: ?I've expressed my admiration before for John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design. But I think my admiration just went up another notch, upon the discovery that he carries this 18-year-old academic paper (literally, on paper) by Pixar's John Lasseter with him wherever he goes. The excerpts from the paper he links to are well worth reading. And I love the photo, with a sheet of paper in the background containing, over and over, the handwritten words, "raison d'être." Three cheers.?

from "My Favorite Research Paper," by John Maeda, Our (and Your) RISD, 4 November 2008

I have carried a reprint of John Lasseter’s seminal paper on computer animation, “Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation,” for the last 18 years. This hardcopy document has been to Japan, both coasts of the US, and has really been near/dear to me and is yellowed from age and embarassingly food-stained and so forth. It occurred to me today that maybe this paper might be available online, and I just found it in excerpted form here. I’m not sure what to call it … but maybe I had a kind of myopia when it came to this one document in my life. I felt that unless I held onto it in print, that I would never be able to handily access the information. Discovering that the content is available online right now seems truly freeing to me. And yet oddly enough, I am still hesitant to place my tattered reprint into my recycling box before I leave to my next engagement this evening.

There’s always the “just in case” when it comes to any information around you. Even in this digital era we know it’s easy to lose information forever. Nothing is truly permanent. But I’ve carried this paper around for 18 years — hmmmm, as old as an RISD freshman. Ah. The power of perspective. Looks like this paper will be sticking around me for many more years to come. Dilemma resolved. Paper wins.

Even if the camera isn’t real

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?A profound parable of the world-making effects of technology, or really rather just the idea of technology (which sometimes can be more powerful than the real thing).?

Animation by Chris Ware, the intro to "The Cameraman," This American Life, Season One, Episode Four