By Geoffrey Golden

American animated movies tend to think big. Our heroes set-off on a journey to explore humongous landscapes and meet other over-the-top characters, as they complete a mind-bogglingly impossible task. I’m a huge fan of animated adventure stories, but it’s nice to have some variety in the cartoon cinema. That’s why Wes Anderson’s first animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox (now playing theaters), was such a breath of fresh, cider-scented air.

Pixar is the current gold standard for animated films, and they lean heavily towards the big adventure story. Up is about an around-the-world journey in a hot air balloon house; The Incredibles help save the world from an evil genius; and WALL-E helps save humanity from an apocalypse of pleasure. Even in Toy Story, because the perspective of the characters is so small, a trip to Pizza Planet becomes an epic journey.

DreamWorks Animation and other studios tend to follow suit, with stories involving kingdom-saving ogres and animals trying to survive the ice age. Big stories, even bigger set pieces and enormous characters voiced by comedy legends. When a formula works, there’s little reason for Hollywood to stray.
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By Geoffrey Golden

It’s been a long, long ride to get to Planet 51, which opens in theaters tomorrow. Since 2002, Illion Animation Studios has been perfecting their first feature length animated movie for theaters. Seven years of re-writing, re-recording and re-animating later, they finally launched their film into theaters, but will it be a smooth landing with audiences?

The best CG animation sweats the details, whether it’s tweaking a story beat or perfecting the bounce of an antenna, so it’s no surprise that Illion wanted to get everything just right for their debut feature. On the visuals, they scored a home run. A perfectionistic attention to detail makes the film pure eye candy.

The textures are especially well-crafted, from the peach-soft alien skin to the glossy metallic shell of Rover, the dog-like space exploration robot. You also can’t help but admire the backgrounds and visual touches, like the glossy bowling alley and the humorously stylized poster for the alien horror movie poster, “Humaniacs 2.”
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With every great piece of character animation comes striking, innovative, stylish, or original character design. In recent years, some animation artists have published their own books on the subject; David Coleman’s The Art of Animal Character Design, Mike Mattesi’s Character Design From Life Drawing and Tom Bancroft’s Creating Characters With Personality just to name a few.

But I now present to you the mother of all Character Design books to inspire any animator.

Great New Characters is spectacular 670 page cube-shaped book with so many character designs to drool over that you won’t know what to do with yourself. It was created by Zeixs in collaboration with the cutting edge publishing house Feierabend Unique Books, and the ground-breaking design agency 12ender, with a brilliantly illustrated cover by Patrick Morgan.

From their hugely popular Design Cube Series, which has several volumes covering the art of Graphic Design, Typography, Poster Design, T-Shirt Design, and Logo Design, comes this superbly illustrated edition that brings together an unsurpassed collection of the most creative and inventive characters from designers and artists from around the world. Featuring a huge variety of styles and mediums – including 2D, 3D, animated, illustrated, digital, vinyl, paper, plush, textile, street and urban.

If you are a character designer of any sorts, you’re visual cortex will be appropriately stimulated by this bible of pioneering design samples.

by Dan Forgione

As an SVA animation student a few years back, I had a few lunches with cartoonist and animation vet Bob Camp, who at the time was working as a Story Artist for Blue Sky Studios. One particular conversation happened while I was starting work on my senior film, during which I expressed my struggles with designing characters. His advice to me was to get a couple of the Art of books, and spend a little time each day copying and breaking down some of the designs to their basic forms. By doing so, I would begin to see how and why the characters worked so well, and by figuring out the basic construction, I would start to apply similar concepts to my own designs. He was right, and even to this date, it is the best character design advice I have ever received. To all the character designers out there, I highly recommend this process, whether you’re looking to improve your skills or even just get started.

Which brings me to the latest release from Chronicle Books, The Art of UP, by Tim Hauser. As a huge fan of Pixar’s films, and the company as a whole, I tried hard to review the book with an unbiased approach, focusing solely on the artwork, and avoiding any rants or raves about the film, which I believe has some key story flaws that lower its ranking on my list of favorite Pixar films. But who the hell am I to judge? Pixar still holds the top spot in my book, and even some of their “weaker” films rank higher than most of the other recent CG films. But despite my opinions about the film, I will not deny that the design and overall look of UP is truly beautiful. And I can’t help but admire and applaud all who were involved with the film, not only for the skill and effort put into every single detail, regardless of its success or failure to make it into the film, but also for also taking risks and challenging themselves. As an animator, I strive to learn and grow as an artist, and it’s always comforting to know that even at the top, studios like Pixar continue to push themselves to new levels, and refuse to settle for what already comes easy for them.
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Today, Universal Studios Home Entertainment released Coraline, Henry Selick’s 101 minute stop-motion feast for the eyes. Our lengthy review of this LAIKA and Focus Features film, which was the first stop-motion feature shot for 3D viewing, was posted back in February, but below is our review of the DVD itself.

The Lineboil offices received the 2-Disc Collector’s Edition with 3D, but know that there are numerous other versions, including the Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy w/3D and the Single-Disc Edition w/ 3D. Ours also included the Digital Copy feature, which allows owners to transfer a copy of the film to iTunes and other players; a nice feature in this day and age of portable media.

The 2-Disc set also comes with (count-em) 4 sets of 3D glasses. I put all of them on at once, and I’m pretty sure I saw the movie in 12D. An interesting slide is included on the 3D version of the film, which states that “it will take your eyes 5 minutes to fully adjust to the 3D viewing experience.”

The extras are solid – in particular I enjoyed the deleted scenes. At the head of these shots, Selick explains that after such painstaking work, one would hope that every frame of animation filmed would end up in the final cut, but that’s what DVDs are for. All told, there’s around 6 or 7 minutes of cut scenes on the second disc, which probably amounts to 3 years worth of a collective animator’s life.
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By Keith Staskiewicz

The Goodes are the blue-state analogues of the Hills, Mike Judge’s venerable Texas-twangers who will soon be packing up the propane after a staggering 13 seasons. A bespectacled father voiced by Judge, an overweight son, a midriff-baring daughter, a cantankerous old coot of a father, and a dog named after a political figure; Judge’s creations for his new series The Goode Family, which premieres Wednesday May 27th (9:00-9:30 p.m., ET) on ABC, are the cultural and political negative images of his previous ones. Rather than chugging beer on the front lawn, the Goodes are more likely to be found swigging soy milk in their solar-powered home and then painstakingly recycling the containers.

Here’s a few clips from the pilot:

The pater familias here is Gerald Goode, a poncho-wearing member of the liberal academe. His wife is a local activist with whom he has two children, one adopted and one biological. The dog is an unwilling vegan and they shower outside in a home-made rainwater catchment system. Read more »

by Keith Staskiewicz

Directors: Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
Runtime: 104 minutes
Rated: PG
Distribution: Walt Disney Pictures

Pixar has always been in the business of telling human stories. Woody and Buzz were toys, but their struggles with friendship and their fears of obsolescence were instantly relatable. The Incredibles may have been superpowered but their insecurities were all too real. Ratatouille’s Remy the rat embodied every underappreciated artist, Marlin the fish every overprotective father, and WALL-E every hopeless romantic.

In their latest venture, Up (in theaters May 29th), Disney/Pixar finally sheds these anthropomorphic and archetypical avatars to tell the story of Carl Fredrickson, an old man who lived a very average life. After his wife passes away, he decides to realize their dream of moving to the wilderness of Venezuela, and so attaches a kaleidoscopic squadron of balloons to his house to float up and out of his urban environs. Of course, unbeknownst to him, he has himself a stowaway in the form of a chipper young Wilderness Explorer named Russell.

They make it to South America, but must trek through the jungle and mountainous terrain to make it to Paradise Falls, on top of which Carl and his wife always hoped to live. On the way, they find themselves embroiled in scads of adventure of the deliciously pulpy variety, with sneering villains and giant dirigibles, but even as the story gets increasingly outrageous and the action more intense, the characters remain firmly grounded in reality. They are beset by packs of vicious dogs, dangerous thunderheads and a series of precipitous heights, but the real obstacles they must overcome are those of loss, abandonment and fear. Carl is one of the most three-dimensional 3D-animated characters ever put to screen. That, plus the fact that much of the violence is surprisingly un-cartoony, provides the film with quite a few moments of genuine peril.
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