Rats. Russell Crowe is Jor-El in Zack Snyder’s Superman movie.

Posted on June 19, 2011
Filed Under animation, contemporary, film news

Warner Bros. announced last week that Russell Crowe has joined the cast of Man of Steel, the upcoming Superman film to be directed by Zack Snyder. This is depressing news.

I’m disheartened not by Crowe, an actor I admire, but by the role he’s playing: Jor-El, the Kryptonian scientist who… (gritted teeth)… saves his infant son from Krypton’s imminent destruction by sending him in a spaceship to Earth, where the boy is adopted by simple country folk Jonathan and Martha Kent and soon discovers… oh bloody hell. Read more

Dziga Vertov’s “Soviet Toys” (1924)

Posted on February 6, 2011
Filed Under animation

Dziga Vertov’s little-known propaganda cartoon, the first Soviet animated film, seems crude—but it’s more sophisticated than it looks, and was loaded with meaning for viewers in the tumultuous Soviet Union of 1924. “Soviet Toys” depicts a worker partnering with a peasant to defeat the machinations of a capitalist “NEPman,” a caricature of the entrepreneurs who blossomed under Lenin’s short-lived New Economic Policy. Read more

Cambria Productions, Space Ghost and Jonny Quest

Posted on December 22, 2010
Filed Under animation, early television

Cambria Productions was a small independent animation house in West Hollywood established by cartoonist Clark Haas, Jr. and cameraman Edwin Gillette in 1957. The studio’s work is notable for its extremely limited animation and its use of Gillette’s Synchro-Vox technique, which enables animators to superimpose film of moving human lips onto a static image. Between 1959 and 1965 Cambria produced four animated television shows for children, one after another: Clutch Cargo, Space Angel, Captain Fathom and The New Three Stooges. None of them are very good, but the first two have interesting connections to Hanna-Barbera’s later, much-better-known Space Ghost and Jonny Quest. Read more

Animating Life

Posted on November 16, 2010
Filed Under animation, miscellany

The image at left is from the astonishing video Powering the Cell: Mitochondria. I learned of the video, which animates the workings in the nucleus of a living cell, from Erik Olsen’s terrific New York Times piece, “Where Cinema and Biology Meet,” which appears in today’s paper. Read more

Hatsune Miku: Comes now the future…

Posted on November 13, 2010
Filed Under animation, contemporary, miscellany

Below is a video of a “live” performance by Hatsune Miku, a rising J-pop star. From the Los Angeles Times:

“With her long cerulean pigtails and her part-schoolgirl, part-spy outfit, she’s easy on the eyes. Yes, her voice sounds like it might have gone through a little –- OK, a lot –- of studio magic. Legions of screaming fans and the requisite fan sites? She’s got ‘em.”

Hatsune Miku is a autostereoscopic volumetric display, commonly called a “hologram.” The screaming human fans are real. Read more

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