Not at all like Johnny Five

As mentioned in my previous post, director Andrew Stanton has been quite open about Wall-E's debt to various eco-themed 70's sci-fi flicks. The most obvious influence is also the most obscure: Doug Trumball's 1972 flick Silent Running. Wall-E would be right at home with the cute little R2D2 archetypes of Silent Running.

The new Pixar flick also brings back the gloom and doom, humanity-is-evil scenarios of films like Planet of the Apes, Logans Run and Aliens. It's a bit cynical to suggest that humanity is doomed to evolve into slug-like creatures, completely dependent on technology. Considering Pixar owes it's success to technology, it seems a tad disingenuous. Sure they put great stories up on the screen - but it's the technology that gave them something no one else had.

My only caveat about Wall-E is the rather jarring use of live-action inserts featuring actual human beings, a first for a Pixar film. It seems cheap and it reads a bit strange when animated humans finally appear in the second half. Imagine if the Wicked Queen in Snow White was a live actor. It takes you out of the cartoon world a bit.

Various clips from Hello Dolly are also featured prominently but the musical bits are tied into the theme more readily than Fred Willard's sudden appearence as a C.E.O./politico proxy. And speaking of live-action stuff, are there any modern films that can tell a story without using faux tv-news clips? Is this a problem anyone else has noticed? Is it cheating?

But I'm just kvetching here. Wall-E is a great film. It makes up for the headache-inducing parts of Cars and it's as cute as Nemo without being cloying.

And no Steve Guttenberg.

Wall-E Coyote, Super Genius

Nice interview here with Wall-E director Andrew Stanton via the A.V. Club.

And speaking of the hallowed halls of Pixar, here is a great link to a Brad Bird treatise on dynamic image composition that is equally relevant to live-action as it is to animation. Strangely enough it was apparently created for "King of the Hill" - not a show that readily springs to mind when I hear the words "dynamic composition."

The big take-away from Bird's mini-manifesto:

• Lower the camera angle/raise the horizon for more dynamic shots.
• Keep away from parallel lines - they tend to make for boring images.

Lots of other very cool animation meat and potatoes at animationmeat.com

Mr. Turtleneck and Mr. Hawaiian Shirt Guy

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price

The Pixar story owes more to Silicon Valley than Hollywood. And that's entirely appropriate since Pixar started out as a hardware/software vendor. Pixar's nominal mission was building machines and software that would create new standards for graphics-intensive apps in fields like industrial design and medical imaging.

Well, sort-of. It's complicated.

It's hard to think of a road to success more twisted and less predetermined than the one traveled by Pixar. After the success of the first Star Wars film, George Lucas aimed his tractor-beam at a team of east coast academics who were making some big strides in the area of computer graphics.

Lucas wanted to modernize film production and special effects work. The shiny, futuristic worlds of Star Wars and Blade Runner were put together with "wire, tape and rubber bands." Not a lot had changed since the days of George Melies.

Disney's Tron may have latched onto the sci-fi revival Lucas started, but the effects work in the first three Star Wars films had more in common with the mechanical wonders of George Pal and Ray Harryhausen.

Initially at least, Lucas was apparently more interested in developing digital technology as an editing and compositing tool. The idea that you might be able to create an entire film - a whole world even - without a physical camera was something of an afterthought.

The problem was Lucas never really knew how to monetize what was essentially a highly specialized research and development team. Pixar was burning through a lot of cash with little to show for it besides a series of clever animated demo films with zero commercial prospects.

But the animated shorts are the real starting point - technically and emotionally - that led slowly and surely to Toy Story, the Incredibles and Finding Nemo backpacks.

Most computer graphics demo films at the time were strictly eye-candy - visual displays of dense theories and research papers - but with former Disney animator John Lasseter on their team, the Pixar demos were major crowd-pleasers, actual films with stories and characters.

Lucas bailed after an expensive divorce and the mounting costs associated with Skywalker Ranch.

Enter Steve Jobs. Jobs was recently ousted from Apple and had a boatload of cash and a lot of time on his hands to micro-manage. The problem was that no one seemed too interested in what Pixar had to sell. Jobs and company had a vague notion that if they created a toolbox of advanced graphics and animation tools somebody would find a way to use them.

Pixar might have ended up a niche hardware company selling whiz-bang boxes to industrial design and medical imaging firms if Lasseter's animated shorts didn't attract so much attention. Maybe Steve Jobs had a vision of Pixar technologies eventually becoming some kind of PC standard but most of the folks there wanted to make feature films from the start. Even the die-hard techies saw this as the ultimate endgame.

Jobs comes across as a bit of a tool in the book but that's not really anything new. Maybe my notion of the Mac vs. Microsoft schism always paints Mr. Turtleneck as some kind of contemplative Flash Gordon at war with Bill Gates Ming the Merciless, but the dude was a scheming bastard from day one. He basically dicked all the early Pixar folks into giving up their equity stakes in exchange for his continuing to bankroll the operation. Like I said, this book is really more about the biz machinations of Pixar, not the creative vision and Jobs' is front and center for most of it. John Lasseter isn't exactly absent here but his importance to contemporary Pixar is something that developed over time as the company changed focus.

Jobs may have come to the table with business acumen and determination but guys like Lasseter are what made Pixar what it is today. I thought I heard rumblings about Lasseter doing his own book a few years back. Let's hope we can hear his take on the Pixar story eventually.

Queek Straw!

Artist Bob Logan's blog features a slew of incredible images from Hanna-Barbera Viewmaster reels from the early '60's. They look like some alluring mash-up of H-B and Rankin Bass. Very cool.

Take a look at Bob Logan's artwork while you're in the neighborhood. Pretty impressive stuff. Rockets, pedal cars and Tiki masks. Something for everyone.

I found Bob via Cartoon Brew Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi's deep and frequently-updated shrine to all things animated. Brew has a nice mix, covering current animation as well as old school stuff.

Batman's Bad Thoughts

Although ComicCoverage sees fit to feature the above image as part of their "Worst. Cover. Ever" series, I beg to differ.

More like Best. Cover. Ever. Or maybe - "Gayest. Cover. Ever."

This image makes Stuck Rubber Baby look like a Chuck Norris movie.

What exactly is going on here? The mind reels at the possibilities.

My take: it looks like Robin and Superman have just convinced a skeptical Batman that it would be O.K. to get Bat-Nekkid and dive into a swimming hole full of wet boys.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

"Sam Rocket" Concept Art

As mentioned in a previous post, my big summer project is an action/adventure serial,
"The Adventures of Sam Rocket." Visually, I'm aiming for a combination of "Sky Captain," the live-action version of "Cutey Honey" and Republic Pictures "Adventures of Captain Marvel."

But as far as dramaturgy, I'm hoping to avoid the retro-corny parody stuff that seems to be a requirement for some garage-built f/x films. I have seen one too many take-offs on cold war robot flicks. Ironic, tounge-in-cheek sci-fi parodies (in black and white) are replacing zombie flicks as the lingua franca of every cheeseball with a DV camera.

Probably every frame will have at least one visual effect or composite element. But after looking around at other no-budget projects I've come to the conclusion that it's real hard to cut from a live-action scene to a complete CGI scene without looking pretty cheesy. I'm going to try and make sure everything at is anchored in some sort of real-world footage. All the render farms in the world can't come up with the kind of natural light that Jesus renders unto thee on a daily basis.

Sounds like a no-brainer and while I didnt really plan on doing any full-on CGI scenes, it seems to be a pretty common mistake. Obviously it's something that is done all the time in the Hollywood films. Saw the new Hulk flick this weekend and even though the effects were pretty damn cool, every once in a while a shot would call a little too much attention to itself and it started to feel like watching cut-scenes in a video game. Maybe it's just something that happens when the script is less than stellar and you start losing the audience. They start subconsciously nitpicking and next thing you know, you generate a reality-distortion field in the brain tissue that controls suspension-of-disbelief.

Even before digital effects, this sort of thing was a problem. F/X pioneer (and "Silent Running" director) Douglas Trumball said that when he took his kids to see "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" they asked him why Dick Van Dyke had funny blue edges in his hair everytime Chitty went airborne.

"Tron" had some of the same issues when bouncing between (more or less) organic imagery and wholly CGI shots. But I think "Tron" pulled it off because it was more an animated than a live-action one. And everything was pretty consistent in the fantasy realm where it spent most of its screen time.

And Ralph Bakshi made these kind of jarring transitions something of a personal trademark.

Spiderman 2 and 3 are pretty good examples of a crappy story getting in the way of cool f/x. Some of the effects in 3 seemed a little over-baked and distracting. Of course, "Spiderman 2" probably had even more full-on CGI stuff but the story was so cool - and the pace never waned - and you just got fully involved in the story.

Do I have that kind of script? An incredibly involving and propulsive story? Well, I kind of doubt it. But I'm trying. And a big thing working in my favor is that I'm going to be releasing it in short chunks of six-minutes or so. Yes, there will be a high ratio of just plain eye-candy to actual exposition- but in small chunks, you will hopefully not have time to get distracted.

And I think if you leave enough of the real world in there, you won't have to worry so much about people getting pulled out of it in some kind of jarring way.

I have a hunch this is another tangent of the "uncanny valley" theory. But if I wanted to really explain it, I would have to spend years at M.I.T. scanning peoples brains and writing grant proposals.

And that's just not the way I roll.

Here is a quick piece of concept art for "Sam Rocket." Not exactly Ralph McQuarrie. And when I'm really under the gun, my storyboards will revert to crude stick figures of absolutely no use to anyone but me. But doing pieces like this forces you to really concentrate on how you are going to sell the shot and all the various pieces that you need to make it work.

And maybe more importantly, you learn what you don't need. You might be better off with just a quick flash of light and some squiggly lines instead of digital actors on a meticulous digital set.

And because your effect can't hold up to more than a few frames of scrutiny, you'll tend to get out of it a lot quicker and be less inclined to stay on something that you spent weeks putting together. Pride goeth before a fall. And the biggest sin is leaving something in that aint moving things forward - just because you expended so much damn effort on it.

Kill your darlings. Hopefully, I will.

CUT TO: Sam SPINS around, brings her board up like a MACHINE GUN and -

SAM:
Eat this, fish-face.

-Sam IGNITES her jet-board. FLAMING EXHAUST ENGULFS THE SKY SHARK-

"SDS a Graphic History" By Harvey Pekar et al.

The SDS - "Students for a Democratic Society" - was a leftist political group formed in the 1960's. Their legend looms large in every narrative about mid-century counter culture shenanigans. The endlessly blathered about "turbulence of the era" was mirrored by the organizational chaos of the SDS itself. It seems like they spent less time worrying about sticking it to The Man and more time fighting each other.

The SDS was a fractious group of well-meaning but self-absorbed hipsters. Too much time and effort were devoted to organizational messes that could have benefited from perusing "Robert's Rules of Order" and less time with Marx and Lenin. The SDS folks seem to put so much faith in some kind of reductive, all-inclusive, messy democracy that they never get anything done. Some folks get the anarchy they deserve - Yes, I'm talking to you Mr. Faux-hawked skater whining about the cops interfering with your right to drink malt-liquor and stencil your bad clip-art crap all over stop signs.

Hey, I want to eat the rich just as much as the next guy, but I'm not convinced that capitalism is the worst thing in the world. I'm all for the "workers controlling the means of production" - but if the workers can't even make a decent double-cheeseburger, I'm not holding out much hope that the trains are going to run on time.

As far as "redistribution of wealth" goes - and I'm someone who would benefit from the redistribution of change left under couch cushions - I'm not too convinced that stealing from the rich to pay the poor is going to do anyone much good.

I stopped by a local teachers union rally today and was rather surprised when a speaker trotted out the aforementioned "redistribution" rhetoric. The old-school radical left is still around. And apparently they have taken up residence in the waning Catholic schools of Northeast Pennsylvania. Who knew? Someone better tell Michael Savage how the pinko radicals have spread beyond the Ivy league.

The book is honest to a fault. Way too much ink is spent recounting infighting and tedious, talky posturing on the part of various SDS factions. It's amazing they got anything done with all the internal politics of an organization that was maybe a little too democratic for its own good.

Decentralized and node-based organizing principles - the stuff that brings us the wonderful collectivism of MySpace and Facebook - would have served the Sixties radical community well. I'm sure a lot of contemporary anarcho/activist/vegan/bike-messengers who spend their days screen-printing fliers for their own "Days of Rage" would disagree. But it's better to spend less time organizing and more time doing.

The text is largely the work of Harvey Pekar and most of the artwork was done by Gary Dumm. Dumm's work will be familiar to any reader of Harvey's splendid "American Splendor." I think Harvey's a genius but one thing I didn't anticipate was how much I enjoyed Dumm's work here. In American Splendor, Dumm has to compete against flashier stuff from name brand artists like Crumb etc. Dumm really shines here. Working with cranky old Harvey has taught him a few tricks about making talky, prosaic stuff visually interesting.

CLICK HERE and help put independent bookstores out of business by purchasing
"SDS a Graphic History" from Amazon

"Top of the World Ma!"

As you may have heard, a ginourmous fire took out a large chunk of Universal Studios backlot. The above image - swiped from the New York Times - shows the towering inferno.

'Courthouse Square'*- seen in "Back to the Future", "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Gremlins"- was destroyed in the blaze.

But the cool thing about this picture is the foreground set, featuring a wrecked suburban McMansion with the remains of an airliner in the front yard. Eagle-eyed readers will recognize this as one of the cooler sets from Speilberg's "War of the Worlds."

Why is this set still standing? Was it part of the tour? Nearby, you can see a bit of the Munsters** house. That big blue wall you see is adjacent to a parking lot that can be filled with water and used for cheapo ocean vistas like those in the 1966 "Batman" feature.

*UPDATE: Later reports indicated that the "Back to the Future" clock tower set survived
the fire.

** ERRATA: Maybe that's the "Psycho" house. Both the Munsters house and the Psycho place are still standing. I think I recognized a redressed Munsters manse in one of those annoying Fandango.com trailers.

"The Rise and Fall of Ham Fisher"

Ham Fisher was the creator of "Joe Palooka" a largely forgotten comic strip from the 30's that was a staple of the comic page for years. Fisher had a nasty, long-running feud with his former assistant, Alfred Caplin. After spending several years doing Fisher's grunt work for $20 a week, Caplin decided to make his move. He changed his name to 'Al Capp' and created his own strip, "Lil' Abner."

"Lil' Abner" was a huge hit. And Capp became more successful than Fisher ever dreamed possible. It drove Fisher down the path of maddness.

Capp apparently never read the first rule of power:
"The Pupil Must Never Outshine the Master"

Capp ignored the rules, but Fisher was the one on the receiving end of some mighty bad karma. Not a pretty picture.

Last year, I did a comic-strip bio of Fisher that you can read (via pdf) here.

A Flash version is also available by clicking here.

Shortly after this piece was published I found a Fisher story by cartoonist Kim Deitch. I love Kim Deitch and while I'm pretty sure I never saw his version, it sure looks like I'm dancing with his girl. So if I'm going to be accused of subliminal thievery, at least I'm stealing from a master. Sorry Kim.

Wally Wood had his own rules of power:

• Never draw anything you can copy.
• Never copy anything you can trace.
• Never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.

William Gibson's "Spook Country"

Just finished reading William Gibson's "Spook Country." Like his previous book "Pattern Recognition," "Spook Country" takes place in the here and now but still manages to squeeze in lots of nerd-worthy gadgets and futuristic concepts. While reading "Pattern Recognition" I hit up Google more than once trying to figure out if something depicted was real or not. This time around I knew better.

Is a book still considered "Science Fiction" if you remove the element of speculation?

(Years ago someone - maybe Forry Ackerman - made a credible case for calling sci-fi "speculative fiction.")

"Neuromancer" took the idea of virtual reality and extrapolated it to the Nth degree, but Gibson's last few books have turned actual reality inside-out and assembled a fantastic world out of bits and pieces of preexisting technology. Maybe it's the kind of stuff any old hack could find on "Boing-Boing" but Gibson knows what to do with it.

Even prosaic stuff like wi-fi connections and high tech sneakers become bits of magic in the right context. Parkour, cryptology and Santeria all make it into the book at various points, and it all makes perfect sense in Gibson's world. Maybe this is magic realism for people who dont like too much hocus-pocus in their mumbo-jumbo.

And like "Pattern Recognition" a big theme here is post-9/11 anxiety and the gulf between homeland security & liberty.

'Spook' is filled with buzzed-about, topical concepts but somehow you don't get the feeling that it's going to feel dated 10 years down the road. It's fast and funny (at times) and Gibson writes lean and breezy passages without a speck of the hoopty-doodle.

The protagonist, Hollis Henry is a bit of a reboot of "Pattern Recognition" lead Cayce Pollard. But having a smart and cool female framing a story like this is pretty refreshing - so you can excuse Gibson for relying on a stock character. Hubertus Biggend from 'Pattern' figures in the story. Strange, because I thought Biggend was kind of a cartoon. Not entirely believable, but he served the story in 'Pattern' well. Here, he's more of a deux ex machina.

And if you can pull off a character named Hubertus Biggend you are more than capable of holding my attention.

"The Hooterville Massacre"

For years I have held CBS czar William Paley accountable for the rural comedy diaspora that wiped the Big Eye clean of Andy Griffith, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee-Haw, Petticoat Junction and most tragically, Green Acres.The oft-told tale is that CBS was loathe to be seen as hayseed central and was courting a classier demographic. Hence the en masse elimination of the top-rated Paul Henning comedies. At one point, episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies were listed among the most watched individual shows ever broadcast. I'm not talking about "very special" episodes or over-hyped cliffhangers, just random shows drawing gazillions of viewers.

William Paley is usually painted as the villain in this tale, but according to this entry from the Museum of Broadcasting website, credit (or blame) sits on the shoulders of CBS executive Robert Wood.

Mr. Wood also gave walking papers to Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan and Red Skeleton - paving the way for the overrated "All in the Family" and the ascendancy of the stupidly-hatted Norman Lear. Maybe Wood was just a patsy. I imagine Paley got a lot of grief from the old-money crowd at cocktail parties about his declasse way of making a buck.

Poor Paul Henning. A prophet without honor. I would much rather spend time in Mr. Haney's Hooterville than Archie Bunker's Queens. The Museum of Broadcasting bio credits Mr. Henning with creating television's first "narratively interthreaded" world. That's a pretty apt description of the interplay between Hooterville and Petticoat Junction. Later on, Norman Lear did likewise with Archie Bunker's extended family morphing into multiple off-shoots like Maude, The Jeffersons, Good Times et al.

And just when you begin to wonder what real purpose is served by the digital-inter-webs, you find this nifty Green Acres website featuring cast member grave sites, tons of pictures and a French version of Vic Mizzy's theme song.