Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical music.  However, consciously or not, the film has a deeper unifying principle.  Each of the film’s episodes touches in one way or another upon the ... read more »

Great news for animation buffs!  Minimalist animation genius, Gene Deitch, creator of Tom Terrific, The Juggler of Our Lady, Munroe, Sick Sick Sidney, and many others will appear for a special tribute screening and Q&A at L.A.’s Cinefamily/Silent Movie Theater on Tuesday, July 6th, at 8:00 p.m.  (Tom Terrific, above, was created for the 1950s childrens’ television ... read more »

Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art.  Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney itself may be partly responsible for the form’s decline, since all of their hand-drawn features since 101 Dalmations – with one or two rare exceptions ... read more »

The Avatar hype continues.  There was a front-page (!) piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of best picture nominees, the ‘Avatar’ actors have not nabbed a single major critic’s award, or guild prize. The snubs reflect the apparent ambivalence of the ... read more »

Shed a tear for the creator of gentle Gumby. Art Clokey was a disciple of avant-garde film theorist, Slavko Vorkapich, under whose mentorship Clokey filmed Gumbasia (above) and other experimental works. Producer Samuel G. Engel saw and admired Gumbasia’s “claymation,” which led to Clokey’s creation of The Adventures of Gumby as an antidote to the ... read more »

When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. –Stevie Wonder In 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their “package” films – barely-feature length vignette collections made on reduced budgets during World War II for theatrical distribution – though the dyad of animated novellas included are improved little ... read more »

Long before Terminators 1, 2, 3, and 4, a revolt of the machines was successfully quelled by the Great Green Hope otherwise known as Gumby, aided by his four-legged comrade-in-arms, Pokey. Robot Rumpus is one of the earliest and best of the Gumby stop motion shorts directed for television by Art Clokey in his 1950s ... read more »

Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a hole in a tree that leads him, Alice-style, from his own reality, Halloween Town, to the very different alt-reality of Christmas Town. In James and ... read more »

According to the Los Angeles Times and the The Huffington Post: “[Comedian] Jerry Lewis made an anti-gay slur on Australian television similar to one he apologized for using on his annual telethon a year ago. Following a news conference in Sydney Friday, Lewis, 82, was asked by a Network Ten national TV reporter for his ... read more »