Channel Frederator Blog

The Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco (655 Mission Street) has just announced that it will present an exhibition of original artwork from the feature film Coraline from January 24-February 15.

“The exhibition features drawings, storyboards, puppets, sets, costumes and more from this groundbreaking movie, the first ever stop-motion animated film to be shot in 3D…this exhibit includes almost 80 pieces from the extraordinary world of Coraline, created by a team of over 300 artists bringing to life the vision of the world’s foremost stop-motion animation director, Henry Selick.”

For more on Coraline, you can check out the official website. (The image above is from a cool collection of behind-the-scenes stills on that site.) The movie opens February 6th, so the CAM exhibit will make for a great sneak peek.

Here are few other interesting museum shows in SF this month (not about animation, just generally cool):

1000 Journals at SFMOMA

Harlem of the West at the [Read more…]

In case you missed it in the frenzy of holiday happenings, there was a great article about animation in last Wednesday’s New York Times. “Cartoons Without Computers? Silly Animators!” features the “insurgent element” of modern animation. As far as I can tell, that just means interesting animators of an indie bent, though big budget Henry Selick seems to qualify. (Odd title as well, since many of the artist mentioned DO use computers in one way or another.) But anyway…faves Bill Plympton, Don Hertzfeldt, Signe Baumane, and Alex Budovsky are featured.

In case you were wondering how Bill Plympton gets so much animation done (while managing to actually get out of the house and socialize, and also make appearances at all the major cons and conferences) one tip is that he gets up early!

“I do about 100 drawings a day, which is about 10 an hour, and if I can do that times [Read more…]

On the heels of yesterday’s post about Henry Selick and Coraline, I recently came across a two-part interview on Ward Jenkin’s blog (from last year) about the obscure animated feature Twice Upon a Time, directed by John Korty and Charles Swenson. (Click here for Part One and Part Two.) Selick worked on this way back in 1983 as a “sequence director”. Ward interviews Taylor Jessen, who wrote an article on the subject for Animation Blast #9. (An online version can be found here.)

Twice Upon a Time was created with an animation technique called “lumage”: stop-motion using translucent 2D objects photographed against a backlit background.

Some other interesting people who worked on this: Marshall Efron and Lorenzo Music did voices; director David Fincher (Fight Club) was responsible for “special photographic effects”. Oh yeah, and George Lucas was the producer!

Additional info is available at this site devoted to “the most unusual animated film of the 1980’s”.

Since there are no [Read more…]

The stop motion fantasy feature Coraline will be released February 6, 2009. Directed by Henry Selick, based upon the Neil Gaiman book, produced by Laika (formerly Will Vinton Studios), this promises to be an oddball animation classic.

It’s got a super solid voice cast that includes Dakota Fanning, John Hodgman, and Jennifer Saunders. And music by They Might Be Giants.

How much talent can you stuff into one animated film?

Anyway, a slew of sneak peek material has recently been released to the net. I thought it would be a good idea to round up the links for you:

Coraline photo gallery from LA Times

Sneak peek videos from Rotten Tomatoes

Oregonian article.

Image Gallery from IGN

Video gallery from IGN

Shock Til You Drop set visit and Selick interview

Original sculpted models for the movie displayed at Comicon here.

And a fun flashback: Selick’s Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions (1990) for MTV:

—Anne D. Bernstein