Channel Frederator Blog

You may not think of the Alliance Française as a place to go watch cartoons, but on November 1st, the New York branch will present Serge Bromberg’s 100 Years of Animation: Treasures from a Chest.

“A collector of more than 20,000 early movies and the artistic force behind Lobster Films, Bromberg has become one of the great champions of silent films and a master at recreating the initial rush audiences felt when first entering the cinema house.

Throughout this exceptional event, Bromberg will present animated shorts that he has discovered and restored, accompanying them with anecdotes and piano music…”

(Serge is also the Artistic Director of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.)

The program will include Fantasmagorie (Emil Cohl), Cartoon Factory (Fleischer Brothers), The Sinking of the Lusitania (Windsor McKay), Egged On (Charley Bower and H.L. Muller), and George Pal’s Tulips Shall Grow.

Tickets are $10 ($7 for students). Go to this page for ticket information.

By the way, 2008 is the 100th anniversary of Fantasmagorie, one of the earliest examples of a fully-animated film. If you’ve never seen it, do so immediately!

After the jump, a low-res recording of Serge Bromberg’s live performance with Windsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (at Annecy 2008)…with tuba score! [Read more…]

Earlier this month, I blogged about Alex Budovsky’s music video for “Last Time at Clerkenwell” by The Real Tuesday Weld. At the time, I didn’t realize that Stephen Coates (the guy behind TRTW) was such a heavy duty fan of animation. The music video above is “The Show Must Go On” which was made by the small Brooklyn animation house Giant Squid Eye Productions. Giant Squid Eye is George Fort (director) and Monica Smith (producer). (Recently, George worked on backgrounds for over-the-top action fest Superjail—coming to Adult Swim this fall. And Monica was color key designer for Supernormal on CITV. A super coincidence?)

Of interest to animation history buffs is the new score Coates composed for Winsor McCay’s The Centaurs. The Centaurs was an unfinished animated film that only survives in fragments. McCay worked on it between 1918 and 1921. Most of the completed footage deteriorated due to poor storage. I think it’s really, really [Read more…]