Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

October 21 - Happy Birthday, Mary Blair

Posted October 21, 2020

Today's famous birthday is - according to an award posthumously given to her in 1991 - a Disney Legend.

Artist Mary Blair, who was born in Oklahoma on this date in 1911, moved to California in her 20s. She graduated from one of California's state universities and then won a scholarship to an art institute in Los Angeles. After graduating from art school, she married another artist and became known for her watercolors and her design sense.

Blair began to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as an animator, and it wasn't long before she was snatched up by Disney Studios. 

She even got to travel to South America with other artists and Walt Disney himself, as part of a research tour. 

Blair became an art supervisor, a color stylist, a character designer, and a designer who offered concept art for various movies and projects. 

Here are just a few of Blair's many contributions:

Concept art for Alice in Wonderland



Concept art and character designs for It's a Small World



Design of a huge mosaic inside Disney's Contemporary Resort in Florida



Design part of the Mexico Pavilion at the Epcot Center


















(Third Wednesday in October)




 

(Third or fourth Wednesday of October)





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November 2 - An Instagram Hit - in Motion!

Posted on November 2, 2018

 Today is the anniversary of Japanese chef / food carver Takehiro Kishimoto first taking his hit Instagram photos into the realm of animation.

 With the Instagram name gakugakugakugakugaku1,  Kishimoto had already been thrilling his followers with his amazing carvings, which he says are his versions of traditional Thai carvings. 

 Kishimoto had been turning apples into gorgeous flowers and cantaloupes into mysterious treasure balls, plus wielding his Exacto knife on foods as varied as sushi and tomatoes and carrots and broccoli and cauliflower and avocados and and and...

But on this date in 2016, Kishimoto decided to do a simple animation as a birthday tribute.
This is a screenshot of the 11/2/16 animation
"gaku carving" posted on Instagram.
The way Instagram gives feedback is by number of Likes and number of Followers. I don't think that there is a way of guessing how many people look at your Instagram posts unless they decide to hit the "Like" heart, or follow you, or both.

 But when you post a video - even a stop-action animation video like the one Kishimoto did, all of a sudden you see how many views your video had. And all of a sudden, perhaps, you see just how many people are looking at your posts!

Because, with that first simple, non-spectacular animation, Kishimoto went from hundreds of likes to tens of thousands of views!

 Inspired, perhaps, by that experience, two days later Kishimoto was back with another animation - this time carving soap! - and by November 22 he thought of a really clever animation:

Check out some more beautiful photos:








 And here is one of his videos.



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February 26 – Happy Birthday, Tex Avery!

Posted on February 26, 2017

Bugs Bunny!


Daffy Duck!

 Porky Pig!

Have you ever heard of these characters?

 Tex Avery is part of the Golden Age of American Animation - the time from the invention of the sound cartoon in 1928 to the 1960s, when animated "shorts" in movie theaters began to lose interest for people who had access to animated TV shows.

 While Walt Disney and the Disney studios are most famous in early animation, Tex Avery, who worked for Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, was able to steer the industry toward less sweet, less cute cartoons. Adults tended to like Avery's sarcasm, and kids liked his non-stop action. He even had a bit of an adult twist on fairy tale characters.

 Here's another thing that Avery brought to cartoons: breaking the artifice of the cartoon.

 I love this! 

 Avery would sometimes have a cartoon character burst through the end credits to pop off one last witty remark... 

 Or he would have a character directly talk to us in the audience... 

 Or he would have a character complain about the plot of the cartoon...within the cartoon!

 These clever bits almost always crack me up!

Avery was known for pushing boundaries of animation in many ways, and he was famous for saying, "In a cartoon, you can do anything."

 Avery was an animator, cartoonist, voice actor, and director. His small hometown of Taylor, Texas, is where Avery was born on this date in 1908. 


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