First of all, apologies if you arrived here excited by the pretense of the crappy (yet oddly endearing) 1980s cartoon of the same name. Here’s something very arguably better. Adam Phillips, the guy who created the superb Bitey Castle shorts, has been commissioned to produce a number of brief animated cartoons to promote the new 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Episode 1: The Beholder (above)
Episode 2: The Gnome and the Teifling
Episode 3: The Mindflayer

He’s working on a fourth as I type.

Meanwhile, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins over at Penny Arcade and Scott Kurtz from PvP have put together a podcast of, essentially, eight hours of them playing Dungeons and Dragons around a microphone. With the wrong people this really could be the dullest thing on earth but it somehow manages to remain entertaining throughout the four half-hour and a bit podcasts they’ve already put out. Stick this link into iTunes or your podcast grabber of choice: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/rsspodcast.xml or, iTunes users, try this - more here, though you’ll need to sign up for a free account to access the pages.

They’re also doing a little strip to accompany each show.

And, oh ok… If you insist.

Oh hi… are you still here?

I’ve been a little bit more than busy recently and quite a lot of dust has settled all over the furniture here at Antikewl Daily. I’ve been such a bad blogger that I’ve sometimes found it easier to twitter cool stuff or simply email other bloggers so the cool stuff doesn’t go to waste! Here’s a great example of that. It’s an awesome animation by Italian artist Blu (thanks Edd!) and I meant to blog about it ages ago. You’ve probably seen it already by now.

Right, this is going to stop right here! From now on I pledge to post here at least twice a week. Not a massive target, granted, but I believe that if I aim low I’m bound to at least nearly hit it form time to time! You never know, I might even get around to shoving that new design up one day as well…

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking around!

P.S. If you’re into the whole twitter thing, Antikewl Daily has a twitter feed as well.

Possibly an enormous co-incidence, but the new animated Play-Doh bunnies commercial for Sony Bravia by ad agency Fallon bears a rather remarkable resemblance to one of artist duo Kozyndan’s earlier pieces of artwork, “What’s next, USA-chan?”

It really is a beautiful commercial, but a huge shame they haven’t credited the very obvious inspiration. Bad Sony. Again.

Chris Sanders, former Disney artist and the creator/director of Lilo and Stitch, finally has a website. He also released a new sketchbook at this year’s San Diego Comi-con which I’ll have to order a copy of to sit alongside the one he printed last year on my bookshelf.

Imagineer, former animator and Disney Legend, X Atencio speaks on the Official Disneyland Resort Podcast about his work as an animator through to an imagineer at Disney, and talks about his work on the original Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.

Talking of Disney animators, Clay Kaytis has just put up the latest segment of his interview with Burny Mattinson at the Animation Podcast.

powered by ODEO

I haven’t had a chance to post anything for a while so I’m catching up a a bit here. Originally mentioned by Blackwing Diaries, the UCLA’s Department of Special Collections unveiled a new website with 5,100 images from the archives of the LA Times and the Los Angeles Daily News.

Cartoon Brew has been rooting through the archives and has come up with a load of interesting photos of Disneyland, Walt Disney Studios (the strikes, and the never very camera-shy Ward Kimball), Bill Peet and many more that haven’t been seen for a very long time. Enjoy.

Update: Boing Boing has also been on a photo hunt and come up a whole new array of goodies.

“At this time, we do not have a DVD release date for DESTINO. We will forward your request for release to our Marketing Department for consideration. No additional LEGACY COLLECTION releases have been announced.”

Did I dream the Destino DVD box mock-up that was, until recently, displayed on the Legacy site?

I’m a great fan of the film critic Mark Kermode and, for the most part, respect his judgement, however I did have to cringe while hearing him review the Disney (not Pixar) flick Meet the Robinsons in his latest podcast straight after reading the comments on this blog entry at Blackwing Diaries — yes, he mentions the “seven writers”. As Jenny says, it’s not unusual for many storyboard artists to be involved in “writing” a film, what is unusual is that they get all their deserved credit at the beginning of the film.

To his credit the rest of the review sounded quite fair. He also brought to my attention the “3-D glasses” version of the movie — after seeing what Disney can do with Mickey’s Philharmagic I’d really love to see that!

Jenny at The Blackwing Diaries has a great set of scans from this 60s Disneyland book “How to Draw Goofy: A Walt Disney Character Model Guide”. I particularly like the quote from Walt Disney himself.

Part one: Cover and Walt’s quote.
Part two: Page scans.

The Skirball Cultural Center in LA is currently hosting an exhibition of Saul Bass’ film-based work until April 1st. I missed the show at the Design Museum in London a couple of years ago and kicked myself that I did. If you’re near to the sunny part of California it might be worth taking a look.

Once upon a time Walt Disney: Remember the Walt Disney art exhibition that I told you about last month which is currently showing at the Grand Palais in Paris? Well, we’ve just got back and I have to say that it exceeded all expectations; the thing was huge — three floors of gorgeous animation history chronologically laid out for my consumption!

After a 20 minute queue outside in the rain (I put the long line down to being a holiday weekend) we finally got inside where I was immediately mis-recognised as a French actor. My poor grasp of the French language eventually gave me away as an imposter and the guy apologised and wished me a good holiday.

Highlights for me were seeing many many pieces of original Mary Blair concept art for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Eyvind Earle’s numerous, enormous, background pieces for Sleeping Beauty and other films, Salvador Dali’s concept work for Destino (and the film played in its entirety), and many original character sheets and sketches.

When I first saw the Mary Blair work I actually had to practically press my nose against the glass to check that they were the real thing and not just prints. They were, indeed, the real thing and I was delighted to be able to see her pencil outlines just visible beneath the paint! This is the kind of thing you never get to see in coffee table books, now matter how good. Just seeing how the Mad Hatter’s hat, for example, was originally sketched much larger brought her thought process to life.

Eyvind Earle wasn’t a Disney artist that I knew much about before this exhibition but I was blown away by his concept work and, in particular, backgrounds. The first time I saw one of his paintings I stopped and couldn’t move away from it… quite literally! After viewing the pieces from afar I was drawn in to inspect the detail of each one… the combination and use of colour, the painting techniques on his massive paintings. No print, or indeed DVD, could ever do this detail justice! What’s more fantastic is that these are backgrounds; emphasising that numerous art forms must be combined, with equal importance, to produce a truly outstanding animated feature or short.

Low lights? The inability to take any photos of all the fantastic stuff on display… (wishing I’d bought a notebook and pen with me) and the disappointing selection of prints and postcards available in the shop, postcards were mostly poor crops of incredible artwork and really didn’t do the originals justice, especially after just being overwhelmed by them in the flesh. The book and the guidebook were only available in French and printed on some rather cheap paper stock (when the exhibition reaches Montreal later in the year I’ll be interested to see if an English language guidebook becomes available). A shame really, but I couldn’t leave empty handed. I picked up a print of a Marc Davis sketch of Bambi’s Thumper which was a rather reasonable six euros. I also regret not purchasing the accompanying DVD but, as we were on a very tight budget, I just couldn’t afford to.

And talking of not being able to afford not to… if you’re in Paris before the 15th January, or in or around Montreal between March 8 and June 24th, you really can’t afford to miss this.

If you want a complete overview of the show, take a look at this article at Animated Views (thanks Jenny)

Update: Michael Barrier mentions in his post about the exhibition that an English language edition of the book is available to pre-order on Amazon.

“In the spirit of capitalist Christianity and giving” John K has remastered the two minute George Liquor christmas cartoon short that Spumco released as a Flash cartoon in the late 90s into a new nicely rendered Quicktime version. It’s short, but sweet. It’s also just $1… which is 54p by today’s exchange rate, which means I really can’t complain that they didn’t bother to upgrade the crappy compressed sound quality! Buy it here at the Boing Boing Digital Emporium.

Hopefully this will mean John K and his team will be re-releasing more of the web cartoon stuff they produced ahead of their time.

Joe Barbera died yesterday at the age of 95. Joe Barbera was, of course, the co-founder of the Hanna-Barbera studios with Bill Hanna which was, more or less, created out of their Tom and Jerry cartoons and commercials while at MGM. The studio went on to produce much loved classics like The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and the Jetsons.

Cartoon Brew are collecting memories and tributes.

UPDATE: John K now has a great tribute over on his blog.

Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney: I meant to write about this earlier, but I got so excited that I’d actually be seeing it next month that I almost completely forgot! Le Grand Palais in Paris is running an fantastic exhibition of classic Disney artwork alongside the works that inspired them. It runs until January 15th 2007, so there’s still time to catch it before the exhibition moves to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from March 8 to June 24th 2007.

There’s a superb slideshow of artwork at l’Express and Cartoon Brew (where I originally found out about the exhibition) has a few more details as well.

Update: I’ve been! Read my report here.

After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year. The studio has released a few shorts in recent years — “Destino,” “Lorenzo” and “The Little Match Girl” — but those were more artistic exercise than commercial endeavor. The new cartoons, by contrast, are an effort by a new leadership team from Pixar Animation Studios, now a Disney unit, to put the Burbank company back at the forefront of animation with a form it once pioneered.

1. Composition for layout and background artists
2. Intersection
3. Clear staging
4. Staging groups of characters
5. Negative vs positive space
6. Avoid The Middle, Asymmetry is more natural and interesting
7. Compose your poses together
8. For Layout and BG artists - Form over detail, lettering, study other artists

Steve Worth is also adding some more valuable stuff on compostion at the Hollywood Animation Archive blog; including the 1960’s Famous Artists lesson: 3. Composition - How to make pictures.

They also have a couple of other Famous Artists lessons on their site, including: 24. Television Art and 16. Animals

Enjoy!