Holiday Heroes & Villains

Whatever you're celebrating, have a good time and be safe. Maybe you're not celebrating a danged thing. That's okay. Everybody likes cartoons, so let's celebrate the fact that we can watch this obscure bit of Christmas cheer pretty much where ever we want to, whenever we want to.

"Wouldn't marry the pres-i-dent"

The National Film Board of Canada has a Vimeo channel. Want to get lost in a land of cinematic wonder, we ask, rhetorically? It's one of the best places on the Web to spend some time being entertained and educated.

Here's a great example of what NFBC does with its money, and reader, we think that's money well spent.


Mr. Frog Went A-Courting from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

And we highly recommend Blinkety Blank by Norman MacLaren (1955).

Everybody Wants a Moon Monster Of Their Own

The Typing Monkey digs the short films of Jason Willis. And the rascal's back again with another seasonal effort:


Moon Monster - Animated Horror Fan Club Spot (Comic Book Ad, 1970) from Jason Willis on Vimeo.

It's good fun and took a lot of work, as you might imagine. Read about the making of Moon Monster here. And check out Mr. Willis' website for more neat stuff.

NSFW

As a reward for all the reading we've made you do, here's a video that's rather filthy, but in a very funny way. It's probably best viewed in a non-work environment. Unless you work somewhere that doesn't mind cartoons that suggest trashy European softcore cinema from decades past.


Michel Homm from simon landrein on Vimeo.


You dirty monkey! You watched the whole thing, didn't you? Good. Now read this oral history of the creation of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" video and write a three-page report tonight as homework. Discuss the themes of the piece, alternate perspectives on feminine beauty, and the idea that rhythm has replaced melody in popular song.


[An artful wiggle to the NSFW site This Isn't Happiness and Vulture.]

Look Behind You!

If you followed our headline and actually saw something scary, that's pretty cool. But you probably saw curtains, or the back of the couch ... maybe a coworker. Either way, we've made it to the end of the 2013 Halloween Frenzy. Whew!

We hope it was good for you. Have fun today and be safe tonight. Remember to check under the bed.

Here's a Silly Symphony from 1929 called Hells Bells. Based on slightly foggy memories of a couple biographies we read more than a decade ago, the whole 'toon was likely designed and plotted by Ub Iwerks, the nearly invisible hand that guided Disney's formative years as an animation studio.


[courtesy of Pat Hawkins]

And at no extra charge, have a laugh at Hark! A Vagrant's newest, a Halloween themed set of one-strip gags based on antique postcards. "Bewitching Halloween" is a riot.

So Much to See

Sometimes we see blogs, Tumblrs and other stops on the web and wonder why we even bother. Then we remember, we bother because if we weren't here to pass the links on to you, who would?

At least that's what we tell ourselves at night before drinking enough cough syrup to fall asleep while listening to old radio dramas.

Imagine some sort of brass fanfare here. Now look!

Can you even stand it?! Yeah, exclamation points. Journalism-degree-be-damned. If ever there was a still from a Disney cartoon that merited a freak-out, this certainly makes the grade.

This is just a smoked pepper corn amongst the bounty of spicy offerings at the Graves and Ghouls Tumblr.

It's run by a woman named Cat who has another Tumblr worth your time, Vintage Gal.

There are GIFs on both, which tend to bug our wonky eyes, but that's one broken match in the factory full of joy. And please know there are ladies in various states of undress on both blogs, so don't get fired on our watch, okay?

Sebastian's Voodoo

Joaquin Baldwin made this animated short in 2009, and it's presented here by the National Film Board of Canada. The Paraguay native now works for Disney. Let's hope the mouse doesn't squeeze the creativity from him.

Now, for our feature presentation:

Halloween on the Street: Learning Shapes

We'll start with something light and kid friendly:

Nice, eh? It was done by Jack Davis for Sesame Street Magazine. Davis did cartoon art and illustrations for many print advertisements as well as magazine illustrations, most notably for EC and Mad. He also did a fair amount of movie posters and contributed character design work for the Rankin and Bass animation team.

Thank Mr. Davis for the excellent look of the creeps and heroes in the forever excellent Mad Monster Party.

And if you like fun, and really, who doesn't? Visit Sam Henderson's Magic Whistle Tumblr for more great finds and absurd humor.

Art From a Film That Never Was

Hans Bacher and Andreas Deja are artists and animators who have worked for Disney as well as other studios. Some time ago (2004 per one source) they were put to work doing character and design work for a proposed animated feature for Disney called Fraidy Cat.

As is usually the case, the project was shelved and will likely never come back. And as is sometimes the case, giving up on the project is a big loss. The film was "a charming crime story taking place in London of the sixties, a bit of HITCHCOCK’S ‘REAR WINDOW’ with animals," said Bacher. [caps and emphasis his]

Alas, Fraidy Cat will never be. But Deja and Bacher have posted some of their early concept art and oh boy, does it look like it would have been fun.

Deja worked on character design for Oscar and Corrina, a cat and a bird who were to be the film's protagonists. He also did a sizeable gallery of the various supporting cast:

Bacher worked on background and style designs that show off the script's proposed settings:

And is it just us, or does that cat look a little like Cary Grant?

See everything they posted here and here. And read Bleeding Cool's post about the abandoned project, because that's where we read about it.

Switchblades at Dawn

The Typing Monkey has never watched more than a few seconds of the animated Fox sitcom Bob's Burgers. We don't know why, it just never happened. Maybe someday.

Neither have we seen anything beyond a teaser clip for the Nickelodeon cartoon Sanjay and Craig.

Why are we giving an inventory of animated shows we've never seen? Because artist Jay Howell has a hand in both of those shows and we've just discovered his art blog.

One of the most creative and sly things Howell shares via his site, are the "book paintings" in which he paints a sort of illustration on the title page of a paperback. Most of the books are Harlequin romance novels:

When Howell interprets the title literally, as in the example above, it changes what we can assume the book is actually about. Try hard enough, and you can probably imagine what the real book cover looked like. You're probably not far off if you've seen a romance novel or two.

Howell makes them funny, absurd and creepy-cute. His site is full of these, and he even sells them. (We didn't check to see how much he charges.) But just getting to see them online makes his blog worth a look.

Yes, it's the sun covered in naked people. Somehow, Howell has tapped into the 9-year-old boy part of his brain that giggled when Huck Finn shouted "hump yourself" at Jim as the teacher read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out loud in class.

The Naked Sun joke is so simple and Howell's depiction so elegant and profane that the viewer isn't so much angry that we didn't do it first, but rather overjoyed that somebody made this happen.

Not that Howell's art is all bewbs and knife fights. Go see  for yourself what happened when he took his brushes and pens to the title page of a paperback called Cast a Tender Shadow.


[Yet another enthusiastic nod to Monster Brains for turning us on to Howell's work.]

Thank You Ray Harryhausen

Stop-motion animation and visual effects master Ray Harryhausen has died.

For a certain kind of kid, the mere mention of Harryhausen stirs up many happy memories of watching his films on TV, or in the theater if you were lucky enough, and being fully transported to worlds where the beasts of Greek, Arab and Hindu mythology were very real and frequently out to kill the hero.

The AV Club's obit contains the fun "Creature List" video from Youtube, with a montage of nearly every beast that came to life at Ray Harryhausen's hands -- including his wonderful dinosaurs that are clearly the foundation of Jurassic Park.

Coming Soon's obit contains this wonderful quotation from Phil Tippet, the man who is as close to inheriting the Harryhausen throne as any: "You know I'm always saying to the guys that I work with now on computer graphics -- do it like Ray Harryhausen"

The Typing Monkey spent many afternoons running loose in the suburban wilds, recreating scenes from the Sinbad movies, and especially Ray Harryhausen's master work, Jason and the Argonauts.


[courtesy of jasonargomov]

Zombie Brothers

The Screen Novelties crew is at it again, with a fun short film made for Nickelodeon.

Nick Animated Original Short - Zombie Brothers
Get More: Nick,Nick Videos,Nick Games

It's Them $@#% Goblins Again!

The animators at Screen Novelties do good work. And The Typing Monkey has swiped their content before to show you why we think that.

Here's another great piece of stop-motion and puppet animation work Screen Novelties crafted, inspired by Wladyslaw Starewicz's seminal work. It's both sweet and creepy, and that's not easy to achieve.

Check it:


You like? Here's a link to their Vimeo page for more, more, more.

Look Over Here

We love good visual art as much as anybody who has at least one eyeball and a heart. The comic and fantastic is were the fun stuff tends to live. As such, we gravitate toward those places.

There are many good art blogs out there cataloging these things, so please spend some time at Monster Crazy and Monster Brains, where you are likely to lose hours at a time just taking it all in.

Now that that's out of the way, we must point you to the work of Christopher Mitten, an artist and illustrator working in comic books. He's been at it long enough to have a crackerjack resume but we just learned of him and are looking forward to reading some of the books he's worked on.

Stylistically, his work recalls Bill Sienkiewicz and Mike Mignola. And like the former, it's especially fun to see what happens when Mitten interprets iconic characters from sci-fi, horror and pop culture past.

His Skeletor will erase any memory you might have of the silly Filmation toy commercial cartoon from the '80s. That's a villain to be feared kids.

And don't you just love Mitten's fin-enhanced Creature from the Black Lagoon?

Mitten is launching a new site soon, so keep looking at his Tumblr, where we guess he'll post more in the meantime.

["Creature from the Black Lagoon" illustration by Christopher Mittens 2011. Copyright applies, so don't copy it without attribution, ya dig? Commissioned by Ashcan Allstars for a Universal Monsters theme.]

Cartoons Can Be Funny

In March 2012, Cartoon Network debuted it's programming block called DC Nation. It's various animated series based on characters from the DC universe, to varying degrees of engagement for grown-ups who are willing to spend time watching this sort of thing. (Or, you know, want to.)

The real joy of tuning in to DC Nation's programming is that each Saturday they debut two new short 'toons from a group of creators who forgo any heroic posturing for the characters and instead aim for comedy. And they're all pretty funny.

The two stand-outs are Lauren Faust's Super Best Friends Forever, starring Wonder Girl, Batgirl and Supergirl doing things that we'd all do if we were them.



And Aardman Studios gives Superman, Batman, Catwoman and The Joker the Creature Comforts treatment by having them voiced by little kids saying things wholly unrelated to the business of crime fighting. DC World's Funniest is delightful.



Tune in for some of the other shorts, but do scour the Web for more of the DC World's Funniest shorts and, you lucky dog, io9 has all of Faust's Super BFF work up for your entertainment.

We'll be right back after these messages ...

F-R-E-S-H! Fresh fresh fresh that's fresh!


[Courtesy of Stonesthrow]

"Nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired."

A man named Lee Hardcastle makes claymation and other animated films. His series "Done in 60 Seconds" recreates iconic horror and science fiction films in about one minute. Hardcastle's latest is a retelling of John Carpenter's The Thing starring a bunch of penguins:



If you like that, go to his site and see more 60-second horrors and a whole mess of other fun stuff.


[A wink and a nod to Bleeding Cool.]

UPDATE: The video Pingu's The Thing has been removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim. (From the Pingu people, not John Carpenter. Lee Hardcastle says he'll update on Jan 24.)

Happy Halloween

Over the weekend The Typing Monkey staff drank some delicious beverages and freaked out over a great set of images on the ever-wonderful Monster Brains. The covers of Tales from the Tomb magazine and the other Eerie Publications may drive the weak-willed insane.

In snooping around for more information we came across some neat video by Jason Willis, who used to post great horror records on his blog Scar Stuff, and now appears to be making killer animated shorts. Here is the Halloween film Willis made this year, set to a children's record "Halloween" by Kay Lande and Wade Denning.

Note that Willis shot most of this on an iPhone. (Ker-BOING!)



We like to keep it more or less PG-13 because you never know who is reading. So keep that in mind for the following. The short that Jason Willis made in 2010 is a nearly 8-minute piece painstakingly pieced together from the covers of Eerie magazines and set to a novelty horror record from the early '70s.

Eerie Publications polluted young brains with lurid gore, violence, absurd monsters and barely clothed women, all of them brought to life via Willis' mad science.

Now that you know what you're getting CLICK HERE and have fun.

We'll be right back after these messages ...

The last week of March pummelled us into a coarse paste reconstituted only by carefully measured doses of Hennessey and prosecco. Original content, reviews, and all the other ramblings nobody reads will appear here eventually. Until then, whip out your lighter and shout with us: "Freberg!"

[courtesy of liviuarh]

The animation is by Paul Glickman, the voices by Stan Freberg. Happy April. Sooner or later it's going to stop raining.

More Good Grief

This image may be a screen-capture from a new Peanuts cartoon called Happiness Is a Warm Blanket. We didn't bother to research that anymore than we bothered to figure out how to embed an animated .gif onto the page. That's right, this picture moves if you click here.

There's a similarly stark image of Linus, probably from the same 'toon, that is also an animated loop. And the second picture contains even more hopelessness than the first. Perhaps it's the sunset (or sunrise?) that keeps the above image from turning into an  Andrew Wyeth painting. We lift both of these images to the same level as Wyeth's "Christina's World."


[Hat tip to FuckYeahAnimation]