harvey @ deneroff.com

The recent news that Playhouse Disney has joined with Britain’s Tiger Aspect Productions is co-producing a new animated TV series, Tinga Tinga Tales for preschoolers with Kenya’s Homeboyz Entertainment. The show, which revolves around African animals and is just starting animation,  is based on the Tinga Tinga art of Tanzania and was commissioned last year by CBeebies,(Children’s BBC).  What’s interesting is that the animation will be done in a studio  set up by Homeboyz in Nairobi.

A C21Media.net story notes that, “After production is completed in 2010, the studio will continue to provide jobs for the new animation industry in East Africa.” In addition,

Andrew Zein, Tiger Aspect’s MD, said: “This is one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever taken on. On top of everything else it is truly inspirational to think that 50% of Tiger Aspect’s profits from the show will help make a real difference in improving the educational needs of children in East Africa.”

What interests me is what this may mean for animation in sub-Saharan Africa — will this really jump start animation in East Africa, or is just a one off deal?

Overseas animation studios have been around since the dawn of American television animation, when Jay Ward sent work on Rocky and His Friends to Mexico; in the process, it seems to have given a boost to the local Mexican animation.  However, Mexico did not last long as an destination for American TV work and, over the years, work flowed to countries as varied as Spain, Poland, Argentine, Japan, Taiwan, China and, more recently, India. The one continent that has been largely unaffected by this constant search for lower cost facilities has been Africa.

A small animation industry does exist in South Africa, though the only African outpost for overseas production I know of has been Pipangai Production on the island of La Réunion, a French colonial outpost off Madagascar. (Pipangai’s success seems due in large part to its political status as an overseas department of France, which allows for various financial incentives.) If Homeboyz can pull off its part of the bargain, and if Kenya can maintain some political stability, and if the show is a success, perhaps there might be some hope that East Africa can join the international animation fraternity.

Doug Sweetland’s Presto, the new Pixar short that shows before Andrew Stanton’s WALL·E, is an absolute delight. As good as some of best classic Hollywood cartoons, it is brilliant, very funny and a much better piece of filmmaking than the accompanying feature. The nonstop piling of gag upon gag seems more in line with more recent DreamWorks Animation movies than to the run of the mill Pixar film (Brad Bird’s The Incredibles is a something of an exception).

For its part, WALL·E  tries very hard to be a silent comedy, as its two main robotic characters hardly speak. Stanton admits to looking to the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton for inspiration, which is not a bad idea; after all, Otto Messmer based the character of Felix the Cat on a close study of Chaplin films. But the film really does not, in the end, really work and seems a bit too precious. The story, an ecological fable about how the Earth has been abandoned for 700 years because of a garbage crisis, seems a rather weak thread to hang a feature film.

The film is not without its merits, especially in the design and rendering of the garbage-filled cityscapes on Earth .(Kudos to production designer Ralph Eggleston , who was art director on FernGully and The Incredibles, as well as directed the Oscar-winning Pixar short, For the Birds.) In comparison, Kung Fu Panda, is much the better film.

Moving Image Source is a new website of interest launched by the Museum of the Moving Image, which is located in New York’s  Astoria Studio across the East River from Manhattan. It features a blog-like magazine devoted to film history and a very useful portal with extensive links to all sorts of sites related to “film, television, and digital media.” For instance, there is a a calendar of events listing retrospectives showing at film archives around the world as well as a research guide that providing links to all sorts of material, from magazines and online databases to films online and bibliographies.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Museum, which is often overshadowed by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center; after all, they not only funded an oral history which led to my work on the history of animation unions, but later invited me to give a lecture on the topic several years later.

New Scientist reports, “digital motion capture could soon be within reach of low-budget film makers thanks to new software that records movement without using markers.” The system, developed at Stanford University, in California, and the Max-Planck Institute Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany, allows for what they say is a “3D digital clone” of the actor using a laser scanner. avoiding the use use of body markers or special suits; it also allows the software to capture not only body movement, but everything from facial expressions to clothing. (See demonstration image above and video below.)

This sort of advance seems inevitable and can only add to the anguish felt by many in animation, who as one of my students, Paul Krause, pointed out, seems to reduce animation to a postproduction process. It is also the type of advance that might further encourage live-action filmmakers to move into animation.

The problem with motion capture animation, as with rotoscoping, is not so much the process, but how it is used. Despite all the hype, raw mocap data is rarely useful for animated films, as is and it often requires the assistance of a skilled animator to make it useful; it is this extra step that generally inflates the cost of motion capture, just as it inflates the cost of rotoscoping. (Remember, Max Fleischer gave up the original rotoscoped version of Koko the Clown in 1925 in favor of a more cartoony one because of cost.) While the new process is certainly an interesting breakthrough, it really does not change the basic role that mocap will play for the immediate future, except for perhaps making it somewhat less expensive and perhaps less complicated. The new approach will certainly be welcomed by those who use mocap for video games and scientific purposes, as well as those in visual effects.

In the meantime, go here for a higher resolution, downloadable copy of the video and a preprint of the paper the developers will be presenting at the August SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles.

CNET blogger Harrison Hoffman reported yesterday that,

YouTube has just announced the launch of the rumored YouTube Screening Room. The news broke yesterday that YouTube was going to be delving into professional films, with the possibility breaking out of their 10 minute mold and into longer form. YouTube is actively pursuing filmmakers to try and get high quality content for the site. The YouTube Screening Room has debuted with four short films, including one Academy Award winner and one nominee.

Animation Magazine adds,

The site will feature four new short films every two weeks, as well as feature-length films on a case-by-case basis. Initial animated offerings include Torill Kove’s Oscar-winning short The Danish Poet, as well as Fredrik Emilson’s Award-winning Love and War and Josh Raskin’s Academy Award-nominated I Met The Walrus.

Canada’s Mediacaster also notes that the National Film Board of Canada will have seven of its animated films, including Chris Landreth’s Ryan (pictured above) as well as The Danish Poet, shown.

The judge by a viewing of Love and War, an operatic romantic drama in the manner of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the picture and sound quality is much better than the normal YouTube offering; however, there does not seem an easy way to download the film from the site, though one is directed to an official download site. Anyway, check it out.

I was delighted that John Stevenson and Mark Osborne’s Kung Fu Panda, DreamWorks Animation’s latest effort. more than lived up to its hype. I really have little to add to general critical applause the film has elicited for its sharp take on martial arts films, which compares favorably with Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films (though it is considerably less bloody).

What impressed me even more, partly because I was not expecting it, was the film’s visual richness, which is sumptuous to say the least; I was especially impressed with the vivid detail which the film seems to luxuriate in. Afterwards, I regretted not having made the extra effort to see it in its IMAX version (which was playing a half hour away in Buford), which is obviously the way to see it. (The standard version in your local multiplex ain’t bad either.)

Both directors are new to the feature animation scene, at least in terms of directing. John Stevenson previously directed episodes of DreamWorks Animation’s ill-fated CG TV series Father of the Pride, and has a number of credits as a storyboard artist, including Madagascar. 

Interestingly, co-director Mark Osborne is not new to IMAX, as his 1998 Oscar-nominated stop motion short, More (see QuickTime version  here) was made under the auspices of the Large Format Films Association; this was an initiative that involved independent filmmaker Christine Panushka and also resulted in the production of Aleksandr Petrov’s Oscar-winning version of The Old Man and the Sea. More recently, Osborne directed episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants and Dropping Out (2000),  an independent live-action comedy that screened at the Sundance Festival.

Currently, there is an almost total lack of films by Émile Cohl, the pioneer French animator, who also worked in the United States,  available in on DVD; I know of two DVDs that I  that have his seminal Fantasmagorie (1908), which is often seen as the first fully animated film to explore the artistic possibilities of the medium. While there may be other films available here and there, a complete edition of his extant films is long overdue.

However, in searching Amazon France, I noticed the announcement of a new book, Émile Cohl: L’inventeur du dessin animé (Émile Cohl: Inventor of the Animated Cartoon), by Cohl’s grandson Pierre-Courtet Cohl, with an introduction by Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), to be published on August 20th; and best of all, the book also also includes a 2-DVD set of all the Cohl’s existing films. There is no indication yet whether the DVDs are region free; if not, it might be a reason to get a region free player or software.

An interesting piece of legislation, some say Quixotic, called the Commercial Advertisement  Mitigation, or CALM)Act was introduced in the US House of Representatives on June 9th. Multichannel News reports that,

The Federal Communications Commission would be required to regulate the volume of television commercials for excessive loudness under a House bill recently introduced by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.).

Eshoo, a member the Energy and Commerce Committee who represents Silicon Valley, wants the FCC to regulate “excessively noisy and strident” ads on broadcast TV, cable television and satellite television. The bill would exempt radio stations and the Internet.

Esho states on her website that,  “My legislation will reduce the volume of commercials in order to bring them to same level as the programs they accompany.”

As the San Francisco Chronicle story also notes,

Eshoo is not alone in pressing the issue. British regulators approved similar rules last month that require broadcasters to limit the “maximum subjective loudness” of TV ads after receiving complaints.

According to Britain’s The Guardian, the new rules to be put into effect on July 7th, were instituted

after the Advertising Standards Authority received more than 100 complaints in 2007 from viewers complaining that some commercials were too loud.

“Often the problem arises because the audio files used in the ads have been compressed, making quieter sounds more pronounced or ‘punchy’,” said the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for writing the TV ad code.

As I’ve noted before, these sort of complaints have been around since the early days of TV in the United States. However, the Chronicle reports that,

“We get lots of complaints about various things, but I haven’t really heard any complaints about this issue,” said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president in the Washington, D.C., office of the Association of National Advertisers, a trade group that includes advertising heavyweights like Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble.

Multichannel News, though, notes that,

In January, the FCC released a report showing that it had received complaints from consumers about the “abrupt changes in volume” during transitions from regular programming to commercials.

The Madness of Being, a striking short film  Hal Miles made last year, recently finished doing the festival circuit. Its about a character (a stop motion armature) trapped in a situation right out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit; Miles describes the story as being about a “character … confined in an extremely small and isolated room for all eternity, [who] confronts its madness of being by witnessing a series of agonizing situations about itself.” The fact that the character is essentially the skeleton of a stop motion puppet (modeled on one used in Mighty Joe Young), might be considered a meditation on the madness of filmmaking.

Hal Miles is someone I had the pleasure of getting to know when I worked in the Savannah campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he teaches stop motion animation and visual effects. Early in his career, he worked under Tex Avery and later befriended Ray Harryhausen, who he claims as major influences. His credits include working on the visual effects of such films as The Abyss, Terminator II and Titanic, as well as animating the Pillsbury Doughboy and directing several of his own short films.

For me, Hal is the go to person on questions on puppet animation; his passion for his history and technique is reflected in his wonderful collection of stop motion artifacts (which naturally supplied the armature used in The Madness of Being). His long-term plan is to open a stop motion museum. (Interestingly, his new wife, Nancy, is herself a collector of animation art, though it’s obvious that theirs is not a marriage of convenience.)

The dark mood of The Madness of Being seems out of character for such a lively person; as his wife Nancy says, who knew that such a funny person could make such a film. Well, he did and did a pretty good job of it too.

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Animation Unlimited 2008 is the name of this year’s Society for Animation Studies conference at the Art Institute at Bournemouth, which is in the English seaside resort town. The Society is very close to my heart, having founded the international membership organization in 1987 and served as its first president. SAS, I am happy to say, has survived very nicely without me, with my main duties these days is acting as Editor of its Animation Bibliography project.

This year’s conference kicks off with a keynote address by Esther Leslie, author of Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, who will be speaking on “‘The Flux and Flurry of Animated Worlds — On Stillness and Hypermovement.” However, the core of the event will be papers presented by a wide variety of international scholars and filmmakers on various aspects of animation history and theory. For instance, the opening set of panels are devoted to The Simpsons and Japanese animation. Later that day, I will be talking about “The Movie Brat Generation and the Animation Renaissance,” while my co-panelists will be discussing “The Fleischer Advertising Cartoons” (Mark Langer), Shamus Culhane’s Woody Woodpecker cartoons (Tom Klein), and “Floyd Norman’s Story” (Musa Brooker).

Other panels will be devoted to the “Animated Documentary”  and “Interdisciplinary Currents in Animation Studies,” in addition to those on more traditional topics, including animation theory, digital animation and teaching animation. In addition, there are two other keynote addresses and the Art Institute’s Gallery will be hosting a “Bob Godfrey Retrospective Exhibition” from July 14-August 22. This exhibit of original animation art, by that icon of British animation, is being curated by Suzanne Buchan and draws upon the Godfrey Collection at the University of the Arts’ Animation Research Centre, at Farnham.

All in all, it is something I very much look forward to attending, especially after I had to cancel my trip to last year’s conference,  held Portland State University, in Portland, Oregon,  in conjunction with the first Platform International Animation Festival.

 Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas: An Insider’s View of the Birth of a Pop Culture Phenomenon by Fred Ladd, with assistance from myself, has now been officially announced by McFarland, which is publishing it on November 30th. (It is also available for pre-order at Amazon.) The book is Fred’s story of his involvement in producing the English-language versions of Astro Boy, Gigantor and Kimba, the White Lion, among other pioneering anime series, and his dealings with the such figures as Osamu Tezuka. In addition, he gives a personal history of the phenonemon that is anime.

The book is something Fred and I have been working for several years. Actually, the idea developed during conversations we had preparing for a panel discussion I was chairing  which Fred organized, for the Postwar Japanese Anime/Manga Exhibit at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, in April 2003.  I  will have more to say about the book closer to publication, but thought it’s time to break silence and begin putting the word out.

Last year, Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis grabbed the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, helping to launch it on the road to international fame. It also brought a greater realization that animated films could be taken as seriously as their live-action brethren. Now, with Satrapi serving on this year’s Cannes jury,  Waltz With Bashir, Ari Forman’s Israeli-made documentary, seems to be garnering considerable buzz at this year’s festival. And if the reception reaches beyond Cannes, it’s possible that animation will have reached a new tipping point.

The reception from the press seems generally positive. For instance, in a report for Time entitled “Cartoon Pandas, Animated Nightmares,” Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss note that,

For the seven decades since Walt Disney made Snow White, most animated features have followed the Disney mold: cute and colorful, with talking animals and a coming-of-age plot meant to inspire and amuse. Even a seeming exception like Persepolis found saving humor in its girl-grows-up story. Ari Forman’s Waltz With Bashir is a break from all this: an animated documentary about the lingering, subterranean effects of war on the director and some old friends who had served in the Israeli Army during the 1982 incursion into Lebanon. They are still haunted by the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, perpetrated by followers of the assassinated Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayal.

Ari Forman’s background is as a director of live-action documentaries and feature films. He first used animation to open each episode of The Material that Love is Made Of, a documentary TV  series. That an established live-action director made a move into animation is no longer a surprise, even for a documentary filmmaker.  (Michael Moore, who used animation in  Bowling for Columbine, subsequently announced he was going to make an animated film, though he has not yet followed through on  it.)

Animated theatrical movies have been taken seriously before, but that acceptance in the West has often been fleeting. For instance, there was no real follow up to Ralph Bakshi initial successes, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies took several years before reaching American screens, and Bill Plympton’s independent features have performed poorly viz-à-viz his short films. But  with critical excitement over Waltz With Bashir coming on the heels of Persepolis, the increasing acceptance by live-action directors of animation and independent animation filmmakers finally starting to move into features, there is the promise of a new day dawning.

Whatever happens though, it looks like the next few years could be very interesting. In the meantime, check out the excerpt below and the film’s official website for trailers.

The following was originally written in December 2004 for Skwigly Animation Magazine, a British online journal that subsequently went out of business; though parts of the magazine’s site can still be seen on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, this article cannot It was written on the occasion of the release of Priestly first DVDs: Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity and is an update of an piece I wrote in 2001 for Animatoon (issue 30). The film about menopause she mentions eventually turned into the recently completed Streetcar Named Perspire, which I recently wrote about on December 20, 2007.

“I really love Flash,” Joanna Priestley gushes. “It’s so easy to use and I rarely have problems. It’s phenomenally fast, I can change things right away and rarely lose things. It’s not for everything, but it suits my style. It has totally changed the way I make films. Best of all, using Flash reminds me of what filmmaking used to be like; and once again, I can do everything myself.” This endorsement is unusual only in that Priestley, one of the leading lights of American independent animation, has traditionally relied on jerry-built techniques that seem primitive even compared to those used when Winsor McCay was starting out.

Priestley used Flash for Dew Line (2004), a delightful abstract film which she compares to “Henri Matisse’s cutout technique of his last years, which was very flat and used solid colors. But Flash is only one many techniques and I like to use many techniques.”

Dew Lines is one of two recent films — the other being Andaluz (2004), co-directed with Karen Aqua — which is included in her first set of DVD releases, Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity. The former includes eight of her classic films, including Voices (1984) and She-Bop (1988); the latter includes Dew Line and Andaluz, as well as The Rubber Stamp Film (1983) and Jade Leaf (1985), a rarely seen computer animated student film made at the California Institute of the Arts. Both discs also include documentaries in which Priestley describes how she works and other bonus material.

“One of my main goals in making films,” Priestley says, “is to try to push the boundaries of what I know, as far as I can. In every film, I try to do something new and different. I try new techniques, new subject matter, new styles, or new color palettes.” The one constant, though, in all her work is their deeply felt and often humorous exploration of her life and personality.

This is clearly seen in Voices, another CalArts student film which remains one of her signature pieces. She has described it as, “A humorous exploration of the fears we share: fear of the darkness, of monsters, of aging, of being overweight and of global destruction.” It features a rotoscoped image of Priestley talking to the camera, whose appearance constantly changes to reflect her fears and anxieties.

This type of personal exploration of her life is also seen in such films as All My Relations (1990) [above] and Grown Up (1993) [below], which deal with relationships and the perils of becoming middle-aged respectively. Her films also reflect a strong feminist instinct, as seen in the poetic She-Bop, which mixes puppets and drawings to examine human frailties, and After the Fall (1991), which examines the isolation of men in modern Western society. This tendency to personalize her films is even evident in her recent turn toward abstraction, including Surface Dive, inspired by her experiences diving in an underground river in Mexico.

Discovering Animation

Born and raised in Oregon, Joanna Priestley began experimenting with animation very early in her life. “One of the first toys I was ever given,” she recalls, “was a zoetrope, which worked on a little turntable and it had little zoetrope strips with it. I loved it! I’m sure I became an animator because of that toy. Then I started drawing on the corners of my textbooks in grade school, and later studied art in high school and college, where I specializing in painting and printmaking.”

After college, she moved to Paris “to study printmaking with intaglio master Bill Hayter at Atelier 17.” Returning to Oregon, she settled in Sisters, “a little tiny cowboy town in the center of the state, where there was almost nothing to do in the evenings.” With no commercial cinema around, she helped start a film society, which became a huge success.

“We then had some money left over and decided to invite Bob Gardiner, who had won an Oscar for Closed Mondays with Will Vinton. He was funny and charming and showed a whole program of animation; and that was when I really discovered animation. I immediately saw the possibilities of transferring over [from painting and printmaking] to animation. So, I went to a store, bought a pack of index cards and started experimenting with them.” It was a very inexpensive way to work which she continues to use.

Working as a film librarian for the Northwest Film Center, in Portland, enabled her to see new work and meet filmmakers like independent animator George Griffin, whose work Priestley “just fell in love with” and who became a big influence. Other animators who have had a great influence include Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Jane Aaron.

“However,” she says, “the one film that’s influenced me the most is La Jetée by Chris Marker, [which consists entirely of still photos]. I saw it in college in 16mm; I was so astounded by it that I insisted I be able to take the film and look at it myself, and was able to look at it four times in a row. At that point, I was supporting myself doing commercial slide shows with three or six projectors. And there’s such an interesting overlap between slide shows and La Jetée and animation, because movement occurs between the dissolves between these still images.”

Rubber Stamps & CalArts

In the late 70s, Priestley began work on her first film, The Rubber Stamp Film. She recalls, “It took me five years to do it. I literally knew absolutely nothing about filmmaking. I bought my own equipment from flea markets.”

The first festival she entered the film in was Telluride, where she met André Tarkovsky, “one of the directors I most admired in the world, and I just thought I died and gone to heaven. And I got a very good response to the film, including positive notices from several major film critics such as Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert.”

Despite this success, she decided to go back to college and enrolled in the Experimental Animation Program at CalArts. “The time I spent at CalArts,” she says, “was one of the most exciting times in my life. I was worked incredibly hard and did four or five films. I was able to collaborate with my mentor, Jules Engel, on a couple of films done on the computer. It was a time when computers first arrived at CalArts, so we were the first people doing computer animation there. My desk was next to the wall adjoining the Indonesian Music Room, so all day long I would hear the gamelan rehearsing. I was also able to take African dance, study acting and stage design, helped live-action filmmakers with their projects, and did lots of wild experiments.”

“After I left CalArts,” she says, “I went back to what I had been doing. And that turned out to be extremely helpful, because what I was doing was sitting with a pile of index cards and animating away. I think sometimes when people are at a school like CalArts, which has wonderful equipment, they become paralyzed after they leave because they don’t have access to the equipment. So, lots of people don’t continue on in filmmaking or in animation. But I just went back to my studio and started working.”

On Her Own

Since then, Priestley has largely made her living making independent short films, usually depending on government funding or foundation grants to support her efforts — supplemented by workshops and teaching at the Art Institute of Portland. One of her more creative efforts at fund raising was for Pro and Con (1993), an animated documentary on prison life she did with Joan Gratz , that took advantage of a law allocating a small percentage of money for public projects to arts funding.

She had worked together with Gratz several years earlier on the joyful Candyjam, an anijam in which 10 filmmakers from around the world did segments featuring animated candy. (The filmmakers included David Anderson, Karen Aqua, Craig Bartlett, Elizabeth Buttler, Paul Driessen, Tom Gasek. Marv Newland, and Christine Panushka, as well as Gratz and herself.)

“It was very thrilling to organize a film like that,” she said, “because what you do is put an idea out there. Joan and I had just traveled in Japan and seen all this amazing candy, which I thought, I’ve got to animate this, it’s so incredibly beautiful. But I couldn’t imagine doing an entire film with candy all by myself. So, I talked to Joan about it and the more we talked the more we thought, Wouldn’t it be amazing to ask different people from all around the world to do something with the candy from their area? So, we did and they said yes. That’s one of the really amazing things about our international community. People are very open. They’re very willing to share their talent and their time and, in this case, their money, to work together.”

In regards to Andaluz, her most recent collaboration, she says, “Karen Aqua and I started working on it when we were both, by coincidence, residents at an artists colony in Southern Spain, in the village of Mojacar. We fell in love with the place and decided to do a film about it. We had no idea what we were going to do. So, the first thing we did was go outside in a field and do a ritual, where we called to the four directions. And amazingly both of us seemed to know how to do this. It was like a miracle. You couldn’t know that about each other.”

“Out of that ritual came the idea of doing a film that would honor the landscape and the architecture and the plants and the culture of this area. That gave us the opportunity to do drawings outside and wander around the town and draw the architecture, study the plants, study the sky, go swimming and study the water. We did about 1200 drawings together.” The wonderful Moorish design motifs that populate the film, she notes, were based on tile patterns and architectural details of the Alhambra.

“The film took about four or five years to make, as a lot of things intervened: Karen was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemo a few times, so there were a lot of emotional challenges.(She is doing fine right now.) We finished Andaluz at the end of 2003 and released it at beginning of 2004.”

Dew Line, Priestley notes, was “based on mechanical studies I did on a trip to Alaska for the Oregon Zoo. I was impressed by an abandoned dew line station in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All the things that were there are still there, rotting in the tundra, including thousands of rusty barrels. In photographing many of the tiny little plants found there, I began thinking of about all the species we are losing. It was also the beginning of my current interest in botany and in being a medicinal herbalist.”

Currently, Priestley has two projects she is exploring. “One,” she reports, “is a very traditional character animation about menopause. The other is experimenting with complicated collages, and putting skwigly drawings on top. I don’t know if either will result in a film. But I love experimenting and seeing where it will go. I hope the menopause film will be funny. My husband [animator Paul Harrod] thought it was a terrible idea, which made me want to do it all the more. It’s an odd subject and have been working on it for six months, I’m not sure if a film is going to happen or not out of it, but I will stay with it another six months before making a decision.”

“But,” she says, “I’ve never done it for the money. I absolutely love what I do. I love coming to my studio and am never as happy as I am when I’m working on my films.”

Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity can be ordered directly from Priestley Motion Pictures at http://www.primopix.com/.

The above photo of Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Roy Disney was taken on November 2, 2002, at the Disney Studio tribute to Ward Kimball, which took place at the Directors Guild. Frank and Ollie were among those giving tribute and it was probably their last public appearance I went to. Frank died at 92 in 2004, and now Ollie passed away on April 14, at 95, the last of Disney’s Nine Old Men.

The Nine Old Men was something of a public relations gimmick created by the Disney organization, as it blithely ignored the talents of people like Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla, who left the studio under uncomfortable circumstances.  However,  the contributions of Frank and Ollie cannot be ignored. One only has to look at their work on Bambi to see how good they were. In addition, their Illusion of Life: Disney Animation is a landmark text which. along with Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit, have helped define the way animation is taught around the world.

Frank and Ollie were, of course, inseparable companions and speakers. And I first met them when they came to speak to a class at the University of Southern California in the fall of 1979; it occurred just after Don Bluth very publicly left Disney, and I recall getting into a conversation with Frank about it. I had recently returned to USC to finish my PhD after an 11 year hiatus and had finally committed to focus my career on animation. Needless to say, I would encounter them many times before I left Los Angeles in December 2003, as they were a vital part of Hollywood’s animation community, ever eager to share their knowledge and wisdom.

Ollie Johnston’s death has been well covered, and a good place to find some of the best online tributes is gathered here by Cartoon Brew. which also posted a nice tribute by Brad Bird.

Enough is enough! I finally had it with the Midtown when, on April 2nd, I went there to see Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, a documentary that mixes live action and animation.  When the commercials and trailers started, the sound was so loud I immediately left to protest, only to be told that it would probably not be possible to turn the volume down until the film itself began. This was later confirmed by a manager.  Not wanting to miss the start of the movie, I foolishly went back into the theater, standing in the back with my fingers blocking my ears. I unplugged my ears when the film started, but found the sound distorted (what I saw as an aftereffect of the noise I had been exposed to) and immediately left, angrily asking for and getting my money back.

This was not the first time I left the Midtown because of this problem (usually after my wife and I found the sound of the movie itself much too loud); I even stopped going there for six months last year. This is sad, since, in terms of programming,  the Midtown is one of best  theaters in Atlanta; it shows a wide variety of films, from mainstream to independent, and is a venue for several festivals, including the current Atlanta Film Festival. All this, though, is not worth the damage to my hearing. (Two days later, I realized the damage was such that I was unable to stay at my usual Friday night contra dance and have not tried to go to any other movie theater.)

When I lived in Los Angeles, my wife and I occasionally walked out of theaters because of sound problems; these always involved local multiplexes and my wife blamed youthful projectionists brought up on rock concerts; and the advent of digital sound has certainly allowed theaters to turn up the volume with less distortion. I never had a problem with such L.A. theaters as the Nuart (like the Midtown, owned by Landmark Theatres); and there never a problem during our stay in London, or as a matter of fact in any of the other theaters in Atlanta, including the Tara (Atlanta’s other important art house) and several local multiplexes.

The problem is not a new one and complaints about TV commercials being too loud go back to the early 1950s. I recall a junior high science teacher talking about it and how the local TV station he complained to telling him he was mistaken; he claimed otherwise and he was right. Today, when the sound is too loud during a commercial, you can either turn the sound down, hit the mute button or skip it with your TiVo; in a movie theater, your only option may be to leave the theater; you could, of course, use earplugs, but why should anybody have to use them to see a movie?

A November 27th  article on the WTVD-TV Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, website asks the question, “Are movies too loud?” It does not address the problem with commercials and trailers, but its observations are pertinent. The station investigated the matter after a viewer expressed concern that the sound levels in a theater she took her grandchild to were much too loud.

“He almost immediately put his hands over his ears and a little while later started crying and said it hurt it hurt,” says [Marjorie] Hopkins. “We had to take him out of the movie,” she continued, “We didn’t even stay to see the end because it hurt his ears too badly.”

The station went on to do some random testing.

We saw kids’ movies like The Game Plan, Harry Potter and Bee Movie. We also checked out action movies like American Gangster.

… For the most part, they all averaged well within safe levels as described by the National Institutes of Health.

But, each movie peaked above the safe level, 85 decibels, multiple times. The NIH says those higher levels could damage your hearing after long or repeated exposure.

…. We [also] watched Transformers at the I-MAX in the Marbles Children’s Museum in downtown Raleigh. This time the movie averaged more than 80 decibels. That’s just below what’s considered safe. It also peaked at nearly one hundred decibels.

…Dr. [Edith] Ferris [, an audiologist,] says the decibel readings we found at Bee Movie and Transformers could damage hearing over time.

If the sound levels for the feature presentation are too loud, what then about the trailers, which theaters readily admit are louder still?

The story adds that,

The theater manager at the I-MAX … tells us the studios preset the volume level for movies. He says the I-MAX theater is tested quarterly to make sure it stays within safe volume levels. He also says the staff monitors every movie and if they receive complaints they’ll check it out and sometimes turn down the volume if it appears to be too loud.

I hope what the Marbles Children’s Museum says is true; however, it is obvious the management of theaters like the Midtown apparently do not have the ability or the option to turn down the volume.

Going Over to the Dark Side

The problem of movies being too loud certainly contributes to the ongoing decline of movie attendance. And it looks like I may be joining the crowd.

This past weekend my wife and I went shopping at Fry’s Electronics and spotted a HD TV set playing a Blu-ray DVD of Enchanted (a film we had seen at the Midtown). My wife, who has always been annoyingly blasé about TV picture quality, was startled, and said, “I never knew a TV picture could be that good!” She was especially impressed with the 3-dimensional quality of the image. I was also impressed and realized that the picture was certainly equal to, and in some ways superior to what we saw in the movie theater. Right then and there, we both agreed to start saving for a HD TV and (when they come  out) a region-free Blu-ray player, and set up a home theater.

My fealty to the romance of “the moviegoing experience” and a sense of professional duty has prevented me from making what is, after all, a very logical decision, which an increasing number of Americans are making.

In the meantime, I made an appointment with an hearing specialist and will be ordering a pair of earplugs designed for musicians (though I understand toilet paper will do in a pinch) and writing to Landmark about my decision. I will eventually go back to the movies, being careful to both use earplugs and to come at least five minutes late (to avoid some of the trailers); however, until I have proof they have changed their ways, I will avoid the Midtown.

(Disclosures: Twenty years ago, I worked for Expanded Entertainment, a division of Landmark Theatres, when they published Animation Magazine (I was its first editor). Also, over the years, I have suffered some hearing loss, some of which may have been from causes other than moviegoing.)