Another Random Betty Boop

I'm re-uploading various images directly to the blog to better help people find them. Apparently, non-photographic images have a tendency to moulder in obscurity when uploaded directly to Picasa.

Cartoon Network's Birthday

I'm sorry that I missed the celebration, but this music video is great. It highlights the surreal nature of Cartoon Network and the influence that it has had on animation in general. CN is far from perfect. They are, in many ways, just as stupid and conservative as every other corporate monstrosity. But there has always been something different about them. I don't know where it comes from. All I can say is that they are in a different league than the garbage at Disney and Nickelodeon. Happy birthday, CN.

Make sure to watch this at high resolution, full screen, with the volume turned up.

Betty Boop

I'm getting back into the swing of things with making original images. Because of the bizarre way that Google "weights" their images, I think that many people are never finding my various images of Betty Boop, Red Hot Riding Hood, Jessica Rabbit, Princess Yum Yum, and my own work. So I'm going to start re-posting it using Blogger's image upload tool. The images are never full-resolution, but at least people can find them. Annoying.

Dino Time 3D Trailer Causes Acute Case of WTF?

Holy crap on a crap cracker, what the hell is this?



What is it with animation and the ability to get total garbage produced? This reminds me of that bizzare debacle known as Delgo, where the movie was awful, but was loaded with acting luminaries like Anne Bancroft. Who the hell greenlights these things?

In response, I shall post the intro to a far superior "mixed-race group of skateboarding kids meets dinosaur" cartoon, Denver: The Last Dinosaur. Denver gets bonus points for more neon and more 80's.

New Wreck-It Ralph Trailer Looks Good

General audience-oriented animated films frequently have awful trailers. Dreamworks trailers, I think, work against the actual movie more often than they help. For example, Over The Hedge was a funny, entertaining film. Did the trailers make it look like a cliche piece of crap? Yep!

Wreck-It Ralph is in the middle. All three trailers thus far have tried a little too hard for gags, which generally indicates a bad film (it looks like we will have immediate precedent for this in Hotel Transylvania), but the premise is just so great that I can't imagine the movie not having some charms.

3D Is A Freaking Gimmick

Industry analysts and Disney are all surprised and dismayed by the disappointment of Finding Nemo in 3D. I'm not. First, 3D is a gimmick. Plain and simple. It might be a cool gimmick, but it doesn't add anything to the experience of a movie other than a little "wow." That small amount of "wow" isn't enough to increase the value of the movie going experience to where more people are willing to pay. The industry instead has a smaller number of people willing to pay the same or more. This is the direct opposite of industry growth and the reason why we have seen a decrease in tickets sold from a peak way back in 2002.

Those numbers are actually much worse than they appear. The US population continues to grow at a rate of about 1.0% per year. All things being equal, we should be seeing a 1% annual increase in ticket sales. We are not. They do nothing but go down.

Second, and this is the biggest reason why I'm not surprised: movie studios and theaters seem to think that 3D is the magic bullet that will allow them to continue their constant increase in ticket prices. It is not something that is used to increase value. It is something to balance out an extant equation that is going in the wrong direction. If your business is not increasing value, it is dying.

Slapping 3D onto a nine-year-old movie and then trying to sell it at current prices is no way to add value. It does not overcome the loss of value from the movie being old and seen by pretty much everyone that would want to see it. The huge success of The Lion King in 3D was novelty, just as the massive success of Avatar was novelty. Once that novelty is gone, it's gone. Not just a studio, but the industry cannot get it back.

Monsters Inc. 3D will do worse than Nemo, and the percentage of movie sales going to more expensive 3D showings will continue to drop. Unless the studios and theaters drop 3D to the same prices as ordinary tickets, they will kill this frail golden goose. And even then, I suspect that it will fade. I hate 3D. I would pay more to avoid 3D, and I know many people who feel the same way.

"Horus: Prince Of The Sun" Is Back Up!

Horus: Prince of the Sun, also known as Hols: Prince of the Sun, is the first film on which Hayao Miyazaki worked. It was produced by Toei, and apparently because of the attention paid to it from Youtube uploads, Toei decided to have them ALL taken down and put up the god-awful English dub on Hulu. I don't know what they hope to get. They will not get any money for this. It's from 1969, for Pete's sake. No one but hard-core fans care and none of them are on Hulu because Hulu sucks.

Thankfully, fans continue to upload the subtitled version to Youtube, in defiance of Toei's stupidity. This newest version is great, being available in glorious high-resolution. Enjoy it while it's up!

UPDATE: And down it goes. Toei, if you're reading this, from the deepest part of my heart, go fuck yourselves.