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Animation fantasy fun at CineSavant. First up, correspondent Lee Kaplan points us to a polished YouTube presentation from ‘The Royal Ocean Film Society,’ a 13-minute short subject about the nuts and bolts of Ray Harryhausen’s game-changing ‘reality sandwich’ Dynamation setup.

The text is intelligent and the technical explanation is good, and the clips are nicely chosen. We skip most web odes to Mr. H., but this one is a good basic introduction to a much-admired Lost Cinema Art.

And the dependable Michael McQuarrie comes up with second good link related to animation, this time traditional cel animation.

It’s a short subject visiting the Miami Fleischer Animation Studio for an inside look at its workings, filmed in bright color. It’s fun just seeing the employees’ hairstyles from 1938, let alone the traditional animation tables and the cels with their registration pegs.

The process is covered fairly well, and we get a good look at the Fleischers themselves. We may have posted this short subject before, but this new scan is much cleaner. Thunderbean did the restoration. They have also re-formatted the five-minute short subject for widescreen. We can debate the appropriateness of that, and the fact that the original titles and credits are completely missing.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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We sometimes feel far removed from the font of interesting web news on film, and thus thank our correspondents for all these good links and the connections that come with them. We were pleased to see this Scott Campbell article from the web page Far Out.  It references  Pulp Fiction. We thought we’d heard enough about that movie to last for the rest of our lives, but this is pretty cute.

The article includes a sentimental Joe Dante connection, which is always a positive. Director Quentin Tarantino has his unique way of being maddeningly opinionated, yet he’s the one guy who can tout his own genius without making us want to slam the door in his face. He’s a lot of things, but not a phony.

The brief article posts a video of the scene in question, with Harvey Keitel, Julia Sweeney and Dick Miller. It’s bright and witty, and the film would have been better with it.

Years ago, I got to witness Miller performing his bit role in Steven Spielberg’s  “1941”. All but a blip of his ‘moment’ was excised for the theatrical cut, but it was reinstated in the restored version, when Bob Gale put back a full half-hour of crazy scenes.

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Note, just after posting: I’m presently reading Charlie Largent’s new review of the 4K SORCERER, and rush to report that he’s really on his game with this one, as he was with Carnal Knowledge. Don’t skip them.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Correspondent ‘Troilus’ sent me this link that shows yet another amusing, quite intriguing use of Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a short video by a specialist whose hobby is making and painting miniatures, and then using them in tabletop war games. They sound a lot like D&D gaming — rolling dice is involved. His handiwork looks great to me.

‘Medieval Wargamer’ talks about the conversion of his miniatures into moving armies that clash in full dimensional action. They still look exactly like his clever miniatures, which I find really charming. But from where does his AI program ‘learn’ to separate, group and move his toy soldiers in such complex ways? They look very much like movie scenes … familiar movie scenes, sometimes.

Can I assume that the AI program must source and sculpt its action from costume pictures, from which it generates its own versions?  The protest is that all those sourced movies are intellectual property being raided without compensation, right?  Or would the AI defense be that all art is copied from existing models, and AI just does it more efficiently?

No doubt about it, Medieval Wargamer’s little scenes are really captivating.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Correspondent Michael McQuarrie has found a good one, a half-hour ‘Century 21 Films’ documentary on the voice artists that provided the personalities for the wooden characters in Gerry and Sylvia Andersons’ English Sci-fi shows starring marionettes —  Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet etc.

The well-produced show encouraged these seldom-seen performers to ‘act up.’ They tend to be very entertaining … and proud to shine on camera.

… the wonderful  June Foray was once stuck waiting with me on a phone line for 20 minutes. Instead of griping, she proceeded to fill the minutes with more character voices, jokes and friendly gab than I ever heard from a celebrity. Ms. Foray insisted on talking ‘normal’ to me as Rocket J. Squirrel — I couldn’t believe my ears but my mind’s eye pictured her as the cartoon character.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Dick Dinman has his newest DVD Classics Corner on the Air show up and ready:

It’s all about the new 4K disc release of  Shane from Kino Lorber. Judging by reader response, the movie still generates a great deal of interest. Dick’s guest is George Stevens Jr., and he says that he thinks this talk is in the Top Ten of all the shows he’s done:

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I also see that Sharon Braun has a newish website up. Sharon was MGM/UA’s digital artist back when DVDs were first introduced, and our department (Home Video video advertising) got to see a lot of her work as it was created.

Although a few other DVD companies were doing interesting things with DVD menu interfaces, Sharon was one of the first to add complicated ‘buffer’ animation, and the first to hide Easter Eggs in her menus. Some companies, especially Disney, got too ambitious with opening montages and animated seques that took forever. Sharon’s semi-abstract animated graphics for the first James Bond DVDs are fairly incredible — very busy, very fast, but always with an eye to function and user clarity.

Ms. Braun’s website has some examples of her work — just still images, but enough to want to sample these again. Times have changed — studios are no longer investing in lavish extras, leaving that field to independent disc boutiques. The same goes for artwork and animation in the menus. The new 4K James Bond disc menus are as plain-wrap as can be, with the same generic, photo paste-up graphic for all six movies.

And Michael McQuarrie, having seen last Saturday’s review of  Fire Maidens from Outer Space, reminds us of the existence of a ripe Second City Television spoof from 1984, based on the ‘Amazon babes in Space’ motif.

It begins as a parody of 2001 and goes sideways from there.

The impersonations are choice. Joe Flaherty and Martin Short look like Simon and Garfunkel, but channel Stooge-like behavior. Eugene Levy does an incredible riff on Ernest Borgnine, gap-tooth and all. The spoof is painfully accurate — “Botchino!”

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson