SOME UNCLE EDDIE PHOTOS

I'm kinda busy tonight so I'll have to put up Mike's pictures tomorrow. I think you'll find it worth the wait. Meanwhile here's some Uncle Eddie photos taken in the backyard of my first house. John needed some pictures so he could try to sell me to TV as a cartoon show host.

THE REMARKABLE MIKE FONTANELLI

It's about time I paid tribute to a terrific artist and a good friend, Mike Fontanelli. Mike is an awesome character designer, a phenominal writer and gag-man, an ace director, a hilarious caricaturist and a legendary oogler of women. The designs on this page were done for Tiny Toons, which was his first character design gig. In other words he did these drawings when he was raw, almost right out of the starting gate. He's even better (and much thinner) now but I don't have his recent work at hand so these will have to do.
Mike grew up in Brooklyn and went to the School of Visual Arts where he studied with Will Eisner. After SVA Mike got a job in a New York book store while he tried to figure out what to do next. While there he did some free drawings for a small-circulation fan magazine which somehow made its way to Los Angeles where Bruce Timm saw it and showed it to John K. John immediately called him and offered him a job. He even offered to pay his plane fare out to LA. The rest is history. Boy, it pays to get published, even in small venues! You never know who might be watching!

This drawing of Buster Bunny (above) is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. Look how happy and energetic it is! It just oozes charisma and appeal! And take a look at the clean-up line. The thick-and-thin is exquisite! Then there's the bear with human feet below. Now all these years later Mike is a rich, ascoted bachleor living with his cheetah and fine art collection high atop a penthouse in Beverly Hills. Really, Mike is carried around everywhere by an army of naked butlerettes. We still eat pizza together but his tasters have to have the first bite. OK, I'm exagerrating just a bit.

WHY ANIME SUCCEEDS

When I first got into the industry I was really impressed by some of the animatics I saw. I remember thinking, "Gee, you don't need to animate some of this stuff! The story is interesting even without animation! And without animation there'd be more time and money to make the drawings really good!" I remembered how much I liked "Crusader Rabbit" when I was a little kid and that was nothing more than a Leica reel. "Roger Ramjet" and "Astro Boy" confirmed the idea.

Of course the biggest advantage of animatic films like anime isn't the low cost or even the potential for better drawings. The biggest advantage is that having no animation forces the filmmaker to look for other ways to make the film interesting. Even the least imaginative animatic makers are likely to consider drawings with drastic angles and stories with a Sergio Leone sensibility. Animatic producers tend to be more aggressive in their search for new ideas and audience-pleasing techniques. With no animation they have to be! You've gotta hand it to them, the animatic people made an asset out of a liability and generated a whole industry (anime) centered around animated films without much animation.

So how does the rest of the animation industry compete with this? It seems to me that the natural way to compete with innovative still drawings is to create innovative moving drawings. That's what John did with "Naked Beach Frenzy," possibly the funniest cartoon made in the last half century. Funny moving drawings require a new way of writing stories. The stories actually have to be funny and they have to lend themselves to the type of humor that funny artists like to draw. Good plots may be less important than good opportunities for funny drawings. Well, it's a big subject and there's no space to cover it here.

Following the lead of anime, it would be nice if cartoons containg funny movement would be cheaper to make. Sometimes I toy with the idea of making cheap, pencil test cartoon shorts. I don't know how often I've heard studio people say things like, "Well it was a lot funnier in the pencil test" or "You should have seen the pencil test!" The fact is that pencil tests are almost always far, far more funny and gutsy than the finished film they're subordinated to. The only problem comes with trying to color them. How do you put color on lines that are all over the place?

SOME ROCK & ROLL FACES

I wish I could remember the name of the library book I got these pictures from. Maybe it was a history of rock & Roll. Anyway, what do you think of them? I love the picture of the Jitterbug musicians on top. Is that Duke Ellington on the left? No, it couldn't be, he'd be older. The guy on the right is surely one of the happiest people ever captured by photography. I know how he feels. It's a great feeling to get some drastic new threads! Other musicians and vocalists (below) include Louis Jordan, Nathaniel Mayer, Little Richard and...who are those 70s guys?

THOUGHTS ABOUT ANIME

You don't need a crystal ball to see that anime is poised to make a big impact on the American market, even bigger than it's made so far. Somewhere down the line someone will make the breakthrough anime that'll push Disney and Pixar off the map. It's only a matter of time.

Me, I'm not an anime fan. I know there's been some good stuff done in that medium but there's also an awful, awful lot of kitch. I mean big, hulking mountains of it! All the cute girls with gigantic, cute Bambi eyes, cute and oh so precious hairstyles, and cute little outfits with cute little boots... Cute! Cute! Cute! Even the guys are cute! Man, I'm getting a sugar overdose here!
And how do you like anime plots ? "Ganzu, the cute princess of cutania must get the power ring back that was stolen by Power lad and his Power Pals. A fight ensues with Power Lad shooting power beams at the cute girls and their cute, fuzzy little animal friends. Eventually Power Lad and his Power Pals realize the've been manipulated by the evil Ganzuni. Another power beam fight ensues with the cute forces in beautiful outfits joining with the powerful Power Pals (also in cute outfits and hairstyles) against Ganzuni. The good guys win. " Aaaaarggghh!!!!!

BTW, I didn't draw the picture of power Lad and his Powerful Beams of Power above.

GWEETINGTH FINE ART LOVERTH!

Can you guess who did these nudes?

WHAT I'M READING NOW

Here it is, the second volume of Simon Callow's biography of Welles. I've only just begun it so I really shouldn't be writing about it so soon. I just can't help it, there's so many interesting things in it. Please forgive my writing and probable typos. I have to write this fast with no time to edit.
Here's an example (above) of the kind of narrative prose Welles liked to write. I knew I'd seen the style before but I couldn't place it until now: it's from Psalm 23 in the King James Bible. In that Psalm each line is split in two: " The Lord is my shepherd / I shall not want. " It's the only poetry in the English language that might surpass Shakespeare, in fact some say that Shakespeare wrote it. Almost every line is two or three simple thoughts jammed together with a natural pause between each thought...it's a very powerfull type of prose. Very noble, very musical.

Shakespeare used it in the beginning of "Romeo and Juliette:" "Two houses / both alike in dignity /in fair Verona /where we lay our scene (maybe I've quoted wrong, I don't have it infront of me)." That's the way Welles wrote about the little boy and his bull: "The boy's name was Chico / and the bull's name was Bonito." Joe Fante, a heavyweight writer himself, is credited with writing the narration but you know that Welles wrote it. All his narratives sound like that. It's a beautiful way to write.

I've only read a dozen pages or so. When I put it down Callow was relating the story of how Welles rehearsed the actors in "Magnificent Ambersons." He recorded the rehearsel on records then played the best parts back when it was time to film it. Welles thought actors always spoke their lines too slow infront of the camera and he wanted to remind them how good it sounded when they spoke fast in rehearsel. Callow thought it had the unexpected effect of making the scenes feel awkward because the actors couldn't find the natural rythym of the present, infront of the camera.

Welles put a lot of emphasis on the reading that was done in rehearsel. I'm proud of myself because I deduced this before I ever read it, in fact I did a blog entry about it. You can hear it in the way he delivered his lines in " Jane Eyre." The lines sound like they're being read! You might think that would be a liability but it wasn't. It sounded great that way! I read ahead in the Jane Eyre sequence and discovered that he walked on the set and started directing from a podium just like a conducter, even though he was only hired to act.