What a fascinating subject is history of animation films! It brought for me a lot of memories from my childhood.
My first nightmare was from image of witch with the apple from the film “Sleeping Beauty”. I don’t know how called this first home projectors, it was manual moving film, cadres moved by hands and film was without sound, there were subtitles which read parents or older children who study to the school already. Films were placed in the small tins.
I realise how talented first animation films artist were!
Using only black ink and paper and they produced very characters and emotional images and faces!
I remember caricatures and comics. I remember from my “black-and-white” childhood political caricatures in the soviet newspapers which read my father. I didn’t understand anything but always looked on those funny people in the caricatures.
30 October we are going to the trip to Haworth Village and National Film Centre with Student Union. I hope found those first home film projectors there! I remember stereo films cards with charming house and teddy bears there. It was small devise looks like binoculars, inside placed card with films, there are only 5 or 6 cadres on the card and when you look there directing to the day light or lamp, there inside was a beautiful fairy tale! I loved it!
My favourite cartoon artist are Dean Yeagle and his “Mandy girl”
By Jake Friedman Dean Yeagle has been animating and designing for decades, from licensed characters to his own creations. His work can be seen from Bugs Bunny to Playboy magazine, and his sketchbooks, including that of the sexy character dubbed “Mandy,” are a trove of quality draftsmanship. He was also assigned the unique task to revitalize a 65-year-old Disney property in the World War II-era comic book, “Return of the Gremlins,” for Dark Horse Comics. Look for it on the shelves.
Recently I had the chance to talk to Dean about his rise to success, the Gremlins project, and his sexy pin-ups.
Let’s start with your background. What was your first job?
I started working in Philadelephia – that’s where I’m from. It was a tiny company called “Animation Arts Incorporated” and it had some very good people working there. They were able to teach me some stuff that I might not have been able to learn going cold into a place like Disney, being pegged into one job or another. I got to do a little bit of everything.
Then I had to go into the service during Viet Nam; I was in the navy. After that my wife and I moved to New York. For the first seven years I worked at Zander’s Animation Parlour as a designer and animator and eventually a director. Jack Zander was a great animator of the old Tom & Jerry cartoons; he recently celebrated his 99th birthday. Afterwards I opened my own company called “Caged Beagle Productions” with Nancy Beiman and Daryl Cagle. Nancy is a great animator who worked for Disney and is now teaching in Rochester New York. Daryl is editor of the MSNBC editorial cartoon site now. And as of 2006 I’m living in Southern California.
How did you get involved in such a fringe project as reviving “The Gremlins?” It was originally Dark Horse’s idea. Mike Richardson is the company head, and he also works in movies as a producer and director, and it was his idea to reprint the original book that Disney put out in 1943. It was Roald Dahl’s very first book, and Dahl was a flyer for the British air force at the time. The basic premise is that there are these little gremlins who are messing up the British airplanes. People started saying that when anything went wrong, it was the work of the gremlins. After he wrote it, it got to Disney, Disney bought the book, and they were going to do a feature film. In fact, I have storyboards from it that they sent me.
But various things happened, including the war ending, and they never made the movie. Another thing was that Warner Brothers took the gremlin idea and came out with a couple very funny gremlin cartoons by Bob Clampett, and that was another reason why Disney killed the project. The gremlin from the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Falling Hare” looked very much like Disney’s, as a matter of fact.
Tell me about Mandy. Where did she come from?
Mandy is a character I developed in 2002 for an online workship I hosted at bellefree.com. A group of us cartoon pin-up types got together as an offshoot of sketchbook sessions, and that’s what I started on. I originally based her on what the Coppertone girl might look like grown up, in the style of my Playboy cartoons. Now she has a wide audience with both men and women. She doesn’t use guns or karate chops – she’s just herself, a sexy but innocent and, I hope, charming character. I get a lot of fans from my websites, and a good number of projects come up as well…for instance, she’s been licensed as the iconic character for coffee by a company in Russia – they’re actually calling it ‘Café Mandy’, and her picture’s on every package. They have big plans for the brand in Japan, Europe, China, and here in the US.
Herluf Bidstrup, 1912 - 1988, was a cartoonist with both a German and Danish background. His cartoons represent everyday situations, smugness and human weaknesses with the help of satirical comedy. Most of his drawings are completely text free to help make any language barriers easier. (Here's hoping you all enjoy them.)
