A seventh grade student, BridgeAnne d’Avignon, and her 80 year old grandfather traced President Obama’s ancestry back to a common relative with most of the other presidents. They’re all related to the former King of England from 1199 to 1216, John “Lackland” Plantagenet.
You may remember John “Lackland” Plantagenet, or John of England from the characterization in Disney’s Robin Hood.
Prince John and Sir Hiss as scanned from page 166 of The Illusion of Life Disney Animation by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
Yes, THAT Prince John. Aha.
According to BridgeAnne, the only former US president that does not share John “Lackland” Plantagenet as an ancestor is Martin Van Buren.
Disney has released the trailer for its newest full length feature animation, The Princess and the Frog. It will be the animation studio’s 49th animated feature and the first traditional animation feature since Home on the Range — my least favorite Disney animation of all time. I’m hoping things have improved…
The new movie will add to Disney’s profitable princess franchise, and, more importantly, with directors John Musker and Ron Clements at the helm, I suspect it will have the kind craftsmanship and story that will make it worthy to become part of the Disney Classics canon.
Ron and John’s directing credits include: The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, and Treasure Planet. These guys have worked with the masters and, of course, are masters in their own right.
Back in the early days of Disney animation, it was not uncommon for animators to cycle animation forward and then backward, repeat action more than once, or use a cross-over technique in which two or more characters do the same action.
Sometimes an action could be repeated just as it was in a second scene, but more often a new beginning or a different ending were called for. In these cases, the animator could repeat part of the action by borrowing drawings from the earlier scene. In other cases, there would be an action that could be repeated intact in the same scenes—a character climbing a slippery pole, or sliding down an incline, or being knocked down by a mechanical device.
I remember watching the Disney classics as a kid and thinking some of these scenes are very similar to other Disney movies. I never realized that this type of repeated action was so prominent between films until seeing this YouTube compilation:
Having said that, I don’t considering this to be as big of a cheat as to deserve a flippant “fail” tag so indiscriminately handed out by the pharisees of the net.
The copying done here, is not tracing, but transferring poses from one character to another, perhaps even from Disney’s large collection of reference footage. As anyone that’s done any animation knows, putting any animation onto a new character is still a very difficult task regardless of where you get the poses.
Since the introduction of open lectures by progressive thinking educational institutions like M.I.T., Stanford, Duke, Yale, and others, many exceptional presentations have bubbled to the top and should be watched.
Here are five must see open course video lectures as recommended by Virginia Heffernan of the NYTimes.
I listened to about a quarter of all the lectures from this course—most of which were over my head, but the first and second (mp3) classes are fascinating and make me wish I studied biology at school.
Captain Jack Sparrow Uploaded by ankneyd on 27 Apr 07, 8.19PM PDT. CC Some rights reserved.
Disney wanted us to tone Jack down, so they put us through an acting class to discover reasons why Jack walks and talks the way he does. Obviously he is based on Keith Richards, who’s always messed up, which is why they came up with the class. “Don’t be flirtatious,” they told us. “See women as trouble.” And they said as far as alcohol goes, don’t even mention drinking. But the Pirates of the Caribbean song is all about drinking, and they’re drinking all along the ride. So I eventually broke that rule, because it would have taken me out of character. When parents took pictures, I’d say, “Everyone say ‘rum,’” and the parents loved it. The kids would just ask, “What’s rum?”
Rumours abound that Disney is buying up property to build another theme park next to Disneyland. It seems more likely the company just wants to build more hotels, but if they did build another park… I would love it!
The [Disney] company has slowly but steadily amassed 460 acres in Anaheim, including a prime chunk of strawberry fields down Harbor Boulevard from Disneyland that is the designated site of a third park.
And someone is approaching the field’s neighboring landowners, trying to buy up land. Corona del Mar resident Benjamin Kraut, 81, said Disney offered to buy his 5 acres several years ago. Then, six months ago, a suitor Kraut declined to name offered him $14.5 million for the land where he co-owns a 90-unit apartment complex. He said it is not for sale.
Disney hasn’t unveiled plans for the Disney Resort—those typically come amid fanfare and orchestration—but top executives have hinted at expanding existing markets and increasing its time-share offerings.
It’s fun to think about a new Disney theme park, but I think it’s safe to say that even if considerations for a new park are being thrown around, it will still be a good 25 years before anything comes to fruition. Disney’s California Adventure still needs more E-ticket attractions for one thing, and certainly in Disneyland itself they’ll want to see how the revamping of the old Submarine Voyage into a Finding Nemo attraction performs.
My brother and I started working on it as a summer project, but since he was only here for one afternoon, we didn’t get very far. Lately he’s been back visiting and it got me back working on it again. Today, it’s finally finished and it looks great!
It has only been a short time since Disney’s all stock buy-out of Pixar and already some big changes are under way. The Los Angeles Times reports that with this deal comes an end to quarrel over Pixar sequels.
In remarks made during a Tuesday conference call with analysts, Iger and Pixar Chief Executive Steve Jobs implied what other sources confirmed Wednesday: that Disney’s 150-plus-person Pixar sequels unit which is housed in a Glendale warehouse and is already at work on “Toy Story 3″ will soon be no more.
“We feel very strongly that if the sequels are going to be made, we want the people who were involved in the original films involved in the sequels,” Jobs said.
Iger sounded the same note.
“It was really important to me that the people who made the films originally, who had the vision, who knew the characters and the essence of these films get a shot at making any films that were derivative,” the Disney chief said.
“While Disney might have been able to make them, Pixar making them is just so much different,” Iger added. “Not to take away from the talent of other people who might have been picked to make them.”
The announcement isn’t a complete surprise since Disney making Pixar sequels (or not making them) was a major factor during negotiations. Still it’s nice to see that Disney will no longer be destroying classics as they have done in the past. And because Pixar is taking over for Walt Disney Feature Animation, I guess this also means no more Dumbo 2? (Yes, they really were thinking about it.)
I’ve been hearing rumours about Disney buying Pixar in an all-stock deal for a couple of days. Here is the lowdown:
The Telegraph article was the first one that I heard of announcing the deal.
Today the New York Times reports that Disney may announce their acquisition of Pixar as early as tomorrow. According to the Times, “the deal would combine Pixar with Disney’s animation unit and give Mr. Jobs a seat on Disney’s board.”
Harry Mccracken has a collection of interesting questions about the Disney-Pixar merger on his blog posting, “Disney+Pixar=?“.
Update: Over at Cartoon Brew they have a copy of an email from Walt Disney Feature Animation President David Stainton as he prepares to hand over the position to John Lasseter. Especially interesting is the comment from an anonymous Disney director.
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