TIMEasia.com: Asian Heroes : The Cuddliest Hero in Asia!
Doraemon comes with a personality and a history. He weighs 129.3 kg, his height is 129.3 cm and his birthday is Sept. 3, 2112. (He’s a VIRGO like Eddie.)
At The Monster Ball
Check out Basic Hip Digital Oddio for some kooky monster tunes! (The first one on the list is pretty good.)
Link: Gallery of Mascots!
¡Mucha Lucha! newsflash
From the Animation Insider forums: The latest Kids WB press release reveals their Fall 2003-2004 schedule. ¡Mucha Lucha! will be back on air at 11.30am.
More animated Koalas…
The BBC (UK) has just successfully sold an animated series about “Koalas in the outback” to Australia’s ABC.
The Koala Brothers follows the adventures of Frank and Buster, two koalas on a mission to help others in need in the Australian outback.
Link: Animation Magazine news item.
Do we really need MORE shows about koalas in this country? We don’t even want to imagine what the accents would sound like …
Cold War Animation
An interesting article – how the CIA funded production of Halas and Batchelor’s Animal Farm. (From Animation World Magazine).
A must-see animated movie is Juan Padron’s Vampiros en La Habana (Vampires in Havana) from Cuba. I first caught this on SBS many years ago and loved it. It has since been rereleased on VHS and DVD. Hilarious story with a socialist subtext and great music! An obscure and interesting fact: Juan Padron’s mentor in animation was Harry Reade, an Australian who migrated to Cuba in the late 50′s to join the revolution, who more or less pioneered Cuban animation.
Looks like there’s going to be a Vampiros en La Habana 2 (webpage is in Spanish) And we finally have Juan Padron’s email address. Cool.
Yoram Gross Receives an Award!
Let’s just say we do our best to be “positive” and supportive of our local animation industry on this blog (there is enough negativity and jadedness around as it is), but when we saw this news item, everyone’s first reaction was: WHAAAATT???!!!
Kim Dalton, head of the AFC, is presenting Gross with the ASDA animation award for “Excellence over a body of work.” ASDA president Donald Crombie comments, “In honoring Mr. Gross with an ASDA, the Directors’ organization is recognizing not only his excellence over a body of work, but that he has built a major animation business that has made landmark Australian animated films and provided inspiration and employment to younger animators.” (Link: Animation Magazine news item)
There is no doubt that Yoram Gross has established the biggest animation studio in Australia, offered employment to lots of aspiring animation artists (most of us have worked there at some point), and for producing far more TV series than any other studio in this country. But we have yet to meet any animator – young or old, who has been genuinely “inspired” by the Yoram Gross product.
For Yoram it has always been about getting the job done as cheaply as possible (and this was never a secret) – the result: mediocre characters, stories and humour.
And we thought ASDA (Australian Screen Directors’ Association) were a lot more discerning and could tell the difference between “creative excellence” and “business excellence”.
Flash to DVD?
I was searching for tips on the process to get Flash-based movies onto DVD/VCD, and came across this thread – Flash Kit Community Forums: Flash Cartoons to VHS – a few years old, but worth bookmarking.
Lots of FAQs at www.vcdhelp.com (though nothing related specifically to Flash) and this program sounds interesting:
You’ll spend less time trying to understand file formats and more time having fun making great-looking DVDs. When you capture video from a digital or analog camcorder, DVD MovieFactory 2 will automatically convert any video file to the proper DVD format. Has anyone used this?
And so the research continues… Tips and suggestions welcome!
We didn’t go to Tropfest on Sunday but have just learnt that Troy Planet received the Best Actor Award this year. Good on him! Troy Planet is the voice actor extraordinaire who has given life to most of our (male) animated characters: Walt Waxline, The Fuzz, HandJob, Stench, Beloved Team Leader, Laika.
Tiki Update
A big YAY! from Eddie who has just finished doing all the sound effects for Lava Palaver, our Super Mahi Tiki pilot. Next step is outputting the Flash movie to video.
For those who don’t know – this is a self-funded (after-hours) pilot episode we have been working on over the past year. To all the people who keep asking us WHEN the Super Mahi Tiki pilot will be ready, we can tell you now that we’re not far off.
Some ideas we tossed around this weekend:
TIKI CULTURE links:
Tiki Central – their discussion forum is a lively place and makes one realize how BIG this tiki culture actually is. Now why oh why don’t we have any tiki events or even tiki bars in Sydney? We’re in Oceania, after all.
Munktiki.com is the website with the coolest (and most expensive) tiki mugs. Melbourne’s outre gallery stock some munktiki mugs, but the ones I really want are these
… Moai mugs with astroturf coasters!
Welcome to Australia
Some hilarious writings from a witty Melbourne blogger who goes by the name of LadyMissTree. (written for “‘Merkins”, btw)
A Beginner’s Guide to Australia – Part 1 and Part 2
Gatchaman/G-Force/BOTP
Got around to watching our DVD booty. The verdict on Kinnikuman 2nd Generations: pretty generic anime. No desire to see Episode 2. And the main character (kinniku mantarou?) was one of the most annoying characters in the history of animation. - eddie.
I can see though, why kids would enjoy this. It’s silly and has lots of fighting. The animation isn’t bad. - lili
Gatchaman: superslick and action-oriented remake, but we both missed the hokey-ness of the original. The female character (Princess) looked like she’d had one major boob job, and the music sucked fourteen different kinds of ass. - eddie
So many versions were made of this series. So many character name changes. I remembered it as G-Force (and it was a fave when I was a kid) I wanted to be Princess and had a crush on Mark. OK, I was young. Eddie watched it as Battle of The Planets, and remembers the ‘R2D2′ character used to bug him. (“it still does” - eddie)
Link: Gatchaman/G-Force/BOTP website
Images are from the website of Tatsunoko Productions. They designed Space Ace, Speed Racer and Guzura/Gazula.
Listen: The Gazula theme song! (mp3 format, 281KB)
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