April 7, 2003
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OK, here goes for the second time. This laptop crashed and I lost everything the first time…
Weekend Pics
At Pink’s Hotdogs - an LA institution where there are queues out front 24/7. See all the famous people on the walls? We had to go and see what the fuss was all about. After wolfing down my Spicy Ozzy Osbourne Dog, I say it gets FIVE STARS! Eddie had a Bacon Chilli Cheese Dog and it also got a high rating. Mind you, we were ravenously hungry from not having eaten anything all day.
Today: Astro Boy’s Birthday Party & Postwar Anime Exhibition:
Ricky Garduno & Ellie; Gabe Swarr & (? I can’t remember her name, sorry!); Eddie and Tony Mora
The exhibition consisted of artwork and videoclips from Astro Boy, Gigantor, Kimba, Speed Racer etc. and vendors selling books, figurines, DVDs.
Fred Ladd (producer of the American-language Astro Boy series in the 60′s) gave an opening speech with stories of the collaborative process between the Japanese studio (led by Tezuka) and the American studio on the series. Then they played snippets of the Astro Boy theme song, and everyone sang Happy Birthday.
I think that’s one of the original character designers from Toei Studios on the far left; Fred Ladd is standing behind the cake; Fred Patten (Japanime scholar/writer) is partially hidden behing the man in black. I don’t know who the other people were.
Free Birthday cake, tea and coffee!
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As always, we couldn’t resist spending money. We bought some ‘Spirited Away’ figurines and this Kinnikuman plastic mask below, as modelled by Eddie.
One of the vendors were exhibiting these awesome Tezuka School of Animation books…
Of course I had to buy them but was told they wouldn’t be available until June. Luckily, an hour later in our strolls through Little Tokyo, I found some copies for sale at a bookstore.
It’s always refreshing to read animation instruction books that aren’t written by Disney-style classical animators. (…as much as I still appreciate our copies of Preston Blair & Richard Williams …Well, what else is there?)
All the basic principles are there in Volume 1: walk and run cycles, effects cycles (wind, water, fire, hair, smoke… all that stuff that Japanese animators excel at) and it’s really cute the lessons are presented by Astro Boy characters.
Volume 2 is super cool and includes movement cycles for even fish, birds, insects and baboons! We’ll definitely be going back to buy extra copies for our animation friends in Sydney. The 2 volumes (I wish there were more!) are also available online at www.akadotretail.com
SUPER MILK CHAN!
Figurines from the Giant Robot store:
Eddie and I were introduced to the whimsical & offbeat SuperMilk Chan series a couple of years ago when Rodrigo (Locomotion Channel) sent us a couple of episodes on tape
In every episode, Super Milk receives a call from the President and goes on a mission… which inevitably goes offtrack … Each episode ends with Super Milk and friends singing about wanting to go and eat sushi.
The episodes we watched were in Japanese with Spanish subtitles, but the designs by Hideyuki Tanaka are so cool, it didn’t matter that we only half-understood the dialogue.
website: www.supermilk-chan.com
update: The whole set of figurines!
Comments (3)
Whoa, that was a whole bunch of cool info. What an awesome looking cake, too. What the heck does Astro Boy know about drawing animals? Shouldn’t Kimba be narrating that volume? Lion discrimination, I tell you.
And I have GOT to go to Pink’s next time I go down there!
Yay, Pink’s! Love ‘em hotdogs and burgers! Gary loved their strawberry soda! (^_^) My mom and I would stop by there after we’ve been to the movies! *sigh* Cant wait to go back there now!
Hey Darren, Kimba narrates too! (The “lion” section, of course).