Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 28, 2007 in Science
As the European space probe Rosetta completes it’s final orbital maneuvers, it has taken some amazing photographs of Mars, showing all sorts of amazing detail like Martian clouds and weather patterns. Shown above is an image image which was acquired on February 24th from a distance of about 240 000 km from the surface of Mars.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 28, 2007 in Animation
This is a new series of commercials for a ringtone service in the UK called Vizzavi, what I like about this series is that 3D animation has a very nice “puppet feeling” to the look of the character designs:
There’s a great photo gallery at An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla covering Wonder Festival 2007, which is the biggest figure and model convention in Japan. The convention is filled with all sorts of fanboy goodies like giant Godzilla models and creepy life sized anime figurines. Seen above are models from the classic anime series Space Cruiser Yamato, shown are the Comet Empire and a Dark Star Nebula warcraft.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 27, 2007 in Animation
“Horn OK Please” is a claymation film that was a collaboration between animators in India and Northern Ireland. The film was produced last year by Flickerpix Animations, and it follows a monotonous day in the life of an Indian taxi driver named Lucky. Lucky’s goal is to earn enough rupees to buy the air-conditioned taxi of his dreams. I love the attention to detail that was put into the set designs for this project:
There’s also some other interesting work on the Flickerpix website worth checking out:
“Futari ha PreCure (Pretty Cure) is a set of fighting magical girl stories featuring a pair of junior high school girls. There are three series, PreCure (2004), Max Heart (2005), and Splash Star (2006). In all of the series, the magical girls have to fight to save earth from evil alien enemies. Most of the components of traditional magical girl anime can be found, such as long transformation sequences, magical items, cute pets, magical phrases, and magical attacks. However this anime has some of the most violent contact fighting scenes among magical girl anime. There’s quite a bit of sports involved too.”
And for your hardcore fanboys the official website for Futari ha PreCure (ふたりはプリキュア) is:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 26, 2007 in Animation
This entertaining music video was created by doing animation on whiteboard. It’s for the elctro music group Minilogue, for their song Hitchiker’s Choice:
“Shiina Ringo (alternately Sheena Ringo and similar spellings) somehow steps around the industry archetypes. In fact, it’s hard to say who Shiina Ringo is. We’ve seen her as a lost teenager going against the grain, a racy nurse with an interest in her female patients, a bride with a smile as bright as the pistol she holds to her head, even a jazz-hungry flapper. With a wink and a flash of skin, Shiina Ringo has proven to be many things, but it always comes down to her incredible music.
There is no way to classify Shiina Ringo’s work other than that it is her own. She flits between and merges together genres in ways never thought possible, so much that she really has a genre all of her own. It doesn’t matter if it’s jazz, rock, or some bizarre combination of the two, she will make it work and you will like it. She experiments with her music and her voice; she whispers, rasps, coos, and screeches her way through playful lyrics and arrangements in a way only Shiina Ringo can.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 25, 2007 in Animation
I love the job that Disney done of turning Pucca into an animated tv show. They managed to stay true to the strong graphic look of Pucca without giving up the comedy and storytelling required to make cartoons fun:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 24, 2007 in Animation
Fans of the “cartoon modern style” will get a kick out of the well designed look of this 1968 episode of the French aimated series “Les Shadoks”:
Les Shadoks features quite a bit of offbeat philosophical humor, roughly translated the first principle of Shadok logic is “Why to make things simple when you can make them complicated? “
According to Wikipedia here’s some interesting bacground info on Les Shadoks:
“Les Shadoks was the invention of the seminal French cartoonist Jacques Rouxel (February 26, 1931 – April 25, 2004) and became a major French TV phenomenon in the 1960s. The Shadoks were bird-like in appearance (in the tradition of cartoon birds they had beaks with teeth), were characterised by ruthlessness and stupidity and inhabited a two dimensional planet.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 23, 2007 in Television
This music filled title sequence is from a 1970 British kids themed show called “The Double Deckers”:
I never heard of this show before, but the cast has every cliched character that you can think of, there’s a smart kid called “Brains”, a drum player called “Sticks”, and of course an sad overweight child whose taunting nickname is “Doughnut”. And of course no show would be complete without a little girl called “Tiger” who has (you guessed it) a pet tiger doll also named “Tiger”.
The plot of the show is that “The Double Deckers” are a group of seven young adults (aged 9 to 16) living in London who hang out and play together in a converted doubledecker bus. The bus serves as a club house for the kids. The token American character is the drum player Sticks, and the lone adult regular was Albert, a street cleaner.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 22, 2007 in Science
In the below article John Glenn gripes about the International Space Station being overlooked. I agree with him, but I think it’s part of a larger issue, which is that NASA on the whole has been shortchanged these last few years. It’s unfair to cut the budget for the program but then keep adding goals like going to Mars. From where I’m sitting both the space station and the Mars project are being shortchanged. You can’t do big government projects like NASA on the cheap, unless you don’t mind the bad press from dead astronauts:
“The country is not getting its money’s worth out of the international space station, John Glenn said Tuesday, the 45th anniversary of the day he became the first American to orbit the Earth.
Diverting money from the orbiting research outpost to President Bush’s goal of sending astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars is preventing some scientific experiments on the space station, Glenn told an audience of about 300 high school students and space enthusiasts at the COSI Columbus science center.
“To not utilize that station the way I think it ought to be utilized is just wrong,” said Glenn, 85, also a former U.S. senator. He said he supports the president’s moon and Mars goals but not at the expense of the space station, which is only two-thirds complete. NASA and its international partners, including Canada, Japan and Russia, hope to finish the space station in 2010, but no decision has been made to extend its operation past 2016.
Glenn, a Democrat who represented Ohio from 1975 to 1999, said the station shouldn’t be abandoned, especially after costing taxpayers billions of dollars. “We will not even begin to realize its potential,” he said.”
Is there nothing else left for Hollywood to ruin? Running in and out of rehab is nothing to be ashamed of in Tinsel Town, but coming up with a new idea for a film must be some sort of unspoken sin. Anyway it looks like the classic science fiction film “The Day the earth Stood Still” is set to be ruined, I mean “reinvisioned” by Fox:
“Apparently Box Office Mojo, the best website for all things box office earnings, has updated their schedule for summer 2008 and included a listing of The Day the Earth Stood Still to open on May 9th, 2008 (one week after Iron Man). The original is a sci-fi classic 1951 movie about an alien and a robot that land on Earth to try and save the world from being destroyed. IMDB doesn’t even have a listing for this remake, but Box Office Mojo claims it’s being produced by Fox, fast-tracked for a spot in 2008′s busy summer.”
Here’s a trailer for the “classic version” of the film:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 21, 2007 in Animation
It’s always amazing to me to discover all sorts of lost gems on YouTube. My latest discovery is an old BBC show called Pinky & Perky which features two singing pig puppets that sound quite a bit like Alvin and the Chipmunks. The show ran from 1957 to the early 1970’s on British television and featured cover versions of many pop songs of the day. And as with any kids show there was a ton of merchandise associated with Pinky & Perky, everything from toys to books to records.
The following clip features host Jimmy Thomson (who also had a few roles in various episodes of the Benny Hill Show):
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 21, 2007 in Japanese TV
This is a cute series of commercials from Japan for a recruiting service which stars Yui Aragaki:
Here’s some background info on Yui Aragaki from Wikipedia:
“Yui Aragaki (新垣結衣 Aragaki Yui, born June 11, 1988) is a Ryukyuan Japanese model, actress and seiyu. Born in Naha, Okinawa, she was nicknamed Gakky in 2001 by Ayako Enomoto. After seeing an audition notice for the junior fashion magazine nicola, Yui applied and won the Grand Prix award for the audition. After that, she became a nicomo (nicola model) and because of her fashion sense and logical personality, gained many fans. In 2004 she put her modeling in nicola on hold to expand her current career into gravure, appearing on variety shows, and acting. In 2005 she officially graduated from the magazine. The same year, she was in the TBS drama Dragon Zakura. This began her entrance into the acting world and she has gone on to appear in other shows since. Even though she has graduated from nicola, she still appears in the magazine occasionally.”
Above: On the left a pin up poster from the “Be Forever Yamato” Roman Album from the 80s, on the right the cover from the “Samurai Champloo” Roman Album from 2006.
I ordered it as Christmas gift for myself, but it only showed up in my mailbox today well over a month after other people had opened their goodies. I freely admit that it was a bit of a guilty pleasure, and despite my being a creative professional whose work does touch upon animation there was in fact no “real reason” that I needed the object in question. But upon opening the box my heart felt inspired again, and I remember why I had gotten into it all.
The little treasure I’m talking about is a Samurai Champloo Roman Album. Now of course most anime fans have heard of Samurai Champloo (although at this point they’re all mostly watching Bleach) but only a small handful of the Japanimation faithful know what a Roman Album is, or why they’re so special.
To start with a “Roman Album” is neither Italian nor a music album. To be honest I have no idea how they got their name, but Roman Albums date back to the 70s in Japan when anime was going through it’s first major boom. Along with this boom came a glut of merchandise for Japanese otaku to buy, everything from model kits of your favorite robot to the first generation of magazines that only covered anime.
It was during this era that the Roman Album was born. To start with a Roman Album is a softcover letter sized paperback book of about 100 pages. Unlike a magazine, a single Roman Album is done on only one specific television series or movie. The first few pages of a Roman Album were always packed with dozens upon dozens of shots of almost every major scene from the anime production being covered.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 19, 2007 in Videogames
Bandai has just announced a new gizmo called Human Player which allows you to create a virtual Tamagotchi of yourself. First, you take a fifty question personality test (called an “Ego-Gram”) which assigns you one of 22 personalities. Now you’re set to have fun with other Human Player owners:
Mmmmm, I wonder what she’s thinking? And here’s a nifty video which gives a nice demo of the product:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 18, 2007 in Science
To oldtime fanboys who grew up with the “Six Million Dollar Man” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” the concept of bionic eyes will seem old school, but in a nice twist-of-technology it looks like the concept is starting to become quite real according to this BBC news article:
“A bionic eye implant that could help restore the sight of millions of blind people could be available to patients within two years. US researchers have been given the go-ahead to implant the prototype device in 50 to 75 patients. The Argus II system uses a spectacle-mounted camera to feed visual information to electrodes in the eye. Patients who tested less-advanced versions of the retinal implant were able to see light, shapes and movement.”
“The premise of the artificial retina project is to take images from a glass-worn camera and convert it into patterns of electrical stimulations that would excite the remaining retinal neurons and when transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve result in restoring useful visual cues. In so doing, the artificial retina would by pass the loss of the photoreceptor function. The critical questions in the development of the artificial retina lie in how best to electrically and mechanically interface the implanted electronics with the remaining retinal neurons (e.g., retinal ganglion cells).”
“Laurie Gordon, Ryan Larkin’s producer, manager and good friend expressed her profound sympathy today at the passing of legendary Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Larkin died peacefully in his sleep, Wednesday, February 14, in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec following a long-term battle with cancer. Larkin was 63.
Most recently, Larkin was working with Gordon on an animation film “Spare Change” about his experience as a panhandler on the Main in Montreal, Quebec; it was going to be a comeback project for Larkin. Gordon will continue to work on “Spare Change” in Ryan’s memory. Details can be found at www.ryanbango.com.”
Here’s a wonderful gem of a film he animated in 1965, titled “Syrinx”:
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 17, 2007 in Animation
With Oscars coming up most of the public attention will go to mega-blockbuster films featuring mega-movie stars, which to me is sort of sad because what the Academy Awards should do is highlight smaller films that are creative and deserve our attention. A good example of this is the overlooked cateogory for animated shorts which is filled with goodies that should be exposed to the film going masses (or even us animation fanboys and fangirls).
“The Danish Poet” is a quirky animated short film worth checking out which is up for an nomination this year. The style of the animation reminds me of children’s book yet the sense of humor is very sophisticated and philosophical. What’s also nice about the film is that in an age of computer graphics, the film instead uses the good old fashion method of 2D cell animation (although they did cheat and do all their coloring on the computer, but you get the idea). Director Torill Kove is up for her 2nd nomination, and what’s also interesting is that the film is a Canada-Norway co-production.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 17, 2007 in Animation
Lemon Jelly is an electronica band from France. This video done for the ‘the Shouty Track’ does a great job of putting together doodled cartoon monsters and music:
