Due to a whole set of unforeseen circumstances, I didn’t post Student Posts of the Week for the week of the fifteenth, so I’m making up for that by hitting two weeks at once.
As always, I’m not able to highlight all the blog posts I felt were particularly good or interesting– there’s just far too many of them. What you have here, then, is a selection from two weeks’ worth of solid student work… With extremely brief commentary from me.
Kristina Wade gives us a very nice introduction to WWII propaganda cartoons– Education for Death and Der Fuerher’s Face are two classics that no student of 20th century history should miss, and it was especially instructive to compare them to the Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon she included.
Andrew Steward presents us with a fascinating peek at what could well be the first crossover of animated characters from (very) different continuities, with a cartoon that combines two of the Fleisher Brothers’ most popular properties– Superman and Popeye. An unlikely but entertaining pairing, even if it’s not one of the best Fleisher Popeye cartoons out there.
Justin Pangilinan blogs about a topic that touches on concepts of international intellectual property, fair use, digital “piracy,” and fandom– some of my favorite topics– in his discussion of fan-subtitled (“fansubbed”) anime.
Elliot Meek discusses The Snowman as an example of a longer-form silent cartoon… I hadn’t seen this cartoon since I was a kid, and I’d forgotten how much I loved the art when I was little. It’s a little treacly now, but it holds up as an interesting cartoon. Definitely not as good an example of long-form silent animation as the first forty five minutes of Wall-E, but at the same time, this one ends before you get the ridiculous weird fat humans in hoverchairs and the HAL-9000 rip-off baddie.
Samitra Denardo gives us an excellent introduction to John Sutherland’s industrial animations, including Rhapsody of Steel, which is another can’t-miss piece of animation…definitely worth checking out.
James Benjamin Davis blogged about the recent feature 9 that touches on something that I wish more students would explore in their blogs– the assumption that just because a film is animated, it’s aimed at an audience of children. Seems to have started up a bit of a discussion, too.
Finally, two really fascinating posts about Pixar: Scott Bell made me think about the way Pixar makes movies by pointing out something I’d never really thought about: Pixar movies are almost all “about” one animation problem– Monsters, Inc. is essentially a movie about hair, for example. Jeannie Hilleary discusses the Easter Eggs that Pixar animators have left in their movies. Pixar plans their projects so far in advance that you can actually spot Wall-E in Toy Story.
