Progress City, U.S.A.

Well, the big day is here and WALL-E is opening on thousands of screens across the country. There’s little I can say here to meaningfully elaborate on the excitement over the new Pixar feature or to underscore the breathless reviews the film has been getting. Adding to the excitement is the fact that we’ll be getting our first real look at the long in gestation Walt Disney Animation Studios film Bolt (unless you watch it online now). Wrap it all up with a new Pixar animated short, Presto, and we’re good to go.

And if that wasn’t enough, ladies and gentlemen, the fine folks at 2719 Hyperion and Imaginerding are holding an inaugural North Carolina Disney Blog conclave to view the film tomorrow, June 28th, in High Point, N.C. I’ve often been bewildered by the sheer density of Disney bloggers in North Carolina, as we seem to threaten California and Florida in the rankings of per capita number of Disney blogs. Between barbeque, college basketball, and Disney blogging, we’ve got it covered. So it’s only fitting that great minds meet and enjoy a little Pixar excellence in the process.

See you at the theatre…

Seriously. I’m so freaking excited about this.

Although unconfirmed, it’s widely believed that Pixar director Andrew Stanton’s next film after WALL-E will be John Carter of Mars. The science-fiction film, based on the series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, has been alternately rumored to be animated, live-action or a hybrid of both. Yet it is not Hollywood’s first attempt to film Burroughs’ tales of Barsoom - several studios have tried and failed over the decades to get a John Carter project off the ground. The first of these attempts was all the way back in the 1930s, and ironically this iteration of the tale was actually intended as an animated serial.

In 1931 Bob Clampett went to work at the Harman-Ising Studios, where the Disney expatriates were producing shorts for Warner Brothers. Here he worked on the early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, staying with Warners when Harman and Ising left and Leon Schlesinger took over the animation unit. Working with Friz Freleng and Tex Avery, Clampett would eventually become one of Warners’ legendary animators. Around 1936, however, he had an idea for striking out on his own.

Clampett approached Edgar Rice Burroughs about serializing his Mars novels in animated form. Burroughs, although unfamiliar with the animation world, was enthusiastic about the project and gave it his consent. Clampett worked for about a year on development with Burroughs’ son, John Coleman Burroughs. While still working for Warners, Clampett moonlighted on the John Carter project with assistance from animator Chuck Jones and eventually created a pencil test and demo reel.

Sadly, studio politics were just as wrongheaded then as they are now and executive interference eventually led to the demise of the project. MGM, who held the rights to Burroughs’ properties, didn’t understand the serious, science-fiction tone Clampett was trying to achieve. They instead wanted more slapstick, comical films and wanted Burroughs to adapt his more popular Tarzan character for animation. Eventually Clampett tired of the process and returned to Warners where he signed a new contract to direct.

The project never revived; animated shorts remained the domain of the funny animals and slapstick that had dominated them for years. The closest that Hollywood would come to the aesthetic of Clampett’s John Carter would be the Fleischers’ Superman shorts several years later. Clampett’s project, if realized, might have changed the face of science-fiction and animation forever.

This little history lesson is basically so I can show you this footage - the quite awesome demo that Clampett produced in 1936 to demonstrate his concept:

More information is available in this interesting article by Jim Korkis.

…or at least last weekend.

Due to a bit of uncharacteristic good luck, a trip back home last weekend led to a brush with Pixar. I had already decided to drive over to Winston-Salem when my BFF swingin’ Teddi Barra rang me up with the news that Pixar staffer David Park would be a featured speaker at the Reynolda Film Festival. Park was the Art Department Coordinator for Ratatouille and is currently the Animation Department Coordinator for WALL-E. Needless to say, I was in.

After getting up early on Saturday, we met up and headed over to Wake Forest for the festival. While sadly I don’t have any good documentation of the presentation, as it didn’t seem savvy to be snapping tons of pictures in a dark auditorium, I thought that I’d bring it all up here in case you, dear reader, ever have a chance to attend one of these talks. If you have the chance, be sure and go - it’s well worth it.

Park led off with a discussion of Pixar itself - its campus and its culture. His presentation provided us with a brief history of the company’s creation and culminated with an audiovisual tour of its Emoryville, California, campus. Both the technical and artistic halves of the company were discussed, with accompanying pictures and anecdotes from Park’s own experience. Needless to say, Pixar is an amazing place and I will shamelessly solicit tour offers from any of my readers from the pixar.com domain. The tour of Pixar segued into a discussion of their core values which are well known amongst fans - the focus on story which is achieved through a constant, iterative process of collaboration.

To illustrate the process, Park walked us through the production of Ratatouille from its original concept to final rendering. While the actual animation process is not a mystery to any avid fan, it’s still fascinating to watch it play out from an insider’s perspective. Throughout the presentation, Park peppered his speech with little facts and stories from production that gave an insight that was missing in the film’s bare-bones DVD.

All in all, the presentation didn’t contain any earth-shattering revelations, but it was full of great art that I had never seen, and nice slice-of-life peeks into Pixar headquarters. It was highly enjoyable and I would recommend it to anyone, regardless of their animation I.Q. One interesting tidbit: considering Pixar’s history of focusing on a new technological innovation in each new film, my companion Teddi asked Park what breakthroughs the company was introducing in WALL-E. Hedging a bit due to his NDA, Park said that all he could tell us was to watch how the camera moved. So - camera moves! Be prepared. I asked him what Pixar’s specific production contribution would be to its upcoming live-action co-productions (thinking of 1906 and hoping to get him to say something about John Carter of Mars), but Park said that it was too far out to know for sure about those issues.

So there you go, kids - my brush with Pixar. If their traveling roadshow ever comes to your town, be sure and catch it. I’ll now be quitting my job, packing my hobo sack and catching a boxcar to Emoryville. They can only pass me, sitting on the sidewalk outside the front gate, for so many days before someone lets me in, right?

While Disney Feature Animation has been eager to trumpet its new shorts program by occasionally giving us peeks at its upcoming slate, Pixar has been less forthcoming about the projects in its pipeline. With the release of WALL-E growing ever closer, Jerry Beck has given us a glimpse at what will accompany that film to theaters. Presto, directed by Doug Sweetland, is the name of the new short and all I know about it is what can be divined by the still above, which Beck scanned from a flier for the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. What can I say? I’m sold already. The short is Sweetland’s directorial debut; he formerly served at Pixar as a supervising animator. Just one more reason why June 27th can’t come soon enough…