Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Chestnut Tree - Hyun-min Lee

Another fine piece of hand-drawn animation for your edification and inspiration . Story and Animation by Hyun-min Lee. This started life as a student film and was finished up with some support from Jennifer and Bert Klein, and Don Hahn.

A film about a girl revisiting her memories of her childhood spent with her mother. Hand drawn animation set to piano music by Chopin

Inspiration - Fred Moore's dwarf scenes

Pedro Daniel Garcia has kindly posted a reel of most of Fred Moore's animation of the Seven Dwarfs from Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".



Sometimes you will read things about Fred Moore that are written in a slightly condescending tone, like "oh, yeah, poor old Freddy, he was good for his time ... a little rough around the edges,  not sophisticated enough to "keep up" with the better animators at Disney "   etc.    





As though Moore's animation was kind of simple but charming work that doesn't really hold up compared to what came later .
But really now ... look at this reel of animation and tell me if you've seen much contemporary animation that comes anywhere close to the level of work that Fred Moore is doing here ? (this was done in 1936 folks , and is the stuff we're doing today better than this for the most part ? )  How much Disney animation of the later years resonates like this ?   I don't know ... maybe I'm just simple and unsophisticated, but I find that I respond on a gut level to these Fred Moore scenes a lot more than I do to some of the so-called "sophisticated" animation that came later.


Check out Jenny Lerew's blog "The Blackwing Diaries" for some great Fred Moore artwork. 


Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Animator's Demo Reels - Jen Hager

One of the things I like about YouTube is finding great animator's demo reels.  An animator whose work is new to me is Jen Hager

This is her demo reel of hand-drawn animation done as a student at Cal Arts. This is really good stuff ! 

I would say that if you're an animation student and you want to know what level you should be aspiring to this is it.   This is the kind of reel a review board at a studio looks at and says : "Give that person a job !" 






Remember this is student work.   Wow.

Jen Hager is now working at Disney Animation Studios.