Pretty, Dead. 2010. USA. Directed by Jeff Scher. Digital cinema. Purchase from the artist
In Pretty, Dead, Jeff Scher plays with all the stuff film noir dreams are made of: the hardboiled private eye and the femme fatale; the revolver, the slouched hat, the alley brawl, and the twisted corpse; sweat, paranoia, fatalism, destiny. All this is to be found among the nearly 4,000 collages and paintings in watercolor and gouache that compose the work.
Chicken Run. 2000. USA. Directed by Nick Park, Peter Lord. Courtesy of Dreamworks/Photofest
Sometimes a movie makes you laugh out loud even if you’re in room by yourself. You can’t contain your laughter and don’t care who might or might not hear. This is exactly the experience I had recently watching Chicken Run (2000)
The Tender Game. 1958. USA. Directed by John Hubley
These notes accompany a program of independent animated films screening on December 26, 27, and 28 in Theater 3.
The departure of many animation artists from Disney as a result of labor troubles and a desire for freer expression led to a diffusion of talent and styles in the animation field.
These notes accompany screenings of Karel Zeman’s The Fabulous World of Jules Verne on December 5, 6, and 7 in Theater 3.
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. 1958. Czechoslovakia. Written and directed by Karel Zeman
Our series is dedicated this month to an all-too-brief look at developments in the field of animation in the 1940s and 1950s.
Pinocchio. 1940. USA. Produced by Walt Disney
Still image from Leonardo. Directed by Jim Capobianco. 2010
People often ask me, “How do you discover new films for acquisition for the MoMA collection?” This is a good question that mines the basics of curatorial work, but one that is also impossible to answer in a concise manner. Our collection is growing all the time, and each work has its own unique origin story. Here’s one of them.
These notes accompany the Disney, Iwerks, and Fleischer in the 1930s program on February 9, 10, and 11 in Theater 3.
Last June we presented a brief survey of early animation in both America and Europe. On the continent, with the emergence of figures like Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger in Germany and (with the coming of sound) Len Lye in Britain, abstraction became the predominant form. Lotte Reiniger continued her silhouettes, eventually landing also in Britain. Ladislas Starevitch spent the first decade of the sound era working on the puppet feature Le Roman de Renard in France.
Gertie the Dinosaur. 1914. USA. Directed by Winsor McCay. Preserved with funding from Celeste Bartos
These notes accompany the Early Animation program, June 2, 3, and 4 in Theater 2.
The art of film animation developed out of a long tradition of newspaper and magazine cartoonists both in Europe and the United States. The Frenchman, Emile Cohl (1857–1938), and the American, Winsor McCay (1871–1934), were politically tinged newspapermen who took advantage of the newly-invented concept of stop-motion photography, shooting a slightly varied drawing on each successive film frame. Although their work appears primitive beside Pixar technology, there must have been a sense of wonder and awe in early audiences who saw drawn figures come to a kind of life on the screen.
To help promote MoMA’s Tim Burton retrospective, we asked Burton himself to animate the MoMA logo for a thirty-second video that would be used to promote the exhibition on television, at the Museum, and online. Tim quickly came up with a concept utilizing stop-motion animation, and he asked Allison Abbate, his producer on Corpse Bride (2005) and the upcoming full-length version of Frankenweenie, if she could help pull things together.
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