Here's the first batch of photos from our recent trip to Japan. Cheers to Facebook for changing their programming so that those of you who haven't joined the Facebook cult yet can still look at photos that are posted there.

Short explanation of our trip: In 2007, Shaenon and I curated an exhibition for the Cartoon Art Museum called The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. It was very well-received, prompting Studio Ghibli to plan their own much, much, much larger version.

Shaenon and I were hired on as consultants, assisting Mary's nieces with the process of gathering all of the art together and making arrangements for the art to travel to Tokyo back in April.

Earlier this month, we made a return trip to pack up the artwork and bring it back to the U.S. Fortunately for us, they held over the exhibition long enough for us to get a look at it. Even cooler, we got a private look at the exhibition on its final night with staff from Studio Ghibli, the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, Japanese broadcaster NHK, Disney, and the core crew behind Pixar's UP, which is already one of our all-time favorite movies. It was incredibly cool to be able to trade Mary Blair stories with Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Jonas Rivera and Ronnie Del Carmen as we walked through the galleries.

Anyway, please check out the photos. More should be on the way soon.

I've got a new Fresh From the Festivals column up at Animation World Network, and if you missed it, I had a review of Don Hahn's new book, The Alchemy of Animation, up earlier this month.

Coming soon will be some interviews I did as part of the 20th (!) anniversary of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

And as long as I'm plugging things, there are a lot of events coming up at the Cartoon Art Museum over the next couple of weeks. Please check out our LiveJournal for details.

Here's my newest set of reviews for Animation World Network. There's some fun stuff in this month's clips, including the must-see shorts Skhizein and A-Z.

I got quoted again, this time in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Shaenon and I got to spend this past Saturday at Pixar for the Totoro Forest Project Art Auction, and we had a great time--even though we didn't manage to get the winning bid on our favorite piece. a non-profit museum curator earns slightly less annual income than the other folks who were attending the fundraiser, and I couldn't justify cutting lunch, the phone bill and running water from my budget for the next two months to justify dropping $700 on a single piece of art, much as I'd have liked to.

For those of you who missed the event, though, you can look at online versions of the Totoro artwork at the aforementioned Totoro Forest Project website, and if you want to see everything in person, you can visit the Cartoon Art Museum between September 20, 2008 and February 8, 2009 and see just about all of it.

If I've been slow getting back to anyone over the past couple of months, it's partly because of this.

And this.

And this.

And this.

More information on these as they develop--make sure to click on the first link, though. And join the official Totoro Forest Project Facebook Group while you're at it.

Me, I'm gonna take a nap.

Earlier this month, I interviewed El Tigre Co-Creator and Executive Producer Jorge Gutierrez for Animation World Network. You can read the complete interview here. Please check it out, and, as always, if you enjoy what I'm writing, please drop the folks at AWN.com a line and tell them to keep me around.

Thanks!

In all the hubbub this week, I forgot to mention that my March 2008 Fresh From the Festivals column is now online at the Animation World Network.

And as always, if you like what you read, please send a quick email to editor@awn.com. I'm not sure how many of the articles generate feedback, but a positive word or two can't hurt.

I interviewed New Frontier comic creator Darwyn Cooke and super-cool voice director Andrea Romano at WonderCon a few weeks ago, and you can read those along with my mini-reviews of the New Frontier DVD and just-released tie-in comic book, too.

If you aren't into the superhero thing but you're a fan of animation in general, you can skip over Darwyn Cooke and dive right into the Andrea Romano part. She's got a great story about Huckleberry Hound voice actor Daws Butler and has some pretty cool insights into the animation process, too.

I'm popping up all over the place right now. Here's an interview I did with filmmaker Steven-Charles Jaffe about his new documentary Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird. There's a screening of the film at WonderCon tomorrow evening, and I advise everyone to check it out before swinging by the Cartoon Art Museum for our annual WonderCon Friday Fundraiser.

After many, many months of gearing up for it, we're now about one week away from the opening of the Cartoon Art Museum's newest exhibition, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. More than fifty pieces of one of the all-time great Disney artists will be on display, many of which have never been seen by the public.

You can buy the book of the same name here, although what you *really* need to do is book yourself a flight to San Francisco as soon as humanly possible. Our Edward Gorey exhibition runs through January, as does our Lark Pien spotlight, I Am Ten, and you can also check out the work of Hellen Jo in our Small Press Spotlight (along with our permanent collection of classic comic strips, political cartoons, animation and other stuff).

And just to whet your appetites a bit, here are some choice images from the exhibition, starting with a Baker's Chocolate ad:



And some Alice In Wonderland concept art:



More pictures after the cut:

( Read more... )

The good news? I've got a lengthy article up in the new installment of Animation World Network's online magazine detailing this year's convention.

The bad news? Rampant use of the word "geeky" throughout the headline and any part of the article that I didn't write. (Out of curiosity, though, I just found out that a google search for "Andrew Farago" and "cool" produces 8,54o results, while "Andrew Farago" and "geeky" only turns up 157, including the article. Make of that what you will.)

Read on for details...


WonderCon 2007: Bay Area Goes Geeky
Andrew Farago goes geeky at the growing WonderCon and tells us what Hollywood had in store for fans in the San Francisco Bay area:

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=3210&page=1