Sunday, June 20: win rare art by Fred Moore. Or Glen Keane. Or Marc Davis. Or 100 other geniuses of animation.

UPDATED 6/22 For the record: the auction raised over 70,000 to help Pres and his family defray the tremendous costs of his fight with leukemia.



This is a drawing by Fred Moore-probably a study for a presentation painting. It's one of a kind and it's beautiful-and it can be yours.
It'll be auctioned live tomorrow and even if you're many miles away, you can email the auction organizers today and arrange for an absentee bid to be placed for you. It's part of one of the most impressive auctions of great animation art in quite some time, and it's for a good cause.

UPDATED TO ADD: The L.A. Times had a nice article covering the auction here


Good cause? That's an understatement.


Patrick's painting of Pres and his wife Jeannine as Bonnie & Clyde, from Patrick's blog
I've never met Pres Romanillos, but thanks to my friend Patrick Mate I know several things about him, including these: he and his wife Jeannine have an awesome pride of cats, he's an excellent animator, and he's an awful lot of fun to take on road trips to the Comic Con. Also, anyone that Patrick draws with such affection and gusto must be quite a guy.

This is also borne out by the amazing organization of "Pres Aid", the auction tomorrow that Pres' friends and colleagues in animation have put together to help defray the costs of Pres' battle with leukemia.
There are far, far too many pieces for me to feature them all here, but clicking on the link above will take you to the blog set up to display most of them and explain more about the event.

In addition, some additional, choice art that wont be auctioned in the live event on June 20th has been listed on Ebay-I managed to win a beautiful, unsigned Marc Davis giclee of his personal watercolor work. Those listings, which are ongoing, are accessible here.

But back to June 2oth: here's a sampling of the stuff that'll wind up with a happy new home tomorrow:

Carlos Grangel studies for Tim Burton's "The Corpse Bride"; Carlos' original paintings--like Nico Marlet's and many of the other current artists in the auction--is virtually never available for anyone to buy anywhere. This is an extremely rare opportunity to own one. This particular piece was exhibited in recent the MOMA show devoted to Tim Burton's career.


A limited edition print-one of only 22 made-of a personal painting by Marc Davis, signed by Marc and donated to the auction by Alice Davis. Pres and his wife were good friends of the Davis'. I want this painting. Bid against me and make me earn it

This fantastic painting of Messrs Hitchcock and Scorsese by Patrick is going to be in the auction tomorrow. He's one of the very best caricaturists I know, in addition to his visdev and animation work.

Beautiful piece of character design(of Gobber) from Nico Marlet, done for "How To Train Your Dragon". Nico's famous work is more beautiful in person than any scan can show-true of all the scans I have here. You can bid on it tomorrow.

An original pastel by the terrific illustrator-much beloved of animatio artists--the late Earl Oliver Hurst.

THE DETAILS:
Live Auction to benefit Disney and Dreamworks animator Pres Romanillos
Sunday, June 20, at the Animation Guild
1105 N. Hollywood Way (just north of Magnolia)
Burbank, CA 91505. Registration at 1pm, auction to follow at 2 til it's done (about 4pm)

From Kevin Koch's Pres-Aid site: "The building will open at noon, and we anticipate registering people at 1 pm and starting the bidding at 2 pm. We're working with our friend Howard Lowery, the expert on animation auctions, and we're deeply grateful for his participation. Absentee bidding will be available for those who cannot be in Burbank that day, and we anticipate being able to handle phone bidding on a limited basis."

Ricky, Pete, George Booth and UP

sketch of Carl by Pete Docter

Yesterday's New York Times had an interesting article about the character designs in "UP".

Read it here.

Accompanying the text of the original published piece is yet another of those online-only great Times interactive specialties, with Ricky(Nierva) and Pete (Docter) discussing their ideas. Wonderful stuff.

And if you're not familiar with George Booth yet, you should be.

ADDENDUM: Some of you probably know that "UP" had its premiere at Cannes last week. I know virtually nothing about the film. First, because in its early days as with all the projects of that studio no one working on it or around it said anything, and so pretty much everyone not in Emeryville was in the dark.

When we down south do get jots of information--that Brad Bird has taken over direction of "Ratatouille", for instance--all we know is it's something concerning a rat/chef. Dubious as it might seem as a premise, it's usually a safe bet to assume that Bird will pull off whatever he's doing.

The same goes for the people working on "UP". While I've certainly been curious about it, as its release nears I find I don't want any spoilers at all. I really want to be surprised.

So, the film finally opened at Cannes--the first film screened (out of competition), a gala event. It was reported that it received an ovation. Todd McCarthy, longtime primary reviewer for variety and one of my favorite writers on fllm, filed his report. I skimmed the traditional bold-type opening paragraph, reading no further than that as I didn't want to learn anything crucial. Here's a bit of what he wrote:

Tale of an unlikely journey to uncharted geographic and emotional territory by an old codger and a young explorer could easily have been cloying, but instead proves disarming in its deep reserves of narrative imagination and surprise, as well as its poignant thematic balance of dreams deferred and dreams fulfilled.

Mr. McCarthy doesn't toss around that kind of sentiment very lightly.
It sounds lovely, and I wish the crew all the happiness that a good film will bring, that they've earned through their hard work these last 3-plus years.

Shane P. and Shannon T. and Coraline J.

Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle are swell guys: friendly, generous with thoughts and props, and fun. They also draw and design like a bat out of heck.
At top is an example of Shane's work; Shannon's is below; click to enlarge them(and there's much more where they came from-see the links below to their blogs).

Dreamworks has them right now, but several years ago they were working on a stop-motion feature based on an exceptional book by Neil Gaiman, my new favorite author(be sure to read his latest, "The Graveyard Book", which just won the Newbery medal as the outstanding children's book of the year-also keeping in mind that in my opinion Gaiman, like all great authors, doesn't write so much for children as for himself).



I went to see "Coraline" on Sunday. It's a film that both men gave a lot to, along with many other brilliant artists.
I should probably do a separate post just about the film, but for now here's a sampling of some beautiful work Shane is sharing on his own blog, and Shannon's equally inspiring paintings are here. Go see--there's a lot more and it's all simply wonderful.

Lastly, here's a link to what's far and away the best of the several Coraline trailers, on YouTube. Really worth watching, even if you've seen the others.