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      Reclaiming Place in Animation History for Bessie Mae Kelley

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      The pioneers of hand-drawn animation were all men — or at least that is what historians (men, almost exclusively) have long told us.Winsor McCay made the influential short “Gertie the Dinosaur” in 1914. Paul Terry (Farmer Al Falfa), Max and Dave Fleischer (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop) and Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) each made well-documented early contributions. Walt Disney hired a team that became mythologized as the Nine Old Men.Earlier this year, however, the animation scholar Mindy Johnson came across an illustration — an old class photo, of a sort, depicting the usual male animators from the early 1920s. In a corner was an unidentified woman with dark hair. Who was she? The owner of the image, another animation historian, “presumed she was a cleaning lady or possibly a secretary,” Johnson said.“I said to him, ‘Did it ever cross your mind that she might also be an animator?’” Johnson recalled. “And he said, ‘No. Not at all.’”But Johnson wondered if it could be Bessie Mae Kelley, whose name she had discovered years earlier in an obscure article about vaudevillians who became animators.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.As part of an investigation that found Johnson cold-calling people in Minnesota, digging through archives at the University of Iowa and salvaging corroded cans of nitrate film from a San Diego garage, Johnson confirmed her hunch. The woman was Kelley, and she animated and directed alongside many of the men who would later become titans of the art form. According to Johnson’s research, Kelley started her career in 1917 and began to direct and animate shorts that now rank as the earliest-known hand-drawn animated films by a woman.So much for that cleaning lady theory.“History is recorded, preserved, written about and archived from a male perspective, and so nobody had really examined the level of what women did — their contribution was often just passed off as a single sentence, if at all,” Johnson said. “Finally, we have proof that women have been helming animation from the very beginning.”Bessie Mae Kelley directed an animated short with characters from the comic strip “Gasoline Alley.”Manitou ProductionsPreviously, historians had considered Tissa David to be the earliest example of a woman who directed her own hand-drawn work. She was credited on Jean Image’s “Bonjour Paris” in 1953. (The earliest surviving animated film directed and animated by a woman would be Lotte Reiniger’s “The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart” from 1919. But Reiniger worked in silhouette stop-motion animation, which is very different from the hand-drawn variety.)Johnson will present her findings on Monday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The evening event will include the first public screening of two restored, previously unknown short films by Kelley. One is called “Flower Fairies” and was completed in 1921, Johnson said. It involves composite animation (live footage with hand-drawn animation on top). Sweet-natured, human-looking creatures with wings awaken flowers and dance among them. Kelley completed “Flower Fairies” through the Brinner Film Company, a small Chicago studio that became known for newsreels.Mindy Johnson spent five years searching for evidence that a woman animated and directed alongside many of the men who became titans of the art form.via Mindy Johnson“Her forms are glorious, especially when you compare it to something like Walt Disney’s ‘Goddess of Spring,’ which was about 15 years later,” Johnson said. She was referring to a Silly Symphonies short that Disney based on the Greek myth of Persephone. “Goddess of Spring” is viewed as a critical steppingstone for Disney because it was used to develop techniques for the rendering of human forms, with the groundbreaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) as a result.Kelley’s second film had a Christmas theme and was made in 1922. It includes stop-motion animation and finds a girl reading a book beside a crackling fire, a stocking dangling from the mantel. Santa climbs out of the book and sets about his duties.“Mindy has made a significant breakthrough, filling in an important gap in our understanding about the beginnings of this industry and art form,” said Bernardo Rondeau, the Academy Museum’s senior director of film programs. Johnson’s presentation at the museum is part of a series of screenings and talks dedicated to newly preserved and restored films from the Academy Film Archive.The stash of materials that Johnson located in San Diego — in the possession of Kelley’s great-nephew — also included original rice paper drawings used in the creation of the short films; copper prints; a journal and scrapbooks; and photos with notations by Kelley. One of the cans of film included a badly damaged animated short that Kelley directed with characters from “Gasoline Alley,” the comic strip that debuted in 1918.A drawing from “Colonel Heeza Liar,” an early syndicated animation cartoon series that Kelley worked on.Bray Studios, via Manitou ProductionsJohnson also discovered that Kelley helped design and animate a mouse couple from Paul Terry’s influential “Aesop’s Fables” series (1921 to 1933). Johnson noted that Walt Disney spoke about being inspired by the series. (“My ambition was to make cartoons as good as ‘Aesop’s Fables.’”)Johnson, who teaches animation history at California Institute of the Arts and Drexel University, is known for her 2017 book “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation,” a 384-page examination of unsung female artists and writers in the early days of Walt Disney Studios. She is now working on a book and documentary about Kelley — animation’s version, perhaps, of the 2013 film “Finding Vivian Maier,” about a nanny whose previously unknown cache of photographs earned her posthumous recognition as an accomplished street photographer.“I want to help Bess reclaim her legacy,” Johnson said.“It matters, in part because the animation field is still so dominated by men,” she added. “I’ve seen the posture of my female students change when I have told them about Bess. They’re like, yes, I have a place at this table. I have a place at the head of this table.” More

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      ‘Ainbo’ Review: Saved by a Princess

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      The eponymous young huntress of this animated feature forges a plan to protect her village in the Amazon rainforest.While “Ainbo” follows the royal family of Candamo, who lives in an Amazon rainforest village threatened by mining encroachment, it is the eponymous best friend of the princess who forges a plan to save them.Ainbo (Lola Raie), a young huntress with her head in the clouds, nearly misses the coronation ceremony of her best friend, Zumi (Naomi Serrano), as princess of Candamo. Ainbo is busy hiking deep into the forest and on her way back to the ceremony meets a playful pair of unlikely “spirit guides,” Dillo (Dino Andrade), a comical armadillo and Vaca (Joe Hernandez), a sheepish tapir. Her late mother’s spirit has sent them to aid Ainbo in becoming the seasoned hunter she needs to be in order to save her people from the greed of DeWitt, a gold mining speculator masquerading as a botanist.Directed by Jose Zelada and Richard Claus, this animated feature is at its best when it fills out the world of Candamo and its people with meticulous detail and lush color. The visual rendering of spiritual myths and gods give the film its primary bursts of energy. The main villain of “Ainbo,” for instance, takes inspiration from the Yacuruna archetype, the shape-shifting water-dwelling god (similar to Amphibian Man in Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water”).But the vivid patterns of body paint and intricate costumes of Candamo’s royals, warriors and hunters have to contend with a generic plot that turns its complex subject matter and distinct characters into a predictable naptime preamble. The story dawdles through its first and second acts, but in its final third does find a more deliberate pace. One wishes it had been there from the start.AinboNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Jules Bass, Co-Producer of TV Holiday Staples, Is Dead at 87

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      The animation company he ran with Arthur Rankin Jr. gave the world “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and much more.Jules Bass, who created an animation empire with his business partner, Arthur Rankin Jr., that produced perennial Christmastime television favorites like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman,” died on Tuesday in Rye, N.Y. He was 87.His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Jennifer Ruff, whose mother was Mr. Bass’s first wife.The Rankin/Bass studio was a major force in animated programming, mostly on television, from the early 1960s to the late ’80s. Some of its TV shows and movies used traditional hand-drawn cel animation, but it carved out a separate specialty in the stop-motion puppet animation familiar to viewers since “Gumby” in the 1950s.Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion specials included “Rudolph” (1964), featuring the voice of the folk singer Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman;“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1970), with Fred Astaire as the narrator and Mickey Rooney as the voice of Kris Kringle; and “Jack Frost” (1979), with Robert Morse voicing the title role.“Frosty” (1969), narrated by Jimmy Durante, used traditional animation.To create the stop-motion effect, animators in Japan painstakingly shot thousands of pictures of the tiniest movements and gestures of inches-tall puppets. When run at 24 frames a second, the images generated a whimsical sort of herky-jerky animation that became the Rankin/Bass signature.“When I saw their cartoons, they left a great impression on me because they had dimensionality versus drawn animation,” said Tom Gasek, a professor in the school of film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology who was inspired by Rankin/Bass’s work to become a stop-motion animator. “They were not high quality by any means, but they were charming and their designs were very smart.”Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin were often credited as the directors of their work and offered input on scripts and storyboards. But they played different roles at the company, said Rick Goldschmidt, the studio’s official historian.Mr. Bass composed much of the music. He hired and worked closely with the musical supervisor, Maury Laws, and ran the company’s business in Manhattan while Mr. Rankin was in Japan supervising the animation.“Where Jules is really the star of Rankin/Bass is as a songwriter and his partnership with Maury,” Mr. Goldschmidt said in a phone interview.Mr. Rankin, who was the studio’s chief executive, also sold the shows to TV networks and made sure they were delivered on time.“After a while, we were never seen together — I’d be doing production in Tokyo and he’d be recording a soundtrack in New York,” Mr. Rankin said in an interview in 2003 with the Museum of Television and Radio, now the Paley Center for Media. “If we were together, one of us wasn’t necessary.”Mr. Bass was rarely quoted publicly, and little is known about his private life. But the two partners spoke during a joint interview with The New York Times in 1982 when their animated theatrical feature, “The Last Unicorn,” was released.When they were asked who did most of the directing — the movie credits both of them — they initially said they did it together.“Anything he can do, I can do better,” Mr. Rankin said.Mr. Bass countered: “He never worked a day on the film. I did everything.”Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the screenplay for “The Last Unicorn” and the novel it was based on, recalled in a phone interview that his dealings with Mr. Bass “were very professional.” But, he added, “he was very private, and I never had a true sense of what was going on deepest in his head.”He added, “I’m grateful that the film came out pretty much as I wrote it.”Arthur Rankin Jr., left, and Mr. Bass in 1965. Both men were credited as producers and directors of their TV specials, but Mr. Bass was more involved with the music and Mr. Rankin with the animation.Miser Bros. Press/Rick Goldschmidt ArchivesJulius Bass was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1935. His father, Max, was a wholesale beer salesman, and his mother, Bernice (Palat) Bass, was a homemaker.He attended New York University, where he studied marketing from 1952 to 1954, but he did not graduate. He was hired by Gardner Advertising in Manhattan, where he met Mr. Rankin, who was making TV commercials under the banner of his company, Videocraft International.Mr. Bass joined Videocraft in the mid-1950s, and the two men produced commercials, occasionally using animation, for agencies that represented clients including General Electric and the A.&P. supermarket chain. They wearied of commercial production and shifted to animation in 1960 with a TV series, “The New Adventures of Pinocchio,” which used the stop-motion technique Mr. Bass had discovered in Japan.The company eventually changed its name to Rankin/Bass, and its work toggled between stop-motion and traditional cel animation.Although Rankin/Bass was best known for its Christmas programs, it also made TV movies like “The Ballad of Smokey the Bear” (1966), which was narrated by James Cagney,; “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971); and “The Hobbit” (1977), which earned a Peabody Award. They also produced animated TV series like “King Kong” (1966), “The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show” (1970), the “Jackson 5ive” (1971),“TigerSharks” (1985) and “Thundercats” (1987).Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin ended their partnership in the late 1980s after their company was acquired by Lorimar-Telepictures, which was subsequently bought by Warner Communications, which is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Mr. Rankin died in 2014.Mr. Bass later wrote three children’s books. “Herb the Vegetarian Dragon” and “Cooking With Herb the Vegetarian Dragon,” illustrated by Debbie Harter, were both published in 1999. “The Mythomaniacs” (2013), with illustrations by Lawrence Christmas, is about a teenage magician who sends a group of readers of his father’s fairy tales into the books as characters.He also wrote an adult novel, “Headhunters” (2001), about four women from New Jersey who go to Monte Carlo and pretend to be among the world’s wealthiest women. It was adapted into a 2011 film, “Monte Carlo,” starring Selena Gomez.Mr. Bass leaves no immediate survivors. His daughter, Jean Nicole Bass, died this year. His marriages to Renee Fisherman and Sylvia Bass ended in divorce.The power of two of Rankin/Bass’s best-known productions has reverberated for decades since they were released: Both “Rudolph” and “Frosty” remain highly rated cornerstones of CBS’s pre-Christmas programming.In 2014, CBS promoted “Rudolph” on its 50th anniversary with ads that used stop motion to show the renowned reindeer and Sam the Snowman walking around the network’s backlot, meeting the stars of some of its other shows, including Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory” and Michael Weatherly of “NCIS.”“They’re the fabric of our Christmas hearth, the wood in the Christmas fire,” George Schweitzer, CBS’s former president of marketing, said in a phone interview. “You knew Christmas was coming when Rudolph and Frosty showed up on CBS.” More

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      Review: ‘Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero’ Is Deluxe Fan Service

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      In the latest “Dragon Ball” outing, directed by Tetsuro Kodama and written by the series creator, Akira Toriyama, the menacing villain is a pair of state-of-the-art androids.Between the original “Dragon Ball” and its sequel series, “Dragon Ball Z,” “Dragon Ball GT” and “Dragon Ball Super,” the popular anime franchise encompasses well over 600 episodes and two dozen theatrical features, but the stories reliably follow a simple arc: Some menacing villain appears, threatens the planet’s takeover or destruction, and fights our irrepressible heroes, including Goku (voiced by Sean Schemmel in the English dub), Vegeta (Christopher Sabat) and Gohan (Kyle Hebert).In “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero,” the latest “Dragon Ball” outing, directed by Tetsuro Kodama and written by the series creator, Akira Toriyama, the menacing villains are state-of-the-art androids, Gamma 1 (voiced by Aleks Le) and Gamma 2 (voiced by Zeno Robinson), who have been built by an evil conglomerate called the Red Ribbon Army with the express purpose of overcoming our heroes. Gohan and the Namekian warrior Piccolo (also Sabat), upgraded to top billing, are responsible for the Earth’s defense, while the usual series leads Goku and Vegeta are sidelined, training on a distant planet. Gohan and Piccolo square off against the androids, and are summarily outclassed — until, of course, they power up and transform, and inevitably fend off their foes.The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be. Dramatic transformations from Saiyan to Super Saiyan — when a hero’s hair explodes into a luminous flare of yellow-gold, and their muscles swell and bulge outrageously — never fail to exhilarate, and recent advances in animation, which combine the style of classical anime illustrations with flourishes of computer-generated effects, have only made every punch, kick and superpowered kamehameha attack more vivid and spectacular. The battles in “Dragon Ball” have always been drawn and staged with thrilling gusto. In “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero,” they look better than ever.I’m not sure what kind of impression this is likely to make on a series newcomer: The film is clearly intended for fans whose knowledge of these characters and their continuing adventures borders on encyclopedic, and references to the events of earlier films and series in the franchise, from “Dragon Ball” (1986) to “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” (2018), are deployed with casual frequency. But for this critic, who has been following “Dragon Ball” diligently since his teenage years, the fan service only added to the esoteric charm.Dragon Ball Super: Super HeroRated PG-13 for cartoon action and violence. In English and Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Inu-oh’ Review: Dazzling Anime Meets Medieval Epic

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      This modern riff on “The Tale of the Heike,” from 14th-century Japan, takes some confusing turns. But the animation is undeniably wonderful.Visually sumptuous and narratively tangled, the anime “Inu-oh” takes place in 14th-century Japan. The main story does, at least. It tells of two young, audaciously talented castaways — a blind musician and a cursed dancer — who meet one dark evening. After the usual how-do-you-do, they begin performing for each other and quickly slide into enchanted sync. Together, they frolic and jam and whirl, and before long they’re levitating, gyrating against an expanse of shimmery stars as they orbit each other like heavenly bodies.It’s fitting that these characters meet on a bridge, given that the movie spans past and present, reality and fantasy. It’s based on a novel, “The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-oh Chapters,” by the Japanese writer Hideo Furukawa that riffs on “The Tale of the Heike,” a foundational medieval epic about clans engaged in civil war. A font of innumerable interpretations, the original tale reaches a climax with the battle of Dan-no-Ura, during which the Heike clan is defeated, the child emperor drowned and a sacred imperial sword lost. That sword pops up periodically in “Inu-oh” — but good luck understanding why.What the sword — which at times drips blood — has to do with our two whirling strangers isn’t altogether clear. Those who’ve read Furukawa’s novel, which doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, may have no issue tracking the movie’s labyrinthine turns, its time shifts, storytelling elisions and fantastical flourishes. After the first hour or so and having forgotten much of the (confusing!) introductory exposition, I gave up trying to fit the pieces together. Instead, I just grooved along on the often-spectacular animation, savoring its watery hues, vivid character designs and recurrent, galvanizing embrace of near-abstraction.The director Masaaki Yuasa (“Ride Your Wave”) opens “Inu-oh” with a great whoosh of images that announce his visual ambitions and give you little time to establish your bearings. After a short, vivid sprint across time, the story settles on Tomona (voiced by Mirai Moriyama), a boy who lives in a fishing village with his parents. One day, two royal emissaries commission Tomona’s father to dive for a mysterious treasure. It goes disastrously wrong; the father is killed and Tomona blinded. He leaves home but soon finds a calling, becoming a biwa (lute) player and eventually meeting the stranger on the bridge.That would be Inu-oh (Avu-chan, from the rock band Queen Bee), and his background adds complications. A pariah born with severe deformities, including an arm that’s longer than his coltish legs — when he runs, it trails him as perilously as Isadora Duncan’s scarf — Inu-oh hides his face under a gourd mask. He also speaks with an adenoidal whine and scrambles about with feverish agility that evolves into a kind of superpower after he and Tomona meet. Together, they hit the road and refine their talents: Inu-oh becomes a performing sensation and Tomona a proto-rocker, complete with squealing biwa and admirers.Given the attention Yuasa lavishes on these passages, it’s clear that he loves the idea of 14th-century performers rocking out like modern-day arena gods. If nothing else, these interludes have a storytelling clarity and directness that’s otherwise lacking here. (The script is by Akiko Nogi.) Certainly it’s amusing to watch Tomona jam: He plays his biwa behind his head à la Jimi Hendrix (to be clear, the resemblance is strictly gestural), whips around his luxurious mane and bares his chest, lathering up the crowd. Yet while in time the performances reveal truths about the players and their lives, they rapidly grow tiresome.Still, sometimes beauty is enough (or almost). And “Inu-oh” is often visually arresting, starting with an early interlude that, with its washes of color, delicate figures, negative space and lateral movements, looks like an animated scroll painting. This sequence, like the rest of the movie, retains a strong trace of the human hand and shows a deep grasp of (and pleasure in) the medium’s plasticity, all of which are too often absent in contemporary commercial animation. Even as Yuasa’s approach changes from section to section — as he plays with texture, volume and hue and gently shifts the balance between the figurative and the abstract — his extraordinary touch remains evident in each line and in every eye-popping swirl.Inu-ohRated PG-13 for mild peril and death. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      After Pixar Ouster, John Lasseter Returns With Apple and ‘Luck’

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      John Lasseter was toppled five years ago by allegations about his workplace behavior. He’s back with an animated film and a studio that could be Pixar 2.0.LOS ANGELES — The most Pixar movie of the summer is not from Pixar. It’s from Apple TV+ and the lightning-rod filmmaker-executive who turned Pixar into a superpower: John Lasseter.Five years ago, Mr. Lasseter was toppled by allegations about his behavior in the workplace. Almost overnight, his many accomplishments — building Pixar from scratch, forging the megawatt “Toy Story” and “Cars” franchises, reviving a moribund Walt Disney Animation, delivering “Frozen,” winning Oscars — became a footnote.After employees complained about unwanted hugging by Mr. Lasseter, Disney investigated and found that some subordinates occasionally felt him to be a tyrant. He was forced to resign as Disney-Pixar’s animation chief, apologizing for “missteps” that made staff members feel “disrespected or uncomfortable.”Mr. Lasseter, 65, is now on the verge of professional redemption. His first animated feature since he left Disney-Pixar will arrive on Apple’s subscription streaming service on Friday. Called “Luck,” the $140 million movie follows an unlucky young woman who discovers a secret world where magical creatures make good luck (the Department of Right Place, Right Time) and bad luck (a pet waste research and design lab dedicated to “tracked it in the house”). Things go terribly wrong, resulting in a comedic adventure involving an unusual dragon, bunnies in hazmat suits, leprechaun millennials and an overweight German unicorn in a too-tight tracksuit.Apple, perhaps the only company that safeguards its brand more zealously than Disney, has been using Mr. Lasseter as a prominent part of its marketing campaign for “Luck.” Ads for the film, which Peggy Holmes directed and Mr. Lasseter produced, describe it as coming “from the creative visionary behind TOY STORY and CARS.”“Luck” arrives on Apple TV+ on Friday.Apple TV+Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, shared a look at the film in March at the company’s latest product showcase event. “Luck” is just the beginning of Apple’s bet on Mr. Lasseter and Skydance Media, an independent studio that — contentiously — hired him in 2019 as animation chief. (Skydance hired lawyers to scrutinize the allegations against Mr. Lasseter and privately concluded there was nothing egregious.) Skydance has a deal to supply Apple TV+ with multiple animated films and at least one animated series by 2024.Pariah? Not at Apple.“It feels like part of me has come home,” Mr. Lasseter said in a phone interview, noting that Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, helped build Pixar before selling it to Disney in 2006. “I really like what Apple TV+ is doing. It’s about quality, not quantity. And their marketing is just spectacular. It’s the best I’ve ever seen in all the movies I’ve made.”Mr. Lasseter’s return to full-length filmmaking comes at an awkward time for Disney-Pixar, which appears to be a little lost without him, having misfired badly in June with a “Toy Story” prequel. “Lightyear,” about Buzz Lightyear before he became a toy, seemed to forget what made the character so beloved. The movie, which cost an estimated $300 million to make and market worldwide, has taken in about $220 million, which is even worse than it sounds for Disney’s bottom line because theaters keep at least 40 percent of ticket sales. “Lightyear” is the second-worst-performing title in Pixar’s history, ranking only above “Onward,” which came out in March 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. Lasseter declined to comment on “Lightyear,” which arrives on Disney+ on Wednesday. He also declined to discuss his departure from Disney.The Race to Rule Streaming TVTurmoil at Netflix: Despite a loss of subscribers, job cuts and a steep stock drop, the streaming giant has said it is staying the course.An Expensive Gamble: Netflix hopes “The Gray Man” — its new $200 million action movie — can be the start of a blockbuster franchise that attracts much-needed subscribers.Live Sports: Apple and Amazon are eager to expand their streaming audiences. They increasingly see live sports as a way to do it.End of an Era?: The golden age of streaming might be over, and we probably won’t like what happens next, our tech columnist writes.More than 50 people have followed Mr. Lasseter to Skydance from Disney and Pixar, including Ms. Holmes (“Secret of the Wings”), whom he hired to direct “Luck.” The screenplay for “Luck” is credited to Kiel Murray, whose Pixar and Disney writing credits include “Cars” and “Raya and the Last Dragon.” Mr. Lasseter and Ms. Holmes hired at least five more Disney-Pixar veterans for senior “Luck” crew jobs, including the animation director Yuriko Senoo (“Tangled”) and the production designer Fred Warter (“A Bug’s Life”).John Ratzenberger, known as Pixar’s “good luck charm” because he has voiced so many characters over the decades, pops up in “Luck” as Rootie, the Land of Bad Luck’s unofficial mayor.The upshot: With its glistening animation, attention to detail, story twists and emotional ending, “Luck” has all the hallmarks of a Pixar release. (Reviews will arrive on Wednesday.) Some people who have seen the film have commented on similarities between “Luck” and the 2001 Pixar classic, “Monsters, Inc.” Both films involve elaborate secret worlds that are accidentally disrupted by humans.“I want to take the audience to a world that is so interesting and beautiful and clever that people love being in it,” Mr. Lasseter said. “You want the audience to want to book a week’s vacation to the place where the movie just took place.”It remains true, however, that Mr. Lasseter continues to be a polarizing figure in Hollywood. Ashlyn Anstee, a director at Cartoon Network, told The Hollywood Reporter last week that she was unhappy that Skydance was “letting a so-called creative genius continue to take up positions and space in an industry that could begin to be filled with different people.”Emma Thompson has not changed her public position on Mr. Lasseter since backing out of a role in “Luck” in 2019. She had been cast by the film’s first director and quit when Mr. Lasseter joined Skydance.“It feels very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr. Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct,” Ms. Thompson wrote in a letter to David Ellison, Skydance’s chief executive. (Her character, a human, no longer exists in the radically reworked film.)Ms. Holmes, the “Luck” director, said she had no qualms about joining Mr. Lasseter at Skydance.“It has been a very, very positive experience, and John has been a great mentor,” she said.Holly Edwards, the president of Skydance Animation, a division of Skydance Media, echoed Ms. Holmes. “John has been incredible,” she said. “I’m proud that we’re creating an environment where people know they have a voice and know they are being heard.” Ms. Edwards previously spent nearly two decades at DreamWorks Animation.Some of Mr. Lasseter’s creative tactics have not changed. One is a willingness to radically overhaul projects while they are on the assembly line — including removing a director, something that can cause hurt feelings and fan blowback. He believes that such decisions, while difficult, are sometimes crucial to a quality outcome.Peggy Holmes, the director of “Luck,” said she had no reservations about working with Mr. Lasseter.Michael Tran/FilmMagic“Luck,” for instance, was already in the works when Mr. Lasseter arrived at Skydance. Alessandro Carloni (“Kung Fu Panda 3”) had been hired to direct the film, which then involved a battle between human agents of good luck and bad luck.“As soon as I heard the concept, I actually was kind of jealous,” Mr. Lasseter said. “It’s a subject that every single person in the world has a relationship with, and that is very rare in a basic concept of a movie.”But he ultimately threw out almost everything and started over. The primary cast now includes Jane Fonda, who voices a pink dragon who can sniff out bad luck, and Whoopi Goldberg, who plays a droll leprechaun taskmaster. Flula Borg (“Pitch Perfect 2”) voices the overweight, bipedal unicorn, who is a major scene stealer.“Sometimes you have to take a building down to its foundation and, frankly, in this case, down to its lot,” Mr. Lasseter said.Mr. Lasseter did not invent the concept of doing real-world research to inform animated stories and artwork, but he is known for pushing far beyond what is typically done. For “Luck,” he had researchers dig into what constitutes good luck and bad luck in myriad cultures; the filmmaking team also researched the foster care system, which informed part of the story. (The lead character grows up in foster care and is repeatedly passed over for adoption.)As at Pixar and at Disney, Mr. Lasseter set up a “story trust” council at Skydance in which a group of elite directors and writers candidly and repeatedly critique one another’s work. The Skydance Animation version will soon include Brad Bird, a longtime Pixar force (“The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille”) who recently joined Mr. Lasseter’s operation to develop an original animated film called “Ray Gunn.”Ms. Holmes said Mr. Lasseter was a nurturing creative force, not a tyrannical one.“John will give you notes on sequences,” she said. “He will suggest dialogue. He will comment on color or timing or effects. He’ll pitch story ideas. He’ll draw something — ‘Oh, maybe it could look like this.’“And then it’s up to you and your team to execute against those notes. Or not. Sometimes we came back to John and said the note didn’t work — and this is why — or we decided we didn’t need to address it.”Ms. Holmes added: “When the answer is no, he’s really OK with it. He’s really OK with it.” More

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      Ken Knowlton, a Father of Computer Art and Animation, Dies at 91

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      His work at Bell Labs in the 1960s laid the groundwork for today’s computer-generated imagery in film and on TV.Ken Knowlton, an engineer, computer scientist and artist who helped pioneer the science and art of computer graphics and made many of the first computer-generated pictures, portraits and movies, died on June 16 in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.His son, Rick Knowlton, said the cause of death, at a hospice facility, was unclear.In 1962, after finishing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Dr. Knowlton joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., a future-focused division of the Bell telephone conglomerate that was among the world’s leading research labs. After learning that the lab had installed a new machine that could print images onto film, he resolved to make movies using computer-generated graphics.“You could make pictures with letters on the screen or spots on the screen or lines on the screen,” he said in a 2016 interview, recalling his arrival at Bell Labs. “How about a movie?”Over the next several months, he developed what he believed to be the first computer programming language for computer animation, called BEFLIX (short for “Bell Labs Flicks”). The following year, he used this language to make an animated movie. Called “A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies,” this 10-minute film described the technology used to make it.Though Dr. Knowlton was the only person to ever use the BEFLIX language —he and his colleagues quickly replaced it with other tools and techniques — the ideas behind this technology would eventually overhaul the movie business.By the mid-1980s, computer graphics were an integral part of feature films like “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter.” In 1995, a studio in Northern California, Pixar, released “Toy Story,” a feature film whose images were generated entirely by computer. Today, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, plays a role in practically every movie and television show.“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels,” said Ted Nelson, a computer science pioneer and philosopher who wrote about Dr. Knowlton’s early work. “Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”Kenneth Charles Knowlton was born on June 6, 1931, in Springville, N.Y. His parents, Frank and Eva (Reith) Knowlton, owned a farm in that small community, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, where they grew corn and raised chickens.After graduating a year early from high school as class valedictorian, Dr. Knowlton enrolled in a five-year engineering and physics program at Cornell University, where his parents had first met while studying agriculture before deciding to buy a farm. He stayed at Cornell for a master’s degree, which involved building an X-ray camera using parts from an electron microscope.At Cornell, he met his future wife, Roberta Behrens, and together they joined the Quakers. After he finished his master’s degree, they traveled to Quaker work camps that helped build housing infrastructure for the poor in El Salvador and Mexico, where he contracted polio. He walked with a leg brace or a cane for the rest of his life.It was at Cornell in the mid-1950s that Dr. Knowlton developed his interest in computers — room-size machines operated via punched cards and magnetic tape reels that were just beginning to arrive in government labs, academia and industry. After reading about a group at the Massachusetts Institute Technology that aimed to build computer technology that could translate between languages, like English and French, he joined the project as a Ph.D. student. His thesis advisers included the linguist Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence.At Bell Labs, Dr. Knowlton realized that he could create detailed images by stringing together dots, letters, numbers and other symbols generated by a computer. Each symbol was chosen solely for its brightness — how bright or how dark it appeared at a distance. His computer programs, by carefully changing brightness as they placed each symbol, could then build familiar images, like flowers or faces.Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Harmon’s 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman was hung on the wall of their boss’s office as a joke. This remastered version was recreated under Dr. Knowlton’s supervision in 2016. Jim Boulton, Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton; remastered from Jim Boulton’s backward-analyzed digital files of Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s “Studies in Perception I, 1966.”After experimenting with movies, he applied similar techniques to portraits and other still images. In the mid-1960s, he and a collaborator named Leon Harmon created a 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman and, as a joke, hung it on the wall of their boss’s office.Their boss, Edward E. David, Jr., the Bell Labs executive director of communications research, who would later serve as science adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, was not amused. But the portrait later caught the attention of the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who put it on display in his New York City loft when he launched a project called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., in the fall of 1967, aiming to develop new collaborations between artists and engineers.The New York Times published an article about the event the next day, including a picture of Dr. Knowlton’s image of the nude woman, titled “Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I).” It was believed to be the first full-frontal nude printed in the pages of The New York Times. A year later, the picture was part of a landmark exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”Dr. Knowlton remained at Bell Labs until 1982, experimenting with everything from computer-generated music to technologies that allowed deaf people to read sign language over the telephone. He later joined Wang Laboratories, where, in the late-1980s, he helped develop a personal computer that let users annotate documents with synchronized voice messages and digital pen strokes.In 2008, after retiring from tech research, he joined a magician and inventor named Mark Setteducati in creating a jigsaw puzzle called Ji Ga Zo, which could be arranged to resemble anyone’s face. “He had a mathematical mind combined with a great sense of aesthetics,” Mr. Setteducati said in a phone interview.In addition to his son Rick, Dr. Knowlton is survived by two other sons, Kenneth and David, all from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; a brother, Fredrick Knowlton; and a sister, Marie Knowlton. Two daughters, Melinda and Suzanne Knowlton, also from his first marriage, and his second wife, Barbara Bean-Knowlton, have died.While at Bell Labs, Mr. Knowlton collaborated with several well-known artists, including the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, the computer artist Lillian Schwartz and the electronic-music composer Laurie Spiegel. He saw himself as an engineer who helped others create art, as prescribed by Mr. Rauschenberg’s E.A.T. project.But later in life he began creating, showing and selling art of his own, building traditional analog images with dominoes, dice, seashells and other materials. He belatedly realized that when engineers collaborate with artists, they become more than engineers.“In the best cases, they become more complete humans, in part from understanding that all behavior comes not from logic but, at the bottommost level, from intrinsically indefensible emotions, values and drives,” he wrote in 2001. “Some ultimately become artists.” More