Beginning next week, Cartoon Brew TV [1] will be showing a film series celebrating the “Modern Art of Gene Deitch.” The Oscar-winning animator, illustrator and director, whose legendary and still very active career dates back to his mid 1940s Record Changer jazz album art as well as his seminal work at UPA, has been collaborating with the Brew to bring a series of his works to the net.
According to Jerry Beck, who along with Amid Amidi man Cartoon Brew, “If you think you’re familiar with the animated works of the legendary Gene Deitch, think again. We’ve been collaborating with the master himself to dig out his rarest and most obscure modernist shorts. We even found one film that Gene hadn’t seen in fifty-five years! Many of the films in our line-up are industrial and educational shorts which were never intended to last more than a few years, much less into the 21st century. But the artistry and craftsmanship that Gene and his crew put into the films have given them a far longer shelf-life than anybody anticipated—and soon audiences will be enjoying them again.”
AWN has had a long relationship with Gene, dating back to our publishing his immensely popular book, How To Succeed in Animation (don’t let a little thing like failure stop you!), exclusively online in 2001. Still widely read after almost 10 years, with new content added periodically by Gene during that time, HTSIA can be found at http://genedeitch.awn.com [2].
Links:
[1] http://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/modern-art-of-gene-deitch-coming-to-brew-tv.html
[2] http://genedeitch.awn.com/