Bradbury 100 animation

For no other reason other than that I felt like it, I animated my Bradbury 100 logo. A bit pointless for an audio-only podcast, I admit. But that little rocketship just needed to take flight!

The music, by the way, is called "Red Mist", and is taken from the music site Purple Planet.

Happy Halloween!

Forget Christmas. In Ray Bradbury's fiction, Halloween is the biggest holiday of them all.

As I was browsing through some files on my laptop, I came across a couple of images from The Halloween Tree which I don't think I have used before on Bradburymedia. They are background paintings, used as establishing shots in the 1993 Hanna-Barbara film based on Bradbury's novel. Ray wrote the script for the film, and won an Emmy Award for his efforts.

The paintings, below, are shown here as you never quite see them in the film. Both are used in panning shots - the camera moves across each one, from one side to the other. A couple of years ago, I took frame grabs from the DVD and stitched together several frames to create the panoramic images you now see.

I wish I could give due credit to the original background artist(s), but unfortunately I have no idea who they were. The film's credits are not specific about who created the backgrounds, and there are any number of artists who might have been responsible (see the full list of film credits here).

I've always been quite taken with the second image below, a representation of the fictional Green Town, Illinois. It looks very like old Waukegan, the real town it is based on.

Click on the images to embiggen.

deadmau5

Here is the music video for deadmau5's recent track "The Veldt". Both the song and the animation are influenced by Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name, which was first published in 1950.




You can read more about the song and the animation on Wikipedia, and in this official press release. Bradbury's story can be found in his books The Illustrated Man, The Vintage Bradbury, and The Stories of Ray Bradbury.

Illustrate Bradbury, or Become an Illustrated Man...

Steven Paul Leiva's ambitions for Ray Bradbury Week (mentioned previously on this blog) now also include a package of illustrations and/or animations to be presented to Ray Bradbury. Full details are given on Cartoon Brew, here. Bradbury, of course, has a long association with animation: he was a childhood pal (and lifelong friend) of Ray Harryhausen; a close friend of Chuck Jones, with whom he originated The Halloween Tree; worked extensively with Disney (albeit mostly on theme parks rather than animated films); worked on an animated short of Icarus Montgolfier Wright, which received an Oscar nomination; received an Emmy for his work on the TV film version of The Halloween Tree; and did the original script for the somewhat abortive Little Nemo feature film. And has seen countless animators develop his short stories into films.



According to an article from Wired, we could in the near future have animated tattoos, just like Bradbury's fictional character in "The Illustrated Man". It's all thanks to a bizarre new use for LED technology.

The Wired article is here, and below is a video simulation of this strange new concept:

Russian Bradbury

Ray Bradbury's work seems to be quite well known in Russia (and the rest of the former Soviet Union). Several Russian-language films have been based on his works, often without his permission: Vel'd (1987), Trinadtsatyj Apostol (1988), Vino Iz Oduvanchikov (1997).

Two of the short animated films have recently popped up on YouTube. The most interesting of these is There Will Come Soft Rains (1984). In some ways more bleak than the Bradbury original, this film also seems to make some comment on religion, or Christianity, or western values. You can view the film, with English subtitles, here.

Less interesting, and rather primitive in its animation, is Here There Be Tygers. I know very little about this film, except that it is based on the story of the same name (which has been adapted once for live action, in the Ray Bradbury Theater series; Bradbury also wrote a teleplay of the story for the original Twilight Zone series in the 1960s, but it was never filmed). You can view the animated film, with English subtitles, here. Until this version appeared on YouTube, I had never seen a subtitled version; it's nice to be able to understand what's going on in the film!