Director and producer Koji Wakamatsu has died. Wakamatsu had just been named filmmaker of the year at the 2012 Busan Film Festival. Wildgrounds has an interview, which Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats helped translate, Keyframe has an obituary and Subway Cinema had a brief overview of Wakamatsu’s career paralleling a […]
True Classics has a lovely retrospective of vaudevillian, cartoonist and animator, Winsor McCay. “McCay got his start in entertainment doing “chalk talks” on the vaudeville circuit. Much like J. Stuart Blackton, a groundbreaking figure in early animation in his own right, McCay drew figures on a chalkboard and altered […]
The Library of Congress has an online exhibit on the history of illustration, cartoons, animation, single panel gag cartoons and comic strips in the United States. (via @fantagraphics)
Possibly the world’s first old dark house movie, The Haunted House (1908) by Segundo de Chomón and the first vampire/Satanic castle movie, Le Manoir du Diable (1896) by Georges Méliès. (Thanks, Keith and Teleport City!)
Special effects master Carlo Rambaldi has died. Rambaldi is probably most famous for his work in ET, The Extraterrestrial; Alien; and Dune, but Rambaldi also worked extensively for Mario Bava. The New York Times has an obituary. Here are a video homage, another by Il Centro Sperimentale di […]
“Depth, light, sound, music: Stephen and Timothy Quay speak on the many dimensions of film,” both animated and live-action, at Keyframe.