Saturday, November 29, 2025

Donald's Crime (1945)

 

I still think the Jack King Donald Duck cartoons are watchable to this day, even though I don't watch a ton of short films back to back anymore, these always influenced me. An underrated film titled Donald's Crime (1945) has this one-minute scene of playing out as a criminal with very unique backgrounds and great action scenes. 


I love these colors, I also the enjoy walk cycles.









Reminds me of a "good" old hollywood movie when they use those medium close-up shots. You might expect another movie related post coming soon.








I could just imagine more slick and cooler music to go with these scenes instead of the usual whimsy style coming from Edward Plumb. I could imagine the chorus to Michael Jackson's Speed Demon in the background with these scenes. 





Love that priceless facial expression! 





We get some more interesting poses and still shots from this one scene. The layouts are absoutely incredible in this cartoon, it adds alot of personality to the environment.










It's crazy to me that this eighty year old cartoon is sorta what interests me the most in cinema and art in particular. 

The dark and mysterious but pleasent tone, a narrator voice, shocking expressions, and running from danger. That sounds like my type of vibe.











These shots below are impressive.












Donald's Crime is more than just your standard cartoon with silly shenanigans, this reminds me of the Tex Avery cartoons mixed with Disney's most darkest but coolest films like The Great Mouse Detective and The Headless Horseman from Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, it's filled with unexpected possibilities, velocity, and unlimited animation techniques like for example Donald reaching for the piggy bank, or the picture above of the light following him in stretchy cartoony movements. It's good alright. 


Wanna experience it yourself?


https://www.toontales.net/short/donalds-crime/


Thursday, November 27, 2025

Happy Thanksgiving! (2025)



Happy Thanksgiving from The Art-Mania family! God bless to all whom woke up today, can breathe and be thankful for what life has brought us. Family, loved ones especially from heaven, food, having talents, nature and mostly importantly our all loving God! 


I hope you all have a comforting and peaceful Thanksgiving. My characters included are all proud to be here in one image hoping that you have a decent day as always! 


Friday, November 21, 2025

Trying To Understand What Being An Animator Is Like 2


I'm someone who wants to enjoy a moment of their life drawing and improving traditional animation techniques. I'm already getting the hang of constructing different characters and acting methods. I looked into my old drawings I did back in July filled with very basic and quick doodles, I observed more into pencil sketches and screencaps rather than on-screen movement nowadays. 



I already talked about my inspirations on the Song of The South scenes, because they're just too goshdarn good looking! This isn't actually that bad to me. I could kinda draw these characters very well, or sorta capture the style. 


The Wolf is heavily inspired by Brer Fox, so I tried practicing more detailed and constructive surfaces of the design, starting off with a red coloring pencil to sketch the circular head and adding curved lines.





Then I really start adding the details.









Finally, I use my normal pencil and finished. 

I tried to fully capture the charm and complexity of a well-designed villain. 


Take Ratigan and Brer Fox as examples of the best animated villains.








Close-ups also help too. It's much more menacing and creepy in the best ways possible. When I first watched these Brer Fox scenes I was astounded, I immediately wanted to know more about this character, he was just like what I enjoy in the older Disney movies, the fresh and fierce moods, especially with stuff like the Pleasure Island scenes, Maleficent, the fight with Peter and Captain Hook and The Headless Horseman.

There's something to love about the modern Disney movies like the ones from the Bronze Age and Renaissance but that's for another post. 


I tend to be invested with these characters because they have more of a presence and feel more human to their surroundings. 




Someone like Mickey and his friends are very memorable but they lack deep emotion or sense. Something like Mickey's Christmas Carol I can give credit for, but the short films, and the pre-school TV shows just makes these characters less likeable to me. Sometimes Donald can be blinded to reality and just reacts not suitable to the situation like in his Chip and Dale cartoons. It's just the average short-film personality.



I stopped watching cartoons because the characters were so tame and don't progress in my opinion. It's like those under 60 minute old westerns. I could understand people liking the characters but they aren't the most well-written or relatable characters ever. That's why I'm trying to explore more deeper and inspirational stories and personalities. 






I want to fully talk about how I'm now drawing characters with red pencils, it all came from one image of Brer Rabbit.





Since I obviously love the designs of the characters, the red pencil details were so interesting to me, I thought it was useful and better to draw the more detailed proportions. 



This is another drawing of The Wolf and his sidekick Cauliflower. 







This drawing took me less than 10 minutes to make. I researched into how much time was it to draw one additional frame or drawing, it just depends. You could draw something extremely detailed and sharp and it'll take over countless minutes or even hours to make it work. I did look into more aspects of the animation theory like in-betweeners, turns out not a single animator could control all of the scenes themselves, kinda interesting to be honest. 



All I have to say is, it would've been possible without my animation heroes, Preston Blair, love his book. 


This is what started the saga.







I want to freely talk about my interests in story-telling next since it's obvious now that this series is taken rest again after a few months.


Thursday, November 20, 2025

Great Vintage Stuff 3

 

It is that time again! For another vintage stuff post! To start off, this is a great painting by Mead Schaeffer. 


Limited colors = Brilliance 





Here's another great one by him.






Too late to celebrate Halloween nowadays, but I thought this was just beautiful. J.C Leyendecker is such a wonderful artist!






Here's 2 artworks created by Charles Relyea. He's an incredibly talented artist. I'm a huge fan of his art nowadays. This is some of my 3 favorites so far.











That final image's color palette is stunning!





I love the two-tone color schemes so much, do you know who also seems to enjoy it? Chuck Jones. I immediately loved these and wanted to share it to you guys! 














Now here's something unreal that it's outstanding, Frederick Edwin Church's 1853 painting Mount Ktaadn. 





Lastly is some nice vintage art of Sleeping Beauty from a French magazine. I've grown to like the film alot more. Maleficent is a fantastic villain and the animation of her dragon transformation will never not astound me.








Monday, November 17, 2025

The Disney+ AI Situation



Just about a few days ago, Bob Iger, CEO of Disney officially announced that Disney+ will soon feature AI generated user content, stating that it'll "provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience." So that means subscribers of the platform will create some of their own types of content only using artificial intelligence.




Now all of that is unimpressive so far but there's also this to mention.




To be honest, we knew that the company would continue to push boundaries like this, but this is going TOO far.


Disney has already declined over the years for it's obsession with quantity, their control with materialism over idealism and taking the advantage to promote films nobody seems to care about because they're either tame or unoriginal. Ever since Disney's consumption, they're owning these other companies that feel unnecessary for a film studio to possess. They have owned countless studios like Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox as well as other properties like ESPN, and Hulu. Disney+ in particular adding shows and highlights from those channels and studios for more consumerism. 


The whole AI situation to me is terrible because it's basically trying to consume subscribers by watching the unnecessary content but this time, not made by naturally hand-crafted artists. 

I've been influenced by alot of Walt Disney's quotes over the past few weeks. This is probably the best example from researching upon the situation.


"You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality."


This quote has been ignored and panned for a long time. Now I haven't fully checked out too much on what Iger states about the future of Disney but you shouldn't just jam down our throats to make a statement like that and BOOM! out of nowhere is trending on social media. 


We us as a community are instantly disappointed and unable to handle this issue, and if that's how it's gonna be, then let it arise. Hate it or not. You can still be fine with what you experience on the platform even if it's distracting or disputable. This isn't a message for everyone, as I am fully aware of people in general, having different interests and hobbies. 


As someone who is more of an older Disney movie fan, into the 30s-50s films, this doesn't affect me that much. The beauty and passion that went into the animated films inspire me the most, so the recent news about stuff happening with Disney doesn't particularly interest me at all.


Oh and as of writing this, Disney announced the trailer for the live-action Moana. How wonderful...



All I have to say is, appreciate what interests you the most, if you don't like the changes, avoid them. You can like what you like, that's why I have DVDs so if the streaming service gets more expensive and the artifical generated content is gonna spread, I have them anytime. They have scene selections, and more interesting bonus features.


Here's the link if your curious.


https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/disney-plus-gen-ai-user-generated-content-1236426135/


Saturday, November 15, 2025

Owls

 

Owls are one of the most interesting types of birds. I love them myself, they're classified as being morally analytical, and solitary. I recently created a new edition to the Art-Mania Villain crew. This is The Wise Ol' Owl, he believes in the willpower of wisdom, but he can be very deceitful, and tries treacherous methods to change people's minds from becoming completely normal to geniuses of his teachings.




This is what he looks like, notice that smug, yet wicked facial expression in the middle of the sketches. This is a true glance of his devious personality.








This idea started off as I was watching the extras selection of the 2005 Bambi DVD, it's becoming one of my all-time favorite movies, and Friend Owl in particular is a very expressive character, so it's a very useful example of studying specific owls.








They actually showed live-action owls, but these are images I searched on the internet, mostly for key reference. The narrow eyes show off suspicion.












This owl is flying mid-air, owls themselves don't usually walk on ground, so it's useful that they use their feathers.







Now Wise Ol' Owl may be a little more anthropomorphic, but he still decides to act traditionally anyway.








An owl is shocked, or maybe even surprised. Their eyes are more wide open, in a cautious sort of way.





Mr. Owl isn't particularly that shocked. The film theory is that the heroes are particularly more confident at handling challenging situations than villains often do. 







There's not a bunch of owls in animation. They're fun to draw, in fact my high school mascot is an owl. Last year, I designed and promoted virtue art until I graduated.