In 1937, Walt Dis­ney Stu­dios shot Snow White and the Sev­en Dwarfs with a new-fan­gled cam­era, the mul­ti­plane cam­era, which allowed car­toon ani­ma­tion to take a quan­tum leap for­ward. Thanks to this new “super car­toon cam­era,” ani­mat­ed scenes sud­den­ly looked more real­is­tic and three-dimen­sion­al. You only need to watch this pre­sen­ta­tion by Walt Dis­ney him­self (record­ed in 1957) and you’ll see what I mean. Dis­ney shot many of its clas­sic fea­ture films – Pinoc­chio, Fan­ta­sia, Bam­bi, and Peter Pan – with the mul­ti­plane cam­era, and it remained in pro­duc­tion right through The Lit­tle Mer­maid, filmed in 1989. Today, only three orig­i­nal Dis­ney mul­ti­plane cam­eras sur­vive.

A big thanks to Sergey for send­ing this vin­tage clip our way. If you see a good piece of open cul­ture, don’t hes­i­tate to send it our way…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made

Disney’s Oscar-Win­ning Adven­tures in Music

Don­ald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Tax­es (1943)

We’ve already writ­ten about the excel­lent film blog MUBIdai­ly, which is pub­lished by the online screen­ing room Mubi.com. We’ve nev­er real­ly pushed Mubi itself, even though the site fea­tures a wide selec­tion of inde­pen­dent and for­eign films. It’s a sub­scrip­tion site, and we pre­fer to focus on cul­tur­al offer­ings that you can access free of charge.

Still, for the next month, you can watch cer­tain films on Mubi free of charge — specif­i­cal­ly, selec­tions from mul­ti­ple years of Cannes’ La Semaine de la Cri­tique (Crit­ics’ Week), one of the fes­ti­val’s most con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing side­bars. Each year a pan­el of inter­na­tion­al crit­ics selects a cur­rent crop of shorts and fea­tures from first and sec­ond time direc­tors, and now MUBI has made a num­ber of past selec­tions freely avail­able online. The selec­tion is a lit­tle uneven, but still often inspir­ing. Of the choic­es offered at Mubi’s mini-ret­ro­spec­tive, we rec­om­mend the Japan­ese film Chick­en Heart, the clever Swedish short Seeds of the Fall, and espe­cial­ly Round Da Way  (Las­cars), a live­ly French ani­mat­ed fea­ture about life in the projects. You can watch Round Da Way above.

The full selec­tion is avail­able for free on Mubi until June 30th, with a caveat or two: Each film is only free for its first 1,000 view­ings, you do need to reg­is­ter to watch, and there may be some geo­re­stric­tion at work (though we can’t say for sure since we’re based in the US).

And final­ly, of course, don’t miss our big curat­ed col­lec­tion of 380 Free Movies, which includes a few major films from Cannes too.

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

When Dul­cidio Caldeira of the agency Para­noid BR was com­mis­sioned recent­ly to cre­ate a one-minute com­mer­cial mark­ing MTV Brazil’s 21st birth­day, he end­ed up re-imag­in­ing one of animation’s old­est forms: the flip book. The result is a work of inspired silli­ness, with char­ac­ters like Gene Sim­mons, Slash, Ozzy Osbourne—even Ozzy’s bat—appearing on a long line of bal­loons being popped at a rate of ten per sec­ond. Caldeira and col­lab­o­ra­tors Andre Faria and Guga Ket­zer used a laser to line up hun­dreds of bal­loons along a 656-foot (200-meter) set of tracks. It took them 24 hours to shoot.

Via: Print Mag­a­zine