This week the Annecy Animation Festival is being held in France. Since 1961 Annecy has been animation's oldest and most prestigious festival.At least once in your professional life you should attend an Annecy Festival. For animation students and fans it is a wonderful opportunity to meet the most famous animation artists in the world, and tipple copious amounts of red wine with them. I have an article of Annecy memories in this months ANIMATION MAGAZINE, but here are some other images of the first Annecy Pat and I attended twenty years ago in 1987. Click on images to enlarge.

the castle gate in the canal that cuts through the old section of Annecy.


At this Annecy I got to know Disney legend Marc Davis really well. We became lifelong friends and he called me his "historian".

The award ceremony at Annecy. Frederic Back's The Man Who Planted Trees won the highest honors. Fyodor Khytruk was given a special lifetime award that was sculpted from a large block of lucite. It was so heavy poor Fyodor could barely hold it without help.

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DRAWING THE LINE received a great review from THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM.(507, issue #114)
Reviewer John Newsinger called it " A marvelous book "
Something else to add to my F.B.I. dossier! Better send out for some more manila folders!
Thank You and Solidarity, Baby!

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Birthdays: Tomaso Albinioni, Senator Fighting Bob LaFollette,, Margaret Bourke-White, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sam Wanamaker, Dorothy McGuire, Burle Ives, Gene Barry, Jerzy Kosinski, Steffi Graf, Marla Gibbs

Happy Flag Day -in 1777 The Continental Congress orders the Stars and Stripes flag to replace the Cambridge Flag (The Tree and Stripes) and the Snake and Stripes and all those other things silly things and stripes as the U.S. Flag.

1816- Writers Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley were spending the summer at the Villa Deodati on Lake Geneva. This day among the revels, drinking, partner swapping and opium taking Byron suggested they all write a ghost story. They all tried but failed except for 19 year old Mary who invented the tale of a Swiss scientist who created an artificial man. She called it Frankenstein.

1822- Charles Babbage presented a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society in London proposing to build a "Difference Engine" a machine that could calculate equations and print the results-i.e. a computer. After ten years and a small fortune it never quite comes off.

1846-THE GREAT BEAR REBELLION- U.S. citizens living in Spanish California led by a school teacher named William Ide and Ezekiel Merritt declared themselves an independent country, not knowing that back east the U.S. government had already declared war on Mexico and annexed California to the U.S.. Remember information took months to get back East across Indian territory and burning deserts. The Anglo-Californians seized a Sonoma military post and arrested the owner of the largest hacienda in the area, a retired Mexican General named Mariano Vallejo. Ironically Senor Vallejo himself desired AltaCalifornia to have independence from Mexico City. They chose as their flag for the new republic the grizzly bear and the polar star, which is now the state flag. It wasn’t well drawn and a Mexican noblewoman watching the events thought the flag looked like a large towel with a red pig painted on it. US Col. John Freemont took over the Great Bear settlers and raised the US flag over the Presidio in San Francisco July 1st.

1941- First day shooting on John Huston’s film "The Maltese Falcon". It was Huston’s first director gig. After George Raft turned down the role of Sam Spade the lead went to an actor named Humphrey Bogart. He had started well as the hood Duke Mantee in Petrified Forrest but had since been typecast in character roles. At the time no one thought that Bogie was romantic leading man material. Bogart even had to wear his own suits on camera.

1951- Univac I, built by Dr John W, Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert Jr. of the Remington Rand Company to be the first commercial built electronic computer, went on line for the census bureau in Philadelphia.

1954- The Eisenhower Administration ordered the adding of the words "Under God" to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy, who penned the original words, was a Socialist who would never have added them in his lifetime.

1957- Nelson Mandela married Winnie Mandela.

1962- Albert de Salvo, the Boston Strangler, killed his first victim.

1964- THE FIRST HIPPY BUS- Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, bought an old school bus, painted it psychadelic colors, took of troupe of 14 fellow free spirits called the Merry Pranksters and spent the next few months driving across the country taking LSD and staging Happenings in various cities and towns. The Bus’s name was Further and it’s driver was Neil Cassidy, friend of Beatnik author Jack Kerouac. A book documenting the escapades of the "hippy bus" was "The Electric Koolaid Acid Test.". Kesey became interested in LSD when he volunteered for a college program to experiment with the drug, secretly funded by the CIA. The Merry Pranksters were invited in 1969 to be the security for the Woodstock Rock Festival.

1966- The Vatican officially abolished the Index of Forbidden Books.

1977- The skinny Carnaby Street fashion model Twiggy Lawson got married to Michael Whitney.

1983- The Pioneer 10 space probe left it’s orbit around Jupiter and headed off into deep space. NASA lost all contact in 1997. Pioneer 10 is expected to reach the solar system of the star Ross 246 in the Constellation Taurus in the year 34,600 AD. Oh Boy, I can’t wait!

1989- Retired actress Zsa Zsa Gabor was arrested for slapping a Beverly Hills policeman who was writing her a traffic ticket.

1995, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MP3. The researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987. By 1992 it was considered far ahead of its times. MP3 became the generally accepted acronym as the popular standard for digital music on the on the Internet."

2001- The Oxford English Dictionary admitted the slang expletive of Homer Simpson "DOH!" into its august pages.

2002- An asteroid the size of a football field bypassed the Earth by just 75,000 miles, about one fifth the distance to our moon. If it had hit us, the cataclysm might have rivaled the one that eliminated the Dinosaurs. Little was said about it in the media because it came from the direction of the Sun and was undetectable until almost on top of us. So sleep well tonight, modern science is on guard!