Ask IMA CEO Maxwell Anderson about the price of freedom. He’ll tell you about the IMA’s successful challenge to a law passed by the Indiana legislature this year forcing any entity selling materials deemed “harmful to minors” to register with the State and pay a fee to do so. If Judge Sarah Evans Barker had not agreed with the IMA, Big Hat Books, and other plaintiffs and struck down the restrictive law, every school with a sex ed text book—or art museum gift shop with books featuring the nude form—would have had to pay up and be policed.

Ask Indianapolis educator Connie Heermann about the price of freedom. Connie is the Perry Township teacher suspended without pay for teaching the book The Freedom Writers Diary in her class last year without permission from the school board. The book, written by the students of California teacher Erin Gruwell, is a record of their daily lives, fraught with violence and racism. This work of non-fiction contains profanity and bloodshed–because that’s what these teens experienced.

Filmmaker Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud, Freedom Writers) turned the story of Erin Gruwell and herstudents into a film starring Hilary Swank. In a Huffington Post blog entry last month, LaGravenese makes a passionate defense of the liberty to learn.

In the spirit of the First Amendment, the IMA is hosts a screening of the film Freedom Writers and a post-film discussion with Connie Heermann. Come to the IMA August 21 at 6 pm to hear about an all-too-real struggle for free expression in Indiana. Dissenters welcome.

This winter, the IMA will debut Winter Nights, a counterpart to the IMA’s popular Summer Nights film series. Winter Nights will feature classic films with familiar names. All films will be screened in the IMA’s Tobias Theater (aka The Toby) which will open this fall. (Which means…unlike Summer Nights, the IMA will provide the seats AND climate control.)

Below are some of the films that you will get to see this winter on The Toby’s big screen:

• The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941, 101 mins, B & W)
• La Dolce Vita (dir. Federico Fellini, 1960, 180 mins, B & W)
• The Bank Dick (dir. Edward F. Cline, 1940, 72 mins B & W)
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982, Color)
• The General (dir. Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, 1927, 75 mins, B & W) with live accompaniment by the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra.
• Lolita (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1962, 152 mins, B & W)

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL FOLKS! Back by popular demand - the IMA’s Film Poll. We want to know what you want to see. Polls close on July 18 and at that time the movie that has the most vote in each one of the categories below will be chosen for the 2009 Winter Nights Series. You can vote as often as you like, so vote every 15 minutes, every day or just once. It’s up to you, my friends!

Here are the categories:

AntiWestern/Revisionist Western/Acid Western (January 2)
AntiWestern, Revisionist, Acid. Call ‘em what you will, but these counter-culture Westerns favor realism over romanticisim.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Rough & Tumble Action Epic (January 30)
Nothing beats a great car chase. Except maybe deception, betrayal, gunfights, escapes and explosions. But no, nothing beats a great car chase.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

French New Wave (February 6)
In true esprit de francais, New Wave directors snubbed their noses at classical cinema by experimenting with unique editing and narrative styles.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Who doesn’t love a kung fu panda? HI-YA! From cave paintings, frieze reliefs and spinning pottery attempting to convey motion, to the Victorian thaumatrope toy and the 1868 flip book, the development of animation has come a long way to reach a fully animated martial arts panda. This development urges us to think of animation as art, not just entertainment.

You may not first think of animation as a highly esteemed visual art form, but it certainly captures a large and important audience, along with highly talented creators, not to mention a hefty chunk of revenue. Possibly the first animated film, created in 1906 by American J. Stuart Blackton, was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. The film tells the story of a cartoonist drawing faces on a chalkboard, with the faces coming to life. In the United States, animation began in the 1900s age of silent film with Bray Studios in New York City with characters like Felix the Cat, and moved into the Golden Age of Hollywood animation with Walt Disney’s many creations including Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and Popeye. The 1950s through the 1980s brought the beginning of Saturday Morning Cartoons, perhaps the first visual art to which most children are exposed. Today, modern animation seems limitless with evolving computer technology, marked by the first fully computer generated feature film Toy Story. Animation now caters to adult audiences and appeals to the masses with niches such as Japanese Anime and stop motion animation like Wallace and Gromit. It is also incorporated into live action movies such as the Lord of the Rings series, blurring the lines between the two forms of cinema.

Animation comes with its share of sterotypes in America. Among them are a lack of being taken seriously and the opinion that animation is for kids. Actually, one might argue that the only difference between live cinema and an animated movie is the art of photography verses drawing, as Paul le Fou smartly pointed out on his blog Anima in 2007. It’s obvious that the business of animation is huge, and while I wasn’t able to track down what percentage of the movie industry is made up of animated films, a rush of other media outlets using animation come to mind - video and computer games, advertisements and all news outlets. Indiana even boasts its own animation genius Jim Davis, father of Garfield the cat.

Focusing on the science of animation, a local exhibition at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, called Animation, traces the process of creating a cartoon from storyboarding to design, voice recording and final editing with interactive features. The Cartoon Network brings the exhibit to life with characters from The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo and others. This one is sure to intrigue all ages.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Friday night film series Summer Nights includes its own animation magic. Each film is preceded by a cartoon featuring one of your favorites (Mine? Pepe LePew!):

Gilda - Cartoon: Hare-Raising Hare
This is Spinal Tap - Cartoon: Rabbit’s Kin
The Goonies - Cartoon: Devil May Hare
Glory - Cartoon: Bunker Hill Bunny
The Rocky Horror Picture Show -
Cartoon: Water, Water Every Hare
The Mummy - Cartoon: The Rabbit of Seville
The Big Lebowski - Cartoon: Don’t Give Up the Sheep
Strangers on a Train - Cartoon: Baton Bunny
Devil in Blue Dress - Cartoon: Bugs & Thugs
Dr. Strangelove - Cartoon: Duck Amuck
Sholay - Cartoon: Ballot Box Bunny
Ghostbusters - Cartoon: Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, starring Daffy Duck
Click here for a full schedule of Summer Night films.

Maybe it’s time American culture takes a cue from Japan and embraces the Kung Fu Panda with the respect he deserves.

TONIGHT: Catch the last night of The Animation Show, featuring new independent animation, at Key Cinemas Filmworks tonight at 7:00 pm and 8:30 pm. “This year Mike Judge has gathered together over two dozen of his favorite funny short films from around the world. It’s a ground breaking program of eye-popping adult animation from tomorrow’s next great animators. This isn’t a dirty “adults only” animation show, but the program does skew towards a mature audience with some explicit language and adult subject matter.”

I’ve always been at the mercy of this terrible, wonderful flick.  My dad took me to see it, on the first day of summer after my fourth grade year.  We were late; I think we came in during the “Summer Nights” number.  We both liked the visual geometry of the dances, the buoyant froth of the songs.

My friends and I started going in packs.  We saw it at the drive-in, the way it was meant to be seen.  We staged sock hops.  One 9-year-old dressed up like a version of Sandy in fishnet hose and a leotard and rode around the neighborhood on her banana seat bike.  Years later my friend made me this kitschy Grease mirror, a true piece of folk art:

Don’t get me started on the centrifugal force of Travolta’s hips as he snakes around the white car during “Greased Lightnin’.”  Or the carnival Shake Shack scene, where John and Olivia shimmy in black against a colorful planar backdrop worthy of Mondrian.  I’ve always loved sad Danny and the phallic hot dog scene.  And the strange appeal of Crater Face.

Just two years after Grease arrived, MTV was born, and the Spandex Revolution began.  Children of the 80’s will also find much to love about this year’s Summer Nights line up, which includes The Goonies and Ghostbusters.  The movie schedule was built around four categories we conceived: Stylish Danger (i.e. Gilda); Alternate Universes (Dr. Strangelove), Dark Humor (The Big Lebowski), and Mad Musicals (Rocky Horror).

We also paid close attention to what cartoon goes with what movie.  I’m particularly looking forward to Rabbit’s Kin (1957), starring Pete the Puma, an underappreciated Warner Bros. character.  Watch for Pete before This is Spinal Tap on June 20.

Leave me your raves and rants about Grease—or Summer Nights ’08.

Next Thursday, June 5, at 6:00 pm, you can come to the IMA and catch a documentary called Helvetica. Yep—it’s a whole 80 minutes of font porn. Director Gary Hustwit premiered the documentary on the fiftieth anniversary of the ubiquitous typeface, prevalent in urban centers everywhere for its clean, communicative ease. Think of the “el” signs in Chicago.

My husband couldn’t believe there was a whole film about one font. What’s the plot, he asked, an epic smackdown between Helvetica and Times New Roman, while crazy Comic Sans plots to sabotage them all? Sort of, I replied. Fonts are dramatic. They harbor visual memories (the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup font is childhood itself), deftly evoke history (from 1930s Art Deco to the Wild West), and keep social systems flowing (imagine a green highway sign in Freestyle Script…there would be wrecks galore).

Thursday night’s film screening is presented in collaboration with the IMA Design Arts Society and the AIGA Indy (local chapter of the American Institute for Graphic Arts) – two groups working to raise the design bar in our city.

Helvetica is part of a Design Film Series at IMA that continues June 12—with a selection of short films from the Ray & Charles Eames industrial design empire. Grandson Eames Demetrios will fly by to introduce the films. Then on June 19, come see a film about Sir John Soane, a 19th century English architect who influenced 20th century architecture whizzes such as Philip Johnson and Michael Graves.

All films start at 6:00 in DeBoest Lecture Hall and are free. See you there. But meanwhile, feed the font beast and leave me a comment about your psychological adventures with typeface.