Red Tails is a new action-packed flick from Lucasfilm about the Tuskegee Airmen, the African-American Army Air Corps underdogs that fought “against all odds and became heroes” in World War II. Interesting side note, the Airmen’s aerial dog fights are what inspired George Lucas to create the Star Wars space battles. The movie, directed by Anthony Hemingway and starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Bryan Cranston, opens in theatres on January 20, 2012.

1944. To help win the war, the Pentagon brass has no choice but to consider the untested African-American pilots of the experimental Tuskegee training program.

Just as the young Tuskegee men are about to be shut down and shipped back home, they are given the ultimate chance to show their courage. These intrepid young airmen take to the skies to fight for their country – and the fate of the free world.

USA Today recently talked with executive producer George Lucas on why it took 23 years to make this movie and why it’s self-financed:

“Food Will Win The War” is a World War II animated propaganda film about the agricultural productivity of America, created by Disney animators in 1942. The film emphasizes the scale of American agriculture with some rather odd examples—for instance if the entirety of American corn production were fashioned into one giant ear, it would extend from London to the Black Sea (“and that hangs right over your head, Adolf”).

via Super Punch

We recently posted about a powerful photo essay and documentary project by photographer Brian McCarty called WAR-TOYS. Brian has traveled to various Middle East war zones to photograph and film children making art about their experiences growing up in turmoil. He is now begun a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to help continue his efforts there.

Completing WAR-TOYS will not be possible without your support. For the project, I must travel to areas of conflict and immerse myself in diverse communities, working with humanitarian organizations to observe and collaborate with local children. It will take more time and resources than most independent artists can bear.

Every $20,000 that I’m able to raise buys me approximately three weeks of time in the Middle East to work. While it’d be amazing to raise enough to complete the twelve week project in one, extended trip, I’ll be grateful for any opportunity to continue my work one step at a time.

I believe in this project, enough to empty my savings, max-out credit cards, and put wedding plans on hold.

Brian has worked with package designer Hugh Brown to create a wonderful limited-edition series of incentive folios for donating to the Kickstarter campaign.

…the folios are housed in surplus, French military medical kits, specially repurposed. Each one is unique, inside and out. Their heavy steel cases have been filled with pieces of 7200 plastic army men, suspended in resin to form shelves for the archival prints. Each print from the edition of 50 is signed and numbered on the back. Each folio case is numbered with an engraved metal plate and includes a Certificate of Authenticity.

“Cardboard Warfare 2″ by Clinton Jones, the long awaited sequel to “Cardboard Warfare”.

A squad from Cardboard Company is sent to locate and kill a Nazi Officer responsible for the deaths of countless American lives.

via The High Definite

London-based Hasraf HaZ Dulull created Fubar, a motion comic film short depicting the “on-going political war…with cats and dogs”, using a combination of still photography and animation using The Foundry’s NUKEX 3D effects tool. His “making of” video is worth a look too.

Two factions who have been at war with each other for centuries finally come to an agreement for a form of peace, but there are certain higher political powers which would do anything to prevent this historic event from happening.

via Short of the Week

images & photo via Hasraf HaZ Dulull

Kamikaze Swimmers Finally Reach Pearl Harbor

via David Klass

image via The Onion

In just three minutes and six lines, this film short, Porcelain Unicorn by director Keegan Wilcox, packs a real emotional punch. The film won the Grand Prize in 2010 for the Philips Parallel Lines “Tell It Your Way” international competition and is about a young German boy who has a heart when it comes to a Jewish girl hiding in a storage closet during the Holocaust.

via Petapixel

Flower bombing is now made fun and easy! With the motto, Throw and Grow, the Flower Grenade originally began as a 2008 concept piece called BioGrenade in biodegradable paper from designer Tony Minh Nguyen. UK’s Snowhome, a design retailer, began creating them in smashable unfired clay with manufacturer and distributor suckUK. While the grenades may unintentionally promote hippie vandalism, they are available to purchase at Snowhome.

Gardening’s gone guerilla – You’ve seen them, you may have looked away, but you’ve seen them. Those forgotten areas of the estate, left to fall apart and fall into disrepair. The municipal scrubland where nothing can grow… Or can it? Turn the concrete jungle into a wilderness with our compacted wild flower seed grenades.

via Technabob

photo by Snowhome

The year was 1944 and WWII pilot Maj. Claude Hensinger narrowly escaped death when he jumped out of an enflamed B-29 bomber plane. He used his parachute as a pillow and to keep warm while he was waiting to be rescued. Just a few years later in 1947, Hensinger proposed to girlfriend Ruth and offered up the life-saving parachute keepsake as the fabric to create her wedding gown. Inspired by the costume dresses from Gone With the Wind, Ruth and a local seamstress created this striking wedding gown that has now earned a spot in the prestigious Smithsonian National Museum of American History collection.

photo by Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Freddie Wong shows how badass cat Mr. Meowmers won the medal of honor.

Known best for his still-life toy photographs, friend Brian McCarty is now taking a more serious direction with the WAR-TOYS project by documenting the experiences of children living in Middle East war zones and their art. Brian includes the children in the entire process, from making the (often grim) art to helping the photograph and film the project. The WAR-TOYS work-in-progress trailer is a smart and touching account of how the project came to be and why the work is important and relevant.

WAR-TOYS is a work-in-progress photo essay and documentary film by Brian McCarty. Using Brian’s unique toy photography and principles of play and art therapy, the project explores firsthand accounts of war from the perspective of children living in its day-to-day reality. Working through local humanitarian organizations in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, WAR-TOYS focuses on the latest generation of Israelis and Palestinians that has never known an existence without the constant threat of rocket attacks, air strikes, gunfire, explosions, and incursions.

photos by War Toys Project and McCarty Photoworks

See Also:

- Art-Toys, A New Book of Toy Photography by Brian McCarty
- 2008 Wall Calendar Featuring Brian McCarty’s Toy Photography
- Plastic Fantastic Featuring Brian McCarty’s Toy Photography
- Laughing Squid: Decade 2 Poster by Brian McCarty
- Laughing Squid Photo by Brian McCarty
- Brian McCarty

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Isaiah, a 10-year old Chihuahua dressed as General George Patton at the Rolling Thunder rally in Washington DC.

via Archie McPhee & The Telegraph

photo via Getty Images

“Casualties of War” by the UK-based Dorothy Collective is a disturbing series of plastic toy soldier figurines that shows some of the troubles that await returning American veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The figurines are inspired by articles in the Colorado Springs Gazette and the New York Times about the plight of these American veterans.

The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazette published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A separate investigation into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.

via who killed bambi?

photos via Dorothy Collective

You might know about the War Dogs, but cats can also play a significant role in military operations. Slate takes an inside look at The Pentagon’s top-secret feline special-operations program.

Canadian troops show a creative way to make coffee in Afghanistan while under combat conditions.

via The Daily What

“Day at the Beach” by Travis Kurtz of comedy group Zeke Mahogany tells the story of a Frenchman’s visit to the beach on June 6, 1944, aka D-Day.

Frank Buckles, the last surviving US World War I veteran, has died at 110 years of age.

Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the United States entered the “war to end all wars” in April 1917. He was repeatedly rejected before convincing an Army captain he was 18. He was actually 16 1/2.

submitted by Graeme Wagoner-Lynch via The New York Times

photos via The Library of Congress

Lego Black Ops by Keshen

[via The High Definite]

“Germans in the Woods” by the Rauch Brothers on StoryCorps

86-year-old World War II veteran Joseph Robertson fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Over 60 years later, he still can’t forget one soldier he killed there.

via Daily Animation

90 year-old Jack tells the story of an amazing experience he had during World War II.

via Upper Playground

“Flower Warfare”, a psychedelic action scene by Freddie Wong, where instead of bullets, guns shoot flowers.

Here’s the behind-the-scenes video showing how it was made.

Freddie Wong is the guy who made the awesome “Light Warfare” video in June.

via Nerdcore

An epic battle is fought with cardboard weapons in “Cardboard Warfare” by Clinton Jones

via reddit

We hear about them often; there is visibility in our culture when it comes to soldier casualties in Iraq, but civilian casualties remain largely invisible — in the media at least, but not in life. Iraqi performance artist Wafaa Bilal is planning to literally turn his body into a permanent work that will have him making these casualties painfully visible, and he will carry the legacy of civilian deaths in Iraq with him the rest of his life. In effect, Bilal already does this, having lost his brother to a checkpoint missile in 2004. Starting at 8pm on March 8th at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC, Bilal will begin the first 24 hours of …and Counting, where he will get tattooed for each American and Iraqi civilian casualty, film the process, and is endeavoring to livestream the performance. Bilal’s artist statement reads:

…and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body – in a 24-hour live performance — into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.

Also, Bilal is asking each visitor to donate $1 which will go to the group Rally for Iraq, to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war. Based on official numbers of casualties, one dollar for each would mean $105,000 in scholarship money.

When: 8pm March 8 to 8pm March 9, 2010
Where: Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
Blackburn 20/20
323 W39th Street 5th Floor NY, NY 10018

via We Make Money Not Art

In honor of Veterans Day, mental_floss has a heartwarming round-up of super excited dogs greeting soldiers returning home.

via Boing Boing

The great folks over at Boing Boing Video and guest-host Todd Lappin recently went on an epic exploration of one of the world’s largest personal collections of military vehicles. The Military Vehicle Technology Foundation is a museum of tanks, armored cars, and all sorts of things that defy simple classification. The majority of the collection, if not all of it, came from Jacques Littlefield, a self made millionaire that had good taste in rides.

Mr. Littlefield’s interest in tanks was largely technical, not based on their military or historical significance. His collection was not open to the public, but he gave private tours to about 4,000 historians, Boy Scouts, journalists and veterans a year.

“There’s nothing like it,” said Hans Halberstadt of San Jose, an author of several military history books who frequently brought fellow historians to see Mr. Littlefield’s collection. “He gathered these machines and made them available for study. And he was brilliant at understanding how they worked. I really respected him.”

By studying tanks, historians and engineers can learn how various designs worked under differing battle conditions and how each model balanced mobility, armor and fire power, Halberstadt said.

Jacques has recently shuffled off his mortal coil, but his passion and collection lives on. While he left them a hefty endowment, they do accept public support and will arrange tours for the interested.

Finally, this video was made possible through Dorkbot SF organizer Karen Marcelo, who reminds us that June 2009 is the 7th anniversary of Dorkbot SF! Jon Sarriugarte is hosting a big 7th Anniversary Party on June 20th, 2009, featuring more oil punk than you can shake a dipstick at.