Everyone’s favorite Japanese animation dubber and classic cartoon colorizer, Fred Ladd, is honored at his alma mater, Ohio State University. Read about it here.

Apparently Dreamworks Animation’s SHREK 2 has an estimated U.S. box office gross of over $125 million for its first five days of release.
Wow!

Another reason to get your hands on the issue of WIRED that Jerry mentions below is that my pal Jon Gibson has a nice piece in there about filmmaker Kyle Cooper, who is among a handful of modern film title designers on a par with Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro. Cooper talks about his new studio Prologue Films, which is an attempt to pull back and focus on fewer and higher quality projects than his previous design shop Imaginary Forces. The article also mentions a recently published monograph about Kyle Cooper (written by Andrea Codrington) which I’ve been meaning to pick up.

Does everybody here know about the latest issue of WIRED?On sale now, the June issue has a major article about PIXAR and Brad Bird.
It’s a must read. And it’s posted here.Great quote from Bird: Once Walt died, watching Disney films get made was like “watching master chefs cook hot dogs.”

The WEBSITE for the Ottawa Animation Festival (September 22-26, 2004) has just posted details for all of their screenings and retrospectives, and it’s pretty damn exciting. Kudos to artistic director Chris Robinson for putting together one of the most diverse and daring group of programs I’ve ever seen for an animation fest. The screenings range all the way from Soviet propaganda films to contemporary French animation, Popeye to Harvey Birdman, and Hayao Miyazaki to Robert Breer. There’s also original programming concepts like the “Words in Motion” series. Even the competition jury members are cool folk like Bill Plympton, Gary Baseman and Mo Willems. I’m honored to be the programmer for one of the tributes at this year’s Ottawa fest: the Fred Crippen Retrospective. This is the first major retrospective of Fred’s work, and if you only know him as the creator of ROGER RAMJET, then be prepared for an eye-opening experience. Fred will also be coming up to Ottawa to partake in the festivities.

Here is a FOLLOW-UP to this STORY from a few days ago about Pixar’s plans to expand their Emeryville campus. Unless the Emeryville City Council is mentally deficient, they’ll let Pixar keep their fence.

The talented Seonna Hong, whose BG paintings can be seen on MY LIFE AS A TEENAGE ROBOT and TEACHER’S PET, has a painting show that opens tomorrow evening, May 22, at the sixspace gallery (549 West 23rd Street in downtown LA). Sixspace owner Caryn Coleman writes about the show on her site art.blogging.la.

Here are four issues of UPA’s first comic book: Dell’s “GERALD McBOING BOING AND THE NEAR SIGHTED MR. MAGOO”. This series ran five issues in 1952-53 - then Dell published seven more issues of just plain “MR. MAGOO” spread out over the next decade. DC’s FOX & CROW outsold the Dell UPA comics no doubt, but for Columbia Pictures, Magoo & McBoing Boing brought more prestige at the box office - and that’s what counts!
Click over to Diamond Galleries’ Scoop to see the covers enlarged!