Yet another foreign animated feature that has almost no chance of being distributed in the U.S., here’s the trailer for a new anime feature called STORMY NIGHT.

Most of us who love cartoons also have a love for The Three Stooges. Even those cheap TV cartoons made in the 1960s fascinate me. Steve Cox and Jim Terry have a new book coming out next month focusing on Larry Fine. ONE FINE STOOGE: A FRIZZY LIFE IN PICTURES features Larry’s recently discovered private memorabilia collection - personal notes, clippings, interviews, correspondence, and a unique cache of memorabilia - published for the first time, thirty years after his passing. It also includes storyboards by Dave Detiege from the mid-1960s Cambria cartoons. Go to LarryFine.com for more information.

If you are in L.A. today, get yourself over to The El Capitan Theatre tonight for a screening of a newly restored LADY AND THE TRAMP, preceeded by a panel (at 7pm) with Andreas Deja, Stan Freberg, Eric Goldberg, songwriter Richard Sherman, Disney restoration man Theo Gluck and hosted by Oscar nominee John Canemaker. I’d never miss this, but I’m committed to my monthly film & music show at the Steve Allen Theatre (tonight at 8pm).

Many of the most insightful comments about the Disney-Pixar merger are not coming from the mainstream media, but rather from artists posting thoughts on their blogs. Here’s a few of the interesting posts that I’ve run across recently:

Animator Jeremy Bernstein believes the return of hand-drawn animation is inevitable at Disney, and he’s excited about that possibility.

Toon Baboon wants to see the studio return to its core fundamentals: hand-drawn animation, storytelling, timelessness, and innovation/exploration.

Photographer Daniel Sroka asks, Will Disney generate content or make art?: “Part of Disney’s problem of late is they have confused their business method (themepark, character licensing, etc.) for their mission (telling stories).”

Michael Sporn, on his excellent blog, has posted a bio of animator Tom Johnson from the October 1935 issue of Max Fleischer’s in-house publication Fleischer Animated News. Johnson isn’t discussed much, but he was one of the steady staffers at Fleischer (mainly on POPEYE) and Famous Studios. He also animated the original Jack-In-The-Box Paramount NOVELTOON opening of the 1940s.

We couldn’t state it any better than this: Neal Gabler in the New York Times today on the Disney-Pixar merger.

…the seeming conflict between Disney and Pixar was never about old technology bowing to new. It was about aesthetics and how technology best served them. …it isn’t C.G.I. itself that has made their films so wildly successful. Rather, it is the narrative craft with which those films were made. …Disney is doing something that perhaps no other corporation of this size has ever done: actively de-corporatizing itself. It is reassigning authority from the bureaucracy to a small group of creative individuals. It is, in short, trying to resurrect Walt Disney and his early hands-on management style.

Last month, we wrote about RENAISSANCE, a black-&-white French animated noir that’ll be released theatrically this Spring. Now there’s word of another very different French animated noir, also in black-&-white, that’ll be released in Winter 2006. PEUR[S] DU NOIR (AFRAID OF THE DARK), produced by Prima Linea Productions, seems to be largely a hand-drawn 2D film. It’s conceived as a FANTASIA of fear (my description) with seven short segments exploring the subject of fear, from the macabre to the comical. Each of the segments is designed and written by well known illustrators, comic authors and graphic designers. The artists involved are Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou & Romain Slocombe, Pierre di Sciullo, Dupuy & Berbérian, Lorenzo Mattotti & Jerry Kramsky, and Richard McGuire & Michel Pirus, under the artistic direction of Etienne Robial.

An exhibition about the making of the film opened last week at the Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image (CNBDI) in Angoul’me and it will run through August 2006. My friend, French comic writer and novelist David Calvo, saw the exhibit last week while at Angoul’me BD and says the show is well worth checking out.

The official PEUR[S] DU NOIR website offers only a brief glimpse of the film, but it looks quite promising. More details about the CNBDI exhibit can be found HERE.