The LA TIMES tore painter Thomas Kinkade a new one with yesterday’s article about his crude behavior and shady business practices. As far as I’m concerned, Kinkade is to fine art what Shag is to “pop surrealism”: a mediocre and formulaic artist who has tapped into a very specific market and fooled that fanbase into believing that his work has skill and competence. The piece mentions that Kinkade had worked in animation prior to becoming a ‘fine artist’, which is something I wasn’t aware of. A quick search online reveals that he was a background painter on Ralph Bakshi’s FIRE AND ICE (1983). The TIMES piece also has this anecdote about Kinkade’s “territory marking” habits:

And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

“This one’s for you, Walt,” the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade’s company, in an interview.

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Congrats to our friend John Canemaker for winning the Best Animated Short Oscar, for his film THE MOON AND THE SON: AN IMAGINED CONVERSATION, and to Nick Park, Steve Box and Aardman for winning Best Animated Feature for WALLACE AND GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT. Interesting to note that neither winner was CG: one is a hand-drawn film and the other stop motion. Great animation can be produced with any technique, despite what industry executives would like you to believe.

The biggest animation event of 2007 - in the United States - was formally announced this weekend.The Platform International Animation Festival will make its debut in Portland, Oregon during June 25-30th 2007 and its goal is to become America’s version of Annecy and Zagreb - an international animation competition with retrospectives, panels and special events. The festival has just opened offices in Portland and North Hollywood and has already started preliminary plans for programming and publicity. And they are off to a good start.Animation producer Irene Kotlarz has been appointed Festival Director. Irene was Director of the Cambridge, Bristol, and Cardiff International Animation Festivals in Britain. Marilyn Zornado, animator and producer at Will Vinton Studios, is Festival Coordinator. A website will debut this summer. Cartoon Network has signed on to financially back this event.Personally, I’m very excited about this project. An annual U.S. animation festival has proven difficult to maintain without the kind of government support international festivals regularly receive. Having been involved with several Los Angeles Animation Celebrations, and as a guest programmer at Annecy and Ottawa, I know the hard work that will be involved here. Amid and I have been in contact with Irene and Marilyn and plan to have some role in planning tributes and retrospectives.To be continued…

Tomorrow night is Oscar night and nothing seems as certain as the WALLACE & GROMIT win. However, the only suspense around here is for who will win the award for animated short. They are all outstanding, and the winner will seem obvious in hindsight.John McElwee on his Greenbriar Picture Shows blog takes an affectionate look at how RKO and MGM touted their Oscar winning cartoon characters with ads in Hollywood trade magazines 60 years ago.

A must-see: live-action SIMPSONS opening from the UK’s Sky TV.

Finally, an animation executive salary increase that’s actually deserved.

Anime has arrived in Iraq, otaku will follow.

Nick Park on the Oscars: We’re animators, we’re not used to getting out of our dark studio and meeting real people, let alone glamorous and attractive ones

CNN does an article about all the crap CG-animated features scheduled for release in 2006. “Hollywood has never been bashful about its own competence,” says Dennis McAlpine, an independent media analyst. “If studios see somebody else do something, they think they can do it better. But it’s not as simple as it looks — the story has to attract people.”

This interview with Bob Iger is an interesting read. He discusses the Pixar acquisition at some length, and says that in his five months as Disney CEO, the Pixar deal is “what I’m most proud of.” The interview also lays out his three strategic priorities for Disney:

1. Creating great content.
2. Applying technology in the creation and distribution of your businesses.
3. Growing internationally, in terms of both expanding Disney’s businesses around the world and changing the notion that Burbank has a monopoly on creativity.

(via Animated-News)

University Press of Mississippi has two great new Disney books coming out in the next few months. Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records by Tim Hollis and Greg Ehrbar, is an appreciative overview of the oft-overlooked Disney record company.

The book chronicles for the first time the fifty-year history of the Disney recording companies launched by Walt Disney and Roy Disney in the mid-1950s, when Disneyland Park, Davy Crockett, and the Mickey Mouse Club were taking the world by storm. The book provides a perspective on all-time Disney favorites and features anecdotes, reminiscences, and biographies of the artists who brought Disney magic to audio. Authors Tim Hollis and Greg Ehrbar go behind the scenes at the Walt Disney Studios and discover that in the early days Walt Disney and Roy Disney resisted going into the record business before the success of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” ignited the in-house label. Mouse Tracks reveals the struggles, major successes, and occasional misfires. Included are impressions and details of teen-pop princesses Annette Funicello and Hayley Mills, the Mary Poppins phenomenon, a Disney-style “British Invasion,” and a low period when sagging sales forced Walt Disney to suggest closing the division down.

The book is loaded with performer biographies, reproductions of album covers and art, and facsimiles of related promotional material. It’ll be out in May.The other book, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity by Thomas Andrae, will be published in July. This is a critical study of Barks’s work from a cultural perspective. Andrae analyzes all phases of Barks’s career from his work in animation to his postretirement years writing Junior Woodchucks stories. Barks is one of America’s greatest storytellers and, Andrae contends, “lifted the comic book form to the level of great literature.”