And here’s the newly released trailer for Disney’s Bolt.

Here is the trailer for Universal’s CG adaptation of the children’s book The Tales of Despereaux. Sam Fell (Flushed Away) is directing, but the production has had a troubled history with earlier directors including Sylvain Chomet (Triplets of Belleville) and Mike Johnson (The Corpse Bride). Chomet told an interviewer about his decision to leave the film: “As the budget got bigger, the studio wanted a less dark, more commercial story and it wasn’t what I wanted to make.” Chomet’s wife and business partner, Sally, added, “We had barely finished a character sketch and its potential as a plastic toy was being assessed.”

(Thanks, Jakob for trailer link)

The professional critics have had their say (a huge 98% positive on Rotten Tomatoes). Now it’s your turn to weigh in with an opinion of Pixar’s latest feature film and short subject.

The purpose of this post is to solicit readers opinions of Wall•E and Presto. Please respond below only if you’ve actually seen the film (we will not post comments here by those who have not).

Several years ago I curated a program of CinemaScope cartoon shorts from the 1950s, which I screened at the Ottawa Animation Festival, the Museum of Modern Art and several other venues. While researching the subject, I came upon a small article by Ward Kimball, from Films In Review (March 1954), in which he discusses the subject.

Kimball makes several interesting points referencing his work on Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and shows the thought Disney’s animators put into using this unique, new screen shape. Kimball notes how wide shots and longer scenes play better in wide screen and how, in CinemaScope, “cartoon characters no longer perform in one spot against a moving background, but are moved through the scenes.” He also makes note of the use of directional Stereophonic sound used in these shorts. (Grand CanyonScope will be released letterboxed and in stereo on the forthcoming Disney Treasures: Donald Vol. 4 later this year).

Kimball’s piece is preceeded by an overview by writer Ed Lubin entitled “Disney Is Still Creative”(!) which touts the studio’s relevancy during the changing animation scene of the early 50s. Click on the thumbnails below to read both articles.

Big news for New York anime fans: acclaimed Japanese animation director Satoshi Kon (Paprika, Perfect Blue, etc.) is coming to New York City this week to personally host a retrospective of his films for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Kon will be participating in an onstage interview opening night, Friday June 27th, to kick off the series, and will be introducing all the films for the duration of the screenings (June 27-July 1).

This is an incredible opportunity to meet one of the modern masters of anime. For more information on this series, Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination, and to purchase tickets go to the Walter Reade Theatre website.

The CalArts Character Animation Department is looking for a new program director. Here’s the job listing. The CalArts grad who sent us this link added in his email:

“As an alum, I’ve grown somewhat disappointed with the level of ability graduating from the same department that raised me (don’t even get me started about last year’s Producers’ Show), so I have great hopes that whoever they get back in the school will do whatever it takes to restore its once sterling reputation.”

Dan Harmon, one of the writers of Kung Pu Panda, has written an entertaingly long rant about how much he disliked working on the film and particularly how much he disliked working with Jeffrey Katzenberg. Actually I’m not sure what’s more amusing: that Harmon hated working with Katzenberg so much or that he’s so damn clueless about the animation process. To begin the piece, Harmon expresses incredulity that some animated films are written with storyboards and not scripts: “First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.”

Here’s another choice excerpt:

“I came in about four writers into the process. It’s kind of hard to write a “better” scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.

“It’s harder than it sounds. Especially when the larger “bucket” that the movie is contained in cannot change: the fact that the story has to be about a panda who is informed he is the chosen one, destined to …beat up… a guy who has escaped from prison and who is spending the entire movie walking to town, in order to…try to beat him up, because that’s the prophecy. And I won’t spoil the movie, but the bad guy doesn’t win. Because he’s not destined to. But just to make sure he doesn’t win, and because there’s 70 minutes of time to kill before he gets there on foot, the panda is trained in the martial arts. it’s kind of like Karate Kid, but if Mister Miyogi had long ago banished the Kobras and was running the karate tournament.”

(via Seward Street)

According to Steve Hulett of the animation union Local 839, the execs at Sony are perplexed about why their films (Open Season, Surf’s Up) are underperforming at the box office:

“[Co-Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment] Amy Pascal asked animation executives why Pixar movies were doing so well and Sony Pictures Animation’s weren’t. This was a few months ago. A couple of the story artists who’d worked at other studios wrote up a little paper about what some other feature studios did, how they approached things. They passed it on to Penny and Sandy before those two left. Whether the paper got into Amy Pascal’s hands or not, I’ve got no idea …”

Of course, Pascal is the executive whose suggestion for improving Surf’s Up was to add “more poop,” but besides the obvious cluelessness, their problems can be boiled down to the lack of one key element in their films: vision. The films Sony produces, like those of many other studios, are filmmaking by committee. They have no coherent vision, voice or reason supporting them. They borrow a piece from Pixar, a bit from DreamWorks, and the result is a cobbled-together half-baked Frankenstein idea.

As much as I cringe at the DreamWorks animated features, I have to give credit to Jeffrey Katzenberg for sticking with an original and singular vision for the type of films his studio produces. For what it’s worth, he established the crass humor, celebrity-driven, parodic CGI style with Shrek in 2001. Look at the animated features that were released prior to Shrek and one doesn’t find a whole lot of similar films, though elements of this style were budding in Katzenberg’s Disney-era features. Katzenberg succeeded by doing something original that nobody else in animation was doing at the time, the very same thing that Pixar had done a few years earlier, with the primary difference being that Pixar’s formula was based on a foundation of artistic and narrative integrity.

Sony, on the other hand, seems to be headed down the same doomed path of Fox and Warner Bros. circa mid-’90s: copying the formulas of more successful studios with slight variations on their themes. There have been plenty of shake-ups at Sony Feature Animation in recent months, but I’ve yet to hear of anybody taking over their animation division who might encourage a shift towards an original direction.