Cartoon Brew

Wallace & Gromit Top The Annies

Aardman Animation's WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT won this year's ASIFA-Hollywood Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. Like the INCREDIBLES at last year's Annies, WALLACE & GROMIT dominated the feature categories, taking home ten awards in total, including best directing, music, character design, storyboarding, production design, character animation, voice acting and writing in a feature. The award for best television production went to Cartoon Network's STAR WARS: CLONE WARS II. Here is the complete list of winners.

Cartoon Brew Film of the Week: Eva Goes to Foreign

Something a bit different for our Cartoon Brew Film of the Week. EVA GOES TO FOREIGN is a 1-minute, 45-second UK-produced public service announcement aimed at dissuading women in Carribbean countries who might engage in drug trafficking. The film is a powerful example of the medium, showing how animation can effectively communicate difficult, serious ideas in a short amount of time.

The spot is also impressive for its distinctive graphic look, courtesy of the film's co-director and designer Neil Campbell Ross. The backgrounds have a painterly esthetic composed of solid swatches of color with no inked outline. The characters in front also have minimal use of line, with their bodies constructed of bold, colored forms. Both characters and backgrounds have highly abstracted light and shadows playing off their forms that really ties the piece together. Ross has previously done production design/illustration on films as diverse as ANTZ, THE CORPSE BRIDE, TARZAN II, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and Aardman's upcoming FLUSHED AWAY. I've been a big fan since discovering his work online and was surprised to find a piece of animation like EVA that so faithfully translates his style to film. You can see more of his work, including lots of development art for EVA, at his website NeilCampbellRoss.co.uk. Also be sure to check out his BLOG and his incredible development art for THE CORPSE BRIDE.

I asked Neil if he could provide a few background details on the film and here's what he wrote:

It is a public information short commisioned by FPWP/HIBISCUS, a voluntary organisation that works with drug offenders in the U.K. The story was conceived by Tass Darlington and is based on her interviews with Jamaican women doing time in British prisons for trafficking in hard drugs. It is now being shown on cable and local TV stations in the English-speaking Caribbean countries. Its purpose is to dissuade the kind of vulnerable individual, who gets lured into trafficking, from making the wrong move. The design 'style' I would call graphic—realistic. The characters and their settings had to be believable for the intended audience. The sad story is an abbreviated but accurate account of how a young Jamaican woman—EVA—becomes a 'drug mule' and the tragic consequences for herself and her family.

My initial designs and all backgrounds were done in Photoshop. The animation was roughed in traditionally—pencil on paper—then cleaned up in Flash and composited in After Effects. The tight soul-reggae music track is by Paul Maxx and Deep Rooted Production. Eva's beautiful Jamaican patois is spoken by Susan Lawson-Reynolds. Script by Mark Holloway. Adapted by Leone Ross. Co-direction is by myself and Richard Burdett for ANIMAGE FILMS.

EVA GOES TO FOREIGN can be viewed HERE, courtesy of Uli Meyer Studios, where the film's animation was produced.

ANNIE AWARDS

Quick reminder: Tomorrow afternoon, ASIFA-Hollywood's ANNIE AWARDS ceremony at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Anything that brings together Brad Bird, Corny Cole and William Shatner has to be good. Highly recommended!

STORMY NIGHT

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.

THE THREE STOOGES

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.

TONIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD

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).

More Thoughts about Disney-Pixar

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)."

FORGOTTEN ANIMATOR TOM JOHNSON

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.

NYT OP-ED ON DISNEY-PIXAR

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.

PEUR[S] DU NOIR

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 Angoulême and it will run through August 2006. My friend, French comic writer and novelist David Calvo, saw the exhibit last week while at Angoulême 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.

Disney's The Wild

This recent GLOBE AND MAIL story reveals that the cost of Disney's upcoming THE WILD was $80 million. Judging from the film's nearly unwatchable TRAILER, an $80 million budget is not enough to do the following:

- have characters speak with decent lip sync
- plant a character's feet firmly on the ground so it doesn't look like it's floating
- create a production design that marries characters and backgrounds in a manner that doesn't disturb viewers

I don't know whether the $80 million figure is taking into account the decade-long cost of when the film was being developed at Disney, but clearly the $80 million budget isn't showing up in the finished film. Despite the good news that came out of last week's deal with Pixar, Disney will be unable to avoid the impending embarassment of this film when it's released in April.

If the powers that be were smart, they'd bury this film and bury it deep. The Disney animation brand is suffering enough nowadays without films like THE WILD exacerbating the situation. The wisest bet would be for Disney to hire the WB folks who were responsible for marketing THE IRON GIANT. That'll guarantee nobody ever sees THE WILD.

Project Firefly Article

There's a worthwhile article in today's ORLANDO SENTINEL about Project Firefly, an independent animation studio created out of the wreckage of Disney Feature Animation in Orlando. The studio recently produced 25% of the outsourced animation on the upcoming CURIOUS GEORGE picture, and is developing its own projects like the TV series FARM FORCE.

OSCAR SHORT NOMINEES

And the nomineees are:

Badgered (A National Film and Television School Production) Sharon Colman
The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation John Canemaker and Peggy Stern
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello Anthony Lucas
9 (UCLA Animation) Shane Acker
One Man Band (Pixar Animation Studios) Andrew Jimenez and Mark Andrews

Congratuations to all the nominees, particularly to our friends at Pixar and John Canemaker. This is a fine set of nominees. Here's my quick take on the films:

BADGERED is the "laugh" film. The quickest way to an Oscar nomination (and sometimes a win) is to produce a film that has some big laughs. BADGERED is about a sleepy badger who lives in a mountain that becomes a nuclear missile silo. It's no more original than an old Barney Bear cartoon, but it's nicely drawn and very very funny.
THE MOON AND THE SON is Canemakers powerful autobiographical account of his relationship with his father. Strong, absorbing, skillful—and clearly hard for the Academy to ignore.
JASPER MORELLO is an amazing half-hour fantasy "mini-feature" done with some combination of silhouette cut-outs and CG (or for all I know, it's entirely CG). Beautifully art directed, great Jules Verne-esque story, and produced at very high level of craft.
Shane Acker's "9" is supposedly a student film produced at UCLA—but it's an extremely well made, slick, professional piece of science fiction filmmaking. Excellent CG art direction and animation.
ONE MAN BAND is another great Pixar short—as lavish and handsome as any of their feature films, and just as clever. Produced in widescreen CinemaScope, BAND once again shows the range of subject matter and the strong character animation talent the studio is known for.

UPDATE: Our friend Steve Segal weighs in on "9": I attended Shane Acker's talk at Siggraph and he wasn't really a student when he made 9. He had already worked on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as an animator. And I believe he was working at Rhythm & Hues at the time. He had gone to UCLA years ago and went back to take advantage of their equipment. That in no way deminishes his achievement; it is basically a one man operation with the help of some friends (no small feat to compete with Pixar).

OSCAR FEATURE NOMINEES - NO CG

The nominees are:

Howl’s Moving Castle (Buena Vista) Hayao Miyazaki
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (Warner Bros.) Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (DreamWorks Animation SKG) Nick Park and Steve Box

CG was shut out. Big smile on my face...

This is a great list of nominees. I thought the hand-drawn HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE was one of Miyazaki's best (though I know many who disagree with me on that), the puppets of TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE took the craft of stop-motion animation to the heights of the art, and WALLACE AND GROMIT combined storytelling, character animation, and big laughs into a feature-length adventure with skill and charm. I loved them all—but may the best man, dog and rabbit win.

Daily Show Does Disney-Pixar

The DAILY SHOW looks at the Disney-Pixar merger, and they take good shots at Jobs, Iger, Randy Newman and Pixar's films, all in two minutes. Good stuff.

2006 Animation Predictions

Better late than never. Here are a few thoughts from your Brewmasters—Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi—about what might happen in animation during 2006. It'll be difficult to top the excitement of last week's Disney-Pixar deal, but we think there's still room for other interesting things to develop during the next eleven months.

FILM
→ 2006 will be the great shake-out of computer animated features. More CG films are planned for release in 2006 than ever before, and most of them (at first glance) range in quality from mediocre to awful. As we earlier noted HERE, there are at least eight films planned for 2006 release that are about a group of anthropomorphic animals on a grand adventure. Throw in FOODFIGHT, MONSTER HOUSE and YANKEE IRVING, and it's a virtual guarantee that there's going to be a lot of animated flops this year. We feel that these poorly conceived, hastily executed, unoriginal CG features will erode the cachet of CG animation, while at the same time leveling the playing field and creating new and exciting opportunities for films of different techniques, styles and stories.

→ Pixar's CARS will be the most financially successful animated feature of 2006. CARS may not be the envelope-pushing artistic achievement of THE INCREDIBLES, but it looks like solid entertainment. Furthermore, the weak slate of animated films this year will only will reaffirm Pixar's dominance in the field of computer animation, and remind us why the studio has yet to fail at the box office.

→ Los Angeles, which used to be the only major center of feature animation production, is increasingly losing that distinction. Feature production has been slowly moving northward for a number of years. Pixar and Dreamworks/PDI are already producing animated features in the Bay Area. Now, the Orphanage and Wild Brain are joining them in 2006, and the Bay Area is on its way to becoming a major center of feature animation production. A little further north in Portland, Laika is also staffing up for feature production, and the feature industry is becoming less LA-centric than ever before.

TV
→ If a 20-year-veteran of the cable industry and the president of the #1-rated kids' network (Nickelodeon) resigns from his post, wouldn't the number #2 and #3 kids cable networks be lining up to grab him, no matter what the cost? The reality is that Herb Scannell is either talking to (or already has a deal with) Disney Channel or Cartoon Network to become the new boss. Both are rumored to be undergoing major shake-ups this year. With Jobs and Lasseter in control at Disney, Scannell at Disney Channel seems like a perfect fit. If not CN or the Mouse, where then? Perhaps Comcast. The cable giant has long announced plans to create new cable channels using its programming content acquired as a result of the Sony-MGM merger. Herb could come in and launch a slew of new networks for cable, Internet and broadcast TV. Wherever Herb lands, he'll do a great job. A beloved creative exec with a proven track record won't be idle for too long.

→ "Adult Swim" will spin-off into its own channel by the end of the year, due to changing cable laws and the "a la carte"-ization of the cable industry. Cartoon Network proper will continue its decline, if not in ratings then in quality of programming. Once a powerhouse of 'creator-driven' animation, it has increasingly lost its focus and sense of direction. There is so much confusion that the network has taken to screening live-action programming in recent months. The network's vice president of development, Sam Register, recently stepped down from his post, highlighting the internal turmoil and lack of clear consistent direction for the network.

→ The new CW Network (combining the WB and UPN) could have had a Saturday Morning combining Nickelodeon cartoons (recently ousted from the CBS Saturday Morning schedule), Kids' WB! animation and Cartoon Network originals. The combined Viacom and Warner Bros. Animation library is a goldmine of classic cartoon greatness: Looney Tunes, Terrytoons, and Tex Avery to name but a few. Just imagine a new special featuring Spongebob beating the crap out of Coconut Fred, or THE MIGHTY HEROES taking on the LOONATICS—now that would be worth getting up early for. But forget about that. Word on the street is that Kids' WB! alone will continue to supply the Saturday morning block with its own brand of derivative pap. We do hope they will at least allow us to see the thirteen half hours of new TOM & JERRY TALES which WB Animation produced last year for foreign broadcast and is otherwise sitting on the shelf. And CBS has announced a Saturday morning schedule that sounds like an acid flashback to 1975: ARCHIE, SABRINA, THE LITTLES, INSPECTOR GADGET and STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE. The entire line-up produced by DiC. If someone had told us 20 years ago that Filmation and Hanna Barbera would be gone and that DiC would produce an entire Saturday morning network schedule, we'd never have believed it. The bottom line: We predict low Saturday morning ratings for CBS and CW—while the dedicated cable channels continue to dominate the children's cartoon market.

BLOGGING
→ We previously labeled 2004 "the year of the animation blog" and the summer of 2005 as the "animation artist's blog renaissance." What will 2006 be? There is little doubt that blogs will continue to grow in importance within the animation community. Moving beyond a place for showcasing art and sharing opinions, blogs will increasingly become a vital networking tool. Blogs are connecting animation artists all over the globe in ways previously unimaginable, allowing talented artists from around the world to show their artwork to the rest of the animation industry and receive instant feedback on their work. Future animated productions will benefit by having an entire world of talent to choose from, with blogs becoming a modern, more efficient, form of the portfolio. Also, in the second half of 2005, many animation bloggers began adding video to their sites, including Seward Street and Nick Cross, and the video trend will only grow in 2006.