It’s beginning to look official. Britain’s TELEGRAPH is reporting today that Pixar’s board will meet on Monday to approve Disney’s $7 billion takeover bid. The deal would make Steve Jobs the single largest Disney shareholder. It’s a little too early to begin discussing the implications of what all this means, but this is truly as massive a shakeup in the animation world as could be imagined. At this point, it’s easy to see it going either way: either Lasseter and company will shine their creative light upon Disney helping to revitalize the Mouse’s slumbering animation division or Disney’s corporate bureaucracy will drag down Pixar with it and we’ll enter a new era of films like THE INCREDIBLES MEET WOODY AND BUZZ. One thing is for certain: there’s going to be a hell of a lot to talk about on the Brew here in 2006.

HOODWINKED writer/director Cory Edwards recently defended criticism of his film on Animation Nation. The primary purpose of Edwards’ post is he would like everybody to believe that the reason HOODWINKED looks the way it does is because of the film’s meager production budget combined with the inexperience of his Philippines production crew.

I initially wrote a lengthy response addressing his comments, but afterwards realized that my thoughts could basically be summed up in two brief ideas:

1.) The budget of HOODWINKED was not the primary barrier to its low artistic quality. Sylvain Chomet’s THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE was produced for a slight $8 million and Masaaki Yuasa’s recent masterpiece MIND GAME was produced for a similarly low figure. My favorite Bill Plympton feature, HAIR HIGH, was produced for well under $1 million. These films, however, were created by artists who understood the medium of animation and who wanted to exploit the unique possibilities inherent within the medium; the films were also created by artists who understood their budget going into the production, and the possibilities and limitations of what such a budget presented. If anything, a small budget can be a blessing that allows filmmakers the freedom to take creative risks that would not be possible on a big budget feature. But HOODWINKED lacks any such artistic motivation. The only vision behind this film, as far as one can tell from the finished results, is a shrewd opportunity to capitalize on the fairytale-skewering success of the SHREK franchise. The production was clearly set up to create a lame CG knockoff of SHREK, and not to create a distinctive animated film appropriate to the budget, like TRIPLETS, MIND GAME or HAIR HIGH.

2.) Edwards argues that the film wasn’t made by executives, but by struggling filmmakers. Yet, in true executive fashion, he blames the artists for the film’s shortcomings: “I KNOW the animation could be better! The film was made with the skill levels we had at the studio we could afford,” he says. Real artists don’t blame the other hard-working artists on their crew for their film’s shortcomings. In fact, the visual deficiencies of HOODWINKED originated long before the overseas studio ever got its hands on the film. In the latest issue of ANIMATION MAGAZINE, there are hand-drawn model sheets from the film, and the model sheets are as poorly designed as the CG characters in the film are modeled. In other words, the skill levels of the overseas artists seem to have been fine, and they did a good job of translating the designs to CG, but the artwork they had was weak to begin with. Similarly, the quality of animation was likely the result of the direction the overseas artists were receiving rather than their own doing. It’s disingenuous to blame the overseas production crew for problems that could have been addressed in pre-production if the filmmakers had had a more solid grasp of the animation medium.

Edwards says that the only way he can create something of artistic value is for somebody to give him more money. “If I direct more animation, my first choice will always be to make it in the U.S. and for a much bigger budget.” Perhaps first he could explain though why HOODWINKED looks the way it does when he already had a more than adequate budget to create a quality piece of animation.

Animation character designer and PIGTALE comic creator Ovi Nedelcu has just released a new book of his drawings and designs called DESENE: SKETCHES & SCRIBBLES. The full-color hardcover book is 104 pages and has a foreword by director Henry Selick. I haven’t seen the book yet, but I’ve always enjoyed Ovi’s work and I’m sure there’s solid work throughout. There’s a 10-page preview of the book HERE and it can be ordered at Amazon.com. Ovi will also be doing a signing in LA next Saturday, January 28, at Meltdown Comics from 6-8pm.

Story Boredom is a new blog with lots of great drawings by a bunch of feature storyboard artists. The artists use nicknames so it’s not clear who’s who, but one of the contributors seems to be the co-director of Disney’s HOME ON THE RANGE, John Sanford. Among the cool things worth seeing are these sketches by LILO & STITCH’s Chris Sanders.

Animator/director Norman McCabe passed away last Wednesday at age 94. McCabe had a long and impressive career in animation from animating on Clampett’s PORKY IN WACKYLAND (1938) to directing TV commercials in the 1950s at Swift Productions and TELE-mation to animating on the first Pink Panther short PINK PHINK (1964) to sheet timing on ANIMANIACS and FREAKAZOID. Between 1934 and 1999, McCabe worked at Schlesinger’s, Warner Bros., US Army Air Corps Training Film Unit, MGM, Swift Productions, Five Star Productions, Telemation, Pacific Title, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, DePatie-Freleng, Ruby-Spears, Filmfair, Marvel and Universal. Services will be held on Tuesday, January 24 at 10am at the Shadow Hills Presbyterian Church (10158 Johanna Ave., Sunland, CA 91040). Here are McCabe’s credits at IMDB and here’s a nice little write-up about Norm at Jaime Weinman’s blog.

UPDATE: Mark Evanier has posted some additional thoughts about McCabe on his blog NewsFromME.

For the third week in a row, our film of the week hails from France. Very much an unintended coincidence and we’ll certainly start highlighting films from other countries in the coming weeks. This week’s entry, CLIKCLAK is an excellent new student work from France directed by Aurélie Frechinos, Thomas Wagner and Victor-Emmanuel Moulin. A hi-res English version of the film can be found HERE. Like last week’s film TIM TOM, CLIKCLAK was made at the CG school Supinfocom.

For a computer animated short, CLIKCLAK shows a lot of visual restraint. The two robot characters have no color except for their bright blue and green eyes, and this spare use of color is further accentuated by the film’s plain greyscale backgrounds. The characters communicate not with spoken words, but rather with written words that flash across the screen. The written text is well integrated into the film, and serves as a unique visual element that complements the action, such as when the chandelier shakes or when the robots move up and down on the seesaw. Sound efx are also well designed and add a lot to the mood. Screenhead notes that the opening of CLIKCLAK may be a Rube Goldberg-esque nod to the recent Honda ad “Cog”.

Above is a fun painting by Brew pal Tom Neely celebrating Popeye’s 77th birthday today. Popeye first appeared as a character in the January 17, 1929 installment of the THIMBLE THEATRE comic strip by Elzie Segar. Despite the character’s enduring popularity, the bulk of the Popeye cartoons have never been released on any home video format. Here’s a PETITION you can sign to help bring the black-and-white Popeyes to dvd. And here’s an ARTICLE about Popeye’s birthday.

(click on images for larger versions)

NY-based studio Asterisk recently completed a thirty-five second piece for the Merchant Ivory film THE WHITE COUNTESS. The animation was created in an authentic Chinese brushwork style. It was produced and directed by Richard O’Connor and Brian O’Connell, designed by Handong Quan, and animated by Doug Compton, Ed Smith and Winnie Tom. The two images in this post are concept pieces from the production. I haven’t seen the finished animation, but Richard tells me that the production art doesn’t stray too far from this original vision.