BREW ADVISORY: New CB Biz Editor

Chris ArrantWe are happy to announce that a new member has joined Cartoon Brew’s editorial team. Chris Arrant is the editor of CB Biz where he curates a daily collection of breaking news releases from across the industry. His addition to our editorial team addresses one of the most common requests we receive, which is to offer a broader spectrum of straight industry coverage. His posts can be conveniently accessed via the INDUSTRY HEADLINES box in the right-hand column.

A little more about him: Chris Arrant is a freelance writer specializing in comics, animation and film. In addition to being the editor of CB Biz for CartoonBrew.com, he writes about entertainment for Newsarama.com, MTVGeek.Com, CBR’s Robot 6 blog, iFanboy.com and Marvel’s Marvel Spotlight magazine and website. He is also a published comics writer, writing 2008’s Female Force: Princess Diana and doing stories in anthologies such as Tori Amos’ Comic Book Tattoo, 24seven Vol. 2 and Negative Burn.

Publicists may submit their press releases directly to Chris at the following e-mail: PR [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com

HOW-TO: Commenting on Cartoon Brew

During the past few months, we’ve experienced a triple fold increase in reader comments on Cartoon Brew which has meant a lot more moderation work for us. We appreciate and encourage your participation, but as a respectful community of animation lovers, we request that you follow a few basic guidelines. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with those guidelines HERE. Better yet, we’ll save you a click and just reprint them below:

* Comments are moderated and will not appear immediately on the site. Please be patient.

* Be considerate and respectful of others in the discussion. Defamatory, rude or unnecessarily antagonistic comments will be deleted.

* It is OK to post with a nickname or alias, but your email address (which we will NEVER share publicly), must be a real, permanent email address.

* Stay on-topic. Comments are not a place to post random thoughts, “say hi,” or discuss ideas not directly related to the post.

* Short comments that don’t add anything to the discussion (for example, “Blecch” or “This sucks”) may be deleted without comment. Also beware the word “meh”; we know you can do better than that.

* The comments are a place for discussion, not promotion. Self-links are okay if they’re acknowledged as such and are relevant to the discussion.

* A half-dozen comments on a single topic are unnecessary. Think about what you want to say and say it once. You can influence a discussion by the quality of your writing, not by how many times you repeat yourself.

* Spelling and grammar count. Numerous egregious spelling/grammatical errors will result in deletion of comment.

* Comments should NOT have signatures. There are fields provided for your name and the URL of your site right above the comment text area, so please don’t duplicate that info in your actual comment.

* If you are recommending or discussing something, disclose any relationship you may have to the artist, film project or company. This includes friends, family, co-workers, employers, etc.

* We reserve the right to edit or delete comments at our sole discretion.

NOTE: On rare occasions, your comments become caught in our spam filter and are inadvertently deleted. Unfortunately, due to the sheer volume of spam, sorting out legitimate comments is beyond our control. If your comments are persistently caught in our spam filtering system, please contact us via our tech support page and we’ll look into it.

Cartoon Brew is Seven!

Happy Birthday Cartoon Brew

We started Cartoon Brew seven years ago on this day. It started as an outlet for the two of us to share our unfiltered thoughts about animation with like-minded friends. Seven years later, we’ve stayed true to that mission, and stunningly, we get to share our passions as a full-time job with a group of friends larger than our wildest dreams. Thank you all.

– Jerry and Amid

Comment of the Day: “Ballad of Nessie” Production Notes

The Ballad of Nessie

Matt M, one of the artists who worked on Disney’s The Ballad of Nessie, commented with some helpful details about the production of the short:

This short film is based off of Stevie’s (one of the directors) ideas she had come up with while back at CalArts I believe. The style is meant to be flat. The character animation was traditionally done on paper as well as the cleanup. The effects were done using Toon Boom and were drawn on Cintiq’s the same way we did all of the effects on PATF. All ink and paint and comp was done in Toon Boom as well. I even used maya (3d) on a couple of shots but you would never know it by the way it was treated in Toon Boom. I believe Joe Mildenberger (2d efx) used After Effects with Toon Boom for one of the sequences with art direction based of Lorelay Bove’s work. Dan Lund set up the look of the effects with some scenes he did. It is a simple story and the style is simply done. Not everything needs all the bells and whistles. Enjoy the animation and enjoy the story from this film. Both go hand in hand and neither one of them tries to overshadow the other. This film was completed at the end of PATF and was a nice way to roll of a very busy film. Andy Harkness was the art director and was so great to work with as was everyone at Disney. People who dont work there or never have need to find out facts before they bash on a place. Does Disney have its problems, yes but at the same time it employs some of the most amazing people and I believe in time things will get to where they should be at Disney.

Thank you to our March Site Sponsors

It’s the time of month where we take a moment to thank the companies that are currently advertising on Cartoon Brew. Our major site sponsors for March 2011 are:

Animation Mentor

Amazon Studios

Max the Mutt Animation School

The Cinefamily

If your business is looking to reach the largest and most knowledgeable on-line community of animation pros, students and fans, please contact our friendly ad rep, Reachout Media.

Today on Cartoon Brew Biz

Just some of the stories you’ll find today on CB Biz:

* Dreamworks Animation Posts Profit in Q4 2010 Report

* Irish Film Board Announces Short Animation Funding Grant

* Nancy Kanter Named as Disney Junior Worldwide’s General Manager

* IMAGI Buys Toon Express

* Fox Re-Ups Seth MacFarlane’s “American Dad” for 7th Season

* Disney Announces “Bambi” Diamond Edition

For all the latest CB Biz stories, look in the brown INDUSTRY HEADLINES box in the right column.

Comment of the Day: “Disney Can Do Better”

Some of the commenters in the post about Disney’s disastrous foray into “urban” fashion failed to grasp how embarrassing it is for a company with Disney’s legacy and reputation to release products as ill-conceived as the ones in its Graphic Edge line. Historian Jeff Kurtti saw the bigger picture and eloquently summed up everything that is wrong with the Disney Company’s approach to contemporary fashion:

What’s unfortunate is manifold:

1) Plain poor design. Not just ugly, but uninformed; putting characters in situations that have nothing to do with their long-standing and strong identities, or that belittle their history,

2) That an organization that continues to base so much of its business on the strength of its culture can prostitute their core characters in such a blatant way, and that does nothing to build on those characters, or have any cultural value beyond desire for profit,

3) That “relevance” is seen not in playing up the characters’ strengths and long-standing identities in a new and unique fashion, but rather in dressing them up in “whatever the kids are into.”

4) That, rather than using those built-in strengths to lead a design trend in pop fashion, they choose to ape an already-tired “Urban Fashion.”

It’s “Disco Mickey Mouse,” writ large and without tongue in cheek.