Some of the stories you’ll find today on Cartoon Brew Biz:
* Dreamworks Animation Posts Profit in Q4 2010 Report
* Fox Re-Ups Seth MacFarlane’s “American Dad” for 7th Season
* Irish Film Board Announces Short Animation Funding Grant
* Marvel Animation Unveils “Thor: Tales of Asgard”
* Nancy Kanter Named as Disney Junior Worldwide’s General Manager
For handy links to all the latest CB Biz stories, look in the brown INDUSTRY HEADLINES box in the right column.
Today on Cartoon Brew Biz:
* Two Prominent Voice Actors propose convention for Voice Actors
* Nick Jr. greenlights second season of Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom
* Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts to be screened in LA & NYC
Read more CartoonBrew.com/biz
The CB Biz section is now being updated regularly with news releases from around the industry. Email PR (AT) CARTOONBREW (DOT) COM to submit your press releases.
2011 will be our 8th year of Cartoon Brew. We’re really excited about the site this year and we’ll be spending more time than ever building Cartoon Brew into the Internet’s premier animation destination. How would you like to see Cartoon Brew grow in 2011? What topics would you like us to write more about–industry news, international news, anime, comics, short films, TV, CGI, how-to’s? More episodes of Cartoon Brew TV? More of Brew TV’s Student Animation Festival? Should we start producing original Cartoon Brew animation content? Give us your wishlist. Animation is one of the quickest growing art forms around the world, and we plan to grow along with it.
2011 promises to deliver a brand new slate of American animated features. But how new is it? Our list of sixteen features below reveals an awful lot of familiar faces with continuing adventures for Kung Fu Panda, Shrek’s Puss In Boots, Cars‘ Lightning McQueen, and the casts of Alvin and the Chipmunks and Happy Feet. The Smurfs franchise is dusted off, Winnie the Pooh reappears, and Tintin gets a make-over in mo-cap.
Such reliance on sequels, revivals, spin-offs and specific techniques (all but one film is computer animated) show a greater dependence by producers on traditional major-studio business models. Even Pixar, which once was recognized for its originality, will rely on a sequel (Cars 2) for the second straight year. Expect studios to play it cautious and unoriginal as long as their formulas perform reliably. Animated features may not exactly qualify as an innovative art form in the United States, but they are reliable cash cows for movie studios. This year, six of the top fifteen films at the US box office were animated, which is remarkable considering the tiny percentage of animated features compared to the overall film market.
In 2011, the emigration of live-action directors to animation continues en masse with first timers Gore Verbinski and Steven Spielberg. George Miller and Robert Zemeckis also continue to produce animation. Other notable events to watch: ILM debuts its first CG feature; Illumination (the production company behind Despicable Me) tries for a second box office hit; Aardman restarts its feature ambitions with a new creative/distribution partner.
This is by no means a complete list of animated features slated for release in 2011. Our list focuses on films made by American studios. There will be, of course, dozens of foreign and independent productions, many of which we predict will be more daring in content, style and technique. No one knows how all of this will play out, but two things are for certain: Robert Zemeckis’s films will continue to horrify viewers, and throughout the year Cartoon Brew readers will make their opinions known loud and clear.
LIST OF 2011 FEATURES BY RELEASE DATE
Gnomeo and Juliet
Release Date: February 11, 2011
Director: Kelly Asbury
Production Company: Starz Animation
Label: Touchstone Pictures
Distributor: Walt Disney
Technique: CGI
Film Website
Rango
Release Date: March 4, 2011
Director: Gore Verbinski
Label: Nickelodeon Movies
Production Company: Industrial Light & Magic
Distributor: Paramount
Technique: CGI
Film Website
The tenth and concluding entry in our 2010 Cartoon Brew TV Student Animation Festival: The Facts In The Case of Mr. Valdemar was made by Bahij Jaroudi for the MA program at Kingston University. The story is based on an 1845 Edgar Allen Poe story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. Traditional animated interpretations of Poe have been rooted in an illustrative tradition, a la the UPA classic The Tell-Tale Heart (1953). Jaroudi’s approach runs counter to convention, and he creates a bright and exaggerated interpretation of Poe’s story with nods to the cartooniest of animators and cartoonists like Rod Scribner and Basil Wolverton. Poe’s gory details, which at point includes a description of Valdemar’s eyes leaking a “profuse outflowing of a yellowish ichor,” are played for comic effect in Jaroudi’s short.
Visit Cartoon Brew TV to comment about the film, read more about the short, and interact with the filmmaker.
Looking for holiday gifts for that special animation someone…or maybe just for yourself. Look no further than Cartoon Brew’s 2010 Holiday Gift Guide compiled by Jerry and Amid.
LEONARDO – THE COMPLETE CODEX
Animator Jim Capobianco (Pixar) first created a beautiful hand drawn short, Leonardo, then packaged it for sale so attractively, it’s a model for what we’d like to see all animators do. Included in the beautiful DVD boxed set is the complete preliminary storyreel, deleted scenes, audio commentary – as well as a flipbook, a notebook and a pencil. And much much more. A perfect gift to all animators and those aspiring to be.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this morning the shortlist of ten animated shorts for the 2010 Best Animated Short category. Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch will now vote one more time to narrow it down to five nominees. The final vote, which determines the winner, is open to all Academy members provided that they have watched every nominated short.
We published the list of 33 qualifying shorts a few weeks ago on Cartoon Brew. The ten shorts that were voted to move forward are below. Did your favorites make the cut?
Coyote Falls
Director: Matthew O’Callaghan
United States, 2010, 3 min
Link to filmmaker website
Day & Night
Director: Teddy Newton
United States, 2010, 6 min
Link to filmmaker website
UPDATE (No. 27, 2010): We are no longer accepting applications. Thank you to everybody who took the time to apply. We will be contacting everybody soon.
Cartoon Brew is growing. We’re currently looking to hire a News Editor for our expanding industry news section CB Biz. Candidates should have basic fluency with HTML. Experience with editing a website is helpful. This job is not full-time. In fact, it’s not even part-time. It will be approximately an hour’s worth of work daily. Duties may expand in the future.
If you’re attending the CTN Animation Expo this weekend in Burbank, say hi to Jerry and drop by our Brew lounge in the evenings.
The following thirty-three films have fulfilled the qualifications necessary to be considered in the category of Best Animated Short for 2010 Academy Awards. Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will vote on a shortlist of ten films from this list. A second round of voting, also restricted to members of the Short Films and Feature Animation branches, will narrow it down to the five nominees for Best Animated Short Film Oscar. The final vote, which determines the winner, is open to all Academy members provided that they have watched every nominated short. It’s a wide open field this year with plenty of newcomers; only three filmmakers among the thirty-three contenders have ever been nominated for an Oscar (Bill Plympton, Tomasz BagiÅ„ski and Don Hertzfeldt).
A Family Portrait
Director: Joseph Pierce
Great Britain, 2010, 4 min
Link to filmmaker website
Angry Man (Sinna Mann)
Director: Anita Killi
Norway, 2009, 20 min
Link to filmmaker website
Animated History of Poland
Director: Tomasz Bagiński
Poland, 2010, 8 min
Link to filmmaker website
Barking Island (Chienne D’Histoire)
Director: Serge Avédikian
France, 2010, 15 min
Link to filmmaker website
Coyote Falls
Director: Matthew O’Callaghan
United States, 2010, 3 min
Link to filmmaker website
It’s the time of month where we take a moment to thank the companies that have chosen to advertise on Cartoon Brew. It’s awards season and our two biggest sponsors this month are the Walt Disney Company and Universal Pictures. We appreciate each and every company’s support, and we encourage our readers to spend some time learning about what these companies have to offer.
If your business is looking to reach the Internet’s largest and most knowledgeable group of animation pros, students and fans, please contact our friendly ad rep, Reachout Media.
November 2010 Cartoon Brew Advertisers
Walt Disney Company
A lot happened in the animation world during the month of October:
The Hub, a new partly animation channel debuted and Amid believes it represents a symbolic shift ushering in a dark new era in TV animation.
We broke the story about how the first female director at Pixar, Brave‘s Brenda Chapman, was replaced by Mark Andrews. A lot of people had something to say in the comments.
Rocky and Bullwinkle and Crusader Rabbit creator
Alex Anderson died, but Bambi production designer Tyrus Wong turned 100 and bad boy director Ralph Bakshi turned 72.
The largest North American animation festival took place in Ottawa for the 34th year, and one angry French-Canadian woman hated every moment of it.
Pepe LePew is CGI and so is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Toronto police officer, Adam “Bubbles” Josephs, sued YouTube over animated parodies of his bullying behavior.
Jerry doesn’t know how much more he can take of Robert Zemeckis’ mo-cap fetish.
The creator of Pocoyo is developing a new series called Doomed.
Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time launched its second season with a stellar episode called “It Came from the Nightosphere!”.
Yesterday at the Television Animation Conference in Ottawa, Cartoon Brew announced the launch of our new section called CB Biz. The new subsite located at www.cartoonbrew.com/biz can be accessed from our site’s top navigation bar.
As we’ve grown to become the single most heavily trafficked animation news site on-line, we wanted to fulfill one of the most common requests we receive which is to offer more coverage of industry animation news. The new CB Biz section will serve as a source for announcements and public relations messages direct from industry publicity sources. The press releases will appear unedited and free from editorial commentary. The CB Biz section doesn’t change our curated and personal approach to the Cartoon Brew home page, but it serves as an additional resource for those who desire a complete and up-to-the-minute picture of what is happening throughout the industry.
Studio publicists may submit their press releases directly to Cartoon Brew through a new e-mail address: PR [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com
