Starz Film-Roman is producing this new animated direct-to-video feature, Dante’s Inferno: the Animated Epic, through animators in Japan and Korea. It’s based on a popular video game and - be warned, especially those who had a problem with Hairballs - the trailer below is graphically violent.

(Thanks, Sandra Khoo)

The inevitable Disney knock-off DVD has arrived early this year! On sale December 1st from our friends at Goodtimes Home Video is the The Frog Prince. Yeah, we know there are dozens of live and animated adaptations of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale out there - but this new one also happens to have a black princess as its central character. A coincidence? I think not. We have no idea who produced this, so if anyone wants to spend $13.49 and send us a few frame grabs, it would be most appreciated. We just want to give credit where credit is due.

(Thanks, Kurtis Findlay)

In case you were wondering, as I was, what the Oscar-qualifying feature film, The Dolphin, Story of a Dreamer, is: look no further:

UP has nothing to fear. 20th Century Fox is currently releasing the film in South America. UPDATE: Reader Eric Graf informs us that The Dolphin will play at the Laemmle Claremont 5 starting December 11 - same theater and week as A Town Called Panic, per the Laemmle Theatres website.

(Thanks, Matthew Gaastra)

The Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema is back for its 9th edition, and festival organizer Joseph Chen has compiled another fantastic line-up of foreign animated features that can’t be found anywhere else in North America. Chen’s smart curation is yet another step towards challenging the ever-prevalent misconception in North America of animation as a kiddie art form. The selections include films that we’ve discussed on the site recently such as The Secret of Kells, Mary and Max, Panic in the Village and Boogie the Oily One, along with other features that hail from Russia, Serbia, Sweden, and Japan. There is also a retrospective of a couple vintage Russian animated features. The festival takes place from November 19-22 at the Gig Theatre (137 Ontario Street North) in Kitchener, Ontario. Film details as well as ticket info can be found on the festival website at WFAC.ca.

Start making your predictions now! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that twenty films have been submitted for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category. As we discussed last week on the Brew, this means there will be five nominees in the category for only the second time since the inception of the award. The submitted films are:

“Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”
“Astro Boy”
“Battle for Terra”
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
“Coraline”
“Disney’s A Christmas Carol”
“The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer”
“Fantastic Mr. Fox”
“Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”
“Mary and Max”
“The Missing Lynx”
“Monsters vs. Aliens”
“9”
“Planet 51”
“Ponyo”
“The Princess and the Frog”
“The Secret of Kells”
“Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure”
“A Town Called Panic”
“Up”

One important note: seven of these films have not yet completed their LA qualifying run: “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” “The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Planet 51,” “The Princess and the Frog,” “The Secret of Kells” and “A Town Called Panic.” Also, there is still the possibility that films will be disqualified from the field if they do not fulfill the category’s requirements. With this many films in the running though, we’re most definitely looking at a five-nominee field this year.

UPDATE: Looks like The Dolphin is playing at the Laemmle Claremont 5 starting December 11 - same theater and week as A Town Called Panic, per Laemmle Theatres website

The Secret of Kells will be at the AMC Burbank 8 December 4-10 at 7 PM, per the Kells Blog.

(Thanks, Jerrett Zaroski)

A Christmas Carol pulled in $30 million last weekend, falling short of industry expectations, which had ranged from $35 to $40 million. According to Box Office Mojo, the film sold fewer tickets than other recent holiday-themed films like Elf, The Santa Clause 2 and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Seventy-four percent of the film’s gross came from 3D presentations, and it was the best opening weekend of Zemeckis’s career. The opening was nearly identical to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, though that film opened in 500 fewer theaters in a slower box office period and had no megastar anchor like Carrey.

Speaking of Cloudy, while no longer in the top ten, but it added another $1.3M over the weekend for a total of $121 million. It has surpassed Disney’s Bolt at the domestic box office, and will end up grossing in the range of Bee Movie and Robots. It’s Sony’s first animated feature to cross the $100M mark.

Meanwhile, Astro Boy is officially a bomb. After three weeks, the film’s cume stands at a measly $15.1 million. Its final gross should be somewhere in the low-to-mid twenties, putting it alongside Titan A.E. and The Iron Giant, and far below last year’s Space Chimps, which took in $30.1M.

Boy, this looks strange. An upcoming hand-drawn feature from Argentina’s Illusion Studios that advertises itself as “sexist, violent and sadistic” and if you check the gallery on its website, you’ll also find it’s racist.

Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol opens today to a chorus of negative reviews and a rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A particularly harsh assessment comes from Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal:

To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney’s 3-D animated version of “A Christmas Carol” is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey’s voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen other roles. “Why so coldhearted?” Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, asks the old skinflint. The same question could be asked of Robert Zemeckis, who adapted and directed the film, and of the company that financed it. Why was simple pleasure frozen out of the production? Why does the beloved story feel embalmed by technology? And why are its characters as insubstantial as the snowflakes that seem to be falling on the audience?

And that’s just the first paragraph of his review. I watched this short clip from the film, and it is sufficiently inept enough to prevent me from wanting to see any more. What did it for me is the scene at about 1:15 in which a ghost floats rapidly towards Scrooge and knocks him backwards. Scrooge then does a backroll and pops up off the floor in a way that is so comically devoid of the laws of physics and inappropriate to the physical movement of a realistic human that all dramatic impact is instantly drained from the scene. This film may technically qualify as animation, but good animation it isn’t.

Zemeckis’s desecration of this holiday classic comes at a reported cost of $180 million, and box office projections range between $35 to $45 million this weekend.