Even for someone like myself who hasn’t seen a new episode of The Simpsons in years, it’s hard not to be impressed by the obsessive fanboyishness of Dan Cameron Jerry Lerma and Terry Hogan who mapped the entire fictional city of the Simpsons’ Springfield. Here’s a link to the full-sized map.

Michael Eisner has launched a new animation company called Tornante Animation.

And he’s created his own animated series.

And Nickelodeon has picked it up for 20 episodes.

Boy, how’d we ever miss this story?

Eisner’s idea, Glenn Martin DDS, is a stop-motion series about a dentist who wants a change of pace and decides to go on a roadtrip. Sounds like a Gary and Mike for the PoliGrip crowd.

The LA Times article offers an insight into the creative process that Michael Eisner went through to arrive at this idea:

Eisner said he initially wanted to make a show that revolved around a dog like the one owned by his former colleague Tom Staggs, chief financial officer of Disney, “a giant Swiss army dog with a tail that stands straight up,” Eisner said. (According to Disney, the dog is a Swiss mountain dog.) But that idea evolved into the dentist with his family.

Thankfully for Eisner, his show is in good hands. The Times reports that he’s already hired ten writers to work on the series.

We don’t often post about Telenovelas, but since Cartoon Network is going live action, here’s one they might consider: Olivia And I. It sounds like a cross between Ugly Betty and Cool World:

Olivia, a very shy cartoonist, works in an animation studio and falls deeply in love with Pablo, the studio manager. But there is also Pablo’s fiancée, Magdalena.

Olivia designs an animation model, a beautiful young girl who resembles her but has completely different characteristics. This drawn character will slowly become real and will interfere at work but it will also help Pablo and Olivia realize they are in love.

I’d be curious to see if this turns out to be any good. 120 one hour episodes are now in production at Illusion Studios in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Who knows? If it becomes popular there, it might spawn a U.S. spin-off.

LA Weekly has two articles this week profiling Amy Winfrey and her animated webseries Making Fiends and Stefan Bucher’s Daily Monster video podcast. What do both of these creators have in common? Their ideas started out as independent self-financed Internet projects that gained a popular fan following and were ultimately given TV deals by major companies. Making Fiends is about to debut as an animated series on Nickelodeon, while Daily Monster was collected into book form this year and will also appear as a segment on PBS’s new Electric Company in 2009.

The paths that both of these properties have taken offer a view into how new TV animation ideas will be discovered in the future. The dysfunctional system of pitching and development in TV animation still exists, but it is on the wane and being dismantled by the Internet. As Winfrey and Bucher have demonstrated, creators are no longer beholden to clueless and sheltered development execs who don’t have the foggiest about what their audiences want to watch. Today an artist can create an uncompromised piece of animation independently, post it online, and attract a significant audience without any assistance from broadcasters. The cherry on top is that if your idea is successful, major companies will be knocking at your door to pay you money to produce more episodes.

Chop Socky Chooks is a CG television series produced by Aardman for Cartoon Network UK. The show, starring kung fu chickens, was created in-house by one of its animators, Sergio Delfino. I’m not exactly sure why I’m linking to it other than it’s amusing to keep track of all the kung fu-related productions we’re going to be seeing over the next few years. Just in case you’re keeping score, first there was the TV series Skunk Fu! which was produced by Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon and premiered in September 2007, then there’s Chop Socky Chooks which has apparently been airing since March ‘08, and finally DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda, released theatrically in June ‘08.

We mentioned this project back in March. Here’s the sample reel for Renegade’s Funny Face.

Larry Harmon, the actor and animation producer who acquired the rights to Bozo the Clown and turned him into a long running TV franchise and cash cow, died yesterday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.

Harmon purchased the licensing rights to the Bozo character, created by Alan Livingston and first portrayed by Pinto Colvig, from Capitol Records in 1956. In 1958, Harmon produced several Bozo TV cartoons. He later acquired the animation rights to Laurel and Hardy and produced a series of Laurel and Hardy cartoons through Hanna Barbera in 1966. Harmon also produced several Popeye cartoons for King Features in 1960.

If nothing else, Animation Magazine serves as an entertaining repository of all the awful ideas that animation studios try to produce nowadays. In the latest issue one of the properties being pimped by this studio is called Donkey Ollie.

It probably wouldn’t be so disturbing if the same company hadn’t taken out a full-page ad on the facing page honoring a certain animator named Ollie (see below). What’s sadder perhaps is that having a crappily animated CG ass named after one’s self is a higher honor than many animation legends have received.