The People’s Republic of Animation recently produced these slick vinyl toy-styled launch trailers ahead of the release of de Blob 2, a videogame published by THQ. The Adelaide-based studio also produced some of the in-game cinematics.
Second trailer and credits after the jump:
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Tezcatlipoca is a three minute animated short from 2009 by Robin George, inspired by the music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and the Aztec myth of Tezcatlipoca, a “deity who descends from heaven in the form of a jaguar”. This was George’s senior thesis at Southern Adventist University’s School of Visual Art and Design. The animation department there is run by Disney veteran animator, Hendel Butoy (The Black Cauldron, Fantasia 2000). The school is currently producing an animated feature about The Life of Christ.
(Thanks, Jim Turner)
Check out this insane footage from the Tamil film Enthiran, which is the most expensive film ever made in India. Keep watching and the CG just gets nuttier and nuttier. In terms of graphic bravado and sheer ridiculousness, this puts American superhero films to shame–a true live-action cartoon.
(Thanks, Christy Karacas)
The Oscar nominations were announced this morning.
Nominated for BEST ANIMATED FEATURE were:
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON – Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders
THE ILLUSIONIST – Sylvain Chomet
TOY STORY 3 – Lee Unkrich
Also: TOY STORY 3 was also nominated for BEST PICTURE, BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY, SOUND EDITING – and the song “We Belong Together” was nominated for BEST MUSIC (Original Song).
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON was also nominated for Best Music (Original Score).
TANGLED nabbed one nomination: for Best Music (Original Song), “I See The Light”.
And it’s worth noting Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland copped three nominations (Art Direction, Costume Design and Sound Editing) and Tron: Legacy got a nod for Sound editing.
Nominated for BEST ANIMATED SHORT are:
Day & Night Director: Teddy Newton. United States.
Let’s Pollute Director: Geefwee Boedoe. United States.
Madagascar, A Journey Diary Director: Bastien Dubois. France.
The Gruffalo Directors: Jakob Schuh, Max Lang. Great Britain.
The Lost Thing Directors: Andrew Ruhemann, Shaun Tan. Australia.
A complete list of nominees in all categories is posted here.
The filmmakers nominated for Best Animated Short will appear in person for Q&A at Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, on Tuesday February 22nd at 7:30pm — For more information check the Academy’s Oscar Event website.
The directors nominated for Best Animated Feature will appear in person for Q&A with Tom Sito on at Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, on Thursday Februry 24th at 7:30pm — For more information check the Academy’s website.
The Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday February 27th at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
Forget Carlo Vinci and George Nicholas. This 1986 Japanese Flintstones anime promo featuring teenage Pebbles and Bamm Bamm is an absolute gem. Especially the part where Bamm-Bamm kisses Dino on the lips.
(via Charles Brubaker)
Sumner Redstone, Philippe Dauman and Tom Dooley
Viacom, the media conglomerate that owns Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Spike TV, and other animation-producing divisions, as well as Paramount, which is releasing Rango this year, pays its top executives ridiculous amounts of money, according to the company’s latest Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Its three top execs took home $164.2 million last year in the form of salaries, stock options and awards. Here’s the breakdown:
Philippe Dauman, chief executive: $84.5 million
Tom Dooley, chief operating officer: $64.7 million
Sumner Redstone, chairman/controlling shareholder: $15 million
“Those are amazing numbers,” Charles Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, told the LA Times. “Those are entrepreneurial returns for a managerial role. I’ll be interested to see what the investors think.”
Look at it this way. According to this internal memo, Viacom reduced its staff to 11,350 people in late 2008. Using that figure, these three guys earned the equivalent of $14,466 for each of the company’s 10,000 plus employees. Or another way to think about it: they could have given every Viacom employee a $5,000 bonus last year and still split over $100 million between the three of them. But they would never consider doing anything like that. These mofos are the personification of greed, plain and simple.
And what is it that they do exactly? One can only imagine how difficult it must be for Messrs. Dauman and Dooley to decide how many new episodes of SpongeBob and Jersey Shore to greenlight. Even if these guys were curing cancer and eliminating hunger in the developing world while manning a space mission to Mars, I frankly don’t see how this type of payday could be justified. As it is, being responsible for running a shitty media conglomerate that produces volumes of crass, here-today-gone-tomorrow junk, the only words that come to mind for their compensation packages are obscene and disgusting.
Steve Hulett of The Animation Guild has started posting a wonderful series of audio interviews with the current “old guard” of Hollywood hand drawn animation. The first ten sessions are online now with more to come. My good friends Mark Kausler, Dan Haskett and Tom Sito (pictured above) relate some great stories of their almost 40 years (each) in the business. Other interviewees include Mark Kirkland (The Simpsons), Brian McEntee (Beauty and the Beast), Tim Walker (Warner Bros.), Robert Alvarez (Fosters Home), Ed Gombert (Little Mermaid), Bruce Smith (Proud Family) and Rubin Aquino (Lion King) – these are good long interviews, all worth downloading. Click here and enjoy!
The Pig Farmer, the latest short by Canadian filmmaker Nick Cross (The Waif of Persephone, Yellow Cake), debuts online today. Cross’s appealing and traditional cartoon imagery lulls us into a sense of comfort before…well…let’s just say it turns NSFW.
Above right, the first piece of concept art from DreamWorks’ forthcoming Mr. Peabody and Sherman. A bigger version of the concept art is after the jump. Your thoughts on this design?
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We haven’t featured a post about cartoon cake in several months, so this is long overdue. Submitted for you approval, this clever “Up Cake” which was featured on GirlyBubble a while back. Apparently Pixar’s Up has inspired dessert chefs as much as it’s inspired the animation community.
And if this doesn’t make you hungry, check out these delicious Up Cupcakes!
(Thanks, Bill Perry)
The first Cartoon Dump of 2011 is Monday (1/24) at 8pm at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood. My long running show is kicking off the new year with its usual blend of sketches, songs, puppets, stand up comedy and some of the absolute worst cartoons ever made – no shit, these are real life animation atrocities from the traumatic Saturday mornings of our shameful past.
With Frank Conniff (MST3K and, until last Friday, of Countdown with Keith Olbermann), Erica Doering as Compost Brite, J. Elvis Weinstein as Dumpster Diver Dan, Kristin Ariggo as Cue Card Goddess and April Hava Shenkman (Grand daughter of Fleischer/Warner veteran animator Ben Shenkman) as Madame Hava – and special stand-up comedy guest, Matt Braunger (Mad TV). Info: here. Tickets: here.
I’ve got the proof:
(via Maorinette)
Veteran character designer and writer Chris Mitchell (Samurai Jack, SpongeBob Squarepants, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, Ren & Stimpy) has opened Q Pop, a new boutique and gallery in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. The store offers handmade artist goods, toys, and limited edition clothing. They’re also the exclusive West Coast retailer for Japanese street fashion labels Sex Pot Revenge, Algonquins, and Super Lovers.
A grand opening party will take place on Saturday, January 29, from 7-11pm. The store is located at 128 Astronaut E S Onizuka St, in downtown Los Angeles. Photos of the shop’s thoughtfully designed interior can be found on Sweet Streets LA. Also, the blog Kalamari Kastle has an interview with Chris about the store. Chris was quite frank when asked about his reason for starting the store:
“Q Pop came about for several different reasons. One was out of total frustration working in the animation industry. In animation, often times you slave away working sweatshop style long hours, pouring your heart and soul into your work, only to have it pooped on by company executives who have absolutely no taste or experience in the field in which they work. For me personally, I needed to do something that would offer me something more directly fulfilling.”
Here’s some news I’ve literally waited ten years to report. Sony’s syndicated classic-cartoon show Totally Tooned In is now being shown on U.S. television. It’s airing on Antenna TV, a new channel that broadcasts free via over-the-air digital transmission – which means, if you are like me and pay for Dish TV, Direct TV, Comcast, Time-Warner or any cable or satellite service, you can’t see it.
If you can receive the channel (in LA it’s telecast on the KTLA digital channel 5.2; in NY its broadcast on WPIX-TV’s digital channel 11.3), Totally Tooned In runs on Saturday morning for three hours (six formatted half-hour episodes back-to-back) starting at 4am Pacific/7am Eastern. Each episode contains three Columbia cartoons from 1934-1959 – this includes many UPA cartoons, Charles Mintz Color Rhapsodies, Li’l Abner, Fox and Crow and even a few Scrappy cartoons.
I was a producer on this series and helped compile each half hour – that was back around the years 1999-2000. Columbia restored its cartoon library for this show, which was immediately sold overseas and to South America (in some countries it aired on either Cartoon Network or Fox Kids). Until now it was impossible to view it in the States.
The Columbia cartoons were, for decades, the hardest cartoons to see as they have been off screens (movie or TV) for almost 50 years. There are good ones, bad ones – and many absolutely strange ones (Professor Small and Mr. Tall, Mother Hubba-Hubba Hubbard, Lo The Poor Buffal – to name but a few) – but all are worth a look. Frank Tashlin, Dave Fleischer, John Hubley, Art Davis, Mel Blanc, even Bob Clampett contributed to these films. I highly recommend you watch (and record) this show while you can.
For more information about the show and what cartoons are included in each episode, check my Totally Tooned In Episode Guide.
A new stop-motion video from Yuval & Merav Nathan, directors of the fantastic Her Morning Elegance. Lose This Child (for Israeli alternative group, EatLiz) was animated on an actual beach with real sand, by four animators including musician Guy Ben Shetrit, guitarist for the band.
(Thanks, Alfonso Estrada)
