This Sunday at the BFI Southbank in London, the British Film Institute, in association with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, will present the UK/European premiere of the reconstructed work print of Richard Williams’ “The Thief and the Cobbler.” Williams will discuss the film afterward with film critic David Robinson.
West Coast residents are in luck: if you can’t make it to an international film festival, the festival is coming to you.
There is just one annual animation award in the United States that is older than the Oscars and that’s the ASIFA-East Animation Festival. This year’s ceremony will mark the 45th year in a row that the festival has been presented. It takes place this Sunday, May 18th, at the New School’s newly built Tishman Auditorium (63 5th Avenue in Manhattan).
“DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition” opened last month at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Clearly inspired by “Pixar: 20 Years of Animation,” which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York back in 2005, the DreamWorks show includes over 400 items, and covers the studio’s twenty-year history right up to the present—there are displays about “Mr. Peabody & Sherman” and “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” which will be released next month. It is the largest exhibition in the twelve-year history of the ACMI.
The exhibit “Chuck Jones: Doodles of a Genius” has opened at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. We’ve previously written about the show, which features random non-production doodles by the great Golden Age theatrical short director, and now we have a preview of some of those doodles on display thanks to the official Chuck Jones Tumblr.
The Walt Disney Family Museum has opened a new exhibit focused on one of the studio’s legendary Nine Old Men: “Leading Ladies and Femmes Fatales: The Art of Marc Davis.” The show will be up through November 3. Unlike the museum’s current Mary Blair exhibition, the Davis show is much smaller, with around 70 pieces on display.
This fall, the city of Hokkaido, Japan will present the first-ever animation festival to take place entirely in an airport. The New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival will make use of the Hokkaido airport’s well-equipped facilities, including its 377-seat theater with 3D capabilities.
Next Wednesday, the animated duo of Jeff Twiller and Randy J. Johnson will host their own animated film screening in Brooklyn. It’s a legit line-up of animated shorts, with perceptive cinematic commentary supplied inbetween the films by Twiller and Johnson. Thankfully, they happen to be animation experts.
Any exhibition that “…aims to demonstrate the centrality of animation to contemporary global culture…” is worth our attention, and the UK’s Barbican Centre-produced “Watch Me Move: The Animation Show” has been doing that at museum venues since 2011. This June, it comes to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.
“Animated cinema is the demiurgic art par excellence: matter comes to life and is transformed in the hands and imaginations of the creators. They, more than anybody, know about the secret life of objects.” This description, comes from the exhibition “Metamorphosis: Fantasy Visions in Starewitch, Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers,” now playing at the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea (CCCB) in Barcelona, Spain, and it’s a good summary of the work of these four visionary animators.
The Brothers Quay, the legendary team of identical twin stop motion animators, will be appearing tonight in Chicago at DePaul University for a screening and conversation about their work.
Nickelodeon is making a concerted effort to promote its renewed dedication to creativity at its animation studio. This week, they will open an art exhibit, “Butt What Is Art? A Sanjay and Craig Fine Art Retrospective,” at California State University, Fullerton’s Atrium Gallery (Pollak Library). The exhibit will focus on art created for, and inspired by, the series about an Indian boy and his talking snake:
On Sunday April 13, as part of the Bird’s Eye Film Festival, the Barbican art centre in London is set to hold an event to mark the centenary of animator Joy Batchelor. Speaking at the event will be Joy’s daughter Vivien Halas; author and former Channel 4 commissioning editor for animation Clare Kitson; BFI animation curator Jez Stewart, and film critic Brian Sibley, whose work includes books on Disney and Aardman.
The United States has surprisingly few animation festivals for a country of its size, but increasingly we are seeing smaller local events that serve as a substitute for the festival experience. Animation Breakdown is an ongoing series in Los Angeles, and Chicago animation fans, who already enjoy the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, will see the arrival of Animation Torrent next month.
The world’s longest-running and largest animation festival, Annecy, announced short film and TV selections today for its 2014 edition, which will take place June 9-14 in the lakeside town of Annecy, France.
What’s the only thing better than a Chuck Jones museum show? How about TWO Chuck Jones museum shows?
The taboo-shattering counterculture films of seventy-five-year-old animation legend Ralph Bakshi will be the subject of a retrospective this May in his childhood home of Brooklyn, New York.
Rowland Emett, one of the greatest British cartoonists of the previous century yet mostly forgotten today, is finally getting his due. The Birmingham Museum in England will open “Marvellous Machines: The Wonderful World of Rowland Emett” on May 10.
Last weekend the town of Taylor, Texas held their first-ever Tex Avery Day in honor of their hometown animation hero. Here is a look at what happened.
The rest of America can have their Super Bowl tomorrow, but the animation world’s big night is TONIGHT. Slap on your cleanest pair of underwear or panties, wedge that huge tub of ice cream inbetween your legs, and settle in to watch the livestream of the 41st annual Annie Awards from the solitary comfort of your couch. The video below will begin live from Los Angeles at 7pm PT/10pm ET.