Five Works That Should Be Adapted into Animation

Suppose you wanted to make an animated film or TV series, but you didn’t have any new ideas and (gasp) you don’t want to remake the same old properties. Take heart: there’s a lot of great material out there just begging to be adapted into animation.

Is YouTube Making It Harder for Animators To Make Money?

Ross O’Donovan, an Australian animator who creates Internet cartoons using the handle Rubber Ninja, has posted a video that argues recent changes in YouTube’s algorithms give preferential treatment to live-action content creators while making it more difficult for animation creators to earn money on YouTube.

Why Do Practical Effects Get Replaced with CGI?

Yesterday, we celebrated the momentous decision to replace the practical effect-dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” with CGI animation. Today, we look at the other side of the issue: the effect that CGI has had on traditional puppet-makers, animatronic artists, and stop motion animators whose work has increasingly been relegated to the sidelines.

How Garfield Got His Groove Back: The ‘Garfield’ Remix Phenomenon

Poor Garfield. In his heyday, he was amongst the most beloved characters on the funny pages, his plush likenesses fastened to car windows and his sarcastic barbs adorning office walls around the globe. Then, somewhere along the line, he underwent a pop-cultural re-evaluation. Jim Davis’ strip is now something of a pariah: just look at how “The Simpsons” paired it with “Love Is” as the kind of strip that Milhouse reads. What a comedown for a character once hip enough to be quoted in “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But yet, the orange cat has been saved from cultural oblivion by a peculiar trend: the remixed “Garfield” strip.

‘Legends of Oz’ Producer Greg Centineo Knows Why The Film Flopped

Last weekend, “The Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return” recorded the worst opening ever for an animated film in more than 2,500 theaters. The film’s exec producer, Greg Centineo, a former Florida coffee shop owner who raised over $100 million from investors to produce this film and its followups, thinks he knows what went wrong.

25 Great Cartoonists You Should Know

For the past few days on Cartoon Brew’s Instagram account, we’ve been running a series called 25 Cartoonists You Should Know. The entire series is below, and yes, the list could easily be twice as long and still incomplete.

Reflections On 10 Years of Cartoon Brew

Cartoon Brew officially launched on March 15, 2004. A decade is a long time to be doing anything, but it feels like an especially long time to be blogging daily. As we head into the site’s 10th anniversary year, here are some reflections on where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ And A Thought on The Hyper-Grotesque

With the entire Internet already yakking about the new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” trailer, it hardly seemed necessary to bring it up here. But for the sake of posterity, here is the trailer for the Jonathan Liebesman-directed film, which will debut on August 8th:

Disney’s ‘Frozen’: The Acting and Performance Analysis

“Frozen” is beautiful to see, fun to sing along with and is a modern day marketing marvel, but the script has structural and performance issues that are worth examining because they impact directly on acting.

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