Pixar’s Ronnie del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa will be having an art show, “Fragments and More”, at Meltdown Comics (7522 Sunset Blvd) this weekend. The opening reception is Saturday, October 2, from 6-9 pm. Enrico and Ronnie will be showing original artwork from their various indie projects like NINA, MIA and FRAGMENTS. Find out more about the show HERE.

Emru Townsend, the original editor of FPS: FRAMES PER SECOND, is relaunching the magazine in February 2005 as an online-only pub that will include a free downloadable PDF version. He’s also just started up the fps blog which promises to be a thoughtful outlet for cartoon views. There’s already some nice posts about his experiences at the Ottawa Animation Festival.

Friday, July 16, 2004
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Jumping Jesus on a smoldering birch bark canoe, these slave-driving Vikings have got me working harder than I ever have in my life! There are multiple meetings with the mercurial Magnus today, and he’s such a fast thinker and talker that I’d have to be a stenographer to write down everything he wants to see in the script. As it is, I’m too busy taking pictures of him jumping around as he describes the action of the characters to take any notes. Thank God Susan got me an iTalk attachment when she bought me my iPod. With the iTalk I digitize the notes, listen to them with headphones, and insert them all in a revised script.

I turn in my revision and am allowed to collapse, every calorie of energy sucked from my body. I catch a few quick winks then take off to join some friends for dinner. David Latham is an astrophysicist who’s here to attend a Mad Scientist Convention discussing the possibility of life on other planets, and his equally bigbrained wife Ginny is a doctor who I hope can answer a question that’s been nagging me since the first time I closed my eyes in Iceland:

Mystery solved! The cure for my condition: GET SOME DAMN SLEEP!
Goodnight to all (doctor’s orders!) – Ken Pontac, Iceland

The Simpsons is set to reveal that Marge’s sister is a lesbian.According to Ananova.com, this season the purple-haired Patty decides to pursue women after being snubbed by every man in Springfield. She finds true love after being seduced in a bar by a butch lesbian. Homer – who dubbed Patty and twin sister Selma the “gruesome twosome – is horrified at first. But according to early scripts, he ends up being ordained as a minister – then marrying Patty and her girlfriend.

Ward Jenkins, a talented director and designer at Atlanta’s Primal Screen who I finally met in Ottawa last week after many email exchanges, points out that there’s another Toulouse, France-based graffiti artist, Miss Van who has been doing the ‘plump girl-style’ longer than Fafi. Says Ward, “[Miss Van]’s work does fall into a certain rut, as all her girls look the same, with highly-stylized features and over-the-top sexuality, but there’s something more to them than from what I saw in Fafi’s work. My two cents.”

Katie Rice (aka ‘KatieNice’), currently working as a designer on Disney’s MAGGIE THE MAGGOT series, has posted a handful of super-appealing cavegirl sketches HERE. (Thanks to Shane G. for the link)

Evidence that a new “toon boom” is upon us – with the highly anticipated release of THE INCREDIBLES, ROBOTS, CHICKEN LITTLE, MADAGASGAR, CARS in the next 18 months – comes with this announcement about Wild Brain and Miramax.Is this another Disney buffer against losing Pixar? Sounds like it to me – but it’s an exciting move that adds another player to the growing list of current CGI cartoon factories: Blue Sky, Pixar, Disney, Sony, Dreamworks and ILM.

Now, THIS looks good: the teaser trailer for MADAGASCAR.