Amid and I will be lurking about in Ottawa for the next seven days. If posting here is light, that’s why. Here are some places you can find me:• Friday September 23rd 10am - PINK PANTHER RETROSPECTIVE at the Bytowne Cinema
• Saturday September 24th 1pm - PINK PANTHER RETROSPECTIVE at the NAC, Southam Hall
• Saturday September 24th 5pm - Book Signing at the CHAPTERS BOOKSTORE
• Saturday September 24th 7pm & 9pm - WORST CARTOONS EVER! screening at BARRYMORESSee you there!

I’m very proud to announce that Frederator Studios’ OH YEAH! CARTOONS has given a greenlight to produce a character I created called HORNSWIGGLE.For the next few months I will be producing a pilot with the fine folks at G7 Animation. I won’t be talking about it much here - that’s because I’ve started a new blog over on the Frederator website where I will be discussing the entire creative and production process as we go along. The cartoon should wrap in March and air in the fall 2006. Wish me luck!

For the last several years, the artists of Disney Publishing’s Global Design Group have been having a ball illustrating the Little Golden Books based on their latest feature films (including FINDING NEMO and HOME ON THE RANGE) in the style of classic Mary Blair, Mel Crawford, J.P. Miller illustrations. Case in point: Lori Tyminski’s art on the just released CHICKEN LITTLE. Totally worth buying.

Last year Mark Ackland and his partner in crime, Riccardo Durante, completed a series of short films produced by Nelvana for their anthology series “Fun Pak”. Those shorts were called “Gruesomestein’s Monsters”. The show premiered in Canada on a channel called YTV and one of the shorts made it into the Nicktoons Film Festival last year.Now, in an effort to get more exposure for their works, the boys have set up a blog (with permission of Nelvana) that they will update weekly where they will post everything from concept designs to rough poses to clean designs, to bgs, etc.

Animation director Ward Jenkins wrote a blog post about the recent deluge of blogs by animators and illustrators, and he attributes this phenomenon to four factors. Read his thoughtful piece at the Ward-O-Matic.

Girl drawings.
Freddie Moore.
‘Nuf said.

“You’ve got to embrace [computer animation] or there isn’t going to be a place for you.” It was with that ultimatum, Walt Disney Feature Animation chief David Stainton proudly tells us, that he fixed the studio’s animation division. You see, the silly artists at Disney had been using the wrong tool for the past decade. But Stainton put his M.B.A. from Harvard to good use and figured out that if the artists simply changed their tool from pencil to computer, the Disney films would stop sucking so hard.

Superficial changes in technique aside, this must-read article in yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES makes it apparent that there remains a clear absence of leadership and creative direction at Disney. The quintessential example of the studio’s continuing animation woes can be found in the story of CHICKEN LITTLE, or rather the “stories” of CHICKEN LITTLE. Somebody explain to me how you begin a film as the tale of “a young girl who went to summer camp to build confidence so she wouldn’t overreact” and end up with the story of “a boy trying to save his town from space aliens?”

At Disney, there is such an unbelievable disregard (downright contempt) for story that it would almost be comical, if the resulting films weren’t so thematically hollow and emotionally shallow. Of course, the type of drastic story overhaul we’re seeing on CHICKEN LITTLE is nothing out of the ordinary at Disney (eg. KINGDOM OF THE SUN to THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE; SWEATING BULLETS to HOME ON THE RANGE), and it is one of the root causes of the studio’s abominable output over the past decade. Read between the lines of this NY TIMES piece, heck, just read the piece, and it becomes obvious that there’s little new under the sun. The CG Disney characters may be a lot shinier and the camera will swirl and twirl until everybody’s dizzy, but their filmmaking process, CG or otherwise, is still diseased at its core, and sadly will remain so as long as imperious corporate hacks like Stainton run the show.

Another new piece worth reading is Richard Corliss’s “Can Mickey Find His Mojo?” in this week’s edition of TIME MAGAZINE. Corliss puts a more positive spin on Disney’s upcoming slate of CG films, and informs us that CHICKEN LITTLE comes replete with Barbra Streisand jokes. I’m sure Stainton couldn’t be more pleased.

Jared Deal and Garnet Syberg-Olsen have lots of fun stuff to look at over at Carnival Cartoons.