Today’s news from around the industry, only on CB Biz:

→ Pixar Releases Upcoming Film Slate at CinemaCon

→ Columbia College Chicago Honors Outstanding Alumni At Commencement Ceremonies, Including Disney Animator Marlon West

→ The One Club Announces Judging Panel For 4th Annual One Show Awards

→ Anaheim’s Promenade Gallery Hosts Disneyland-themed “Rat Trap Gallery” Show

→ New Zealand Animation/VFX Company Toybox Hires Bruce Carter & Leoni Willis

→ DreamWorks Animation Releases iOs App For “Rise of the Guardians”

→ Korea Announces Government Funding For Dubbing Of Korean Films For Foreign Release

→ Call For Entries: Philadelphia Film & Animation Festival

→ Call For Entries: Athens Animation Festival

→ New York Int’l Children’s Festival Invited Adults For Claymation Workshop Benefit For Scholarship Program

Quick reminder: we’re soon going to begin accepting submissions for the 3rd annual Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival. Last year’s selections were fantastic and we’re planning to put together another showcase of outstanding student animation from around the globe. If you’re finishing up a student film this year, we hope you’ll submit to Cartoon Brew’s festival. Any student film completed after May 1, 2011 and not yet posted on-line is eligible. Full details coming soon!

This past month we not only commemorated Cartoon Brew’s eighth anniversary, we also achieved the highest month of traffic in our site’s history. The twenty posts below were the individual posts that you viewed most frequently during March. Three of the posts, including the top one, were related to Glen Keane’s departure from Disney, but the pageviews were spread out across plenty of other big stories as well.

1. EXCLUSIVE: The Full Text of Glen Keane’s Disney Resignation Letter
2. The Sweatbox, The Documentary That Disney Doesn’t Want You to See
3. Digital Domain’s John Textor Brags to Investors About Exploiting Animation Student Labor
4. The Poster For The Walt Disney Biopic You’ll Never See
5. The Failure of John Carter and Analyzing Andrew Stanton
6. Why Kids Today Think Disney Was A Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist
7. How Much Money Animated Shorts Earn on YouTube
8. BREAKING: Glen Keane Left Disney Today
9. First Look at Genndy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania
10. Ricky Garduno, RIP
11. Pete Docter’s Flipbook Animation Set
12. Dick Clark is Selling His Flintstones Home
13. FIRST LOOK: Rise of the Guardians Trailer
14. Let’s Cast the Walt Disney Biopic
15. An Open Letter to Glen Keane
16. EXCLUSIVE: Nickelodeon’s New Shorts Program
17. Frankenweenie Teaser
18. Japanese Brave trailer
19. Brad Bird on Ollie Johnston
20. The Lorax Talkback

Cartoon Brew is eight years old today, and for what it’s worth, that makes us the longest-continually operating animation blog on the Internet. We had no idea what would happen when we launched the Brew in 2004, but we’re proud that it’s lasted as long as it has and that you’ve allowed us to be a voice for the animation community. In the past few years, we’ve launched new initiatives like CB Biz and the Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival, but we’ve got even bigger things in store for this year, including a major site overhaul.

Whether you’ve been with us since the pre-Brew era when we published our thoughts as Cartoon Research and Animation Blast or you’ve joined us more recently, we have a simple message to our readers. We want to thank each of you very sincerely for reading Cartoon Brew. We know that you have many choices today for animation news, and we’re honored and humbled that so many of you have chosen the Brew as one of your sources. The Cartoon Brew team spends large portions of time working on the site to keep the content fresh and everything running smoothly, and we intend to continue doing that for a long time to come.

Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi,
The Brewmasters

UPDATE: Our friends at the French animation blog Catsuka remind us that they’re twelve years old. So that make us the second longest-continually operating animation blog.

Through the first 70 days of 2012, we’re averaging 2.8 posts per day on Cartoon Brew’s homepage. That’s not counting all the posts on our industry news section CB Biz. For the curious reader, here are Cartoon Brew’s most viewed and most commented posts through the first two-and-a-half months of 2012.

MOST VIEWED POSTS IN 2012
1. Ricky Garduno, RIP
2. A Tale of Two Titmouses: A Cartoon Brew Investigation
3. Preview: 2012 US Animated Features
4. Why Kids Today Think Walt Disney was a Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist
5. Web Premiere: “Wild Life” by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
6. Stephen Colbert’s Must-See Interview with Maurice Sendak
7. Rediscovered: Long-Lost Version of “The Hobbit” by Gene Deitch
8. The End of the Creator-Driven Era in Animation
9. Out of Context Animation
10. Ghostshrimp Exposes the Hypocrisy of Cartoon Network

MOST COMMENTED POSTS IN 2012
1. A Tale of Two Titmouses: A Cartoon Brew Investigation – 350 comments
2. Ghostshrimp Exposes the Hypocrisy of Cartoon Network – 135 comments
3. New Brave Trailer – “The Prize” – 112 comments
4. Lou Dobbs Says “The Lorax” and “Arrietty” Indoctrinate Children – 100 comments
5. My Favorite Super Bowl Commercial – 95 comments
6. The Oscars: Animated Feature Nominees – 90 comments
7. Academy Award Talkback; RANGO and MORRIS LESSMORE win – 86 comments
8. Joe Murray’s Kaboing Goes Kaput – 75 comments
9. “The Adventures of Tintin” Wins Golden Globe – 74 comments
10. How Cartoon Brew Spawned Bronies – 68 comments

You may have noticed that a lot of websites have gone “dark” today, most notably Wikipedia and Tumblr. There’s grave concern throughout the online community as a result of two bills currently in the US Congress: Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This animated video explains why the bills would almost certainly kill off sites like Cartoon Brew:

Our ISP sent us a note this morning explaining how it would affect both him and us:

As an ISP I will become responsible for all of your content. Currently I am not. Due to the massive logs requirements and policing I would either need to increase my fees or discontinue service if the law is passed. If you are interested about its impact on hosting please take a moment and read this at SaveHosting.org.

Keep the Internet alive. Send a message to your Congressperson today by visiting AmericanCensorship.org.

Your Brewmasters,
Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi

Have an animated film or a piece of news to share? Here are some helpful tips for submitting to Cartoon Brew:

* If you are submitting an item, DO NOT SUBMIT using our personal contact forms or Twitter accounts. Submissions via our personal forms will be junked. Use our SUGGEST A STORY form, which is conveniently located in the right sidebar.

* An easier way to get our attention is to submit items via Cartoon Brew’s Facebook page. The benefit is that even if we can’t post it, it becomes part of the public discussion among nearly 5,000 Brew readers. Our FB page is quite active and we both both haunt it regularly.

* If you have a company press release, submit it to our CB BIZ news editor Chris at PR [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com

* Do not send links to film fundraising campaigns.We haven’t linked to a single fundraising campaign in over 18 months. That includes Kickstarter, IndieGogo and all their imitators. We instituted the no-fundraising policy as a fair way of dealing with the barrage of requests. If a film project is newsworthy for a reason other than the fact that it needs money, we may write about it AFTER the fundraising campaign is over, or we’ll post about the project without promoting the fundraising effort.

Join Cartoon Brew this Monday, October 3, for a FREE screening of this year’s selections in Cartoon Brew’s Student Animation Festival. Sure, you can see them all on-line (we’re posting the last one this Monday), but we think the films are even cooler viewed with an audience on a giant HD-format LED screen against the side of a building in midtown Manhattan.

We’re putting on the show in collaboration with the fine film purveyors at the Big Screen Plaza who have been hosting a solid line-up of animation and live-action films all summer long. Most of the films they show are professional productions, and we’re extremely delighted that they’re celebrating the quality of these student productions alongside their other programs.

Screening starts at 7pm and the location is 851 6th Avenue (between 29th and 30th St., behind the Eventi Hotel). If you’re coming from work and hungry, rest assured there’s an indoor cafe where you can grab a bite before or during the screening. And if you see Amid, say hi. (He’s friendly as long as you don’t talk about animation with him.) Here’s the Facebook invite page.

We’ve updated our new one-stop guide for short filmmakers. More international animation festivals and submission deadlines have been added to the list. We’ve also created a section of additional resources with links about posting your short film online and rules for qualifying films for the 2011 Oscar consideration. (Hint: If you want to do the latter, you don’t have much time left.) Bookmark the page because it’s going to grow in the coming months. And if you’re a short filmmaker, let us know what you’d like to see added to the page.

One of the questions that we get asked most frequently is, Which animation festivals should I submit my animated short to? Withoutabox offers an unedited list of thousands of regional and niche film festivals, but there’s no clear hierarchy of which festivals are important to the animation community. Considering the time and expense required to submit films, we thought it would be helpful to create a simple guide for filmmakers who wish to participate in the most significant animation festivals around the globe. So, let us introduce Cartoon Brew’s Animation Festival Guide.

We’ll update the list regularly with submission deadlines, and add more international animation festivals to the list. We encourage festival organizers to keep us up to date. Though the list will grow, it will also remain carefully curated to include only major international festivals that have diverse programming slates and invite guests and attendees from around the world. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and unedited list of every film festival in the world, there are other places to find that.

Are you following Cartoon Brew on Twitter and Facebook? Both communities have grown a lot in the past few months and we’d love to have you be a part of them too.

And if you prefer a more personal connection, both of the Brewmasters now have Twitter accounts: @Amid and @JerryBeck.

We’ve extended the deadline for our 2011 reader poll through this Sunday, August 7. So far, over 2,500 of you have responded. If you read the site, we’d really appreciate if you took a few moments to add your input below.

IMPORTANT: You may take the survey anonymously. However, we are also giving away four $50 Amazon gift certificates. If you would like to be entered into the drawing, include your email address in the last question. We’ll only use the email address to contact you if you are chosen in the drawing. It will not be used for any other purpose.