Oscar Focus: Grant Orchard Talks About “A Morning Stroll”
Oscar Focus: Patrick Doyon Discusses "Sunday"
Oscar Focus: Enrico Casarosa Talks "La Luna"
"The Secret World of Arrietty" talkback
Follow @CartoonBrew on Twitter
YouTube
Vimeo
RSS
Follow Cartoon Brew on Facebook
|
|
|
|
TAG FOR “Academy Awards”Cartoon Brew's home for up-to-the-minute, unedited announcements and press releases direct from industry sources.
February 16, 2012 7:00 am
BREWMASTERS NOTE: This week Cartoon Brew takes a closer look at the five Academy Award nominated animated shorts. Each day at 10am EST/7am PST we will post an exclusive interview with the director(s) of one of the films. Today, we discuss the NFB’s Sunday with its writer/director Patrick Doyon:
An Oscar nomination is the ultimate hard-won honor for a short filmmaker. Thirty-two-old Canadian filmmaker Patrick Doyon achieved the Oscar nod with his first professional film. His short Sunday is as quiet and reflective as the day of the week its named after. Told through a young boy’s point of view, the film celebrates the triumph of imagination over the mundane routine of childhood. The events that take places in this quaintly drawn world are accompanied by a feeling of foreboding. “Death is very present throughout the film,” Doyon says. “The three crows are never very far.” The apprehension about the future—signified by a large factory with a “for sale” sign on it—is in part rooted in Doyon’s childhood memories growing up in the Quebec town of Desbiens. “As young as I can remember, the factory was always closed. Maybe just a few times, it was functioning, but only for a short period of time,” Doyon says.
Doyon acknowledges that a lot of the film is autobiographical—going to church with his parents, visiting his grandparents—but he took liberties with the animation. For example, though he lived near a railroad and his house vibrated with each passing train, his home didn’t jump and bounce off its foundation as the houses do in Sunday. “This is the pleasure of animation: not trying to recreate reality,” he says. 7 Comments » posted in *Top Posts, Shorts, Academy Awards, Canada, National Film Board of Canada, NFB, Oscars, Patrick Doyon, Sunday 
February 15, 2012 7:00 am
BREWMASTERS NOTE: This week Cartoon Brew takes a look at the five Academy Award nominated animated shorts. Each day at 10am EST/7am PST we will post an exclusive interview with the director(s) of one of the films. Today, we discuss Wild Life with its writer/directors Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby:
Chris Arrant: This story centers around the concept of a remittance man, something most people don’t know about, but was pretty common in North America a few centuries ago. It sounds like a great historical fact, but what made it something you thought relevant and interesting to you two and to today’s audiences? Wendy Tilby: We Canadians tend to think our national history is quite boring. One almost forgotten historical phenomenon was around the turn of the 20th century when thousands of these remittance men flooded into western Canada, sent by their well-to-do families because they were essentially useless. Britain was becoming a meritocracy and so these second sons could no longer expect to land positions just because they were members of the aristocracy. They tended to have a pretty good time….until the reality of surviving in the Canadian wilderness caught up with them. We were also attracted to the idea of Empire and how education and breeding doesn’t prepare one for surviving in the very harsh conditions. The remittance men were victims of all that fine breeding and pressure from their families. But they also relished the escape and the adventure, and the dream of being cowboys. Amanda Forbis: I don’t think we contemplated necessarily if it would be relevant to today’s audiences. I think sometimes you just find these things interesting even though you can’t nail down why exactly. But overall, there’s something inherently poignant about colorful characters inhabiting a bleak landscape. Wendy: The other part of it is that both Amanda and I have English grandparents who came to Canada around that time and experienced similar hardships. Chris: Were you able to talk to your grandparents about the story inside Wild Life to get their first-hand viewpoint on remittance men? 5 Comments » posted in Awards, Shorts, Academy Awards, Amanda Forbis, Canada, NFB, Oscars, Shorts, Wendy Tilby, Wild Life
February 14, 2012 1:13 pm
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Animated Feature category in the Oscars, but I play along because that’s what all the cool kids do. This piece by Mark Harris on Grantland is a compelling argument though for why the animated feature category is, statistically speaking, silly and unnecessary. It’s such a thoughtful piece that I’m even willing to overlook Harris’s identification of animation as a genre, which we all know is incorrect.. At the very least, the Academy should consider Harris’s suggestion to cap the number of animated feature nominees at three. To date, there has not been a single year where more than three films have been worthy of the award. And it makes little sense to select five nominees out of a field of eighteen, when the Foreign Language category selects five from over sixty films. And those 60 films are already whittled down from a long list of contenders in each country. The dozen-and-a-half contenders in the feature animation category aren’t even preselected from a larger pool; films that nobody would ever think of rewarding like Mars Needs Moms and Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil are what make the category possible. Are animated films really that much better than live-action that every third film made is Oscar-worthy? As much as I like animation, even I’m not that deluded. (Thanks, Chris) 36 Comments » posted in Awards, Feature Film, Academy Awards, Grantland, Oscars
February 14, 2012 7:00 am
BREWMASTERS NOTE: This week Cartoon Brew takes a closer look at the five Academy Award nominated animated shorts. Each day at 10am EST/7am PST we will post an exclusive interview with the director(s) of one of the films. Today, we discuss Pixar’s La Luna with its writer/director Enrico Casarosa: Jerry: Enrico, how long were you at Pixar before La Luna? Enrico: Roughly 8 years. I’ve been there 10 years this month, and it was a couple of years ago that I pitched La Luna. Jerry: You worked on Ratatouille… Enrico: Yes, I worked on Ratatouille, a little bit on Cars and Up, and then a little bit on Cars 2. It sounds funny, but in eight years I was mostly on two movies. But then, of course, these movies are marathon. (laughter) Jerry: What is the pitch process for shorts at Pixar? Is John Lasseter open at all times or does he takes pitches for shorts a couple of times a year? How does that work? 1 Comment » posted in *Top Posts, CGI, Pixar, Shorts, Academy Awards, Enrico Casarosa, La Luna, Oscars, Pixar
February 13, 2012 7:00 am
BREWMASTERS NOTE: This week Cartoon Brew takes a closer look at each of the five Academy Award nominated animated shorts. Each day at 10am EST/7am PST we will post an exclusive interview with the director(s) of one of the films. Today, we begin with The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore: 13 Comments » posted in CGI, Shorts, Stop Motion, Academy Awards, Brandon Oldenburg, Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Louisiana, Moonbot Studios, Oscars, Shreveport, William Joyce
February 1, 2012 12:05 am
Brad Bird will host a special screening and on-stage discussion with the filmmakers of the 2011 animated and live-action shorts on Tuesday night February 21st at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills. The program, called Shorts!, will include all five animated short nominees and their respective directors: Patrick Doyon (Dimanche/Sunday), William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg (The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore), Enrico Casarosa (La Luna), Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe (A Morning Stroll) and Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby (Wild Life). The program will begin at 7:30pm. For ticket information click here.
The now traditional Academy Animated Feature Symposium will be held on Thursday February 23rd at 7:30pm. Actor/comedian Patton Oswalt will host a panel featuring the 2011 Oscar nominees in the Animated Feature Film category. The nominees (schedules permitting) include Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli (A Cat in Paris), Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (Chico & Rita), Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda 2), Chris Miller (Puss in Boots) and Gore Verbinski (Rango). The panelists will discuss their films’ development and their creative processes as well as present clips illustrating their techniques. Both events will take place at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, CA, and will begin at 7:30pm. $5 general admission/$3 for Academy members and students with a valid ID (limit 2 at the discounted price). Tickets will be available online and by mail on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Friday, February 3 at 9:01 a.m. To order tickets click here. 3 Comments » posted in Events, Academy Awards
January 30, 2012 2:22 pm
The results are in from Cartoon Brew’s Oscar survey and the winners are Pixar’s La Luna in the Animated Short Category and ILM’s Rango for Animated Feature. The full results are below:
As an unfortunate sidenote, we had to end the survey a few days earlier than we’d anticipated because someone attempted to hack the survey over the weekend. Despite the system’s restrictions for allowing one vote per IP, a user with the IP 75.128.42.114 who lives in a residential neighborhood of Glendale, circumvented these safeguards. This person voted a total of 224 times, 221 of those votes for Kung Fu Panda 2. In a show of generosity, the other three votes were awarded to Puss in Boots. We eliminated all of those results and ended up with 618 legitimate ballots. 39 Comments » posted in Feature Film, Shorts, Academy Awards, Oscars
January 26, 2012 1:34 am
With no clear frontrunners in either the Best Animated Feature or Short categories, it’s time to call upon the wisdom of the animation masses. Tell us what films you think SHOULD win the animation Oscars this year. We’ll keep the survey open for a week until everyone has had a chance to make their voice heard. GO TO THE SURVEY PAGE >>> |
ADVERTISEMENTS
EVENTSLos Angeles Animation Festival UPA CARTOONS at LACMA RECENT BREW TV EPISODES By Sitji Chou. A man tries to understand the futility of creating human connections when they’ve been impeded by the microcosmic void between material particles.  By Nikolas Ilic. A story of a Scottish sheep farmer who shears his sheep and tosses them cliff side…  By Dylan Hayes. Lesson 1: Everyone gambles, not everyone loses. Lesson 2: The world is full of traps. Lesson 3: You cannot win if you don’t take risks.  By Jean Yi. A personal and humorous exploration of being the ‘Nice Girl’ and coming to terms with the label and all its different meanings.  By Ferg Brennan. A lonely fisherman catches an unusual fish, which he decides to keep as a pet. |
