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While Iranian live-action cinema has achieved vast acclaim throughout the years, the country has yet to produce an animated feature that has made a similar impact on the international scene. That may change soon with multiple animated features currently in production and rapidly rising production standards.
Sony Pictures Animation is exploring new directions with the announcement of the stop motion/live-action hybrid feature "Superbago." The superhero-themed film will be directed by John Harvatine and Eric Towner, both veterans of "Robot Chicken" among other animated TV shows.
Guillermo del Toro announced yesterday that he is developing an animated series based on his film "Pacific Rim."
Disney's "Feast" debuted yesterday to a raucous packed house at the Annecy International Animation Festival, alongside some never-before-seen clips from the studio's next feature "Big Hero 6."
Foreign animation distributor GKIDS announced yesterday that they have acquired North American rights to the Brazilian film "Boy and the World."
Animation and visual effects studio Sony Pictures Imageworks has confirmed what many in the industry had suspected for a long while: the studio is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Vancouver, Canada to take advantage of generous tax credits provided by the Canadian government. This move, combined with Digital Domain's jump to Vancouver and Rhythm & Hues' bankruptcy, prompted "Variety'"s VFX chronicler David S. Cohen to say that the Los Angeles feature film visual effects industry is "in full collapse."
Although Greg Centineo, the producer of "Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return," had hoped for a big second weekend, the film plummeted 48% this weekend and ended up with a sophomore frame of $1.9 million. The movie has struggled to find a fan following, except for the film's Facebook page which is filled with a curiously large number of middle-aged and elderly people who absolutely adore the film.
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.
"Jellyfish Eyes" marks the feature film directing debut of Japanese superstar artist Takashi Murakami. Described as a post-Fukushima sci-fi fantasy, the $7 million live-action/CGI hybrid film incorporates Murakami's goofily-styled creatures throughout, as well as an appearance by his fine art character Miss Ko2.
Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef are an animation duo from Ghent, Belgium. Their work has gained extensive notoriety in the past few years, after their 17-minute wool-animated short "Oh Willy…" swept the festival circuit, racking up countless awards and charming the hearts of audiences across the globe.
Animated Fragments is our semi-regular feature of animation tests, experiments, micro-shorts, and other bits of cartoon flotsam that doesn't fit into other categories. To view the previous 25 installments, go to the Fragments archive.
Today the Annecy International Animated Film Festival announced the feature film selections for their 2014 edition. Eighteen films were selected—nine in competition and nine out of competition. A total of 68 animated features were submitted this year.
The NFB StopMo Studio app for the iPad provides essentially everything you need to jump into creating an animated film. You won't have any issues getting comfortable with the user interface if you've worked with animation programs before, and it seems more than approachable for newcomers young and old. Once you open up the program, you're welcomed with a short and succinct tutorial that covers the basic tools, and then opens up to allow you to explore the rest of the options available.
This short animation of a seemingly CG bear climbing stairs is garnering a lot of attention on the Internet because it's actually a CG bear printed as 3-D models and then animated in stop motion.
After three years of tryouts and short runs in a total of four different cities, Disney Theatrical’s version of "Aladdin" finally opened on Broadway March 20th at the New Amsterdam Theatre. So now that it's here, how does it compare to the animated "Aladdin" we all know and love? After seeing the musical a few days ago, here are my observations.
This weekend, Disney’s "Frozen" became the highest grossing animated film of all time. Its $1.072 billion worldwide gross has surpassed the $1.063 billion of "Toy Story 3," which was the previous record-holder for biggest animated feature.
The 17th edition of the Holland Animation Film Festival concluded last Sunday in Utrecht, Netherlands. The winners of the top prizes for both feature film and narrative short hailed from South Korea.
The autobiographical graphic novel L’Ascension du Haut Mal, (released in English as Epileptic), is being adapted into an animated …
The website Short of the Week, which has established itself as one of the preeminent online forums for short film discourse, has announced the winners of their 2014 awards, honoring projects that "took the torch of short film and charged into the unknown [and] explored new genres, new characters, new styles, and left an impression upon us we can’t ever shake."
Besides today's bonanza of Genndy Tartakovsky projects, Sony Pictures Animation also made it official that Kelly Asbury ("Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron," "Shrek 2," "Gnomeo & Juliet") will direct the upcoming, as-yet-untitled "Smurfs" movie.