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Larry had me writing sequence scripts for "The Fox and the Hound," which turned out to be my assignment for the next six months. Part of the package was attending Woolie Reitherman's marathon story sessions, which often left me drained and dazed. There were also Woolie's marathon take-selection meetings, which left me drained and bewildered.
Last weekend at the U.S. box office, two films with strong animation ties opened in very different fashions. Disney's "Maleficent," a dark fantasy reimagining of the 1959 animated feature from the perspective of the villain, launched with $69.4 million.
A look at the work of Don Shank, Cartoon Brew’s Artist of the Day.
Drafthouse Films released the final U.S. trailer today for The Congress, the 2013 live-action/animation hybrid directed by Ari Folman …
Disney's head animation writer in 1977 was cartoon veteran Larry Clemmons, who had first been hired at the studio in 1930. At the time of his hiring, he was a Yale graduate with a degree in architecture, but an Ivy League education was of little value in 1930 when the economy was collapsing...and few buildings were being erected.
Joanna Davidovich is a freelance animator based in Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, she has been working as an animator, designer, and storyboard artist on commercials, on-air content, and TV shows since 2005. Her animated short film "Monkey Rag", which debuts online this afternoon, has been making the festival rounds since it was completed last July.
The first chapter of Steve Hulett's memoir about working as a writer at Disney in the late-Seventies and Eighties.
Yesterday in New York City, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Pro 3, the latest iteration of its fully-featured PC/tablet with pressure-sensitivity and an abililty to run any PC-based creative software from Adobe's Creative Cloud suite to Toon Boom, Maya and ZBrush, to post-production filmmaker tools like Assimilate’s SCRATCH and RED’s CineX.
John Lasseter, who became a doctor for the second time last week, delivered the commencement speech to this year's graduating CalArts class. Lasseter's speech is a cross between a revival meeting and a rock concert, complete with rowdy audience members chiming in, like in this exchange.
The 45th annual ASIFA-East Animation Festival Awards took place last Sunday in Manhattan. The long-running ceremony, which celebrates achievements in East Coast animation, is making an effort to gradually transform its annual ceremony into a more upscale affair.
Half a year on from the events of the previous episode, it's a winter of the soul for the various protagonists. We see just how much has changed in the intervening months through the kaleidoscopic lens of one Christmas Eve.
To commemorate the National Film Board of Canada's 75th anniversary, Canada Post released a set of five stamps this month that celebrate the government-run studio's films.
"A Dangerous Journey" (part funded by Comic Relief) warns young African women of the dangers of being coerced and tricked into prostitution by traffickers who use scare tactics perpetrated by native doctors and false promises.
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.
Tonight, Cartoon Network quietly released two new pilots that were produced in 2013: "AJ's Infinite Summer" created by Toby Jones and "Long Live the Royals" by Sean Szeles. Both Jones and Szeles work on "Regular Show"—Jones as a writer/storyboard artist and Szeles as a supervising director/writer/storyboard artist.
Reading beforehand what this episode was supposed to be about, my mind completely went somewhere else. Steven’s at that age when boys want alone time for a very specific reason and while I was 99.9% sure Cartoon Network wasn’t going to go that far, I thought they’d at least allude to that idea of adolescence and growing up. Instead we dived into the real reason (sort of) that Steven wanted to be left alone, and dug a little deeper into the idea of his parental units via a room and a weird, very strange world created by said room.
There is just one annual animation award in the United States that is older than the Oscars and that's the ASIFA-East Animation Festival. This year's ceremony will mark the 45th year in a row that the festival has been presented. It takes place this Sunday, May 18th, at the New School's newly built Tishman Auditorium (63 5th Avenue in Manhattan).
"The Begun of Tigtone" is a parody of every fantasy convention there is, from movies to games. And the star character of this story is Tigtone, a man whose personality is intentionally modeled after a two-dimnesional, anti-hero cliche. Along his journey, he is challenged by pointless puzzles, preposterously clad goddesses, and generic quest goals. Not even the dialog is safe from skewering, as the fantasy convention of convoluted language is parodied right down to the very title of the story.
Our post on Andy Serkis's inflammatory rhetoric about the limited role of animators on his motion capture performances generated a robust, often heated, discussion in the comments. By far, the most informative comment was provided by 3-time Oscar winner Randall William Cook, who was the animation supervisor and designer at WETA on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy that was released between 2001 and 2003.
If you didn't hear about last weekend's opening of "Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return," don't worry because no one else in America did either. Opening in 2,575 theaters, the film eked out $3.7 million, which is the worst opening ever for an animated feature in saturated release (over 2,500 theaters). The previous animation record holder in this dubious category was the 2011 Weinstein Company release "Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil," which grossed $4.1M from 2,505 theaters.