The $100 Million Club

Ice Age 3 stomped over the century marker on Friday:

... [T]he third Ice Age movie ... consumed $8.7 million on Friday while evolving past the $100 million mark ...

As of Friday, IA3 has a worldwide gross of $252.4 million, 60% of the take coming from foreign venues. The producers claim a $90 million budget for the feature; if true, the third incarnation of the Adventures of the Wool-covered Elephants should be moving into the black right about now ...

Elsewhere on the domestic box office front, the phony Austrian Bruno collected $14.2 million to come in at #1, the animated epic Tranformers dropped 58% but already has $322.6 million in its steel gunny sack, and fourth place Public Enemies owns a total of $56.8 million.

Finally, The Proposal (#5 with a bullet) has also joined the $100 million club, having amassed $106.7 million to date.

Click here to read entire post

In the Halls of Mouse

In between packing files, papers and office knick-knacks into cardboard boxes, a fellow IATSE rep and I spent a piece of the morning talking to employees about the  oncoming negotiations for an updated Disney-IA Collective Bargaining Agreement. (The pact is up the end of October, so the IA and TAG are now laying groundwork for Fall negotiations.) ....

During our studio ramble, we ran into Glen Keane, who related that he was supervising animation with the Rapunzel animation crew (He's also executive producing on the picture.). Glen told us traditional animators are teaming with c.g. animators to bring a more "hand-drawn" sensibility to the c.g. characters in Rapunzel, with more stylization and counter-weight in the animation, melding computer graphics with the rhythms and tempo of traditional Disney animated features.   He related how the characters' skin will have a softer look. (There is also the animation dynamics of Rapunzel's seventy feet of hair.  Animationg that will be fun.)

The way Glen described the process, it's going to make Rapunzel a c.g. feature to put on your "to see" list.   The film is now going into serious production, so we'll be able to watch the results of the artists' and technicians' labors in (relatively) short order.

Have yourself a splendiferous weekend.

Click here to read entire post

We're moving ... FINALLY!

At long last we can confirm that we will be moving to our new headquarters in Burbank in less than two weeks.

Effective Wednesday, July 22, 2009*, the new address of the Animation Guild Local 839 IATSE and the American Animation Institute will be:

• 1105 N. Hollywood Way (between Chandler and Magnolia) Burbank, CA 91505-2528

Our new phone numbers:

• TAG Local 839: (818) 845-7500
• American Animation Institute: (818) 845-7000

Our new fax number will be:

• (818) 843-0300

* We'll be moving on Tuesday, July 21. Please note that it will be difficult to reach us by phone or fax on that day.

---

Our first membership meeting at the new building is scheduled for:

• Tuesday, August 4
• Pizza and refreshments: 6:30 pm
• Meeting: 7 pm

We'll give members at that meeting a tour of the new building, and also discuss important issues about the TAG contract negotiations. Further details in the July Peg-Board and on the TAG Blog.

---

Click the thumbnail below for a full-page flier with map

Click here to read entire post

The MegaCollector's Flip the Frog

Ub Iwerks was Walt's strong right arm in the 1920s. He was a designer and work-horse animator on the early Disney shorts, considered so valuable that he was a 20% owner of the studio.

But the 20% ownership ended when Iwerks departed Walt Disney Productions after a falling out with the majority owner. Bankrolled by movie mogul Pat Powers, Iwerks developed the frog character above, but within a few years flamed out as an animation kingpin and returned to Disney's.

The drawing above is from the Mega Collector's massive collection, file # 34-438. Mr. Mega believes it to be an Ub drawing. It was originally owned by Ub's son Dave.

Click here to read entire post

New Warner Product?

As I related a couple of days ago, Warner Bros. Animation has surged back to life after a lengthy hibernation. New series. New direct-to-video projects. The offices and cubicles at the studio are filled with artists busy at work.

I know that among the new works-in-progress at WBA are a number of super-hero projects (like around seven), but frankly, I pay minimal attention to specific new titles (I'm a union guy; sue me.) But now Comic Continuum reports on a new character being added to the roster:

DC Comics' Jonah Hex -- already featured in a live-action movie starring Josh Brolin next year -- will be the subject of an animated project as well, The Continuum has learned.

Jonah Hex will be featured in a short from Warner Bros. Animation, written by Joe R. Lansdale.

And MTV.com chimes in about old Jonah:

The character of Jonah Hex has appeared in animated projects in the past, including “Batman: The Animated Series,” “Justice League Unlimited” and “Batman: The Brave and the Bold.” This time, however, Hex will ride solo without help from others in the DC Universe, following the lead of the self-contained films released thus far from the WB. Additionally, the “Hex” short will follow the PG-13 mold demonstrated by the other DC Universe animated projects.

I should really pay more attention to what's going on at each and every studio. But some weeks you just get overloaded, you know?

Click here to read entire post

The International Linkomatic

This time, let's not link to animation from the U.S. of A., but range farther afield. Below are a few articles and overlooks at toonage in other parts of the globe ... beginning with the animation biz of Singapore:

... "Since the launch of the Media 21 blueprint in 2003 to chart growth for Singapore's media sector, the industry has experienced steady growth with revenues increasing to S$19.5 billion (US$12.26 billion) ... Today, international giants such as Lucasfilm, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft are based in Singapore, working in partnership with Singapore companies and talents to produce and distribute media content and services for the their customers worldwide ... To date, there are more that S$1.3 billion (US$818 million) worth of media funds based in Singapore, covering the TV, film, animation, games and distribution sectors. The figure is a cumulative total, as a result of private capital injected by banks, financial institutions and strategic Investors over the past few years ...

I wouldn't have guessed that a c.g. animated feature would come our of Palestine, but hey. A c.g. feature has now come out of Palestine.

Animation in Palestine from Sheryle C on Vimeo.

And yet another animation studio (it's for games, but it's still animation) is going into Toronto:

French interactive game maker Ubisoft on Monday unveiled plans to open a Toronto development studio, with the Ontario provincial government pitching in $226 million over 10 years to create 800 jobs.

The move follows the Ontario provincial government in May announcing it will invest $20.5 million into the Starz Animation Toronto 3D cartoon studio over the next five years to create and retain high-tech jobs locally ...

San Diego's Comic Con will be getting more than its usual herd of Hollywood producers and stars this year:

... [Hayao] Miyazaki ... has agreed to address a room full of 6,500 admirers at the San Diego comics, fantasy and film convention on July 24. That is a prelude to his planned appearance the next day in Berkeley, where Mr. Williams’s center will present Mr. Miyazaki with its Japan Prize, awarded annually to a person who has brought the world closer to Japan ...

And there are other things from Japan to celebrate. A big, cartoon robot has a birthday:

The animated sci-fi series "Mobile Suit Gundam" first aired in 1979. It was set 100 years in the future amid a space war between the Earth Federation and hostile space colonies. The show's popularity quickly skyrocketed and further Gundam series, comic books, video games and films were spun off ...

To mark the 30th anniversary of Gundam's launch, a massive replica of the robot is being erected at Tokyo's Odaiba seaside park. It is scheduled to be unveiled Saturday and can be viewed until Aug. 31 — part of Gundam's birthday celebrations ...

Animation World Network reports in detail on the glories of Annecy:

... This year Annecy spotlighted Germany's contribution to the world of animation with numerous special screenings, including a presentation of Lotte Reiniger's 1926 classic The Adventures of Prince Ahmed with live musical accompaniment. Stuttgart's renowned Studio Film Builder, celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, was saluted with a screening of their films and Throwing Light on Works in the Shade took us deep into the archives of German animation from the 1920s to the 1960s along with interviews with surviving witnesses of the dynamic German avant-garde film scene ..

Lastly, we present to you "the Pokemon of Russia" (duly noting that even the original Pokemon isn't what it used to be ...):

... Gogoriki was created by a gentleman named Denis Chernov. He did it under mandate from the Russian government to develop a series that had no “negative” characters amongst the cast. Instead, plots would revolve around “not on the battle of opposing forces but on the unexpected situations which the animated characters stumble upon in their lives.” Launched in 2004, the series is now considered the “Spongebob” of the former USSR, and has also taken off in Germany....

So what is it, exactly? Pokemon or Sponge Bob? Have a zesty week; you're more than halfway through.

Click here to read entire post

Sony Plunges Into Chipmunks Territory

Rights to the Smurfs (feature edition) have been in Sony's hopper for awhile. When I've walked through the Imageworks' campus, there has been artwork and storyboard festooning the walls. But not the company is moving forward with the Blue Crew:

Raja Gosnell has been tapped to direct Sony’s live-action/animated “Smurfs.”

The film will be released in 3-D and 2-D formats on Dec. 17, 2010.

“Smurfs” will be produced by Jordan Kerner (“Charlotte’s Web”). J. David Stem and David N. Weiss (the second and third “Shrek” pics) and Audrey Wells (“George of the Jungle”) penned the script; the logline’s being kept under wraps.

Gosnell started his career as an editor on “Home Alone,” “Pretty Woman” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” and broke into directing on “Home Alone 3.” He most recently helmed “Beverly Hills Chihuahua.”

Sony announced in June 2008 that it had launched the “Smurfs” movie project after obtaining film rights ...

A while ago, when I ambled through Sony Pictures Animation big white building in Culver City, there was jawing among the artists about how realistic/live action or stylized/animated the Smurfs were going to look in the new feature.

You'll be amazed at this, but the artists were pushing for more of a cartoon look. (What possessed them?) And one of the producers on board was pushing for a live-action approach to the the little blue people.

Shocking, but there it is.

Click here to read entire post

Late Night Synchrolux

TAG President Kevin Koch holds forth at Synchrolux and here. He's far more immersed in the animation biz than I am at present ... (I'm the union rep; he's the president working in the cartoon industry)  ... so we share some of his recent posts. (Click the links below for the full articles.)

Story Development in Animated Features

... The story building process typically lasts two or three full years for an animated feature, but there’s a lot of variation, and in some cases it stretches out much, much longer. That’s 2-3 years of dedicated work by a team that usually involves a director or two, a few writers, a team of story artists, and several visual development artists and character designers (at least at the big studios). Often that several-year period of intense development work is preceded by more years of development by one person or a few people who either originated the concept or are trying to make the concept salable or ready for full development ...

Partly Cloudy and G-Force

... Partly Cloudy. This Pixar short seems to have gotten a lot less attention than previous Pixar shorts. Maybe it’s because Partly Cloudy hearkens back to Dumbo and a seemingly simpler and gentler style. If you ignore the technical accomplishments, it is a lot less showy than most short-form animation these days. But that’s what blew me away — the submersion of very difficult and impressive technological accomplishments into a beautiful, evocative piece that never showed off its technical merits for their own sake, but instead told a layered, heartfelt story....

Wall-E: When Theme and Plot Get Out of Sync

... [L]et’s start with a film that many called the best film of 2008. It was not only glowingly reviewed, but it won the Oscar for Best Animated Picture, and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. I enjoyed the film, but found it flawed. Given the reviews and success, I’m clearly seeing a problem where most others don’t, but bear with me.

My issue, put simply, is that the film’s theme was revealed and resolved early, robbing the remainder of the film of meaning. Put another way, by climaxing and resolving the theme about half way through the movie, it ended up feeling like two distinct, shorter episodes welded together, with the first one quite a bit more compelling than the second. ...

Click here to read entire post

At the 'Toon Factory of the Brothers Warner

Daffy Duck models from the MegaCollector's collection -- © Warner Bros.

I haven't been over to the Warners Ranch in ever so long, and this week I paid a visit to the animation studio housed in a three-story building and a gargantuan trailer. (Which is actually a bunch of interconnected big trailers that -- hooked together -- grow to the Big Family Size.) ...

The last couple of years, WBA has been a sleepy place to walk through, what with lots of empty cubicles and offices. But the emptiness was a by-product of not much work going on. The place had a super-hero series, a video project or two, and that was it.

That isn't the case now. The studio is currently hopping with three television series and seven direct-to-video projects in various stages of production.

There is Scooby Doo (now in its what? 73rd incarnation?). There is a new season of Batman. And there is the reboot of the Looney Tunes franchise with Laff Riot. As one of the Riot artists related:

"This show's going to give us over a year's worth of work. I've been freelancing for a while and it's good to be on staff again, gives me a chance to rebuild my investment losses.

"And if the show's good, maybe it'll be more than a year. The notes we got back on our first boards focused on weaker areas and were right to the point. That's encouraging. It's nice to get notes that make sense ..."

The word circulating around WBA is: "Hooray! Warners Animation is back from its deep sleep and going again!" and "We're glad to be working!"

That working thing. I hear a lot of that these days.

Not that it matters much, but this is TAG Blog's 2500th post ... 2501, here we come ...

Click here to read entire post

Imagi Happenings

As many know, the cartoon producer Imagi -- based in Hong Kong and Sherman Oaks -- has had an interesting roller coaster ride these past several months. (The global financial meltdown has not been kind.)

But the studio's new trailer for Gatchaman is now out and about, so there's production work going on beyond this fall's Astro Boy:

... [T]he trailer sums up the film’s theme with cryptic juxtaposed text, “A world in chaos, an alien evil, a lone warrior is found, earth’s last hope, five shall rise, ‘Gatchaman.’

Set in the not-too-distant future, “Gatchaman” sees a world on the verge of environmental and technological catastrophe attacked by an evil alien menace. Its only hope is a group of five genetically advanced teenagers in bird-themed uniforms. Naturally, they’ve got special abilities, fighting skills and spaceships to get the job done right ...

The game plan, as it's been related to me, is to get Astro Boy successfully launched, and then use the cash flow and momentum from that production to slingshot Gatchaman into full orbit.

The Sherman Oaks studio has down-sized staff over the past eight months as it's temporarily dropped development on features that are farther down the pipeline and focused on projects that have releases nearer at hand.

Hope they make it. There's a lot of competing product out there.

Click here to read entire post

Disney's Other 2009 Animated Feature

Most of the animation community has been focused on The Princess and the Frog, which the House of Mouse releases this holiday season. But there's another feature coming out this November, currently in production in northern California.

Not much of the picture has been rolled out yet, but a few snippets have been screened:

New York press and movie critics got their first glimpse at an animated Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge in a presentation of 3-D footage from Disney’s “A Christmas Carol” at the Regal E-Walk Theatre this week.

Two scenes were shown from the performance capture-driven film, directed by Robert Zemeckis (”Polar Express“), along with a montage of clips and a teaser trailer ...

... [One] scene shown sees Jacob Marley’s ghost crashing in on Scrooge during the night. It is here that the film shows off its high tech special wizardry. Thanks to the 3D effects work, Marley’s ghost hovers off the screen and glows with incandescent color ...

Image-Movers Digital, Disney's San Rafael animation studio in northern California, has been hard at work on Christmas Carol for a couple of years now. (I went up there a few weeks ago and talked to part of the crew about union pension and health coverage, also about how the picture is going. The answer: "Pretty well".)

DIsney has a small unit working on the feature here in L.A., and I've walked through it chatting people up, admiring the artwork on the walls. I've got no idea about the overall quality of the movie, but the London scenics are top-notch. People are going to be immersed in 19th century London, in Victorian staircases and alley ways and candle-lit sitting rooms and shops like they've never been immersed before.

But how it performs at the box office? I've no idea.

Click here to read entire post

Business Week Spots a Trend

And it's truly amazing:

... [S]tudios are finally starting to realize that they don't need to pay stars $20 million a film or give them a big chunk of the revenues, as they had reflexively done for years. Julia Roberts now gets closer to $12 million. Travolta, who got $20 million for the fire disaster movie Ladder 49 in 2004, is said to have received half that for his role in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.

I'm so old that I remember when Jim Carrey got up to $25 million a picture and studio execs were wailing in agony about the $20 million price barrier being breached. But with the collapsing economy, and the various star vehicles that are under-performing, the trend line appears to be bending the other way.

... [S]ays Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com, studios [in earlier times] would have scrambled to find a big-name star to play Captain James T. Kirk and other crew members for this summer's Star Trek. Instead, Paramount (VIA) selected a cast of relative nobodies, amped up the special effects, and "made it all about J.J. Abrams,"

But this "let the films be the stars" thingamabob isn't a new phenomenon ...

When I was a lad, my old man (a Disney employee) said at dinner one night:

"You know, Walt doesn't pay anything for the actors in his movies. He gets them on the way up [Julie Andrews] or on the way down [Fred MacMurray]. That's why the movies don't cost very much ..."

Dad made this observation in the early sixties, around the time 20th Century-Fox was paying a fortune for Elizabeth Taylor to appear in Cleopatra. This "hire 'em cheap" policy remained the Mouse House's religion long after Walt Disney's death, and continued to pay off handsomely. The highest-grossing live action film of 1969 was from Disney, and starred Dean Jones, Buddy Hackett and Suzanne Pleshette. It was titled The Love Bug.

So this hire-less-expensive-actors strategy is hardly new.

As regards animated features, big stars attached to big salaries was never a consideration until Jeffrey Katzenberg made the concept standard operating procedure for DreamWorks Animation. Before J.K., animation producers seldom employed mega-stars as voice talent*.

Today, all the producers of animated features use bigger names, but how much value this adds to the final product remains unclear. Kung Fu Panda made gargantuan dollars with Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman behind the mic, but Brad Pitt did little to boost Sinbad. And Up one of the biggest grossers of the year, employs a 79-year-old tv actor in the lead role.

Please don't strap me into a straitjacket for suggesting this, but maybe it's the quality of the movie that's most important, and not the price tag of the actor.

* Bing Crosby in Disney's Sleepy Hollow could be the exception.

Click here to read entire post

Then Is the Animation Going To ... Hawaii?

Well, a little of it is.   Amazingly enough, there's a small slice of toonage being produced in the Island State.

... [A] production studio in Hawaii will launch a series of animated shows on the national scene. Hawaii Film Partners has produced 38 two-minute episodes of "Ape Escape" for Nickelodeon's NickToons network. The series premieres at 9 a.m. today.

"This was a way for us to do our first animation project on something that was bite-sized," said Rann Watumull, co-founder of Hawaii Film Partners and an executive producer of "Ape Escape." "It's a wonderful way to introduce a show without having to take over a time slot."

... Creating the infrastructure for animation has already led to the next step. Watumull's company is working on 26 half-hour episodes of "Guardians of the Power Masks," an animated series that represents a multinational partnership with South Korea and China, where it will air in prime time ...

The last animation produced in Hawaii was Final Fantasy, also the product of a multi-national effort.  A consortium of Japanese and American artists created the elaborate mo-cap feature in Honolulu at the turn of the millenium. High hopes and big bucks were poured into Fantasy, but only tiny box office resulted, so the big Honolulu studio in the oceanfront high rise went away.

Animation, to a far greater extent than live action, is market driven.  If the projects tank, then the jobs and studios disappear.  Sadly, this is the way it's always worked.

If Hawaii's latest animation house hopes to endure, it will have to deliver the goods, quality wise.  It shouldn't take long to tell if that comes to pass.

Click here to read entire post

Ice Age 3 = King of the World

Now with sub-continental Add On.

The new Ice Age (the feature, not a big global freeze) did nicely stateside, and wonderfully well everywhere else:

... According to studio estimates issued Sunday, [Transformers Deux and Ice Age 3] each sold about $42.5 million worth of tickets during the three-day U.S. Independence Day holiday weekend.

But "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," the third movie in 20th Century Fox's family franchise, was clearly the top pick on a worldwide basis. It earned $148 million from 101 foreign markets, which the News Corp-owned studio said was the sixth-biggest opening overall.

Including its North American tally of $67.5 million since opening Wednesday, the global total stands at $215.5 million ...

Feeding initial weekend data into the Koch Box Office Prognosticator (patent pending), our estimate is that IA3 will finish its domestic run in the $150 million to $165 million neighborhood ... $30-45 million south of Ice Age: the Meltdown.

The last Ice Age (movie, not the weather pattern) collected $456.5 million overseas, which ended up being 70% of the picture's total box office take. It's a safe bet that the new offering will rake in something around $400+ million in its foreign markets. That would make IA3's worldwide total a nice, round $550 mill ... or more.

I'm sure the boys and girls at Fox will sleep soundly, knowing that their latest animated infant will quickly be toddling into sizable profits.

Add On: And now that I've put this up, I note the same info is available in comments below. Ah well ...

Add On:It seems as if IA3 is tearing up the wickets down where the nights are steamy:

With a weekend collection of Rs 2.2 crore on just 60 prints, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs has got the highest opening for any animation film in India, beating the 2005 superhit Hanuman, which had an opening of Rs 1.5 crore on 150 prints.

Fox Star Studios India's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is undoubtedly the 'coolest' hit of the year as it has captured the imaginations of young and old alike.

Vijay Singh, CEO, Fox Star Studios India, said, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs has managed to get one of the highest openings for an animated film in India even though it has released with the hugely hyped Kambakkht Ishq; it has performed even better than Hanuman.

The woolie mammoths beat Hanuman?! We are impressed!

Click here to read entire post

Plus the Fourth of July's Box Office Derby!

Now with flavorful Add Ons!

The Nikkster, now awash in greenbacks from the sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily, tells us that it's a nail-biter at the box office races:

.

... Fox's Ice Age 3-D: Dawn of the Dinosaurs opened very promisingly with $14 million Wednesday, $11.5M Thursday, and $16.2M Friday from 3,993 venues. (Rival studios had been claiming the pic wasn't tracking well with young boys, and that's why 20th felt the need to sneak it at 330 theaters recently. Fox said it "added an additional marketing layer prior to the onslaught of Transformers 2.) With the public clearly not tiring of 3-D toons, the threequel can come close to $42M July Fourth weekend and $67M for the full 5-day holiday even though Saturday's grosses on the 4th will be weak for every movie ...

It appears Rupert has himself another winner. Meantime, Up has a bit of air leak from its balloon, now that another cg 'toon has thundered into town, but will still pull down six million or more for the holiday weekend.

Add On: IA3 collects 7$17,000,000 on Friday, $832,000 behind T2. Let the battle of the sequels rage on!

Add On Too: And at the finish it's ... Transformerz!

Updated studio estimates Monday made it pretty clear who was No. 1 in the photo-finish race for boxoffice supremacy this weekend, with Paramount's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" topping the domestic pack with $42.4 million.

Final official data from Nielsen EDI will be released midday Monday. But morning updates from various studios consistently showed Fox's "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" in second place with less than $42 million in Friday-Sunday boxoffice ....

Click here to read entire post

... And July 4th's Greatest Film

The flick that really says it all::

Okay, it's not Yankee Doodle Dandy, but 1776 blew my socks off when I first saw it during Navy service. After viewing it, I returned to my destroyer base totally jazzed, and tried to talk my shipmates into going to see it.

But nobody cared. And nobody went.

Unpatriotic swabbies.

The picture flopped the year of its release (1972), but I still maintain it's a solid screen musical. William Daniels looks nothing like Mr. Adams, but 1776 is superior to the lower-key John Adams (second episode) that was unspooled last year on HBO.

At least, I think so.

Click here to read entire post

July 4th Linkorama!

Happy fireworks; now enjoy a shorter linkfest to get the holiday sparking.

Consequences of Sound examines the splendors of Beavis and Butthead Do American Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Album:

... [W]hile [the animated film] cost about five million to make (pocket change nowadays), …Do America grossed over $60 million dollars for its domestic box office run, a feat attributed to timing as the height of Beavis and Butt-head’s popularity only dwindled shortly thereafter ...

... [T]his album is essentially the love child of late ’90s alternative and Beavis and Butt-head-approved metal, only with a little comic relief for good measure — a perfect mix for such a confused yet brilliant decade. The on-screen duo get the ’70s buddy cop treatment with the late Issac Hayes turning their TV show theme song into the “Theme From Shaft”’s evil twin, and it’s all aptly titled, “Two Cool Dudes” ...

Bruce Kirkland at the Toronto Sun overviews some of the newer and older animation now out on those little silver disks:

... Animation is about 117 years old, depending on what you count as the earliest example ...

The 1960s [cartoon] collection [from Warner Bros.] includes good stuff like Top Cat, Quick Draw McGraw, The Flintstones and Porky Pig. There is also marginal work such as Precious Pupp and Peter Potamus. The 1970s set includes bits of Batman and Tarzan from their Adventure Hour, as well as Scooby-Doo, Yogi's Gang and other Hanna-Barbera animations.

In the three-dimensional world of animation, the Diz Co. has dropped three million new dollars into the Florida Magic Kingdom's Hall of Presidents..

After an eight-month rehab and a total script rewrite, Walt Disney World on Friday reopened the Hall of Presidents with an animatronic Barack Obama...

Nicknamed "Robobama" by the artisans who created him under tight secrecy in a Los Angeles warehouse, Disney's presidential replica is more realistic than predecessors thanks to new technology such as a more flexible silicone skin.

His mouth wraps around more sounds like "oh" than just jawing up and down. The muscles in the chin and cheeks flex as he talks ....

Examiner.com takes a short tour -- photographic and written -- of the Disney archives.

The archives ... contain shelves and shelves of books, cases of rare antique Mickey Mouse watches, drawers of rare animation cels and artwork, vintage Disney-licensed toys, and almost anything else Disney-related you might imagine ...

The archives are contained in the Frank G. Wells building on the studio lot, and inside the lobby were many more historical exhibits ... on display was one of Walt Disney's three multiplane cameras, which were used to create three-dimensional pans in Walt's early animated films. A set-up from "Pinocchio" was on display, demonstrating how the cameras would hold the cels spaced apart, allowing the camera to focus on various layers giving the viewers the illusion of depth ...

On the European front, The Hollywood Reporter informs us that the live-action icon Lassie is morphing into a 3-D cartoon:

... The series, to be a 26 x 26 min series, will be a U.K.-Ireland-France-Germany-India co-production.

"What we are announcing now is a co-development agreement. But it is very well understood that we will go ahead and co-produce this as a multi-million Euro series, with us as the lead producer," said Tapaas Chakravarti, DQ's CEO. "The script will primarily be written in Europe with the intention of delivering the series at the end of 2010 or early 2011."

If you're in the right age group, black-and-white memories of Lassie are vivid, since the series, beginning in the early fifties, ran for almost twenty years.

Lastly, Tech Radar offers five animated shorts from various times and places for you to pick over ... as you pick the cob corn out of your teeth. (Here's one):

Happy Fourth. Watch out for those Piccolo Petes.

Click here to read entire post

Chris Wedge Speaks

Marshall Fine interviews Chris Wedge, the Big Man of Blue Sky:

...“The differences [between Pixar and Blue Sky features] are pretty apparent to the audience,” Wedge says. “It all depends on what audience you’re making the film for. With the first ‘Ice Age,’ we were making it mostly to entertain ourselves. When we saw the audience was into it, we fine-tuned it. But still, the things we like best are the ideas that entertain me and my buddies.

... “Pixar has a well-understood internal development paradigm. It was started by animators who were influenced by the tradition of animation at Disney. On the other hand, we started on our own." ...

Blue Sky is, to my mind, the third studio in the triad of "Blockbuster Animation Houses" (the other two being Pixar and DreamWorks.)

There are those who snipe at Wedge, but anybody who has produced as much high quality work that is also highly commercial is in rare company. I can only think of two others with equivalent track records who began their working lives as artist/creators.

So here's to Mr. Wedge, and congratulations for seeing Ice Age Three off to a roaring start.

Click here to read entire post

If It Were Simple ...

The Weinstein brothers had a nice profit with Hoodwinked, but it seems this cartoon thing isn't as easy as it looks:

[The animated feature Escape from Planet Earth] is not expected to resume until August or early fall, [and] was halted because of script issues, said several people involved in the production. The film is being written by Tony Leech and Cory Edwards, the writing team behind "Hoodwinked!," The Weinstein Co.'s 2006 hit release that took in $110 million worldwide. Leech is also directing the movie.

But Leech has not been satisfied with his script and has worked through several rewrites. Most of the movie's 150 animators were sent packing from the Vancouver production facility until the creative issues could be resolved ...

There aren't a lot of memorable animated features that haven't been reworked like pretzel dough during the course of production. Snow White had half-finished sequences cut. Aladdin had its whole second act thrown out and redone ("Jeffrey gave us three and a half weeks to reboard it," an artist moaned to me at the time). Toy Story was hanging by a thread when the world's first cgi feature went through a major overhaul. Lion King and Shrek changed directors, and the crews wondered if the pictures would ever come together.

Face it. Creating ninety minutes of animated entertainment that audiences will flock to see is tough under the best of circumstances, which is why so many companies flame out trying to make an entertaining and profitable cartoon. Lasseter, like Disney before him, figured out that having good creative minds focus on story problems and offer solutions was useful, but the landscape is littered with production houses that haven't absorbed the lesson.

Best of luck to the Weinstein Co. It's been a long time since Hoodwinked.

Click here to read entire post

The Unending Question: Is It All Going to India?

This inquiry comes up with metronomic regularity. This article from the Sub-Continent Down Under highlights it:

...When [the animated feature] Alpha and Omega hits the screens in April 2010, it will be a turning point not only for Crest Animation, but for the entire Indian animation industry as well. The box-office fate of the first animated Hollywood film to be produced by an Indian company could well define how the world looks at Indian animators.

The movie, with a budget of US$25 million, is being co-produced by the U.S.-based distributor Lionsgate. It is the first production in a three-film contract between the two ...

Now, I'm not a person who never says "Never!" But here's the working reality as I see it.

The momentum is on the side of domestically-produced theatrical animated features because domestically-produced cartoons are the epics that have performed at the box office in a major way. Ice Age. Up. Kung-Fu Panda. Shrek. All these products were created in some part of the U.S.A., and all of them made their mother companies oodles of money.

Foreign-produced animated features (with the exception of Australia's Happy Feet)?

Not so much.

Now. The day may come when some Mumbai-based Pixar produces ninety minutes of animated splendor that makes a half-billion dollars in the world marketplace, but that hasn't happened yet, not in the twenty years that I've been thinking about it and anticipating it.

As a general rule, Hollywood producers are reluctant to take unconventional chances, because that can get their expensive derrieres fired. And the conventional Hollywood wisdom is that television animation, direct-to-video animated features and some digital visual effects can be outsourced with success, but the bigger budget theatrical stuff cannot. (Success is here defined as one hundred million or more dollars at the world box office.) Many point to Hoodwinked as the big indie c.g.i. hit from the Philippines, but the Red Riding Hood comedy, though profitable, was hardly a money-spinner on the level of Shrek or Ice Age.

My thinking on all this is that some theatrical animation work will probably find its way to the world's lower-cost neighborhoods over the next few years, but until an Asian studio hits a major home-run with one of its productions, the floodgates will not open.

Click here to read entire post

Visiting Disney and DreamWorks

Since I've been negligent visiting studios this week (sometimes e-mail and phone calls change your plans), I made a larger than usual effort to get my rear portion out of the office chair and into the workplace this morning and afternoon ... starting with Disney Animation Studio.

The Princess and the Frog animators have pretty much wrapped work on the picture, but the cleanup folkss soldier on.:

"Almost all of the cleanup people are done the end of July. A few will stay on into August. There's a short to work on, and maybe something after that. But most of the crew will come back in eight or nine months for Winnie the Pooh..."

Four miles east in Glendale, lots of work is going on with How to Train Your Dragon and Shrek 4 I came across two animators looking at S4 character animation and they opined that the upcoming Shrek was a return to earlier form. (Neither had been thrilled with 3). And Puss in Boots which has been in work for what seems like ever, is now in a higher gear.

"Puss in Boots wasn't at the top of the studio's priority list for a while. A lot of the people working on it got pulled off onto pictures that were closer to release. But we finally got a script that is really funny, and now we're boarding it with the idea of making the visuals different from Shrek, even though there's a Shrek character in it. (Puss is the only one from the Shrek franchise.)  Since the story is there now, we're concentrating on staging, setting and characters ..."

And what does the story encompass? Here's what Antonio Banderas (Mr. Puss-In-Boots) says:

They’ve been working very, very heavy on the script for almost three years… it looks unbelievable. It looks really, really cool… I’m very happy with what I’m doing [with the character]. In a way, it’s easy work because I know the parameters of the character. I know how to move him around.”

“We’re going to go from the time he’s a very little cat, so you see actually why and how he becomes an adult killer, and the reasons why he ends up on that path… It goes away from that kind of use of popular culture that ‘Shrek’ has. It goes in a different way, and the movie sometimes gets almost emotional, I may say, and it’s kind of epic… It’s going to surprise people I think; they’re not going to expect what we’re going to do.” ...

I'm so old I can remember when Jeffrey K. used to say: "No period pieces! We only want contemporary animated features. No fairy tales!"

But that was a long time ago, way back then. And this is now ...

Click here to read entire post

Ice Age Snark

I flitted through some MSM stories and reviews about Fox's new animated feature Ice Age 3. Not pretty.

Lazy, transparent, disposable and at its worst, boring, Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs is a sometimes beautiful piece of animation consistently ruined by unfocused directing, bizarre editing choices, phoned-in voice acting, and a script which is neither witty nor filled with momentum. Of course it’s in 3D too because the extra dimension, like everything else in the prehistoric troposphere, is yet another apparatus for the film to hastily implement without foresight, planning or success. I guess the first question which comes to mind is why bother? Why bother even finishing a film all involved were clearly so ambivalent about? ...

Or:

There are so many things going on in "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," ... why does the third installment of this animated tale often feel so glacial? ...

Even the gray lady, even while sprinkling a few compliments, gives the feature the back of its gloved hand.

A collection of short Scrat films would be much more pleasing than the elephantine “Ice Age” series ...

Owwy yeowy.

Me? I liked the first Ice Age and thought the second one told its story well. (The third one I have not seen.)  But I think that the negative reviews -- and they are far from being all negative -- will have minimal impact on worldwide grosses. The earlier films did robust numbers in all corners of the globe, and by now Ice Age is a brand name.

This third incarnation is going to make Fox lots of money.

Click here to read entire post

The MegaCollector's Yogi Bear

© Hanna-Barbera. Click the thumbnails for larger images.

When I was five years old, Yogi Bear premiered as part of Hanna-Barbera's syndicated Huckleberry Hound show, and I can recall being impressed (and a bit confused) that a famous baseball player would name himself after a cartoon character.

The Blue Hound's sidekick quickly became sufficiently popular to be broken off into his own show, along with Snagglepuss and the quickly-forgotten Yakky Doodle.

Wikipedia points out that Yogi was one of many H-B characters to have a collar, which facilitated animating his head separately from the rest of his body.

Local 839 picketers at H-B in 1982 sang their own version of the Yogi Bear Show theme song:

Yogi is the bear
With the greediest boss
When H&B subcontracts
It's America's loss!

Have a foreign country
You will find him there
We're on unemployment
'Cause our bosses don't care!

That's why we are mad
That's why we're annoyed
Hanna won't be happy
'Till we're all unemployed!

Hanna has it better
Than a millionaire
'Cause he's un-American
And that's unfair!

Click here to read entire post

DWA's Early Foray Into Television Animation

A commenter asks:

The only false start that I can remember DWA having on television was "Father of the Pride" in 2004 , which was five years ago. What was the other DWA television flop thirteen years ago ? (Or was it a planned tv show that was never produced ?)

Well, pull up some comfy chairs, friends and neighbors, and I'll tell you of DreamWorks Animation first television studio ... located in sun-kissed Encino on fabled Ventura Boulevard a dozen years ago ...

Before there was Madagascar penguins, before there were prides and fathers and 'Vegas magicians, DreamWorks Animation ran its own teevee animation division, located in a glossy mid-Valley office building.

This was in the middle nineties, when the proprietors of of DreamWorks SKG had visions of a television animation empire dancing in their heads, and the horizons for small-screen projects seemed wide. (Mr. Spielberg, after all, had already enjoyed fine success with Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Pinky and the Brain and others.  And Jeffrey had been present at the birthing of Disney Television Animation.)

Animation for the small screen was then roaring, and top talent was pulling down good salaries at a variety of L.A. studios.  DreamWorks Animation signed a sizable staff to term contractsat high wages and set about to develop new series that would knock the socks off the competition. (I walked through the facility numerous times in those early months, and morale and hopes were high.)

Word was going around that DreamWorks TV Animation was finalizing a deal to supply ABC with all its Saturday morning animated programs ... but then Disney (led by Jeffrey's former compadre Michael Eisner) swooped in and bough the network, and the rumored deal between DreamWorks and the broadcaster never happened.

DreamWorks t.v. division soldiered on, developing other projects. Toonsylvania, a comedy series produced and directed by Bill Kopp and Jeff DeGrandis, was broadcast on Fox, lasted from February to December in 1998, and was then distributed on VHS. (It's never shown up on DVD.)

Also in 1998, DreamWorks' animated mini-series Invasion America ran on the Warner Bros. in prime time. After it aired, one of the artists who worked on it told me.

"Steven Spielberg [one of the show's creators] is really unhappy with the animation and production quality, and didn't think Invasion America looked good at all. He thought the overseas studio did a really poor job" ...

After the two series, the studio in Encino slowly wound down. The staff, which had circulated a petition against one of DreamWorks TV Animation's execs and caused Jefrey Katzenberg to drive over to tamp out fires of discontent, became fatalistic about the division's chances of survival. "We know we're gone as soon as our Personal Service Agreements are up" was a major theme, and by and by the offices in Encino were closed. (The Lakeside building on DreamWorks Animation's Glendale campus, originally slated to house the television animation division, today houses feature animation staff.)

It took most of  a decade before DreamWorks Animation again got seriously involved in television. Father of the Pride was a primetime misfire, but The Penguins of Madagascar has been a solid Nicktoons hit, with other series from DWA features are now in the teevee pipeline.

It took awhile, but DreamWorks Animation is now back in the television business. And now you know the rest of the story.

Click here to read entire post

Toonish Merger Mania

Peter Bart, no longer the Big Kahuna at Variety but still holding a megaphone at the trade paper, speculates on possible corporate suitors for stand-alone DreamWorks Animation:

... Insiders say Time Warner is exploring a bid to acquire DreamWorks Animation, the publicly owned company that presently distributes its very successful films through Paramount. An "out clause" would permit DreamWorks Animation to terminate its Paramount deal next year provided it paid $150 million to that company or that one-third of DWA were acquired by another entity.

... Last week, veteran money manager Mario Gabelli told Barron's, "A round of consolidation will occur in the next six to 12 months because of the costs of financing, prints and advertising, the benefits of globalization and such. We hear talk of something going on."

Allow me to gaze into my crystal ball (handily embedded inside the Pegboard of Ollie Johnston's old animation desk) and give you the lowdown:

DreamWorks Animation will get gobbled up by one of the hungry conglomerates, and within the next two to three years. It's freaking inevitable because:.

1) DWA is the only successful animation studio not attached to an entertainment conglomerate, nad its pursuing the Pixarian business model of "Cash flow is predicated on every animated release being a hit."

2) DWA has built a strong animation track record and sizable 'toon library, both highly desirable things for the big entertainment congloms.  It's also building a television presence after a false start thirteen years ago.

3) DWA is working to hold down costs and squeeze more efficiencies into its production pipeline. (This I know from first-hand experience.) The economizing will improve chances for wider profit margins, thus making the 'toon factory more enticing to those big entertainment companies.

4) Jeffrey K. loudly proclaims that he's not looking to merge with anybody ... much as Steve Jobs proclaimed Pixar's independence from Disney just before, you know, Disney gobbled Pixar up ... and Steve J. pocketed several billion dollars. (Jeffrey can do math, trust me.)

All this is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow morning. I can't tell you the month and day a marriage will occur, and the current economic troubles might slow the nuptials a bit, but there is no way that a merger won't ultimately happen.

Click here to read entire post

Toons International B.O.

We know animation is cleaning up locally, but on the far sides of various oceans it's also holding its own. Like for example:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" blanketed the international circuit during the weekend, recording an explosive $162 million from 9,910 screens -- a per-screen average of $16,347 -- in 58 markets for an overseas total of $181.6 million. The film's global gross is $363.2 million ...

Fox said it anticipates surpassing the $1 billion benchmark as early as this week, when the studio saturates the overseas circuit with "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs." ... Pixar/Disney's "Up" raised its early overseas cume to $47.1 million with a $4.7 million weekend at 2,064 screens in 15 territories ...

Monsters Vs. Aliens, still out in the marketplace, now has a worldwide accumulation of $369 million (which boils down to 53%/47% domestic/foreign.  For this heavily American=themed feature, the box office percentages have been lower in foreign venues that DWA's other recent releases.  Ah well ....)

Coraline has $36.1 million in overseas venues; coupled with the $75.3 million the little girl pulled in across the U.S. and Canada, Henry S.'s stop-motion epic now has a worldwide box office total of $111.4 million, with more markets yet to come ...

Click here to read entire post