Disney the ecowarrior

Lost artworks by Disney animators have been restored to America after being discovered in Chibo University, Japan. The works, hand-picked by Walt Disney, were sent to Japan in 1960 as part of an exhibition which coincided with the opening of Sleeping Beauty.

The display, which was designed to explain the various processes of animation, included rare images from the Oscar winning cartoon Flowers and Trees. No doubt the leafy theme of the discovered paintings pleased David Whitely, the Cambridge professor responsible for giving Disney a green make-over.  Read on...

Films cash in on new media

The media and entertainment (M&E) industry estimates that while 63 per cent of the revenues for a film are generated from the box office and around 13 per cent from home video sales, other sources contribute anywhere between 2 and 25 per cent of a movie’s earnings today.

Schoolboy's dream now a real success

 Eddie White dreamed of starting an animation studio while still a budding 14-year-old artist at school. Running on enthusiasm, talent and passion, he has not waivered from his dream.

With friends James Calvert and Hugh Nguyen, he started The People's Republic of Animation (PRA) in 2003 while studying drama at university.

By the time the trio graduated in 2005, they had ready made jobs.   Read on...

Disney unveils anime 'made in Japan'

 US entertainment giant Walt Disney on Thursday unveiled pilot versions of television animation series it is producing in first-of-a-kind tie-ups with Japanese animation studios.

The move, first announced earlier this month, marks a change of strategy for Disney, which has traditionally distributed US-made characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck around the world.

A Japanese adaptation of the popular US "Lilo and Stitch" series will start in late 2008 as "the first Disney animation made in Japan and set in Japan," an official at the Japanese arm of Walt Disney said.   Read on...

The "Secrets" to Writing for Animation

Creative Screenwriting, a widely read and highly referenced magazine publication for those in-the-know of Hollywood screenwriting and direction trends, has announced the sale of a DVD release dedicated to animation. Hoping to serve as a sort of catch-all guide for curious writers to lend their hand to the film or television spheres of entertainment, the DVD release "Secrets of Animated Movies & TV Shows" by Ken Rotcop (Richie Rich, Superfriends, Charlotte's Web) claims to tackle everything from graphic novel adaptations to Disney-Pixar styled scripts.

Currently on sale as a part of Creative Screenwriting's collection of the Craft and Business of Screenwriting, "Secrets of Animated Movies & TV Shows" -- for $19.95 -- aims to open up the mind of the writer and delegate what one should and shouldn't do when writing for animation.  Read on...

Hollywood on the Plains: No. 21, Iowa City

When Stephen Jennings landed in California, he quickly shed his Iowan roots. His first job carried the only-in-L.A. title of "assistant flame artist."

At Digital Domain and Sony Pictures Imageworks, his animation and special-effects projects included Spider-Man and The Fight Club. He wore bowling shirts, hobnobbed with big-name producers at Oscar parties, and founded Grasshorse Technologies, an animation and special-effects film production company whose clients include the Cartoon Network and Warner Brothers Studios.  Read on...

Catch Stop-Action Animation At Its Best

The hauntingly beautiful and melancholy "Peter and the Wolf" is the class act to catch tonight on PBS.  Airing as a "Great Performances" presentation at 8 p.m. on WEDU, Channel 3, this 30-minute work was this year's Oscar winner for best animated short film.

Animation: Global partnerships, fresh perspective the way forward

WEB TV: The Wizardry of Movie Animation

Vancouver studio tackles painstaking animation project

Animator Mike Hollenbeck reaches into the miniature native Indian village and grabs a puppet's jaw, moves it slightly, then hits a button on his computer that activates a camera. He hits another button, which replays the last three frames of film shot for this scene, so he can check that the character's movements are smooth.

"You have to be careful with every move," says Hollenbeck, who is animating by stop-motion a scene of campfire dialogue. "It kind of feels like defusing a bomb."  Read on...

'Spanish Oscars' animation nominees announced

The best animated short film nominees for the Goya Awards have been announced.

The Goya Awards are the equivalent of the Spanish film industry’s Oscars.

The nominees are:

- Atención al cliente by Marcos Valin and David Alonso
- El bufón y la infanta by Juan Ramón Galiñanes García
- La flor más grande del mundo by Juan Pablo Etcheverry
- Perpetuum Mobile by Raquel García-Ajofrín Virtus and Enrique García Rodríguez
- Tadeo Jones y el sótano maldito by Enrique Gato Borregán.  Read on... 

Beowulf Conquers

The critical and box office success of Robert Zemeckis's latest motion-capture animated film, Beowulf, made at Sony Pictures Imageworks, confirms that movie-going audiences are seeking new and improved experiences on the big screen.

Beowulf, which opened first at the domestic ($28.1 million) and international ($17.3 million) weekend box office and is poised to have a strong showing over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, is the most ambitious computer-generated animated film ever produced. Driven by both the director's vision and by visual effects technology, it was the artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks who brought the characters and worlds to life on screen in both 2D and 3D formats.  Read on...

Where is the line on animation?

The tagline for Disney's upcoming "Enchanted" could well be the motto for the latest push in animation: "The real world and the animated world collide."

Not in the slapstick tradition of 1988's pioneering "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?," but in the sense of transforming actors into animated characters and vice versa.  Read on...

Disney's Enchanted Holiday Formula

It has been a staple of the holidays for years. As the leaves turn brown and the holidays beckon, Walt Disney greets kids and their parents with a family movie that does tons of business and, if the stars are aligned (as they often are), the hit plays straight through New Year's Day. Heck, Disney virtually invented the notion of a two-month holiday box office back in 1987, holding off releasing its Ted Danson/Tom Selleck flick Three Men and a Baby in the summer to ship it to theaters for Turkey Day. The rest, as they say, is history, marked by such November megawinners as The Incredibles, Disney's top-performing film in 2004, and $100 million films such as The Santa Clause 2 and Monsters, Inc. The common denominator for those films: They were either high-end animation movies or films with big-deal movie stars like Tim Allen in The Santa Clause.  Read on...

Big budget animation from Bollywood in '08

There is a cyclone brewing in India’s animation film industry, after ‘Hanuman’ took the Indian film industry by storm. Many animations films are taking shape in studios, with big budgets riding on them and industry inasiders claim that close to 10 such films will be ready for release in India in 2008. Here’s a peek at what viewers can expect.

Yashraj Films Ltd in alliance with The Walt Disney Studios has finished 60% work on its first animation film ‘Roadside Romeo’, slated for release in June 2008.  Read on... 

A Primer to Methods in Computer Gaming Graphics
Part I of II

Modern computer gaming graphics are pushing the limits on today’s computers. With games getting more realistic, interactive, and detailed, more and more computing power is demanded. In order to make computer games run in real time while maintaining near photorealistic graphics, programmers find it absolutely essential to use a number of efficient and clever algorithms. This primer focuses on the techniques used to make modern computer gaming graphics fast while at the same time keeping the graphics and visual effects very realistic and convincing. Full article