New Dates Set for DreamWorks...
Fox has announced the latest release dates for two of upcoming DreamWorks...
Archive
Pixar’s Good-Luck Charm
Okay, so Cars 2 was the first film from Pixar Animation Studios that was greeted by the critics with less than Messianic reviews. Was it bound to happen, given that critics are allowed to love you only so long before they turn ugly and form a mob against you? Or [...]
Ed Benedict and the Cartoon Revolution
The recent release of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh illustrates just how much the look of animation has changed over the past twenty years. Today, of course, we regard such changes as being matters of dimension: two-dimensional, hand-drawn (like Pooh) as opposed to three-dimensional, digital imagery (like damn near everything else). [...]
The Case of the Copycat Concerto
It’s only August, but Oscar chatter is already starting to be heard. This has reminded me of one particular Oscar-winning cartoon, around which revolves one of the few genuine mysteries of the cartoon world: the uncanny, even suspicious, similarity between Warner Bros’ 1946 Bugs Bunny cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit and MGM’s [...]
Leon Schlesinger in Dollars and Scents!
Animation corporate executives have not always been highly regarded by the artists who work for them, particularly during the Golden Age. One exception to that trend was Leon Schlesinger, who until 1944 served as the producer of all of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons released by Warner Bros. (after [...]
Faster Than the Eye Can See!
One individual animation drawing goes by faster than the eye can register. Animators have an abundance of funny ideas. Animators working in England frequently go to lunch in pubs and knock back a few, lubricating those funny ideas. To what do these three facts add up? To that fact that [...]
Daredevil Has a What?
As everyone reading this knows, the San Diego ComicCon is taking place this week. ComicCon is, among other things, the ultimate melding of the comic book, motion pictures and television industries, which these days are pretty darn simpatico. But it was not always so. In 2005 I spoke with legendary [...]
Ray Harryhausen Talks Technique
There are legends, and then there are legends, and then there is Ray Harryhausen. The genius behind such stop-motion animation classics as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts turned 91 a couple weeks ago, and does not make films anymore. Nor does he give very many [...]
Disney Wins By a Head
The name Arthur Davis may not be familiar to the casual toonhead, but not many artists had as long and productive a career in animation as Davis did. He started in animation in the 1920s at the Jefferson Film Corporation, which produced silent Mutt and Jeff cartoons. There he worked [...]
The Looney Tunes Studio’s Near-Death Experience
Throughout the history of animation, there have been plenty of train wrecks (metaphorically speaking, of course), usually on the feature film side of things, but how about bus wrecks? And literal bus wrecks at that? While interviewing legendary layout and design artist Bob Givens in 1992, for an article that [...]
The ‘Toy Story’ Toy That Got Away
Tales From the Toon Trenches: From the Files of Michael Mallory Editor’s Note: Author and journalist Michael Mallory has been covering the animation and visual effects scene for over two decades. Beginning today, he looks back at some of his earlier scoops and shares some of his “untold stories” with [...]
Wiig and Cooper Guest Voice...
The parade of stars stopping by The Simpsons office to do guest voice stints on...
Boinx Unveils New Features of...
German software producer Boinx has unveiled some special upgrades the 3.1...
