Third Grand Juror Selected
Gabor Csupo
Founder & Co-Chairperson, Klasky Csupo
World-renowned animation artist Gabor Csupo is the chairman and co-founder of Klasky Csupo, Inc., the entertainment industry’s leading independent animation company. A fiercely independent artist, Csupo is a Renaissance man, who, in addition to his film, TV and commercial animation career, is an acclaimed musician, the founder of two record labels, a noted restaurateur, a devoted father and an engaged member of the arts community in Los Angeles.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Gabor studied music for eight years and attended art school for four, before commencing his professional training in animation at Hungary’s famed Pannonia Studios in 1971. In 1981, Gabor and Arlene Klasky formed their own animation company, Klasky Csupo, in a spare room of their apartment.

Klasky Csupo moved into its first real office in 1983, expanding into motion graphics and live-action production. Over the next six years, Csupo presided over all aspects of the studio’s business, designing, supervising and animating commercials, company logos, TV station promos, motion picture trailers, on-air network promotions and industrial films.

Then, in 1988, Klasky Csupo was asked by director James L. Brooks top animate a cartoon strip called The Simpsons that was to be shown on The Tracy Ullman Show. The enormous success of those early bumpers led to its work on the series, which Klasky Csupo animated for the first three seasons of the show. For its efforts, Klasky Csupo garnered worldwide recognition and Emmy Awards two years in a row.

Continuing to break new ground, Csupo co-developed, produced and animated the phenomenally successful Rugrats series. Enlarging Klasky Csupo’s roster of programming, Csupo produced and animated such distinguished series as Duckman, Aaahhh!!! Real Monsters, Santo Bugito, Rocket Power, The Wild Thornberrys and As Told By Ginger.

Tireless and inventive, Csupo has expanded Klasky Csupo’s product offerings to all areas of entertainment media. He launched Klasky Csupo Publishing, CLASS-KEY CHEW-PO COMMERCIALS and the eagerly anticipated Global Tantrum web-entertainment division. In 1998, Csupo co-produced the company’s first venture into feature filmmaking, the enormously successful The Rugrats Movie, (the first non-Disney animated film to gross over $100 million) as well as its hit sequel, Rugrats in Paris: The Movie.

As an expression of his life-long passion for music (he left Hungary with only his prized record collection!), Csupo founded the record labels Tone Casualties and Casual Tonalities in 1994. Csupo’s artwork can be seen on the cover of the latest release by his idol and friend, the late Frank Zappa: The Lost Episodes.

Csupo has three sons and one daughter and lives in Los Angeles.


Next Grand Juror
Eric Goldberg, Onboard!
As we get closer to our Call For Entries deadline, we're thrilled to notch up the excitement around our fest with another major announcement! Today, we unveil the next member of our Grand Jury, the massively talented animator and director, Eric Goldberg. Yep! You're right! Eric is the guy that animated the Genie in Disney's Aladdin, co-directed Disney's Pocahontas and served as animation director for Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Here's Eric's full bio for you to peruse.

Eric Goldberg's animation knowledge started early. He created flip books at age six and started making Super-8 films at the age of 13. His teenage years included guest appearances on local Philadelphia television programs, as well as a national appearance on To Tell the Truth. Eric's Super-8 films won top prizes in the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards, including 1974's Grand Prize of summer film courses at the University of Southern California. Eric received a full scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where he majored in illustration and took supplemental animation and film courses. He worked as a freelance animator while still in school and eventually wound up as a fulltime assistant animator on Raggedy Ann and Andy, directed by Richard Williams.

The experience meant working with master animator Tissa David (UPA, Hubley Studios), as well as animation legends Emery Hawkins (Walter Lantz, Warner Bros., Hubley Studios) and Art Babbitt (Disney, UPA, Hubley, Quartet). When the film was completed, Richard Williams invited Eric to work in his London studio as a director/animator on countless television spots. He had the good fortune to work with Ken Harris at that time, learning techniques honed during Ken's stint as Chuck Jones' greatest animator (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner, Pepe Le Pew, et al). Eric's association with Richard Williams continued in Los Angeles, where Eric served as director of animation on the Emmy-winning Ziggy's Gift, based on the popular newspaper cartoon.

Eric met his future wife, Susan, while on holiday in New York, where she was the head background painter for Zander's Animation Parlour. Married during the making of Ziggy, Eric and Susan have enjoyed both a personal and professional relationship with Susan frequently serving as art director on their projects. The couple landed back in London where Eric co-founded Pizazz Pictures, a commercials studio with a worldwide clientele. At Pizazz Eric directed spots employing such diverse techniques as cel animation, brush-painting, stop-motion, pixillation, colored-pencil rendering, live-action and animation combinations and digital compositing.

Eventually Disney came knocking at Eric's door and convinced him to return to California for what turned out to be a 10-year run at the studio. Eric's first assignment was as supervising animator on Aladdin's wise-cracking Genie, who endlessly morphed and shape-shifted into whatever form the brilliant mind of Robin Williams could conjure up. After that, he co-directed the successful Pocahontas, the first Disney feature based on events and people who actually existed as a vivid part of America's history.

Eric then animated the feisty Danny DeVito-voiced satyr Phil in Hercules, and followed that with a stint on Fantasia/2000. Eric directed, wrote and animated two critically-acclaimed sequences for that film: Carnival of the Animals (flamingos with yo-yos, rendered in animated watercolor) and Rhapsody in Blue, a slice-of-life story set in 1930s New York. The piece, a labor of love, was inspired by both George Gershwin and legendary theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who served as artistic consultant. Susan brought her formidable talents to the film as art director on both sequences.Later, Eric spent a year at Universal Studios developing Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are as a CG animated feature film until the project became bogged down in classic "development hell." From there, he went across the street to Warner Bros. and served as animation director on the live-action/animation feature Looney Tunes: Back in Action, directed by Joe Dante. Joe and Eric considered their work a personal tribute to the late Chuck Jones, who was a friend to both and was peerless as the most brilliant animation director ever at Warner Bros. On this film, Eric got to handle the legendary Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Sam and the entire Warners stable, and provided the voices for Speedy Gonzales, Tweety and Marvin the Martian.

First Grand Juror Selected
John Kricfalusi
Okay, artists, here's your chance to get your work under the nose of one of the industry's most out-spoken, out-there creators of all-time, Mr. John Kricfalusi. Here at The Nicktoons Film Festival we're proud to announce that John K. is onboard as one of our three Grand Jurors and will be helping award our $10,000 Grand Prize for best short. Although you probably have his resume memorized, here's the scoop on John's career. (Note: If you're a Los Angeleno, don't forget that John will be appearing in person at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood for a two-night mini-tribute, Sept. 7 & 8. For info go to www.egyptiantheatre.com.)

John Kricfalusi is one of the most influential pioneers of the modern cartoon scene. With his landmark 1991 TV series Ren & Stimpy, featuring the demented, wildly anti-social and hilariously inappropriate antics of the two title characters, Canadian-born animator John Kricfalusi kicked cartooning in its underpants, starting a myriad of trends: the gross-out subversive cartoon (Beavis and Butthead, South Park), the thick-lined flat retro cartoon (Dexter's Laboratory, Fairly OddParents, etc.), the caricatured revival of classic characters cartoon (Boo Boo Runs Wild, The Flintstones On The Rocks).

As a consultant for Fred Seibert and Hanna-Barbera, he helped found the shorts program that introduced Dexter's Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, Powerpuff Girls and many other popular series. After revolutionizing TV cartoons, Kricfalusi followed up by inventing internet cartoons in 1996 with The Goddamn George Liquor Program and developed the pipeline techniques for Flash animation that are used at practically every studio today.

Kricfalusi started his career during the dark ages of cartoons. In the 1980s he worked on such ‘crap,' as he calls it, as The Smurfs, Laverne and Shirley in the Army and other Saturday Morning Cartoons being churned out by animation factories. During this depressing period he and other disgruntled cartoonists developed and pitched his own cartoon creations. His frantic and extremely sweaty pitches terrified network executives.

Luckily for Kricfalusi and the animation world, Ralph Bakshi discovered John in 1987 and hired him to direct CBS' Bakshi's Mighty Mouse. This was the cartoon that started the so-called ‘creator-driven' revolution. Kricfalusi hired a crew of artists that, like him, were dissatisfied with the formula cartoons they were forced to work on at other studios. Kricfalusi developed a production system based on the classic cartoon system of the 1940s but adapted it to the realities of TV production.

Bakshi's Mighty Mouse became the foundation of not only the creative revolution that followed, but also gave the industry the mechanism that would allow it to happen. It put the artists back in charge for the first time in 30 years. Two years later, Ren and Stimpy debuted and the revolution was in full swing. Kricfalusi's legendary series continues, in a totally unleashed adult-fashion, today on Spike TV.

We're thrilled to welcome animator John Kricfalusi to the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian for a special two-night mini-tribute. The first night is a retrospective of Kricfalusi's work, including an uncensored episode of Bakshi's Mighty Mouse, Boo Boo Runs Wild, commercials, webtoons and some brand new no-holds-barred Ren & Stimpy cartoons with NAKED GIRLS made for Spike TV. This will be followed by a question-and-answer period, and you will meet some of John's co-horts.

Also you will see the birth of Ren and Stimpy's first child in "Stimpy's Pregnant"! The second night, Kricfalusi presents the classic cartoons that inspired him. These are some of the greatest, most twisted cartoons ever made! Clampett, Fleischers, Jones, Avery, Lantz and Terrytoons. John will introduce the films and tell how they inspired him. You will laugh! This screening is also followed by a question-and- answer session.

Here's some info on our Pre-Selection Jury
the folks responsible for deciding which films will make it into The Nicktoons Film Festival compilation
series scheduled to air this fall on Nicktoons. We'll be announcing our Grand Jury–the
folks who award the $10,000 Grand Prize–in the weeks to come!

Ryan Ball, Online & Games Editor, Animation Magazine. The son of Stone and Steel, Ryan was sent to Earth to defend the defenseless, enfranchise the disenfranchised and uptrod the downtrodden. Instead, he choose to watch cartoons, play video games and write about them. Before joining Animation Magazine, Ryan worked as a radio DJ, an advertising copywriter and a puppet fabricator for a Disney Channel clay animation series. When he's not covering the world of animation and interactive entertainment, Ryan is busy toiling away on his own stop-motion and 2D computer-animated projects.
   
Eric Homan, VP of Creative Affairs, Frederator Studios. In 1992 Eric joined Hanna-Barbera Studios in Hollywood after reporting news for a radio station chain in Pennsylvania. He rose to the position of creative director of Hanna-Barbera's animation art department, and with its Time-Warner merger he was hired by Warner Bros. Studio Stores to oversee production of HB artwork and collectibles. Eric is the first development executive for Frederator Studios, managing the development of the studio's new cartoon and book projects.
   
Fred Seibert, President, Frederator Studios. Fred Seibert, executive producer for the top-rated Nickelodeon series The Fairly Oddparents, ChalkZone, My Life as a Teenage Robot and Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Fred, along with his partners, former AOL exec Emil Rensing and former Discovery exec Travis Pomposello, founded Frederator Studios in 2000 to package, build and produce media properties. Before founding Frederator, he served as president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. Under Fred's direction the studio launched it's most successful slate of hits in 15 years. The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory, Cow+Chicken, and Johnny Bravo have been the highest rated shows on the Cartoon Network. Fred's work has won or been nominated for every major media award: Grammy, Oscar, Emmy, CableAce, Clio and others. So, boy! Are we proud to have Fred onboard!
   
Rita Street, Publisher/Editorial Director, Animation Magazine. As a journalist, Rita has focused her career on the industry of animation, reporting for publications in the U.S., U.K. and Asia. She is the former editor of Film & Video Magazine and is the founder of the International non-profit organization, Women In Animation. Rita has also authored three books on graphic arts including the Rockport Publisher hardback, Computer Animation: A Whole New World. For the Art Institute of Pittsburgh she serves as a program advisory committee member for Game Art & Design. She has also served on several prestigious juries, most notably Austria's Prix Ars Electronica competition for excellence in computer animation and visual effects.
   
Ramin Zahed, Editor, Animation Magazine. Ramin has been covering the entertainment industry for over 15 years. Before joining Animation Magazine, he was a senior editor at Daily Variety where he covered animation, visual effects, television and independent filmmaking, and also served as a television critic. He was also the publications editor at KCET, the public television station based in Los Angeles. Ramin's articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, LA Weekly, Movieline Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. When he's not watching cartoons, Ramin can be found browsing toy stores, stalking reality show personalities and taming wild horses in rodeo events.