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 [...]

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). [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]