keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

I'm a little surprised at Cartoon Brew 's insistence than Avatar be considered an animated film. I don't know if the reason is because it is the highest grossing film in history and they want animation to have some of the glory or if it's because James Cameron is so insistent that Avatar should not be tainted with the 'A' word. In any case, there are reasons (beyond whatever anyone thinks of Avatar ) why I don't think considering it an animated film is a good thing. Those outside the film business may not be aware of the distinction between production and post-production. In a live action film - one with no animation or special effects - production is the shooting of the film. Post-production is what happens after the film is shot. Those things typically include editing, music, sound effects, dialogue looping, the sound mix and titling. When a film does include special effects, unless they are done in camera during the regular shoot, they are consider...

Robert Iger's free-spending ways have caught up to him. Having purchased Pixar and Marvel for a combined total of $10 billion, the studio has to start making some serious coin in order to pay off the purchases. The strategy is to focus on $150 million films that can be heavily merchandised or films that cost less than $30 million. Anything that falls in the middle of those two budget neighborhoods is out, even if it's a proven money maker. The Proposal , a Sandra Bullock film that cost $40 million and that grossed $315 million worldwide won't have a sequel as a result of this policy. New York magazine reports : The franchise-intensive mantra came after Disney CEO Robert Iger admitted publicly and unflinchingly that 2009 had been "awful": Having started the year with Confessions of a Shopaholic (domestic gross: $44 million) in the worse recession of all time, it then summered with the costly $150 million rodent flop G-Force (domestic gross: $119 million), and ...

Often, a first isn't really the first. It's simply the first that people remember. Steamboat Willie isn't the first sound cartoon, but it's the one that made a difference, so it's the one that enters the history books. If a first isn't very good, it tends to be forgotten. That's the case with Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future , the first TV series to include computer animated characters. It ran only 22 episodes in syndication in 1987-88. I wrote the article below as production on the series was ending. It's ironically fitting that the article appeared in the first and only issue of Cartoon Quarterly , edited by John Cawley and Jim Korkis and published by Gladstone in the fall of 1988. The magazine had a fannish slant, but the roster of writers is one that readers of the blogosphere will recognize. Besides Cawley , Korkis and myself, the authors included Leonard Maltin , Jerry Beck , Floyd Norman , Will Finn , Scott Shaw! and Mark Kau...

Ed Hooks is the author of Acting for Animators . While his own background is not in animation, he's identified many things that animators need to be thinking about while doing their work. One point that he's made is that the quality of a performance is based on the script supplying the necessary foundation for building a character. In his February 2010 newsletter (scroll down for the relevant material), he talks about the shortcomings of Avatar 's script from an acting standpoint. Zoe Saldana is Neytiri, the Na’vi female lead. She has been raised in a kind of New Age Garden of Eden. The Na’vi spend a lot of time tuning into trees, plants and their spiritual vibes. But what are Neytiri's personal values? The script really doesn’t say. In her first scenes, she's helping chase off those pesky humans. But then, in the second act of the script, she befriends the fake Jake avatar and gets romantic. And, at the very end of the story, she slays the dragon, Col Quarit...

Patricia Zohn writes about the women of ink and paint during Disney's golden age over at Vanity Fair . Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White , Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”—the all-male assembly line—once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25—a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes—who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism—Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors—but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good. The article includes original interview material with some of the women, one of whom was Zohn's aunt. (link via Mar...

Mindy Aloff, author of Hippo in a Tutu , is interviewed by Kent Worcester of The Comics Journal . "Both animation and theatrical dancing are labor-intensive activities that benefit from a benevolent visionary at the helm. Animation today could learn much from what Walt Disney arranged for his staff to do: to visit the ballet and sketch the dancers. And dancing could benefit from Disney’s appreciation of melodic, song-based music with a clear pulse as a floor for dancing. Unfortunately, the simple pleasures of dancing that asks the performer to use a comprehensible vocabulary of steps and expressive gestures, which relate moment by moment to music, are exactly what most students of both animation and choreography want to evade now. Balanchine, in fact, once wrote about how dancing could learn about the elaboration of fantasy from cartoons. Artists globally, though, don’t want what these historical animated films are equipped to teach – joy as the text and complication as the subte...