We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience, serve personalised ads or content, and analyse our traffic. By clicking "Accept All", you consent to our use of cookies.
Customise Consent Preferences
We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.
The cookies that are categorised as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ...
Always Active
Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.
No cookies to display.
Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.
No cookies to display.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
No cookies to display.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyse the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
No cookies to display.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customised advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyse the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.
Tiger Aspect Kids & Family (a Banijay Kids & Family company) today announces its 2D-animated comedy Mr. Bean: The Animated Series, has been commissioned for a fourth season, in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery and ITVX, through deals agreed by Banijay Rights.
Executive produced and voiced by the character’s creator, Rowan Atkinson, Season 4 will comprise 52 x 11’ episodes, bringing the total number of episodes across all series to 182 x 11′. It will air on Cartoonito and HBO Max across EMEA, on Warner Bros. Discovery’s kids channels and streaming services across South East Asia and South Asia, and on ITVX Kids in the U.K. and Eire from 2025, which will be the 35th anniversary of the first live-action Mr. Bean episode.
The animation follows the antics of Mr. Bean and of course Teddy, as they embark on a series of adventures, making plenty of mischief along the way.
“I have always enjoyed this iteration of the Mr. Bean character and the particular freedoms he has in animated form,” says Atkinson. “We can take him into space or down a tin mine, without me personally having to suffer the consequences. The animation process creatively is always fascinating and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into the new series very much.”
Tom Beattie, MD Tiger Aspect Kids & Family and series producer, notes, “It’s a real pleasure to have the opportunity to go back to such a special series. Mr. Bean is an iconic comedy legend and it’s an honor to work with Rowan to create this physically funny series.”
Mr. Bean is a British icon: Since the original live-action series debuted in 1990, it has been broadcast in 195 territories, with the series in continual distribution for over 30 years. Co-created by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, the eponymous hero was played by Atkinson, who now voice stars in the globally successful animated series, which launched in 2002. The brand also attracts significant digital audiences, with over 140 million followers on Meta, making it the biggest TV brand on the platform; over 72 million subscribers and 19 billion lifetime views across official YouTube channels; 10 million followers on Instagram; and 14.2 million likes on TikTok.
“One of the most loved characters in television comedy history, Mr. Bean’s amusing escapades are cherished by children and families across the world,” says Cathy Payne, CEO of Banijay Rights. “So, we’re thrilled to continue our long- standing partnership with Warner Bros Discovery and ITV on this wonderful animated series which captures Bean’s world so brilliantly.”
Produced by Tiger Aspect Kids & Family (part of Banijay Kids & Family), Beattie is executive producer along with Atkinson. Dave Osborne is director, Arnold Widdowson is producer and the head writers are Ciaran Murtagh and Andrew Barnett Jones. Banijay Kids & Family division is led by Benoît Di Sabatino.
Peacock has this morning debuted the official trailer for In The Know and the line-up of live-action “guests” who will be appearing on the stop-motion series’ self-effacing public radio show. The series of six half-hours premieres January 25.
From Zach Woods (Silicon Valley, The Office), Brandon Gardner and Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill), In The Know is Peacock’s first adult animated original comedy series. The show blends intricate stop-motion animation by ShadowMachine (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, BoJack Horseman) with live-action interviews with a variety of guests, including:
Kaia Gerber
Jonathan Van Ness
Ken Burns
Finn Wolfhard
Norah Jones
Tegan and Sara
Nicole Byer
Roxane Gay
Mike Tyson
Jorge Masvidal
Hugh Laurie
Kaia Gerber
Jonathan Van Ness
Mike Tyson
Hugh Laurie
Tegan and Sara
Ken Burns
Nicole Byer
Finn Wolfhard
Norah Jones
Roxane Gay
Jorge Masvidal
All photos courtesy of Peacock.
Read more about the previously announced regular voice cast and their characters, including Woods and Judge, here.
Synopsis:Lauren Caspian is NPR’s third most popular host. He’s a well-meaning, hypocritical nimrod, just like you and me. He’s also a stop motion puppet. Each episode follows the making of an episode of Lauren’s show In the Know, in which Lauren conducts in-depth interviews with real world human guests. Lauren collaborates with a diverse crew of NPR staff. They are also puppets and nimrods.
Check out the February ’24 issue (No. 337) of Animation Magazine for a feature story on In The Know — available now.
A lonely urban dog constructs a robot companion, booting up a curious and beautiful friendship against the backdrop of 1980s New York City. This unlikely duo is at the heart of Robot Dreams, the debut animated feature film from Spanish director Pablo Berger, based on the popular graphic novel by American writer Sara Varon.
The film premiered at Cannes last May, and went on to win several honors along the festival circuit, including at Annecy (Contrechamp Award for Best Film), Sitges (Audience Award for Best Motion Picture), the Bucheon International Animation Festival (Audience Prize for International Feature) and Animation Is Film in Los Angeles (Special Jury Prize for Feature Film). With the 2023-24 awards season in full swing, Robot Dreams has already picked up the animated feature prize at the European Film Awards, is nominated for four Goya Awards and three Gaudí Awards, and is considered a strong contender for a nomination spot from the Academy Awards (see the qualified longform animated titles here).
With the film due to arrive in North American theaters from NEON, Pablo Berger sat down for a videocall interview with Jonas Poher Rasmussen — an established Danish documentarian who likewise made a big splash with his entry into animation, Flee, which made history with nominations for the animated feature, international feature and documentary feature at the 94th Oscars. The filmmakers talk about the universal appeal of Robot Dreams, its themes of friendship, loneliness and letting go and the magic of animation.
Berger talks about why the original graphic novel was so important to him. “I read the graphic novel in 2010, fell in love with the images and the story. I am a live-action director. After making three live action films, I remembered the graphic novel and the fact that the end of the book really moved me deeply and brought him to tears, something that literature and cinema have done to me, but never a graphic novel …This is my time to get into animation. I had no other choice but making this animated film.”
“All my previous films prepared me for Robot Dreams,” he adds. “I always had an animation director inside of me. I always spent a year doing storyboards before making my live-action movies. For me, to spend a year doing storyboards felt natural. I’ve done it before.”
The director, who grew up outside Bilbao and later moved to New York to study and work, also pointed out: “New York is a definitely character in the movie. It’s an American city. Sara Varon was living in New York when she created [RobotDreams]. Had to make it mine too. I lived in New York City for 10 years. I was a lonely dog, like the protagonist. I found love and it broke my heart, and I found love again. For me, it’s nostalgic … It made me an adult and a filmmaker. It was one of the biggest reasons for me to make this film.”
Watch the conversation below and gain more insight into Berger’s process in our previous exclusive here.
Video Player
Media error: Format(s) not supported or source(s) not found
In a recent industry round table conducted by The Los Angeles Times, several Hollywood executives gathered to discuss the state of audiovisual entertainment as we step in to 2024 after years of much fluctuation and disruption. The talk touched on the effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the ongoing tug of war between linear and streaming, and the looming specter of AI.
The panel included Roy Lee (Founder, Vertigo Ent.), Jonathan Glickman (Founder & CEO, Panoramic Media), FredAnthony Smith (VP Non-Scripted, SMAC Ent.), Nicole Brown (President, TriStar Pictures), Chris Hart (Partner & Co-Head of Talent, UTA) and Sam Register (President, Warner Bros. Animation, Cartoon Network Studios and Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe).
Tackling the topic of artificial intelligence applied to content creation, Warner Bros. Discovery’s top toon authority commented,
“Animation’s a visual medium. But so far, I haven’t seen anything AI can do visually that an artist doesn’t do better currently … As an animation studio, I just think it’s important we protect the artists and the art form as long as we can. Because I think we should give jobs to people who really do that and so they can get their entry-level experience.”
Sam Register, President of Warner Bros. Animation, is against using AI.
“I just think it’s important we protect the artists and the art form as long as we can. [With storyboarding], we should give jobs to people who really do that so they can get their entry-level experience.” pic.twitter.com/nfvZPeW2mt
Register also commented on the studio’s considerations when it comes to backing projects for its linear and streaming platforms: “We make everything from preschool to adult animation, and it’s the kids, that 6-to-11 core, that basically Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and Disney all made their bones on. That is disappearing. We’re seeing a lot more YA and adult animation doing great. And we see a lot of younger content being produced. But it’s that space in the middle, and it’s not just streaming that’s getting kids away from linear. It’s YouTube and it’s Roblox.”
This holiday season, fans of Ru Paul’s Drag Race personalities were treated to a special animated spin-off episode of Trixie & Katya Show, packed to the top of the stocking with eleganza. Combo Studio, based in Rio de Janeiro and known for productions like Netflix’s Super Drags and Pabllo Vittar’s “Rajadão” music video, was entrusted with the animation production, from character concepts to the final version of the video. “Trixie & Katya Christmas” was released December 20 on the Ru Paul’s Drag Race official YouTube channel.
The five-minute production is a collaboration with New York-based Cartuna, which enlisted Combo to transform the duo’s show into animation with a more mature tone, while retaining the gurls‘ recognizable style. The project was designed with particular care to delighting true fans, with plenty of Easter eggs. The episode features the voices of the titular drag queens, Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamo. (Trixie previously lent her voice to another Combo Studio project, playing Champagne in the English-language version of the Super Drags series.)
“Our main focus was to bring this universe in a format easily recognizable to the characters, with good animation, as a ‘gift’ to our loyal audience,” explains Vitor Campos, animation director and partner at Combo Studio.
Synopsis: In a snowy winter cabin, Katya, a retired drag queen, receives an unexpected visit from Little Brian, a desperate messenger from the village. Nutcracker’s, the last queer bar between the North Pole and Gloucester, faces closure, spelling the end of drag in the region. Little Brian pleads with Katya to perform and save the bar, but she is reluctant to resurrect her past career. However, something unexpected happens…
Combo Studio developed the entire visual creative proposal for the short film, including concepts, visuals and style, after receiving the script and pre-recorded audio. From there, they created storyboards, character designs and handled the total animation production, which took approximately three months to complete. Around 25 professionals were involved in the project, with a notable contribution from representatives of the LGBTQIA+ community and fans of the original series — providing manual work, ideas, suggestions and advice, with the aim of creating an inclusive seasonal tribute to the irrepressible queens.
“We were very happy to be contacted by Cartuna for such an important and representative project. We have a portfolio with productions focused on the LGBTQIA+ audience, and we know that inclusion, diversity, and respect are essential for society. It’s always important to highlight these issues, bringing animations with humor but without losing the main message,” comments Marcelo Pereira, a partner at Combo Studio.
Established in 2015, Combo Studio is responsible for several animated successes both in Brazil and around the world. Its main creation is the character Any Malu. Among its other well-known production contributions, the studio provided animation for the Netflix film America: The Motion Picture, Marvel Studios’ Hit Monkey, CAKE toon Swan Boy (both on Hulu), more than 80 minutes of Netflix series Agent Elvis and episodes of Rick and Morty Season 7 (available on Max).
Back in 2022, She Drew That shared out the Animation & VFX Union rates guide to its community, only to hear back that many working in these industries did not realize a salary that fit the guidelines. In response, the gender equity-focused org conduct a survey to try to get a more realistic view of what the U.K. animation and visual effects community were actually being paid.
The resulting conversation, such as this episode of the She Drew That Podcast, spurred the group to a commitment to additional reports over the next two years.
Now for the second year in a row, She Drew That has recently unveiled its 2023 Salary Report. With slightly modified questions from the 2022 survey, and a much bigger pool of responses (504 across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as some working outside the U.K., compared to 171 in 2022), the second report was generated from confidential data analyzed by an independent researcher. While the sample size is still small and unrandomized, the report offers some much-needed insight.
The arrival of Vivienne Medrano’s new series, Hazbin Hotel, on Prime Video this month kicks off the animation year on a grand note. Based on the talented creator’s pilot of the same name, which has gained over 92 million views on YouTube, the show mixes Broadway-style songs, a princess theme and snappy 2D animation. Medrano was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about her new show and the meteoric rise of her career recently. Here are some of the highlights of our conversations:
Animation Magazine: Congrats on your awesome series! It must feel great to see it evolve and grow and premiere on Prime Video this month.
Vivienne Medrano: Absolutely! It has been quite a journey. Some of these characters that you see on the show have been with me since middle school. I began telling the stories in comics and short films and through SVA (School of Visual Arts). I was the one in middle school who would draw all the time. I came up with some of the characters (Angel and Charlie) when I was at SVA. Then, after I graduated, I was thinking about what my next big step would be. While I was doing freelance jobs, I realized that I really wanted to make something musical and unique. I made a small proof of concept and put it on my YouTube channel, which was growing at the time. The project became a half-hour musical pilot, and it took the internet by storm. It hit a chord with lots of people and I was honored to feel how it exploded, and now it’s a new show on Amazon!
Can you tell us a bit about the premise of the show and how it all came together?
Our main character is Charlie Morningstar, who is the Princess of Hell. She creates this hotel to rehabilitate demons and sinners because she wants to deal humanely with the overpopulation problem. She wants to stop this yearly extermination that happens there. She knows there’s a way to deal with it. Hazbin Hotel is not an easy show to put in a box. It’s an adult comedy that also has a lot of heart and drama. It’s incredibly queer and it’s a musical.
Strange Familiars: Since her college days at SVA, Medrano has been developing the core characters in ‘Hazbin Hotel’, including Charlie the Princess of Hell (voiced by Erika Henningsen of Broadway’s ‘Mean Girls’) and Angel, her first sinner redemption project (actor-singer Blake Roman).
Can you talk a bit about your training and the animation style that appeals to you?
I was lucky to study at SVA, which is an amazing school, and I really developed my animation style there. My art style is very influenced by the work of Jhonen Vasquez. I grew up with Invader Zim, which is one of my favorite shows ever. I love Tim Burton and Bruce Timm, and I was a massive fan of the Disney Renaissance movies, as well as Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes. So, you have that slapstick humor and add the beauty of the Disney musicals and throw in some edgy sharpness on top of that, and you get what I was going for.
How is this new series like the original Hazbin Hotel pilot, and how is it different?
I am really honored by the fact that I was able to bring so many of the artists and the creative people behind the original pilot that I made. That’s why a lot of the DNA of the show feels just right at home and the whole show has the same spirit of the original, because so many of those original people worked on it. But it is a much more polished and realized show. Even between the pilot and the first season, I created another series called Helluva Boss, which is very similar in DNA, and I learned so much on that project and applied that to Season 1 of Hazbin, so it made the show so much stronger. I’m really glad that that middle learning period existed.
Can you tell us about the studio that produces the animation?
We work with Princess Bento, which is based in Melbourne, Australia. One of the best friends that I’ve made on Helluva Boss is Skye Henwood, who came from Flying Bark Productions. She ended up being the animation director for Hazbin and she’s based there. So, I ended up finding a second home in Australia, and I now have some of my closest friends there. It has been really a lot of fun working with the studio there.
What’s the biggest lesson you have learned from this experience?
I’ve learned so many things about production — about just letting things go, what to prioritize and how to be efficient in a pipeline. I have a studio of my own [SpindleHorse Toons], which I also used to make Helluva Boss and helped with the Hazbin pilot. So, it’s been growing, evolving and getting stronger. The whole process of making things and working with people and hiring creative people to just bring a vision to life has been such an amazing learning experience for me.
Hellzapoppin’! Animated by Princess Bento in Australia, the 2D, R-rated musical-comedy blends diverse influences, such as ‘Looney Tunes’ slapstick, Disney classics and the artistic styles of Tim Burton, Bruce Timm and Jhonen Vasquez.
Did you get a lot of notes from the studio, since your show is so very different from everything else that’s out there?
Working with A24 and Prime was really amazing, because they really allowed the show to be itself, and I felt that all the notes [were] just making it stronger, or allowing me to think outside the box or from another perspective, because I think most creators are in the same boat: You know the story inside and out and know exactly where it’s going. I sat down and mapped out where I wanted the story to end, and what all the twists and turns are. When you have all of this in your head, it’s harder to think from the audience’s perspective. That’s why I think the notes help you reel in that and remember that the show is for an audience who doesn’t know it so intimately.
Music plays a big role in the show. Can you tell us about your love of Broadway musicals?
I’m a massive Broadway fan. I try to see as many shows as possible when I go to New York. Of course, that is very useful when you’re working on a show that is a musical. Obviously, working on the pilot was a bit different because it was more of an indie, scrappy project, and I didn’t have access to as many performers as I do now. Not every actor was a singer, and the singers didn’t fit with the speaking roles. But for the Prime series, I felt it was really important to cast performers who could do both, and we found some amazing people and a lot of them came from the Broadway world. I feel Broadway and animation just go hand in hand. Musical performers are trained to act with their voices on stage. It’s a world that has so much potential for voice acting. Of course, as we saw with the Disney renaissance movies, it’s also a great fit with animation.
As someone who had great success by creating a show and putting it out for the world to discover on YouTube, what kind of advice can you give creators who want to do the same thing?
Right now, we are in an amazing place with indie animation. A lot of projects are finding their own audience and being crowdfunded. I know that one of the biggest hurdles is to get funding, but your project doesn’t need to be a 30-minute-long musical. It can simply be a proof of concept, something personal that you make. But I think putting it out there is important because it can find its audience. We live in an age where the internet is so vast and can be a uniting force. What’s so exciting is that a project like Hazbin was able to hit with [an] audience because it was able to just exist as itself. I’m definitely a big advocate for just making your thing first and seeing who you hit, because that also helps shape where you’re going to take it.
As far as where to showcase it, I would default to YouTube, because that’s where my home is. It is obviously accessible worldwide. I think it’s easy. I think there are other platforms to use, and I have many good friends who have made things and gone the festival route. But for me, if you have a project that you want to find an audience for rather than to be recognized as an amazing piece of art, then I do recommend YouTube, just because it’s so accessible to audiences, and to everyone it’s so easy to share. Then, of course, you need to promote it on social media, TikTok, Instagram, etc. Making fun commercials or short-form ads also helps. The more fun something is, the more it resonates with people.
Hazbin Hotel premieres on Prime Video on January 19. The voice cast includes Erika Henningsen, Kimiko Glenn, Stephanie Beatriz, Keith David, Alex Brightman, Blake Roman and Amir Talai.A second season has already been greenlit.
The Animation Time Machine has just returned from its latest mission to the year 1924, gathering snippets of animation news from exactly 100 years ago!
Happy New Year! The Animation Time Machine has flown in on a flurry of seasonal snowflakes, carrying with it century-old animation news from January 1924.
In a month when a famous cartoon feline called Felix the Cat starred in two new releases — Felix Out of Luck and Felix Loses Out — an animated short from the Aesop’s Fables series, called Five Orphans of the Storm, topped the bill at a reopening event for the 6,100-seat New York Hippodrome. According to Moving Picture World” this morally upright tearjerker about an orphan puppy “was received with unmistakable evidences of approval and at one point there was an outburst of applause.”
Next, the Animation Time Machine sped across the Atlantic to Europe, where it discovered a fascinating article in the January 1924 edition of Der Kinematograph, Germany’s first film trade journal.
Entitled “The Silhouette Film,” the article introduces Lotte Reiniger who, having learned the German art of “Scherenschnitte” — literally “scissor cuts” — adapted her skills to create a number of films in which she animated cut-out figures frame by frame.
Innovative at every level, Reiniger stacked her silhouettes one atop the other and moved them in varying increments to create immersive parallax effects — over a decade before Walt Disney perfected the technique with his multiplane camera.
The most famous of Reiniger’s silhouette films is The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an adaptation of Arabic folk stories from One Thousand and One Nights, including Aladdin. Released in Germany in 1926, the film is generally regarded as the world’s oldest animated feature. It remains a remarkably sophisticated example of early animation.
The Der Kinematograph article contrasts Reiniger’s 1924-era stop-motion films with magic lantern shows of the late 19th century, in which hinged cut-outs were manipulated in real-time:
“In film, silhouettes have their limitations. The movements are not fluid but rather puppet-like, angular and proceed in jerks.”
After this somewhat dismissive introduction, the article goes on to praise the advances made in the medium since the days of the magic lantern:
“The technology of silhouette films has advanced by leaps and bounds. In the first silhouette films, probably a decade ago, the movements of the silhouettes were choppier than today, because the intermediate frames were missing. In recent years, we have seen films in which each character has its own unique movement.”
Back in Hollywood, the Animation Time Machine concluded its trip to January 1924 with a copy of Exhibitors Trade Review. Here it found a review of Liquid Lava, a film from the Hodge Podge series made by Lyman H. Howe.
Howe’s Hodge Podge films were educational shorts combining documentary footage with amusing animated vignettes. They were described by Exhibitors Herald as having “more ideas, more novelty per inch than any other screen product.” The series included such titles as Jungle Giants (African wildlife in its natural habitat), Across America in Ten Minutes (a whistlestop tour of the U.S.A.), and Traffic (modes of transport from around the world, including Viennese streetcars, Chinese rickshaws and a Hamburg milk cart drawn by a dog).
A consummate showman, Lyman H. Howe released his first film in 1896, having begun his career exhibiting miniatures and giving phonograph concerts. By the time Liquid Lava hit screens in 1924, he was already a year in his grave.
Here’s an extract from the January 1924 review of Liquid Lava:
“This is another Lyman H. Howe presentation combining sense and nonsense, because, as he says, ‘variety is the very spice of life.’ So cartoon fades into an actual scene and then back to cartoon again, throughout the reel. There are some wonderful photographs of the volcanic eruptions in Java (in action and at night) among other interesting scenes.”
Howe’s jaunty travelogs prove that, even back in January 1924, when animation was in its infancy, audiences around the globe had access to all manner of animated entertainment, from side-splitting cartoons to educational animated shorts and exquisite renditions of classic folk tales. As Howe himself asserted, variety is indeed the spice of life!
Join us again next month when we dispatch the Animation Time Machine on another mission, back through the decades to February 1924!
A few months ago, the animation veterans at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios(Robot Chicken, Crossing Swords, Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K.) launched a crowdfunding campaign to introduce the world to their new creation, an action-comedy project about sentient eggs on the loose.
The Von Dinglesseeks to answer the burning question we all have asked ourselves through the years: What happens to Easter eggs that aren’t found by kids after an egg hunt? Well, they come alive and move away from the scary outside world to the magical Valley of the Von Dingles, of course! We recently had the chance speak with the creator of this new egg-citing project — creator, director and studio co-owner John Harvatine IV and partner in crime Matthew Senreich — to find out more about The Von Dingles and the upcoming graphic novel featuring their hard-boiled adventures.
John Harvatine IV
Matt Senreich
Animation Magazine: So, congrats on your recent creation, John. Can you tell us a bit about the origins of the venture, and the graphic novel which is set to launch in the summer of 2024?
John Harvatine IV: Well, honestly ever since I was a kid I’ve kind of been obsessed with eggs and liked them for some weird reason. When I was a kid, we would go on these Easter egg hunts, and I’d sometimes just wonder what would happen to those eggs if we didn’t find them. Would they grow arms and legs and walk off? So, every once in a while, I find a way express my love for eggs in some comic or a little short project. About a year ago, we finally put all the plans together to make this wonderful stop-motion short featuring the eggs, and we all had a great time, but I continued to think about them. So, after the short, we decided to roll more ideas into a graphic novel, which is currently set for a July release.
So, the idea is that this is going to be the whole story of the characters: What we saw in the short, which was called Halloween Massacre, was just a sliver of that world. In the graphic novel, we get to find out the full story of who these characters are we follow the characters on this journey outside of their little Hidden Valley of Von Dingles into our world, and all the ups and downs that happen along the way. It’s kind of taking this little idea and blowing it up which is one reason we chose the graphic novel because what we want to do is is so big you know at this point to put a budget around that for stop motion could be a little bit exciting to say the least so this is a way for us to kind of express our big story and then we can kind of keep wading through the water.
The Von Dingles in Halloween Massacre
Who are your partners in crime on this venture?
John: We got a big team working with us. So first of all, at Stoopid Buddy, I have the love and support of Matt, Seth [Green] and [Eric] Towner, who are my partners in all of my hopes and dreams and always help kind of bringing things in. Then, we have the talented people at Macro Verse who are helping shape everything with the graphic novel, so it’s kind of like these two big parties that are kind of dancing together. We’re assembling the artists and the team as we try to figure this out which all kind of came together a little bit on the quicker side. As I mentioned, we’ve had this idea for a while, but the timing worked out well for us this past fall.
Matt Senreich: I like to see your excitement. It makes me happy. The short was a testing ground for us and we got a lot of positive reaction from fans. It made us realize that there’s more to be done with this for sure, and that excitement got us into thinking about how we could do this with a budget that we could actually maintain. Because I come from a comic-book background myself, for me it was a very exciting direction to take. that I have yeah it was exciting to go into that direction especially to see.
John: Exactly. It’s really cool that Matt and Seth have such a strong book background. When we started the studio that was always this thing that they would go on and on about. Robot Chicken started from the strip Twisted ToyFare Theatre (In ToyFare magazine) and Wizard magazine. The background of the studio has always had this comic-book feel and vibe, but we really haven’t had a chance to express that. So it’s kind of fun and new to take the history that they’ve had together and make new stories in this format.
Matt: I think we took this Kickstarter and graphic novel route because we’ve never done something like that before, and you have a community forming around the crowdfunding campaign. It’s been really exciting to see people who’ve enjoyed the stop-motion short turn out and say they want to see it in another medium as well.
John: The Kickstarter method is really exciting for us, because it’s the first time we’ve gone out directly to the fans, the people that love and support us.
Zombie Egg puppets for ‘Halloween Massacre’
So, first you made the stop-motion short, then next up is the graphic novel. Are we going to see the eggs in a series of other formats?
John: We’ll stop at the theme park! Well, we definitely want to continue exploring the story through comics, because I feel like it really fits that world I think we’re also assembling the idea of what a TV show could look like, as our background is also in stop motion. It’s something that is very near and dear to me and the studio. So we hope to continue exploring these characters and their world. Plus, there are so many talented artists here down here that would love to work on something like that so we just would love to feed that beast!
How long did it take you all to make the first short?
John: That was a two or three month process. We worked with a tight little schedule. We did the stop-motion animation in about two weeks, and it took a little bit of ramping up and writing it and making the characters. Then, we did the cleaning up and the post part, so overall it was about three months for a two minute short.
Can you give us more of an idea of where the graphic novel is going to take us?
John: It’s really the story of Clark, who is a misfit egg that doesn’t have arms and legs: He’s just different from the rest all the other eggs. He really wants to go out and see the world outside their little hidden valley. So his friends reluctantly let him out and he starts to explore the world, and of course, he’s got some issues and there are some troubles, so his best friends come to his aid. Together, they start exploring. Our main bad guy in this is Pecker Egg, which is a little bit of a wink and a kiss emoji to Matt and Robot Chicken. He wants this Dingleberry Bush all for himself, so we have this epic battle between the two of them, and yes, it does ultimately offer a nice “Hero’s Journey” for our egg hero.
Matt: It has similar vibes as The Smurfs and Fraggle Rock (with Uncle Travelling Matt going out to into the world). The big difference is that those two other shows are more kid-oriented while the Von Dingles are kind of PG-14.
So, you’ve been working on this while juggling all the other regular projects at the studio?
John: Well, we were working on a tightrope, because of the strikes last year, but we’re back now. Over on our main stages, we were working on several Disney project (Mickey and Friends: Trick or Treat, Doc & Bella Are In!, Mickey’s Christmas Tales). We have also done some great commercials and continue to work on our live-action projects.
Matt: Without saying too much, we’re working on a project that also allows us to go back to our roots, so hopefully we can talk more about that soon.
And one final question: What’s your take on the state of animation in 2024?
Matt: We all have our fingers crossed that everyone will still be investing in animation, as many were cutting budgets across the board. But I think that if you have a good project that stands out, they’re still going to invest in it. It’s just really about making sure that what you are pitching is solid and unique. I also do believe that there are other nontraditional ways to make things. So. I’m hopeful, but you just have to be cautious.
John: As you know, the industry always goes in wave. You go up and you go down. That’s entertainment, so I think obviously this past year was a pretty down period, but just like Matt, I am hopeful that in 2024, everyone will start ramping up production because are so many great artists that are looking for work and ready to create. We’re just excited to have everyone get back together and start making great stuff in this new year.
Acclaimed Japanese studio Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) has revealed a project that will apply the talents of its artists in a different direction. Titled Hagureboshi no Uta (translating to Song of a Stray Star), the story will be told through an illustrated picture book with an accompanying soundtrack, from the minds and hands of some of the talents behind the studio’s hit anime franchise, Violet Evergarden.
Song of a Stray Star centers on a boy with blue eyes, named Lazuli, who learns on his 12th birthday that he is not the biological son of his mother. He runs away from home, and meets a boy with blonde hair named Eden, who recognizes the particular fruit entrusted to Lazuli’s care by his mother, and the two set out to find the tree where it grows.
The picture book is created by KyoAni director Taichi Ishidate, who helmed the Violet Evergarden limited TV series and Violet Evergarden: The Movie, as well as serving as supervising director on Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll. His directing credits also include the series Sound! Euphonium, Beyond the Boundary and K-On!, as well as the feature-length Beyond the Boundary projects I’ll Be Here – Future and I’ll Be Here – Past.
The project’s original soundtrack is by American-born composer Evan Call, who in addition to the Violet Evergarden franchise has scored for the acclaimed films Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom and Josee, the Tiger and the Fish and many series, most recently Frieren: Beyond Jerouney’s End, My Happy Marriage and the upcoming Sengoku Youko.
.Song of a Stray Star is being produced through Kyoto Animation’s KyoAni Muse Labo.
In the new Warner Bros. movie Wonka, director Paul King (Paddington) offers an origin story for the eccentric chocolatier introduced in Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The whimsical feature stars Timothée Chalamet as the younger version of the enigmatic character played by Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp in previous movie adaptations of the property. Chalamet gets to perform some musical numbers and trade barbs with a cast that includes Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Tom Davis, Olivia Colman and Hugh Grant.
To achieve the appropriate cinematic scope and magical elements, King turned to Graham Page (The Midnight Sky) to lead a visual team featuring Framestore, Goldcrest VFX, Host VFX and Outpost VFX to create 1,163 shots, ranging from a CG giraffe running rampant to a mischievous Oompa Loompa (Grant) to a fully digital environment for a rooftop dance.
Creatures Great and Small: Crafting the world of ‘Wonka’ required 1,163 VFX shots and the creation of fully-digital characters, including a giraffe and Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa avatar.
A Tall Order
One of the film’s most exciting sequences features a giraffe in the London Zoo, which was created by photographing a real one named Molly. The footage was then copied, scanned and used as an entirely digital actor. As Page explains, “We found these clips of real giraffes and used them to fit into the story for that moment where the giraffe comes up over the pulpit and is licking its lips. We built a full-scale puppet, which was not realistic but the right size for framing and to get reactions from the actors. We would do one version of each take where it would have the puppeteers running through St. Paul’s Cathedral chasing after Rowan Atkinson (playing a choco-holic priest) to get an idea of how big it is and where the eyelines would be. That was fantastic fun with the giraffe puppet.”
The giraffe tests conducted by the animation team at Framestore Montreal and supervised by Meena Ibrahim took into account that the world of Wonka exists within a heightened reality. “Paul King loves animation, and he would guide us through what he wanted for the giraffe to do by acting out the motions,” notes Page. “We would interpret that and look at real giraffe references as well, which helped us get the right timing and deliver the comedy. Sometimes we would try to push the animation quite far in a caricature way and then pull it back to get a more subtle performance.”
Actor Hugh Grant proved to be the perfect actor to play the pint-size, sardonic Oompa Loompa known as Lofty. “Hugh Grant has to be this tiny creature and also younger than he is in real life, so he is fully CG,” reveals Page. “We tried to work out how to shrink him down and what his body would be like, because he is a creature not human. The neck proportions are slightly different, which feeds into the animation [supervised by Dale Newton at Framestore London]. How something moves and gets through a human-sized space when they’re that small. There is a lot of character in it and [it] is driven by marks and timing to get across jokes, but we’re always trying to be realistic and subtle.”
‘Paul King loves animation, and he would guide us through what he wanted for the giraffe to do by acting out the motions. We would interpret that and look at real giraffe references as well, to get the right timing and deliver the comedy.’
— VFX supervisor Graham Page
A Lofty puppet was used on set for framing and eyelines. “For the scene where Wonka captures Lofty in the jar, Timothée Chalamet had an earphone and Hugh was in booth with witness cameras just off the set so both could hear and react to each other,” recalls the VFX supervisor. “Some of those lines ended up being improvised on the day. We did little workshops with Hugh, motion-captured Chris Gattelli [choreographer] for some of the dance moves and took references of Paul King and the animators themselves. To get the nuances of the body performance correctly, the animators would do a rough first version, and Paul would refine little things.”
The VFX and production design teams had a wide variety of inspiration for the setting of the film, which is a nondescript European city. “The center point of the grand city is the Gallery Gourmet, a shopping arcade where Wonka dreams of going to when he’s a kid,” remarks Page. “On top of the Gallery Gourmet is the glass dome, which is loosely based on Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. We looked at street layouts around these real-world galleries and put our quirky Prague structures into those spaces. We worked out a harbor area with slightly smaller buildings and that goes up into a cliff edge which becomes your bigger town square buildings. Then, you would have an area based on Oxford with a bit of Bath thrown in, and there is the castle, which was inspired by Bodiam Castle in Kent.”
Page says the goal was to boil down all these European points of reference into one giant, cohesive backdrop. “This is a fantasy city, so it’s not like you’re trying to re-create New York City, Paris or London,” he adds. “You’re trying to create a world that feels like those places but doesn’t have their actual street layouts.”
Calah Lane as Noodle and Timothée Chalamet as the titular candy genius, Willy Wonka.
A sequence involving Willy Wonka and Noodle (played by Calah Lane) dancing on rooftops required extensive previsualization work. “We worked with Paul to create a previz based on storyboards and that was used as a blueprint to do a rehearsal shoot, which meant they could work out, ‘We need these wires in that position and this flight path for the characters.’”
The only practical elements were a raised walkway, a flag pole and a proxy for the dome. “It was shot fairly traditionally with bluescreen,” he recalls. “Below them was supposed to be Gallery Gourmet with the bright lights, so we made sure to have these soft boxes underneath to get a nice up lighting. Essentially, it was about the balloons and trying to make sure that their performance looked natural. There were no balloons on the day because Timothée Chalamet and Calah Lane were on wire rigs and that would have caused them to get tangled up. What we did do [was] film a version of the sequence with the dance team on the floor level holding a whole bunch of balloons, so you could see that when someone does a twist what happens to the balloons. Later on, we had the city layout built up and had the characters we were going to put on top of the roof; then we had to body track them to get reflections in the glass and attach the balloons to the hands.”
Among the film’s other charming points of interest is Willy Wonka’s compact, portable workshop. “The travel factory was an amazing, intricately made prop with moving parts,” says Page. “The conceit is within the case is childhood footage of him and his mom. In 3D, we re-created a mutoscope with the pages turning; that was an homage to early cinema.”
Bunnies, Flamingos and Rainbows
One of the film’s most challenging tasks was the opening shot featuring Wonka traveling by boat. Page explains, “It was one of the first shots I started working on in previs and certainly one of the last shots to be finished because of its length. It’s a fully CG shot with water, digital doubles and CG birds.”
The musical numbers throughout Wonka also added to the complexity. “In the past when I’ve done transitions, you’re just thinking about the positions of the people and camera. But in this movie, the timing of the singing and the footsteps to the music have to be the same. You can’t slightly re-speed things or offset timings because then the timing won’t be right for the music.”
Overall, the film’s mandate was to make things as fun and funny as possible. “When we were in Wonka’s chocolate shop, we added little bunnies that come out of a tree, as well as a rainbow made of sweets,” says Page. “The flamingos also became a significant thing. Lots of kids love flamingos. … All of these things were trying to brighten up the environment to make it seem more fun; that was very important for Paul.”
Wonka opened on December 14 in the U.S. and is currently playing in theaters worldwide.
Ever since Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron debuted in Japan on July 14, the movie has captured the imagination of animation fans all around the world. Although the 12th film written and directed by the 82-year-old anime master debuted in a veil of secrecy, with only one cryptic poster image revealed prior to release date, the magical, semi-autobiographical movie smashed box-office records in Japan and in the U.S., debuting in the number-one position on the charts. The movie quickly became Studio Ghibli and GKIDS’ biggest blockbuster to date (U.S.: $30.9 million, worldwide: $122.6 million, as of 12/27/23), went on to land on most best-of-the-year critics’ lists and is now a prime contender for this year’s Best Animated Feature Academy Award. (We also think the movie deserves to be on the Best Picture list alongside live-action nominees, but that’s another story.)
Since the master himself rarely gives interviews, we were lucky to be able to interview the film’s producer, Studio Ghibli co-founder and president Toshio Suzuki, as well as longtime Studio Ghibli cinematographer Atsushi Okui and English-language dub director Michael Sinterniklaas to get their takes on working on Miyazaki’s latest masterpiece.
Dreams of Loss: ‘The Boy and the Heron’ continues Miyazaki’s existential explorations through a lens of childhood upheaval, following young Mahito on an impossible quest to rescue his mother from a strange world.
Toshio Suzuki
On the most powerful memory of working on the movie:
This isn’t a pleasant memory, but my most profound memory is the death of director Isao Takahata [April 5, 2018], who was Hayao Miyazaki’s mentor, friend and biggest rival. His death unmistakably had a great influence on this film.
Did Miyazaki reveal anything about the movie that will stay with you forever?
What will stay with me is the moment he handed me a project treatment and told me, “Here’s the next feature-length film I want to make,” even though he had announced his retirement at a press conference in 2013. I sensed everything go dark in front of my eyes.
The Boy and the Heron
How was working on this movie different from previous Studio Ghibli movies?
We began production without any group of investors, using only Studio Ghibli’s funds, without even setting a release date. As director Miyazaki is elderly, I wanted to allow him to take as much time as he wanted to make the film he envisioned, without deciding on a release date.
Why do you think this movie has struck such a chord worldwide?
Since we began streaming distribution of Studio Ghibli films abroad, so many more viewers have seen Ghibli films and become fans of them. Being able to see the latest film by director Miyazaki on a theater screen must have been a wonderful surprise for fans worldwide.
[Guillaume Collet / SIPA / REX / Shutterstock]
‘Miyazaki, in my estimation, is the greatest director of animation ever, and he has made his films as full of dialogs and questions as he is. These are not easy films, but these are films that portray him so intimately, that you feel you’re having a conversation with him. And they are paradoxical because he understands that beauty cannot exist without horror, and delicacy cannot exist without brutality.’
— Guillermo del Toro, introducing the movie at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere
Magic Takes Wing: Led by a heron into a mysterious tower, Mahito encounters creatures ranging from the adorable Warawara (unborn souls) to the bloodthirsty troops of the Parakeet King.
Atsushi Okui
What did you love best about working on The Boy and the Heron?
I loved everything about the project. The best part was being able to share working on the production period of five years with a limited number of staff persons.
What was the most challenging scene for you?
The most challenging scene may have been the fire at the start of the film. It was difficult to take the animation drawings from the animators and complete them as digital images. Even so, I felt like I was enjoying the process.
What were your biggest sources of inspiration on this movie?
The image sketches drawn by director Miyazaki influenced me as sources of inspiration.
How closely did you work with the director on achieving the unforgettable images for the movie?
Having worked with director Miyazaki for 30 years, I can imagine pretty well what he requires. When my work was being checked by director Miyazaki, I would purposely prepare a curve-ball idea to show him in order to search for a better way of expressing the scene.
Have you talked to Miyazaki-san about the film’s unanimous acclaim?
Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to talk directly with director Miyazaki about the response to the film. But I am sure he is happy that the film that he poured his heart and soul into has gained high praise, and I feel the same way.
‘I first saw The Boy and the Heron at Studio Ghibli earlier this year, and after five minutes I began to cry. There was another Miyazaki film in the world. What a gift. After Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle, it’s easy to take for granted how unique Miyazaki’s gifts are. The beauty, the lusciousness, the humor and playfulness, the nuance are all here … the movement of the heron in flight, of fish in the water, the tottering old aunties. Nothing can compare.”
— Eric Beckman, President & Founder of GKIDS
Michael Sinterniklaas
First impressions:
I felt that it was such an incredibly beautiful movie and that it was even more detailed and lovely than his last film. I love all of Miyazaki’s movies, but this one really struck me as being even more richly detailed and on a whole new level. I also felt that he might be saying goodbye, and I don’t want him to say goodbye. I think my first reaction was: This is clearly a masterpiece.
How long did it take to deliver the English-language dub?
Studio Ghibli was generous enough to let us work with the assets early on and trusted us with their most guarded treasure before it was released. So, we were able to work on the script and casting earlier in the year. But the entire production took about four months for us, and a lot of it was just waiting for the cast to be put together.
Can you tell us a bit about the specific challenge of working on such a high-profile title?
Well, the stakes were so high, and it’s so important to serve the original creator’s intent, because it’s such a personal film and it’s the most personal film of the most important anime director we’ve ever had. So you’re checking yourself every moment of every scene you’re directing to make sure that you’re conveying what his intention was rather than having your own interpretation.
Then, of course, we’re working with all these amazing actors that have worked on Miyazaki movies in the past, like Mark Hamill and Christian Bale, as well as people like Karen Fukuhara, Florence Pugh, Robert Pattinson and Dave Bautista. Luckily, because of the magnitude of this piece, we all have this thing in common.
One of the things I always am cognizant of is, I never feel like as the director I’m imposing my will on the piece or the actor. If anything, the way I describe it is finding the individual ‘love language’ of that performer and then speaking to inspire them to get what they can bring, as opposed to, “This is what I think it should be.” I think that’s a really important distinction to this kind of work. The other thing is that if I’m going to channel anything, it’s Hayao Miyazaki’s aesthetic style and intent — which we’ll never entirely know because, he’s not going to come back and give us a commentary track. He always says that he’s not looking back because he doesn’t want to see mistakes. And he’s moving on to the next thing.
‘The mission of my films is to comfort you — to fill in the gap that might be in your heart or your everyday life. How do you live? I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.’
— Hayao Miyazaki, in a 2021 New York Times interview
The Boy and the Heron is currently screening in theaters across the U.S. through GKIDS and internationally.
The live-action/2D hybrid Looney Tunes movie Coyote vs. Acme is looking forward to a brighter future in the new year. Rescued from the brink of Warner Bros. Discovery’s tax write-off cliff which has claimed several animated victims, the highly lauded project is shopping for a new distribution outlet — but seems to have been confirmed for release this year in a first-look photo posted by Eric Bauza with the caption “See ya in 2024!!” The Looney Tunes regular stars as the voice of Wile E. Coyote.
Based on the humorous New Yorker article by Ian Frazier (1990), Coyote vs. Acme finds Wile E. Coyote (Bauza) at the end of his tether when one too many ACME products ruins his plans to catch the elusive Roadrunner. Taking the company to court, Wile E. and his lawyer (Will Forte) go up against the lawyer’s intimidating boss (John Cena) — but their growing, unlikely friendship across species and cartoon lines spurs them on.
The film is directed by Dave Green (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Earth to Echo) from a screenplay by Samy Burch (MayDecember), who worked out the story with Jeremy Slater and producer James Gunn.
The popular dragon-battling anime Ragna Crimson returns to television and streaming screens in Japan this month, kicking off its second cour (or season). A new preview and a sneak peek at a special manga exclusive included with an upcoming Blu-ray release were unveiled by King Amusement Creative over the winter holiday break.
The latest trailer sneak peeks the next stage of young hero Ragna’s mission to hunt down the dragons terrorizing humanity — especially their nefarious former king, Crimson. Separated from his dearest friend Leonica and united with the charismatic leader of the Silver Corps warriors, Starlia Reese, Ragna prepares to apply his remarkable powers to the opening battle of a seemingly hopeless war against the Winged Blood Clan.
The show’s “Human Dragon War” arc premieres Saturday, January 13 across multiple broadcasters and streamers, details below.
In addition to the new trailer, details of the new, original manga from Ragna Crimson creator Daiki Kobayashi included in the booklet boxed with the upcoming Limited Edition Blu-ray set (released in Japan on February 21) have been revealed for the first time. According to Kobayashi, the battle between the Silver Corps and the Winged Bloodline dragons will spotlight Dornea, the ninth-ranked member of clan. The manga creator also produced an original illustration to be used as the box cover artwork., featuring Starlia, Garm, Christopher, Hesela and Glare.
Details of the Blu-ray release (in Japanese) can be found here.
Ragna Crimson 2nd Cour Will broadcast Saturdays at 25:00 (1 a.m.) (moved up 30 minutes) on Tokyo MX and BS11; Saturdays at 27:38 (3:38 a.m.) on MBS; terrestrial pre-distribution on Saturdays at 24:00 (midnight) on d’Anime Store, U-NEXT and Unlimited Anime; Thursdays at 24:00 on Prime Video, Hulu, TELASA, J:COM STREAM, milplus, Smart Pass Premium, FOD, ABEMA, DMM TV, TVer and MBS Video-ism; Fridays at 12:00 on Happy Videos; Fridays at 18:00 on Bandai Channel; Saturdays at 25:00 on Crank in! Video; and Mondays at 12:00 on casual video (internet cafe).
With the earliest incarnation of Mickey Mouse now officially in the public domain, 95 years since the debut of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’ black-and-white cartoon Steamboat Willie, artists and content creators are taking full advantage. A couple more prominent projects that have surfaced since 12:01 a.m., January 1, include two live-action slasher movies — as well as an unconnected horror game — and a spiff-up of the original film.
ROKiT Studios and Windy Tales Animation have launched a new revamped Steamboat Willie on the ROKiT Flix platform (rokitstudios.com/rokit-flix | App Store). The update features new music and colorization for the nearly century-old short (released November 18, 1928 in New York City’s Colony Theater).
“We are delighted to have been able to revamp the iconic Steamboat Willie movie with newly-added color, now the copyright has expired, and relaunch this masterpiece for a new audience on our ROKiT Flix streaming platform globally, free of charge,” said Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman & Founder of the ROKiT Group. “We offer this as a homage to the genius of Walt Disney and we hope our audiences not only love watching it but also appreciate the historical importance of this seminal film.”
On the less reverent end of the spectrum, the Mickey’s Mouse Trap trailer peeks a live-action horror spectacle featuring a killer who wears a Mickey mask stalking a group of young people around an arcade. The logline reads, “It’s Alex’s 21st Birthday, but she’s stuck at the amusement arcade on a late shift so her friends decide to surprise her, but a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse decides to play a game of his own with them which she must survive.”
After the buzz created by Winnie the Pooh:Blood and Honey at the beginning of 2023, it was inevitable that Mickey would get his own gorefest. (B&H is ripe for a sequel, with Pooh’s pal Tigger also entering public domain this year.) Tagged #TheMouseIsOut, the project is an Into Frame Productions presentation of a Bailey Philips production, directed by Jamie Bailey.
Following the Mickey’s Mouse Trap trailer, filmmaker Steven LaMorte (The Mean One, Bury Me Twice) announced an as-yet-untitled movie project of his own inspired more directly by Steamboat Willie. The horror-comedy will unfold as a late-night boat ride turns into a fight for survival in New York City as a hapless group of tourists are tormented by a monster-fied version of the iconic mouse.
LaMorte directs and produces; producers also include Amy Schumacher and Martine Melloul (The Mean One), Steven Della Salla and Micahel Leavy (Terrifier 2).
The video game contingent has also offered a much darker alternative to Mickey’s Kingdom Hearts adventures. The evocatively named Nightmare Forge Games announced the one- to four-player survival horror co-op Infestation 88, now in development for PC. The title is available to wishlist on Steam.
Here’s the description: “In the year 1988, what was thought to be an outbreak of rodents in various locations morphed into something far more sinister.” Players must work together as a team of exterminators, laying traps and evading the squeaky hordes.
Reiterating the company’s statement at the end of the year, Mickey Mouse rights holder The Walt Disney Company stated through a spokesperson, “More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions and merchandise … We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright, and we will work to safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters.”
The final box office numbers for 2023 are in and Universal, Illumination and Sony Pictures Animation have landed on top of the animation charts with The Super Mario Bros Movie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on the number one and two positions. The third spot belongs to Disney/Pixar’s Elemental, which proved to be have strong animation legs after a rocky debut in June. Both Studio Ghibli/GKIDS’ The Boy and the Heron and Universal/Illumination’s Migration managed to land in the year’s top-ten charts despite arriving in December, later than all the other animated movies of the year.
2023 ANIMATED MOVIES AT THE BOX OFFICE
Rank Title (Studio) U.S. Gross
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (Universal) $574,934,330
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Sony) $381,311,319
Elemental (Disney) $154,426,697
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Universal) $129,870,190
TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (Paramount) $118,613,586
Trolls Band Together (Universal) $96,379, 440
PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (Paramount) $65,231,360
Just in time for 2024, which is the “year of the dragon,” the acclaimed Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin has revealed that three animated projects based on this popular books are in the works. In a blog post published on Sunday, the author of Song of Ice and Fire began by recommending fans to watch one his favorite shows, the Netflix animated series, Blue Eye Samurai.
“As it happens, HBO and I have our own animated projects, set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire,” Martin added. “None of them have been greenlit yet, but I think we are getting close to taking the next step with a couple of them. When this last round of development started a few years back, we had four ideas for animated shows, with some great talents attached. Writers rooms and summits, outline and scripts followed in due course… but, alas, two of the original projects were subsequently shelved.”
The author also noted that while two of the original animated projects are still being developed, the House of the Dragon prequel Nine Voyages has moved from live action to animation. The series will center on the adventures of Sea Snake Corlys Velaryon (played in House of the Dragon by Steve Toussaint) as he embarks on his legendary adventure across Essos.
Martin added, “Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live-action version prohibitively expensive, what with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to… well, on and on and on. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation. So we now have three animated projects underway.”
“Will any of them make it to air? No way to know,” he wrote. “Nothing is certain in Hollywood. But if it does happen, with one or two or all of thee hows, I hope we can make them as good as gorgeous and gripping as Blue Eye Samurai…we will for damn sure try!”
HBO has also confirmed that the next Game of Thrones spinoff will be A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, which follows the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall, and his squire, Egg, a century before the events of the original saga.
Here we are again, ready for a fresh start after a year of technological progress and humanitarian setbacks. But let’s focus on the things that have stood out in our industry over the past 12 months. Most of them feel helpful, and some could actually upend the way we’ve been doing things for decades:
Gaussian Splatting. This is not a brand-new technology, but with 3D scanning on the rise, the tech has become more prevalent. It’s essentially an uber-point cloud where a “splat” is placed at each point and then blended with each other. It’s really lightweight and is great for visualizing scenes in real time. However, it can’t be used for all 3D things because it’s not a polygonal mesh. But the data used to derive the splats is used in techniques that lead to photogrammetry and NeRFs: There are multiple paths to take depending on your needs.
Neuralangelo. Here we have yet another tool for generating 3D meshes. Developed by NVIDIA and Johns Hopkins University, the technique takes video and extracts a higher-detailed mesh in comparison to photogrammetry and straight-forward NeRFs. The math is multi-sampled, iterative and more complex than I want to get into here. But given that NVIDIA is part of the science, you know that there will be GPU acceleration involved, and there are applications ready to implement — and not just for creating visual effects.
MetaHuman Animator. MetaHuman (a realistic human-creation tool) is back again, but Epic has expanded the tool set to make it relatively easy to capture facial capture on your phone and apply the performance to MetaHuman. This lightweight parametric surface modeler is geared mostly to product and engineering design. It doesn’t seem to be meant for precise manufacturing, but more for quickly prototyping designs — kind of like SketchUp. Plus, at $100 its barriers to entry are super low.
Move One. What’s not to like about being able to create single-camera motion capture using your iPhone? You can capture single subjects anywhere without suits or studios. With Move One, you can record takes up to 60 seconds and get your motion data back in five minutes, and apply to character via FBX or USD.
Stable Video Diffusion. This is a useful expansion of Stable Diffusion to make moving images. The noncommercial version is limited to a few seconds, and some results out of the box are frightening — in more of a Jacob’s Ladder-nightmare way rather than AI-is-taking-over-the-world way. But this, combined with a quiver of additional tools for de-flickering, continuity, uprezzing, etc., and some intriguing possibilities, are on the horizon.
Firefly/Photoshop Generative Fill. Adobe’s AI is astonishingly powerful and is really well integrated into its tools. Bonus points go to Adobe for proclaiming that the company only trains Firefly on its own image library.
ai. Designers can now conceptualize ideas through sketches, photos, 3D models, etc., and then feed it into Vizcom.ai which will attempt to translate that idea into a more finalized image. The result can then be adjusted and iterated on itself, providing an artist-AI synergy that I like to see (as opposed to simply typing words and proclaiming victory at finally becoming an artist)!
LucidLink. With all the cloud storage and collaboration environments such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Boxx, do we really need another system? Evidently, according to my visual effects cohorts, LucidLink is the next step up for launching and distributing projects to remote teams.
ProdPro. This is a helpful tool for tracking data on film productions and providing analytics based on that data. ProdPro helps with crewing, networking, production planning, release planning, etc. And while most of that is above the pay grade of us wee artists, we can use it to be a little more engaged in choosing our next projects.
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning vfx supervisor and digital artist whose credits include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. You can reach him at teaspoonvfx.com.
Just in time for the new year, Adult Swim has unveiled the first clip from the eagerly anticipated new Rick and Morty: The Anime series. The new take on Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon’s Emmy-winning show was created and developed by Takashi Sano and produced by Studio Deen, Sola Entertainment and Telecom Animation (Lupin the IIIrd) for Adult Swim. Yohei Tadano and Keisuke Chiba reprise their roles as Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith from the Japanese dub of the original show. Sano is directing the 10-episode series, which will arrive on Adult Swim and Max in 2024.
The original pilot anime shorts were released from March 2020 to October 2021. The show puts an anime spin on adventures of the Smith family, especially mad scientist and samurai Rick Sanchez and his grandchildren, 14-year-old Morty and the 17-year-old Summer, whose parents Jerry and Beth, disapprove of their adventures. Different versions of the characters live in the many parallel dimensions of the show’s multiverse.
For animators and animation lovers, 2023 was a year of surprises that ranged from record-breaking successes in the U.S. and Japan to disappointments and stunning flops. Here are my picks for the outstanding films of the year:
The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki returned after a 10-year hiatus/retirement with his formidable imaginative powers intact. This grand adventure, which recalls Castle in the Sky and Spirited Away, contains strong autobiographical elements (Miyazaki’s family manufactured airplane parts during World War II, as Mahito’s father does in the film). No filmmaker can match Miyazaki’s skill at building brilliant fantasy worlds; his creations are governed by a dreamlike inner logic that makes them feel believable. Like Pazu in Castle in the Sky and Chihiro in Spirited Away, Mahito is tested. And also like them, his bravery, resolve and inner growth enable him to overcome the challenges he faces. TheBoy and the Heron confirms Miyazaki is not only a great animation filmmaker, but a great filmmaker. The best animated feature of the year by a long shot.
The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli/GKIDS)
Although The Boy and Heron is clearly No. 1 in my opinion, the other top films are so different it’s hard to rank them against each other. Here they are alphabetically:
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Aardman Animations manages to preserve its identity as a British studio that produces a uniquely silly style of animated film while competing with the big American production houses. Ginger, Rocky, Frizzle, Babs and the other avian eccentrics from the original Chicken Run (2000) return in this absurd comedy. Ginger’s adventurous daughter Molly and a friend visit what appears to be a paradise for poultry — but does something sinister lurk beneath the fixed smiles and rainbow colors? It’s The Truman Show meets KFC as these plucky birds battle their old nemesis, the terrible Mrs. Tweedy, and her latest scheme to devour chicken-kind. (Dir: Sam Fell; Aardman Animations/Netflix)
Chicken for Linda!
This modest film addresses the problems and demands of single parenthood, the complexities of mother-daughter bonds and the challenges of coping with the loss of a loved one. But it’s also a delightfully skewed comedy about children’s expectations and misadventures. Paulette promises her daughter Linda that she’ll prepare her late father’s signature chicken with peppers, but an unexpected general strike closes all the stores, making it impossible to buy chicken or peppers. The attempted solutions go astray in often hilarious ways. Directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach (The Girl Without Hands, 2016) mix bold colors and loose-limbed animation to tell this offbeat tale. (Chiara Malta, Sébastien Laudenbach; GKIDS)
Elemental
Elemental became the Little Film That Could despite opening to a weak box office and unusually vitriolic reviews. Peter Sohn drew on his experience as the son of hardworking Korean immigrants running a small store in this rom-com a mismatched girl composed of fire and a guy made of water. All the elements of a classic Pixar story are there — they just need a little trimming and rearranging. (Peter Sohn; Pixar)
The First Slam Dunk
One of the biggest anime hits of 2022, The First Slam Dunk won the Japanese Academy Film Prize for Animation of the Year and ranks as the fifth highest-grossing anime feature of all time. Takehiko Inoue’s extraordinary drawings come to life through a combination of skillfully used motion-capture and inventive rendering that eclipses the earlier TV series (1993-96). Inoue reworked the last books of his hit basketball manga, shifting the focus of the story from outrageous power forward Hanamichi Sakuragi to Okinawan point guard Ryota Miyagi. Although the outcome of a key game is never in doubt in an animated sports film, Inoue and his artists manage to maintain the tension and suspense. (Takehiko Inoue; GKIDS)
The First Slam Dunk (Toei Animation, DandeLion, GKIDS)
Nimona
This fantasy-adventure offered interesting design work, and the animators did an impressive job of keeping the title character’s style of movement consistent during her shape-shifting. Nimona also featured the first real gay hero in an American animated feature: Ballister Blackheart is a far more layered, credible character than the over-supported Ethan Clade in Disney’s Strange World (2022). Despite a troubled production that involved a shift from Blue Sky to Annapurna, it’s a very interesting, original film. If only it weren’t so needlessly talky. (Nick Bruno, Troy Quane; Netflix)
Nimona (Netflix/Annapurna)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Audiences have waited five years to revisit Miles Morales and his world. The seemingly infinite “Spider-Verse” offers funny visual gags (such as a Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture that turns out to be filled with candy) reflections on parent-child tensions and some thoughtful discussions among the various Spider-Men and Women. But as good as Across the SpiderVerse is, it can’t quite match the exceptionally high bar the first film set. It takes too long for Miles to appear on screen — the audience came to see him — and some of the visuals are needlessly complicated and hard to follow. It’s a highly enjoyable film, despite those caveats. (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson; Sony Pictures Animation)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Sony Pictures Animation)
One of Japan’s top young anime directors, Makoto Shinkai tackles the still-ongoing trauma of the Fukushima disaster through Suzume Iwato, his complex, resourceful heroine. When Shouta, a dashing young man, is transformed into a three-legged chair by the mischievous cat spirit Daijin, high school student Suzume finds herself charged with closing supernatural portals to prevent wormlike monsters from causing destructive earthquakes. Unlike Asha in Disney’s Wish or the title character in DreamWorks’ Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, Suzume doesn’t need superpowers or magic to resolve the crisis she faces. Any brave, resourceful high school girl could do what she does: That’s real Girl Power. (Makoto Shinkai; Crunchyroll)
Suzume (Crunchyroll, CoMix Wave)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
For the first time in this long-running franchise, the characters feel like believable teenage brothers who just want to go high school, attend the prom and make friends. They also feel like individuals rather than interchangeable elements in a four-piece set. The filmmakers obviously drew on the first Spider-Verse film for inspiration, but they pushed the film’s visual style in a different direction. The montage of the turtle quartet learning martial arts moves from reruns of old chop-socky films under the tutelage of Jackie Chan’s Splinter is a stand-out. (Jeff Rowe; Paramount)
Charles Solomon is an animation historian and critic who has written on the subject for numerous publications around the world. Among his most recent books are The Man Who Leapt Through Film: The Art of Mamoru Mosoda, The Art of Wolfwalkers, The Art of Frozen and The Art of the Disney Golden Books.
