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"The Croods" have gone extinct at Dreamworks.

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Executive producer Brendan Hay talks about how to play imminent demise for laughs in the new Netflix series 'Dawn of the Croods.'

The post ‘Dawn of The Croods’: Brendan Hay Discusses Building A Kinder, Gentler Animated Apocalypse appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

DreamWorks has finally found a viable business model: selling its studio campus over and over again.

In 2013, filmgoers in the United Kingdom and Ireland watched more animation than any other type of film, according to a new report by the British Film Institute.

From forty-five talented and prolific DreamWorks Studio Art Directors, Character Designers, Production Designers and Visual Development Artists comes the first title of its kind in which an Animation studio creates a book showcasing the art work that its artists create for the sake of creation.

Moonshine features artwork that is made during the precious little time of day when the contributors are not working on stunning upcoming movies such as Puss in Boots, The Croods, Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom, Megamind, Guardians, Scared Shrekless and Kung Fu Panda Holiday; these artists amaze us with their individualistically styled images that they create after dark at DreamWorks Studios.

Get it on Amazon:
MOONSHINE: DREAMWORKS ARTISTS…AFTER DARK!

Here’s something for the individual who’s torn between watching college football and animation. Tomorrow’s USC versus Utah game will feature a half-time “Tribute to Alan Silvestri” performed by the USC Marching Trojans. Among the selections that will be performed is “Smash & Grab” from DreamWorks’ The Croods. Footage from the film will play on the Los Angeles Coliseum Jumbotron alongside with the live performance.

“Smash & Grab” is one of the film’s most distinctive tracks, appearing in an early scene involving a hunt for food. Directors Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco (a USC alum, by the way) and composer Silvestri (Forrest Gump, The Avengers, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future) recruited the USC Marching Trojans to perform the track for the film’s score. By comparing the scene in the film to that of a football game, they wanted to underscore that “in the prehistoric world of the Crood family, even getting breakfast is a full contact sport.” As far as I know, this is the first live performance of the piece by the Marching Trojans.

Kickoff time for the USC/Utah game is 3:30pm ET, and it will be broadcast on ABC/ESPN2.

Left to right: Chris Sanders, Art Bartner (Director, Trojan Marching Band), composer Alan Silvestri and Kirk De Micco.

The Wall Street Journal published a story last weekend about Hollywood’s struggle to recoup its costs on big-budget tentpole films, but there’s one bright spot the WSJ (along with the rest of the mainstream media) always fail to recognize and that’s that animation is more successful than ever before.

Despite Turbo’ stumble at the box office and Henry Selick’s diss that American animated films are all the same, audiences around the world can’t get enough of big-budget CG animated features. Check this out:

Only six films have grossed $500 million dollars or more at the worldwide box office in 2013, and three of those films are animated. Let’s put this into perspective: animation studios have released just five animated features this year with a production cost of over $75 million and three of those films became half-billion grossers; on the other hand, live-action filmmakers have released over 20 films this year that cost $75 million or more, and only three of those films have achieved a similar mark. The evidence is clear: expensive animated tentpoles have a much better chance of being profitable than their live-action counterparts.

Leading the way amongst animated films at last week’s box office was the mega-hit Despicable Me which landed in 3rd place with $16.4 mil in its fourth U.S. weekend, boosting its domestic total to $306.8 mil. The film added $24.5 mil from foreign markets for an overseas total of $354.5 mil.

Monsters University continued a similarly strong run, earning $2.9 mil in its sixth U.S. weekend and $15.6 mil from overseas. The film’s totals are now $255.5 mil domestically and $321.6 foreign. The film has yet to open in markets like China and Italy, and by the time it’s all over, the film should become Pixar’s fourth highest-grossing movie ever.

The only animated clunker in theaters right now is DreamWorks’ Turbo, which had a sophomore frame gross of $13.7 mil, good enough for fourth place and a U.S. total of $56.2 mil. The film had a slim 35.5% decline, but it was slim only because the film couldn’t decline much further from its already meager opening weekend. Turbo managed to pick up $12.5 mil from 30 overseas markets pushing its foreign total to $41.9 mil. After two weekends, the film’s combined gross is $98.1 mil.

More animation is coming soon, too. Sony’s Smurfs 2 will be released this week, and Disney’s Planes next week.

Blue Sky’s Epic, directed by Chris Wedge, opened its U.S. box office run in fourth place with a respectable weekend take of $33.5 million. If you add in earnings from Monday, which was a holiday in the States, Epic’s 4-day total stands at $42.8M.

The film was based on a story by children’s author/illustrator Bill Joyce, whose movie projects have had difficulty capturing the attention of audiences. Similarly, Epic is the weakest opening ever for a Blue Sky feature. While Epic outperformed the dismal openings of the last two films based on Joyce properties—DreamWorks’ Rise of the Guardians ($23.8M) and Disney’s Meet the Robinsons ($25.1M)—it still failed to match the opening weekend of the Blue Sky/Bill Joyce collaboration Robots which had a 3-day total of $36 million in 2005.

Fox president of dommestic distribution, Chris Aronson, was optimistic about the film’s long-term potential, telling the Hollywood Reporter, “I think it’s a fantastic start. We have a four week run before Monsters University opens, and I’m very bullish on where Epic goes.”

In other box office news, after ten weeks in theaters, DreamWorks’ The Croods continues to show great legs and remains in the top ten. The film took ninth place last weekend with $1.2 million. As of yesterday, its U.S. total stands at $179.6 million and its foreign total is $383.4 million for a grand total of $563 million.

Finally, GKIDS is headed for its first million dollar-grossing release in the U.S. with Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill. The film earned $17,281 last weekend pushing its grand total to $958,610.

DreamWorks’ The Croods opened in first place at the U.S. box office with $43.6 million. That is almost the exact same opening as Chris Sanders’ last film, How to Train Your Dragon, which opened with $43.7 million in 2010. It is also much stronger than the studio’s last film, Rise of the Guardians, which earned $23.8 million during its opening weekend last November. The Croods netted an additional $62.6 million from its foreign debut. Russia, which as we’ve established is crazy for DreamWorks animation, was the film’s top foreign market and generated $12.9 million in box office earnings.

In other box office news, The Weinstein Company’s Escape from Planet Earth is winding down its theatrical run. It grossed $477,522 in its sixth frame, upping its total to $53.4 million. GKIDS expanded Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill into 6 theaters and grossed $59,693. The film’s two-week U.S. total stands at $131,927.

Nearly 600 people took our Croods box office poll which asked readers to guess how much the film would earn during its opening weekend. The correct choice—$42-44 mil—was the sixth most popular answer, guessed by 7.35% of readers. Here were the top five guesses:

10.93% of readers guessed $38-40 mil
10.04% of readers guessed $40-42 mil
9.5% of readers guessed under $25 million
8.78% of readers guessed $36-38 mil
7.53% of readers guessed $30-32 mil

I’m sure DreamWorks had the purest of intentions when they enlisted their superstar animator James Baxter to teach children how to draw characters like Eep and Guy from The Croods. But we all know how these tutorials will be put to use by the Internet. (All links NSFW in the last sentence.)

They’ve even made a “Gran” tutorial for the gerontophiles:

And please, I beg of you, if you do anything smutty with this character, don’t show me:

To conclude our week of exploring (a few) of the crew members on The Croods, let’s take a look at the work of Gabriele Pennacchioli, who served as a story artist on the film.

Gabriele’s blog is where you can see more of his personal work, such as his “Young Minotaur” character who battles all kinds of other creatures. He released a collection of these drawings as a book in 2008, which is still available here.

Scrolling further through his blog you’ll also find some other spear-wielding people, panthers, a cyclops and all sorts of expertly executed cartoon drawings.

Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco’s The Croods opens todsay in the United States as well as over 45 other countries. Critics haven’t been particularly kind, and the film has a mild 61% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Typical reviews include Richard Corliss in Time who complained that, “The family-dramedy genre that the film inhabits demands a bit more narrative ingenuity than is on display,” and Leslie Felperin in Variety who wrote that the film “adopts a relatively primitive approach to storytelling with its Flintstonian construction of stock, ill-fitting narrative elements.”

The good news is that mainstream audiences seems to disagree with the critics. They’ve given The Croods a robust 87% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

So who do you agree with? Check out the film and report back here with your opinion in the comments below. As usual, the talkback is open only to those who have actually seen the film and should be about your opinion of the film.

Continuing our week of looking into the work of The Croods crew, take a look at the work of Louie del Carmen who was a story artist on the movie. Louie’s website gallery features drawings, sketches, and examples of his storyboard work.

Louie regularly produces personal projects such as original books and comics in addition to the work that he does in television and feature animation.

Louie recently returned to television work from features to be a director for Dreamworks’ Dragons: Riders of Berk.

We can’t seem to get over our obsession with the caveman, who has appeared on screen since at least 1912. In fact, anthropologist Judith Berman has written that a new caveman character has been introduced into pop culture every year since World War II.

DreamWorks’ The Croods, directed by Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco, presents the most recent version of prehistoric man; Grug, is a responsible father facing such dad-like issues as a teenage daughter who just wants to be her own person. He transcends the behavior expected of a typical caveman, but his character design doesn’t evolve past a stereotype that is largely of our own making.

We’ve distilled an entire subspecies of human down to a single iconic image, one that is perpetuated year after year through film, animation, comic art and bad Halloween costumes. The caveman is always brutish, dressed in some type of fur loin cloth and possessing limited intelligence. Some stereotypes of prehistoric humans are certainly based on archeological facts: the structure of the skull, anatomical proportions and pelt-based wardrobe. But other stereotypes, such as wielding clubs, communing with dinosaurs and pulling women by the hair, are our own projections of prehistoric behavior.

The iconic caveman image we know today was already established by the 1930s, seen in the comic strip Alley Oop. He carried a stone axe, manhandled women and rode a dinosaur named Dinny. Alley Oop, along with the Fleischer’s Stone Age Cartoons series, was a response to western society grappling with what it meant to be modern. The simple world of the caveman was a nostalgic comfort to those who feared progress.

Alley Oop was the pop culture bookend of a caveman fiction trend that began in the 19th century. One of the earliest examples is Paris Before Man, a novel written by Pierre Boitard in 1861. The frontispiece print (above) shows a club-wielding caveman, protecting his mate. As the genre developed, the caveman became more brutish and ill-mannered—an 1886 short story written by Andrew Lang describes a marriage custom in which women are “knocked on the head and dragged home.” By the 1920s, numerous newspaper headlines used “caveman” and “neanderthal” as adjectives to describe senseless male brutality.

The mid-century resurgence of cavemen in film (The Neanderthal Man, Monster on Campus), comics (B.C.) and television (The Flintstones) can partly be blamed on World War II rhetoric. Newscasters sang the praises of atomic power while warning of its devastating potential to send us back to a new Stone Age. To help us deal with these fears, the caveman was domesticated; The Flintstones showed that, even as the worst case scenario, the Stone Age wasn’t so bad. Even cavemen could wear neckties and accomplish an honest day’s work.

Over time, films and TV shows have moved away from the wife-clubbing caveman of the 19th century to fit G-rated expectations of civilized society. In fact, The Croods has pushed the caveman to the opposite end of the spectrum, with a father figure that seems like he could handle modern-day discussions of co-parenting and all-terrain strollers. No longer a commentary on uncivilized man or our fears of the future, the caveman and his era presented in The Croods is merely a backdrop ideal for contrasting our modern reality of iPods and WiFi.

On Friday, DreamWorks Animation will release Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco’s The Croods, the company’s 26th feature. It will also be the first one released under their new distribution deal with Fox.

Box Office Guru is playing it conservative and predicting the film will open with a $39 million weekend. Box Office Mojo forecasts the film will earn between $40-44 million. Variety says the film is tracking north of $40 million, and even has a shot of reaching Wreck-It Ralph’s $49 million opening weekend. Not in question is that the film will be huge internationally. It opens day-and-date in over 45 countries tomorrow, and predictions are in the $300 million range for overseas opening weekend.

Now, it’s your turn. We are going to find out if the collective knowledge of the animation community can accurately predict an animated film’s opening weekend. The survey below will remain open through Saturday evening. Read up on the links above, and then make your best guess for how much The Croods will gross on its US opening weekend.

Continuing our week of looking at some of The Croods crew’s work, take a look at the art of Nicolas Weis, who served as a visual development artist on the film.

His website is full of sketchbook drawings of fantastic structures, observational drawing and many dragons, which he comments “are like kitten videos, people like them…”

The simple, rapid blots and washes of watercolor over pencil and pen lend his creatures an energetic liveliness and a real sense that they could exist in our chaotic, gritty, physical world.

Shane Prigmore designed many of the creatures in The Croods along with Carter Goodrich, Takao Noguchi, and Shannon Tindle. He has worked on other Dreamworks, too, including How to Train Your Dragon and Rise of the Guardians. Some of Shane’s development work on Rise of the Guardians is posted on his blog, with a few examples below. Here is an interview with Shane from the Character Design blog. It includes some earlier personal work and designs from movies such as Coraline.

Croods week continues for our Artist of the Day profile. Steven A. MacLeod worked as a storyboard artist on The Croods as his first job straight out of college, bounced over to How to Train Your Dragon, then as that wrapped up, he switched back again to The Croods. On his blog he shows off several design ideas that he contributed for Croods teaser posters such as the above image.

Steven’s personal work includes many studies of landscapes sketched in oil pastels and pencils, and larger pieces drawn exclusively in pencil. Steven keeps an art blog here and another main blog here that includes doodles, artwork and commentary.

This week we’ll take a look at the work of artists who were part of the production crew of The Croods, which will be released in theaters this Friday, March 22nd. If there’s any downside to focusing on the artists of Croods, it’s that there are countless more impressive artists on the film’s crew who are equally worthy of being featured here.

For starters, one of the crew members with a substantial web presence happens to be Chris Sanders, the co-director of the film. Although the gallery and comics section of his website (Chris creates a strip called Kiskaloo) are currently empty and being refreshed at some point in the future, Chris’s work can still be seen throughout his website’s blog, deviantART and Twitter.

Chris’s drawings of humans and creatures tend to have a distinctive facial/eye design and proportions that are strongly identifiable as his own. His style was particularly on display in his first feature, Disney’s Lilo & Stitch.

There is also a generous amount of storyboard drawings from The Croods that Chris has posted on his blog in its own category.

Director Chris Sanders (How To Train Your Dragon) is posting while in post-production on The Croods. He’s letting us see some of his deleted boards, of scenes that were cut or altered, on his new Dreamworks film. Sanders art is magnificent – his storytelling is superb. Head on over to Chris Sanders’ blog now and check it out!

Here it is, the first trailer from Dreamworks initial 20th Century-Fox release, Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco’s The Croods. Eye candy awaits:

Already one the most anticipated animated features coming in 2013, Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco’s The Croods keeps looking better and better with each new tease. Dreamworks’ released the first poster today (below) and its gorgeous. It’s also the first of their 20th Century-Fox releases – note the logo bottom right.

In case you want to see what the characters faces actually look like, here’s the cover to Noela Hueso’s Art Of The Croods which Titan Books will release in February. (I’ve already pre-ordered mine).

DreamWorks Animation has unveiled the most ambitious animated feature slate of any cartoon studio in history. Beginning next spring, DreamWorks will release a total of 12 features in 3-1/2 years under their new distribution deal with Fox.

More details about DreamWorks’ plans can be found at the Wall Street Journal and The Hollywood Reporter. Here is the list of films and release dates:

The Croods (March 22, 2013)
Turbo (July 19, 2013)
Mr. Peabody & Sherman (Nov. 1, 2013)
Me and My Shadow (March 14, 2014)
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (June 20, 2014)
Happy Smekday! (Nov. 26, 2014)
The Penguins of Madagascar (March 27, 2015)
Trolls (working title, June 5, 2015)
B.O.O: Bureau of Otherwordly Operations (Nov. 6, 2015)
Mumbai Musical (working title, Dec. 19, 2015)
Kung Fu Panda 3 (March 18, 2016)
How to Train Your Dragon 3 (June 18, 2016)

A few thousand copies of this Croods print drawn by Chris Sanders and painted by Arthur Fong were handed out at Comic-Con last week. The charm and vitality of Sanders’ sinuous line artwork will inevitably be lost in the transition to CGI so enjoy this little taste of what the film could have been. (Click on the image for a bigger version.)

(via The Croods blog)

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Arthur Fong, Chris Sanders, dreamworks, The Croods

Our friends at ComingSoon.net snapped some intriguing images from the floor of The Licensing Expo, the industry trade show that started today in Las Vegas. Here’s another look at Chris Sanders highly anticipated The Croods; Dreamworks’ racing snail film, Turbo; and Chris Wedge’s Epic (formerly known as The Leaf Men), based on William Joyce’s book. Which one are you most excited about?

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Epic, The Croods, Turbo