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'Trolls' director Mike Mitchell and co-director Walt Dohrn talk to Cartoon Brew about creative freedom, how Genndy Tartakovsky and Phil Lord helped out, and making cg look more handmade.

The post ‘Trolls’ Director Mike Mitchell: There Was No Mythology to These Things…I’ve Never Felt So Free appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Creator Genndy Tartakovsky gives a preview of his darker, grittier "Samurai Jack" reboot for Adult Swim.

The post Go Behind-The-Scenes of The ‘Samurai Jack’ Revival With Genndy Tartakovsky appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Everyone was at Annecy this year, from Guillermo del Toro to the president of France.

The post Annecy 2016 Review: Rainy, Crowded, Star-Studded, And Unforgettable appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Tartakovsky says he got an idea for a third "Hotel Transylvania" film that "made it irresistible to return" and direct again.

The post Genndy Tartakovsky Isn’t Done With ‘Hotel Transylvania,’ Will Direct Third Film in Franchise appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The annual mega-animation festival is happening in a few weeks, and we're here to help guide you through it.

The post 9 Can’t-Miss Events At Annecy 2016 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Adam Sandler is expanding his animation empire with a new feature.

The post Adam Sandler Will Write and Star In Animated Feature For STX Entertainment appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The new episodes will air on Adult Swim next year.

The post Cartoon Network Nabs Genndy Tartakovsky, New Season of ‘Samurai Jack’ Announced appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Charlie Brown might be a loveable loser, but Fox proved a winner with a $45 million "Peanuts Movie" launch.

We dig deeper into the creation of "Hotel Transylvania 2" in this exclusive behind-the-scenes video with director Genndy Tartakovsky.

Heading into its fifth weekend at the U.S. box office, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania 2 has proven to be a crowd-pleaser in both the United States and abroad, cementing the Drac Pack’s status as a valued franchise for Sony Pictures Animation.

One of the key creative figures on this second trip to Hotel T was production designer Michael Kurinsky. While it’s Kurinsky’s first outing as a feature film production designer, he’s enjoyed a distinguished career in animation, including a decade at Disney painting backgrounds on hand-drawn films such as Hercules, Tarzan, Fantasia/2000, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. For the last dozen years, he’s been at Sony, where he’s contributed to most of their animated projects, including art directing the splashy universe of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

As production designer of Hotel Transylvania 2, Kurinsky was responsible for expanding the world while maintaining visual consistency with the original film’s universe. Among the most memorable expansions in the new installment were the introductions of Dracula’s father, Vlad (voiced by Mel Brooks), and his menacing sidekick Bela (Rob Riggle). I spoke with Kurinsky at length about the process of creating these characters, their environment, and how they evolved through the course of the production.

Michael Kurinsky: Vlad originally wasn’t in the first script. We had a completely different villain: it was this real estate mogul named Quinston and they were trying to get Quentin Tarantino to be the voice. Actually the designs looked a lot like Quentin Tarantino. And two things happened. One, Quentin Tarantino turned down that role, and two, it just didn’t work after they did a first screening. You know, you’re in this monster world and your villain is a human real estate developer who wanted to turn the Hotel Transylvania into a theme hotel, kind of like the W. I think it was going to be called the T, and he wanted to put them all over the world.

So, Genndy came up with this idea: What if Dracula had a dad? In the final version of the movie, Mavis does know about Grandpa Vlad because she says it in the wedding sequence, but in the original, she didn’t even know she had a grandfather; he was a recluse. He and Drac were estranged from each other; that was the tone. So we were like, “This is cool. He’s really old school monster.” This union of Mavis and Johnny would be very upsetting for him. And you’d get this backstory that Drac and Vlad had some sort of bad fallout and they haven’t talked to each other for 600 years or something crazy like that.

Vlad was thrown out to two different artists: Craig Kellman and Andre Medina. Andre did some really funny stuff; picture like Danny DeVito being Vlad. This is before we knew who the voice was going to be. So he had these little tiny stumpy looking guys, and then he had these sort of dandified looking guys, almost like Gary Oldman when he was playing Dracula. We had a big range, but when Craig’s stuff came in, we got the most laughs out of those. When Craig heard Mel Brooks was doing the voice, a design came in from him, and we told him we liked that design. The next thing we knew we got a bunch of expression sheets back from Craig and now you could almost hear Mel Brooks’ voice coming out of those drawings.

Genndy is an extremely hands-on director who knows very much what he is looking for. The thing that I think he’s most specific about are the characters. When it comes to a new character design, he’s the one who says, “This is a Craig Kellman design,” or “This is going to be a Stephen DeStefano.” He picked the people he wanted to draw the characters, and sometimes he would even send them a preliminary sketch/idea asking for something in a particular vein.

Where I got mostly involved with characters was when it had to make the translation from black and white drawings into color and texture — either I would paint some of them myself and start really filling out the volume of the character, or I’d hand it to who I thought would be the best artist to do that character.

For Bela, I just took one of Stephen DeStefano’s drawings that I liked, and just wanted to try something out so I started painting this thing. I had a picture in my head for these creatures that clearly never see the light of the day and live in a cave, and what the quality of their skin was going to be, almost a translucent fish-flesh kind of thing. I can be a real renderer and a real noodler if need be, and was really happy with the painting because it got the quality of the skin, and the leathery wings and the veins running through it. I loved monster movies as a kid, and this really had all the things that were in my head.

Genndy could have told me to dial it back but he didn’t. He liked all that stuff. I remember when I put that painting up, he said, “This is scary. You’re going to scare kids. But we should work with these kind of textures, and when we get the right kind of facial expressions on this character, it won’t be that scary.”

And he wanted to go even further than what the painting had, not so much in the textures, but based on looking at the drawing Stephen had done, he asked our vfx supervisor, “Can we build a muscle system underneath the skin?” Because normally it’s skeleton on the inside and you’re animating just the skin that has the volume in it. He said, “I’d like a skin with real muscles underneath it and then the skeleton,” so that we could really feel when these characters bent their arms and made a fist — you could feel the muscles flex and tense. We took the realism in this character much further than any other character in the Hotel Transylvania universe.

Vlad and Bela’s Environment

Michael Kurinsky: When Vlad was written into the script, whenever they would talk about his location, it would say “Exterior: Vlad’s Castle,” so we started designing castles. At 10 o’clock every morning we had these meetings where we would show Genndy what we were working on, and we put up a bunch of castle sketches, and he was like, “We already have a castle. It’s called the Hotel. Let’s do something different. What if we put him into a more natural structure like a cave or something?”

I don’t think Genndy had discussed it with the writers or anything like that. It was just an idea that he had right there in that meeting and we immediately went and attacked it. We started designing this cave, which actually worked great, because Vlad felt like a reclusive hermit in there, like he purposefully was sequestering himself away from his family, from the world, from everything. And it really set the stage for who this character was; it helped support his story.

There was a whole sequence that I absolutely loved and it hurt so bad when I heard it was being taken out for time. There was a sequence called “Meet Vlad,” and it helped strengthen this story of how this person wanted to be left alone. In the sequence, Frank and Drac have to go to Vlad’s lair. To do that, they first had to drive through this windy mountain road and then the car comes to a dead end, and then they had to go down a rocky hill; they had to crawl through a tunnel, and then at the tunnel, there was another steeper hill that was covered in big stickly briar patches, and they kind of bounced down that hill. A trap door would open up and they’d fall down this never-ending hole, and then boom, they landed into an entry chamber where they were greeted by one of the cronies, who escorted them through a little passageway which led into the throne room.

When we were going to do the lighting for it, we started with this really warm lighting at the top of the scene and as they kept moving down, down, closer to Vlad’s lair, the lighting would get colder and colder, so what it was doing was supporting the story of this guy — that he was this cold, angry curmudgeon, and this is where he chose to live. It was the classic example of showing, not telling who this character was. It was all done with visuals and music; there was very little dialogue as they were traversing all this stuff. And you would have felt when we finally got into his presence, “Oh my gosh, I know a lot about this guy already.”

The French animated feature The Little Prince, directed by Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda) and produced by French/Canadian studio Mikros Image, launched in China with a solid $10.8 million. The film opened in the #3 spot, behind the debut of Ant-Man and the Chinese megahit Goodbye Mr. Loser.

The adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, which uses a mixed-media approach combining CGI and stop motion, has grossed $38 million worldwide to date. That total includes over $10 million in France, and over $7 million in Brazil, where it became the first non-American animated feature to reach #1 at the box office. Paramount is looking to release in the United States in 2016.

Little Prince’s Chinese launch will likely beat out the recent debut of Pixar’s Inside Out, which has grossed just $14.7 million after two weeks of release. Boxoffice.com pointe out that part of the reason may have been the release strategy:

The Little Prince was shown in both English and Mandarin dubbed versions and naturally, audiences flocked to the Mandarin one. In a smart move, distributor Fundamental Films utilized high-profile celebrity voice talents Huang Bo (Lost in Thailand) and teen idol Jackson Yi to attract family audiences. In contrast, Inside Out’s dubbed version was voiced by a cast of virtually unknown Chinese performers which could be one reason the pic failed to hit with Mainland audiences.

Back in the United States, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania 2 grossed $12.6M in its fourth frame, good for fifth place. The film has now grossed $136.8M domestically, and will soon exceed the original’s $148.3M total.

Internationally, the Sony Pictures Animation film scored $30.6M, lifted by a #1 bow in the UK with $9.5 million. Worldwide total is now $267.9M.

Pixar's "Inside Out" also reached a new milestone becoming the 10th highest grossing animated feature of all time.

Genndy Tartakovsky's feature continues to surprise everyone with stronger-than-expected box office numbers.

The two best-opening Sony Animation movies have now been directed by Genndy Tartakovsky.

The other day the great animator Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Lab, Clone Wars, Hotel Transylvania) did an interview for Hotel Transylvania 2, which is coming out soon, and sneaked in a reference to a Luke Cage comics that he drew in 2007: “Actually, you could help out with that,” Tartakovsky told me, with a laugh. “The […]

In a wide-ranging conversation, Genndy Tartakovsky talks to Cartoon Brew about the challenges of making "Hotel Transylvania 2" and what he's trying to do next.

Sony Pictures Animation and Nelvana's 'Hotel Transylvania' animated television series is scheduled for an early 2017 launch.

Mavis and company will arrive on TV in 2017.

There's no official "Samurai Jack" film coming anytime soon, but that's not stopping fans from creating their own work.

Genndy Tartakovsky's monstrous goofballs are going to California.

Sony Pictures Animation presents a detailed unpacking of the artistry happening on Genndy Tartakovsky's upcoming feature.

Annecy is taking over San Diego Comic-Con as the place for Hollywood to preview its major projects.

"It was hard to let Popeye go," says Genndy Tartakovsky.

Our first look at Genndy Tartakovsky's "Hotel Transylvania 2."

Sony Pictures Animation just debuted on its YouTube channel an exclusive animation test from Genndy Tartakovsky's "Popeye" CG feature.