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Stay up-to-date on which animation and vfx films are winning end-of-year honors.

The post The Cartoon Brew 2016-17 Animation Award Winners Tracker appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The vfx shortlist includes the expected ("Doctor Strange," "The Jungle Book") and the unexpected ("Kubo and the Two Strings," "Arrival")

The post VFX Oscar Race is Narrowed Down To 10 Films appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The 20 films in contention for the vfx Oscar have been announced.

The post Academy Reveals Contenders in VFX Category, Including ‘Rogue: One,’ ‘Jungle Book,’ and ‘Kubo’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Who are the likely contenders for a visual effects Oscar? And which films might surprise this year?

The post 2017 VFX Oscar Contenders: From Most-Likely To The Outliers appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

American animated features are unstoppable all over the globe.

The post ‘Finding Dory’ Three-Peats In U.S.; ‘Secret Life of Pets,’ ‘Ice Age’ Strong Internationally appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

So many good videos to choose from today!  First and foremost, I begin with a very special message from Jon Scieszka.  It seems you still have two days to vote in the Children’s Book Choice Awards and . . . well . . . Jon would really like your kids to do so.  Seriously.

I own that suit!

I also enjoyed this video from Storycorps.  In it, a woman reflects on the bookmobile that changed her life:

In other news, it’s been a good book trailer season. When I went to Zootopia the other day (and how cool was its Emmett Otter reference?) I got a couple before the show. In this first video I spent the bulk of it trying to figure out if it was an adaptation of the Mac Barnett / Jory John Terrible Two series. It is based on a book, but we just aren’t that lucky:

On the plus side, the new BFG trailer looks pretty darn good:

And there’s a new trailer for A Monster Calls that I really enjoyed.

Finally, for the off-topic video, I actually think you could make a case for this being on-topic.  I mean, have you ever seen a truer to life version of Are You My Mother?

It comes with its own Snort!

Fun stuff.  Looks a lot like Harry Potter to a certain extent (mood, lighting, music, etc.).  It’s the trailer for Roald Dahl’s The BFG.

Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the link!

A bit of an older video here.  In my travels recently I discovered that the entirety of the Oliver Jeffers short film version of his book Lost and Found is apparently online.  Bonus!  I never got to see it.  For your viewing pleasure then (and it’s 24 minutes long, FYI):

Shoot. Christmas is over but only now have I learned about this new collection of Walt Kelly’s Fairy Tales.  Well, there’s always next year, I guess.

Cool. I’d heard that there was a children’s theater adaptation of Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, but didn’t know it had a little trailer too. Eh, voila.

And for the off-topic video, we’re not entirely off-topic.  After all, Mary Poppins was a children’s book originally.  Ipso facto a flash mob for Dick Van Dyke’s 90th birthday is . . . well it works for me.

Fellow Boomerang Blogger, Romi Sharp recently congratulated me on hitting my first century. Gob smacked! I mean I don’t even own a cricket bat, let alone know how to hold one. She meant blogs of course. I hardly noticed. They rack up and slip by like birthdays these days. Nonetheless, even numbers deserve celebration (especially […]

I’m up early, hanging with the three youngest. Huck’s tummy is a bit off today. He climbed into bed with us before dawn and slept snuggled against me in a way that hardly ever happens anymore; he’s getting so big and busy. He was restless, and after a while I reached for my phone and read mail with his arm flung half across my face. It’s not that I ever want my kids to be sick—honestly, I’ve dealt with enough childhood illness for three lifetimes—but there’s something very sweet in the moment, when you’re cuddled up with a heavy-limbed child who just wants to curl into you as close as possible. My baby will be six in a few months (the mind boggles) and these moments don’t happen very often anymore. I enjoyed this one, while it lasted. Then suddenly he clapped a hand over his mouth, ran to the bathroom, and threw up into the tub.

I’m just impressed that he made it that far.

He’s getting the Gatorade treatment now, watching cartoons. (A few sips of Gatorade every ten minutes for an hour, a trick gleaned from the Dr. Sears Baby Book* a million years ago.) I brought my laptop out to the couch to be near him and am trying not to listen to the squeakings of Curious George. At least it’s not Caillou.

*ETA: Scott has chimed in to say he thinks it was The Portable Pediatrician, not Dr. Sears. We gave ‘em both away ages ago, so I can’t check. I’m sure he’s right—he’s been the one handling the timing of this absolutely tried-and-true method for, yikes, almost 20 years now.

***

I’m still getting requests for those notes I promised to share from my habits talk way back in August (gulp). I’ve realized I’ll have to post them in notes fashion, for sure, because writing up the talk essay-style makes it all seem too formal, too authoritative. The idea of coming across as authoritative about parenting gives me the willies—it’s far too subjective and individual an endeavor for me to ever feel comfortable making pronouncements about the ‘right’ or ‘best’ way to do things. All I can do is say ‘here’s what’s worked great for us’—after the fact, you know, speaking from personal experience, same as I do with homeschooling. There’s a reason my whole Tidal Homeschooling thing is a description, not a method.

So maybe I can just take my habits-and-behavior talk notes and spit them out just like that, as notes, not, you know, entire sentences. Sentences are hard. They need verbs. I’m okay with past-tense verbs (did, tried, practiced, worked, laughed)—it’s the imperative ones that spook me, the kind with the implied “you.”

***

For my memories file: Several times over the past couple of weeks, after the boys were in bed, while Scott watched S.H.I.E.L.D. or a movie with Bean and Rose, Rilla and I sat on my bed with our art journals and listened to The BFG on audiobook. Colored pencils and markers all over the quilt. (Imprudent but comfy.) Natasha Richardson doing a bang-up job with the voices.

There you go, a bit of parenting advice I can pronounce in the imperative: Do that. It was delightful and you should totally try it.

#88 The BFG by Roald Dahl (1982)
22 points

A return by an old friend.  Previously appearing on this list at #54, Dahl’s later classic sinks to a not terrible #88.  Does that mean that other Dahls that have not been on this list before will make an appearance? Only time will tell . . .

The plot from the RoaldDahlFans website reads, “When orphan Sophie is snatched from her bed by a Giant, she fears that he’s going to eat her. But although he carries her far away to Giant Country, the Giant has no intention of harming her. As he explains, in his unique way of talking, ‘I is the only nice and jumbly Giant in Giant Country! I is THE BIG FRIENDLY GIANT! I is the BFG.’ The BFG tells Sophie how he mixes up dreams to blow through a trumpet into the rooms of sleeping children. But soon, all the BFG’s powers are put to the test as he and Sophie battle to stop the other Giants from tucking into the children of the world. The RAF and even the Queen become involved in the mission.”

I was unaware that Roald Dahl liked to put references from one of his books into another.  But according to Anita Silvey’s 100 Best Books for Children, “In the second chapter of Danny, the Champion of the World, Danny’s father tells his son a series of bedtime stories ‘about an enormous fellow called The Big Friendly Giant, or the BFG for short.’  Huh!  Who knew?

For this book, editor Stephen Roxburgh apparently (according to Silvey) “spent days drafting his editorial suggestions to Dahl, ten typed, single-spaced pages that commented on inconsistencies, cliches, and matters of taste.”  Whew!  Prior to the publication of this book Roald Dahl tried his hand at the story George’s Marvelous Medicine.  Adults were rarely entirely pleased with Dahl’s stories as they came out, but they definitely disliked this one in particular.  So BFG was a welcome relief and a much more popular book when it as released.

Actually, there’s a rather fun essay called White Blossoms and Snozzcumbers: Alternative Sentimentalities in the Giants of Oscar Wilde and Roald Dahl in which author Hope Howell Hodgkins seeks to show that, “The space between the nineteenth and the twentieth fin-de-siècles in children’s literature may be measured by the distance from Oscar Wilde’s ‘Selfish Giant’ (1888) to Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant [BFG] (1982).”  It’s a fun read.  Example: “Wilde’s fairy tales suggest on the surface a decadent weariness, but seem to rely upon moralistic cures and utopian endings: the selfish giant’s everblooming garden or an ineffable Paradise. Dahl, however, writes in and of a ‘fleshguzzling’ postmodern interpretive community, which is hilariously entertaining though alarming in its unspoken implications. Dahl offers no final answers for the century of the gigaton.”

The article “Spell-Binding Dahl: Considering Roald Dahl’s Fantasy” by Eileen Donaldson (found in the book Change and Renewal in Children’s Literature) also had a lot of fun with considering the author’s use of dreams. “Dahl uses dreams as magic in this novel . . .Thus, dreams in this novel become the means through which Sophie and the BFG transform their worlds; they literally recombine the elements of different dreams in order to create a new entity and, through it, a new way of living together as a family.”

This last one kind of amused me too.  In British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918-1960, the section on Roald Dahl gives this immensely silly book the fully academic once over

The competition has just gone up another level! We have our first reviews of the Treasure Island book and, as you know from the March 1 post, those reviews are Buzzer Beaters and count as five points! Before we get into that, though, let me let you all know that your reviews of the Treasure Island play have been mentioned on Imaginon's Facebook page. Take a look and good work, men!