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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 Jungle Book" and "Zootopia" were recognized tonight by the Critics' Choice Awards.

The post ‘The Jungle Book’ Wins Best VFX, ‘Zootopia’ Best Animated Feature At Critics’ Choice Awards 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.

If you described today's announcement of a "Lion King" remake as a 'live-action film,' you really shouldn't be covering the film industry.

The post Get It Right: Disney Is Doing An Animated—Not Live-Action—Remake of ‘The Lion King’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

"Zootopia" reached the milestone just two days before its Blu-ray release.

The post ‘Zootopia’ Becomes The Fourth Animated Feature To Reach $1 Billion Global Gross appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Will Rovio's big gamble on "Angry Birds" pay off?

The post ‘The Angry Birds Movie’ Launches with $43M, ‘Jungle Book’ Is India’s Biggest Hollywood Film Ever appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Rainmaker's approach to video game adaptations may need a rethink, while Disney is obliterating box office records in 2016.

The post ‘Ratchet & Clank”s Dreadful Second Weekend Raises Questions About ‘Sly Cooper’ Feature appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The ninth weekend of Disney's "Zootopia" outperformed its new competition, "Ratchet & Clank."

The post ‘Zootopia’ Overpowers ‘Ratchet and Clank’ Debut appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

What do you call a live-action film that's 90% animated?

The post ‘Jungle Book’ Filmmakers Can’t Decide If They Made An Animated Film Or Not appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Both of Disney's animated films in theaters right now are huge hits.

The post Disney Animation Is Unstoppable: ‘Jungle Book’ Crosses $500M, ‘Zootopia’ Over $900M appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Another animated film takes over the top spot at the U.S. box office.

The post Disney Rules The Box Office Again With Their Animated Hit ‘The Jungle Book’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Disney used a Super Bowl ad to spotlight Jon Favreau’s upcoming live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic story The Jungle Book.

The film stars Neel Sethi, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Walken, and Bill Murray among others. The production hits theaters in April.

We’ve got the trailer embedded above.

Jon Favreau's dark reboot screens like a terrorized tale drained of humor, compared to Wolfgang Reitherman's amiable 1967 feature.

In his never-ending quest to be recognized as a serious thespian, character actor Andy Serkis continues to minimize the role of the animators who make his performances possible. With each interview he gives, Serkis seems to do more and more of the work, and the animators less and less. About the only thing Serkis doesn't do at this point is build his own motion capture rigs and provide his own craft services.

Like a signature, each animator has their own little quirks or trademarks that distinguish their animation from others. Some draw character’s features in a unique way (eyes, hands, etc.), some lean heavily on certain principles or include abstract imagery or gimmicks into their scenes, and some fall back on specific poses or gestures. The “Milt Kahl Head Swaggle” is an example of the latter, and it both intrigues and aggravates me at the same time.

To clarify, the “Milt Kahl Head Swaggle” is when a character (animated by Disney legend Milt Kahl) sort of rattles his/her head from side to side, usually at times when they’re feeling cocky or self-assured. Sort of an “Am I great or what?” type of gesture.

Again, I can’t deny how remarkable an animator Milt Kahl was, but for a long time I considered him to be a really hammy animator in the worst possible sense, and this gesture cemented that idea in me for a good long while.

In a Frank Thomas or Ollie Johnston scene, I could see the wheels turn in the character’s heads and felt that the characters were sincere, emotionally-driven personalities. I never felt that in the majority of Kahl’s characters. A lot of his characters are like actors on a stage, projecting themselves a bit too far in their performances.

But at the same time, he uses this gesture for a reason, and it works well in every scene he implements it. He only used it on broader, more caricatured characters like Tigger, Sir Ector or Brer Rabbit, characters with strong egos and a cocky sensibility, and the gesture defines the character’s personality in the most simple and direct way possible.

Much like finding an often-reused piece of animation or sound effect in a Disney film, my dislike for it came only from repeated viewings. Because we live in the age of DVDs, Netflix and Quicktime files,  we now can have a studio’s entire library literally at our fingertips, able to survey and dissect the content any way we choose, including surveying an animator’s entire forty-year output front to back and taking shots completely out of context like I have here.

Another thing I realized over time is that Kahl seemed to prefer being a broader animator. For years he was stuck with the most difficult and seemingly less interesting assignments, which the rest of the animators couldn’t pull off because they weren’t as good of a draftsman as him. For example, he clamored to work on characters like Captain Hook but was stuck doing Peter Pan and the Darling children, or with Alice instead of the more zany, off-the wall characters that populate the rest of Alice and Wonderland. He would end up designing a lot of these other characters, but never get to animate most of them.

Luckily for him, by the 1960s, Kahl’s creative shackles were loosened and he was back to doing broader animation, and like a free spirit, he went all out on each character, from The Sword in the Stone through The Rescuers. Each character he animated during that period overflowed with energy, all of which was probably pent up inside him for so many years. His days of princes and realistic little children were over, and for the rest of his career he was able to let loose, have fun and do the things he wanted to do.

Milt Kahl knew he was a good animator, and he wasn’t afraid to show it through brash flourishes of animation. The head swaggle, corny and over-the-top though it may be, not only defines those Disney characters, but also defines the self-assured Kahl himself.

Wordle is a fun web tool that allows people to make artistic text collages or  “word clouds” from any text.

Here’s more from the site: “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

This GalleyCat contributor took eBookNewser’s “Free eBook of the Day” (Rudyard Kipling‘s The Jungle Book) and created a word cloud–the image is embedded above. Other literary projects on Wordle include the U.S. Constitution, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Yesterday I was a green-eyed monster. I saw Michael Morpurgo’s latest novel Running Wild in the bookstores. It’s the story of a boy and an elephant who rush off into the jungle because the elephant senses a tsunami coming. Four years ago (in 2005 to be precise... as I still have all my paperwork) I researched Sea Gipsies and elephants who escaped the tsunami because of their intuitive knowledge… a sort of 6th sense. I discovered these insights while reading Ian McCallum’s book, Ecological Intelligence. Fascinated I broached the idea of a story based on this. But the tsunami had devastated too many people’s lives and it was believed to be too close to the event. Four years later out comes Running Wild!

How often this occurs… writers have an idea, and then someone else brings out a similar story! On the positive side, Michael’s book with its handsome cover and lovely endpapers, made me wonder if we’re seeing a revival of ‘jungle’. Hopefully it bodes well for frogs too… seeing that my new series is called The Frog Diaries.

In the stakes of frogs versus vampires, it’s a no-brainer as far as popularity goes. Yet geckoes, chameleons and mammoth Madagascan moon moths were great draw-cards with 9 & 10 yr olds in the butterfly tent at the Natural History Museum this summer. And recently at the Saatchi Gallery it was the photograph of the toxic looking Blue Poison Dart frog (dendrobates azureus) that had a ring of children around it. Is this a trend? Will the jungle book return? I’d like to think so.

‘New jungle’ mixes nature with suspense and adventure. What’s not terrifying about the Golden Poison Dart frog (phyllobates terribilis) from the rainforests of Colombia, that’s capable of killing 10 to 20 people with its poison? A single gram on an envelope would kill anyone licking it.

So I’m playing herpetology and writing my Frog Diaries and soon to be Frog Blog. I’ve hunted down reed frogs in the Okavango Swamp (in reality often) with a frog-trafficking, dynamite-throwing villainess and I’ve trekked (in my imagination) the rainforests of Madagascar to track down its ghostly lemurs and Golden Mantella frogs and found much more… secret distilleries of ylang ylang flowers and modern-day pirates too.

I love doing what I’m doing. Because what does a primitive ylang ylang distillery look like in the heart of a rainforest? And how will my hero’s tree-house be suspended in the forest canopy by steel cables? Never mind plot problems and jungle-fact problems, I wake up each morning to engineering problems… and its fun. Fun because I love doing what I’m doing.

My frog stories join the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking new encounters. And if there’s to be an encounter with the world (and ourselves), then it’s up to us maniacs to do it. The root meaning of the word enthusiasm is enthosiasmos which in Greek translates: to be filled by the gods. I hope you are all filled by the gods this morning!

Book recommendations: