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New videos explore the water and volcano effects simulations in 'Moana'.

The post The Effects Tech Behind ‘Moana’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

A new featurette from Disney Animation focuses on the Pacific islands cultural history that inspired "Moana."

The post New ‘Moana’ Featurette Highlights Cultural Inspirations appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The October doldrums are past (where The Martian was the #1 movie for four of the past five weeks?!). Last weekend saw the double whammy of James Bond and Charlie Brown gain 76% of the weekend box office, and the total take of all movies to be 148% over the previous weekend’s cumulatives and 6% over this time last […]

Disney Animation Studios has regained their glamour of Walt’s era, where every new Disney animated feature is eagerly awaited and anticipated. And speculated. Whispers are heard from Emeryville and Burbank regarding any future films, and even a simple title card can set fans imaginations churning. Such is the case with  “Moana”, the next “princess” animated film […]

Other members of Team Beat will be along soon to give their reviews of Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out”, debuting tomorrow. There was mention of a news embargo, but it looks like other sites are beginning to talk about the movie.

Since I paid $25 to see the Fathom Events sneak peek, I’m not really prevented from reviewing it as a fan, but I don’t want to rock the boat…

So here are some random “feels”…

• Disney isn’t marketing this movie very well. Right now, they should do two things IMMEDIATELY: 1) Push this as a great movie to take your father (and mother) to go see for Father’s Day. Yes, the movie centers around a 12-year-old girl, but the family dynamic is important. 2) Release a clip of Joy and Sadness meeting Bing Bong. He’s the breakout supporting character.
• Get there early, because, like every Pixar movie ever, there’s a short before the feature. This one is called “Lava”, and it rivals the Carl & Ellie montage from “Up”. The director wrote the music, and even performed it a few times on television. I won’t link to YouTube, because you should hear it first as part of the cartoon. (And you’ll probably get sick of hearing it from every ukulele player for the next five years.)
• Where does “Inside Out” rank among all Pixar films? Well, I’ve been a fan since watching “Tin Toy” back in 1988… I’ll place it up there with “Up” and “WALL-E”. It’s definitely the front-runner for Best Animated Feature this year, but there are a lot of contenders to come.
• The Fathom Event was good.  AMC Times Square screwed up a bit… First, they started handing out the swag (a lanyard with a secret online code, and a mini-poster) FIVE minutes before the show started, and with only ONE usher handing out stuff.  Some people didn’t get the lanyard, and for $25, well, the disgruntlement can be enflamed. They also had some nice jazzy marimba music as background music, but Disney had little video vignettes with each of the voice actors and their roles.  They didn’t turn on the audio until the previews began, and then we had to yell to get them to do that.
• The previews: The Good Dinosaur and Zootopia.
• Then there was a 15?-minute behind-the-scenes tour of the Steve Jobs Building at Pixar, guided by Pete Docter (the director) and Jonas Rivera (the producer) working a steady-cam. Yes, you’ll want to freeze-frame the movie, just to see all the goodies on the walls and shelves. While John Lasseter’s office is epic (and wait until you see his house!), the smaller offices of the staff are even cooler! Here’s hoping this film gets added to the DVD release.
• Afterwards, there was a nice live-streamed interview with Pete Docter and Amy Poehler in Sydney, Australia. (The Opera House makes a nice backdrop!) They took moderated questions from Twitter, which is something I wish Hall H would do.
• I didn’t notice many Easter eggs, but I didn’t really look for them because I was lost in the movie. John Ratzenberger plays “Fritz”. (I’m not exactly sure who that was.) There is also a reference to “The Good Dinosaur”, quite possibly the most blatant pre-film cameo of all the Pixar movies. No reports of A113 or Pizza Planet yet, although there is a good pizza joke.
• Stay for the credits.
• Oh, and it passes the Bechdel Test. In multiple combinations.

The major studios filed a motion last Friday in federal court asking a judge to dismiss the antitrust wage-fixing lawsuit that had been filed by animation industry employees.

Today we look at the work of Will Finn, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

A look at the work of Jeff Turley, Cartoon Brew’s Artist of the Day.

A look at the work of Romain Barriaux, Cartoon Brew’s Artist of the Day.

If you’re a warm blooded human and have been out in public, then you’ve most likely heard that wildly popular and award winning song from the movie Frozen. Yeah, you know the one I’m talking about. The one that has gotten so far wedged into your head that brain trauma is the only remedy. Well don’t worry. This article isn’t about that song.

No one can deny that Frozen hasn’t been a homerun for Walt Disney Animation. It has won the first Oscar award for an animated movie for the 91 year old Disney Animation Studios, and reports are claiming that it’s the highest grossing animated picture for the company, ever! A lot of time, planning and work went into this sweep of a film. But aside from the producers, the voice actors, and the animators, there are those that worked well behind the scenes who made the movie the hit it has become: The story artists.
This year at Wondercon Anaheim we were joined by four story artists who worked on Frozen: Jeff Rango, Fawn Veerasunthorn, Nicole Mitchell, and Normand Lemay. Each of them shared what they felt what the term “story” meant for them. Jeff Rango, whose first work with Disney after his three years at Cal Arts was designing the Titans for a little animated film named Hercules, shared that for him, “Story is the architecture of a movie. And [that] the story artist is the architect.”

Jeff is also the man who worked on making the scenes match up well with the movie’s music. “The songs are pretty much done before we start [working] with the scenes. I listen to the songs and try to design the scenes around them.” Jeff worked closely with the music and lyrics composers, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, during much of the process. Since the pair lives on the East coast however, Jeff had to do it all over the web. And because he really didn’t live near the animation offices, he had to get there early to make up for the three hour time difference. But he made it work. “Since my drive was an hour and a half both ways, it let me listen to the music probably over a thousand times. It allowed me to get a feel for it.”

Fawn Veerasunthorn, Thailand born and having worked with Disney since 2011, shared that she felt the story process was broken up into two parts. The first of which is more or less pitching ideas, communicating and elaborating with others verbally, and also a little bit of “worrying” too. The ideas that make it through then are then put to a storyboard and sketched out. “With the scene that included Elsa and Anna after the coronation, we originally had it that Hans wasn’t going to be there. But as we sketched it out, we felt that Anna was just talking about her invisible boyfriend. There wasn’t enough Hans.” With the sketches, the story team was also able to focus on some repeating symbolisms. Over and over in the movie we see the gloves (protection/security) and doors (fear/hiding). They were able to decide where these symbols were most effective for each particular scene.

Before any of the scenes are animated, the general ideas have to be discussed and finalized. To get a better idea of what would work for the animation, the artists create what are called “screenings.” They’re basically the proposed scenes drawn out in pencil and animated like a slow flip book. Potential dialogue is also given to each of these hand drawn scenes. “Screenings help put into perspective what will and will not work for the story,” says Normand Lemay. Normand, the Canadian born story artist, has worked for Disney Animation for four years, with Frozen being his first credited work.

What about the snowman do you ask? Where did he come from? Well, you have Jeff Rango to really thank for that. Seen as the more comedic one of the team, he helped to design and name that silly but brainless pile of snow called “Olaf.” “I’ve lived in San Diego, and in [Ocean Beach] there use to be ‘Big Olaf’s Ice Cream.’ I pushed for that guy to be named Olaf.” Jeff also helped much with Olaf’s comedic singing scene, which personally was my favorite singing scene. Guilty pleasure you can call it. But that cute and funny snowman almost ended up on the cutting room floor if it weren’t for one scene that helped solidify his importance. “We decided that it should be Olaf who helped Anna realize that Kristoff might be her real true love and answer,” says Nicole Mitchell. She’s worked with Disney Animation for the last six years, first entering through the trainee program. “That she was loved. It helped Olaf to become a [real] piece of the movie.”

There’s a lot of work that goes into an animated feature. A lot of it is what you see in the final product on the big screen. But like any house, it should be build on a strong foundation. Next time you sit down in a theatre, or flip on your favorite animated movie, don’t forget to thank those who helped form the supporting beams that hold the entire thing up, and allowed it to become something great.

~Nicholas Eskey

Disney character designer Jin Kim drew this suite of twenty-five caricatures of co-workers for Disney’s annual in-house caricature show. Like the rest of Kim’s work, these drawings are distinguished by their expressive line and confident shapes. His prodigious abilities make it look far too easy. Above, from left to right, Lino DiSalbo, Don Hall, and Shiyoon Kim.

Yesterday at D23 expo, Walt Disney Animation Studios announced Zootopia (working title), a feature slated for 2016 that will be directed by Byron Howard (Bolt, Tangled) and written by Jared Bush (a writer on the TV series All of Us). The film’s set-up is standard buddy-cop comedy, in which a fox named Nick Wilde who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit teams up with rabbit cop Lt. Judy Hops. The twist is that the entire film is set in a world in which humans never existed (a la Pixar’s Cars) and animals have built everything. Entertainment Weekly elaborated on this conceit:

[Disney] also displayed concept images of Zootopia’s title city. “One of the key concepts is if you squint at any frame of film you might think you’re looking at an animal in a natural environment,” Howard said. He then showed a frame of a snow-covered Alpine mountain, which faded into an irregularly shaped white pyramid luxury hotel. Just like New York has Chinatown and Little Italy, Zootopia has distinct regional neighborhoods like Tundratown, Sahara Square, Little Rodenta (the bad part of town, populated by vermin), and Burrowborough, populated by millions of bunnies.

Walt Disney Animation Studios has partnered with Touch Press, the digital book publishers behind Elements and Leonardo DaVinci: Anatomy, to create Disney Animated, a new premium iPad app that provides “unprecedented access” to the art and technology behind all 53 of Disney’s animated feature films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the upcoming Frozen.

Disney Animated, which is available today in the iTunes app store for $13.99, contains 750 interactive illustrations, over 400 short animation clips and 350 backgrounds, concept drawings and storyboards. “The promise of Disney Animated is that it is a serious work about the history and present day practice of making animated feature films, in which the medium is finally able to speak for itself”, explains Theodore Gray, Touch Press COO and co-author of the new app, on the Touch Press blog, “where every image from every film is in fact a short clip, complete with sound, music, and life.”

Source: Wall Street Journal

Today’s Cartoon Brew Artist of the Day post is sponsored by the CG Master Academy. Sign up TODAY for The Art of Color & Light which is co-taught by Ryan Lang.

Ryan Lang works as a visual development artist at Walt Disney Animation, including on the upcoming Disney/Marvel pic Big Hero 6.

Ryan shares some of his personal work and digital/traditional paint studies on his blog:

These menacing figures below won’t appear in a Disney film anytime soon, but they show his range as an artist:

This afternoon at the Walt Disney Animation studio, they took some time off to celebrate this guy:

(photo via)

That’s Burny Mattinson, and he started working at Disney sixty years ago today, making him the studio’s last active employee to have worked directly with Walt Disney. It’s amazing to think what a different place America was when Mattinson first started working at the company: Disneyland didn’t yet exist, WWII general Dwight D. Eisenhower was President, there had never been a Super Bowl, Elvis Presley was just graduating high school, black people still sat in the back of the bus in many parts of America, and we’d never traveled into outer space.

Starting in the mailroom, Mattinson worked as an inbetweener, assistant animator and clean-up artist on Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and 101 Dalmatians. He inbetweened on some of Fred Moore’s last animation and did clean-up on Marc Davis’ Maleficent. Later, he became a storyman on The Jungle Book and The Aristocats.

Mattinson made his directing debut on the featurette Mickey’s Christmas Carol, before returning to do story on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tarzan, and the recent Winnie the Pooh feature, among others. Here’s a four-part podcast in which Mattinson discusses his career.

Everyone showed up this afternoon for the ceremony honoring Burny, including Ron Clements, Eric Goldberg, John Musker and John Lasseter:

(photo via)

The Disney artists made a huge cake in Burny’s honor:

(photo via)

and then devoured it:

(photo via)

Then, they washed it down with Burny cupcakes:

(photo via)

They celebrated him with artwork, like this piece by director Kevin Deters:

(photo via)

And the county of Los Angeles (as well as the state of California) gave Burny official commendation…and managed to misspell Aristocats in the process, because, well, they’re the government:

(photo via)

CONGRATULATIONS, BURNY, ON YOUR 60TH DISNEY ANNIVERSARY!