Summer Linkorama

Now this would make a gang-buster live-action Batman movie ...

Another round of 'toony links for a summer day.

Variety asks the age-old question:

So why can't there be an animated performance category to recognize the teams that create toon characters, from voice actors to animators?

Answer: Because the mostly live-action Academy has minimal interest in doing this.

Finally, not Andrew Stanton this time but Wall-E supervising animator Angus McLane holds forth on Pixar's latest:

And when you come to the point where you’re going ahead with the project, and you’re tasked with animating a robot, how did you tackle that?

It’s actually very similar to animating fish!

You think about fish, and you’re like I don’t know how I’m going to animate these things, and you look at footage of fish and start off by trying to replicate it exactly. And then once you figure out how fish move, you go okay, I’ve got a scene where a character, Fish X, says blah blah blah, and so you go after he says blah blah blah, I’ll have the tail wiggle a little bit, just to remind the audience that this guy’s underwater. And then we’ll flip the fin a little bit, and wiggle around, and so you get this thing where you’re always giving indications to the audience that the character is what they are.

Speaking of the Wallster, Disney is doing some savvy marketing for the flick as it rolls out across Yurp:

... for months now, there has been a lot of buzz about this film. Wall-E opened in US theaters on June 27th and is set to open in UK theatres on July 18th, followed by European theaters at the end of July/beginning of August. The buzz is mainly thanks to short and funny teaser videos starring Wall-E ...

Kung Fu Panda has apparently really ticked off Chinese patriot Zhao Bhandi:

"Designing the panda with green eyes is a conspiracy. A panda with green eyes has the feeling of evil. I have studied oil painting, and we would never use green eyes to describe a kind-hearted figure. So I ask them to open their creative meeting records of this film and explain why the green eyes?

"Next, why is the panda's father is a duck? ..."

Yeeahh. Why is Daddy a duck? Seems like inter-species canoodling to us, as it does to Bhandi. So of course, he's suing over this outrage.

As the new Batman feature smashes box office records, writer Alan Burnett talks about the animated version:

How long did you work on this -- was this an easy story for you?

The story came pretty easily. The story wrote itself in a way. I liked doing 11 minutes. It's short and sweet. A little bit like doing a comic book. It's just fun. This is not "Gone with the Wind," you know? It's just a good time ...

And as The Dark Knight rolls out, Warners works to make sure no greenbacks go unharvested. WB is putting "Comics that Mooove" on the intertubes:

the studio is also set to unleash an online series starring the Caped Crusader that it hopes will usher in a new kind of Web entertainment: a hybrid of comic books and animation that Warner calls "motion comics."

"Mad Love" is a series of Web shorts drawing on a particularly popular comic book featuring Batman and the Joker, the first chapter of which will be released for downloading next week ...

The shorts are a kind of hybrid between a printed comic and a cartoon. The animation isn't nearly as rich as a fully animated cartoon, with only limited motion that comes in the form of wisps of smoke, darting eyeballs and the like. But the story is advanced with music and voiceovers that speak the characters' parts.

Warner, a unit of Time Warner Inc., sees the initiative as a way to unlock value from the company's D.C. Comics library by creating a new kind of comic that can be distributed via the Internet, mobile phones and video on demand ...

We'll leave you with this morsel:

A DRUNK punter who gave an Ipswich Cup crowd a chuckle by galloping on the track disguised as the shaggy cartoon crime fighter Scooby Doo has been fined $500.

Nicholas Anthony Allen's joke backfired today when he was exposed in the Ipswich Magistrate's Court as the offender of the booze-fuelled prank.

Allen, a electrical cable joiner, was one of three men to front court for invading the track and racing down the home straight during the June 14 race meeting at Bundamba's Ipswich Turf Club.

I'm telling you, Warners is missing a trick not teaming Scooby and Batman. Box office dynamite!