Your Weekly Linkfest

One more links festival of cartoony goodness:

Animator and director Glen Keane expounds on Disney Animation's Rapunzel:.

"It's a story of the need for each person to become who they are supposed to be and for a parent to set them free so they can become that. It will be a musical and a comedy and have a lot of heart and sincerity ... There’s no photoreal hair. I want luscious hair, and we are inventing new ways of doing that. I want to bring the warmth and intuitive feel of hand-drawn to CGI.”

Matt Groening and Seth McFarlane hold a mutual admiration festival:

"Matt and I get along very well," MacFarlane said. "People want us to hate each other. We get along extremely well. He's a wonderful guy. Seriously." ...

"I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for The Simpsons," MacFarlane said.

And since we're heavy on Family Guy information, there's updates about the oncoming Cleveland Show ...

... perhaps the biggest event coming up on Family Guy is Cleveland's exodus from Quahog. He'll end up losing his house to wife Loretta, then will move back to his hometown in Virginia and hook up with a new girlfriend who has a couple smart-talking kids of her own. MacFarlane described the new series as "the black Brady Bunch," and also promised that the character's new neighborhood will be filled with all sorts of memorable weirdos. Cleveland's new neighbors will include a stupid redneck, as well as a family of bears voiced by MacFarlane.

And if you're in the vicinity of Los Angeles, you might want to visits this exhibit at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:

The Academy’s new exhibition “Ink & Paint” highlights the work of numerous artists who have devoted decades of their lives to creating the characters, storyboards, color keys, backgrounds, layouts, cels and thousands of other process artworks that are needed to assemble a traditional animated film.

“Ink & Paint” also celebrates the artists whose genius spawned the screwball characters of Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes cartoons, the classic fairytale environments of Disney animated features and the Academy Award®-winning shorts of UPA, whose stylized look and simple lines approach modern art.

The New York Times weighs in on Comic Con (I doubt the gray lady would have noticed the Con even existed back in the El Cortez Hotel days ...)

Frank Miller, a revered figure in the comics world, explained how he found the temerity to direct a movie version of “The Spirit,” the signature work of an even more revered figure, Will Eisner.

“If I didn’t do it, somebody else was going to do it, and something very bad could happen,” Mr. Miller told about 6,500 listeners in one of the convention’s big halls ...

Brad Bird, who directed both “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” for Pixar Animation Studios, worked for years on his own version of “The Spirit” after leaving the California Institute of the Arts. Mr. Bird has said in the past that he thought the project best suited to hand-drawn animation, an approach very far from the live-action, computer-assisted, star-driven approach taken by Mr. Miller ...

(Deadline Hollywood has ongoing posts of the Con extravaganza here.)

And as Comic Con was going on in San Diego, animation was being celebrated down in Brazil:

Anima Mundi, one of the largest and most prominent animation festivals in the world, awarded Delgo, the Best Animated Feature of the year.

An audience of 100,000 viewers, rather than a festival jury, determines the award for Best Feature Film. Anima Mundi director, Cesar Coelho, stated, “We believe it’s important for film enthusiasts to decide on the winner rather than a panel of jurors or film critics. Everyone who watches the selected films has an opportunity to voice their opinion.” ...

We end with George Lucas (you've heard of him, right?) waxing philosophic about the road(s) not chosen:

... “Right at the beginning, I wanted to be an illustrator. Then I wanted to go to art school, to an arts centre in Los Angeles. My father said, ‘No way - you are not going to be an artist. Artists don’t make any money, and I won’t pay for that.’ Knowing I was a lazy underachiever then, he knew I wasn’t going to pursue that seriously. It was hard, but I do believe that, in the end, if I had gone to the arts centre and started to be an illustrator, I would probably have drifted into animation, and would probably have moved into Star Wars, just like I did." ...

Have yourself a joyous, productive weekend.