Linkamation

A few mid-week piffles for your linky pleasure.

Man, this 3-D thing appears to be catching on. Something to do with the $59 million weekend a certain studio had? Naaah..

Walt Disney is going 3-D on a lot of future films — and some from its past.

The studio says 3-D versions of the computer-animated tales "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2" will be released Oct. 2 for a two-week run as a double feature. Disney also is preparing a 3-D version of its hand-drawn animated musical "Beauty and the Beast" for release Feb. 12, 2010.

No doubt this announcement was coming anyway. Still, the time and place for making it is ... ah ... interesting.

[John] Lasseter said, "The 'Toy Story' films and characters will always hold a very special place in our hearts and we're so excited to be bringing these first two films back for audiences to enjoy in a whole new way thanks to the latest in 3D technology ..."

For immediate release, wouldn't you say?

A fine exhibition of Japanese comics and animation is unspooling in New York City:

... [A] couple of teenage girls crouched down to get inside a small tea house-like enclosure lined with hundreds of manga, some the size of telephone books.

Elsewhere, six anime were being simultaneously projected along a long wall in a room with cubicles where visitors could sit comfortably and watch the same excerpts on smaller screens ...

The exhibition, "Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games," has been drawing large and diverse crowds — young, old and in-between — since it opened March 13.

Reese Witherspoon on cartoon voice acting:

... The hardest part of the movie, for me, was to get the voice right for an action hero. They (the filmmakers) kept saying to me ‘say this line like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger’, that big action movie tag line - ‘I-AM-GINORMICA!’ (laughs) and I just couldn’t do it! They kept saying ‘no, that just sounds like a robot’.’ ...

The Wrap, in an over-heated commentary, examines the business side of Stereo Viewing:

... There are 40 3D features scheduled for the next three years, including 17 from Disney -- which, through Roy Disney's Shamrock Holdings, has invested $50 million in RealD, the company that pioneered the new process -- and every release from DreamWorks Animation. And though the credit crunch has slowed the installation of 3D projection systems in theaters, RealD's revenue nearly doubled in 2008 ...

Theaters that lease the RealD process (for about $5,000-$10,000) have to pay the company 50 cents for every ticket sold. But even allowing for that and, it's fair to guess, allowing for the manufacturing cost of a pair of plastic glasses, the studios are obviously making money off the surcharge.

Katzenberg, John Lassetter at Pixar, and the other studio heads who will release movies in RealD are simply indulging in the carny barker tradition of squeezing whatever money they can out of the public who flocks to their attractions.

(Hey, you don't like the price of the 3-D version, don't go to the 3-D version. It won't be the end of civilization as we know it. And here's a report on the Show West reaction to DWA's 3-D epic.)

British comic thesp Simon Pegg discusses his character in Ice Age 3:

"[He's] a slightly unhinged, swashbuckling weasel ..."

You can never get enough swashbucking weasles.

Lastly, the Animation Archive has a nice sampling of caricatures by Miguel Cavarrubias.

Al Hirschfeld studied under Covarrubias and shared a studio with him in 1924. He spoke of Covarrubias' talent in the same breath as Daumier and Hogarth ...

Clark Gable and Prince Edward ... by Miguel C.

Have a fine, midweek work experience ... if you can.

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A Decade of Animator Wages

What follows are data points over ten years of time.

We began doing TAG wage surveys in the mid-nineties, at the suggestion of a background artist working at Warner Bros. Feature Animation. We've pretty much done them ever since, with the exception of a couple of years.

So below you will find what the mid-point animator salaries were from 1996 onward. The median, as you can see, went up in the late nineties as long-term Personal Service Contracts kicked in and required higher payments, then declined as big industry lay-offs occurred.

Soak them in and draw your conclusions. (The one I draw is: "The laws of supply and demand have weight and meaning.")

Wage Survey Animators Medians (40–hour week)

(CG Animators averages were not broken out in the first survey in 1996)

1996

Character Animators $1,750

1997

Character Animators $2,057

CGI Animators $1,850

1998

Character Animators $2,000

CGI Animators $1,850

1999

Character Animators $2,050

CGI Animators $1,800

2000

Character Animators $2,120

CGI Animators $1,938

2001

Character Animators $2,200

CGI Animators $1,882

2003

Character Animators $1,963

CGI Animators $2,000

2005

Character Animators $1,785

CGI Animators $2,011

2006

3D Animators $1,809

2D Animators $1,425

2007

3D Animators $1,672

2D Animators $1,530

2008

3D Animators $1,745

2D Animators $2,080

Notes and addenda: In the early years, "character animators" mostly meant "graphite animators," but not always. This is because returned forms were not always clear; however we did detective work.

The numbers are snapshots in time, based on a return rate of between 18%-23% of survey forms. (Would we have liked a larger flood of mailed-back forms? You betchya. But they are what they are. Based on written and anecdotal evidence, as far as we can tell the wages aren't too far off.)

You will note that there is a jump in hand-drawn salaries in 2008. We attribute this to more hiring of traditional animators.

(Supply and demand ... supply and demand ... supply and demand. And then there are those pesky union minimums.)

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Shallow Musings

If you listen to a lot of critics and some commenters around here, DreamWorks Animation's features just aren't as good as the Pixar product.

Most of those [DWA features] are OK films, some a little racy for kids, some just plain bland. Biggest disappointment: There’s no progress.

On the other side of the CGI coin, Pixar has been steadily evolving on both visual and story lines: “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars,” “Ratatouille,” and the sci-fi masterpiece, “Wall-E,” which should’ve been nominated for Best Picture instead of just Best Animated Film ...

This is similar to critics' comparisons between Jay Leno and David Letterman over the years: "Jay's all right, but David is the zesty, cutting edge comedy guy ..."

But of course, Leno consistently beats Dave in the ratings. Sort of like .... well, you know.

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Correcting Myths

Down below, there is a snark-fest going on about c.g. animators versus graphite animators. Who's better? Who's more skilled? Who deserves more respect? ... and so on.

Me, I think both sets of artists are talented, and should get our praise and our thanks for all the entertainment they've provided us. But that's not what I want to get into here. Rather, it's observations like these:

…I agree about CG animators being mostly button-pushers compared to the artistry of 2D animators like the Nine Old Men …

...I think long gone are the days when animators were considered "super stars" or even "actors". With schools pumping out animators at a record pace...animators are becoming acknowledged as little more than button-pushers by the big studios. …

... 2D had many artists who produced the girth of the animation with their single hand. They got higher salaries because they could not be so easily replaced ....

Judging from the above comments, people seem to think that:

A) Disney's vaunted "Nine Old Men" were animation stars who made lots of money, and

B) Artists who drew hand-drawn animation earned bigger salaries than others in the field.

Actually, no.

Woolie Reitherman, who climbed to the summit of the Disney empire running the company's feature animation department, told me:

"I didn't get rich from the salary they paid me around here. It was never very much. The reason I'm well off is because of the stock options. It's the reason all of us are doing better than all right."

A veteran Disney layout artist ... who worked at the studio for three and a half decades ... said to me at one of TAG's award banquets honoring fifty-year veterans:

"Animation is the part of the movie business where you work fifty years because you have to ..."

My father, a Disney background artist for decades, was once screamed at by a talented but disgruntled short-timer on his way out the door:

"I don't know what's wrong with you people! You work here year after year, and for next to nothing! Why do you put up with it?!"

Dear old Dad, at the time of his death, was making $500 per week. After thirty-six years of employment.

Please don't misunderstand me. Nobody was chained to their desks at Disney. Nobody slept under their desks (at least, not in the modern era). The place was considered the "country club" of animation studios, with ball fields, ping-pong tables, a pleasant commissary, and a work schedule that (usually) wasn't soul-crushing.

But high pay? It wasn't part of the equation.

And while many Disney animators were known inside the profession, nobody on the far side of Monrovia knew who they were. It was only in later years that wider recognition arrived.

There was really only one ten-year span where animators' fame and salaries grew geometrically, and that was the 1990s. For one brief shining and unsustainable moment, animators made fairly ginormous salaries and got their names and pictures in glossy magazines. But it didn't last. Animated features didn't make the mountains of money the conglomerates expected, and after a little while supply of talent caught up to demand.

At which point, weekly paychecks fell back to earth.

So let's stop hallucinating over wage levels that never were. With the exception of the nineties, animation salaries have never been exorbitant. Even for the Nine Old Men.

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Inferno

I've got to tell you, this one slipped by me:

Electronic Arts Inc. and Starz Media's Film Roman announced today the start of production on an animated movie based on the immortal epic Dante's Inferno. The feature-length project will expand on the story in EA's new game coming out ... in 2010.

"This is like nothing else out in the marketplace right now - a visually stunning project based on one of the most powerful stories ever told," notes Jay Fukuto, Head of Studio for Film Roman. "It could only happen with a partner with the vision and creativity of EA. They were great collaborators on 'Dead Space: Downfall,' and we expect another very rewarding experience with this new feature."

"The animated feature will be a great companion piece to the game," said Jonathan Knight, Executive Producer and Creative Director for Dante's Inferno. "The feature will explore aspects of the poem that the game does not, and will provide more insight into the characters and the unique story adaptation that the game has established." ...

I've roamed the halls of Starz Media/Film Roman for some time now, and not a word did I hear about this project.

And today I called a Starz exec to ask about it, and got the reply: "New one on me."

So there you are. A new full-length 'toon explodes across the internets, and I'm pig-ignorant about it.

Meanwhile, I asked a couple of Simpsons staffers when they thought the Yellow Family would get themselves a second theatrical feature and was told:

"Not for awhile. Gracie Films says Jim Brooks is off doing a live-action movie, and won't be even thinking about a Simpsons movie for at least a year. And that means they won't have a script for probably two years."

Two freaking years. But maybe that would be pretty good timing, because the teevee series is supposed to be finishing up its new two-year order around then, so artists could jump over to the feature.

I dream.

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The Oncoming Cavalcade of Cartoons

Sitting in a movie theater watching the usual half hour of trailers, you get the idea that there are a poopload of animated features coming soon to your local AMC, because there are a whole lot of animated trailers touting them.

Ten years back, the Mainstream Media got it into its large, dim head that the Second Golden Age of animated features happened during the decade that straddled the late 1980s through the bulk of the 1990s. Disney, Bluth, DreamWorks Animation, Turner, Warner Bros., all of them were turning out bright, hand-drawn cartoons of the ninety minute variety.

But as impressive as it all seemed at the time, the numerical output and quality is but small potatoes compared to the animated features coming at us in the soon-to-be future ...

Let's do a little inventorying, shall we? First, the olden days, and the tally of animated feature created in the U.S. of A. when Franklin Roosevelt ruled with a benevolent hand.

The first "Golden Age of Animation," -- 1937-1942 --saw exactly six full-length animated features made. (I'm not counting the two Fleischer P0peye featurettes, nor Fanatasia or The Reluctant Dragon, since those were compilation features.) Here's the list:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Gulliver's Travels

Pinocchio

Dumbo

Mr. Bug Goes to Town

Bambi

And that's it. A paltry half-dozen, after which the production of same stopped dead for twelve-plus years, until Cinderella rolled into neighborhood Bijous during the age of Milton Berle. Thereafter, Uncle Walt pretty much had the feature playground to himself for the next few decades because nobody else was making them. (Oh sure, there were occasional pretenders to the throne like Yellow Submarine and the Magoo Arabian Nights feature, but by and large it was Disney, Disney, Disney.)

Then in the 1980s, Don Bluth decamped from the House of Mouse and began producing a long string of animated features on his own, and Katzenberg/Eisner arrived at Disney where they ended up revitalizing the basic hand-drawn program. After that, of course, there was the frenetic nineties where huge grosses for the newer Disney product had everyone and his Aunt Tilly opening animation studios in their own quest for big pots of gold.

Which brings us to the 21st century ... and now. And take a look at the animated extravaganzas that are in theaters as I write ... or will be over the next thirty-three months:

Coraline

Monsters Vs, Aliens

The Battle for Terra

Up

Astro Boy*

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

The Princess and the Frog

How to Train Your Dragon

Despicable Me*

Shrek Goes Fourth

Ice Age 3

Toy Story 3

Master Mind

Kung Fu Panda 2

Cars 2

Rapunzel

Crood Awakening

Green Eggs and Ham

The Bear and the Bow

If I'm adding correctly, that's nineteen features over thirty-three months, the seventeen without asterisks produced wholly in Aux Etats Unis. (No doubt I've left a few specimens out, but this is a damn blog post, not an article for the Atlantic Monthly.)

And if you include the features in release between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2011, the total bumps up to include Bolt and the French feature The Tale of Despereaux. A grand total of twenty-one.

Now. Compare that number to the first dozen years of cartoon features, when a big six got made. Another wrinkle to that first Golden Era? Way more live-action features were being ground out by Hollywood then than get made today. Way more.

Which makes the current rate of output even more amazing, at least to me.

So if you want to talk about Golden Ages for longish cartoons, in a commercial sense there is one that towers over the rest, and we happen to be living in it.

Add On: Then there's Christmas Carol from Disney/ Image Movers Digital at Christmas.

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Overseas American Animated Feature

From time to time we discuss "Is It All Going to India?".

I keep saying no, it isn't. But of course, I'm no more a soothsayer than anybody else. I take what knowledge I have and make educated guesses.

Like any guesses, they could be wrong.

But since a commenter offered the prognostication that Southern California animation was going to go away in the next several years, let me tee up -- again -- the reasons why it won't ...

It's not just a matter of cost, you see. It's also a matter of producing a feature that will make lots of money at the box office. Thus far, that means "Do it stateside," because it does no good to create something for $30 million if all it makes if $40 mill. Much better to spend more money and grab at those hundred million grosses.

The reason that so much of the animation industry lives in California is: cartoon studios are here developing talent, which causes more studios to spring up, the better to partake of that talent, which causes more talent to grow here ...

And so on.

This is, after all, about talent that creates value, about critical mass and gravitational pull. Obviously that pull is tested all the time. In fact, it's being tested now. Currently there are two animated features scheduled for American releases that are being (mostly) produced overseas. One is Astro Boy from Imagi. The other is Despicable Me from Chris Meledandri's new studio Ilumination Entertainment, bankrolled by GE/Universal.

Now here's the nitty gritty: If Astro Boy hits a three of four bagger box office-wise, heads might look up in Hollywood's front offices, and small light bulbs might wink on. But it will take a sizable hit to make the wattage power up to where attention starts to be seriously paid.

Despicable Me is getting produced in France by Mac Guff Ligne. Why? Mac Guff has talent, and France has tax rebates. As Meledandri explains:

"I came to France because of the extraordinary talent of French artists working in animation," says Meledandri. "They have one of the very best animation schools in the world, Gobelins, as well as a great cultural tradition of animation."

But of course, there is also that tax thing:

... [T]hanks to the 20% tax rebate plan approved by the French parliament in December, foreign CG and toon producers doing business with Gallic houses will be able to seek tax breaks worth up to €4 million.

My best estimate is that both AB and DM will do respectably at the world box office. But neither will do the kind of jaw-dropping numbers that cause the Masters of the Cinema Universe to put down their I-phones and rejigger their business models in any large and meaningful way.

Naturally, I could be in error here, but it takes a long time to turn an ocean liner around. So too conventional wisdom about animation business practices. And it's going to take more than a brace of mega-hits from outside the U.S. to bring sizable change. Even those numbers might not be enough.

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Monster Box Office

With flavorful Add On.

To nobody's surprise, Monsters Vs. Aliens has a very pleasant Friday opening of $16.7 million.

The Nikkster provides interesting data:

[MvA] could have a $57 million weekend. This would make it the 2nd biggest non-sequel for DWA, behind 2008's Kung Fu Panda. And it's not even a summer or Easter weekend. That's high compared with two past March releases of toons aimed at kids: Ice Age, which opened to $46M and ended up earning $173M, and Horton Hears A Who, which debuted to $45M and went on to take in $154.

The Nikkster also slops out a generous dollop of snark, calling the flick "Review Proof," even though Rotten Tomatoes pegs MvA at 69% favorable. Go figure.

Meanwhile ... and this is a shocker ... Coraline has dropped out of the Top Ten.

Add On: Monsters Vs. Aliens lands at the top end of estimates, collecting $58.2 million for the weekend, a huge amount of that take coming from 3-D screens. (So ... whatever you think of stereo viewing ... Is it a temporary gimmick or the Next Big Thing? ... It's proven itself in the marketplace thus far.)

And Coraline gets slammed with an 85% market drop. Yeowch.

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Today's Animation Writers

Not very long ago, I had lunch with a television animation writer who lamented that his studio was, more and more, hiring sitcom weriters to turn out scripts on their half-hour projects, leaving him with a smaller playing field on which to work, since he had never written sitcoms but only standard-issue television cartoons.

I understand how he feels. The days of 'toon writers who haven't had their tickets punched on higher-profile projects are like, mostly gone:

The 'Slumdog Millionaire' writer Simon Beaufoy, who walked away with this year's Oscar for adapted screenplay, is reportedly wielding his pen for DreamWorks Animation film, 'Truckers'.

Beaufoy isn't the first screenwriter to work for animation after winning the Oscar. Michael Arndt, who won the original screenplay Oscar for 2006's Little Miss Sunshinee, ... worked on ... "Toy Story 3".

I've occasionally mused how there's no way I would be hired off the street in 2009 to write on theatrical animated features. The 1970s are a looong time ago, and that sort of thing just isn't done anymore.

Not that it matters to me at this point in my checkered career. I not only have the wrong resume, but I'm way too elderly for any self-respecting animation producer to even halfway consider for a job.

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California in Double Digits

Whichever UC unemployment prediction you buy, both are pretty damn grim.

California's unemployment rate will soar to between 12 percent and 15 percent by next spring and remain in the double digits until at least the beginning of 2012, according to forecasts released by two teams of University of California economists.

The state's unemployment rate has not reached those heights since the Great Depression.

The projections – one released today by UCLA's Anderson Forecast, the other last week by UC Santa Barbara's Economic Forecast – paint a grim picture of declining economic growth, lower retail sales, a troubled housing market and falling office prices lasting through much of 2010 ...

I don't know which dire prognostication up above is more accurate, but since California had one of the largest real estate bubbles .... and steepest real estate crashes, these high unemployment numbers are not real surprising.

On the micro and anecdotal level, I've noticed the grimness seeping into the animation studios. Everybody knows it's rugged out there in unemployment land, and behaving accordingly.

Even as employers lower salaries and tighten schedules, employees are keeping a stiff upper lip.

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At CN

Still more Cartoon Network.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon at the studio. An artist filled me in on the cartoon side of Turner's cable network:

"There's some newer cartoon shows coming. Out of the shorts program, I'm hearing there's going to be two cartoons from the new crop greenlit into series. And the brass is thinking of okaying new episodes of Chowder.

"One of the problems is, the executives in Atlanta okay a series order of like, six half-hours, and then waits to see how it does before ordering more. And all the people who worked on it have been laid off and gone someplace else.

"And all the focus groups that look at new 'toons and vote on them? Doesn't work all that well. And all it really does is help management not take responsibility for its decisions ..."

There's a lot of live-action rolling onto Cartoon Network (as the media has pointed out), but there's ... still ... a goodly amount of animated product. A staffer steered me to a CN press release that I had missed.

• Adventure Time with Finn and Jake: Finn, the human boy with the awesome hat, and Jake, the wise dog, are close friends and partners in strange adventures in the land of Ooo. The 30-minute series is from Cartoon Network Studios, created by Pendleton Ward and executive produced by Fred Siebert and Derek Drymon.

• Ben 10: Evolutions (working title): An all-new animated series follows 16-year-old Ben Tennyson as his secret identity has been revealed to the world and he’s now an international mega-star super hero ....

• Sym-Bionic Titan: From creator Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack) comes an exciting hybrid of high school drama and giant robot battles ...

• Generator Rex: Infected by microscopic molecular-altering nanites, 15-year-old Rex has the ability to grow incredible machines out of his body ...

• Scooby-Doo – Mystery, Inc.: A sleepy little village, Crystal Cove, boasts a long history of ghost sightings, poltergeists, demon possession, phantoms and other paranormal occurrences. The renowned sleuthing team of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo arrive to prove all of this simply isn’t real ...

One of the CN veterans marveled that the Big Dog is still trucking right along. "You believe it? Scoob has been around since '67. And here's another series being teed up. Amazing."

Me, I'm praying that Scoob's fifty-third incarnation outstrips CN's Othersiders. And I'm delighted that Time-Warner, in its infinite wisdom, is finally putting another series produced by Warner Bros. Animation on its Time-Warner cable network.

It only took these folks about ... oh ...sixteen years to stumble across the concept of synergy. Well done!

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Quantcast Analyzes El Bloggo

How quantcast.com knows that TAG blog viewers are 74% male and 66% college educated is a mystery to me. But there you are:

It's an interesting web metric that signifies ... uh ... not very much, but we throw it out there anyway.

We gotta get more female high schoolers involved. All there is to it.

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Jeffrey Katzenberg Tells All to the Vatican

Father Guido Sarducci Luca Pellegrini of L'Ossevatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, interviewed DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg about ... well ... this, that and the other thing:

Disegnare mostri per parlare di tolleranza

Ammettiamo che l'abbia realmente proferita dal suo doloroso esilio. La citazione renderebbe Napoleone grande e singolare anche come uomo capace di una modernissima intuizione ...

Oh, wait. This is Italian. Lots of people here don't speak Italian ...

Through the magic of Google's special translating machine, we can make the interview crystal clear.

Draw monsters to speak of tolerance

Admit that the actually uttered by his painful exile. The summons would make great and unique Napoleon as a man capable of a very modern idea: The imagination gouverne le monde. He, who has ruled the world with armies, puts the fantasy at the heart of his machinery of power. The Count of Las Cases drafting the famous Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène perhaps only heard the whisper, this sentence seems so harmless. So enough. Jeffrey Katzenberg could remember where and when she wrote her, memories. Why did the imagination a real film industry, profitable course before working on the Walt Disney Pictures, then founded with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, the DreamWorks (name and program perfectly identical), directing the field of so-called animation, namely that which deals with designing and producing the cartoons. Among his creatures: the green ogre, and good heart Shrek or fish Oscars of Shark Tale.

And then, the penetrating questions and Jeffrey's fine answers:

There is much truth to what was said by Napoleon, is not it?

I do not know if the fantasy is precisely the source and secret of my power or only the essence of what it means to do animation today. The fact is that each image created on the screen for DreamWorks comes the imagination of someone for the fun of many ...

And so on. Here is the original, and here's the full Googley translation.

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Happy Birthday

Guess who's past Social Security age?

Tweety is sixty-seven.

Sylvester, by contrast, is a young sixty-four. But trust me. You don't want to see a picture of the cat ....

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Cartoon Network Skews Live

I met with a bunch of Cartoon Network Studio staffers recently, and discovered some long faces because the cable network of the same name is chasing a variation of the Disney model.

... The net is diversifying into live-action ... Chief Content Officer Rob Sorcher and Turner Animation prexy Stu Snyder unveiled a 6-skein reality show slate.

In addition to the reality shows, CN is beginning a partnership (announced last week) with the NBA, repped by a short-form entry into the network's slate: "My Dad's a Pro," starring Jalen House, son of Celtics player Eddie House.

"If I were a buyer, I would buy," joked NBA commish David Stern to the aud of potential advertisers.

The move is likely a response to Disney XD's much-publicized partnership with ESPN ...

Many of the net's live-action series appear to be tween-friendly versions of adult reality fare, like "Head Rush," a "Cash Cab"-style game show set on a roller coaster; "Survive This," an outdoors adventure show that focuses on teamwork instead of backstabbing; and "Dude, What Would Happen," a "Mythbusters"-esque series of answers to oddball questions like, "What would happen if you attached 350 helium balloons to a sumo wrestler?" ...

High quality, high concept stuff, to be sure.

Me, I wish the boys and girls at Cartoon Network would stick more to cartoons and less to cousins of the Disney Channel's flesh-and-blood line-up. But then, I'm prejudiced toward funny animals and wacky kids drawn on paper and Cintiqs in two dimensions.

I just hope the day doesn't come where Cartoon Network doesn't morph into plain old Network.

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A Brief, Fifty-eight Year History

It might be semi-useful -- since the subject has recently come up -- to briefly reiterate the history of TAG ... how it came to be, and how it came to be chucked out of the IATSE West Coast bargaining unit in 1985.

(This was partially covered in comments down below ... but we add useful, baco-bits of information that many sentient beings don't know ...)

1951 -- TAG founded (starting life as The Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists) wins industry-wide election to represent animation employees.

(The opposition Screen Cartoonists Guild, led by animator Bill Melendez, banished to repping various commercial animation houses until the early sixties. Bill was miffed about it ever after.)

January 1952 -- TAG officially chartered, begins operations.

(And the Charter Members listed on the charter? Lots of different folks; lots of Disney personnel, some of whom were true union believers and some of whom supported the local because Walt told them to.)

1958 -- TAG organizes Hanna-Barbera.

1972 -- T.V. animation starts to be sub-contracted out of the country.

1979 -- TAG strikes television animation studios, wins guarantees regarding staffing levels before work can be subbed out of the country.

1982 -- TAG goes on strike to preserve "runaway clause" in its contract; loses ten-week strike; loses clause from contract.

1983 -- WGAw (Writers Guild of America) files claims with the National Labor Relations Board for animation writers because of lengthy strike and no contract. NLRB rules against WGAw. Television Writers stay with TAG.

1985 -- AMPTP tells the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes that it will no longer negotiate on behalf of the studios with TAG (Local 839) in the IATSE bargaining unit, in punishment for going out on two successive strikes. IA bargains for a new Basic Agreement without 839 as part of the Bargaining Unit.

1991 -- TAG attempts to organize Film Roman. Loses the NLRB election 5-1.

1995 -- TAG achieves a 401(k) Pension Plan to supplement the two pensions of the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan.

1995 -- TAG signs contract with DreamWorks Animation.

1998 -- TAG organizes Sony Adelaide.

2000 -- Nine-month contract negotiation fails to gain individual residual for writers, but results in improved freelance rates for scribes.

2003 -- TAG organizes Nickelodeon Animation Studios.

2004 -- TAG organizes Film Roman. This time wins the NLRB election 5-1. (We don't like to rush things too much ...)

2007 --TAG organizes Imagi Animation Studios.

For a definitive look at unions in the animation industry, you can't do better than Tom Sito's Drawing the Line. And Tom always has lots of labor history -- and every other kind of history -- on his excellent blog.

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Pirates of the South China Seas

A few years ago, a Disney animation staffer who'd just return from Thailand said to me:

"You know, I was in Bangkok the day Chicken Little opened in Thai theaters. And the same day, I walked through a city shopping bazaar and bought this."

At which point, he held up a dvd box with Chicken Little artwork on it. "Ah," I thought to myself. "A pirated dvd."

Which, of course, it was.

So it's not surprising that this is going on now:

The 3-D animated movie "Monsters vs. Aliens" will release in China on March 31 on more than 200 screens -- all 3-D equipped, making it all but impossible to pirate the film with a video recorder, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said Wednesday ...

"China is the only market in the world where it will be shown 100% in 3-D," Katzenberg said, adding that after successes across the region with "Kung Fu Panda" and "Madagascar" animation, Asia and the combination thereof is increasingly important to DreamWorks...

Lim Han Seng, regional director of sales and marketing for distributor United International Pictures Asia, put at 180 the number of screens on which "Monsters vs. Aliens" would show in China, mostly in Beijing and Shanghai.

China, which caps at 20 the annual number of imported films allowed to screen on a revenue-sharing basis, has allowed 3-D pictures to skirt that limit.

The reason that piracy is a big deal and ongoing cancer ... I mean beyond the money the multi-nationals lose ... is that it impacts the amount of work and amount of money that film workers ultimately get.

Less revenue equals less work plus smaller paychecks.

Not to mention the nasty way it impacts the level of residuals that flow into health and pension plans and film workers' pockets.

Every guild and union has been screaming about movie piracy for years. (A while back, IA reps were royally bugged by the "who cares" attitude of various representatives from foreign governments at a couple of overseas conferences, so it's not like government entities in far-away lands necessarily worry about this, or that they're going to waste much money, time and energy enforcing international copyright laws.)

My take is: theft of intellectual property will always be with us. The best we can hope for is to diminish it some. It's good that 3-D is slowing down the pirates. But they'll find a way around the impediments placed around them. They always do.

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Studio Merry-Go-Round

I made my usual spins through some of our fine, Southern California cartoon factories the last few days, to wit:

Over at Nick, there might not be as much production as at other points in the studio's existence, but hands down, Nickelodeon has got more projects going on ... and more artists bent over their Cintiqs ... than any other teevee toon factory in town.

And what projects are percolating in the Viacom pot? Fairly Odd Parents, Dora the Explorer, Go Diego, Go, Barnyard, Fan Boy and Chum Chum, Sponge Bob Square Pants, The Might Bee, MiHao Kai Lan and Penguins of Madagascar.

Added to which, there are three or four future series in early development, plus a few specials.

Am I getting complaints about compressed production schedules? About uncompensated o.t.? About workloads? Noooo. Not now.

At Film Roman/Starz Media, The Simpsons crew got the word yesterday from Gracie Film's Richard Sakai and Richard Reynes that Fox is cutting the budgets of all their television series and The Yellow Family is no exception.

"The directors met with Sakai and Reynes earlier in the day, design crew later in the day. They tell us the plan is to hold salaries flat for overscale people, and hang on to as much of the crew as they can.

"The show's more complicated now, what with the high-def format, but we've got to somehow do more for less. They said they were going to honor union contracts, bump up people making scale minimums when they had to.

"It was nice that they came out and had the meetings in person instead of some memo going around. Sakai and Reynes answered questions people had, but there weren't many questions, to tell you the truth. The facts were pretty straight forward. Leaving the meeting, people weren't upset, weren't angry. Just kind of ... resigned."

The crew on King of the Hill has now departed. But when I was over at Fox Animation's The Celveland Show last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see some of the Hill staffers working on Cleveland. Nice to see that at least some artists are landing on new job perches after the older roosts collapse out from under them.

An artist asked me today: "So how many studios you visit a day?"

I told him the answer was usually one, but occasionally two ... and very occasionally three. I also said that I drive to two or three only when I'm feeling completely insane.

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Image Movers Acquires

Which is good news, as far as we're concerned.

"The Stoneheart Trilogy," a young-adult fantasy book series by Charlie Fletcher, is moving towards a big-screen adaptation, with Robert Zemeckis' production company, ImageMovers, and Walt Disney Pictures in negotiations to pick up film rights to the material.

Here's the program: Anytime a studio employs a lot of folks whom you represent, you want that studio to prosper. Because you want that studio to go right on employing a lot of folks.

So the fact that IM Digital and the Walt Disney Co. are going to have more projects lined up on the tarmac, ready to lift into the Wild Blue, is a very good thing.

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Filled Out Your Wage Survey Yet?

If you've worked under the Guild's jurisdiction in the last ... oh ... twelve months, then you should have gotten our annual wage survey questionnaire in the mail. And you may have read the cover letter, in which Kevin and Steve discussed exactly why it's important for EVERYONE who's received the survey to reply.

The good news is that last year, we had an increase in the percentage of survey response. Even so, the rate of reply is still below where we'd like it to be. So. To insure a meaningful and accurate look at where wages are ... and where they've been trending, fill out your form tonight and get it back to us pronto.

We know you have questions; herewith are my replies:

Why is it so important that you know how much I make? What business is it of yours?

Outside of a situation where we might have to go to bat for you -- like, if you're being paid less that the contract minimums -- it probably isn't any of our business how much you make. But we don't want to know how much you, the individual artist earns each week. Really

What we want are big gobs of data so the wage survey has weight and meaning to your workaday life.

Which is why the survey is anonymous.

I'm afraid if I tell the union what I make, the word will get out.

Which is why the survey is anonymous. (Sorry for repeating ourselves, but we hear this one a lot.) Nobody will know. There's no place for your name on the envelope of form. Honest to Betsy.

Why don't you publish what people make broken down by employer? Why not just publish the raw data?

We've looked at the raw data from past surveys, and we realized that if we published it as is, or in a less generalized format than the one we've been using, it would be too easy to "play detective" with ... uh ... certain results. And the bottom line is, we want the survey to remain anonymous. (That word again.)

(By the way, if you are looking for specific numbers broken down by department and employer, send Jeff Massie an e-mail at jeffm@animationguild.org, or call him at (818) 766-7151 ext. 104. He can bringup his magic spreadsheet and give you meaningful numbers, without revealing anything that might jeopardize anyone's privacy.)

When I got hired, my employer told me I had to keep my salary a secret.

We've said it before and we'll say it again -- this is illegal.

Section 232 of The California Labor Code prohibits employers from:

• requiring as a condition of employment that any employee refrain from disclosing the amount of their wages [Section 232(a)];
• requiring an employee to sign a waiver of their right to disclose their wages [§232(b)]; or
• discharging, formally disciplining, or otherwise discriminating against an employee who discloses the amount of their wages [§232(c)].

Of course, that fact that it's illegal doesn't prevent certain employers or employer reps from pulling it, or trying to phrase it in a "nice" way: "Gee, we sure hope you understand it could get embarrassing if everyone found out what a great salary we're paying you ..." (this, invariably, to the artist who doesn't realize the "great" salary being offered is hundreds per week below the going rate.)

And anyway, the survey is anonymous (yawn), so there is no way any employer will know that you ratted them out to us. (Which is legal.)

Why don't you publish a survey of non-union wages?

Because we have no way to accurately poll non-members ... who are the ones who largely make up the workforce at many non-union employers.

However, many of the survey results we get from members show what they are being paid at non-union shops. In most cases, these are the numbers that show up at or near the survey minimums. In our experience, those Guild members who work at non-Guild shops are typically more experienced than their non-member fellow workers, and thus tend to be among the higher-paid.

If you want to know what it's like out there in non-union-land, there are several online surveys that show what the going rates are in non-union areas:

• Dice.com 2008-2009 Tech Salary Survey
• Gamasutra.com 2001 Game Developer's Salary Survey
• Gamasutra.com 2007 Game Developer's Salary Survey

So why don't you publish the wage survey questionnaire online or in the Peg-Board so that non-union members can fill it out?

We go out of our way to make sure that the survey is conducted fairly and impartially, which is why we only accept the colored survey forms that have been mailed to us by members. Otherwise, we lose control over the accuracy of the results.

It would be easy, for example, for a non-union employer to fill out multiple forms to drive down the medians ... or for others to submit inflated numbers to drive the numbers over the actual going rate. Bottom line: the survey is only as valuable as its credibility.

Things are terrible in the business nowadays ... I don't think the Guild should publish a list that shows everyone how bad the wages are.

This gets to the #1 reason why an accurate wage survey is very important:

This is information that your employer already knows. So you and your fellow members deserve to know it as well.

Lower wages are not a secret, and if the survey results reflect that, it's not as if we're the ones who have broken the news. If you're looking for work in this atmosphere, it's important that you do so with your eyes wide open ... and you can't do that with an unrealistic view of what your talents and skills will fetch in the marketplace.

I worked at a union shop last year, and I didn't get a wage survey. (Or maybe I did, but I lost it.)

So E-mail Jeff Massie at jeffm@animationguild.org, or call him at (818) 766-7151 ext. 104, and he'll get one out to you.

One last thing. If you really, really feel it's important to get more wage survey forms out there, then drop a comment below. We can, if there is enough of a demand for them, put up a web version on the TAG website. But be warned: The last time we offered this thrilling option, we got eight (8) web forms back.

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Monsters March on Moscow

The new DreamWorks Animation extravaganza won't open stateside until Friday, but it's already tearing up the wickets elsewhere.

DreamWorks Animation/Paramount's "Monsters vs. Aliens," made its overseas debut in Russian and the Ukraine a week before to its domestic bow. The 3-D animated film finished at No. 1 in both markets, registering a total of $6.9 million from 632 spots.

At 755 screens at 560 sites in Russia, the tally was $6.6 million, the fourth-largest market opener for an animation title. The gross was, per Paramount, 15% ahead of last year's "Kung Fu Panda" and 80% bigger than that of Oscar winner "WALL-E." Ukraine tally was $350,000 from 72 screens.

The 115 3-D screens played in Russia produced a $17,000 per-screen average, "well ahead of the $6,700 average for conventional 2-D screens," Paramount said. All "Monsters vs. Aliens" showings at three Imax venues were sold out. In all, 32% of the total business came from 3-D venues, which comprised only 15% of the total prints ...

So this 3-D thing, it looks like it might catch on, yes? And DreamWorks Animation appears to have yet another hit on its hands. We'll know what kind of hit by next Sunday ...

Meanwhile, the continuing takes of other 'toons in overseas venues is not half shabby.

Disney Animation's "Bolt" -- $177 million

Universal's "The Tale of Despereaux" -- $32.7 million

Universal's "Coraline" -- $8 million

DreamWorks Animation/Paramount's "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" -- $406 million

Let's review, shall we? The French entry Despereaux approaches the $100 million marker; Madagascar Deux is a runaway smash hit, clocking in at over half a billion in total international moolah; Coraline is either just beginning to roll out ... or underperforming (methinks the former),.

And The White Doggie is closing in on $300 million ($177 million overseas plus $114 million domestic equals $291 million and change.)

All in all, animation seems to be doing nicely in this time of trouble and woe.

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Weekend Mini-Link Carnival

When you have nothing useful to say on a Sunday afternoon, what better time to throw a small linkfest?

Chuck Jones (you remember him, don't you?) gets profiled next Tuesday on Turner Classic Movies.

The documentary is not so much a biography as it is a joyful exploration of an artist's childhood. Jones, who died at 89 in February 2002, sat down at his drawing table for lengthy interviews in 1997 with filmmakers Peggy Stern and John Canemaker.

These interviews were fashioned into "Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood." And the greatest compliment you could pay this documentary is that it's the type of work Jones would have loved.

It's very touching, but it's also very clever, very crafty and very funny. Sharing the antic Jones' sense of humor, Stern and Canemaker package these marvelous memories with witty splashes of animation and musical flourishes. A black-and-white sketch or colorful graphic represents a distinctive Jones memory, then animation brings these images and memories to life ...

The music score for Monsters Vs. Aliens is analyzed by Blogger News.

... [F]rom the sound of the tracks here, it appears that [composer Henry] Jackman has been paying attention on all his assignments. He’s able to pull together the action sensibilities of The Dark Knight and Hancock - check out the intensely pounding “Do Something Violent!” with its super-fast-paced tempo and full orchestral involvement - with the cartoonish elements of The Simpsons Movie and Kung Fu Panda - “Meet the Monsters” is a hip, quirky piece that feels like an extended, spruced up sitcom introduction with jazzy Lilo Schifrin elements thrown in for good measure. Monsters vs. Aliens is a thrilling score that mixes dark superhero themes with childlike wonder, at times sounding like John Williams’ Superman score - listen to the opening of “Oversized Tin Can” and tell me I’m wrong - and at other times sounding like a goofy kid pleaser - okay, now check out the second half of “Oversized Tin Can.” ...

And Cristy Lytal of the L.A. Times profiles Phil McNally, the master of MvA's three dimensions.

... To avoid eye strain, McNally's depth scripts confine the most extreme 3-D to certain scenes, such as the climactic battle in "Monsters vs. Aliens." "Obviously, we want to ramp up this big event at the end of the movie with all this big action," McNally says. "There's a great shot where Susan's diving off the top of an exploding platform with all the guys and she's falling into this huge space. There are explosions, and there's stuff flying out past us as well."

Racking their brains: 2-D techniques such as the rack focus -- in which the focus is shifted between the background and foreground to direct the audience's attention -- are not as effective in 3-D filmmaking. "In 3-D, if you just do a rack focus without anything else changing, half the audience will be left looking at someone who just went blurry because there's a strong desire to look at what's closest, and there's less desire to look at what's farther away," McNally says ...

Computer Graphic World's Barbara Robertson discusses a variety of c.g. shorts.

... When Pixar wanted a new short film to show with its then upcoming CG feature Wall-e, animator Doug Sweetland jumped at the opportunity. The result is a five-minute ’toon called “Presto,” a short film about a rabbit that pulls a magician out of its hat. It’s different from anything Pixar has produced in the past, and it’s the first short Pixar has produced on a rigid deadline.

“Normally, shorts are not primary projects,” Sweetland says. “When a feature needs resources, the short goes on hold. But, one of the tests with ‘Presto’ was to see if we could do the film without interruptions.”

They did, but it took some clever tricks on the part of the production crew to make it happen. “Our original schedule had us finishing before the peak usage of labor on Wall-e occurred,” says Richard Hollander, producer. “We lost that battle and became lock-step to Wall-e ..."

Have yourself a useful workweek in the days ahead,

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Early Spring Box Office

Coraline hangs onto the tent (or should I say tenth) spot in the B. O. Hit Parade, pulling in $630,000 for a total domestic gross of $71,340,000.

Further up the ladder, Nicholas Cage like, Just Knows he'll land in the top spot, and Male Bondery takes the #2 position, while Julia Roberts has a well-reviewed but under-attended comeback film with Duplicity.

Overseas, Variety notes that Slumdog Millionair, Marley and Me and Gran Torino are doing big business in various markets.

"Slumdog" placed No. 3 overall at the international box office for the weekend of March 13-15, grossing roughly $13.1 million from 1,800 playdates in 23 territories. "Slumdog" may not reach the $300 million mark at the worldwide B.O., but it will likely come close.

Sadly, there's not a word about the white doggie.

Add On: Coraline ends up at #10 and another $2 million to nudge up against $73 million in total box office. (Coraline ended up with the lowest percentage drop of any Top Ten movie -- 21.2%. This will probably change when Monsters Vs. Aliens blows into the neighborhood A.M.C. next week.)

As for the rest of the field, Knowing came in almost exactly where the prognosticators thought it would, I Love You, Man made off with $18 million, and Duplicity underperformed projections with $14.4 million.

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But ... What About 839? ...

A commenter on Deadline Hollywood Daily asks (in regards to the ratification of the IATSE Basic Agreement):

Hey, how did IATSE 839 vote on this union wide contract?

Oh yeah, 839 DOESN’T EVEN GET TO VOTE IN UNION WIDE ELECTIONS!

How is that even legal? What a joke.

Comment by iatse 839 — March 20, 2009 @ 4:20 pm

And Biz Rep Hulett replies:

Funny thing about TAG 839 not getting a vote inside the IA bargaining unit.

From 1952 until 1985 TAG was one of the IA locals in the bargaining unit, getting to vote on each Basic Agreement as it was negotiated.

But in 1985, kindly old Nick Counter told then IA President Walter Diehl that the AMPTP would no longer be negotiating on behalf of the studios as regards Local 839. In other words, the Alliance was kicking us out of the bargaining unit because we had been overly frisky in 1979 and 1982 with job actions. (In other words, we went on strike.)

Although the IATSE authorized the strikes, when we were pushed out of the bargaining unit, the IA contested the expulsion, but not strenuously. And so, ultimately, we were out. (These things happened while I was a feature animation writer at Disney and serving on the TAG executive board as Vice President. But I didn't participate in the 1985 negotiations.)

From that day to this, we have negotiated contracts all by our loneseome, separate and apart frmo the IA Basic Agreement. Generally, we negotiate the same deal that the IA locals inside the bargaining unit negotiate.

Disadvantages? You're not part of the larger body, and so you have to fend more for yourself. (In recent years, the International has become a more active participant in our local negotiations. They were less involved in the early and middle nineties.)

We have lsee input regarding the Health and Pension benefits that are negotiated under the Basic Agreement, not under our local agreement.

Advantages? Because we're out of the unit, we've been able to negotiate a 401(k) Plan ... in addition to the Motion Picture Health and Pension Benefits that we've had since the fifties.

Happily, members vote on ratification for each and every Local 839 agreement.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Nikki commenter. Since Nikki F. has blocked TAG comments on her blog in the past, I take the liberty of answering you here.

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The IA Basic Agreement Ratified

My faithful assisting companion Jeffrey Massie and I journeyed to the IATSE West Coast Office this morning to witness the ratification vote tally of the IA Basic Agreement. The results:

Despite the unhappy comments and posts about this contract that was posted on various sites on the web, the Basic Agreement was ratified unanimously by the fifteen IATSE bargaining-unit locals, by percentages ranging from 56% to 97%. The contract ratification is done by a sort of Electoral-College-type system with each local union casting votes based on their delegate counts from the last union convention.

The Basic Agreement is the umbrella under which most IA West Coast Studio Locals negotiate their terms and conditions, including health insurance and pension. For historical reasons, TAG isn't in that bargaining unit, but we have traditionally had our health insurance, pension and minimum rate increases modeled on the IA agreement.

As one business representative said:

This was a tough contract to negotiate, and a lot of members had questions about why we ended up where we did. But once we gave them all the information, they came back and voted in large numbers, and voted favorably. To be honest, I was surprised by the size of the positive vote that we got. But they processed the information and made up their minds.

My lesson from all this is: Don't be faked out by the complaints and anger you hear in some places, because that is a very small sample of union members, and is a pretty lousy indicator of people's mindsets.

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Selling

One thing about Jeffrey Katzenberg. He gets out there and sells the product.

"There were two major developments in cinema during the 20th century. The first came in the Twenties when silent movies became talkies. The second came in the following decade, when we went from black-and-white to colour. Now, 70 years on, we're in the third great revolution: the new generation of 3D ..."

"Sure, it's even more expensive, but I think everybody will go this way eventually. People will demand this kind of experience. It's an experience you simply can't have at home on DVD."

As we've noted here previously, Jeffrey is a showman. P.T. Barnum, Darryl Zanuck, and David O. Selznick are his (figurative) ancestors.

He supervises the making of the movie, he pushes the selling of the movie, he gives copious interviews for the movie. The last two things are sprinkled with flavorful bits of hyperbole.

Which makes sense. If you don't wax enthusiastic over your children, how are you going to engender enthusiasm in the people you want to rush out and buy tickets to view your children?

More power to him.

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Beware the Links of March

Toonish Links for a Spring day ... (watch out for French sprites ...)

Apparently there is blow-back over having Dora (the well-known explorer) grow older:

Many parents were up in arms recently when Nickelodeon announced plans for a new-and-improved Dora the Explorer. Specifically, an older, more sophisticated, 10-year-old Dora for tweens.

"As tweenage Dora, our heroine has moved to the big city, attends middle school and has a whole new fashionable look," the press release stated, showcasing a silhouette of the new Dora that looked to be wearing a micro mini skirt, long hair swinging sexily below her shoulders.

...With images of Bratz dolls pole-dancing in their heads, many parents took to the internet to protest the change. "What, little girls don't have enough fashion-obsessed trash idols?" one commenter quipped over at CafeMom.com. "The outrage is powered by pent up outrage over the sexualization of our daughters, of their dolls and their clothing," ...

These people don't seem to appreciate that in conglomerate land, it's anything for a smooth buck. And if enlarging the franchise makes Viacom more money, then the franchise gets enlarged, capice?

Pixar's Ronnie Del Carmen explains his passion for drawing comic books.

... I gravitate towards books that have a controlling idea behind them, no matter how slight. I think it makes the editing process easier but more than that it makes the book about something. The question I deal with in my day job as story supervisor is: "What is--insert project here--about?" So, rather than just having a series of images that can run the gamut of drawings and scribbles I have in my sketchbooks I thought about what I was experiencing over time with my sketchbooks. What could a compilation of my drawings be about? ...

It's been noted elsewhere in more than a few places, but we still note the passing of Millard Kaufman, co-creator of Mr. Magoo.

A former newspaperman who launched his screenwriting career after serving in the Marines during World War II, Kaufman quickly made a mark on pop culture by writing the screenplay for "Ragtime Bear," the 1949 cartoon short directed by John Hubley that introduced the near-sighted Mr. Magoo.

The character, which was voiced by actor Jim Backus, was modeled in part on Kaufman's uncle.

"My uncle had no problem with his eyes," Kaufman said in a 2007 National Public Radio interview. "He simply interpreted everything that came across his way in his own particular manner, and he could at times be a little bit difficult, but he would only see things the way they existed highly subjectively to him."

The Nikkster projects Monsters Vs. Aliens opening, domestic and worldwide grosses, citing a box office specialist:

Media analyst Rich Greenfield of Pali Research today writes (registration required) that his prediction for Monsters vs. Aliens' worldwide box office estimate of $483M is "conservative ($186 domestic, $297 international), given the recent strength in domestic movie attendance trends (consumers escaping from the gloomy economy) and the benefit the movie should see from premium 3-D" pricing ...

(Nikki's commenters write of their disdain for DreamWorks animated product, forgetting the old Hollywood axium: "A good movie is a movie that makes a lot of money.")

Not to rest on its laurels, Disney/Pixar's Up will get the big launch at some French resort or other:

Disney-Pixar announced that a 3D presentation of its coming animated feature “Up” has been selected as the opening night premiere of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

But speaking of the country that helped launch our own ... the French film business is on a roll:

French filmmaking powered up in 2008, with budgets and production levels rising for the second year running.

The number of French-nationality pic productions rose to 240 last year from 203 in 2006 and 228 in 2007 ...

French investment in domestic pic production skyrocketed 28.6% to 1.22 billion euros ($1.6 billion).

Much of it was driven by two high-bracket animation features from EuropaCorp, both directed by Luc Besson: "Arthur and the Two Worlds War" ($89.3 million) and "Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard" ($82.0 million), plus Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud's docu "Oceans" ($64.7 million).

Have a glorious Friday.

Nikkster Add On: Nikki F. is now hyperventilating over DreamWorks Animation's tie-in with B of A for movie tickets:

Though I suppose it was just a matter of time before the Hollywood moguls figured out a way to get their hands on some of that U.S. goverment bailout money, albeit indirectly. But why in the world are American taxpayers helping foot the bill to promote a big-budget 3-D DreamWorks Animation movie? Well, it appears the reason is because the president of the Jeffrey Katzenberg-led Hollywood animation studio just happens to be Bank of America's former Vice Chairman and CFO.

It took respected media analyst Rich Greenfield of Pali Research to uncover this staggering scheme...

A scheme! A nefarious scheme! Quick! Pass a bill in congress!

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At the Hat

An afternoon spent breezing through the hallways of Disney Animation Studios, and nothing much to report, except ...

The PATF artists to whom I spoke think that this "black princess, white prince" semi-controversy is silly:

"Black/white isn't what this movie is about. It could be anywhere or anybody in this story. The race thing just isn't a factor ..."

Staffers feel that some of the jobss that management eliminated doing this new hand-drawn feature has cost the studio more money than it's saved.

"Older style, made-by-hand cartoon features are not the kinds of movies the new management is used to making ... or knows real well ..."

Everybody is working hard and with satisfaction over the quality of the movie they're making. Rapunzel moves steadily into production. (It's ... ah ... changed some over the six or seven years it's been in work.)

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Questions and Answers

So let me share actual recent questions I've been asked in the studios and on the phone, and the actual answers I've supplied.

(Happily, they're better than my "I've got no idea" of a couple of days ago ...)

How's the animation business holding up? (Often phrased as: "What's going on out there?")

The theatrical side is fairly robust, the t.v. side fairly depressed. The brighter area in television land is prime time animation. Fox owns the concept, and others are trying to get in on the act. But by and large, bread-and-butter kid cartoon shows are going through a rough patch because live-action has encroached on the usual ebb and flow of half-hour, animated product. Other studios are chasing the Disney model (live-action half hours), even though it's expensive. This has hurt staffing on the television side of animation.

The biggest gainers in animation have been on the theatrical side. DreamWorks animation was adding staff throughout 2008, also Image Movers Digital. The Disney Animation Studio laid off crew when Bolt ended, and will probably lay off traditional artists at the conclusion of Princess and the Frog, but staff will be increased as Rapunzel gets deeper into production ...

What do you do when your studio doesn't pick up your personal service contract, but wants to keep you on and renegotiate your wage increase to zero?

Studios have the right to exercise or not exercise contract options (that's why they're built into the initial deal). If they want to retain you but not pick up the option to extend, they're no doubt looking at market conditions and deciding that you will stay around ... even though you won't be getting that contractual wage bump.

My advice is: Seriously look around and see what other jobs and wages are out in the marketplace, and seriously consider taking one when you find it. And let your old employer -- the one that didn't pick up the option -- know that you'll be moving on if they don't match the newer job offer.

I suggest this approach because, if you're truly unhappy with the way you're being treated and want to be treated better, the only way you'll get what you want is by playing chicken ... and being willing to walk away from a deal you're not happy with. It's the only way you can negotiate with higher effectiveness. Having that willingness to say "no" is key. (And yeah, this could be tough to do in the present work/economic environment.)

My supervisor and I haven't been getting along. He doesn't think I'm a "team player." What do I do?

(My answer here ties in with the numerous other posts I've done on this subject; here is yet another version:)

Not what I did in the workplace.

When I worked at Disney, I was a feisty, stick-up-for-myself, mouthy kind of story guy. This was relatively okay under the regime that hired me, but wasn't okay under the regime that came in later. Sadly, I didn't get the memo about the rule change and so was shown the door.

One of the harder things to do in the studio environment is knowing the acceptable boundaries of behavior with your boss. After watching a lot of different studios for a long time, I've concluded there is no totally foolproof mode of behavior, but in general: 1) Don't contradict your supervisor in front of superiors, 2) Don't tell your supervisor "I told you so" when they turn out to be wrong and you turn out to be right, 3) Go the extra mile and be as agreeable as the law and your internal rheostat allows (and be sure your rheostat is properly adjusted for the reality in which you are working.)

My 401(k) has tanked. What do I do?

Stay at least partially in stocks. And wait for the market to rebound.

(Easy advice to give. Harder advice to follow.)

There is no super-great answer here. The market has already eaten it and is, as I write, moving up again. (And yeah, it might go down some more ... although I think it's far closer to the bottom than the top.)

There are no great pearls of wisdom to be given in this space. I'm far from an expert, but few if any financial advisors saw the stock market Tsunami coming, and fewer still know when the market will recoup its losses. (My guess is: a while.)

If you are young, you'll likely have time to recover from this fall off the cliff and should consider remaining in equities. If you are old and near retirement age, you should have been weighted in bonds going into this. If you weren't, calculate what you need to live on in retirement and develop a plan to claw your way there. Maybe it's working an extra three years, maybe it's taking Social Security earlier, maybe it's diversifying your reduced accounts. Whatever it is, develop a plan.

My general advice: Don't invest beyond the tolerance of your nervous system. And for heaven's sake, figure out the amount of punishment your nerves will tolerate.

Etcetera, etcetera. Now you know the kinds of questions I've been getting in the last few weeks and months. Also the accompanying answers.

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February Studio Roundabout

At Film Roman, most of the The Simpsons's crew is finishing the current season of The Yellow Family. Various people came up to me today and mentioned that they now have five qualifed pension years under their belts. So folks who've been working there since TAG signed a contract with FR in early 2005 are now vested in both pension plans run by the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan.

A few hearty souls have already started with Season 21 of The Simpsons. One of them related:

"We've got twenty-two episodes in the new season, which is great, but they're cutting schedules, so everyone is going to have to work longer days, and with the high def format we're reworking a lot of the old locations and setups and there's a lot more pencil mileage. And the word around is that the company want's to keep salaries flat. But hey, we're working ..."

"We're working," It's a phrase I hear a lot. (I might have mentioned this before. Like twenty or thirty times.)

And it ties in with what a Disney veteran (who's no longer there) recently told me over lunch re Disney Animation Studios.

"Old friends are telling me that Princess and the Frog has tested really well, and that the rumor going around is that the studio is thinking about doing more hand-drawn features, maybe two.

"But nobody's taking anything for granted, and everybody's insecure. Like they don't know if they'll be there after PATF is done or not ..."

Then, of course, there's the tempest currently brewing in your local thimble:

... [E]ven though "The Princess and the Frog" isn’t released until later this year, it is already stirring up controversy.

For while Princess Tiana and many in the cartoon cast are black – the prince is not. Which has led some critics to complain that Disney has ducked the opportunity for a fairytale ending for a black prince and princess.

While some have hailed Disney’s decision as a reflection of melting pot America, others say the company is sending out a mixed message.

Mixed message. That's choice.

Apparently it's escaped the notice of some outraged filmgoers -- and journalists unhampered by irony -- that the United States has a President who is ... how do I say this diplomatically? ... of "mixed race." You know, like a white mother and black father?

So maybe the mixed message thing fits right in. You think?

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401(k) Changes

For people here who are plugged into the TAG 401(k) Plan, we have some changes dialed into the mix. (Everybody else, skip this post.) ...

In our quest to improve the mix of funds, effective June 1 we will be:

1) Dropping the Mass Mutual Destination Series funds (age-based retirement dates) and replacing them with the Vanguard Target Date Series. The Vanguard funds are not only more cost efficient, they track market benchmarks more closely than the Mass Mutual funds. (Added to which, the Mass Mutual Destination Funds have been under-performing of late.)

2) We’re eliminating the Oppenheimer Small and Mid Cap Value Fund and the Oppenheimer Main Street Small Cap Fund. Both of these funds have under-performed funds of the same type over the past nine months. We’ll be replacing them with the Allianz NFJ SCV Fund, and the Gabelli SCG fund, respectively.

3) We’ll be eliminating the American Funds World Bond Fund and the Premier Inflation Protected Bond Fund (funds for each transferred to PIMCO Total Return Fund), as well as the NASDAQ 100 Fund (money there going to Select Indexed Equity) and the MRS International New Discovery and International Equity Index (both charting to American Funds Euro Pacific).

The Plan Trustees, after months of review, felt that these funds were a) duplicative of better funds offered by the Plan, and b) outside our core mission of offering a simpler, diversified offering of different asset groups.

Lastly, if you have money in any of the dropped funds, it will be automatically transferred to the same type of core funds that remain in the Plan. (Money in the Select NADAQ 100 will transfer to the Plan's S & P 500 Fund.)

We now return to teh regular blogging.

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Clearing Up a DWA Question

Since I was kind of in error in the DreamWorks post down below ... but don't want to get in the middle of other commenters' firefight ... let me clarify a few items of interest up here ...

Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois? Co-directing How to Train Your Dragon? Absolutely true.

I know it's true because I read it in Wikipedia, and if you can't trust Wikipedia, what can you trust? Also, various employees at DreamWorks Animation told me the same thing.

And the shorter production schedule? I'm informed that HTTYD has always had a fairly short window to get the picutre done, and has one now.

"We know we're going to be working a lot of overtime on the picture, but nobody's uptight about it, everybody's happy to be working. The story's coming along, nobody is worried about that. We know the picture's going to get done. We've done it before, many times ..."

So, to sum up: People aren't worried that the time they've got to produce How to Train Your Dragon is too short (at least, nobody I talked to.) And nobody's fretting about the story.

All I know is what I read in Wikipedia, and hear from people on the DreamWorks campus.

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Writers Guild Shrinks Staff

Another sign post of tough times:

The Writers Guild of America West has notified its staff that it will cut at least 10% of its 185 employees as a result of an operating deficit of more than $2 million.

The WGA West had no comment Monday evening about the job cuts, expected to be announced in coming weeks.

... The WGA West has increased its expenditures in recent years to beef up its organizing efforts in reality and animation but has registered negligible gains in those arenas.

It's difficult to have to cut staff, but sometimes your hand is forced. You can't always predict cash flow in the middle of financial distress, so you trim the sails and hope for the best as you plow into the storm.

On thing, however, I know: It's better for every working person in Hollywood when the industry's unions are strong and taking care of business. Because it means that, long term, the people who have to work for a living will have enough money in their pockets to raise healthy families and be productive citizens.

Let's hope that whatever cuts the Guild has to make are neither deep nor prolonged.

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White Doggie Watch

Though Bolt is gone from U.S. movie screens (topping out at $114,053,579 when it departed in February), the picture still trots right along overseas:

... Bolt added $2.5m from 2,877 screens in 33 for $175.8m

Which means, White Doggie now has a worldwide theatrical cume of $289.8 million.

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A WBA Project

In the early and mid-eighties, Warner Bros. Animation was pretty much a boutique studio, turning out the occasional short or compilation of shorts at a small office in Toluca Lake.

Then in 1989 WGA entered a partnership with Steven Spielberg and began a major Renaissance (and a move to new spaces in the Sherman Oaks Galleria), turning out Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and a raft of other product that was pretty much the gold standard for television animation in the first half of the 1990s ...

The quality Warners cartoon staff was kept on even when production was slow, and times were good.

Now, of course, times have changed. WBA is a much smaller version of its former self, and headquartered in two sites on the Warners (formerly Columbia) Ranch. Daffy, Bugs and Yosemite Sam have given way to comic book super heroes:

This time it is SUPERMAN/BATMAN: PUBLIC ENEMIES based upon the Jeff Loeb and Ed McGuinness comic series. Bruce Timm is the Executive Producer on the film and is currently actually in production ...

Of late, Warners Animation has been home to various spandexed crime fighters, in both direct-to-video features and t.v. episodics. "We keep getting close to adding a couple of new series to the production slate," one staffer told me, "but so far we've just done the Batman series and a string of dvd features. I keep hoping it's going to be more. We're sure trying ..."

It would be nice to return to those halcyon days when WBA artists worked year 'round and were carried during thin periods. But I'm sure the board artists, directors and model designers would settle for two or three newer series.

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When Leverage Erodes

Talk to any veteran animator in the business today, and they'll tell you (if they're willing to talk at all) that they aren't making near the money they earned thirteen or fourteen years ago. As markets and competition drove paychecks up then, so are the same forces are pushing wages down now.

And so it is with labor unions.

Case in point, the Screen Actors Guild. A few days back the Nikkster bemoaned the spinelessness of SAG's new, moderate regime. To wit:

[T]he newly installed SAG leadership has zero interest in bettering the lousy terms of the AMPTP's "Last, Best And Final" TV/Theatrical contract offer made to the Guild on February 18th. Not the New Media terms. Not the issues of residuals or jurisdictions. Not anything except the expiration date of the contract.

[M]y own insiders and even the LA Times' sources say the new SAG leaders are only bargaining the issue of the contract's expiration date ... So the sole dispute between the Hollywood CEOs and the SAG National Majority right now is about whether the pact runs only 2 years or 3, and only that because it could prevent a SAG/AFTRA merger.

So tell me, SAG members: is that the only dispute between you and the Hollywood CEOs worth talking about now? ...

Nikki, you see, is agitated that the new SAG leadership doesn't get out there and improve the crappy New Media/residual terms to which the other guilds and unions -- most particulalry the horrid AFTRA -- have already agreed.

She's got no skin in the game, but hey. She's outraged. And she'll urge the players on from the quiet safety of her internet perch until the last picket sign falls.

But here's a good part of the reason SAG isn't more militant and aggressive with New Media ... and everything else save the contract expiration date ... in the way Nikki Finke would like:

The looming possibility of a SAG strike and the lure of the less-expensive and more-flexible digital production has accelerated the transition from film to digital. The union affiliation for a pilot and the subsequent series is determined by the method of filming: film for SAG and digital for AFTRA. That is firmed up after directors are hired, and with all pilot helmers in place, the final union pilot tally is coming together.

Sixty-six of 70 pilots this season will be AFTRA-affiliated, up from a handful last pilot season ...

See, there's this other union representing actors that has a three-year deal ... with the crappy New Media and residuals language that Nikki and a lot of SAG members hate. (And maybe it is crappy, who knows?)

But the problem is, crappy or not, the AFTRA deal is a ratified reality, and in place for years to come. And every studio in town has the option of signing onto it, whether SAG likes it or not.

And now it comes out that many studios are, at the ratio of eight or nine to one.

So SAG can rend its garments, dump ashes on it head, and weep and wail all it wants. But it gave AFTRA the finger when the smaller union attempted to merge with its militant sister a half dozen years ago, and now SAG is paying the price.

Because if you don't control the workforce, you lose leverage. And without leverage, you lose. Just ask the animators who were making four thousand dollars a week in 1995.

Add On: I notice, now that I've put this up, that Craig Mazin at Artful Writer has posted on the same topic from a slightly different angle. And his angle is well worth reading.

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A Mountain of B.O.

Now with sugar-free Add On.

The actor formerly know as "the Rock" sits atop the box office heap.

Dwayne Johnston's Race to Witch Mountain, came in Numero Uno on Friday.

Two 1970s remakes weighed down on "Watchmen" in its second Friday as Disney’s Dwayne Johnson adventure "Race to Witch Mountain" notched first with $6.7 million followed by Universal/Rogue’s "The Last House on the Left" which reaped $5.6 million.

In the meantime, Watchmen has imploded, falling 78%. If Warner Bros. was looking for legs on the picture, the company had better start looking elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Coraline hangs in at #10, accumulating grosses that now total $67,183,000.

Add On: Who among us could have guessed that Witch Mountain would triumph again? I mean, since Eddie Albert is dead.

Ah, but the retoasted Disney chestnut lands atop the winter heap, taking in $25 million on its opening weekend.

Elsewhere on the box office list, Taken and Coraline hold well, and Watchmen runs through its fan base to decline 67% (and change) in its second weekend.

Coraline. at Number Seven, is now bumping against a $70 million gross. But I tremble to think what will happen to the little girl when the oncoming Monsters Vs. Aliens gobbles up a bunch of those stereoscopic screens ...

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Re How to Train Your Dragon

Inside the refurbished Lakeside building over at DreamWorks Animation, work trundles along on Shrek Goes Fourth, added DVD goodies are being created for Monsters Vs. Aliens, and the first DreamWorks animated feature slated for release in 2010, How to Train Your Dragon is rolling into production ...

A staffer on Dragon related:

"We're going to be doing most of the animation on this between now and next Fall. It's kind of a Bolt schedule. [For those who don't know, the bulk of production work on The Tale of the White Doggie was done in a hectic, action-packed nine months.] We won't be working at a slow pace ..."

Walking around, I saw more scenes of Shrek IV being worked on than Dragon, (Shrek in slapstick action with supporting players) yet the ogre lumbers into your local cinema a couple of months after Dragon.

This could mean story is further along on Shrek than Dragon, or it might mean Shrek has more moving parts and needs a longer production schedule, or it might mean ... not much at all.

I have no knowledge of the story development of either picture, and my knowledge of the Dragon story is minimal except for this:

How To Train Your Dragon is a comic adventure set in the mythical world of Vikings ... The story centers around a scrawny teenager who lives in the North Sea on the island of Berk. His Viking tribe, the Hairy Hooligans, live, and all too frequently die, by their motto: Only the Strong Can Belong! Hiccup desperately wants to make his father, the Hooligans’ chief Stoick the Vast and his tribe proud.

Initiation is coming, and all young Vikings must capture and subdue a wild dragon from Dragon Island. But when Hiccup is saddled with an undersized and uncooperative dragon, chances for impressing his tribe and his father look bleak. Yet, in his quest to train his dragon-of-choice, he teaches his father and all of the Hooligans a new definition of strength.

But the way story work has gone on in feature cartoons since the beginning of time is: Act One of the movie gets tied down pretty good, Act II is being firmed up, and Act III is still ... sketchy. But production has started on Act I because, you know, there's a release date looming out there and nobody can lolly gaggle while other story kinks are being worked out. It's move, move, move so the release window and marketing tie-ins don't get screwd up. (Years ago, the middle of Aladdin was retooled while animation was being done, and the name "Baghdad" was changed to "Agrabah" due to a brief war.)

In short, animated features are always in a state of semi-chaotic flux. Climaxes get altered, dialogue is tweaked, and sequences are dropped and added. It's just the way the process of tooning works.

And for whatever reason, HTTYD is going to move at a high rate of speed for the next several months. You've been warned.

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Toony Daylight Savings Time Links

Another cluster of linkolicious offerings, starting with Michael Eisner, Teeve Toon producer":

Michael Eisner helped kick off the springtime cable upfront presentation season Thursday morning, as the former Disney CEO took the stage at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom to talk up a series he's developed for rival Nickelodeon.

Supporting his weight on crutches, his left ankle encased in a plaster cast -- he later joked that he had injured himself while "fighting with (Viacom topper) Sumner Redstone over a parking space at Bank of America" -- Eisner pitched the assembled throng of media buyers "Glenn Martin, DDS," his new stop-motion animated series that will bow this summer on Nick-at-Nite.

Eisner told his audience that he was "having fun" with the series, adding that the project has allowed him to focus on something other than the cratering economy. "I'm not worried about the meltdown. ... I'm worried about this show," he said. Eisner went on to note the irony of his association with Nickelodeon, which he characterized as "a once distant rival that is now in (Disney's) face.".

Watch out, Jeffrey Katzenberg. There's a new animation guy in town, and he's tall.

Meanwhile, DreamWorks pays a bit of money for a short book:

DreamWorks Animation has optioned rights to "Dinotrux," an illustrated children's book that will be developed as a CG-animated film. Deal was for mid-six figures.

Written by Chris Gall, the 32-page book takes place in a fictional prehistoric age, when the world was ruled by Dinotrux, creatures that were part trucks, part dinosaurs

And South Park eviscerates the Disney Co. (They do Mickey Mouse to a fare thee well.)

... a brilliant parody of not only the Jonas Brothers but the entire Disney company ethos attacks the absurdity of using a hot boy band wearing "purity rings" to sell sex to young girls ...

Newsarama profiles French animation director Michel Ocelot.

Born in 1943, the son of Catholic missionaries, he spent his childhood in what was then West Guinea, where his parents wound up teaching in a palm-thatched one-room school. While he did attend the California Institute of the Arts, he wasn’t part of their world-renown animation program. Instead, he studied decorative arts. His inspiration for animation came from a do-it-yourself book on stop motion animation. At the same time, anyone who’s seen his films will see he’s taken many of the most familiar traditional techniques of animation and reinterpreted them in a number of startlingly fresh ways ...

A good piece on the Fleischer's place in the cartoon firmament, and the direction Toonland might have spun if they had prevailed over Uncle Walt:

The Fleischer cartoons are now being rediscovered, since most of them have no copyright status, so, unlike early Disney shorts for instance, they can be posted online with impunity. Their influence has waned a bit, but oddly enough they haven’t dated nearly as badly as other cartoons from the same era. And it’s always fun to take a look back at them and think of what could have been if the Fleischers rather than Disney had won their old depression-era rivalry.

Walter Sragow at the Baltimore Sun thinks there's no contest between Watchmen and The Incredibles. It's the cartoon by a couple of laps:

A tempest in an inkpot: That's one way of characterizing the mini-eruption over the relative virtues of the movie Watchmen and Brad Bird's 2004 Pixar smash, The Incredibles. Yet the contrast provides an instructive and entertaining demonstration of the difference between a work of art that inspires timeless love and affection and a cult item that begs for disproportionate devotion because of the impact it had on pop culture ...

The Incredibles can spin like a pop-art pinwheel and still be all of a piece because Bird boasts a coherent and scintillating vision. The members of the Incredible family represent the height of human aspiration; the forces that would pull them down stand for the leveling power of mediocrity ...

The Independent surveys the animation of primetime and wonders aloud if The Simpsons will ever be dethroned. The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Richmond supplies the answer:

"There are no plans to pull the plug for the simple reason that the show remains a massive cash cow in its rerun syndication afterlife," says Richmond. "The show repeats more effectively than possibly any show in history, and it's easy to see why. The characters never age, change little, and learn practically nothing from their pasts. They remain stuck in time." ...

Which will make the Yellow Family's animation crew happy. For they (last time I checked) wish to remain stuck in time also. Collecting a weekly paycheck to create the show.

Have a fulfilling weekend.

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The Princess's Progress

Today at the Disney hat building, some of the artists and animators on The Princess and the Frog gave me an update on how the work is going.

"We've animated around 60% of the movie, and we've got maybe ten or eleven weeks to go on the production schedule. We had some wiggle room earlier but now things are tight, and we're really going to have to move things along ..."

Oh yeah. That griping about salary cuts from a couple of months ago? Like magic, most of that has disappeared. Now I get tight smiles and "Hey. I'm working, you know?"

Amazing how a sharp economic downturn and massive layoffs can change hearts and minds.

"The cleanup crew will wrap up their work in late summer. Management's hired more staff on the back end because there's a lot of drawing on paper. The show isn't 'paperless' like they first hoped it would be ..."

Today as I walked out, I stopped to really look at the short sequence playing on the flat screen teevees in the hall display case. It's a short, amusing scene between the principles, and it's offered in story reel, rough animation and full-blown color. And very nice work it is, all the way around.

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The "F Bomb"? From the Mouse?

Now with extra hearty Add On.

TAG blog often goes to Disney stockholder meetings, but not this year. And too bad we missed it, because this is kind of ... ahm ... interesting (especially given Mr. Mouse's performance on South Park last night):

According to... the National Center for Public Policy Research, Disney CEO Robert Iger used an F-word other than Fantasia at this year's annual shareholders meeting. Conservative columnist Tom Borelli, senior fellow with the organization... claimed that Iger said "F**k you" to him at the meeting...

...Disney spokesman Jonathan Friedland, however, told me that he was 'sitting right there,' and that 'Bob didn't say anything back to him.' He also said he was 'pretty sure Bob shook his hand.’ He described the episode as 'strange.'"

Disney spokespersons deny that Mr. Iger hurled any bon mots toward Mr. Borelli. Mr. Borelli, along with Mrs. Borelli, represents otherwise:

After I finished my presentation I again walked by Iger and offered my hand once again. He just stared at me and said "F--- Y--." I immediately walked back to the podium where I told the audience what Iger said to me.

Since "Fuck" is basically an all-purpose epithet and verb-noun-modifier these days, this is hardly the stuff of a mass fainting. Seems out or character for Robert Iger, but what do I know? Maybe the F-bomb is one of his weapons of choice.

Add On: AOL news takes a somewhat different tack from Borelli's press release:

At issue was Borelli's claim. that Iger has refused to sell the rights to the ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11" for personal political reasons. Disney asserts that they think the film is "a loser" in the DVD market, and says they are open to offers for rights to the film ...

And the Reverend Moon's paper The Washington Times jumps in, siding with Monsieur Borelli:

The late Walt Disney, who in testimony before Congress accused the Screen Actors Guild of being a Communist front, must have rolled over in his grave when Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger reportedly spouted "[expletive] you" to Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, at Tuesday's annual Disney shareholder meeting.

Mr. Borelli says he just finished informing shareholders from the podium about Mr. Iger's refusal to sell the DVD or distribution rights of the miniseries "The Path to 9/11," and upon returning to his seat attempted to shake hands with Disney's CEO.

That's when the not-so-kind words were uttered. At which time Mr. Borelli says he stepped back before the microphone and quoted Mr. Iger word-for-word, which caused "gasps" from the crowd of shareholders.

"So much for the family-friendly Disney reputation," he now says in a statement released by the District-based conservative think tank and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense ...

And how did other media outlets cover this supposed outbreak of potty mouth? Why, like it didn't happen.

And Tom Borelli? He's one of the fine columnists at Townhall,com. So you can be sure that he's got no axes to grind, none at all.

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Imagi Again

I motored back to Imagi in Sherman Oaks this a.m., checking up on how the studio's doing after its January shutdown. A lot of staff is back ... but a lot of staff isn't.

There's crew working on Astroboy, artists working on Tusker and Gatchaman. Nobody, however, is sure how long they'll be employed or how long the studio will stay open ...

"Imagi seems to have a game plan. Everybody's been paid the money they're owed. The company is finishing Astroboy for an October release, and it's getting the other two projects in shape for pitches to distributors. Both of properties are coming along pretty well ..."

Another employee said:

"Management here isn't saying how long the doors will stay open. But I don't think management here knows. As far as I can see, the intent is to keep everything going, but Hong Kong [the mother ship] isn't saying much about the money situation. Options on some personal service contracts aren't being picked up. I'm pretty sure the company wants to retain people, but I think it's keeping options open if the money flow stops again. They don't want to be in the position they were in back during January, where they couldn't meet payroll and had a lot of long-term personal service contracts they couldn't honor ..."

My take-away, after jawing with staff into the early afternoon, is that the company intends to stay in business if at all possible, but the global economic freeze-up isn't making it easy. As an artist who's been there a long time said:

"If we can get to October and a solid release for Astroboy, then things are on more solid ground. They'll have more money. But the question is: Can we get to that place? And if Imagi has to shut down again, will they get the same quality people back? Because employees won't wait around, they'll take other jobs."

We'll just have to wait and see how things turn out. (Like there's some other choice? In this economic environment?)

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Not Quite So Many Screens

I think I've mentioned how Aliens Vs. Monsters 3-D imaging really pops off the screen at you. (In other words, I thought it worked real well).

So it's kind of a bummer that there's this fly in the stereoscopic ointment:

Last week DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told investors that “Monsters,” with an estimated budget of $165 million, would be able to be seen on “in excess of 2,000 3D screens,” out of the 7,000 screens planned for opening weekend.

“We believe this number will be more than enough to allow our film to serve as a proof of concept and to propel the new format forward,” he said on the investor call.

But that’s a far cry from what DreamWorks had anticipated, and will be a blow to its ability to maximize the moviegoing experience and ticket sales on the movie ...

As a history freak, I think the parallels between the movies tech conversion now and the one that was happening during our last big economic hiccup (1929-1933) ... are downright eerie.

In 1929, Talkies were happening in a Big Way. At the beginning of that year, there were still mega budget silent movies being made; by the end of it, hardly any were getting produced. Everything was "All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!"

Converting theaters from silent to sound was going full bore, then the stock market crashed and the economy imploded.

And the numbers of theaters converting to sound slowed waaay down.

It's little noted today, but there were still lots of silent movie houses well into the 1930s. Lots of films were sent out as sound and silent as late as 1932.

So here we are in the next century, in the middle of another economic meltdown, and whattayanknow? Another tech conversion of movie theaters gets reduced to a crawl.

Here’s the key reason for the slowdown: Installing digital cinema installation required for 3D can cost $100,000 per screen. These installations are typically financed using a virtual print fee (VPF) model -- meaning that the studios pay an agreed fee per screen, per movie, to offset exhibitors' costs.

The studios have been covering their part of the cost. The theater-owners’ portion of the financing has needed to come through venture capital financing, which has dried up since the catastrophic news on Wall Street ....

Regardless, Monsters Vs. Aliens will be launched on a huge number of screens, just not in as many 3-D venues as DreamWorks Animation would have liked. How this impacts grosses, nobody knows.

But since this is DWA's one 'toon release this year, it would be good if it doesn't impact the movie very much. Right?

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You Know It's Bad When ...

Everybody is aware of our... ah ... economic problems. But on a micro-economic level I think the animation biz has reached a new level.

Because yesterday, when I was walking through one of our fine, signator studios, the first six people I talked to said the following without prompting:

"I am really glad to be working."

Now. I get people telling me this here and there. And I've gotten more of it in the last couple of months.

But a half dozen people people in a row telling me this without prompting? A new record.

They must be really, really happy. Or a little bit ... I donno ... uptight.

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Virtues of Animated Caped Evil Slayers

Live-action movies have taken over comic-book super heroes the way piranhas take over bloody slabs of beef. I mean, Iron Man, Batman, Watchmen, flesh-and-blood actors enhanced with copious amounts of c.g.i. now cover them all. But such wasn't always the case.

Max Fleischer’s Oscar-nominated “Superman” cartoons first appeared in 1941, merely three years after the Man of Steel (arguably the first superhero) made his comic book debut ...

Today, of course, the massive moolah for the comic book brigade is in mega budget epics that are mostly live action. As Curt Holman (of creativeloafing.com) points out, this isn't necessarily a great idea.

For every hit like The Dark Knight, there’s at least one costly flop: take the nipple-costumed Batman & Robin or Halle Berry’s embarrassing Catwoman. Even with the successes, audiences face flaws like the obvious CGI-rendered Spider-Man and Hulk in their first movies, or unfortunate choices such as Ian McKellen’s dumb-looking Magneto helmet in the X-Men films ...

The problem, of course, is that all these characters began life as drawings flowing out of a comic-book artist's mind. So they're not photo-realistic to begin with.

For my money, The Incredibles is one of the best super hero movies ever made, and not just because the story is solid and the characters work like gangbusters. There is also the visual reality that Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible) comes out of an artist's visualization, not Billy Crudup in a bizarre foam suit.

Animation holds out an easier approach; it goes with comic book stories as comfortably as a cape and cowl. The best cartoon features and TV series can do an end run around the real world’s limitations to offer an unlimited canvas that emulates iconic comic book art while putting exciting designs into motion. The right voice performances can even convey emotional heft without hanging a tights-wearing movie star from wires ...

Face it. Animation serves the comic book kingdom as well or better than live-action ever could. But as long as big money is raked in by pictures like The Dark Knight, animation will remain in the low-rent district, super hero-wise.

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Dog Pictures

And I don't mean bad films. I mean features with canines in them.

Fox has signed director Tom Dey to develop a big-screen adaptation of "Marmaduke" ...

Fox no doubt registered the huge response to the Fox 2000/Regency Enterprises 2007 hit "Alvin and the Chipmunks," directed by Tim Hill. The family comedy, which mixed live-action human characters and CG-animated rodent protagonists, grossed $358 million worldwide. A sequel, "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," is in production for a Christmas Day release ...

Try talking about Marmaduke or Alvin and the Chipmunks with an animation artist, and you'll most likely get a grimace. ("Why don't they try something new?!") But Hollywood execs love these films because many of them come with a license to open your own mint, and ...stop me if you've heard this before ... M-O-N-E-Y is, first and always, Tinsel Town's raison d'etre.

Even though citizens of taste and breeding (you and me) might dislike ancient comics-page characters getting recycled into big-budget films, the bright minds in the front office don't really care what we dislike. They read balance sheets, and they know who issues their weekly paychecks.

In the past five months, there have been three doggie films: the live-action entry (Marley and Me -- $175 million worldwide gross), the combination film (Beverly Hills Chihuahua -- $138 million worldwide gross) and the c.g. animated feature (Bolt -- $285 million w.w. gross).

All three will make their studios money, and in an industry that plays the odds the way Grannie plays casino slot machines (fifty years ago there were twenty-eight television westerns on the air at the same time because cowboys were hot), Fox, Disney, Paramount and the rest will be making more movies ... a lot more ... with cuddlesome animals in them.

But don't get too downhearted. The studios are also not going to stop making zombie and slasher movies either, no matter how repulsed part of the viewing public is. Because the name of the game is box office grosses, and when large sums are at stake, as many perceived sure bets as possible will get made.

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Bolt Watch

Well, well, well. The White Doggie appears to be within spitting distance of the $300 million plateau:

"Bolt" ... remains a winner for Disney overseas, grossing $4.2 million for the weekend in 26 territories for a cume of $171.6 million. Pic has yet to open in Japan. "Bolt," which grossed $114 [million] in its domestic run, sports a worldwide cume of $285.6 million.

TIf it hadn't been for those sexy vampires, the feature would be past $300 million now. Happily, the Big Mouse learned from its stateside releasing mistake.

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Mini Linkage

No, it's not Mickey's girlfriend in bondage, but a few fresher animation news pieces, rolled out for viewing. (Now with Add On.

Apparently Mr.Spielberg completes his mo-cap direction of Tintin in the next week or so:

Steven Spielberg this week will quietly wrap 32 days of performance-capture lensing on "Tintin," then hand the project to producer Peter Jackson, who will focus on the film's special effects for the next 18 months.

Although the baton-pass is stealthy, "Tintin" is anything but a low-profile project. And that's just the first of many contradictions inherent with the film, which brings together two of cinema's visionaries ...

And a Japanese animation studio is partnering with the world's largest carmaker:.

Studio Ghibli, the toon house responsible for the Hayao Miyazaki smashes "Spirited Away" and "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea," is collaborating with automaker Toyota to open a new training studio ...

Beginning in April, Ghibli will dispatch 20 new hires to the studio for a two-year course to learn animation techniques while being exposed to robotics and other Toyota technologies. Studio supremo Miyazaki and other veteran Ghibli animators will give lectures ...

A new Disney-type mag called D23 rolls out in the Spring; The Pixar Blog (for there is a blog for everything) has news about a Pixar short that's contained within:

[D23] (Spring 2009) contains a sidebar with the first ever plot details on Pixar's next theatrical short Partly Cloudy, that'll be in theatres attached to Up starting May 29.

The tipster reports that Partly Cloudy will elaborate on the age-old story of babies being delivered to their mothers by storks. In the short, clouds are essentially baby factories, where babies are made out of 'fluffy white stuff'. Each cloud has a stork assigned to deliver the babies produced.

Partly Cloudy's protagonist is a cloud named Gus who makes the 'tougher babies' like alligators and porcupines. Peck is Gus' stork who's grown tired of having to deliver all the tough babies and wants to move on to softer ones like kittens and humans. The short's climax is when Gus thinks Peck quit in search of easier deliveries ...

And please forget a new "Mad Max" opus with Mel G. in the title role. Director George Miller has other ideas:

Unlikely as [it] sounds, some big screen animated “Max” action is shaping up to become a reality, according to George Miller, the writer/director of the previous three films. The catch? He doesn’t want Max himself, Mel Gibson, anywhere near the project.

“We’ll probably go a different route,” Miller told MTV News about the potential talent voicing the lead role. The plot would be partly lifted from the script of the fourth “Max” film, which was set to shoot in 2003 until financing collapsed in the wake of the Iraq War.

Now Miller is resurrecting the idea as an R-rated, stereoscopic anime flick for theatrical release ...

Have yourself a relaxing Sunday afternoon.

Add On: Wildbrain has relocated a studio down in the sun-drenched San Fernando Valley.

W!ldbrain Animation Studios general manager Marge Dean said, “With W!ldbrain's growing pipeline of motion pictures and television series, and a steady increase in long-form, work-for-hire business, the impetus of this move can be attributed to the growth of 3D animation in television.”

The new W!ldbrain Animation Studios space is located in Sherman Oaks, CA and is up and running, effective immediately. The Los Angeles-based studio is being headed by Chris Staples and Michelle Papandrew (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends).

It would be a fine thing to nudge Wildbrain into signing a fine TAG collective bargaining agreement, yes?

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Watching the Box Office

Now with fresh-squeezed Add On.

When the resident teenager announced he was going off with his posse to view an 11 p.m screening of Watchmen, the tired old crystal set I use for a brain told me: "Heey now. Something is up at the b.o."

Moviegoers came out to watch "Watchmen" on Friday to the tune of an estimated $24.9 million, including the $4.6 million that the graphic novel adaptation about dystopian superheroes picked up at midnight screenings Thursday ...

Meanwhile, all the other product in the turnstile conga line moved down a notch or two.

Tyler Pery is now knocked down to #2. Taken lives in the third place position, and Coraline now hangs on to #10, having collected $63.2 million to date.

Add On: Watchmen rolls up a fine $55 million while most ofther movies at the cineplex do remarkably well too.

Or, as the Nikkster charts it:

1. Watchmen (Warner Bros) OPENER [3,611 theaters] $55.6M Wkd

2. Madea Goes to Jail (Lionsgate) Week 3 [2,151] $8.8M Wkd, Cume $76.5M

3. Taken (20th Century Fox) Week 6 [3,016] $7.4M Wkd, Cume $118M

4. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox SL) Week 17 [2,890] $6.9M Wkd, Cume $125.4M

5. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) Week 8 [2,558] $4.2M Wkd, Cume $133.6M

6. He's Just Not That Into You (NL/WB) Week 5 [2,445] $4M Wkd, Cume $84.6M

7. Coraline 3-D (Focus Features) Week 5 [1,959] $3.3M Wkd, Cume $65.6M

8. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) Week 4 [2,290] $3.1M Wkd, Cume $38.3M

9. Jonas Brothers: 3D (Disney) Week 2 [1,276] $2.7M Wkd, (-78%) Cume $16.7M

10. Fired Up! (Sony) Week 3 [1,798] $2.6M Wkd, Cume $13.3M

Coraline methodically closes in on the $70 million level, stays at #7. The next big animated opus, of course, is Monsters vs. Aliens at the end of the month, then Up at the end of May. (WIll Shania Twain be on the soundtrack?)

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Two Rivals, Rivaling Again

Now with Add On!

Pinocchio and arch-rival Gulliver's Travels, get simultaneous launches on Blu-Ray this next week. Pretty much like they got (almost) simultaneous launches in theatres 69 years ago ...

The two studios struggled for supremacy through much of the 1930s, until Disney played his trump card: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), a feature-length animation in glowing Technicolor. A phenomenal success, “Snow White” changed the game, forcing the Fleischers to abandon their urban turf and play on Disney’s field. Rushed into production in a new studio built in Miami, the Fleischers’ “Gulliver’s Travels” (1939) made money at the box office but not enough to put the brothers on sound financial footing ...

So the Fleischers are long gone, but the Mouse marches on. Yet I see billboards around town, touting the "70th" anniversary of Pinoke.

Can't the people at Disney marketing count? We're 70 minus a year from original launch. Or do they just have an aversion to the number "69"?

Add On: Well now. We rummaged around the TAG blog attic, and came up with some Pinoke antiques. Here, here and here ...

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Meltdown on a Personal Level

Lately, the financial news has been uniformly crappy. When companies run out of customers and cash, they tend to implode. And as economist Noruierl Roubini notes, we're imploding:

The global recession may continue until the end of 2010 as the response by governments to rectify it is “too little, too late,” said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the financial crisis.

“Governments are falling behind the curve,” Roubini said at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi today. “This recession can end up becoming even worse.” ...

The cratering economy has treated me like everybody else, and I've taken painful hits right in the middle of my retirement funds. As an added treat, I also get to field phone calls from members who are freaking out ...

A week ago, an artist close to retirement called and told me, "I don't know a lot about investing, and my brother talked me into using a broker he said was very good. The man made me money for seven years, but the last nine months, I've lost half my savings. He's got me 100% in stocks, and when I call to ask him to move some of it to bonds, he yells at me to stay with what I've got, that I'll be fine, and stop watching financial news since it gets me upset."

I pointed out to him that the broker works for him, not the other way around, and that it's his money, not the stock jockey's. Also that it was unwise to be totally in stocks when you were on the cusp of retirement. He didn't disagree.

Another member wanted to take her 401(k) money and buy a house. I said that since home prices were still going down, she might want to wait a while on the big purchase.

Tonight I talked to one of my oldest friends, an economist with a PhD from Cornell and a going consulting business. He's been on the President's Economic Council and he keeps up with the policy makers in Washington. He told me the following:

"Anybody who tells you they know where the market is going is full of it. Roubini has been predicting disaster for years, and now he's right, and that makes him the man of the hour. I've got most of my money in cash, sitting on the sidelines. I don't know where the bottom is, and nobody else does either."

"I listened to Geithner, the secretary of the Treasury, on C-Span last night. Listened to him for hours. He does a good job of explaining overall government policy but a bad job of explaining how to rescue the banks. They're trying hard not to nationalize the financial sector, but the marketplace thinks they will nattionalize, so the marketplace has taken bank stocks down to almost zero. There's no confidence."

We're in a fustercluck and I think we're going to be there awhile, but I sure as hell don't have a PhD to back my opinions up. The one thing I do know: artists have got to educate themselves about basic investing so they can make semi-inteligent decisions all by themselves.

What I've told people for freaking yours is, invest at your comfort level. If you freak out over losing momney with stocks, maybe you should be in a money market and maybe a few bonds. It's better to get lower returns and be able to sleep at night. But here's a few basic rules that I'd follow in March, 2009:

If you're in your mid fifties or older, be weighted more to bonds and cash. (60-90%, depending on your intestinal fortitude.)

If you're forty to fifty-five, have a bond/stock split of 50%/50%.

If you're thirty to forty, have a bond/stock split of 40%/60%.

And if you're somebody that just can't take the whipsaws of the stock market, can't stomach it going down, down, DOWN, then keep everything in money market funds, stable value funds, and bonds. You won't get much in the way of returns if the stock market spikes, but you won't be in the bathroom hurling, either.

The thing of it is -- and I write this to give you comfort -- almost everybody has taken it in the shorts. A trustee on the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plans recently told me: "A year ago, the Plan's money managers said something funky was happening with the markets, and the trustees voted to shift investments to more conservative investments -- which was, as it turned out, a good thing to do.

"But I listened to these guys and I didn't do the obvious thing with my persona accounts. I should have gone home to my wife and said: 'Honey, let's move all this stuff to money market funds and C.D.s, wait a year and see what happens.'

But I didn't do it. Even with all the expert advice I was listening to on the Pension Plans, I kept my own investments where they were. Turned out to be a not great thing to do ..."

The point of this long ramble is: Nobody has the final answer. Nobody knows where stocks or bonds will be in a year, nobody can say with certainty if the banks will be solvent. But you can educate yourself, make informed estimates about where the economy is going, and protect yourself with some knowledge. In the end, only you can know what's best for you.

Simply saying: "I'm an artist, I'm no good with numbers, I'll turn my investments over to somebody else" is not a good option. Investment advisors might be smart and well-informed, but their long-term needs and goals probably don't align with yours.

Be the captain of your own ship. Have a "Plan A" at the ready, also a "Plan B", "C", and "D". Because, when you scrape away al the media hoo ha, all the blather from various economic gurus, it comes down to this: your personal future is too important and valuable to subcontract out to somebody else.

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Watchmen, Saturday morning style

If the graphic novel upon which this weekend's most-likely-to-be-#1 movie had been sold to a Saturday-morning 'toon shop, it might have looked something like this. (D'ya think Alan Moore would've approved?)

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At Crest Animation

Stole a chunk of the afternoon and popped over to Crest Animation, located in Burbank, and run by a former Disney feature director.

I was over there today because members who work there complained that I wasn't going over to visit very much. So, by way of mea culpa, mea culpa, I drove over there two hours after I got the complaints ...

Crest was formed in the late 1980s, and has been an island of stability ever since, residing at the same Glenoaks Boulevard address for years and years. Currently they are working on Alpha and Omega, a feature that's a joint production with Lionsgate. Most of the pre-production is complete. Most of the production is being done overseas in Mumbai.

The company has now started a new project, yet to be announced, that will be ramping up at A and O goes into full production.

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"So, when are you moving into the new building?"

Click on the thumbnails for a full-sized photo

Thanks to the rain and a few other glitches, it now looks like we'll be moving into our new headquarters at 1105 N. Hollywood way sometime this summer.

If you've driven past lately, you've noticed a) a lot of scaffolding and b) the entire building seems to be wrapped in black paper. That's because the exterior is in the process of being stuccoed. (The above photo is facing towards the Hollywood Way entrance, with the art gallery exterior on the left.)

This is entering the lobby from the south parking lot entrance; restrooms on the left, reception ahead, the elevator and second-floor stairway (both under construction) on the right.

Looking past the reception area towards the offices in the north part of the first floor.

Passing the reception desk into the offices, here are the cubicles, one of which will be set aside for Marta Strohl-Rowand, our 401(k) Plan administrator.

The room straight ahead with the workmen will be Steve Hulett's office. The door to the right will lead to Lyn Mantta's office, and the first of the two doors on the left will lead to Jeff Massie's office.

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The Sonoran Disneys

This p.m. I was pleased to stumble around the two animation studios the Big Mouse owns in sunny Glendale. Both are housed in a large, rectangular building on Sonora Avenue, within spitting distance of the defunct Grand Central Airport, most of which Disney now owns.

Disney Television Animation, in the bottom half of the building, has staff working on the tail end of Mickey's Clubhouse, and that's pretty much it. Other shows are happening at the main Burbank lot, but Sonora is ... autumnal. One of the artists related:

"We're just finishing up on the show, and almost all of us will be out of here in the next few weeks. Word's gone around that a new show starts in June, so most everyone is going to hang on for the next couple of months and get onto it ..."

Upstairs at Toon Disney, work progresses on newer, feature-length Tinkerbells.

"Tinks three and four in tandem, since John Lasseter had the storyline for three reworked and we went back to square one. But I think it's better now, more focused." ... "The first feature's done better than the company expected. They're blocking out Tink 5, and Tinkerbell 6 is going to happen, although right now it's just a gleam in somebody's eye" ... "It's nice to know you have long-term employment" ...

There are more people working at Disney Toons just now, which happens when you have a franchise that's making the Big Mouse big money.

As the DVD market plateaus and ever more releases vie for space on store shelves, the direct-to-video kidvid sector is proving resilient in tough economic times.

Take Disney's "Tinker Bell," the runaway sales success of 2008. According to Meredith Roberts, senior VP and g.m. of DisneyToon Studios, the CG-animated property has far exceeded its revenue target and proves the resiliency of kidvid in times when families are cutting back on a night at the movies ...

Successful video features mean Disney hires more artists to turn out more installments of the hot franchise, which is a good thing.

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Yet Another Film and Animation Fest

This was in sun-kissed Fargo, North Dakota. Somewhat different than Tehran. (a whole lots fewer burkas.)

For the first time since they started giving the award, an animated flick took best picture at the Fargo Film Festival.

Along with that distinction, Don Hertzfeld’s 22-minute animated film, “I Am So Proud of You,” snatched up best screenplay honors as well.

It’s a tribute to the strength of the animation category at this year’s festival. In fact, Executive Director Margie Bailly believes it’s the strongest field of animation in the festival’s nine-year history.

It's always good to see animation taking top prizes. The form might not get a lot of love from the Motion Picture Academy, but others appreciate it.

Text below the break goes here.

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Goodbye to King of the Hill

The King of the Hill crew ... on the Fox lot July 22, 2008, celebrating the 250th episode.

Yesterday afternoon I walked through KOTH's production space at Film Roman. There's a few artists, supervisors, checkers and directors wrapping things up, but mostly it's paper and artwork going into boxes as the show completes its long run.

A lot of people left last Friday. The rest of us go this week. Know of any shows anywhere that are starting up?"

So it's adios to the King ... after 13 seasons and 250+ episodes.

The atmosphere was more cheery up in Simpsons land,where the staff is a little more relaxed now that they know they have two more seasons on which to work. But ...

"The funny thing is, Gracie Films hasn't yet given us the word. Richard Raynis likes to keep people off-balance ..."

Ah, the irrepressible Mr.Raynis. Boosting employee morale wherever he goes ...

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My Two Cents at Cal Arts

From time to time a Cal Arts professor invites me up to give my take on the cartoon industry and how to break into it. Doesn't happen a lot, but I have no trouble shooting my mouth off for sixty minutes about the state of the animation business to a captive audience. Here's the condensed -- and slightly revised -- version of what I said yesterday:

Getting into the animation biz. There's a thousand different routes. If you have the right skill-sets the industry is looking for, it's way easier than if you don't. It's also easier if the industry is expanding rather than contracting, but not impossible either way. New blood flows in under all situations, it just flows more freely when the cartoon business is robust.

Know what your workplace rights are. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (as amended), you are either an employee who is exempt from overtime requirements ("time and a half after forty hours worked", etc.) or you are non-exempt (meaning they've got to pay you, no matter what.) Some of the divisions might surprise you. Designers and board artists and other who create "original images" are exempt under regulations; "animators" are non-exempt.

In my experience, many studios ignore regulations, sometimes purposely, more often because managers don't pay attention. I don't advocate jumping up and down over every infraction that happens to you, but it's a good idea to know your rights so that you can push back if abuses are chronic.

The days of decades-long employment at one company are over. Today the watch word is "project to project." If you luck out and work on The Simpsons for twenty years, bully for you. But you probably won't. Build a network of friends and allies. Accept the reality that you will be moving around a lot.

Learn to play well with others. Getting along with peers and supervisors is essential for career longevity. The great artist who is a pain to be around, who fights, complains and argues, will be working far less than the merely good artist who everybody likes because he's pleasant, supportive and helpful.

Unions and union contracts are useful to work under. Obviously I'm prejudiced here, but the statistics are compelling. For most, working in the unionized part of the biz will mean you'll have a bunch more money at the end of your career.

You will need luck, a good work ethic and talent to succeed in the animation business. If you have more of one of those things you probably will need less of the other two.

That, in essence, was what I told all the bright-eyed youngsters. Nobody ran screaming from the room.

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Ratifying the Basic

The contract ballots are now out, and the Nikkster reports on the IA's campaign to pass the new Basic Agreement:

... According to an email sent from the International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600, President Steven Poster to a select group of National Executive Board members, a phone bank will be set up to call members and get them to Vote Yes. It is being coordinated by Western Region Director David Behm who will supply the phone lists. But it has raised questions about what Guild resources will be used and/or abused. "First, it is not the role of the Guild to lobby the members either for or against ratification -- although there is precedent from the 2006 contract ratification, where the NEB officially authorized an anti-contract-ratification campaign because of the loss of mandatory staffing of camera operators," one ICG Vote No organizer tells me ...

I've got no knowledge about what the Cinematographers Guild's National Executive Board needs to authorize, but almost every IA local campaigns to pass contracts during ratification. In years gone by, I've campaigned to ratify agreements going from studio to studio and talking to members, answering questions. Nothing at all unusual about it.

But to the big issue of this contract. The deal in a nutshell:

1) Hundred of millions of additional bucks from the companies to shore up the pension and health plan,

2) 3% annual wage bump-ups on contract minimums.

3) A Health Plan redesign (in other words, cuts),

4) Reducing the Plan reserves by a few months,

5) Upping the number of qualifying hours for the Health Plan from 300 to 400 hours in the third year of new contract (August, 2011.)

I'm informed that union reps were asked by the IATSE if co-pays or upping of hours were preferable (It was going to be one or the other, given the financial realities.) The vote was to go with higher hours.

I earlier lobbied for co-pays, but it didn't go that way. The thinking was it would be hard to roll back co-pays once they're part of the overall deal, but easier to get additional hours reversed if Plan finances improve during the next three years.

So ... is this new contract deal a bad one? Nope, not in this environment. The IATSE negotiated 3.8% improvements in each year of the contract, right in line with other contracts negotiated over the past twelve months.

What's painful is that 400-hour lump that has to be swallowed, because it's going to impact a number of IA members (Studies indicate 8-9.5% of participants will no longer qualify for benefits).

Will this contract pass? Sure, by 70-85%.

Are the unions campaigning to ratify right in doing so? Yes again, because if the deal goes down, it's back to the negotiating table, and the economic conditions are worse now than they were in November. There's not a huge chance that the next deal will be better. Most likely it will be worse ... but different.

The ballots are counted at the end of the month. We'll know then whether the IATSE has a ratified contract ... or a new negotiation on its hands.*

* The Animation Guild isn't in the IATSE bargaining unit (We were kicked out in 1985 for being overly ... ah ... rambunctious.) We'll be sitting down for our own contract talks in the next few months. We don't negotiate the benefits piece of our own contract. That's tied up with the Basic Agreement.

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Fifty Percent

I was pleased to give a lecture up at Cal Arts today. The small class to which I spoke was fifty percent male, fifty percent female. So standing there I thought of this:

A while ago I was talking to a person who works at one of these animation schools, often metioned here on this subject. The number of female applicants is far lower than the males. He wishes more women applied.

And it's unrealistic to expect that studios had a 1:1 female to male ratio, based on this fact.

It just seems to me females don't really consider animation as a good career.

And I asked: "How many women are in the Cal Arts Animation department? ...

And the answer I got was, 50%.

Now, I didn't run up to the registrar's office and cross-check the numbers. But students and teacher told me it was half.

And given that, the numbers we put up here in January re female employment in animation (directors - 15%; layout - 17.8%; model designers - 15.4%; storyboard 13.3%, visual development - 9.4%) seem a teensy bit ... out of alignment.

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Around Walt Disney Animation Studios

Part of the afternoon was me toting my bag of unwanted 401(k) books from floor to floor at the Disney Hat Building. (Hmmm. Wonder why nobody wants to jump into the stock market just now? ...)

The long entry hall had pieces of animation from Princess and the Frog playing on monitors in the display cases: rough pencil tests, cleaned up pencil tests, color, the whole shebang. And know what? It looks like a Disney hand-drawn feature.

I'm still getting a few questions about the 45-hour workweek, but more people have (apparently) become resigned to it or more accepting. Probably some of both.

I got a quick gander of some visual development work happening on Rapunzel, about which one of the folks on the top floor said:

"We're digging into different European locales and castles, looking at what's been done before, deciding what we can use, creating new stuff. We show a lot of the work to John [Lasseter] soon to see what he likes.

The visual development has kicked into a higher gear, but animation is still a bit of a ways off. Character modelling that I saw for an upcoming featurette also looks like enticing.

The long and short of it is, the House of Mouse has its animated properties lined up on the runway, and each is lifting off in its turn.

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'Toons in Old Tehran

It's March 1st, and you know what that means. It's Day One of the 6th Annual International Animation Festival:

Some 20,000 minutes of animated products will be screened from home and abroad during the five-day event.

The animated products, which have been produced in the past two years, will be screened in seven centers in Tehran ...

The fest will be showing features from around the world, including "Jan Balej's One Night in a City (Czech), Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters per Second (Japan) and Rasa Miskinyte, Donatas Ulvydas, Linas Augutis and Marek Skrobecki's Bug Trainer (Lithuania) ...."

Animation is a fine way to take anxious minds off various world problems. Make cartoons, not war, that's what I say ...

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White Doggie Still Romps

Apparently Variety hasn't gotten the memo about Bolt being a commercial under-performer:

When it comes to staying power, Disney's "Bolt" is the real deal at the international box office.

In its 13th week, the toon came in No. 2 over the Feb. 20-22 weekend, grossing an estimated $11.7 million from 3,372 playdates for a foreign cume of $154.9 million and a worldwide total of $268.9 million. Film's rollout has been slow abroad, a strategy often used for toons.

"Bolt" bounded to the top spot in its second weekend in the U.K., grossing $4.3 million at 494. Dropping 10% after three frames, "Bolt" has exceeded expectations with a cume of $14.7 million ...

Disney is doing a much savvier job rolling the pup out in foreign markets than it did stateside.

In the next two to four weeks, the feature will cross the $300 million marker. If the Mouse hadn't released Bolt against Twilight across the U.S. and Canada, it would be past the magic $300 million now.

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