Your Mid-Week Link Festival

There might be a global slowdown, but there is always a market for small, gold statues.

" The Illusionist," Sylvain Chomet's Jacques Tati-inspired tale of aging stage performer and a young girl; the Spanish sci-fi spoof " Planet 51" and "Sammy's Adventures: The Secret Passage," a Belgian cartoon shot in 3D, are the official nominees for in the animated feature film category of the 2010 European Film Awards ...

For some reason, Hollywood movie honchos are nervous about the commercial prospects for an animated feature about owls.

"Halfway through the production of "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole," director Zack Snyder began feeling pressure to lighten the tone of his 3-D animated feature.

Executives at Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures, the movie's backers, were worried that the story was too dark for younger audiences ...

Andrew Witkin, RIP.

Andrew Witkin, an Oscar-winning senior scientist at Pixar Animation Studios, died Sept. 12 while scuba diving off the coast of Monterey, Calif. He was 58. ...

Stand-up comedians are mating their comedy routines with animation.

Comedian Steve Hofstetter recently debuted ... a series called Animated Revolution, backed by Fremantle (the online arm of the company that produces American Idol). " ... [A]nimation is a natural way to spread stand-up – and if done well, can be more interesting than watching someone stand in front of a brick wall ...."

(Now that I look at it, the piece is crude animation. Of the Clutch Cargo variety. But hopefully somebody got paid to create it ...)

Collider rolls out the second part of its Tangled tour in Burbank:

... [John Lasseter] never lets a scene go into production until it is fantastic in story reel. This means that a lot of deleted scenes, well, they just don’t exist outside of story boards. This also means that they know the exact gag works well before they add money to really flesh it out, which helps make the scene that much better before it ever gets animated. ...

(At the same junket, actress Mandy Moore held forth on recording Rapunzel:

"I was depending on a lot of information from the directors. And, you're by yourself recording. So, there is something freeing about that; not having to be tied down to someone's delivery of a line. You could go into the depths of your imagination.")

Add On: Ordinarily we try to avoid duplicating Cartoon Brew, but since we've discussed Gnomeo and Juliet here and here, we post the trailer as well.

Plunge into your Wednesday with gusto.