Sunday, December 11, 2011

The Weekend Linkorama

Another of our intermittent Link Fests.

Genndy has some concept art from Star Wars, the Cartoons, and it shows up here. ..

Animated short morphs into long-form feature.

Hybrid Animation (of the older style):

The Reporter interviews Kung Fu Panda 2's Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Angelina Jolie.

Andy Young interviews animation veteran Jerry Rees.

TIME Magazine's Richard Corliss leaves animation off his "Ten Best Movies" list for the first time in years.

Women who make video games happen. (They are a whopping 12% of the development work force.)

While we're on the subject: The Reporter tells of the paucity of women in creative positiong in the Hollywood entertainment industry.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great quote from the Jerry Rees interview , talking about showing his film "The Brave Little Toaster" at Sundance:

"We were using Sundance to get distribution, and this was when Sundance was just getting up-and-running. We had a really positive reaction at our screening, and we were hoping we would get the spotlight… we thought if Sundance celebrated us, it would help [us get distribution]. I met some of the judges, and three of them told me at different points that “We thought you had the best movie here this year, but to say that an animated film won the top prize? We don’t think people would take the festival seriously… But secretly, you have the best movie here!” And it was so weird to watch someone else win the award with them winking at us. Back then, animation was still seen as the bastard stepchild of the industry, and we had hoped to elevate it to a legitimate storytelling medium. And of course, now it’s completely different."

I think it's certainly different, but I don't know if it's completely different. I think there have been at least three times that Pixar's films have been called The Best Film of the Year (The Incredibles, Up, Ratatouille) but when the Academy Awards come around the animated films are put into a separate category so they're not allowed to compete with the "real" films.

(they made that mistake once when "Beauty and the Beast" got nominated for Best Picture , and then there was panic about "what have we done ? we can't possibly give the Oscar to a CARTOON !" So I think some of that attitude Jerry found at Sundance back in the 80's is still with us today)

Mark Mayerson said...

Uh, I looked at Corliss's ten best and Rango is on it.

el diablo said...

"Uh, I looked at Corliss's ten best and Rango is on it."

AAAaand?

d.

El seƱor don Gato said...

^
AAAaand ...

in the original post Steve said:

"TIME Magazine's Richard Corliss leaves animation off his "Ten Best Movies" list for the first time in years."

So Mark M. is pointing out that Corliss did in fact include an animated film (Rango) on his Top 10 Films of 2011 list.

Steve Hulett said...

Whoops. Corliss wrote (somewhere) that he'd left animation off his list for the first time in some years.

Apparently not. Or apparently, I misread. Fallibility, thy name is Hulett.

Steve Hulett said...

Ah. Here's what Corliss wrote, and I ... speeding along ... misread:

Constant readers will note that this is the first year since 2007 that an animated feature did not top my list.

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