TAG Blog

Clampett's Carter

2012-01-28T20:54:00.000-08:00

Until I stumbled across today's Geeks of Doom, I had no idea another animation director had aspirations to make a feature-length John Carter of Mars. ...

In 1931, ... author [Edgar Rice] Burroughs approached Bob Clampett about possibly making a full-length animated John Carter feature. Working with Burroughs’ son John Coleman, Clampett spent a year beginning in 1935 producing a reel of test footage ...

The test was impressive enough for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to acquire the rights to Burroughs’ John Carter novels but when the reel was screened for theatrical exhibitors across the country it was greeted with cold indifference, particularly from those who felt the elaborate sci-fi fantasies wouldn’t play well with audiences in the Midwest. MGM canceled development on the film and the next year Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the first full-length animated feature ...

And three-quarters of a century later, Andrew Stanton makes Carter. Sometimes in Hollywood, ideas have to percolate a little while before coming to full boil.

The Weekend Race

2012-01-28T14:09:00.000-08:00

Animation is quiet in the Top Ten (but not totally absent) ...

1) THE GREY -- $6,500,000 -- wk 1

2) ONE FOR THE MONEY -- $4,100,000 -- wk 1

3) UNDERWORLD AWAKENING -- $3,425,000 -- $36,051,000

4) RED TAILS -- $2,800,000 -- $26,180,000

5) MAN ON A LEDGE -- $2,500,000 -- wk 1

6) EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE -- $2,000,000 -- $15,961,000

7) CONTRABAND -- $1,900,000 -- $51,770,000

8) THE DESCENDANTS -- $1,735,000 -- $54,033,000

9) BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (3D) -- $1,227,000 -- $37,029,000

10) HAYWIRE -- $1,170,000 -- $12,449,000 ...

At #11, Brad Bird's Mission Impossible opus has ascended past the $200 million marker, and Alvin and the Chipmunks is at $125.6 million.

Viacom Compensation

2012-01-27T22:12:00.000-08:00

The movie business has been very good to Uncle Sumner and a chosen few.

Billionaire Sumner Redstone got a 39% boost in compensation last year in his role as executive chairman of Viacom Inc. The 88-year-old media mogul and his top two lieutenants together collected compensation packages in 2011 totaling nearly $100 million.

Of course Sumner got a 39% bump in pay. Viacom stock went up close to 9%; we can never do enough for the Job Creators.

Ian Abercrombie, RIP

2012-01-27T18:50:00.000-08:00

The British actor was 77. ...

... Abercrombie ... had a recurring role as Palpatine/Darth Sidious on George Lucas’ animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, did voice work on animation hit Rango this year and, just before his death, completed his work on the latest episode of the Green Lantern animated series for Cartoon Network. ....

A busy man, Mr. Abercrombie.

("Rango" is always an "animated hit." And the current DreamWorks Animation releases are always "disappointments," no matter what sort of money they pull in. ...)

The Deserving Rich

2012-01-27T15:23:00.000-08:00

Face it. The Top Dogs are better and more entitled than you are ...

And if you don't like it, you're a whiner.

... [T]he World Economic Forum, in a recent report, named the growing income divide as one of the biggest risks facing the world in the years to come.

“In developed economies, such as those of Western Europe, North America and Japan, the social contract that has in recent decades been taken for granted is in danger of being destroyed,” the report said, warning of the threat of a “dystopian future for much of humanity.” ...

We are a labor blog, after all. We do occasionally have to point these things out. (Let the Bush and Obama bashing begin.)

Del Toro on the Animated Oscar Nominees

2012-01-26T21:28:00.000-08:00

Guillermo del Toro reflects on DreamWorks Animation's two Oscar nominations.

... On “Puss in Boots,” I felt like one of the many parents that the movie has. Every experience I’ve had at DreamWorks has been really rewarding in terms of how they connect with the audience. Following “Kung Fu Panda 2,” all of the audience test screenings and seeing it get a really strong foothold and then “Puss” also getting the CinemaScore that it got and getting the critical consensus that it got — all of that is hugely satisfying ...

I'm guessing that the folks at Pixar ... and Mr. Spielberg ... are a wee bit unhappy they didn't make the cut. But then, nobody hits it out of the park every time at bat. Sometimes even champion players whiff.

I just hope Disney doesn't boycott next year's Oscars.

A Day at Fox Animation

2012-01-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

Although traffic was awful, I made it to Fox Animation early enough to hit all three Fox shows: American Dad, The Cleveland Show and Family Guy ...

Things are steady as they go on FG and TCS, but the equilibrium is a bit different on American Dad:

... We haven't been picked up for another season, and artists are getting laid off one by one. We're pretty much in limbo ...

I've got a couple of weeks left, and then I'm out of here. There hasn't been any big farewells, it's just ... people disappear and nothing is said. Nobody knows if we're coming back or not. It's kind of weird. ...

As of early January, American Dad is performing much like its Animation Domination counterparts (Family Guy -- 6 million viewers; The Simpsons -- 5.11 million viewers; American Dad -- 4.5 million viewers; The Cleveland Show -- 4.3 million viewers.)

Whether the series gets picked up for another year, I donno. But an American Dad board artist related that it didn't feel like cancellation is imminent.

... Nobody I talk to is uptight about the show going away. Other years artists have been more depressed and fatalistic about American Dad getting cancelled. But this year? Not nearly as much ...

Which may or may not be a good sign. It was explained to me that part of the problem is the show is preempted a lot, so there is a stock pile of episodes.

Me, I hope AD goes on, because I find it the most amusing of the Seth shows, even though it runs behind Family Guy in popularity.

Syd Mead show, opens tonight

2012-01-26T13:35:00.000-08:00

Foreign Releases, Foreign Moolah

2012-01-25T22:39:00.000-08:00

Seeking Alpha gives an astute answer to a semi-dumb question:

2. Why are a bunch of zoo animals going to Europe? Don't they know there's a major financial crisis there?

If we look at the foreign numbers for the last Madagascar movie, we can see that the film did quite well in many European countries, grossing in excess of $40 million in both France, and Germany; about $35 million in Italy, and the U.K.; $20 million in Spain, and depending on whether your grade school geography teacher taught you Russia was part of Europe or Asia, over $40 million in that country, too. So it's not surprising that the Madagascar crew have wound their way into a European traveling circus, likely to visit popular European destinations, as can be seen in the trailer for Madagascar 3. ...

I don't think it's lost on DWA (or other cartoon studios) that animated features without U.S. environments in them do better overseas than movies with.

Monsters Vs. Aliens and MegaMind, both solid performers in the U.S. of A., did less well in foreign venues. Both of DreamWorks Animation's 2011 releases, by contrast, made lots of money in overseas markets.

I think the fact they're not American-themed had a lot to do with it. When I mentioned this to a DWA director, he allowed as how it's likely the case. (Can we prove this with certainty? Nope. But it's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.)

Board Tests

2012-01-25T20:24:00.000-08:00

The testing issue just never goes away.

A month ago, a board artist at one of our fine entertainment conglomerates, who was working on a show that was wrapping up, said to me:

"We're all done with this series in a few weeks. And we're all taking tests to get on the next one. The tests they're asking the crew to cover three and a half pages of script ..."

Three or three and a half typed pages pencil out to a week's worth of work, give or take. When I heard about this, I went to H.R. and ranted about the abuse being visited on production staffers.

I pointed out:

1) Artists have to pour their hearts and souls into work that may or may not result in a job, and do it gratis. For a week.

2) Studios already employing board artists shouldn't require those board artists to take a week-long test to get another job on another show. They already know the artists' capabilities.

3) If an actor or writer or (God help us) production manager was up for a job, it's doubtful the prospective employer would ask the candidate to come in for a week and work free-of-charge to show "how he handled the assignment."

This has been an issue for a decade or more, but (amazingly enough) back when I started as business rep, tests were minimal. Portfolios and maybe a short drawing test were considered sufficient to secure work.

More innocent times, I guess.

Long tests became the norm back in the nineties, and TAG (naturally enough) started complaining about it. Each time we complained, studio reps listened, nodded their heads in agreement, and said that "something had to be done."

And something was done. For a few months. Then new show-runners would wheel into town and initiate new week-long tests. No studio administrators would say boo about it. Then we would start complaining again.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

This time around, the studio in question has agreed to reduce board tests by 40%. We'll see how long the reduction lasts.

Motion Picture and Television Fund's Long Term Care

2012-01-25T16:36:00.000-08:00

The MPTF Motion Picture Retirement Home in Woodland Hills was on the brink of closing its long-term care unit two short years ago. Lack of money was the reason, and there was major push back against the unit being shuttered. In the end, l.t.c. stayed open.

Happily, there is now this: ...

The Motion Picture and Television Fund (MPTF) announced today that it will immediately begin admitting additional industry members to the long term care unit on its Wasserman campus in Woodland Hills. First priority for admission will be given to former MPTF long-term care residents who moved off campus at the time of the announcement of the proposed closure of the unit in 2009. MPTF’s long-term care unit, when fully occupied, will allow for 40 residents.

“We are excited to finally be able to bring more residents into long-term care,” said Bob Beitcher, president and CEO of MPTF. “This will be a pivotal moment for current long-term care residents and their families, other campus residents, and staff. It will restore the continuum of care on campus everyone has been hoping for,”

Getting l.t.c. on a firm footing has been something of an ongoing toothache for the Fund, so it's good to see that the long term care facility is not just holding steady in terms of the number of occupants, but is poised to grow numbers again.

Good news.

Chouinard: An Overture

2012-01-25T07:32:00.000-08:00

* Nelbert Murphy Chouinard pictured above

On Wednesday, February 8 at 8:30 pm the REDCAT Theater in downtown Los Angeles will present Chouinard: An Overture, an evening devoted to a discussion of the Chouinard Institute, its history and its influence. Tickets can be purchased from the REDCAT website:

http://www.redcat.org/event/chouinard-overture.

Founded in 1921 by Nelbert M. Chouinard (approximately pronounced "shuh - nard"), Chouinard Art Institute remains one of the most influential art schools ever to have existed in this country. The impressive faculty and alumni attests to the school's rightful place on the short list of great art schools of 20th Century America. Giants of the art world studied and taught there and many went on to fame, fortune and great respect in the categories of animation, film, fine art, architecture, ceramics, costume design, illustration and photography.

Students and faculty included such luminaries as Mary Blair, Preston Blair, Millard Sheets, Pruett Carter, Corny Cole, Phil Dike, Phil Paradise, Emerson Woelffer, David Siqueiros, Edith Head, Theadora Van Runkle, John Altoon, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Otto Heino, Terry Gilliam, John Van Hamersveld, Rick Griffin, Bob Foster, Terry Allen, Chuck Jones, Bob Kurtz, Pete Alvarado, Dave Brain, Joe Goode, Hardie Gramatky, Karl Hubenthal, John Hench, Robert Irwin, Ollie Johnston, Bob Mackie, Bill Melendez, Jimmy Murakami, Maurice Noble, Virgil Partch, Woolie Reitherman, Dan Spieigle, William Stout, Frank Thomas and Alan Zaslove, to name a few. Chouinard graduates were readily employed by many of the major animation studios in the greater Los Angeles area and to this day many of those graduates are still working in the industry.

In 1969 Chouinard Art Institute merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to form The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) with its campus in Valencia, CA.

The number of artists employed in the animation business who attended Chouinard and, in more recent years, CalArts, is staggering. The Animation Guild is proud to represent almost all of those highly skilled artists who work in the animation business.

The 2012 Oscar Nominations

2012-01-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

The big moment has arrived for 2012 as the nominations for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar Awards was released this morning.

While we congratulate all who were given the prestigious honor of being nominated for their work, we list below the break the nominations pertinent to our corner of the entertainment world.

And the Nominees are ...

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

"A Cat in Paris," Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli

"Chico & Rita," Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal

"Kung Fu Panda 2," Jennifer Yuh Nelson

"Puss in Boots," Chris Miller

"Rango," Gore Verbinski

SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)

"Dimanche/Sunday," Patrick Doyon

"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg

"La Luna," Enrico Casarosa

"A Morning Stroll," Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe

"Wild Life," Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby

VISUAL EFFECTS

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" Tim Burke, David Vickery, Greg Butler and John Richardson

"Hugo," Rob Legato, Joss Williams, Ben Grossman and Alex Henning

"Real Steel," Erik Nash, John Rosengrant, Dan Taylor and Swen Gillberg

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes," Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon," Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier

Add On: Rio from Blue Sky didn't get a "Best Animated Feature" nod, but it picked up a "Best Song" nomination.

The Jennifer Yuh Nelson Interview -- Part II

2012-01-24T00:32:00.000-08:00

Early sketch of the villain from "KFP2"

Jennifer Yuh Nelson spent a long time working on the first Kung Fu Panda. She describes the first picture's development as the more difficult of the two KFP features because they were developing the characters from the ground up, getting to know each one ...

TAG Interview with Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

With Kung Fu Panda 2, most of the major players were in place. But there was still a new villain, about which Jennifer relates this:

... Lord Shen was one of the first things we thought about when we began work [on KFP2 three years ago. A small group of us gets together. We get a lot of snacks, and we get in a room and start spitballing ideas. In the first movie, we had Tai Lung—a guy who could walk into a room and punch someone in the face. We thought, Why don’t we go in the opposite direction—somebody who is devious, sharp, and dangerous in a different way? We made him into a peacock, a character with speed and flash. ...

She is now at work on a new project, about which she is (understandably) mum.

The interview with JYN took place in her office on the DreamWorks Animation campus. So ... audio only. The video interview above? It's a different one. (Like you couldn't tell.)

Oscar Watch

2012-01-23T21:22:00.000-08:00

Here's an animated short in the race for the Little Gold Man that seems to have some oomph behind it:

... [Morris Lessmore], with a hybrid animation style, us[es] stop motion with miniatures, computer animation and traditional hand-drawn techniques. The Morris Lessmore that made it into the film is completely computer animated, but the crew created a miniature version of him too, which it placed inside the miniature sets as a guide for lighting for the animators.

Moonbot Studios is based in Shreveport Louisiana far out of TAG's jurisdiction, yet I know Animation Guild members who've worked there. Whether Moonbot can survive and thrive down on the Mississippi is an open question. But the sample here looks good.

The Jennifer Yuh Nelson Interview -- Part I

2012-01-23T00:07:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Yuh Nelson arrived at DreamWorks Animation after working in television for a half-dozen years as board artist, designer, and director. Her first boarding assignment at DWA was the hand-drawn feature Spirit. ...

TAG Interview with Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

(Jennifer says that her love of drawing horses has declined a wee bit after two-plus years of labor on that particular picture. Ah well ...)

After that came work on Sinbad, then Madagascar. When those finished, she heard about an embryonic project entitled Kung Fu Panda.

"I didn't know anything about it except the title. But I've loved martial arts movies since I was young, and knew I wanted to work on it. Had to work on it. ..."

Tax Breaks Forevah!

2012-01-22T21:19:00.000-08:00

Screams of anguish from Brit animation companies:

The UK's animation industry is "scrabbling for crumbs, selling up and shipping off" because production companies cannot compete against tax breaks offered overseas, the companies behind Wallace & Gromit, Peppa Pig and In The Night Garden have warned.

Animation UK, which represents producers including Aardman Animations and Astley Baker Davies, has written to George Osborne, Chancellor, warning him that Britain is losing its best animation talent, and calling for tax breaks before the industry is wiped out altogether.

The sector is "not seeking handouts to get a competitive advantage", but needs to be able to compete with animators overseas, particularly Ireland and Canada, where tax breaks and funding supply up to 50pc of budgets and create "a distorted market place we cannot survive in", it said in a letter to be delivered to the Treasury today. ...

Let us face facts. Tax breaks for motion picture production are rampant around the globe.

Yesterday, a union rep for an IA live-action local said to me that television and movie productions have galloped away from L.A. in droves, going to where tax and other cost breaks are large and plentiful:

"Lots of shoots are now happening on the east coast. Atlanta has a lot of movie work going on. The place is hopping. " ...

And so it goes. The Los Angeles animation scene has been (somewhat) shielded from poaching and job shifting because Southern California is where a concentration of animation talent resides, and critical mass results in gravitational pull.

But this happy phenomenon will not necessarily last forever. Once upon a time, cities in Canada and other parts of the United States had a tough time fielding professional, competent movie crews, so work remained in L.A. That stopped being the case a long while ago.

When the cost differences and tax breaks get big enough, even established California animation studios could start saying ...

"Heeey now!"

Animators and tech directors are not all that different from their live-action brethren. They are just as likely to pull up stakes and "go where the work is" in order to survive, if and when that work travels elsewhere.

Overseas Winter Box Office

2012-01-22T18:00:00.000-08:00

The numbers we care about:

... No. 5, Fox’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked ... Foreign gross total comes to $170 million.
DreamWorks Animation/Paramount’s Puss In Boots upgraded it overseas cume to $345 million thanks to a $8.7-million stanza at 4,503 playdates in 58 territories. ...

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn drew $4.48 million on the weekend ... Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, $330,000 in three markets ...

Worldwide totals for the above:

Alvin and the Chipmunks -- $294,171,000

Puss In Boots -- $492,724,000

The Adventures of Tintin -- $351,062,000

Beauty and the Beast -- $33,694,000

That last counts B & B's bounty in its 3-D incarnation.

DWA's Fortune Ranking

2012-01-22T17:40:00.000-08:00

I saw this last week, but since one of our fine trade paper mentions it ...

DreamWorks Animation is the only entertainment industry company on this year's annual Fortune list of 100 Best Companies to Work for, ranking 14th after taking the 10th spot a year earlier. ...

"What animates the animators here is the accessibility of CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who welcomes new hires and sends a daily update to the staff," Fortune said. "He makes it feel like 200 people work here, not 2,000," the magazine quoted one staffer as saying. ...

I'm in and out of DreamWorks Animation's campus all the time, and the morale is better than at other cartoon studios I visit. (Which isn't to say it's "ideal." There have been layoffs over the past year and a half, and some rehires. And of course Wall Street has its issues with the company's cash flow and stock performance.)

Still in all, as I ramble cubicle to cubicle and office to office, I find people relatively buoyant about their work situations.

Elton!

2012-01-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Elton John has had a pretty good record with animated features: Lion King. Gnomeo and Juliet And now there is this ...

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures has acquired film rights to Michael Buckley’s bestselling series Nerds, and will develop them as an animated family feature that Buckley will script. ...

The question I have is, what production entity will create Elton's new feature? And what director/board crew will be hired to lead development?

The Usual Stacked Deck

2012-01-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here's a big surprise:

Lori McAdams of Pixar, which also had a "no-poach" agreement with Lucasfilm, sent an internal email saying that "effective now, we'll follow a gentleman's agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement."

Gee. A big company. Colluding with other big companies to hold down wages. Who'd have thought?

Must be a treat for the congloms to have these come out now. I feel so bad for them.

As the Register says:

The emails are part of the Justice Department's evidence in its class action suit that accuses the tech firms of agreeing not to steal each other's staff so that they could artificially lower employees' wages by killing competition.

The only time it wasn't this way was when Disney and DreamWorks CEOs hated each other and the two companies were outbidding each other for talent. This was the middle nineties.

The State of the Box Office

2012-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Beauty and the Beast, they still remain in the Top Ten but decline 61%. The Mouse will make some nice coin, but the returns are not nearly as robust as The Lion King's ...

1. Underworld Awakening (Sony Pictures) NEW [3,078 Theaters] Estimated Friday $9.8M, Estimated Weekend $23.4M

2. Red Tails (LucasFilm/Fox) NEW [2,512 Theaters] Estimated Friday $6.2M, Estimated Weekend $17M

3. Contraband (Universal) Week 2 [2,870 Theaters] Estimated Friday $3.7M, Estimated Weekend $12.5M, Estimated Cume $46.2M

4. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Warner Bros) Week 5 [2,630 Theaters] Estimated Friday $3.2M, Estimated Weekend $9.5M, Estimated Cume $10M

5. Haywire (Relativity) NEW [2,439 Theaters] Estimated Friday $3M, Estimated Weekend $8.6M

6. Beauty And The Beast 3D (Disney) Week 2 [2,625 Theaters] Estimated Friday $2.1M (-61%), Estimated Weekend $8.5M, Estimated Cume $33.2M

7. Joyful Noise (Warner Bros) Week 2 [2,735 Theaters] Estimated Friday $1.7M (-49%), Estimated Weekend $6M, Estimated Cume $21.8M

8. Mission: Impossible 4 (Paramount) Week 6 [2,519 Theaters] Estimated Friday $1.6M, Estimated Weekend $5.5M, Estimated Cume $197.3M

9. Sherlock Holmes 2 (Warner Bros) Week 6 [2,485 Theaters] Estimated Friday $1.2M, Estimated Weekend $4M, Estimated Cume $177.8M

10. The Iron Lady (The Weinstein Co) Week 4 [1,076 Theaters] Estimated Friday $1M, Estimated Weekend $3.4M, Estimated Cume $12.4M

And Brad Bird's picture is about to cross the $200 million threshhold. Congrats, Brad!

Wage Increase

2012-01-20T22:53:00.000-08:00

Now with scrumptious Add On.

The Mouse has reviewed Robert Iger's performance, and found it good.

Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger received nearly $31.4 million in total compensation last year, an 11.9% increase from 2010, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ...

It's good to see Mr. Iger is running ahead of inflation with his salary increases. By contrast, the Hollywood labor organizations get 2% annual wage bump-ups in their collective bargaining agreements.

Add On: Here's a banker of a British state-owned bank, presiding over a stock price that has dropped by half, who's in line for a nice bonus:

... Royal Bank of Scotland prepares to offer a bonus of more than £1m to its chief executive, even though the state-controlled bank’s share price has almost halved in a year.

Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of RBS, and the bank’s board are determined to face down political pressure and will press ahead with a bonus payment to Stephen Hester likely to be in the range of £1.3m-£1.5m on top of a salary of £1.2m. Final figures will be settled next month. ..

The top dogs -- on both sides of the pond -- really do take care of their own. Regardless of results.

Retreat, Regroup

2012-01-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

It sounds like it's over ... all except for the semi-orderly withdrawal.

After a week in which their anti-piracy legislation got derailed by the full force of the Internet lobby, the mood in Hollywood was one of anger, frustration and a growing resignation that the entertainment industry will be forced to accept a much weaker law than originally envisioned.

A full-on counterattack by a tech industry opposed to the toughest elements in the congressional bills, including a well-publicized Wednesday shutdown by key Internet sites, halted the legislation.

With supporters defecting, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday postponed a key procedural vote. The lead sponsor of the companion bill in the House said he would redraft the proposed law in search of consensus. ...

Nothing like a gazillion petitions, e-mails and letters to focus a congress person's attention ...

I got a call today from one of the people from "Creative America" one of the groups helping the DGA, SAG-AFTRA, and the IATSE shepherd the anti-piracy bills through congress. He made reference to the unfairness of the tech industry's attack. I replied with my usual mantra:

"There is no fair. There's only what one side or the other has the leverage to get."

And we got into a back-and-forth about the merits of the bills, the threats of piracy on movie workers' livelihoods, also the unwillingness of the tech and internet industries to bend a little. I replied that it didn't look like those folks had to bend, given their muscle with congress.

He had no response to that.

This is a tough time for content conglomerates and movie unions. The digital age and the internet have upended almost every status quo: television viewing; movie attendance; dvd purchases. Long-time business models are, to put it mildly, in flux.

Major parties in the entertainment industry should have seen this coming, what with those coal-mine canaries called record companies. Capitol/EMI, Warner Records and the rest battled collapsing revenues by suing their customer base (always a great idea) twelve years ago, when college kids started downloading songs off the internet. Apple and iTunes saved some of the industry's bacon when they invented a new business model to which the public flocked, but the cake had already been baked. The era of selling little silver disks out of brick and mortar stores was O-ver.

So now movie studios are in the pressure cooker, fighting the wars the old-line record companies lost a decade ago. They'll have to change to survive and prosper, and it won't be easy. But few things are when you're in the throes of radical transformation.

The Animation Guild, like other Hollywood unions, has long supported the battle against internet piracy. The health of industry pension plans depend on it. As unions and guilds said today:

"We fought for this legislation because illegal Internet businesses that locate offshore expressly to elude U.S. laws should not escape the very same rules of law that currently apply to illegal U.S. websites," ...

For the moment, it seems the fight will be waged under current laws and regulations because the fight to push through SOPA and PIPA is at a standstill. But the problem of big-time internet theft is still out there, and it would be useful to have some sharp-edged weapon to combat it.

A representative from the DGA-SAG-AFTRA-IATSE Internet Piracy Group ("Creative America") will be at the next TAG General Membership meeting on Tuesday, January 31st to talk about the battle and legislation against internet piracy. If you have questions or issues, we suggest you BE there to voice them.

Chroniques des studios sardoniques, by Bob Foster

2012-01-20T13:51:00.000-08:00

French Tunes

2012-01-19T21:55:00.000-08:00

The land of wine, Brie and the Eiffel Tower rolls out its latest animated production in various parts of the globe.

... [Today] sees the release of A Monster in Paris in UAE cinemas, a French production that boasts all of the high-tech modifications of a Hollywood blockbuster: it is computer-animated, presented in 3D and features a noted voice cast in the French singer Vanessa Paradis, who is Johnny Depp's long-time girlfriend, and Danny Huston, a regular in big-budget productions such as Wolverine. ...

I had zero awareness of this movie until my younger son showed me clips of the picture on You Tube. It hasn't gotten a release in the States yet (or maybe a release is secured and not yet not announced) but the opus looks fairly slick. And if my computer and movie-oriented kid is aware of The Monster, something must be up.

France, little by little, has become a center for animation. Illumination Entertainment animates there at its newly-purchased studio. Animation schools abound. And of course there is the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

It ain't all about the U.S. of A. anymore. There are other world players, and the best ones don't appear to be in India. Funny how that happens.

Mega Question Mark

2012-01-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

The Reporter reports on three big-budget movies, two of them with animation directors directing live-action for the first time.

Brad Bird, THR says, had plenty of expert assistance and came out fine. Andrew Stanton the paper isn't so sure of.

But they end on a positive note, with the help of an Anonymous Person:

... "I've got a lot of faith in this guy," one former Disney insider says of Stanton. "Remember: Finding Nemo was supposed to be the first Pixar flop." ...

Me, I think the movie will take in some good-sized grosses. The trouble is, when you spend between $200 and $300 million on a picture, you decrease the Mother Conglomerate's chances for making a profit on the movie. It's one of the problems hand-drawn animate features had in the 1990s. Their budgets doubled, then doubled again. And the big profit margins turned narrow or negative.

The same thing applies to live-action extravaganzas. The more the production budget, the less the opportunity to end up in the black.

Nickelodeon Changes

2012-01-19T17:58:00.000-08:00

Today I visited Nick, and there's some differences at the studio since the last time I tromped through. ...

Over the holidays, sparkly new floors were installed in the central hallway, the entrance lobby, and the back door. (I like it. The new high-quality floor replaces black-and-white chessboard style flooring that was starting to bubble.) Cubicles, office walls and hallways are repainted. The color scheme is now white with a few color highlights hither and yon. (Nice clean look.)

Mark Taylor, the Nickelodeon studio topkick for a long stretch of years, retired at the end of 2011 and his office currently stands empty. (I was told that no replacement for Mark has come into the studio yet.)

The Robot and Monster crew was told yesterday, ten months after 26 episodes were greenlit for production, that their show was ending. (The artists are down, naturally, but keeping stiff upper lips: "You heard? We're kind of in mourning." ... "This isn't the first time a show has ended, right? We'll find other work ...")

I padded around to a lot of R and M's staff and offered condolences. I was able to give a teensy bit of good news: Because most of them have been at the studio eighteen months or more, they'll have health coverage for twelve to fifteen months after they exit.

DWA's Future Cash Needs

2012-01-18T16:55:00.001-08:00

The Nikkster's site is not sunny.

... [A]nalysts want to know how Katzenberg plans to distribute his films at the end of this year when his deal with Paramount expires. His silence about a potential replacement “leads us to believe that (he) may be seriously considering a self-distribution model, which would likely require some sort of capital raise, likely in the form of debt issuance” ...

The last ten years, I've watched DreamWorks Animation do a high wire act with a business model that requires it to turn out one hit film after another, and it's left me in awe.

As I've said before, the only other stand-alone company that performed the trick better was Pixar.

But now the marketplace is changing. More competition. More piracy. And the little silver disks aren't the hot sellers they used to be, for anybody. And DWA is out there all by its lonesome, the only company that isn't part of a big, fat entertainment conglomerate. (Jeffrey Katzenberg has maintained that he's happy being a solo corporation, but I've always believed that the goal was some sort of buyout. But hey, maybe I'm wrong.)

DWA's financial well-being is of concern to TAG because DWA is one of our largest contract studios, so DreamWorks future impacts our future. (Funny how that works.) I've thought for awhile that the features the studio produces have been on a steady, up-trending arc, creatively speaking, but will that be enough going forward?

Guess we'll find out.

Soon a Funeral?

2012-01-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

Hollywood and Hollywood unions (of which TAG is one) appear to be on the fuzzy end of the Internet Piracy popsicle stick:

In the space of a couple of days, Hollywood and its content creators lost the public relations war over Internet piracy SOPA legislation -- which now appears poised to crumble into a million bits of dust.

Wow.

The messaging industry never had control of the message.

The tech guys found a simple, shareable idea -- the Stop Online Piracy Act is Censorship -- made it viral, and made it stick.

Hollywood had Chris Dodd and a press release. Silicon Valley had Facebook.

It shouldacoulda been a fair fight. But it wasn’t. ...

But here's a cute irony: A Fox News contributor argues against SOPA even as Rupert Murdoch (supporter of SOPA; owner of Fox-News Corp.) rails for it.

... SOPA is a Pandora’s box of proposed regulations that would inadvertently make it easier for our government to censor the Internet. Current laws already allow owners of copyrighted material to get that content removed from unauthorized websites. But SOPA would mean entire sites could be shut down even for minor copyright infractions, a slippery slope that would undermine even good, legal content on the web and allow politically-motivated witch hunts against entire websites. ...

I wouldn't care to predict how this legislative struggle will come out. When large corporate interests are in a wrestling match, it's always risky to try and foretell outcomes. But we might be wise to start burial proceedings for the piracy legislations as it currently exists.

TV Ratings

2012-01-17T22:02:00.000-08:00

Enough about theatrical animation. How is Fox's Animation Domination doing? It seems pretty well.

[Thanks to the NFC playoffs,] "The Simpsons" jumped nearly 300 percent to a 6.8 rating in 18-49-year-olds, followed by the series premiere of Napoleon Dynamite which pulled an impressive 4.6 rating in the demo -- almost double that of recent time slot holder Allen Gregory. Family Guy and another Napoleon Dynamite rounded out the night with a 4.4 and a 3.6, respectively. Fox averaged 20.2 million for the night with a 8.0 rating among adults 18-49.

In the meanwhile, ABC and CBS are getting kicked in their scrawny, undernourished backsides ratings wise. Since ABC is owned by the Mouse, which ... so I've heard ... has quite a background with different kinds of cartoons, one would think that the alphabet network would try a frontal assault with some serious cartoon programming.

But such, sadly, is not the case.

Top Animation Grossers

2012-01-17T16:48:00.000-08:00

... of 2011.

5) Kung Fu Panda 2 -- $665.7 mill

8) The Smurfs -- $563.6 mill

9) Cars 2 -- $559.9 mill

11) Rio -- 484.6 mill

13) Puss in Boots* -- $479 mill

18) The Adventures of Tintin* -- $348.1 mill

21) Alvin and the Chipmunks* -- $273.8 mill

23) Rango -- 245.4 mill

33) Gnomeo and Juliet -- $194 mill

38) Lion King 3D -- $168.5 mill

45) Arthur Christmas* -- $146.7 mill

56) Happy Feet 2* -- $123.6 mill

In days gone by, there would have been nowhere near this many animated features released, let alone spotlighted in a "Top Grossers of ..." list.

The fact that the #5 feature for the year, Jennifer Yuh Nelson's Kung Fu Panda 2 is considered a "disappointment" by some of the bright lights of the media, is sort of mind-boggling. But maybe it's a neon marker that points out the strength of animation inside the movie marketplace.

What's equally mind-boggling is that the four movies above KFP2 have large amounts of animated characters and effects in them. Stars aren't the major drivers of box office anymore. Animation -- in all its varied forms -- now does that job.

* Still in theaters and bringing in moolah. So grosses and positions on the list could change.

Ultimate MoCap

2012-01-17T14:30:00.000-08:00

The Future of CGI w/ Michael Bay, Jon Favreau, Ray Liotta and Paul Scheer & Rob Huebel from Michael Bay

We have hardly scratched the motion capture surface ....

Who needs real life?

Longshot

2012-01-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

This doesn't sound good.

When Pixar's "Cars 2" lost the Golden Globe award for animated feature to ... "The Adventures of Tintin" ... it marked the first time in the history of the Globes' category that a movie from the beloved animation house failed to capture the top prize. ...

There's a first time for everything.

But seriously. I haven't met many people living in the Animation Community who think that Cars 2 will take home the Little Gold Man this year.

I haven't met many who are high on Tintin either, but never underestimate the power of Spielberg/Jackson in leveraging the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They are Big Shots. Animation people are anything but. Even with all the high-grossing films they have worked on.

Uncommercial

2012-01-16T17:50:00.000-08:00

I'm sure this will make executive hearts at Sony go pit-a-pat.

... Essex-based Lepra Health in Action has expressed "disbelief" at the scene in Aardman Animation's The Pirates! Adventures with Scientists.

The charity said the film, due for release in March, sees an arm fall off a crew member on a "leper-boat".

... The scene shows the arrival of the Pirate Captain on board a captive ship, demanding gold.

"Afraid we don't have any gold old man, this is a leper-boat," explains a crew member. "See," he adds as his arm falls off.

... "We have already received complaints from people affected by leprosy in Brazil and India” ...

Complaints? Who would have thought?

No word yet if there will be changes to Aardman's short about blind school girls and teenage cripples ...

Cynical

2012-01-16T16:27:00.000-08:00

But kind of true ...

The chart doesn't translate to animation work exactly, but some of the slots I would create (based on participation and observation) are:

HIGHER ON THE CARTOON PYRAMID

Studio CEO (with money/power)

Production Execs (with some power, leverage and money)

Feature Directors (with talent, artistic chops, and a bit of power)

Television Animation Executives

Television Animation Show Runners/Creators (talent, bit of power)

Feature Story Directors (with artistic talent, experience, bit of power)

Production Designers (with talent, resumes, bit of power)

Production Managers

Television Directors

Production Managers

Story Board Feature Artists

LOWER ON THE CARTOON PYRAMID

Television Timing Directors

Production Board Artists

Designers

Animation Checkers

Board Revisionists

Production Assistants

People will no doubt have their own pecking orders, and the orders change a bit from studio to studio, but this presents one viewpoint. (Mine.)

As an old timer told me today ...

The animation biz is getting more and more like live action, isn't it? Shorter gigs, jumping from studio to studio. Makes it more difficult. And there are less places to jump to than in live action."

Well, yes and no.

DreamWorks Animation has pretty long employment for numbers of people, while Disney Feature Animation, not so much. Disney Toons has relatively stable employment for a chosen few, while Disney TVA seems to have hired more artists and directors of late. (Though it's not near the go-go 1990s.)

Warner Bros. Animation has gotten busy again, and Nickelodeon chugs along.

Then there is The Simpsons, which is in a league all its own. Some folks have been working on that TV show for decades ... although the staff is leaner than in previous years.

(Live action has its own sets of frustrations. We will leave that for others to dissect.)

Maybe Not a Lock ...

2012-01-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

So Rango isn't a shoo-in. I guess the Golden Globes knows what it's doing.

Channing Tatum and Jessica Alba presented the animated feature film award to The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson.

... Or maybe the Globes/Foreign Press Association is sucking up to Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson?

Middle January Foreign Derby

2012-01-15T15:09:00.000-08:00

The ongoing box office tally of animation in foreign lands:

No. 4 was DreamWorks Animation’s Puss In Boots ... Weekend overall came up with $14.6 million ... lifting the film’s overseas gross total to $331.7 million.

No. 5, Fox’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, elevated its foreign gross total to $154.2 million, thanks to a $14.4 million weekend ...

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn grossed $3.4 million on the weekend ... Cume comes to $260.8 million.

Puss is approaching a worldwide gross of $500 million, with almost 70% of its ticket sales coming from abroad.

Tintin has rolled up $346.5 million around the globe, with over 80% of the money collected outside the U.S and Canada. And Alvin's latest, owns $271.6 million in worldwide totals, with 56.3% of that coming from abroad.

SOPA Trouble

2012-01-14T15:26:00.000-08:00

Now with Foxy Add On.

Apparently Hollywood content providers (Disney, Time-Warner, Viacom, News Corp., etc.) and the unions who have contracts with them (DGA, SAG, IATSE) have hit a rough patch with internet legislation ("Stop Online Piracy Act") that they favor:

Hollywood has a potential new adversary in its effort to pass expansive antipiracy legislation: President Obama.

A message posted on a White House blog on Saturday says that the Obama administration acknowledges the threat that foreign websites pose but it “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” ...

Bad news for Hollywood players. If SOPA goes down, they will need to develop other strategies to keep internet pirates from stealing movies and television shows.

This is a long-term headache, no matter how you slice it.

(The Nikkster's crew provides their take on developments here.)

Add On: Rupert, he no like Obama's SOPA position, and tweets so:

“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery ...”

No word yet on how much angry snark the News Corp king pin has dumped on Republican Darrel Issa, who is leading the charge against SOPA in the House.

Martin's Box Office

2012-01-14T00:47:00.000-08:00

Now with Add On!

On the long, Martin Luther King weekend, the Nikkster conjures early box office.

1. Contraband (Universal) NEW [2,863 Theaters] Friday $7.7M, 3-Day Weekend $22.9M, 4-Day Holiday $28M

2. Beauty And The Beast 3D (Disney) NEW [2,625 Theaters] Friday $5.5M, 3-Day Weekend $18.5M, 4-Day Holiday $25.6M

3. Joyful Noise (Warner Bros) NEW [2,863 Theaters] Friday $3.7M, 3-Day Weekend $12.3M, 4-Day Holiday $14.8M

4. Mission: Impossible 4 (Paramount) Week 5 [3,346 Theaters] Friday $3.5M, 3-Day Weekend $12.1M, 4-Day Holiday $14.6M, Est Cume $189.9M

5. Sherlock Holmes 2 (Warner Bros) Week 5 [3,155 Theater] Friday $2.5M, 3-Day Weekend $8.8M, 4-Day Holiday $10.6M, Est Cume $172.2M ...

Tintin, hanging onto the Top Ten mid-week, has now exited, running a cume of around $65 million. The feature, a hit in Europe, is a long way from that stateside.

The Mojo informs us that the early number projections seen above didn't quite hold up:

... [Beauty and the Beast's]$18.5 million debut was less than The Lion King's $30.2 million, though it was more than the Toy Story/Toy Story 2 double feature ($12.5 million) and seems to confirm that there is a decent audience for re-issues of classic movies. The movie's 3D share was 97 percent (up from The Lion King's 92 percent), and the audience gave the movie an "A+" CinemaScore.

Even though B and B hasn't had the gangbusters opening that Lion King enjoyed, the fact that it debuted at #2 means that Disney will continue to mine this particular vein of riches. (Beauty was converted to dimensional viewing before Lion King, but didn't get a wide release until it dawned on the execs that "Heey now! We're looking at a nice cash flow here!")

Viz Effx

2012-01-13T22:48:00.000-08:00

Reading through Below the Line's review of the year's big visual effects movies, one sentence jumped out:

... [O]ne problem ... making visual effects a victim, in a sense, of their own success – is that a “consistent level of knock-your-socks-off has made us numb.” ...

There's another problem for effects in the digital age. When people aren't numb from apes or dinosaurs or mind-bending airplane crashes, they are unimpressed with shots that used to jerk them upright in their theater seats.

Think about the long take. In the old days of film, a lengthy tracking shot that ran seamlessly for three or four minutes was truly impressive, because you knew that the actors were exchanging big blocks of dialogue for the entire scene, that the background elements were choreographed in real time, that you were, in short, watching an actual event.

Now the same tracking shot might be cobbled together from multiple takes, but computers humming in dark rooms make it appear as one. Audiences know this, so the real-time "Wow!" factor is gone. Now it's all tricks with pixels.

Party pix

2012-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Our official party photographer, ENRIQUE MAY, has come up with his portfolio detailing the fun that was had on the evening of January 6 at the Autry Museum.

Below the fold, a slideshow ...

Game Over?

2012-01-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

So now that Rango has won the Critics Choice Movie Awards for "Best Animated Feature", I guess we all know what picture goes on to win the Oscar ...

Or do we wait to see what some of the other Gold Trophy Ceremonies designate as "Best" before we fall all over ourselves with congratulations.

Expanding Cartoons

2012-01-12T21:57:00.000-08:00

A worried artist on "The Simpsons" asked me today if the animation business is growing or shrinking. When I said "growing" he was surprised. I told him that one island of animation expands while another erodes, but overall, there are more people working in the animation business in Southern California than ever before.

Of course, you have to count cgi work, visual effects, games, television graphics, animated features, and television product, but if you do, there are one hell of a lot of people engaged in making blocks of entertainment.

To underscore my point, there was this from a few days ago ... that I somehow overlooked ...

Fox Broadcasting Co. is betting on cartoons to challenge NBC's "Saturday Night Live."

The network, which already relies on animation to fill its Sunday night prime-time lineup, is getting even more invested in cartoons with a new Saturday block of cartoons that will compete with "Saturday Night Live," the reigning champ of weekend late-night TV..

Fox is about the only television network that believes in animation and keeps making new shows for new time slots. Of course, there is a reason it believes. Rupert and his minions keep making Big Money out of cartoons.

Now if only some other webs would try the same thing.

Gaming Shrinkage

2012-01-12T21:27:00.000-08:00

As internet streaming and downloads have impacted television, dvds and cds, so is it impacting another area of entertainment (and animation):

... [T]he video game industry saw sales drop 8% last year despite a deluge of highly anticipated titles ...

Some ... dollars have migrated to online, social and mobile games, as well as games that are digitally downloaded ... "December was very rough," [Anita] Frazier, NPD's game analyst,] said. "Because of the great slate of content that came to market during the fourth quarter, I had expected December sales to represent a larger portion of total-year sales than what occurred. ...

Lowered expectations and revenues. Sound familiar?

As the music industry was pushed from its business model of silver disks sold in brick and mortar stores a decade ago, so now are other leisure-time industries getting shoved. The video game industry is just the latest example. Everything is shifting to the internet cloud. Everything is getting priced in new and not always exciting ways.

Changes in the conglomerates' revenue streams are going to continue. Whether the conglomerates like it or not.

Moore Caballeros

2012-01-12T20:21:00.000-08:00

When in doubt ...

When out of things to write about ...

Turn to the Mega Collector ...

(Mega wondered why we never put up this Fred Moore drawing, circa 1942. We're rectifying that oversight now.)

Oncoming Dimensions

2012-01-11T21:27:00.000-08:00

Now with Add On!

Beauty and the Beast, which was converted to 3-D before The Lion King, is only now getting a nation-wide roll-out. (Big box office grosses have a magical pull on movie execs.) This week, corporate hearts at Diz Co. beat faster in anticipation of opening weekend ...

... “Beauty and the Beast” [is the second most popular new release in the Yahoo Search box.] Despite the original film being 20 years old, searches are starting to roar. Over the past seven days, web searches for “beauty and the beast” are up 44%. Related look-ups on “beauty and the beast 3d” are up over 238%. Roughly 25% of the searches come from kids 17 and under. In other words, people who weren't even alive when the film first hit back in 1991..

Since B and B 3-D has already been out on the little silver disks, it's anyone's guess how it performs two days hence.

Add On: Richard Corliss in TIME again give Beauty and the Beast a rave... and this about the new Dimensions:

... For the new edition, the 3-D filigree work — which comprises perhaps 30 or 40% of the film, allowing you to watch most of it without the glasses — sends wood shavings, bats, tree leaves and rain hurtling out of the screen. The process is sometimes an ornament, once or twice a distraction, but it doesn’t materially dilute the still-sublime experience. ...

And of course, there are more conversions to come. In the Fall we get this choice morsel:

A Mega Christmas

2012-01-11T16:51:00.000-08:00

Belated, but still worth posting ...

The above is the 1957 holiday card from UPA, then a thriving animation studio picking up awards left and right, now (sadly) a memory.

If you can't tell, this is a BIG art piece that unfolded to large proportions. In real life, it's a couple of feet wide, and maybe four feet long.

The Christmas greeting is brought to us by our esteemed friend, Mega Collector. (Like you wondered?)

Negotiations!

2012-01-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

One of our fine trade papers notes upcoming contract talks:

... Hollywood's below-the-line unions have set March 5 as a start date for contract negotiations with the congloms ...

When the trades talk about "below the line," they mean the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employes, the Teamsters, and any other Hollywood union that isn't SAG, DGA or WGA.

In other words, us guys.

What you should note here is that The Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE, was chucked out of the "West Coast Bargaining Unit" -- the group that Variety is referring to -- back in 1982.

(We were kicked out for being uppity*. TAG has negotiated by its lonesome ever since.)

This time around, I'll be sitting in the big negotiations, but I will be sitting as an observer, not a participant. Just like always. (We always like to be there because we are tied into the Health and Pension Plans, and what everybody else gets, we also get.)

As best we can tell, TAG's negotiations will take place in April or May, after the Basic Agreement has been negotiated and (hopefully) ratified.

* As used above, uppity means "Striking too much."

The Disney Experience

2012-01-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

I spent part of my day inside the hat building on Riverside Drive for the first time in weeks. Work is humming merrily along on Wreck-It Ralph. A couple of artists said ...

"The script for Frozen had a good table read. Management liked it, and we're putting it up in story reels. They want a screening in the next couple of months ..."

"We're gonna make Frozen in about a year. That's what we seem to always get, a year. Every time we make the tight deadline, we make sure we'll get a tight deadline the next time ..."

Maybe Diz Co. is more focused on schedules and budgets these days. Because they seem to be keeping a lid on spending. Maybe because of this:

"John Carter," the $250 million sci-fi epic ... may be the biggest studio gamble since "Avatar." The film doesn't hit theaters until March, but reports are rampant that "John Carter" has gone over budget and required costly reshoots. ...

"How does something like this get green lit?" one film financier told TheWrap. "It's insane. The only people who could justify a budget like this are true superstar filmmakers like Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and George Lucas. Guys who have a proven history and who have created billions." ...

If Carter opens and sustains interest, then everything is roses and lollipops and the Mouse goes on to its next triumph. And if not, then Richard Ross points his finger at (the departed) Dick Cook and hopes that Wreck-It Ralph and Brave are major hits.

Retirement Saving in a Freelance World

2012-01-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

When Newbies waltz into my office, I always present to them the 21st century realities of the animation business, one reality being:

"Don't anticipate spending you career at one studio. If you're one place for five years, that's exceptional. You'll be working at lots of differents companies, both freelance and on staff. One or two decades from now, you'll be working at places that haven't been started yet ..."

That being the case, it's more important than ever that you sock loot away for your eventual geezerhood. Happily, TAG member Jennifer H. Jerrard has put up a fine post detailing some of the things people in the biz (both animation and visual effects) should be doing now. ...

... Those who don’t plan to work until they drop will need some means of paying for food and housing in their old age. Social Security alone might not be enough.

The Los Angeles visual effects industry does not offer a safety net for its retirees. Visual effects might earn big money at the box office, but VFX artists and VFX studios do not share in those profits. VFX artists do not earn ongoing income from a project after the project ends. When they retire, they’ll be on their own.

The older VFX artists I know already have some kind of plan for their future. Some left the VFX industry for better compensation at 839 studios, and some left VFX altogether. The rest save their money, pay down their debt, work towards home ownership, start their own businesses, create their own intellectual property, invest or practice some combination of the above. ...

For artists who spend their careers under the feathery wings of The Animation Guild, there is a bit more security. Things like:

* A monthly pension check from the MPIPHP to go with the Social Security check.

* Retiree medical benefits under the MPIPHP.

* A lump sum payment from the Individual Account Plan of the MPIPHP that can be rolled over into a tax-sheltered retirement account.

* A 401(k) Retirement Account from TAG.

My two cents: The best move you can make when you get into this business is to live below your means, pay yourself first, and assume that you will have to retire on your own stash even if that is not, three decades down the Great Highway of Life, the actual case.

When I was thirty-nine years old, I didn't have a pot in which to dump change from collecting empty Coke bottles. Then I got a series of jobs that actually paid something, and I made up my mind to put as much money away as possible, because I didn't want to be in a position where I was out of work and had no savings.

Again. Strange, huh?

Very slowly, I learned where to put extra money, and where not. I'm not a licensed financial advisor, but I believe that simplicity and low costs are the best strategies for most people, which has led me to put my money in:

Vanguard Total Stock Market Index

Vanguard Total Bond Market

Vanguard Total International Stock Index

Vanguard Treasury Inflation Protected Securities

I don't use an "Investment Advisor" since he or she usually skims 1% or 2% (plus commissions) off the top. I believe that every dollar you pay an Investment Person is a dollar you take out of your own pocket.

I further believe if your age is 25 to 45 then your stock/bond allocation should be 60%/40% ...

That if your age is 45 to 60 your stock/bond allocation should be 50%/50% ...

And if you are over the age of 60 your allocation should be 40% stock/60% bonds (maybe even 35%/65%.)

Whenever I've gotten tricky and invested in more exotic items, like sow belly futures or individual stocks, I have gotten burned. The small secret about smart investing is that it's simple ... if you allow it to be. The sad part is that many people start making it complicated by going a twisty route chasing hot tips and (ultimately) losing their shirts.

So keep it simple and straightforward. And know that time is on your side. It's close to impossible to outthink or outguess the markets. So don't waste time and energy trying.

The Carlos Saldanha Interview

2012-01-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

TAG Interview with Carlos Saldanha

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

Born and raised in Brazil, Carlos Saldanha has long been a pillar at Blue Sky Studios ...

Mr. Saldanha came to New York a few decades ago to train at the School of Visual Arts, where he focused on computers and their graphics. While there he made two animated shorts that made a splash on the festival circuit. Soon after, Chris Wedge -- one of Carlos's instructors -- invited him to join a small computer-based studio named Blue Sky. Animating and directing commercials and shorts, Mr. Saldanha moved over to co-direct Blue Sky's Ice Age, and his career has been on an ascending trajectory ever since.

We talked on January 6, 2012.

Roy Disney's Farewell

2012-01-09T03:04:00.000-08:00

Eight years and one month back, the ongoing battle between Roy Disney and Michael Eisner came to a (temporary) end with this ...

ROY EDWARD DISNEY

December 3, 2003

Dear Disney Cast Members,

It was nearly 20 years ago that a small group of us recognized that dramatic changes were necessary to reinvigorate and reenergize the Disney Company. We changed the composition of the Board and assembled a new leadership team headed by Frank Wells and Michael Eisner. I returned to the Disney cast and, working as a team, we planted the seeds that rekindled the spirit and creativity that is synonymous with Disney. Those efforts paid off handsomely in the late '80s and early '90s. Once again, Disney was admired for the wholesome family entertainment it brought to millions of people of all ages. Together we created the dreams and excitement that made Disney respected and beloved throughout the world. We succeeded in recapturing the dream born of Walt and my father and the heritage they left us.

Sadly, times have changed. Michael Eisner has lost sight of the vision upon which this Company was founded. The focus has shifted to the chase for the quick buck instead of a dedication to new and high quality ideas, the development of enduring value. This has led to division within the Disney work force, a revolving door of managers, and the exodus of too many of our most creative and inspired employees.

For the last several years, Michael Eisner has done his utmost to isolate me from the members of Disney's Animation Department and exclude me from participation in decision making regarding the Department. Most recently, I was prevented from even attending the Animation Department screening of three feature animation projects. The collegiality and openness that once typified the Disney workplace has been destroyed.

It is against this backdrop that I had no choice but to resign as Chairman of Disney's Animation Department and as a member of Disney's Board of Directors. This has been a very painful decision. I am torn between my duties and loyalties to all of you who have made my journey so memorable and special, and the need to preserve the Disney heritage for future generations. However, I cannot stand idle as the heart and soul of this Company is being systematically eliminated by senior management protected by an ineffective Board of Directors. This is a Board that seeks to avoid constructive tension necessary to guide management through difficult times. Instead, it is a Board that seeks to stifle dissent and, to that end, has asked me to leave the Board of Directors.

Although this is not how and when I would have liked to leave the Disney Company, I assure you that I view it not as an isolated and sad event, but as part of a process. I hope it is not too late for the Disney Board of Directors to finally recognize that fundamental change is needed to restore the Disney luster, nurture and protect the wonderful characters that together we have developed and, most importantly, to create the environment within the workplace necessary to give life to new Disney icons for the generations to come.

As I now set off on a different course, I cannot fail to publicly and openly once again express to all of you my most heartfelt thanks. I am grateful that we have shared this journey. Without you, your contributions and camaraderie, we would not have been able to make the magic and wonder that is Disney. I hope that one day soon the Disney Board gets the message.

Yours faithfully,

Roy E. Disney

And so began Roy E. Disney's second campaign to oust a Disney chief executive.

The first was Ron Miller, whom Roy was successful in eliminating in 1984. The second was Michael Eisner. Roy saw Mr. Eisner depart in 2006, after a proxy fight and press/internet campaign, and he then rejoined the Board as Director Emeritus.

The reason for the fights between two Disney CEOs and Roy Disney were similar. Neither Ron Miller nor Michael Eisner (at the end) gave R. E. Disney much respect. They viewed him as a lightweight, made that view clear, and in retaliation, Roy brought both of them down.

I wasn't privvy to much of the back-and-forth between Ron Miller and Roy Disney during the first corporate dust-up. I was a lowly feature animation employee down in the trenches. But during that second battle, I happened to have a lengthy conversation with Roy about what was going on.

The occasion was one of TAG's Christmas parties. Roy had launched SaveDisney.com, and was talking to shareholder groups and pension funds about pressuring Eisner to resign. And he was looking for allies wherever he could find them.

A labor union not might seem like a natural fit as "best friend" for a Disney family member, but a lot of Disney animation employees were ticked at management running the House of Mouse. So when Roy showed up at two Animation Guild holiday festivities (he was invited by TAG board member Karen Nugent), they welcomed Roy with open arms.

It was at the first party that Mr. Disney told me this:

"They [Disney management] fired me. Only I quit before I could get fired. Michael wouldn't let me come to my office at the Feature Building. Wouldn't tell me about screenings or meetings. I didn't like things that were going on and said so, so they were getting ready to kick me off the Board of Directors. But I left before they could do it."...

I always kind of understood the wrestling match between Ron and Roy. They were members of the same family, and they were having a feud. Ron Miller thought the status quo was okay; Roy wanted more changes. Ron won the first round and Roy left the company, then Roy won the second round and Ron was forced out.

But why Michael Eisner, who had always been careful to keep Roy Disney within the Golden Circle, got high-handed and started ostracizing Disney from corporate perks and functions that Roy had enjoyed for two decades, was always a mystery. I asked Kim Masters, author of Keys to the Kingdom, why Michael did it. She speculated:

"I guess Michael thought he was the company and didn't need Roy. But he didn't have the last name Disney, you know? Michael loved being CEO, he loved being the head of Disney, but I couldn't tell you why he treated Roy the way he did. ..."

I have my own theory. I think human beings often get caught up in their own self-importance. When they are surrounded by people who keep telling them how wonderful and indispensable they are, they begin believing it. And they lose sight of the cold reality that nobody is indispensable, that nobody can stand forever against bad news and powerful enemies with a grudge.

Just ask Moammar Gadhafi, or Louis the XVI. Or Michael Eisner.

* The reason for this post now? In the course of house cleaning today, I came across Roy's letter, sent to my Disney employee wife eight years ago. It started me reflecting.

Foreign B.O.

2012-01-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

Fragrant with the high-flying Sherlock.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows claimed the foreign theatrical circuit’s No. 1 box office spot for the first time with a weekend tally of $43.4 million ...

No. 2 on the weekend was 20th Century Fox’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, which claimed $30.1 million from 7,120 sites in 62 markets, and pushed its overseas gross total to $128.4 million. ...

And some of the other animation titles?

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn bagged $5.3 million. ... Foreign cume stands at $253.8 million.

... Real Steel, $207.4 million ... The Lion King 3D, $74.3 million ...

Lastly, Puss in Boots has a foreign total in the neighborhood of $311,600,000.

Adios to a Disney Exec

2012-01-08T18:34:00.000-08:00

Wow. That was a short run.

... Controversial marketing executive MT Carney is on her way out at the Walt Disney Co., sources confirm ... Carney, who joined Disney under chairman Rich Ross in April 2010 as president of worldwide marketing despite no experience in the film business, has been the subject of months of speculation about her future at the studio. A source says Carney has not been in her Burbank office at Disney in several weeks ...

Disney declined to comment.

I'll bet they declined. The rapid decapitation says it all.

New Media!

2012-01-08T18:07:00.001-08:00

Tom Hanks gets animated on the Intertubes.

... Tom Hanks has created an animated science-fiction show that initially will stream exclusively on Yahoo in what is the giant Internet portal’s first foray into narrative storytelling. ...

The show, called Electric City, is a production of Reliance Entertainment and Playtone, the latter being a TV and film company owned by Hanks and Gary Goetzman.

Hanks will voice the lead character in Electric City and Yahoo will roll out about 20 episodes, each one roughly four minutes long ...

How fancy or intricate EC will be, I couldn't say. It's doubtful the budget will be ... ah ... gargantuan. Despite Yahoo's representation of it being "the most" the net portal has ever paid for a scripted show. (It's the first and only scripted show, after all.)

But TAG has a "new media" clause in its contract, so we could negotiate a deal with Reliance/Playtone, in any event. That would certainly be the goal.

Your Early January Box Office

2012-01-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

The low budget horror flick bumps Brad's spy opus down a notch.

1. The Devil Inside (Paramount) NEW [2,285 Theaters] Friday $15M, Estimated Weekend $30M

2. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Paramount) Week 4 [3,555 Theaters] Friday $5.7M (-45%), Estimated Weekend $19M, Estimated Cume $169.1M

3. Sherlock: Game Of Shadows (Warner Bros) Week 4 [3,603 Theaters] Friday $4.3M (-44%), Estimated Weekend $13M, Estimated Cume $156.5M

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sony) Week 3 [2,950 Theaters] Friday $3.3M (-37%), Estimated Weekend $10.8M, Estimated Cume $76.3M

5. War Horse (DreamWorks/Disney) Week 3 [2,783 Theaters] Friday $2.7M (-47%), Estimated Weekend $8.5M, Estimated Cume $55.9M

6. Alvin & The Chipmunks (Fox) Week 4 [3,425 Theaters] Friday $2M (-71%), Estimated Weekend $9.5M, Estimated Cume $111.6M

7. We Bought A Zoo (Fox) Week 3 [3,170 Theaters] Friday $2.1M (-55%) Estimated Weekend $8M, Estimated Cume $56.1M

8. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features) Week 5 [809 Theaters] Friday $1.6M, Estimated Weekend $5.5M

9. The Adventures Of Tintin (Paramount) Week 3 [3,006 Theaters] Friday $1.6M (-63%), Estimated Weekend $6.7M, Estimated Cume $62M

10. New Year’s Eve (Warner Bros) Week 5 [1,864 Theaters] Friday $1.1M (-55%), Estimated Weekend $3.5M, Estimated Cume $52.3M

It appears that Tintin is fading rapidly. The boy journalist doesn't have the same mojo on this side of the Atlantic that he enjoys in Europe.

The Party

2012-01-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

The Animation Guild's big January bash was going like gang-busters when I staggered off to home. Hope everybody had a good time.

For the second year in a row, the Autry Museum did an outstanding job. Maybe we'll get some pictures up by and by.

Add On: It was terrific catching up with old friends. I fell into conversation with a couple of recent retirees who said that having the MPIPHP pension plan there when work assignments slowed down to a trickle saved them when they badly needed help.

That's the nice thing about "safety nets." They prevent people from having to downsize to a studio apartment in Barstow. Or worse.

The Live-Action Remake

2012-01-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

Disney moves ahead with mining the catalogue.

The studio has tapped Robert Stromberg, the production designer behind the billion-dollar grossing Avatar and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, to direct Maleficent, the company’s live-action take on Sleeping Beauty. ...

I can see the new take on the Old Classic having a visual splendor. And Jolie could well make a terrific evil-doer. But I'm not sure of Woolverton turning out a crackerjack script.

Maybe I'm too much the Negative Ned.

New and Different?

2012-01-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

Gore Verbinski and his creative group worked for twelve months on story reels for Rango. Then they handed the reels off to Industrial Light and Magic so the studio could work its magic.

"Gore talked to ILM's animators as if they were actors. He let them embrace a character and own it." ILM learned to think in terms of entire sequences, not just individual shots ...

I donno. I must live a sheltered life. Because I recall Woolie Reitherman talking to animators like they were actors, back in the day. And I remember working in sequence format. Off in the olden times. I believe it's been done that way for a few years.

Like since 1936.

But it's great that ILM has learned to think in sequence format, now that the format is ... oh ... seventy-six years old.

Deep Thought

2012-01-06T15:05:00.000-08:00

Watching the clip of the new Tangled short, I had what you call an epiphany ...

I wish that Tintin had been made with this animation team ... in this animation style.

The motion capture just doesn't do it for me.

Elton and Animation

2012-01-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

The rock star talks about his cartoon work.

"I remember Jeffrey Katzenberg showing me 'The Lion King' about four weeks before it came out, and it had no 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight,'" John remembered in a conversation with TheWrap. "I was so upset, and I told him so. And he put it back in and it won an Oscar." ...

Sir Elton has had other animated projects that were up and down.

"[Gnomeo and Juliet] died so many times and was resuscitated so many times," said John, who also produced the "Romeo and Juliet"-style story about a pair of garden gnomes from feuding yards. "We were determined to get it made, and in the end it happened."

But there were some near death experiences for G & J. TAG blog reported on one of them back in 2006:

Disney's animated feature "Gnomeo and Juliet," which has been in and out of development for some years, is allegedly out again... The flick, with a garden gnome as a central character, is now cancelled. Insiders say a well-known Pixar executive asked last week at a meeting: "Why are we making this?" After a long silence (SFX: crickets), the exec said "Well, we're not." So, farewell for the second time to "G & J". It was fun while it lasted.

The exec was John Lasseter. After he cut the project loose, it bounced around, finally getting produced in Canada under Kelly Asbury's direction and ultimately grossing $193,967,670 in theaters around the world.

Line Readings

2012-01-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week a long-time feature animation director talked to me about working with actors on recording stages ...

"... If I have twelve takes of a line, I always figure I have more than enough to work with. Lots and lots of takes you don't need, unless the actor just isn't getting it. Years ago, I started marking the takes we liked up in the booth, while we were recording. We'd circle the good ones. We didn't wait until we listened to them later. Saved us time ..."

Some animation directors like lots of takes. I've known a few who got up into triple digits, and that can work okay, but there's the danger of listening to thirty or fifty different deliveries of a written line and being a little, ah, bewildered:

Why did we have him read it that way? ... What were we thinking? ... Take 22 sounds a lot like 34 ... Shit, so does number 16 ...

Woolfgang Reitherman, Disney animator and director, used to have story artists and animators gather in his office to pick voice takes. He would whittle the number down a little and then people would vote on their favorite readings. ("Who likes take 12? Who votes for 16?"). Woolie thought nothing of taking half of one take and half of another to get the shadings he desired. (That part was all right. But the town meeting aspect, with all those votes, seemed to me a little bit overkill.)

Director John Ford was famous for doing one or two takes and moving on. William Wyler owned the nickname William Forty Takes Wyler" for a reason, but actors in his pictures won a lot of Academy Awards. In the modern era, Clint Eastwood has little patience for actors who want beaucoup takes ("Why do you want to waste everybody's time?")

Most certainly, there is no single "right" way to make a good movie, but I'm in the "less is better" camp. As Mr. Eastwood famously said: "You've got to have the picture there in your mind before you make it. And if you don't, you're not a director, you're a guesser."

Motion Picture Nursing Home Roadblock

2012-01-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

A couple of years back, the Motion Picture and Television Fund was on the brink of closing its nursing care facility out in Woodland Hills, and a firestorm broke out. Friends and relatives of nursing care residents went ballistic that their loved ones were being shunted to new facilities. Soon after, a lot of meetings and letter writing came about over the problem, and changes at the MPTF happened.

Including the retention of the Motion Picture and Television Fund's nursing facility. Now, however, there have been some new bumps in the road ...

After months of negotiations, the Motion Picture & Television Fund is close to finalizing a deal with Kindred Healthcare of Louisville, Ky., to invest in and provide long-term acute care services at the Woodland Hills complex that includes the nursing home.

Under the proposed agreement, Kindred would invest $10 million to remodel an existing hospital building and would lease hospital and rehabilitation beds from the fund. That would give much needed revenue to the fund, which provides various social and healthcare services to entertainment industry workers.

But the signing of the deal, which was originally expected to be completed by the end of 2011, has been delayed by uncertainty over whether Congress will extend a moratorium on the building of long-term acute care facilities. ...

People who have followed this drama might be asking: "Hey. Wasn't this solved already?"

The answer to that is. "Yes, everyone thought so." There was a deal in place with Providence Health and Services, but that deal ultimately fell through.

So now here we are, with a new deal that is waiting for Congress to get off the dime.

Movie and Television Piracy: Two Sides

2012-01-04T15:50:00.000-08:00

Most of the Hollywood entertainment guilds and unions are backing the Stop Online Piracy Act that's now wending its way through congress. (The legislation also has the backing of the entertainment conglomerates, otherwise known as Content Providers.)

But there's a problem: ...

... The bill has exposed a growing fracture between technology and entertainment companies. Digitally oriented companies see SOPA as dangerous and potentially destructive to the open Web and a step toward the kind of intrusive Internet regulation that has made China a global villain to citizens of the Web.

Entertainment companies think that technology companies are aiding and abetting thieves on a broad scale ...

As do many of the labor organizations that have contracts with them. And it's difficult to blame them:

* The motion picture and television business relies heavily on “downstream” revenue from the exploitation of our product in secondary markets, after initial distribution on television or in a movie theatre.
* The music industry has sustained itself for decades on the fundamental model of investment in and the sale of sound recordings. The Internet has become a vital sales and distribution platform for music, but online theft of sound recordings has made it increasingly difficult for recording artists to earn a living.

* Currently, downstream revenues from the reuse of feature films and television programs and lawful sales of sound recordings generate $1.4 billion annually in essential residuals and royalties for our members.

Residuals and royalties also play a significant role in funding the health and pension plans that benefit all of our members. These benefits provide a guaranteed safety net for our members, and are part of our industry’s long-established and collectively bargained agreements.

* In 2009, residuals derived from the sale of Features to Free TV and/or Features and Free TV to supplemental markets (Pay TV, DVD, viewing on airplanes, etc.) funded 71% of DGA’s Basic Pension Plan; 65% of the MPI Health Plan (for IATSE Members); and 31% of SAG's Pension and Health Plan. ...

So it's easy to see why the IATSE (of which we're a part), SAG and the DGA are trying to beat back the piracy thing with new laws that have some teeth in them. Piracy hits residuals, guts pensions, decimates health care. Even so, some of the rank and file doesn't agree with their leadership's current stances:

... Union members who work on movies and TV... have put together a petition urging the MPAA, IATSE, IBT, WGA, SAG, DGA, and AFTRA to formally oppose both SOPA and PIPA, noting that it would be a barrier to innovation that Hollywood desperately needs, wouldn't actually stop infringement, and would also be an online security nightmare ....

The tech supporters are ticked that amendments to SOPA and the House Bill were swatted down in committee, and now red flags are being waved across the internets. "Dicatorship! Unworkable! The end of the web as we know it!"

Etcetera.

Our take: This isn't a problem that will be going away in the next century or three. The internet will continue to exist and expand, and pirates will continue to maraud inside it. The proposed legislation may or may not stem some of the depradations, but everyone should understand that any solution is temporary. New bills will roll down the congressional pike, new work-arounds in the real world will be used to defeat the new "fixes."

I think the best long-term solution is to collect a small levy on distribution and have the money flow into a common trust to be distributed among content providers. It might not be an ideal solution, but in the reality-based world, there is no perfect answer. There is only better and worse. Movie workers need pension and health benefits. The internet needs to continue innovating.

The Comments

2012-01-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

As promised in the comment threads, I brought up the Very Important Topic of the Comments Conundrum with the Animation Guild Executive Board last night, and here is the board's thinking:

Fine the way it is.

I know some here are just driven to distraction with the anonymity, the unprofessionalism, the care-free flaming that sometimes goes on, but here's my take:

If people don't like the comments, don't read them. The staff and I will, from time to time, delete horrid and unseemly remarks, but new comments aren't moderated so they will stay up for a bit, even if they are ghastly. (One board member thought we shouldn't do ANY moderating, just let the good times roll.)

However. There will be some monitoring, though it will be light. People around here have other duties besides moderating comments on a medium-sized blog.

That's all for now. Carry on.

Universal Cartoons!

2012-01-03T16:42:00.000-08:00

The entity formerly known as Universal Cartoon Studios (and currently Universal Animation Studios) is back in business after a looong hiatus ...

The cartoon factory has moved from the Black Tower in North Hollywood to the center of Glendale, where it's creating a string of new Curious George episodes for PBS. I walked through the place for the first time this afternoon, and was happy to see a lot of familiar faces.

"We've got a batch of new episodes to do, and most of the original artistic staff has come back to work on them. We've got low overhead here and hope to keep things going ..."

Universal closed its cartoon facility in the skyscraper a couple of years ago. Permanently, I was told. But the future is unpredictable, PBS wanted new shows, and here we are.

Sometimes the surprises you receive are pleasant, instead of the other way around.

(UCS/UAS came into existence in the early nineties. They created a number of shows ... and lots of direct-to-video Land Before Time features -- over wo decades. The place never quite reached major animation studio status, but they always employed anywhere from fifteen to fifty artists. Good to see that they're out of hibernation.)

Ronald Searle, RIP

2012-01-03T16:18:00.000-08:00

One of the great cartoonists moves on.

British cartoonist Ronald Searle, best known for creating the fictional girls' school St Trinian's, has died aged 91. ...

Searle's spindly cartoons of the naughty schoolgirls first appeared in 1941, before the idea was adapted for film.

... [H]e was a savage satirist, and some of his darker material was informed by his time as a prisoner of war during World War II.

The St Trinian's girls first appeared in 1941 There, he worked on the infamous "Railway of Death" - a Japanese project to create a rail link between Thailand and Burma, the construction of which led to the death of more than 100,000 labourers, including 16,000 Allied prisoners.

Some of the work he created whilst being held captive is displayed at the Imperial War Museum in London ....

Searle's work had a sizable impact on animation artists. Look no further than Tim Burton's designs for Nightmare Before Christmas and other stop motion features to see it.

Our condolences to Mr. Searle's family.

CA Bill 459: The End of Employee Misclassification

2012-01-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

Back in September, we wrote about the US Department of Labor's focus on ending employee misclassification. As we rang in the new year, we should have also celebrated California's commitment to supporting that change with the enactment of California State Bill 459.

SB 459 helps to crack down on the misclassification of independent contractors by providing the worker with notice of how he or she has been classified and how to get help if misclassified. It also improves the enforcement process to create greater financial disincentives for employers who misclassify their employees.

Penalties for misclassifying employees range from $5,000 to $15,000 per violation for isolated violations. Where there is a pattern or practice of violations, the penalty range increases — $10,000 to $25,000 per violation. In addition to the monetary penalties, employers who violate the new law are required to post a "prominent" notice on their public website stating, among other things, that they have "committed a serious violation of the law" by willfully misclassifying employees.

The use and abuse of independent contractors poses a serious threat to workers’ rights and undermines working conditions for all workers. This will be a game-changing law for studios who enjoy misclassifying their artist employees for profit. With the stiff financial penalties written into the law, its easy to imagine a company taking a fresh look at their employment practices.

Paramount = Top Dog

2012-01-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

Paramount/Viacom had a quite good year.

Paramount Pictures Tops All Studios With the Biggest Box Office Gross in 2011, Earning $5.17 Billion Worldwide ...

The interesting part is that so much of Paramount's record year was propelled by animation. Small items like:

Rango ($123.5 mil); Kung Fu Panda 2 ($165.2 mil); Tintin ($51.4 mil); Puss In Boots ($145.8 mil); Transformers: Dark of the Moon ($352.4 mil) ...

And of course all the other live action extravaganzas that were larded with visual effects in 2011. Sit through almost any live action offering, and you'll find an effects house in the credit roll. More often than not you'll find three.

Where once there were matte shots and miniatures done under studio roofs, now we have legions of tech directors, animators and all the rest working to get shots completed at far-flung subcontractors. Few work for the entity that controls the copyright.

But the ante keeps going up ... and the amount of work climbs right along with it. Now if somebody would throw in health and pension benefits.

New Year's Greetings

2012-01-02T21:31:00.000-08:00

(Via Candace Redinger via Tom Sito ...).

... To all animators

New Year Greetings

from Norman McLaren

My best wishes for seven hundred and fifty six million, eight hundred and sixty four thousand frames of hale and hearty good health ...

Norm writes the whole salutation on an exposure sheet.

You remember exposure sheets, don't you? They were long yellow sheets of paper (the size of a legal pad) that animators used.

You remember frames of film, don't you? ...

World Take Over?

2012-01-02T16:32:00.000-08:00

So are animation directors going to "dominate" live action?

... [Andrew] Stanton seems to have found the perfect project for his first live action debut, and one, which he has, a personal passion for. The plot plays to his strengths, surrounding the adventures of John Cater, a civil war vet lost in space after being transported to Mars, and to a wide new world.

It's certainly true that the dividing lines between live action and animation have been melting away. (Avatar? Harry Potter? Terminators? Smurfs?)

But come on. Animation directors will now be ruling the film world? Why don't we all take a deep breath and wait until John Carter of Mars actually comes out?

...The studio is so confident in Andrew Stanton's $250 million sci-fi epic "John Carter" that it is releasing the film in the soft month of March. But response to the movie's trailers has not been strong. ...

$250 million is a lot of production cost to climb over. You need to rake in mucho dinero before you reach the break-even point. Or so I've been told.

Foreign B.O.

2012-01-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

Not all the numbers are in, but animated stuff seems to be performing. ...

... The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn opened via Paramount No. 1 or No. 2 in [Australia.] ... Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked ... collected $24.4 million on the weekend – up 48% from last weekend, says Fox -- from 6,764 locations in 57 territories. ... Arthur Christmas elevated its overseas cume to $96.9 million since its Nov. 11 opening overseas after a $3.5 million weekend at 3,930 sites ...

And Puss in Boots has now earned north of $400 million worldwide, with $255.2 million coming from overseas turnstyles.

Happy New Year! The last day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2012-01-01T03:22:00.000-08:00

Yet another "real life" card, with an artistic rendering of the family Siamese cats.

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Weeper

2011-12-31T23:45:00.000-08:00

I haven't read the Steve Jobs biography. But Sharon Waxman has. And one of Mr. Jobs' multipe qualities leapt out at her ...

I knew Steve Jobs was a visionary. What I didn’t know was that he was such a cry-baby

It's one revelation of Walter Isaacson’s biography that hasn’t gotten much attention since the book hit the best-seller list a few weeks ago.

Along with the bullying, the angry outbursts, the moments of epiphany, the parking in the Handicapped spot – Jobs’s penchant for waterworks is striking.

Every time he experiences a setback or a bad outcome, he weeps. He cries over employees ditching. He cries over losing in a negotiation. He cries over his team missing deadlines. ...

I never laid eyes on Mr. Jobs. All I know about him is what I read ... and what different Pixar employees -- former and current -- have related. Since some of the tales aren't flattering, I won't relate them here. Let's just say that Steve Jobs was like a polished diamond -- a man with many facets.

New Year's Box Office

2011-12-31T11:09:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about "The Shrinking Box Office." But look at it this way: As The U.S. and Canada suffer declines, the rest of the world expands and expands.

The Nikkster's stats: ...

1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Paramount) Week 3 [3,455 Runs] Friday $10.7M (+8% from last Fri), Est 3-Day Weekend $28.2M Est 4-Day Holiday $40M, Est Cume $141M

2. Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows (Warner Bros) Week 3 [3.703 Runs] Friday $7.4M (+10%), Est 3-Day Weekend $20.8M Est 4-Day Holiday $27M, Est Cume $137M

3. Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (Fox) Week 3 [3,724 Runs] Friday $7M (+29%), Est 3-Day Weekend $18M Est 4-Day Holiday $23M, Est Cume $99.3M

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sony) Week 2 [2,914 Runs] Friday $5.3M (+15%), Est 3-Day Weekend $13.9M Est 4-Day Holiday $20M, Est Cume $60.8M

5. We Bought A Zoo (Fox) Week 2 [3,163 Runs] Friday $4.7M (+56%), Est 3-Day Weekend $13M Est 4-Day Holiday $17M, Est Cume $44.5M

6. War Horse (DreamWorks/Disney) Week 2 [2,547 Runs] Friday $4.6M, Est 3-Day Weekend $13.1M Est 4-Day Holiday $17.6M, Est Cume $42.8M

7. The Adventures Of Tintin (Paramount) Week 2 [3,087 Runs] Friday $4.4M, Est 3-Day Weekend $11.4M Est 4-Day Holiday $15.5M, Est Cume $50M

8. New Year’s Eve (Warner Bros) Week 4 [2,585 Runs] Friday $2.3M, Est 3-Day Weekend $6.5M Est 4-Day Holiday $8M, Cume $47.7M

9. The Darkest Hour (Summit) Week 2 [2,327 Runs] Friday $1.6M, Est 3-Day Weekend $3.5M Est 4-Day Holiday $5.2M, Est Cume $14.2M

10. The Muppets (Disney) Week 6 [1,541 Runs] Friday $1.1M, Est 3-Day Weekend $2.7M Est 4-Day Holiday $3.6M, Cume $83.4M.

Meanwhile, Arthur Christmas and Happy Feet Two, both out of the Top Ten, have collected $45.5 million and $60.6 million at the domestic box office.

The nineteenth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-31T03:20:00.000-08:00

Another card drawn from life. The family had a Christmas heirloom much like the one shown here. (Flesh and blood angels not included.)

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Another Tutorial About "Leverage"

2011-12-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

Professor James Garner teaches a lesson in studio accounting, and gaining what's yours ...

... I became an actor by accident, but I'm a businessman by design. My company, Cherokee Productions, produced The Rockford Files. I took less money up front in return for a 37.5 percent share of the profits. I was personally paid about $30,000 per episode, which was and still is a lot of money, but it could have been several times that. But I figured once Rockford went into syndication, the profit sharing would be my real reward and annuity for my old age.

Early in 1979, someone at Universal mistakenly sent me an account sheet that The Rockford Files had lost $9.5 million in its first five years on the air. It shocked me. I thought we were doing well.

It's demoralizing to break your neck bringing a show in on budget and on schedule only to find you've been wasting your time and effort because they've been bookkeeping you to death. ...

CEO Lew Wasserman and Universal didn't invent "creative accounting," they just made it a science. Creative accounting is too polite a term for what Universal was doing, it was flat-out larceny. They systematically inflated the expenses to reduce -- to wipe out -- the net profit. ... Universal tried to tell us that despite taking in $120 million in revenues from syndication and foreign sales, the show had earned less than $1 million in profits. ...

If you had the nerve to complain, they pretended not to know what you were talking about. If you persisted, they shrugged their shoulders and told you to sue them. ... And if anybody had the money to hire a battery of lawyers and the guts to risk his career, Universal would drag out the litigation for years. It was like being in business with the Mafia, only Universal didn't need a gun, just a pencil.

Well, I had the money in the bank -- over $5 million. I'd put it there just in case, and I didn't care about hurting my career. I was in it for the duration.

In December 1988, after seven years of filings and depositions, Universal sent me a check for $607,000. It was an insult. A few months later, they offered $6 million. I declined. We'd found out something Universal didn't want us to know.

Universal's salesmen went to TV stations and pitched reruns of popular series, those that had attained the magic number of one hundred episodes. My lawyers discovered that Universal was syndicating The Rockford Files as part of a package. Station managers were told they could have Rockford cheap, but only if they'd also take the less popular Quincy. Universal would bill Quincy at twice the rate of Rockford. In other words, on paper, Rockford earned only a fraction of the income it should have commanded, cheating me out of millions of dollars in profits.

When we confronted Universal with this knowledge, they immediately offered to settle out of court if we would seal the record. They didn't want this practice revealed, and they certainly didn't want to open their books. ...

On March 23, 1989, we settled the case "on the courthouse steps." As part of the settlement agreement, I promised not to reveal the amount Universal paid me. ...[So] I can't legally comment on [the cash total], but I can say that for a week or two afterward, [my wife] Lois had to keep telling me to wipe the grin off my face, and that she drew a big "V" for victory in lipstick on our front door that stayyed there for a year. ...

James Garner -- "The Garner Files" -- pp. 137-142

The above is one more iteration of the ancient wisdom "You get what you have the leverage to get."

In this case, Mr. Garner had all the principle components of Leverage. He had the Power. He had the Knowledge. And he had the Courage/Moxie/Resolve to press ahead with his mission. (Many don't.)

Plus, he had the willingness to fail, which is a major part of leverage. Because without that willingness, you won't press down hard on the lever to get to where you want to go.

The eighteenth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-30T03:18:00.000-08:00

More heavily laden pine trees, of the type found in the Sierra Nevada.

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Declining

2011-12-29T17:05:00.000-08:00

Which, of course, is not good ...

But the happy news is, foreign box office is robust. And animation plays a large part in all the global robustness, either enhancing live-action (Transformers, Roses of the Apes), or standing alone (Cars 2).

Worldwide, animation did quite nicely in 2011. Like for instance:

Kung Fu Panda 2 -- $665,692,281

Cars 2 -- $551,852,396

Rio -- $484,635,760

Puss in Boots -- $391,347,391 *

The Adventures of Tintin -- $270,872,000 *

Rango -- $245,155,348

With all the varied entertainment choices -- cable television, video games, the internet, apps on the smart phones -- it's not surprising that theatrical movies have gotten a smaller slice of the overall pie. Even so, it's a shame.

* Still out there, raking in the moolah.

Gimme Some Moneee

2011-12-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

Rupert and his minions could be staring at some seriously high mounds of cash in the not-distant future.

... While 20th Century Fox Television re-signed the longest-running comedy on television [The Simpsons] for two more seasons in October, it is unlikely the run will go any further given the tumultuous negotiations that took place with the voice actors.

And here’s why it will mean a windfall for the company within three years. The syndication agreement was signed years ago at a different time in the media landscape and only allowed Fox to sell the show to local affiliates.

Now, News Corp. could sell to cable stations such as TBS and Comedy Central and so-called over-the-top distributors like Netflix. ... [T]he company could easily get $1 million to $2 million per episode for the 500-plus episode library. ...

I'm sure that the News Corp. folks will be more than delighted to share a little of this windfall with the artists who have toiled on the show all these years.

Won't they? Won't they?!

The seventeenth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-29T08:17:00.000-08:00

A stylized religious procession in a stylized Jerusalem (or perhaps a fantasy city from the Middle Ages?)

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

The Floyd Norman Interview - Part III

2011-12-29T01:31:00.000-08:00

Full video interview below the fold.

Mr. Norman returned to Diz Co. for the third time in the go-go nineties, when animation was in its "Second Golden Age." (That photo above? That's Floyd from an earlier Disney work period. Just so you know ...)

TAG Interview with Floyd Norman

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

In the final decade of the millenium, Floyd was again working as a storyboard artist, and he soon found himself on detached duty at a small studio in the Bay Area.

The place was named Pixar, and he he ended up working on a brace of pictures for them: Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. (Floyd imagines that working at Pixar in its early days, when it was in a non-descript industrial building, was a bit like working at Disney's Hyperion studio, when it was jammed into an apartment block and overstuffed studio facilities.)

Frankenweenie

2011-12-28T14:08:00.001-08:00

Tim created the original in 1984. Time for an expansion and do-over.

The new feature -- still in work -- is in production in northern California. (The original can be found among Disney silver disks. Not well-received by studio management in '84, but times change do they not?)

The IA negotiated a contract with Diz Co., and we represent some of the artists. (We post the pictures because they became available today, and it's a major animation release, and ... why the hell not?)

Reporter Declares the Winner

2011-12-28T11:50:00.001-08:00

It's all over but the shouting, I guess.

[Rango] has vastly outperformed [other animated features] in virtually every other respect [except box office]: critical reception (it is at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, better than every other 2011 animated film except Arthur Christmas); early critics/precursor awards (it has been voted the year's best animated film by virtually every major awards-dispensing group -- among them the National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, and San Francisco Film Critics Circle -- except the New York Film Critics Circle, which skipped the category this year, and the New York Film Critics Online, which opted for Tintin); ...

My guess? The live-action directors Spielberg and Verbinski are the heavy-weight contenders for "Best Animated Feature" this year. They have the name recognition, the leverage, and the Big Mo.

Everybody else is in a lighter weight-class, doesn't matter how good the other pictures are, doesn't matter what the box office of this or that feature is. Heft and influence matter. That's the way Hollywood has rolled for the last ... oh ... century. It's the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has behaved since it's inception. (With, of course, the occasional exception.)

The Floyd Norman Interview - Part II

2011-12-28T03:30:00.000-08:00

Floyd departed the House of Mouse after his Jungle Book stint. He thought it was time to spread his wings and start his own company, and that he did. For the next half-dozen years he worked in every facet of the biz, live-action, animation, development, you name it ...

TAG Interview with Floyd Norman

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

But Disney came calling again, and Mr. Norman returned to work on Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Robin Hood, and then it was on to layout, animation and screenwriting at Hanna-Barbera and other cartoon fun factories ...

The sixteenth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-28T01:16:00.000-08:00

A nighttime snow scene, done in the early 1950s. Vaguely reminiscent of Grandma Moses's snow scenes. Vaguely.

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Registered

2011-12-27T22:15:00.000-08:00

Bambi (1942) makes the big list:

Walt Disney’s Bambi, Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, John Cassavetes Faces and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump, are just a few of the 25 movies the Library of Congress selected for the 2011 additions to the National Film Registry of films for preservation “because of their enduring significance to American Culture.” ...

Anytime an animated feature or short gets an accolade, we should celebrate. (Ed Catmull's A Computer Animated Hand also made it onto the registry.)

From the official announcement:

One of Walt Disney’s timeless classics (and his own personal favorite), this animated coming-of-age tale of a wide-eyed doe’s life in the forest has enchanted generations since its debut nearly 70 years ago. ...

Bambi, in point of fact, isn't a "wide-eyed doe," but with the name being what it is, I suppose it would be kind of easy to get the gender of the animal confused, eh?

Have you been forced to deal with Yurcor? Let us know ..

2011-12-27T14:04:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to all who have taken the time to write and keep us informed of their experiences working through the Employer of Record company, Yurcor. We have received many emails and phone calls from artists who have read our posts. Many are glad that some action is being taken against companies of this nature and are interested in retrieving the pay that was illegally withheld from them.

The Guild is interested in assisting all artists who have been effected by Yurcor's improper wage withholdings. We have created a form on our site that is meant to give us a better understanding of how many artists have been effected and which studios are utilizing Yurcor's services. If you have worked for a studio that has used Yurcor and would be interested in seeing your wages returned, please take the time to fill out the information on the form and submit it back to us:

Animation Guild Yurcor Form

Our goal is to help enforce labor laws and returning wages that were improperly withheld from visual effects artists. Once we receive your information, we will contact you to discuss our current progress and the next steps in retrieving your wages.

The Floyd Norman Interview - Part I

2011-12-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

Floyd Norman got a turn down from Disney the first time he tried to get a job there...

TAG Interview with Floyd Norman

Find all TAG Interviews on the TAG website at this link

He was eighteen at the time, and he was told to get some more art training. Which he did. And two and a half years later, the House of Mouse called up and offered work.

That was in 1956. Eight years later, Mr. Norman was a story artist working on Jungle Book, involved in story sessions with the man whose name was prominent at the studio gate. Floyd talks about those years at Disney -- and his Jungle Book story collaborator Vance Gerry, in the latest TAG Blog podcast ...

The fifteenth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

A still life rendered in oil paints. (Not Hulett's usual style of card, but he liked to occasionally mix things up.)

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Box Office Beyond the Seas

2011-12-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

On foreign shores, movie grosses pile up:

... [S]urpassing the $200-million mark is DreamWorks Animation’s Puss In Boots ... Distributor Paramount puts the film’s total foreign box office at $223 million thanks to a $17 million Christmas weekend take. ...

And among other animated entries ...

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked grossed an estimated $20.1 million from 5,677 venues in 52 markets. ... Arthur Christmas, with an overall estimate of $9.7 million collected from 5,925 situations in 74 markets. Overseas cume comes to an estimated $90 million.

Globally, AC has collected $178.3 million. And Puss has now made $367 million. Tintin, an underperformer stateside, is up to a gloabl total of $263.2 million.

And Brad Bird's live-action epic has made $218.6 million ... and counting.

The fourteenth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-26T03:11:00.000-08:00

A sparse winter scene. At first glance out in some snowy nowhere, but on closer inspection, not.

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Merry Christmas, Ralph-Hulett style

2011-12-25T15:09:00.000-08:00

Shepherds wandering through the olive trees.

Interesting factoid: Hulett lived in La Crescenta, which is in a long narrow valley north of Los Angeles. When he moved thre in the early 1950s, La Crescenta still had grape vineyards and olive groves, and there were olive trees on the property where he built his house.

So the olive trees in this card? They're drawn from life. But they aren't the olive trees of the Holy Land, but of La Crescenta in Southern California.

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Your Local Derby

2011-12-24T10:58:00.000-08:00

Now with buttery-smooth Add On

Per the Nikkster:

1. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Paramount) Week 2 [3,448 Theaters] ... Estimated 3-Day Weekend $25.8M, Estimated 4-day Holiday $39.5M, Estimated Domestic Cume $71.5M, Estimated International Cume $105M

2. Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows (Warner Bros) Week 2 [3,703 Theaters] Estimated 3-Day Weekend $16.7M, Estimated 4-Day Holiday $25M, Estimated Domestic Cume $83.8M, Estimated International Cume $27.1M

3. Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (Fox) Week 2 [3,726 Theaters] Estimated 3-Day Weekend $12.8M, Estimated 4-Day Holiday $21.1M, Estimated Domestic Cume $58.1M

4. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sony) NEW [2,914 Theaters] ... Estimated 3-Day Weekend $13.5M, Estimated 4-Day Holiday $20M Estimated Domestic Cume $28.5M, Estimated International Cume $950K

5. The Adventures Of Tintin (Paramount) NEW [3,087 Theaters] Opened Wednesday December 21 ... Estimated 3-Day Weekend $8.8M, Estimated 4-Day Holiday $14M, Estimated Domestic Cume $22M, Estimated International Cume (Sony) $240M ...

So Mr. Bird's film is doing solid business. The rodents are doing tepidly and fading. And the Boy Reporter isn't nearly as strong as he was in Europe, and will probably be fortunate to get near $100 million in domestic grosses.

None of the above seems a surprise when you take the stats over to the light and study them. Pure mo-cap -- separate from a live-action environment -- continues to be a tough sell.

Add On: The Wall Street Journal wraps up the weekend:

A Christmas miracle eluded Hollywood, as strong holiday ticket sales weren't enough to help the industry overcome year-end declines in both attendance and revenue compared with last year. ...

As the number of feature films released this year increased, the average film's box-office gross, when adjusted for inflation, dropped to $14.2 million, from $17.5 million in both 2010 and 2009 ...

"The Adventures of Tintin" and Twentieth Century Fox's "We Bought A Zoo," were beat by earlier December releases like "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" from Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Pictures and "Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" ...

And so it goes. The foreign markets grow, the domestic market is kind of ... stagnant.

The twelfth day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-24T03:08:00.000-08:00

One of the religious-themed cards, with the Three Wise Men. Hulett always had a few of these in each year's line-up, like this ... and this.

(Of the three, I prefer the card with the camels.)

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Kitty in Hat Watch

2011-12-23T22:46:00.000-08:00

Puss in Boots continues to roll out overseas:

... Puss in Boots, now in 2nd place with $29.8 million for an international total of $188.2 million and $331.1 million worldwide ...

Puss continues to roll out healthy grosses, even as it winds down in the States. Since I don't know the kitty's release schedule, I haven't a clue about where hiss foreign totals will end up.

(But I'm sure that DreamWorks has a pretty strong idea ...)

At the other end of the box office spectrum, the chipmunk franchise seems to have run its course.

... In 4th place was Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, equally disappointing overseas with $13.3 million in 36 countries. Back in 2009 Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel opened with $23.4 million from 38 countries so Chipwrecked is slowly turning into the box office dud of this franchise. ...

As the wise old producer once said: "When they don't want to come see your movie, you can't stop them."

The Continuing Box Office Story ...

2011-12-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

Your Reporter and mine says:

... Fox's Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked moved up the chart to No. 3 on Thursday, grossing $4 million for a seven-day domestic cume of $36.9 million. ... Chipwrecked had no trouble besting Steven Spielberg's 3D family film The Adventures of Tintin, which is off to a soft start, opening Wednesday to $2.3 million and grossing $2.5 million on Thursday for a two-day cume of $8 million. ...

So is Tintin the Boy Reporter the problem (being as how he hasn't made a big dent in the American consciousness), or is it the mocap, or is it the story itself?

I continue to think that, all things equal, mocap aliens, dinosaurs and chimpanzees work well in a live-action environment, but mocap humans are a harder sell. And mocap humans in a totally digital environment are a problem because everybody knows how humans in live-action look, move, and act ... and their mo-cap cousins are always a little ... what's the word? ... creepy.

On the other hand, Europeans bought Tintin hook, line and bobber, so perhaps I'm gazing at this through the wrong prism.

The eleventh day of Ralph Hulett’s Christmas

2011-12-23T03:04:00.000-08:00

Another card with the bell motif. Not unlike other bells, except this one has decoration on it.

See other Ralph Hulett Christmas cards on the TAG Blog

Deep in the Snow

2011-12-22T21:45:00.000-08:00

So Slash Film (and other media) are catching on to what selected fanboy sites .. and a few commenters ... have known for some time:

Walt Disney Studios has announced the title for their Holiday 2013 movie — Frozen. All of the Hollywood trade papers are reporting that the movie in question is the Pixar film announced at D23 Expo: Bob Peterson’s “The Untitled Pixar Movie About Dinosaurs“. This is not the case. It seems that the confusion came as the Dinosaur project originally had the November 27th, 2013 date, and it appears Walt Disney Animation has now taken that date for their own release. What is the film? The project formerly known as The Snow Queen.

... When the project was last in development, it was set to be Disney’s next hand drawn animated film after The Princess and The Frog. We don’t know if that is still the case or if it is now a computer animated release. BleedingCool seems to think it will be hand drawn. ...

This is the problem with wandering around studios. You (sometimes) know what's going on but don't want the wrath of management to crash down on you. So you keep your mouth buttoned and wait for The Official Announcement.

So now the word has come that the feature following Wreck-It Ralph will be the Hans Christian Anderson tale. There's other pictures in development but SQ/Frozen is the farthest along. The movie got put up on story reels a long while ago; immediately thereafter, the Main Lot decided to place it on the backburner. (Wasn't Lasseter's idea to do this, but someone who wears a suit.) Then Tangled grossed a lot of money and Frozen got put on a front burner.

And here we are.

Judging from the article above, there are those who can't figure out if the oncoming feature is "hand drawn" or "C.G.I." Bleeding Cool thinks it's still in the hand drawn category. BC is certainly entitled to its opinion, but if anyone is still hazy regarding the movie's format, they can check recent box office grosses for animated features and do a bit of high school math.

And perhaps the clouds will dissipate.