RIP Richard Manginsay

Richard Manginsay, a veteran of The Simpsons died today after a long battle with cancer. Guild board member and fellow Simpsonite K.C. Johnson wrote this:

It's going to be a rough day at The Simpsons, as our friend and colleague Ricky Manginsay went to heaven before the sun rose. A fellow animator -- father, son, husband; assistant director; talented, amazing artist; the kindest, most giving, loving soul -- his loss will be deeply felt by everyone who knew him. ...

Born and educated in the Philippines, Ricky Manginsay enjoyed a long career in the U.S. animation industry. He worked in both television and theatrical features, lending his talents to Anastasia, Bartok the Magnificent, Family Guy, Futurama, and The Simpsons Movie, among numerous others.

Hard-working and upbeat, he said some months ago that he was fighting hard against the cancer that ultimately took him. He kept working almost to the end. Our condolences to Ricky's friends and family.

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James S. Blackton

From President Emeritus Tom Sito:

James Stuart Blackton certainly had an interesting career. The English born artist became a top newspaper cartoonist, a vaudevillian drag act as Mademoiselle Stuart, the first American animator, founder of the Vitagraph Company, the movie fanzine Motion Picture World.

He even successfully faked a newsreel of the battle of Manila Bay in 1898 using toy boats, sparklers and cigar smoke. No one had ever seen a real naval battle on film before, so no one knew the difference. Its considered the first filmed journalism.

He made fortunes and lost them just as quickly. He was ruined in the Stock Market Crash. On this day, he was struck and killed by a bus on Pico Blvd.

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Warner's Lego Super-Villain

From the trades:

Zach Galifianakis is in final negotiations to voice the villain in Lego Batman , Warner Bros.’ spinoff of The Lego Movie.

Galifianakis will voice Batman’s classic archenemy, the Joker, joining Will Arnett, who is reprising the role of the Caped Crusader he originated in Lego Movie. Michael Cera recently came on board to voice the hero’s sidekick, Robin. ...

The fans of Mark Hamill in the role will be chapped, but that's show biz.

If you haven't kept up, Warner Bros. has a newer animation division for the new theatricals it's doing called The Warner Animation Group (WAG). Unlike Warner Bros. Animation, which is headquartered on the Warner Ranch (formerly the Columbia Ranch), WAG occupies a two-story building on the main lot, and presently has several features in development.

WAG is using a modified Chris Meledandri/Illumination Entertainment feature animation model, wherein writers, board artists and designers do pre-production in Burbank and the production is then done overseas. (Paramount Animation, a tenant on the Paramount lot in Hollywood, is using the same basic production model. It works well in certain hands; we'll discover how well it works for Paramount.)

American animated feature production is starting to splinter: Some studios like Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios do (almost) everything under one roof.

Other studios do a lot of the work in one studio, but job sequences (features) to China and India. DreamWorks Animation falls into this camp.

And a growing number of companies -- Warner Animation Group, Paramount Animation, Illumination Entertainment, Sony Pictures Animation -- use the do "pre-production stateside/ production work out of the country" approach. This type of outsourcing has been tried for theatrical features for decades, but until Meledandri made a success of it with Despicable Me, every outsourced cartoon feature going back to Once Upon a Forest had fallen on its face, box office-wise.

With the coming of CG features, lots of companies are making piles of money in the cartoon biz. So now we get to see which company ... and production method ... works best.

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Everything Old Is Rebooted

The mining of treasures, it is ongoing.

... Disney will launch “The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar,” a short primetime movie focused on the son of Simba, the hero of the original [Lion King], in November on Disney Channel. The program will follow Kion, Simba’s second-born cub, as he and a team of animals known as “The Lion Guard” try to keep the peace in the surrounding terrain. Disney intends to launch a “Lion Guard” TV series on Disney Channel and Disney Junior outlets around the world in early 2016.

The program has been about four years in the making, said Nancy Kanter, executive vice president of original programming and general manger of Disney Junior Worldwide, in a recent interview. “We were really trying to make sure, from a production value, that we could get as close to the feel of the movie as we possibly can. I think people will be sort of amazed at just how beautiful it really looks,” she said. ...

Work on The Lion Guard series cranked into high gear several months ago. (It's only a totally unsubstantiated rumor that Kion and Co. will be taking down a bow-and-arrow-packing dentist who is running amuck in an episode. But you never know. ...)



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Ruthie Tompson Bestows Scholarship

Ruthie Tompson and Susan Bin

On Saturday August 8th, Women in Animation (WIA) presented Susan Bin with the 2015 Phyllis Craig Scholarship, awarded to animation students "who demonstrate artistic talent, a passion for animation, and promise for the future." The award was presented by the eldest member of WIA, 103-year-old Ruthie Tompson.

Susan Bin is currently an animation undergraduate at Harvard with plans to pursue a career in visual development. Bin has previous training from LAAFA, Gnomon, and CGMA, interning at DreamWorks Animation and Legendary Entertainment's comics department. She currently illustrates for Facebook, her most recent published work displayed in HBO's upcoming Game of Thrones Compendium. “I am honored to be the recipient of this year's Phyllis Craig Scholarship. As a developing artist who struggled to find a pathway into the animation industry, I appreciate that I am able to turn to Women in Animation's community of members and events for support and growth in both my career and as an individual,” said Bin. ...

Per Women in Animation:

... Ruthie Tompson was asked to help present the scholarship to Bin along with WIA member Angela Lepito, who served as Bin’s supervisor at DreamWorks Animation. 105-year-old Ruthie Tompson was named a Disney Legend in 2000, recognizing her nearly 40-year career in animation with the Walt Disney Company. Her relationship began with the Disney brothers when they established their first West Coast studio on Kingswell Avenue in the 1920s, the Hollywood neighborhood in which she grew up. After graduating from Hollywood High School, Tompson worked as a painter on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, then moved into the animation checking department and eventually into scene planning, where she served as the supervisor for the department until her retirement in 1975. “It’s a special moment in WIA’s legacy to have a trailblazer such as Ruthie bestowing this award upon Susan, a member of our newest generation. ..." says WIA Head of Scholarship Committee Barb Cimity. ...

Ms. Thompson is one of the few surviving artists from "Snow White", animator Don Lusk being one of the others.


From left to right, bottom row: Ruthie Tompson, Susan Bin. Top row: Kaaren Brown (WIA Chair of Mentorship), Tracey Miller-Zarneke (WIA Chair of Legacy and Archives), Barb Cimity (WIA Treasurer), Marge Dean (WIA Co-President), Jinko Gotoh (WIA Chair of Chapter Support)


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High End Salaries

This is the union to work in, I guess.

SAG-AFTRA‘s National Executive Director got a $40,798 raise last year and is now making $600,485 a year, according to the union’s latest financial report filed with the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s a 7.3% pay raise for David White, which is nearly three-times the 2.5% raise he negotiated last year on behalf of SAG-AFTRA members working under the union’s film and TV contract. ...

Human beings sometimes get a wee bit greedy. It was ever thus. Click here to read entire post

Dinotrux

This DreamWorks tv/Netflix series has been in work since the DWA television division set up shop in a skyscraper in downtown Glendale. And now tales set in an alternate universe of creatures that are half construction equipment, half giant reptiles are set to launch.

... Bill Desowitz: What makes Dinotrux different?

Randy Dormans: A couple of things that make it different for us as far as character design is that our characters have to be clearly identifiable dinosaur and construction vehicle or truck for the big guys. For the Reptools, they've gotta be a very identifiable tool and lizard or reptile of some sort. So Ty is a T-Rex mixed with an excavator and Revvit is a rotary tool like a Dremel, mixed with a chameleon.

It's very easy to look at the Pixar franchises [Toy Story and Cars], which is the first thing I thought of because they are these inanimate objects in a fairly realistic world. Lightning McQueen's mouth has a lot of squash-and-stretch to him.In reality, our show is not like these two shows at all. It's much more like Pixar's original short, Luxo Jr. It's all in the pose and very much back to basics and our guy [Ty] is like that. He doesn't deform -- he's constructed as if he's actually made of metal. The LEGGO Movie is the only other thing that does that. ...

There's been changes in personnel on a variety of shows (including this one) at DWA tv. With a studio that has ramped up as quickly as this one over the past couple of years, that might not be a surprise. Nevertheless, a lot of the series DreamWorks has concluded for Netflix, from Turbo Fast to Dragons of Berk have done well.

In the not distant future, the performance of this DreamWorks original will be known.


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The Slippery Slope

Another example of our moral rot.

... [T]he cable and satellite television channel Cartoon Network is currently airing three animated series – Clarence, Adventure Time and Steven Universe – that have strong “gender-queer narratives” or explicitly LGBTQ characters.

Debuting in 2014, Clarence features a main character with two moms, and while Cartoon Network reportedly nixed a kiss on the lips between a homosexual couple in an episode that October, it approved a version in which the men kiss on the cheek. ...

Well, there's two men kissing. And then there's Elmer Fudd blasting Daffy Duck in the face with a shotgun.

Moral rot is where you find it, I guess. And so another generation will be rolling to hell in a handcart with cartoons on it.

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Marge Dean

There's a new GM at SBS.

Marge Dean Named Stoopid Buddy Studios General Manager

The Daytime Emmy-winner and entertainment veteran will oversee day-to-day business operations as general manager at the animation studio.

Dean will work closely with studio founders Seth Green, John Harvatine IV, Matthew Senreich and Eric Towner.

Stoopid Buddy Stoodios creations include television’s longest running stop-motion show, Robot Chicken, as well as Sony Crackle’s upcoming SuperMansion with Bryan Cranston, the upcoming Camp WWE and MAD’s stop-motion py vs. Spy.

Dean will be based in the company’s Burbank studio headquarters and most recently served as director of production for Mattel’s entertainment division, Playground Productions. ...

Ms. Dean has been an exec in the cartoon business for a long time. A couple of years ago, she became one of the leaders of Women in Animation, an industry group that focuses on women working in the industry. Two months ago, she was speaking out about the relatively low percentage of women at L.A. studios:

... “The numbers are out of proportion because there has been very little work done to intentionally change the status quo. Most hiring in entertainment is risk averse where people hire who they know. It’s easier but what that leads to is the hiring of the same people and up until recently primarily men,” said Marge Dean, WIA co-president. ...

“Additionally, women have been trained to be artists in animation schools but not to be leaders. They need to be encouraged to be brave enough to step up to the plate,” she added. ...

We wish Marge well in her new job at Stoopid Buddies, and congratulate her on the new position.


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Diversifying

Hey now. Not enough that animation is the "most profitable" movie sector, it's also #1 in diversity. (f course, everything's relative.)

Animated films lead pack in Hollywood diversity, but it’s a slow pack

A new study on diversity in popular movies helps quantify a fact that any attentive moviegoer has likely noticed: The world as portrayed on the big screen is still overwhelmingly young, white, male, and straight. ...

But the report — the latest installment in a study that began in 2007 — found a smidgen of hope in a sometimes-overlooked corner of Hollywood: animated films. ...

“It makes sense that we should see a shift in what’s on-screen in animation,” says study co-author Stacy Smith, director of the USC program. She notes the shifting demographics in the U.S., pointing out that roughly half of children under the age of 5 are from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. ...

Having a wide array of characters is an easier lift in Cartoonland: Most everything on screen is stylized to start with, and so less threatening.

Plus five and six-year-olds haven't had time to build up burdensome prejudices. They're young and impressionable, so if a black or brown or Asian cartoon character is a major player in an animated feature or TV show, little kids are down with that.

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World-Wide Box Officing

With Add On!

I'm actually a bit surprised here.

Inside Out is a big worldwide hit, but Minions, a spin off of the Despicalbe Me tent-poles, has rocketed past it.

Weekend Foreign Box Office -- (World Totals)

Mission Impossible -- $65,500,000 -- ($265,354,207)

Fantastic Four -- $34,100,000 -- ($60,300,000)

Minions -- $18,200,000 -- ($912,524,400)

Jurassic World -- $15,100,000 -- ($1,581,256,780)

Ant-Man -- $9,200,000 -- ($326,336,546)

Monster Hunt -- $16,400,000 -- ($312,000,000)

Pixels -- $9,200,000 -- ($131,245,304)

Inside Out -- $10,800,000 -- ($635,475,150)

Monkey King -- $4,700,000 -- ($128,200,000)

Shaun the Sheep -- $100,000 -- ($68,821,338)

Ted 2 -- $3,800,000 -- ($166,566,230)

Terminator Genisys -- $1,600,000 -- ($322,496,273)

You will note that the Chinese animated morsel Monster Hunt has now hit $312 million overseas on $0 domestically, since it hasn't been released n the U.S and/or Canada. Meanwhile:

... Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation grossed an additional $65.5M in its sophomore session to bring the offshore cume to $156.7M. The global total through Sunday is $265.3M. ...

Minions added $18.2M this frame in 62 territories as the henchmen beat Despicable Me 2’s international gross with $609.8M to date. This makes the origins story the 5th biggest animated film of all time at the offshore box office. It also becomes Illumination Entertainment’s best overseas take to date. ...

Jurassic World added $15.1M this frame to take the international tally to $945.6M. That makes it the 5th biggest grosser of all time internationally. ... Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out has now crossed $300M overseas with a cume to date of $300.1M. With domestic included, the Pete Docter charmer is at $635.5M. The weekend was worth $10.8M internationally, in 53 territories which is 74% of the footprint. ...

Animation, it does well.

Add On: Monster Hunt, per Deadline, keeps rolling along in the Middle Kingdom:

... MH has been on a tear, steadily rounding up records during its 25-day run thus far. Rentrak puts Monster Hunt‘s cume as of Sunday at $328.4M locally which shoots it past Transformers: Age Of Extinction ($318.78M) to become the No. 2 movie ever at the Chinese box office.

The Global Times reports that Monster Hunt‘s official Sina Weibo account said it had earned 2B yuan ($322M) as of Saturday night. The only other film ever to cross 2B is Furious 7 with 2.43B.

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SpongeBob VoiceWork

Bill Faberbakke expounds on voicing the sidekick on Spongebob Squarepants.

... Part of the appeal of [Spongebob], it works so well in 11 minute segments, so to take it to 85 minutes of whatever, the cuffs are off! To really get to go with every goofy impulse... That's what you get from the movie. The writers are so good. It was really a treat for us to have Stephen Hillenburg, the creator, back in the fold. ...

[The feature Sponge Out of Water] wasn't as enjoyable as the series, where we all are together and it's like doing a radio play. We have so much fun. We did very often work together on the film, but so much of creating an animated film is bits and pieces. It seemed endless, because we're used to the television pace. We'd stopped doing the TV series so they could do the film. We were down for almost two and a half years, so it was kind of agony. We were more accustomed to the different pace. ...

In the last few decades, big-name actors have gotten cast in animated features. Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, Will Ferrell, Robin Williams (etc.) among a few. The artists who put the images and characters onto the screen labor in anonymity; the voice actors sell the product and get the large coin.

This isn't usually the case with TV voice talent, but even there the actors -- who show up for the occasional recording session -- get questioned more than the creative staff who live with the shows week in and week out, sometimes for years on end. (See "Simpsons, The" to see what I mean. Harry Shearer, voice actor, gets a lot more news copy by holding out on a new contract than a veteran director who gets fired or demoted.)

I shrink from labeling anything "fair" or "unfair", and I get how the actors are visible and therefore better agents for publicizing this show or that. But I do like to point out the dynamic: the actors have the visibility and therefore the ability to leverage more money; the artistic talent have their skills, talent and capacity for work. In this culture, it's clear where the leverage lies.


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Your American Box Office

What this week's Top Eleven proves is:

1) Not all animated features end up hits.

2) Not all super-hero movies are mega-blockbusters.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE

1/2). Fantastic Four (Fox), 3,995 theaters / $11M to $11.5M Fri. (includes $2.7M preview) / 3-day gross: $27M to $29M / Wk 1

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (PAR), 3,988 theaters (+32) / $8.3M to $8.6M Fri. / 3-day cume: $28.4M to $29.4M / Total cume: $107M to $108M (-51%) / Wk 2

3). The Gift (STX), 2,503 theaters / $4M to $4.3M Fri. (includes $585K preview) / 3-day gross: $10.6M to $11.4M / Wk 1

4). Minions (UNI), 3,123 theaters (-452) / $2.3M to $2.5M Fri. / 3-day cume: $8M+ /Total cume: $303M / Wk 5

5/6). Ant-Man (DIS), 2,910 theaters (-412) / $2.25M Fri. / 3-day gross: $8M / Total cume: $147.6M / Wk 4

Vacation (WB), 3,430 theaters (+19) / $2.5M Fri. / 3-day cume: $8M (-46%) / Total cume: $36.1M / Wk 2

7). Ricki and the Flash (SONY), 1,603 theaters / $2.3M Fri. (includes $200K preview) / 3-day gross: $7M+ / Wk 1

8). Trainwreck (UNI), 2,525 theaters (-435) / $1.8M Fri. / 3-day gross: $5.9M to $6.1M / Total cume: $91M / Wk 4

9). Pixels (SONY), 2,864 theaters (-859) / $1.6M Fri. / 3-day cume: $5.4M / Total cume: $57.5M/ Wk 3

10). Southpaw (TWC), 2,274 theaters (-498) / $1.2M Fri. / 3-day cume: $4.3M to $4.6M / Total cume: $40M+ / Wk 3

11). Shaun the Sheep Movie (LGF), 2,320 theaters / $1.2M Fri. (715K Wed. preview) / 3-day cume: $3.6M to $4M / 5-day cume: $5.2M to $5.5M / Wk 1 ...

Meantime, after fifty days of release, Inside Out sits north of $333 million in domestic box office, and has now falled out of the Top Ten.

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Shifted

Rupert's minions protect a franchise.

Twentieth Century Fox has moved Ice Age: Collision Course, the newly christened fifth chapter of its Blue Sky animated franchise, from July 15 to July 22, 2016.

This will shift Sid, Manny, Ellie and company off their previous collision course with Sony’s Ghostbusters and two other pictures, the musical La La Land from Lionsgate and The Lake from EuropaCorp. For the time being, Ice Age: Collision Course is sharing its new date with one other title, Warner Bros’ King Arthur. ...

Pushing the cartoon back a week is a smart move. Ghostbusters will chew into Ice Age grosses a lot more than a picture about the knights of the round table would.

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Long Ago ... Far Away

Years ago (like eighteen?) Shrek was in development at DreamWorks Animation. And Eddie Murphy was working with a comedy actor from Saturday Night Live ...



... and it wasn't Mike Myers. ...

Chris Farley had the lead, and as director/story artist/animator Tom Sito once told me, "He brought a lot of energy to the part. Chris was big, made me feel like Twiggy. And he had a different take on the role than Myers did." ...

Shrek did not have a smooth ride from book to screen. The studio went through several directors. The board artists struggled to get the right balance of comedy and story, gags going into sequences then being pulled out again. Jeffrey Katzenberg considered using motion capture but then rejected it.

And in the midst of production with 90% of the dialogue recorded, the actor in the title role died.

It's amazing, when you consider all the ups and downs of the production, that the feature turned out as well as it did. When finally released, not only did Shrek open at #1, but the feature went on to gross almost a half billion dollars against a budget of sixty million. And it was the first winner for "Best Animated Feature" beating the Pixar and Nick entries.

What Shrek might have been with Chris Farley? An unknowable unknown.

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Brave New World

This wave seems to be cresting.

It's been two days of harsh reckoning for the entertainment industry as long-simmering concerns about declining pay-TV subscriptions boiled up in quarterly earnings reports, leading investors to dump shares of media stocks amid worries that a key Hollywood money pot is threatened..

The massive sell-off — one analyst called it "the media meltdown" — came after Walt Disney Co. warned investors late Tuesday that profit from ESPN and other cable channels would not be as robust as initially thought because fewer consumers are subscribing to full pay-TV packages.

The sell-off continued Thursday as Viacom disappointed Wall Street with weak sales. Over the last two days, Time Warner slid 10%, Disney shares dropped 11%, Fox fell nearly 13% and Viacom plunged 21%. ...

Diz Co. has ridden the ESPN cash cow for years, but that animal is getting feeble and doesn't produce as much milk.

The pricing structures and business models conglomerates have enjoyed are now being reshaped (eliminated?) by ever-changing technology. The days of high-priced cable packages give way to Subcription Video on Demand, YouTube and pirate sites. Teenagers and Twenty-Somethings want their entertainment at cut-rate prices. Or free.

Which presents challenges to our fine, entertainment conglomerates. They have to find new ways to squeeze money from all those new platforms ... without alienating the public that consumes content, something of a conundrum.

Movie companies face their own versions of record companies' earlier plight: When little silver disks got replaced with song downloads off the internet, and $16 CDs became history. How Disney, Fox, Warners (etc.) navigate their newer tech challenges is a tale that continues to unfold.

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Women in Animation Now

When I entered the animation business (back when saber tooth tigers were falling into Southern California tar pits with frightening regularity), roughly half of the Guild's membership were women. But most of those women worked in ink and paint departments, and technical jobs like final checking and animation checking (think of those as "screen continuity" positions, weeding out all the visual glitches that cropped up while putting cartoons together.)

The Guild was smaller then, 1500 people compared to over 3000 today. But here in the 21st century the ink and paint positions have gone away, removed because of outsourcing and technological change. And there's a lower percentage of women working under TAG's jurisdiction. Even so, there are way more women working in creative positions today than twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. And the jobs break down like so: ...

WOMEN -- (MEN) = Percentage of Females

Total Women - 692 -- Total Men - (2,614) = 21%

Directors -- 22 -- (175) = 13%

Art Directors -- 6 -- (31) = 19%

Timing Directors -- 14 -- (42) = 33%

Writers -- 48 -- (220) = 22%

Storyboard Artists -- 103 -- (481) = 21%

Animators -- 6 -- (121) = 5%

Background Artists -- 73 -- (173) = 42%

Kindly note: The percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number. And I haven't included all the work categories in which women work, because it's late and my fingers are tired and nobody cares how many apprentices and Level Three assistants are working anyway.

But you should know that women have been steadily gaining in almost every job category, and my expectation is that the trend will continue upward because more women are training in animation jobs in colleges and universities (half the undergrads in Cal Arts' animation department are female), and as more women enter the business, more women climb to supervisory positions where they are in a position to hire other women.

Who knows? Perhaps one day in the future, the animation business will be known as a "Girls' Club". If it can happen in one direction, it can happen in another.

Here's what some percentages were five months ago. The percentage of women in the biz has risen about a quarter percent.

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Dragons Not Bawling

A foreign animated feature from across the sea does well.

After a highly successful international run, Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F opened in the domestic market in only 894 select theaters and playing only one time a night — at 7 PM and the performance here is as stunning as it was overseas in Japan. On Tuesday and last night, it had collected a whopping $1.97M and Wednesday is said to have drawn in another estimated $1.6M.

The movie’s per screen average of more than $2,198 landed it in first place yesterday among all movies. Theater sell outs were reported in major metropolitan areas including New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. They could pull in a similar $1.5M number tonight as well. In fact, this anime picture, on a budget of only $5M, could end up doing $18M to $19M in one week domestically. ...

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, animation is a format, not a genre. You can have multiple animated productions in the marketplace doing well because they're not the same but different, catering to a variety of audiences in the same way that ... ahm ... live-action movies play to different age groups and sensibilities.

It really isn't a hard concept to understand if people take a couple of minutes to look, study and understand it. Maybe someday some of the denser critics and analysts will catch on.

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Churlishness

We've gotten questions about this the last few days, and now CB points out the odd behavior, to wit:

... Now that the profile of our show [BoJack Horseman] is rising, we need to get a lot more protective about what we show online. I know a lot of character designers have been posting their work online since season 1. Sadly, we need to bring an end to that practice. If you have samples of your artwork for the show posted on Tumblr, Instagram or any other website, you’ll need to pull it down. Same goes for any storyboard samples, background and prop art, animatics and any other original art created for the show. ...

The usual drill?

Management frowns on artists putting artwork samples from un-aired shows and unreleased movies into their on-line portfolios. In fact, management does more than frown. It has conniption fits. It tells employees too get said art off the internet pronto. At decibels near the threshold of pain.

And it's understandable. The production isn't out in the marketplace yet, and the release of development materials might negatively impact the unfinished product. But that's for unseen shows or theatrical features.

Once a show or movie is released, managers at most studios are fine with artists showing work samples in their digital portfolios. Industry-wide, the understanding is that people need to get hired, and the major way to get hired is to show the latest storyboard and/or designs to prospective employers. It's the way the biz works. And few managers are interested in ancient work created for shows long gone.

So BoJack suits wanting work to be taken down after it's been up for months? Weird. Just weird.

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Bear Bares All

From the Southern half of the hemisphere.

... "Bear Story" the sad tale of a lonesome bear who builds an elaborate mechanical diorama in an attempt to remember (and perhaps recover) the life he used to live with his wife and son, before he was ripped from his home and sent to a circus.

But audiences in Osorio’s native Chile immediately know that it’s more than that — it’s also an allegory for the way families were torn apart during the murderous Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1970s. ...

Because of the internet, work many would never know existed get's a showing in the U.S. and other markets.

It isn't all Pixar/DreamWorks/Disney/Blue Sky. Which is a good thing when you reflect on it.

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