Competition in Toonland?

And as the Hollywood Reporter writes about television animation, so Daily Variety analyzes the theatrical version:

The world of feature animation -- once thought to be the exclusive domain of Disney and DreamWorks -- is getting increasingly competitive, as studios left outside the gates of the toon kingdom are employing aggressive tactics to break in.

With the successful bow of "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who," Fox Animation reaffirms its place in the top tier, thanks to a string of hits from its Blue Sky CGI studio, capped by "Horton."

Word out and about -- and I've only got a couple of sources so label this "rumor" -- is that Chris Wedge, the founding father of Blue Sky and the man who led the first Ice Age, is not super happy with Fox execs and might move on at some point.

Then, of course, Fox is allegedly pretty tight-fisted in the money department with its Blue Sky unit. (Like, they're not real keen on high salaries for the production crew.) Maybe the complaints I've heard from animators extend to Mr. Wedge?

The other studios are jockeying to join that select crowd.

Universal successfully courted former Fox toon topper Chris Meledandri, who oversaw development on "Horton" and the "Ice Age" franchise, by helping him establish his own independent family entertainment company. The studio's exclusive deal with Meledandri includes partial ownership of his production house, Illumination.

I've called the Universal/Meledandri shop on behalf of artists who've asked me what's going on there. When I checked a couple of months ago, they were still setting up the studio and had little to tell me. By now, of course, things have no doubt changed.

Though it has struggled with its two first releases, Sony recently put new execs atop its animation unit and claims to be re-committing to the space.

We posted about the exec reshuffling at Sony a little while back. I know that long-time employees at SPA were worried that Amy Pascal (head of Sony) was going to sell the Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Picture Imageworks "if the right offer came along."

Selling those two Sony subsidiaries is now, happily, off the table. I have no idea why there was a change of corporate heart, but I'd wager it was a combination of wanting to make Sony's animated franchise work (what with all the successes other studios are having) and few credible offers for the purchase of SPI and SPA.

But I'm glad Sony Pictures Animation is going to soldier on; they've got some topflight people down there in Culver City, and certainly Imageworks/Animation has the creative muscle to make things work. Many people in the cartoon biz had warm feelings for Surf's Up, it just never caught fire at the box office. (More than one artist said to me: "Kinda sucks to be the fifth or sixth penguin movie out there ...")

Coming off the success of "Happy Feet," Warner Bros. has thrown a multitude of projects into development and is hoping to become a destination for live-action filmmakers interested in toons, and for independent animation studios.

Warners, back in the go-go nineties, set up its own feature animation group in Glendale, and didn't have a lot of luck with most of its releases (Quest for Camelot, Iron Giant, Osmosis Jones). Warners Feature Animation is a distant memory. This time around, WB looks to be partnering up with outside players as it gets deeper into the feature animation game.

The big difference with animated features in the 21st century is, Disney isn't the sole colossus anymore. Unlike the early 1990s, when every feature anmation producer crashed and burned trying to emulate the Mouse House's hand-drawn blockbusters, this time around there are a multitude of studios enjoying success and big bucks in cartoon land.

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Video Reference II

Kevin writes:.

... If you’re shooting reference to copy from, rather than to learn from, then you won’t advance as an animator. Just copying will help you produce a particular shot with more nuance and better biomechanics, but you risk becoming an overfed mo-cap machine. In fact, one of the things that makes most mo-cap look unsatisfactory is that there’s no discrimination to what’s captured. A mo-cap system captures as much data as it can, without judgment. The key, distinctive elements of a behavior are given the same weight as random, irrelevant movements (while some key information is completely missed).

As an animator using any kind of reference, we have to have the intelligence and artistic judgment to edit out the ‘noise’ and exaggerate the good stuff. Ah, yes, exaggeration. One of Frank and Ollie’s 12 principles, and one which many people consider the very soul of animation ...

We want to go far beyond any form of rotoscoping or roto-lite. As I’ve said, I’m a crap actor. The last thing I want is animation that’s a little bit better than what I can do as an actual actor. I want animation that’s a million times more interesting than any performance I could ever do.

So, should we avoid shooting our own reference if we aren’t great actors? I don’t think so. Reference is a chance to go beyond the ‘rules of thumb’ that have been handed down. It’s a chance to avoid using the lore we’ve learned from other animators, and observe for ourselves how something really works ... .

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The TV 'Toon Marketplace

I've had lots of conversations with directors and execs about how the television cartoon space is doing. Disney, Cartoon Network, Nick and others have had their ups and downs, and lately many have been in the Drop Zone ... down in the dumps.

Which of course hurts animation employment big time, because when the cartoon marketplace is crappy, the number of artists working is also crappy. So I was happy to see this on the front page of the Hollywood Reporter:

A 13-year winning streak on the ratings front and a roster of franchise hits like "SpongeBob SquarePants," "The Fairly OddParents" and the new live-action series "iCarly" -- which drew 21.7 million viewers during the course of its Sept. 9-10 premiere weekend, averaging 3.92 million viewers per showing -- have planted Nick squarely in the driver's seat in ad-supported cable.

"It's quickly becoming a one-horse race with the lead we have and the momentum we've sustained," Perry said. "But we're never going to rest on our laurels. All it takes is one hit and someone's back on their feet." In this case, that "someone" refers to second-place Cartoon Network.

When the Turner network unveils its upfront slate on April 3, the centerpiece of the presentation will focus on a new project from Star Wars creator George Lucas. Cartoon has ordered 22 episodes of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," a CGI-animated series ...

You don't have to be psychic to know that the t.v. side of animation has been hurting. The Disney Channel has filled timeslots with live-action, squeezing out animated shows, and other cable networks have cut back on animation because ratings have been lacklustre. As a Cartoon Network exec said to me some months back (and I reported here earlier): "We've been hurting in the ratings. And lately we've been #3 ... a distant #3 ..."

Maybe I'm being Pollyannish about this, but in the last few weeks t.v. employment has picked up a bit. It's not just that artists are returning to the Fox prime time shows after a three-month writers' strike, it's the daytime stuff as well. Chowder is doing well for Cartoon Network and its staff is now back at work; Nick has greenlit new episodes of Fairly Odd Parents and Sponge Bob Square Pants; even long-hibernating Warners Animation has a Scooby Doo feature and series order.

Maybe it will be nothing more than a short-lived expansion. Maybe the bloom still has not returned to the small-screen animation rose. But the lede in the Hollywood Reporter fills me with hope:

Early reports on the ill health of the kids upfront [ads for teevee cartoons] have been greatly exaggerated, according to network ad sales executives, who hope to swap out Chicken Little projections of a flat to down market in favor of a more blustery Foghorn Leghorn outlook.

Let us pray that it is so.

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Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan and the WGA Strike

The MPIPHP has crunched numbers regarding what impact the recently ended Writers Guild strike had on the cash flow and overall numbers of the Industry Plan (which covers 120,000 participants).

The hit, as it turns out, wasn't as bad as it could have been ... but there was a hit.

According to Plan accountants, contributions declined sharply over the length of the strike.

In November 2007, after the strike had started but before television production shut down, Plan Contributions increased 12% over the same time frame in November 2006.

In December 2007, as television production gradually went dark, Plan contributions decreased 8.5% from the same period in December 2006.

In January 2008, when almost all t.v. production was down, Plan contributions decreased 20% from January 2007.

And in February 2008, Plan contributions decreased 25% from February 2007.

During the writers' action, one of the questions I got asked a lot was: "So what happens to our health coverage if this goes on for eight months to a year?"

And I said: "Nothing good, but we've got a cushion to carry us for awhile."

The size of that cushion dropped slightly December to December, but as of December 31, 2007, we were still in pretty good shape. We went from 15.7 months of reserves* for active participants at the end of 2006 to 14.7 months of reserves at the end of 2007.

Happily, the strike lasted only 3 months. That helped decrease long-term damage.

* A month of reserves means if NO money comes into the Health Plan for thirty days, then the Plan has enough money to keep paying benefits for thirty days (one month).

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Video Reference

Once more Kevin writes:

When I first started working in animation in the late 1990’s, video reference was looked down upon, like some kind of unworthy crutch. I remember during Quest for Camelot another assistant whispering to me that he’d seen one of the animators enlarging frames of live-action reference at the photocopy machine. The animator looked embarrassed and quickly went back to his office. At DreamWorks every now and then I’d get a glimpse of an animator doing a bit of reference photography or videography, and I noticed it was usually done at a time and place where it wouldn’t get too much attention. Even using self-produced reference as a general tool, without taking individual images and registering and pegging them up, was seen as cheating. Plus it was a big hassle for a variety of reasons, even after video camcorders became commonplace ...

Somehow the shift to CG animation has taken the curse off using video reference. Maybe, with everything digital, it’s just much easier to shoot and use your own reference at your desk. Maybe it’s that CG animation tends to require more realistic movement to not look wonky. I think a big part of it is that CG animation is less spontaneous than hand-drawn - there’s no CG equivalent of a scribble test (at least not yet), and few CG animators (even those who started in 2D) do extensive thumbnails. Shooting a few passes of video reference can go a long way towards organizing one’s thoughts about basic timing and posing, while also revealing bits of nuance that CG animation is particularly good at capturing.

That said, many animators still never use video reference. Jeff Gabor [seen above] clearly enjoys being in front of the camera and performing. Most animators are a lot more shy. One of my old office-mates, Kevin MacLean, is one of the best animators I know, but he’s shy enough that I had to take his place in a DreamWorks improv class. The class would have been torture to him. I know he never shot reference for his scenes, yet he turned in some of the most sensitive and expressive acting shots in "Over the Hedge". On the same film, my pal Sean McLaughlin did some beautiful, dead-on video reference of himself, sometimes playing multiple parts, with great results ...

The full post is, of course, at Synchrolux ...

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At Studios

A short week doesn't mean I don't make the usual rounds. It's me and my trusty bag of 401(k) books, shuttling from studio to studio.

Starz Media is rehiring Simpson crews bit by bit. Every time I drop by there are more artists back at work. On King of the Hill, various leads expect the show to get renewed for another season, but there's nothing offical ... and no Hill personnel rehired yet from hiatus ...

And there's a medium-sized crew working on a direct-to-video feature on a tight budget and schedule, but the artists are happy to be pulling checks.

Over the Santa Monica Mountains at Fox Animation, the same kind of rehiring is going on: every week, artists who've been off of Family Guy or American Dad for one month, two months or longer are being pulled back from unemployment to board and design new scripts. Artists told me:

"It's great to be back but we don't have any new voice tracks, so there's only so far we can go" ... "Seth [McFarlane] is still negotiating a new contract and until it's done he's not recording new shows" ... "It's a pretty big topic of conversation around here." ...

Meanwhile, development on the prospective Cleveland Brown spin-off continues apace, so it looks like Fox Animation is going to be around awhile ... after the new Seth McFarlane employment contract is tied up with a bow (this will happen soon, right?) ... and the SAG negotiations are successfully wrapped up. (This will occur in the near future, yes? No long strike?)

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Production Costs, Union Costs

Some hours ago, I had an enlightening talk with a Wise Old Animation Director who works Everywhere (union and non-union) and knows Everyone (union and non-union).

Among other things, we talked about budget overruns we've seen over the years. I told him about some of the doozies I'd encountered (thinking of a daytime series a decade ago that ran up a tab of a million dollars an episode ... when a mill was real money; one 22-minute piece hitting the $ 2.5 million mark.) The W.O.D. said:

"I know a production exec at one of the studios who's in deep doo-doo. She keeps choosing inexperienced show-runners who keep having big cost overruns with their projects. She thinks hiring "new blood" is what her bosses want. But the newbies keep lousing up because they don't know how to run a production, where to put the dollars, what's important and what's not. They're not stupid, they've just never been in charge of a show and budget before.

"And now the production exec is uptight that she's going to be let go because she's hired all these smart but green artists who don't know how to keep things on an even keel."

What I've found over the years is that production costs aren't determined by the crew being "union", or the expense of the benefits package, or richness of the wage rates.

They're determined by the staffing decisions made before production begins.

If the right story artists are hired (you know, ones that can do the job?), the correct writers signed, and a savvy, experienced director who knows how to orchestrate the proceedings and personnel is put under contract, then the show (feature or t.v.) is probably going to come in at close to budgeted costs.

Oh. And be pretty good.

Wandering around as I do, I see lots of waste. There have been shows where directors come and go, characters get redesigned, storylines revamped. Some of this is unavoidable, but a lot of it is plain old waste predicated on lousy choices up front:

Hey! Let's get some new recruits! They're young, they're enthusiastic! They can draw real good! And they're really, really cheap!"

Except they're not. Because they've got no clue about the requirements of a professional production, so they make lots of mistakes. Expensive mistakes. And then some old pro is brought aboard to salvage the smoldering wreckage, and the exec who made the original decision to hire the newbie (who will end up being quite good when he/she gets a little seasoning) tries to fob the responsiblity for the debacle off on somebody else.

This all seems obvious and elementary, but it's not. Because over thirty-plus years, I've seen the same dumb choices being made again ... and again ... and again.

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Network of Cartoons

Today was my Cartoon Network day.

The Chowder crew returned from hiatus this Monday, and plans are afoot for a new wave of short subjects to be produced ...

A well-placed studio person told me:

"We'll have six supervisors doing three shorts each, and overseeing a bunch more. We're gonna be doing a lot of animation here next summer ..."

Here's hoping. The cupboards been relatively bare in teevee animationland the last several months.

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The Eyes Have It (Deux)

Kevin writes:

The subject of eye movements is doubly important in animation because the physiology and psychology that applies to our character’s eye movements applies equally to what our actual audience is doing when they watch our animation.

In other words, understanding eye direction and eye movement tells us not only how to animate our characters, but also how to understand (and manipulate) the viewer’s visual experience. It’s two sides of the same coin.

So where do people look when they’re looking at a face? ...

...Tom Sito talks about the Triangle of Interest - a triangle formed by viewer’s gaze pattern as they scan between the eyes and the mouth ...

... [W]hen we’re ‘reading’ a face, most of the time is spent scanning the eyes. We attend to the nose and mouth much less, and other parts of the face get short shrift. Another nice example of eye scanning a photo of a human face is here.

There is soooo much vital information in the region of the eyes, yet this region has gotten relatively little attention in most animation reference works. I spent a few hours over the weekend going though my many stacks of notes from various animation talks and lectures, and I could barely find anything on animating eyes and eye movements and eye lids. Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit gives it a single page at the very end of several hundred pages of how to animate humans. From that book you’d assume that funny walks are about 1000 times more important that good animation of the eyes. Preston Blair’s two wonderful animation books for Walter Foster (Animation and Advanced Animation, combined into Cartoon Animation) don’t explicitly touch the subject at all. Frank and Ollie’s The Illusion of Life has a rather good 7 pages or so on the subject, though much of that material relates to how to draw the eyes, or photos of kittens. Other books don’t even mention this vital subject at all ...

(Click here or above for Kevin's full post ...)

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Hooray for Fox

While people were fixated on Pixar, here comes Fox News Corp., raking in the cash:

On the heels of a ubiquitous ad campaign and positive reviews, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! enjoyed the biggest debut of the year by taking in $45.1 million, according to studio estimates from box office trackers Nielsen EDI.

The haul was about $5 million more than projected and broke Disney's stranglehold on the top five openings for animated movies. 20th Century Fox's Horton took fifth place, behind Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., Cars and Ratatouille ...

The effete snobs among us will sneer at anything not produced in Emeryville, but I'm telling you, the more studios that produce hits, the more work there is for everybody in animation.

Fox now has a string animated blockbusters behind it: Ice Age, Ice Age the Meltdown, The Simpsons Movie, Alvin and the Chipmunks. And now, Horton Hears a Who. Quite good for a company not called DreamWorks, Disney, or Pixar. And more power to it.

Somewhere in Beverly Hills tonight, Rupert is smiling.

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A Word About the 'Hard Times'

(Some of the voice actors for Horton Hears a Who.)

Down yonder, a commenter mentioned how Carrey, Carrell and Burnett had negative things to say about their participation in Horton Hears a Who in today's L.A. Times. That they didn't give it "a ringing endorsement."

I hadn't read the piece, so I was like, concerned. And so I went and perused the article. When I finished I thought, "Yeah? They acted in isolation? Without the other actors? They floundered around with their interpretations because the picture kept changing ... morphing ... and the directors were remolding things as they went?"

Gee. Welcome to the creative cauldron of the animated feature. Like since the beginning of time.

See, what these actors might not know is that the process they found so painful is the way every feature gets made. It was exactly the same drill drill in 1937 ... 1940 ...1980 ... 2008.

Story concepts change, so six months of previously-recorded dialogue is thrown overboard.

Somebody -- maybe the director, maybe one of the story crew -- gets a hot idea for a new sequence. Everybody loves it and the new stuff gets put in. But suddenly the guy working off in isolation on sequence eight, who's been away from those particular trees and therefore has a better view of the whole forest, sees the new direction in a pitch meeting or in a screening of the latest version and says: "Wait! That new thing changes the characters and relationships in the opening! And in Sequence Four! We gotta change those other things!"

And everybody on the crew, everyone who lives with this writhing, evolving snake called an animated feature, sees that he's right. And suddenly everything gets reexammined and story points and dialogue change yet again.

Oh. And that "isolation" thing? Actors have never recorded together in features (and sure, there's exceptions, always are ...). The reason they don't (mostly) record as an ensemble is so that directors, animators and editors have clean, single-actor takes they can cut together, without other actors' voices overlapping.

But for the unfortunate thespian, who comes in for a strenuous January recording session all alone, and puts himself through the wringer trying to give the cirector up in the booth what he wants, it's frustrating and maddening. Because all that torture from January, all the brilliant emoting, is out the frigging window and these animation yutzes are now doing something different.

Little wonder that the media interviews aren't "upbeat." But I'm telling you, as a guy who once went through the process, who knew the guys who originated the process, this is the way it always effing is.

Because making an animated feature can be creative torture. There's no "script, shoot and edit" process like there is in much of live action. Never has been, never will be. The mold was formed in 1936-1937, and it's never been broken.

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Horton Thunders In

Horton Hears a Who enjoys an energetic Friday, gathering in $13.3 million at the Friday box office.

As Variety tells us:

"Horton" posted the third best opening day for both a pre-summer animated pic and a Twentieth Century Fox-Blue Sky Studios production, ranking behind 2006's "Ice Age: Meltdown" ($21.8 million) and 2002's "Ice Age" ($13.5 million).

"Horton" will likely follow a similar B.O. path to the first "Ice Age" this weekend, which bowed to $46.3 million during the third three-day frame of March 2002.

The other c.g.i. animated film (okay, it's only partial) 10k B.C. falls into second place with $4.9 million. It's now collected $49.7 million.

But certainly this is fine news for animation employees, yes?

Update: And Horton enjoys a fine weekend:

"Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears A Who!" trampled its rivals at the North American box office on Sunday with weekend sales of $45.1 million, the biggest opening of the year...

Fox ... said "Horton" ranks as the fifth-biggest G-rated opening ever; the top honor is held by 2003's "Finding Nemo" with $70.2 million. The studio expected Easter school vacations to boost the film's midweek performance ...

Fox has had a string of animated smashes the last couple of years. And as a Fox exec told me recently, the company is adept at getting more bang from its advertising dollar than many of its rivals. "They spend less money than Disney or DreamWorks," the exec said.

Be that as it may, Fox is definitely on a roll. The media sometimes overlooks it, but Pixar/Disney and DreamWorks aren't the only hevy hitters in Animationland.

The other Top Ten flicks with animation in them: 10k B.C. at #2 ($61.2 million); The Spiderwick Chronicles at #10 ($65.4 million).

(You can find the rest of the weekend box office here.)

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Sony Changes Its Mind?

There've been changes down at Sony's digital group over the last week and year. First Penny Finkelman Coxe departed her Sony Pictures Animation executive position, then last week Yair Landau left for ostensibly greener pastures.

And now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony exec Bob Osher's stepping into the slot Laundau is leaving:

Osher joined Sony Pictures in 2004, and has been serving as COO of the Columbia Pictures Motion Picture Group; he will continue to have oversight over his current areas of responsibility within that group.

Sounds to me like Mr. Osher's responsiblities are expanding, and that Sony has effectively eliminated one executive slot (or two, if Sandra Rabins move to producer is counted).

But, for me, that wasn't the most interesting facet of the article. This was:

In 2007, SPE generated attention when it retained an investment bank to place a value on Imageworks and Sony Pictures Animation. "There were discussions about selling Imageworks. Strategically, we made a decision to take that off the table," Osher said. "We think it is a terrific business to be in."

Over the last few months, I've heard Sony animation employees speculate darkly that the whole joint was going to be sold off. It's good to know -- assuming that the Reporter's story is accurate -- that won't be happening.

One less animation shop means one less group of artists and technicians earning a paycheck. And that's not something anyone wants.

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The 'Toon Linkomatic

And now, the links of mid-March.

USA Today previews DreamWorks' 3-D spectacular Monsters and Aliens:

... [T]he DreamsWorks sci-fi spoof, landing March 27, 2009, also transforms a once-tacky Ike-era gimmick into an eye-popping 21st-century experience as the first computer-animated feature to be shot in 3-D.

Studios such as Disney have dimensionalized CGI films, but only after a non-3-D version was made.

DreamWorks, which will preview Monsters for ShoWest exhibitors in Las Vegas today, is commit- ted to doing all its animated releases directly in 3-D from now on. "This isn't our father's 3-D," says the studio's animation chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg ...

While we're on the subject of 3-D, the LA Times covered Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks Animation's dollar-a-year CEO) and his speech about the glorious new world of three dimensions at ShowWest ... as well as lots of other items. (And Hollywood Reporter columnist Greg Kilday points out it's still nice for 3-D movies to have compelling stories).

Brad Bird departs animation to journey back to Warner Bros. and live action:

Brad Bird has signed on to make his live-action feature directorial debut with "1906," a co-production between Warner Bros. and Disney/Pixar, with the historical San Francisco earthquake as its backdrop ...

"1906" will mark a return for Bird to the studio that released his 1999 2-D-animated film "The Iron Giant." The movie was critically acclaimed though failed to muster much muscle at the boxoffice, causing some to suggest that Warner Bros. had failed to market the film aggressively enough ...

We posted Mark Evanier's obituary of Dave Stevens. Here's the L.A. TIMES obit and a longer bio on Dave's work and career (courtesy of Mr. Evanier).

Animation Magazine profiles Nicktoons present and near-future product:

Currently in its sixth season, SpongeBob SquarePants has been given another 26-episode order ... The Fairly OddParents was renewed for an additional 20 episodes ... The network has committed to at least 20 new installments of its latest hit toon, Back at the Barnyard ...

And while Sony Pictures Animation is having less than stellar results with its theatrical releases, Sony Adelaide (the teevee toon arm) has itself a hit:

"The Spectacular Spider-Man" swung to new heights for Kids' WB! on The CW for Saturday, March 8, scoring season high household numbers in its timeslots and raising ratings by significant percentages during the series' premiere weekend for the No. 1 rated broadcast network kids lineup, according to Nielsen Research Media ...

Later today, Horton comes to a theatre near you. Rottentomatoes rating (as of the moment I write) is solidly positive on the flick. The Orlando Sentinental is downright enthusiastic:

"Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" is the best cartoon ever to come out of Blue Sky Studios, the animation house that produced the "Ice Age" blockbusters. And for that, Fox and Blue Sky have Dr. Seuss to thank ...

We just came across this disheartening story: the Russian Guvmint isn't happy with some of Mother Russia's television cartoons ...

The cartoon channel 2x2 has yanked two animated programs from its rotation after being warned by the federal media watchdog that the shows promote a "cult of violence and brutality."

The Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency issued an official warning to 2x2 over the cartoons "Happy Tree Friends" and "The Adventures of Big Jeff" because it is "absolutely against the law to promote cruelty," agency spokesman Yevgeny Strelchik said Wednesday ...

Thank God the shows aren't being produced by one of TAG's contract studios.

Yair Landau of Sony Pictures Imageworks and Animation, one of their digital kingpins, is leaving the company to strike out on his own:

After 17 years at the studio and nearly a decade as president of its digital division, Yair Landau is preparing to leave Sony Pictures Entertainment in April ...

Sony Pictures Imageworks blossomed under Landau and president Tim Sarnoff. In 2003, its first animated short, "The Chubb Chubbs!" won an Academy Award for best animated short film. Two years later, Imageworks' work on "Spider-Man 2" won an Oscar for achievement in visual effects.

Landau established Sony Pictures Animation in 2002. Along with Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins, they assembled a team of filmmakers that have produced 2006's "Open Season" and 2007's Oscar-nominated "Surf's Up" ...

So, is this departure entirely voluntary? Or was there a gentle nudge?

Finally, the Oregonian tells us that Henry Selick's new stop-motion film will debut before the year is done:

"Coraline," the keenly anticipated debut animated feature from Laika, the Portland-based studio owned by Phil Knight, is still being filmed in our fair city. But it will make its first appearance in limited release in December, 2008 (no doubt to qualify for Academy Award consideration), and open in general release on Feb. 6, 2009 ...

Directed by Henry Selick ("The Nightmare Before Christmas"), "Coraline" is a dark fairy tale from Neil Gaiman. A young girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning), finds a door in her house that leads to an alternate version of her life. It seems too good to be true -- and sure enough, it is ...

Addendum: The British Animation Awards have showered trophies on Aardman animation:

Shaun The Sheep: Still Life, which is broadcast on CBBC, won best children's series and the children's choice award.

The Pearce Sisters, a short film that also won a Bafta this year, won the best craft award.

Aardman was also awarded the gong for best commissioned new media animation for The Peculiar Adventures of Hector at London's National Film Theatre.

Nice to know Aardman is still going strong, even without the DreamWorks partnership ...

Continue your memorable weekend.

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It Ain't Just U.S. Animation ...

There are other areas of the globe facing outsourcing and workplace issues; author Aaron Bynum brings the reality into focus:

...[T]he Japanese animation industry--which occupies 62% of the world market, according to China Daily--has become apprehensive over money matters. The quality of employment for animators has not improved in several years, and for many reasons; while the expanding work load for the overwhelmingly predominant array of small animation studios has become burdensome, forcing producers and financiers to look toward external markets for grunt work ....

Naturally enough, Japanese companies making good money from current quality product are nervous this newer trend could maybe kill the golden goose:

... "Unless something is done, Japanese anime will be ruined," Koichi Murata, the President of animation production group Oh Production, stated recently ...

But it's not just corporate execs who have worries about the state of Japanese animation. The artists also get stressed:

With constant on-the-job training and relentless television schedules that call for twelve-hour workdays, for every day of the week, these new graduates and others of the Japan cartoon market are finding themselves vastly outpaced by the demands of wealthy broadcast and satellite television stations (who in turn, contract studios for a fraction of the animated property's estimated worth) ...

The problem in Japan, of course, is the problem any "high wage" country faces: at some point, companies figure out moving some of the work to a low-wage area of the globe saves them money. And the home-grown artists find themselves trapped in jobs with stagnant/declining wages.

Of the some 440 animation production companies in the country of Japan, sources report 70% are small, with only thirty or fewer workers. About 80% of the country's animation production offices are located in and around the Tokyo metropolitan area, where escalating property values even seem to conspire against struggling animators.

"Sometimes I want to give up," an animator with roughly a year's experience, 26-years-old, employed at Oh Production, is quoted stating. "I never imagined it would be like this.''

The relentless push for "more ... faster ... and cheaper" is a phenomenon stretching around the world.

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The Eyes Have It

Kevin Koch writes:

I’ve been thinking a lot about eyes and eye movements, probably because I’ve done a lot of close-up acting shots on Terra, and some of the characters have HUGE eyes. I’ve found that some of the ‘rules’ and clichés I’ve been taught about how to do eye movements don’t really hold up, or don’t go far enough. In particular, I’ve been spending time really watching people’s eyes, and looking closely at what actors do with their eyes, and looking at some good reference ...

The 1930’s and early 1940’s were probably the key period when animator’s systematically figured out the major principles of animation (only a small subset of which are summarized in the famous 12 Principles of The Illusion of Life). A lot of what was figured out then related to acting, and to the use of eye direction, blinks, eye movements, and so on to convey thought and feeling. It’s these areas that I want to explore here, without necessarily accepting what’s been written in animation books or what gets passed on from animator to animator. I think the usual rules pertaining to eye’s and blinks and saccades are generally fine for hand-drawn animation, but this is one area where CG animation can, and should, go further.

That said, one rule that we hear again and again is that the audience pays particular attention to the eyes of our characters. This is most certainly true, probably more true than many of us keep in mind ...

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Breaking Into Golden Circles

What's most interesting to me about this L.A. Times article about the marble citadel in Emeryville is how much it sounds like the structure I saw ... and the stories I heard ... at Disney three decades ago. First, consider these article snippets:

For all the success ... there's very little room atop Pixar's food chain ... Pixar director slots are few and far between ...

[Jan] Pinkava [original director of Ratatouille] speaks highly of Pixar. "It's a tremendous environment, a company based on everybody wanting to do great animation." But after "Ratatouille" he decided it was time to go. "I was never quite on the inside of Pixar -- I was on the edge of the inner circle. But I have no complaints, really. None."

Pinkava doesn't think Pixar has a glass ceiling: "I'm not sure it's a ceiling as much as it's a runway congestion problem."

For decades at Disney, it took the equivalent of an act of Congress to break into the Mouse House's version of the Golden Circle. Grizzled veterans told me: "Until they started retiring, nobody around here got to be a directing animator except the Nine Old Men.". The Disney story department had their long-time stalwarts and that was pretty much the ball game.

It's a truism with many successful organizations that old-timers defend their turf ferociously, and take few prisoners. (Niven Busch, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, told me how fellow writer Gene Fowler tried to sabotage him in story conferences with Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck.)

I've observed this kind of thing for so long in so many workplaces that I finally came up with my own internal rule:

The more valuable the perceived reward, the more strenuous the infighting.

So, if that's the case, how does anyone break in or get ahead?

1) Your work is too gloriously fabulous to be ignored.

2) You have an "in" with the Guy/Gal Who Counts.

3) The organization has had a series of failures and as a result the pecking order has been shaken up. So it's now (out of desperation) receptive to your new ideas.

4) The organization is wildly successful, growing by leaps and bounds, and needs fresh blood (and ideas.)

5) The old-timers are retiring (or moving on) and a bunch of new slots have opened up.

You can probably think of scenarios that I haven't mentioned here, but you catch my drift: When a workplace has a well-established caste system, it's often hard to break in.

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Dave Stevens, RIP

Mark Evanier writes at "News From Me":

Illustrator Dave Stevens, best known for his "good girl" art and The Rocketeer, died yesterday following a long, wrenching battle with Leukemia. Dave was born July 29, 1955 in Lynwood, California. He was raised in Portland, Oregon, then his family relocated to San Diego, where he attended San Diego City College and became involved in the early days of the San Diego Comic Book Convention, now known as the Comic-Con International. His skills as an artist were instantly evident to all, and he was encouraged by darn near every professional artist who attended the early cons, but especially by Jack Kirby and Russ Manning. In 1975, when Manning began editing a line of Tarzan comic books to be published in Europe, Dave got his first professional assignment, working on those comics and also assisting Russ with the Tarzan newspaper strip. Soon after, he worked on a few projects for Marvel (including the Star Wars comic book) and a number of underground comics. Later, he also worked with Russ on the Star Wars newspaper strip.

In 1977, Dave went to work for Hanna-Barbera where he drew storyboards and layouts, many of them for the Super Friends and Godzilla cartoon shows and bonded with veteran artist Doug Wildey, who produced the latter. Wildey and Stevens became close friends and in 1982, when Dave created his popular character, The Rocketeer, he modelled the character's sidekick, Peevy, on photos of Doug. Dave himself was Cliff Secord, who donned the mask of The Rocketeer, and other friends appeared in other guises ...

(You can click on the header for Mark's full post.)

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2008 Wage Survey!

TAG has completed its 2008 wage survey (the link for which you will find below the break).

Our total percentage of returned forms was 27.1%, 2.5% below last year. We wish mightily that the returns had been higher, since bigger percentages beget more accuracy, but they are what they are. (Returned forms would have equaled or surpassed last year's survey if not for the lower participation rates for a couple of new studios.)

Without further ado, some of the numbers:

What follows are classifications followed by median wages (based on a forty-hour week):

Directors (theatrical) $3,005

Directors (television) $2,400

Story Artists (feature) $2,250

Staff Writers $2,344

Production Board (television) $1,900

Visual Development $2,125

Background Layout/Design $1,800

Technical Directors $1,885

3-D Animators $1,745

For the most part, wage numbers didn't move very much from last year's survey. We always get questions like: "How come wages are so high when people are out of work?". The answer is, unemployment rates and the money people make don't necessarily track in parallel arcs.

Here's the link to the complete 2008 wage survey, in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.

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The Big New Feature Releases ... and Accompanying Risks

Yesterday at DreamWorks, an animator who's trying to work his way into a supervisor's slot asked whether he was better off staying with the company or going someplace else for career advancement. Since I don't have a good idea in what esteem the company holds him (or what his specific prospects for a promotion are), I gave him my semi-generic answer:

"The studio might like you a lot and want to boost you up the ladder, but I think a lot depends on how they're doing at the box office. If Kung Fu Panda does well, and Madagascar II knocks it out of the park, then there will be lots of production being done around here and they'll probably consider you for a higher position. Animation is a market-driven industry. The product does great, and employees usually do fine making more of it.

While we're on the subject of the industry booming or not booming, there are a cluster of upcoming animated projects forPixar/Disney, DreamWorks, and Fox, none of them sequels and all of them creative departures. And Daily Variety speculates on how each will do at the box office (and is being promoted):

Fox's "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!," DreamWorks' "Kung Fu Panda" and Pixar's "Wall-E" signify major departures for their respective studios. As such, marketing efforts have been under way since last summer to message each film's unique qualities to audiences.

"Horton," which opens Friday, marks the first adaptation from Blue Sky Animation, the team behind the "Ice Age" franchise. Since kids aren't likely to make this connection, Fox is pushing the fact that this beloved Dr. Seuss story boasts two A-list comedians, Jim Carrey and Steve Carell ...

[As regards DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda] with Jack Black voicing the title role, laughs would come naturally, but not at the expense of the epic feel [the directors] were trying to create: In a version of ancient China where humans never existed, five critters invent kung fu's key styles according to their unique animal qualities ... "We asked ourselves the question, 'What if Akira Kurosawa shot a Jerry Lewis movie?'"

Pixar's nearly dialogue-free "Wall-E" (June 27), a trash-compacting droid left behind on an uninhabitable Earth falls for a newer model beamed down from space. In the robot romance that ensues, the characters communicate primarily in a language hatched by Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt (the brains behind R2-D2)...

I don't think there's ever been a time when the health of the animation business didn't depend on animated television shows/features/commercials doing gangbuster business. The animation explosion in the early and mid-nineties was pretty much predicated on Disney's string of monster hits, the television renaissance occurred when prime time cartoon series and daytime animated blocks (Duck Tales, The Disney Afternoon) made buckets of money.

So, in your morning and evening prayers, express the fervent home that Horton, Panda and Wall*E set the box office turnstiles to spinning so fast that they burst into effing flames.

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