Doing a 401(k)?! In This Market?

Going from studio to studio these days, I hear people wonder aloud where they should put their 401(k) money.

I have a cluster of really simple answers:

1) Diversify (bonds; foreign and domestic stocks.)

2) Dollar cost average (just keep putting a chunk of money into the market each week, and don't obsess about the ups and downs ... downs ... downs.)

3) Pray that the market is cheap until four years before you're ready to retire, then pray that it shoots up into the stratosphere (the way it did from 1982 through 2000).

The man up above, currently the world's richest, has some observations about commodities -- oil in particular -- and is on record as saying that the American economy will come back strong sooner or later. He's high on Bill Gross (the bond guru of PIMCO, one of our 401(k)'s current options). Also on his partner Charlie Munger. (Not all of this is revealed in the video clip.)

As for the Animation Guild's 401(k) Plan, today the plan Trustees spent a few hours reviewing different administrators who might be running it in the relatively near future. (We do this every three years). We are currently being administered by Mass Mutual, an insurance company. We are looking at New York Life -- another insurance company and Vanguard (the nation's second largest mutual fund family) as possible replacement administrators. (We could very well remain with Mass Mutual, who knows?)

If you have any thoughts on these three administrators and think one might be better than the others, and if you're a plan participant, feel free to comment below, or drop us an e-mail. Oh yeah. Please use your actual name for this, because anonymous won't cut it.

The trustees are going to be chewing different options around for awhile, so there won't be any immediate changes to the Plan, just so you know.

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Three Studios Near Flower Street

Because the rattle trap Ford Taurus I drive around in wouldn't start in a Disney parking lot this afternoon, I ended up doing three studios in the p.m. All in Glendale. All near Flower Street.

They're Disney Toons. Disney Television Animation. And DreamWorks.

The Disney factories -- housed in the Sonora building in Glendale -- I drove to. For DreamWorks, I walked. And not because I wanted to.

In the way of product, there is nothing new to report at any of the studios that I didn't report a couple of weeks ago. In the way of conversations with employees, there's a few more things.

At Disney Toons, I got into a lively discussion about work getting outsourced overseas? ("Is all the work here going away?" "Where will the jobs be three years ... five years ... eight years from now?")

I opined that technological infrastructure and the sizable pool of talent in L.A. will keep a lot of the work here, pointing to Electronic Arts big facility in Playa Vista as an example. One of the computer guys countered that E.A. has closed its Chicago Studio, and that Rhythm and Hues management has told crew that it keeps the doors open at its South Bay facility by outsourcing some of the work to its overseas studio.

Downstairs at Disney TVA, an artist wanted to know how vibrant the teevee animation biz is just now. I said I've seen it better. And bigger. ("Adelaide used to have two hundred employees, Warner Bros. had about as many. Now they've got a couple of dozen.") The artist said he has a bunch of friends looking for work.

The Crew on My Friends Tigger and Pooh are delighted to be working. DreamWorks employees were focused on getting the new feature out.

I finally got my car started. As it ages, the thing takes its own sweet time to fire up. Drives me crazy.

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European Animation Pitches

We talked about it earlier, but The Hollywood Reporter details the "Cartoon Movie" fest that wrapped in Berlin on Friday:.

... Started as a means of support for the ailing European animation community by 20-year-old European association Cartoon, the three-day conference accompanies projects from start to finish, presenting them to possible co-production or distribution partners in concept, development, production and finished stages.

With a record attendance of 530 attendees from 29 countries pitching 48 projects, the mood at the confab was appropriately high, with many professionals sitting on the theater floor or standing along the walls for the most anticipated pitches and presentations of the event ...

Numbers presented by Cartoon managing director Marc Vandeweyer at the final news conference revealed that during Cartoon Movie's 10 years, 40% of the 305 submitted projects secured financing.

TAG reviews the "O-1" immigration visas of animation artists coming into L.A. for work on different animation projects. But the traffice isn't one-way. Over the years, I've seen lots of local animators buying plane tickets to work on projects overseas.

Nice to see that 121 projects have been underwritten for production over there in the European community. The more animation that gets produced worldwide, the more job opportunities there are for everybody.

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The Weekend March of Box Office

Here in the first half of March -- not the highest grossing time of year -- cavemen, c.g. mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers rack up big numbers as 10,000 B.C. rakes in $35.7 million (as critics are left cold) to take the top spot ...

College Road Trip enters the list at #2 with a $14 million take, while the other Martin Lawrence flick Rosco Jenkins... soldiers on at #16 with a $40.8 million total.

The other semi-animated film in the Top Ten, The Spiderwick Chronicles, has now accumulated $61.7 million.

Addendum: Variety has its own overview of the weekend just wrapped:

Though hopes for the Rolland Emmerich-helmed "10,000 BC" rose as high as $40 million-plus, the pic's perf ended up right in line with studio expectations. No one expected "10,000 BC" to come close to the $71 million debut mounted by "300" over the same weekend last year.

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Sinbad Ruffs

Kevin writes:

I got a lot of requests to see some animation roughs after the posts on Spacing and the Baxter Sinbad tests, so here are a couple from the Sinbad test scene I previously posted. The top image is a preliminary rough, the second image is the final rough. You can click on them to see them larger ...

As you can see, James delivered very tight roughs to the clean-up department. This is the way animators at DreamWorks tended to work. The animation roughs I’ve seen from other studios were often more like the top drawing ... And remember the clips I posted in the Spacing discussion of Sinbad carrying Marina across the deck? Well, here’s a drawingthat’s NOT a rough from that scene, though I wish it were ...

Click on the link above to see all the ruffs Kevin talks about -- and the rest of the post -- that aren't shown here. (The image I grabbed off the web -- up there in the right-hand corner -- isn't one of the drawings.)

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Beware the Links of March

Another weekend, another cavalcade of links.

What's allegedly one of the most expensive Swiss films ever made, the stop-motion animated feature Max & Co. gets reviewed by Variety:

Normally, derelict dads, genetic engineering and class warfare would not constitute the stuff of funny-animal fables, but in the freres Guillaume's impressive animated feature, social realism and critiques of capitalism amusingly enter the realm of the fantastic ...

Given the general tendency to consider animation a kiddie medium, "Max & Co" is difficult to pin down with its fairy-tale design and kid hero on the one hand, and its socially sophisticated storyline on the other. The art-film route charted by animated features like "The Triplets of Belleville" and "Persepolis" might merit distrib consideration ...

And yet another fine article on the resurrection of hand-drawn animation (which, of course, has never really gone totally away...):

"Wherever I went in the world and talked to students they always asked me `When is the next big Disney hand-drawn movie coming?'," Disney's LA-based master animator, Andreas Deja, recalling [the dark days of no hand-drawn product at Disney Feature Animation], said in an interview.

"For a while I had to say: `I just don't know where we are going. There are no plans right now, but we are working on it. I'm hanging in there."'

... "John Lasseter came in and said: `This is nonsense. Hand-drawn films are such a big part of Disney ..."

There's this sad news from Warner Bros./D.C. Comics: Teen Titans, once a multi-season series at WB Animation, won't become anything more than that anytime soon:

Warner Brothers and DC Comics have decided not to make Teen Titans: The Judas Contract one of the next DC Universe Animated Movies. Marv Wolfman, who wrote the Teen Titans comic for DC in the 1980s and is one of the scriptwriters for the animated feature recently told World's Finest Online that Warner Home Video has decided to delay the film at least until the completion of Batman: Gotham Knight and Wonder Woman ...

Mr. Katzenberg might not be doing as well as his fellow Captain of Industry one city over (see below), but he's doing pretty well:

Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., received $11 million in stock and option awards in 2007, more than double his 2006 totals, according to a company regulatory filing Friday ...

Here's the Hollywood Reporter/Reuters take on the Disney stockholders meeting (which focuses on different topics than we did):

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Top brass at Disney were called on Thursday to defend their decision not to release the controversial miniseries "The Path to 9/11" on DVD and to justify CEO Robert Iger's $27.7 million pay package.

"Path," a 2006 ABC miniseries critical of President Bill Clinton's handling of terrorist threats, was so controversial that leading Democrats asked Disney not to air the program. Disney, after making some hasty edits, ran it commercial-free.

At Disney's annual shareholders' meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., one mutual fund portfolio manager said it was high time Disney turned "Path" into a DVD and recouped some of the $40 million it spent on the project ...

We'll end with one more article on Blue Sky Animation, Horton, and Fox-News Corp. savvy publicity campaign (of which this article is a part):

Winning approval from the Seuss estate and lining up such voice talent as Jim Carrey (Horton), Steve Carell (the Mayor of Whoville) and Carol Burnett (the meddlesome Kangaroo) was one thing. Translating the book's distinctive drawings filled with floppy foliage, tilted towers and insect-like Whos into computer animation was something else.

"When we started, we were all intimidated by Seuss," says Chris Wedge, Blue Sky co-founder, Ice Age director and an executive producer on Horton.

He and the rest of the crew were well aware that the animated gold standard of such adaptations is Chuck Jones' 1966 TV version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Addendum: The Boston Globe reviews fantasy movies derived from illustrated children's books, from Horton Hears a Who to Winnie the Pooh and books beyond:

... Using children's picture books and illustrated novels as inspiration is nothing new for Hollywood. Several of the most beloved early Disney animation features originated that way. Yet the past few years have seen picture books come to the screen as never before. As a source of family-oriented films they've been exceeded only by fantasy titles ("The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the Harry Potter books, the "Narnia" series, "The Golden Compass").

Seussian cinema, as one might call illustrated-book-derived movies, has practically become its own genre: "The Cat in the Hat" (2003) and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000), among others, preceded "Horton." No doubt this movie connection would please Seuss, who, as Major Theodor Geisel, headed the animation division of Frank Capra's Armed Forces Picture unit during World War II ...

Addendum II: Lastly, let's throw in this Andreas Deja interview from MovieWeb:

[101 Dalmations] is one of the best stories told. It's a very straight line story. It just flows along beautifully. I don't know if you were aware of this, but for the first time, they only had one story person developing the whole story. He drew all of the storyboards, he did the story treatment, and that was a man named Bill Peet ...

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Studio Early Marchabout

Week to week, not a whole lot is different at the big studios. I stumble into this or that animation facility, toting my bag of 401(k) books. I chat people up, then stumble out again.

Exciting, no?

Once in a while, I look at an animation loop on somebody's computer and think: "Heey. That looks interesting." I tend not to look at storyboards hanging on walls or character development stuff because I make a conscious effort not to know much of anything. Like, a few days ago I'm in a story artist's cube when the story director comes in and initiates a conversation about redoes on a sequence. And a discussion ensues about whether one of the characters in the background of a story panel should be facing the doorway, or facing the window, or not be there at all, since now the foreground action is different and it doesn't play the same, yadda ... yadda ...

And I sit in a corner, mostly tuned out. Since I'm not plugged into story development anymore, I pay no attention when I'm accidentally around it. This is partly self-protection on my part. When I get asked for details about some feature or other, I want to be able to say truthfully "I don't know," rather than lie.

The other reason? Getting characters gracefully on and off screen, or deciding whether the pratfall or witty line works better in the middle of the scene or at the end isn't my bag anymore.

But work continues apace at DreamWorks and Disney Animation Studio. Kung Fu Panda is now receiving final touches with lighting before its June release. And heavier production work is happening on Bolt, with some crew getting into overtime as the wheels of production spin faster.

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The Disney Stockholder Meeting in Albquerque

This morning, from 10-11:25 a.m., Disney execs -- led by John Pepper (Chairman of the Board) and Robert Iger (CEO) -- rolled out the company's plans and products to stockholders who had made the trip to New Mexico for the presentation. What follows is a TAG member's report:

Disney characters were entertaining kids outside the auditorium, video cameras picking up the action so it could be projected onto the big screen inside. (Pretty much the same deal as at the Anaheim shareholders meeting two years ago.) Disney Chairman of the Board John Pepper introduced CEO Robert Iger, who proceeded to unveil projects and films in the pipeline, as well as company performance. Some of the highlights:

*The company's stock price has risen 15% over the last five years, outpacing the 11% rise of the S & P 500.

* A short clip of Wall*E was shown, with the announcement that "This is the first time this has been shown publically."

* Roy Disney was in attendance, although he didn't take the stage or speak but merely stood up from the audience when he was intro'd after the board of directors.

* John Lasseter wasn't on stage. If he was there in Albuquerque, he didn't make his presence known.

The Q & A, as it often is, was sort of lively. A stockholder wanted to know if Song of the South was going to be released onto DVD (Answer: There are no plans to put it on little silver disks "at this time.")

A stockholder asked if Mr. Iger's $29 million salary wasn't perhaps excessive, and couldn't the company lower it to, say, $20 million? (Answer:He's compensated in line with executives of companies of equivalent size.)

A stockholder wanted to know if they could pay dividends quarterly rather than annually. (The company's most recent dividend was 35 cents per share.) (Answer: It would be cost prohibitive, particularly since there are so may single-shareholders. The company has done the annual payouts instead of quarterly for the past ten years.)

The whole meeting took less than an hour-and-a-half. All in all, one of the less exciting stockholder meetings that I've attended.

Addendum: The picture up top? That's the Albuquerque Convention Center, where the meeting was held.

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The Wise Old Animation Exec on Blue Sky's Latest

Monday last, a grizzled animation exec I've known like forever said to me: "I don't think Dr. Seuss is going to translate well to CGI." He was referring to the latest animated extravaganza from Fox's wholly-owned subsidiary Blue Sky Animation. The creators, quite naturally, have a different opinion:

..."we looked at 3-D work that has been done," [Horton director Steve Martino] says. "Dr. Seuss had done several sculptures ... and we looked at how he translated his drawing style into 3-D ..."

"The main task that [co-director Jimmy Hayward] and I had was communicating to everybody how we were going to translate those drawings -- his thinking -- into three dimensions," Martino says. "[The drawings] are very organic and rarely symmetrical, often with odd little wrinkles and curves. We built that thinking into the style guide."

Martino and Heyward have their opinions; the wise old exec has his. My longtime friend also knows a bit about the film, and thinks Blue Sky has modernized it and slicked it up too much, and missed Seuss's main thematic points.

Me, I have zilch information or knowledge about the flick, and offered no opinion on whether it was wonderful or less than wonderful. But I do know Tinsel Town's definition of an artistic triumph yesterday, now, and always:

"To Hollywood, a good film is a film that makes a lot of money."

-- Film historian Robert S. Birchard (quoting every movie exec who ever lived.)

And Fox is good at having its animated films make a lot of money. (Alvin and the Chipmunks and Ice Age: The Meltdown anyone?)

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Worldwide Animation Synergy

A short while ago, I had lunch with a longtime animation employee who is now working and consulting for animation studios overseas. He told me:

"I'm not helping with outsourcing American work; it's domestic content in Asian countries that I work on. China is keen on developing a domestic animation industry doing t.v. shows and features for internal consumption, and there are American animators and companies helping them develop ... "

And it's not just in China that American animators and companies are bolstering foreign domestic content. Take this for instance:

Tokyo, Mar 6, 2008 (Jiji Press) - U.S. entertainment giant Walt Disney Co. will start animation production and broadcasting in Japan, it was learned Thursday.

As the first step, Walt Disney will collaborate with Toei Animation Co. to make an animation series featuring a robot and air the program probably in May, sources familiar with the matter said.

And why would Toei partner with the Mouse House? Here's a clue:

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Toei Animation Co. rose the most in four months in Tokyo trading on a TV production alliance between the Japanese creator of animated films and Walt Disney Co.

The shares gained 125 yen, or 5.7 percent, to 2,335 yen, as of 12:40 p.m., on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the biggest advance since Oct. 29. The stock earlier gained as much as 13 percent.

``We have been discussing projects with Toei Animation since August 2006 when we signed an agreement on coproduction of animated features,'' said Walt Disney Co. spokesman Akiyuki Tezuka ...

American animation companies are partnering up with animation studios in India, in China, also Singapore. Smaller niche players and freelancing pipeline and animation consultants are also getting into the act. "In the next five years, this is going to be a big wave to ride for a lot of animation and tech people, " said my lunch companion.

I've little doubt he's right. There's lot of animation going on beyond American borders, animation that Americans barely know exist. But a growing cadre of animation specialists are well aware of newer markets, and working in them.

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Acting In Animation

Clay Kaytis has been interviewing James Baxter for his fantastic podcasts, and Kevin has posted some clips to illustrate part of the interview.

Kevin writes:

Clay Kaytis just put up part two of his James Baxter interview podcast, in which James talks about acting in animation, and cites Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as excellent reference. [At the link above] is a clip of Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray from The Apartment that James used in a talk on secondary action that James gave at DreamWorks a few years ago:

The Apartment is an absolutely fantastic movie that deserves study on multiple levels, but take a look at the secondary action in this clip. As you all know, secondary action is behavior by a character that is not part of the primary action of a scene, and which adds nuance and personality to the character (note that secondary action is NOT “action that results from another action,” as you will find some people redefining the term — that should be referred to as secondary motion, or secondary animation). While the primary action often serves the plot, the secondary action often serves the theme ...

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Katzenberg on Producing Hit Movies

The first time I met Jeffrey Katzenberg I was standing in front of a bunch of storyboards in a Disney hallway, pointing to the little drawings one by one and telling him the story outline of a mid-eighties Disney feature.

I don't think he was overwhelmed with my presentation, but the picture ended up getting made anyway. Now, of course, Jeffrey K. makes animated films full time. He was back East a little while ago answering questions about them ...

Katzenberg [was asked] how much it cost to make a Pixar-animated film compared with a regular, live-action movie.

"I can't answer for Pixar as that's made by the other D company" ... Katzenberg said the cost to make one of the Shrek movies is between $150 million and $160 million. "It's very expensive to do what we do," he said.

The investments, however, have paid off mightily. The three installments of the Shrek franchise have collectively earned $2.2 billion in theatrical realize worldwide ...

Whether you like DreamWorks Animated Features or not (I like a lot of them), what the company has done is an amazing high-wire act. It started with three guys, a few ideas, and Paul Allen's bankroll. And it's turned into a profitable brand name releasing cgi features.

Quite remarkable, when you think about it.

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TAG Approves Remodel of New Building

The Animation Guild executive board has approved the remodel of its new facility in Burbank by the Illig Construction Co. At a special membership meeting tonight, the plans were presented to members.

It's expected the remodel will be completed within the next eight to nine months.

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Our Mother International Negotiates

In case you didn't see it, Daily Variety reports there will be early negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the IA:

... the Intl. Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees will hold early negotiations with the AMPTP on its West Coast contract starting April 7.

IATSE, which covers about 25,000 below-the-line employees in 18 locals in the contract, is about halfway through its current contract. That pact, finalized in early 2006, expires in August 2009.

This early negotiation strategy by the IA has been percolating for a while. I'm assuming that the AMPTP would like to have all the Hollywood labor unions onboard the boat sooner rather than later. So it looks like SAG-AFTRA's negotiations will be last in the current contract cycle, given their weekend squabbling:

AFTRA is telling the Screen Actors Guild to stop dragging its feet -- and warning that it's willing to start negotiations as early as this month without SAG.

The move by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists is the latest indication of the town's increasing frustration over SAG's refusal to schedule formal negotiations with the AMPTP as soon as possible ...

SAG's really brilliant move to reject a merger with AFTRA some years ago could come back to bite it. Instead of having one union negotiating deals, there are now two that can undercut each other.

Fabulous.

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Why Some TV Animation Studios Are Busier Than Others

As I've related, the television side of the animation industry hasn't been super robust lately. Warners Animation is way slower than in years past, Universal Cartoon Studio is down to one series, and Cartoon Network is down from its peak.

Nickelodeon is one 'toon studio that has a pretty full slate of shows. As I walk through it month to month, I've wondered why it's busier than the others. This piece from Bloomberg throws a little light on the subject:

Viacom's media networks, home to cable channels including Comedy Central, increased profit 15 percent to $915.5 million as the MTV shows and Nickelodeon's ``SpongeBob SquarePants'' drew more viewers. Revenue gained 18 percent to $2.45 billion, reflecting higher ad sales and affiliate fees, Viacom said.

Contrast this with Cartoon Network's distant third in the cable wars, its spate of bad luck with executives dying young or leaving because of scandal over failed advertising. Or Time-Warner turning over its Saturday morning block of cartoons to an outside vendor.

If you want a flourishing animation industry, you've got to have a flourishing animation marketplace. Far more than live action, animated product withers then disappears when sales aren't robust. And it grows when profits are high (Lion King, Finding Nemo and Shrek being prime examples on the theatrical side; Scooby Doo, Fairly Odd Parents and Sponge Bob Square Pants being specimens in the t.v. section.).

Which is why I'm always beating the bass drum for animation's success in both venues. Failure smothers the industry.

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Compiling the 2008 Wage Survey

A word about the animation wage survey.

At our deadline we ended up with slightly fewer survey forms than last year. I wish like hell that we had gotten more than last year, but the results are what they are ...

We should have the compilation done in the next week. And we'll publish them here and in the union newsletter when the work is done.

(Pulling one form off the top of the big stack, I find that one character technical director is within spitting distance of last year's average: he or she is making $47.36 per hour or $1894.40 on a forty-hour week.)

Last year the T.D. average was $2000 per forty-hour week. (Check the link up above).

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Donald and Daffy Followup

Kevin writes:

Mark [Kausler’s] comments [regarding his and Joe Ranft's boarding of the piano duel] confirm what I suspected — the director of photography took what were undoubtedly well-staged boards from Mark and Joe and, making his best guess of how the animation should play, arranged the set and the rigged props and shot the plates. Imagine filming a scene without actors, then dropping in the actors later. It’s a setup for a mess, especially if you don’t really understand what animation can do. I can also imagine that a live-action filmmakers may not have been used to looking at animation storyboards ...

I would dearly love to see the piano-duel sequence shot the way Ranft and Kausler boarded it. It was a brilliant idea to make them battling musicians. As I wrote before, there’s some wonderful animation in there (props to Mark and Dave Spafford and everyone else who animated those ducks), and if the camera work and staging were clear, the thrills and excitement of the sequence would come out of the character animation, the way it should ...

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Tron 3D ?

Film School Rejects has a summary of rumors and speculation about Disney's upcoming projects:

... thanks to a spy over at AICN, it appears that we have a little more information as to when this TRON film will be hitting theaters. According to the report, not only is Disney looking at a 2011 release, but it is also looking to continue its foray into 3D with the title ...

Apparently it takes a while to crank up a sequel when the first one -- back in the early eighties -- was such an underperformer at the box office. I remember at the time it was the studio's great hope for "blockbuster", but Tron didn't really even crack many good-sized bricks. It was released at the same time Spielberg's E.T. was rolled out, and guess which film prevailed? Rejects continues:

... The Disney snoop also revealed the company’s other plans for the year 2011, including Cars 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 and National Treasure 3. And say what you want about those three franchises, the fact remains that they continue to make money at the box office.

Somebody pointed out to me a couple of week's ago that it doesn't take a hell of a lot to be a studio "Snoop." All you really need to do is check the company's public filings with the guvmint for registering new film titles (Tron 2, Son of Cars, Goofy and Donald Go Postal etc.) and you can sort of connect dots and deduce what Disney ... or Fox ... or Warners may be up to.

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An Afternoon Remembering

Art Leonardi's display for Warren Batchelder, Alberto De Mello and Tom O'louglin at the Lasky barn.

"Life is but a brief interval in between two Great Infinities"* -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

The '08 memorial for artists, actors and others from the animation industry who passed on last year happened at the Lasky barn earlier today. There was a bushel of stories and recollections about the departed, and the way various things used to be ...

And here's a closer look at the Warners Bros. Animation crew, circa 1965. Feel free to i.d. anyone you recognize.

Dean Yeagle recalled how Jack Zander gave him some advice after Yeagle took midday nap at his animation desk:

"Next time, try not to fall asleep with your face on the disk. You won't get animation peg indentations on your forehead" ...

I pointed out that Ed Hansen -- the administrative head of Disney Animation in the early eighties -- is responsible for the shape of a lot of the industry today because he fired John Lasseter in '83 ... and thereby set a lot of new and different wheels in motion.

Tom Sito, Art Leonardi, and Jerry Eisenberg swap stories about Iwao Takomoto.

Art Leonardi remembered how Iwao Takamoto -- one of the artistic dynamos of Hanna-Barbera for over four decades -- became more than a little concerned when Art discovered that the wide-screen Jetsons feature then being animated overseas was being created in a square television format, not Panavision.

And Jerry Eisenberg reminisced how Iwao honed his youthful artistic skills while in a Nissei internment camp in the Mojave desert during World War II.

Mr. Leonardi's handiwork of Iwao's life and career ...

"When I die I don't want to go to Heaven, I want to go to UPA"* -- Friz Freleng (1906-1995)

"As I lay on the ground, with [the paramedics] working on me, I went to a corner of my mind and looked out on all that was happening. I thought to myself, this doesn't feel so bad. It feels kinda good. So what's the big damn deal? I came back, but ever since then, I'm no longer afraid."* -- Shamus Culhane (1908-1996).

"Well, what did you expect? TWO HUNDRED?"* -- Myron "Grim" Natwick (1890-1990) to a visitor as he lay dying in a hospital bed, age 100.

* from "An Afternoon of Remembrance" program.

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The Box Office

In the Friday prelims, Will Ferrell's latest sports epic takes the top spot, while The Other Boleyn Girl takes #3 ...

All of the older titles move down a notch or two. (Nothing stays dominant in the early months of the year. The holidays are long over. And Titanic was a long time ago ...)

Update: Ferrell takes #1, but the press is pointing out that it's a kind of weak opening weekend:

... while Will Ferrell's basketball comedy Semi-Pro finished at No. 1, you could hardly call its victory a slam dunk.

The R-rated farce grossed a weak $15.3 mil, according to Sunday's estimates, a total that is only about half as much as what most prognosticators (including yours truly) thought it would accumulate. That's among Ferrell's poorest debuts ever as a lead star ...

So, like penguin movies in animation, Ferrell can only do so many sports films before audience fatigue sets in.

Elsewhere in the chart, the Boleyn sisters ended up at #4, taking in $8.3 million, and Penelope, the other debut collected half that at #8.

On the animated feature front, the action is quiet to the point of being comatose.

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