The Shrinking Vocal Middle Class
One hears about the shrinking middle class all the time on the news, though a similar phenomenon is going on in the animation biz: professional voice over specialists are becoming the “shrinking middle...
View ArticleThe Best Western You’ve Never Seen
I’ve written before about the increasingly thin barriers between animation and live-action filmmaking, barriers that are becoming more transparent with time (check out Guillermo del Toro’s Simpsons...
View ArticleGet Ready for a Real Turkey Feast!
The creative forces behind Reel FX’s new animated feature Free Birds discuss the choices behind their time-traveling turkey pic. Take two turkeys, one of them cautious and uncharacteristically smart...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Johns
Last week would have been John Lennon’s 73rd birthday, a fact that was widely recognized around the world. While a lot of people realize that in addition to being a legendary musician Lennon was an...
View ArticleLou Scheimer: An Appreciation
It seems that everyone in the animation business loved Lou Scheimer. The Saturday morning kidvid devotees of the 1960s (which included me) loved the cool shows Lou produced through his company...
View ArticleBela Lugosi Meets a Hollywood Animator
Halloween is upon us once again, which set me thinking about Walter Lantz. What, you may ask, does the purveyor of Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda cartoons have to do with Halloween? Well, back in...
View ArticleAnimation’s Legendary (Semi-) Lost Film
Genuinely lost films in feature animation are so rare as to qualify as unique, but there is at least one: Hanna-Barbera’s Rock Odyssey. Intended as the rock n’ roll answer to Fantasia, Rock Odyssey was...
View ArticleKracov’s Toons: A Career with Legs
I’ve interviewed a lot of people over the past quarter-century and have heard a lot of stories about how individuals found their ways into the Toon Trenches, but none have been so unusual as the story...
View Article‘Khumba’ Earns Its Stripes
The scoop on South African indie Triggerfish’s second feature. You don’t have to scratch too deeply to find the metaphors in Khumba, the second digitally animated feature film to come from South...
View ArticleA Toonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down
Trends come and trends go, but no trend came and went quite so quickly as the one that hit a little over a decade ago, which saw live action films, usually indies, suddenly turning into animation about...
View ArticleThat Other (Sort of) Thanksgiving Movie
One more Thanksgiving Day has come and gone, but this year there actually was a Thanksgiving-themed animated film out there. But nearly 20 years ago, there was another picture that had a similar time...
View ArticleShows While You Wait
Of everyone who has labored within the toon trenches over the decades, it is difficult to find anyone who has worked harder than Phil Harnage. Having started as a script writer at Filmation in the...
View ArticleBetty Boop Takes a Lickin’
Remember when animation professionals used to take pains to argue that animation was not simply a children’s entertainment medium? Neither do the studios. But during the feature animation renaissance...
View ArticleIf That Don’t Beat All
Like every other fan of CN’s The Powerpuff Girls, I was delighted to hear that a new special titled Powerpuff Girls: Dance Pantsed, featuring the kindergarten super heroines with the Keene Painting...
View ArticleThere’s No Business Like Show Business
This past weekend Disney’s Frozen achieved a rare distinction for any film in that it returned to number one box office status after having previously dropped out of the top spot. Because of this, I...
View ArticleSmooth Criminal
Toronto’s ToonBox and Korea’s Redrover tell the tale of a critter heist in the year’s first new CG-animated feature, The Nut Job. There’s a whole story behind the family comedy The Nut Job, the first...
View ArticleA Century of Dinos
What is it about dinosaurs and animation? One could argue that animation is the perfect method of bringing them to life onscreen, which is why the love affair between animators and the long-extinct...
View ArticleAnybody Here Seen Our Old ‘Friend, Martin?’
I am writing this blog on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and I know what a lot of you are thinking: this is very likely the only national holiday for which there is no animated film. Sorry, but wrong. In...
View ArticleJoe Barbera’s Snow Job
As regular readers of this blog know, whenever I’m at a loss for a story idea, I turn back to the book of Joe … Barbera, that is. I knew Joe for the last several years of his life and would often go up...
View ArticleRemembering Arthur Rankin Jr.
I’ve rarely spoken to any one with as much enthusiasm for his work as Arthur Rankin Jr., half of the prolific production team of Rankin/Bass, who has just passed away at the age of 89. Arthur loved...
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