The Top 20 Stories of 2014 on Cartoon Brew
The American animation industry’s wage-fixing scandal garnered the most attention on Cartoon Brew this year, with three of our most viewed stories centered on that topic.
Overall, it was a serious year: our top five was rounded out by stories on animation not getting respect from the mainstream film industry; Clarence creator Skyler Page being booted from Cartoon Network after inappropriate behavior was made public on Twitter; false take-down notices of indie animation on YouTube (ironically, from Sony); and Andy Serkis versus animators.
Layoffs, executive departures, and Meryl Streep’s failed attempt to be an animation historian also proved popular with readers. And the year’s most-viewed post specifically about an animated short: Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life. This is, after all, still the Internet.
Here are 2014’s top twenty posts, ranked by pageviews:
1. “Definitive Proof That Academy Voters Are Ignorant About Animation”
2. “Clarence Creator Skyler Page Out of Cartoon Network After Sexual Assault Allegations”
3. “Pixar’s Ed Catmull Emerges As Central Figure In The Wage-Fixing Scandal”
4. “Sony Demands Removal of Open-Source Indie Short Sintel From YouTube”
5. “Andy Serkis Does Everything, Animators Do Nothing, Says Andy Serkis”
6. “DreamWorks Lays Off Dozens of Employees As Dragons 2 Continues to Underperform”
7. “Farewell To Stu Snyder, The Man Who Tried To Make Cartoon Network Cartoon-Less”
8. “Production is Over On Phineas and Ferb, Future of Show Up in the Air”
9. “Pixar Makes Painterly CG: New Research Could Change The Look of Their Films”
10. “Lord of the Rings Animation Supervisor Randall William Cook Speaks Out On Andy Serkis”
11. “Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Sony Are Sued in Wage Theft Scandal”
12. “Fact-Checking Meryl Streep’s Disney-Bashing Speech”
13. “Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life by Airplane Randy”
14. “Disney Villains Perfume Bottles”
15. “10 Animated Sexploitation Features from the Sixties and Seventies”
16. “Disney and DreamWorks May Have Been Part of Illegal Pixar/Lucasfilm Wage-Fixing Cartel”
17. “The Ultimate Guide to Animated Mockbusters”
18. “Cartoon Network Pulls “Too Sexy” Powerpuff Girls Comic Book Cover”
19. “Disney’s Frozen: The Acting and Performance Analysis”
20. “Triplets of Belleville Director Sylvain Chomet Does French Simpsons Couch Gag”
