Animation Month In Review: June
The animation world never slows down and neither do we. Here are a few of the items we covered on Cartoon Brew last month:
We saw trailers for Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania, Pixar’s Monsters University, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, Blue Sky’s Epic, the French animated feature The Suicide Shop and the Filipino live-action/animated film Saving Sally. We heard that Genndy Tartakovsky will direct a Popeye feature and Louis Clichy will direct an Asterix feature. We celebrated the box office success of Madagascar 3 and Brave and the direct-to-Internet-streaming “success” of Kiara the Brave. We previewed the Walt Disney Family Museum’s upcoming Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 75th anniversary art show and rolled our eyes at the designs of 7D, Disney TV’s new take on the Seven Dwarfs. We listened to Glen Keane discuss his post-Disney plans and LeSean Thomas describe what it’s like for an American animation director to work in Seoul.
And then, we enjoyed looking at classic model sheets from MGM cartoons and even more MGM model sheets. We wished we could live the luxe life of a DreamWorks Animation executive, or even better, like the CEO of DreamWorks Animation. We watched a Stussy commercial by John Kricfalusi and an early piece of animation by South Park co-creator Trey Parker. We debated whether cartoons are racist but didn’t seem to care about this politically incorrect live-action parody of an animated feature. We applauded when June Foray won an Emmy. We saw Hollywood animation artists continue to migrate toward interactive media: Ken Duncan moves forward with his iPad app My Beastly ABCs and Ryan Woodward has finished the first issue of Bottom of the Ninth, an animated graphic novel for the iPad. We discovered that dead fish aren’t easy to animate, Seth MacFarlane’s mom masturbated a dog once, Walt Disney liked to eat roast beef sandwiches and mac ‘n’ cheese and the original model for the Superman cartoons ended up as a member of the Mad Russians wrestling crew. And finally, we learned the definition of cute.
