Thursday, October 28, 2010


Today in Animation
Dr.Toon :When reaganment optimus prime derequlation on TV animation






Book review:Animated Performance
Read how imagination-based excersises really shine in the largest book by nancy beiman.



Catching Bullets Full of Red
Randy Goux tells us about the CG Mayhem in the latest DE comics adaption.



Jackie cockle Talks:Timmy time:The Timmy time creator discuses Aardman's first pre school series now airing on play house Disney.





Jhon Knoll Talks Star Wars 3-D
ILM'S acclaimed VFX supervisor discuses the challanges of converting the star wars sagato 3-D

Thursday, October 21, 2010


Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival
The 2010 Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival(SICAF),the biggest animation festival in korea,will take place at COEX in Samseong-dong,seoul,from Jul.21 to25.With the
participation of 190 animation companies at 532 booths,this year's festival is expected to be the
biggest ever.
The annual festival now in its 14th year will be largely divided into four sections:an Animated
Film Festival.a SICAF Exhibition,an International Digital Cartoon competition and a seoul promotion plan 2010(SPP)

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

i am saying about post production.That means after pre production works
[post production]
  1. particels&fireworks
  2. final color correction
  3. final rendring&output
Best animation cource:
the animation industry is basically divided in many areas,but in a bussiness or job point of view,they are divide into
  1. Movie animation
  2. Gaming animation
  3. Advertisements
  4. Cortoon animation
or u are divided them to
[pre production],&[post production]
pre production:
whats mean by pre productions
  1. concept art
  2. planning-story boarding,camera angles,lighting
  3. 2D layouts,Backgrounds&art work
  4. 2D/3D modelling and basic models
  5. 2d/3d modelling/rigging/skinning
  6. Animation,framimng,timing
  7. lighting
  8. particels
  9. Basic color corrections
  10. Basic rendring
these are the pre productions

Monday, October 18, 2010




student creations
  • 2d animation


  • 3d architecture




  • Graphic design


  • Background creation
BEST ANIMATION COURCES

  • Graduation cources education in multimedia,animation&gaming fields.
  • Orientation sessions discovering careers in digital Entertainment
  • Short Term cource skills in animation, gaming,editing&compositing
STUDENT CREATION IN THAT FIELDS
  • 2D animation






The film of "fantastic mr.fox"(2007)
wes anderson's announcement thai he'd be directing a stop -motipon
adapting of Roald dahls beloved novel fantastic Mr.fox was met with justifiable scepticism by most folks. the final product,however.is a wonderfully entertaining and consistently off-the-wall animated adventure that stays true to dahl's droginal story without sacificing anderson's very specific sense of style,with the film's atmosphere of heighened reality perpetuted by the stunning animation and the efforts of an entertainingly oddball voice cast(which inculdes George clooney,meryel strep,Jason schwartzman, and Bill murray).






TOP ANIMATED FILM AND DIRECTORS
The Beowful
release in 2007.is a maked improvement that's often just as exciting engrossing as Zemeckis live action effects,with the movies breath taking animated style heightened by both his stellar perfomancesand its emphasis on larger then life actin sequences,.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Tom And Jerry

I don’t thing we can find even a single person saying that he or she haven’t grown up while watching this one most famous animated movie series. This is the funniest combination of cat-mouse fights. The fun one gets while watching

this never fades off, neither even when you are grown. This animated series was created, written and directed by the world famous animators Williams Hannah and Joseph Barbera. It was produced by famous Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in thousands of numbers. This cartoon also won the Academy award.


Mickey Mouse

Another sweetie pie cartoon that at least I used to watch a lot was Mickey Mouse. That sweet love and those fights between Mickey and Minnie Mouse had always been an adorable experience to watch. It was first introduced on November 18 1928 by Walt Disney.

This is also an academy award winning comic series that turned out to a wonderful success.

And from the small screen it came in to films also and then into lives of people as children got mad at this character and one could find everything with this character on it.


Tweety

One of the mot popular Looney Tunes character was Tweety that used to appear in cartoon with Bugs Bunny and Taz. While the cat Sylvester was always found chasing to eat her up.

This is a sweet yellow colored bird which actually named as sweetie but as it can not pronounce its name correctly itself so it became Tweety.

Once again this character was also awarded with Academy award.Tweety has a misconception attached to it that this is a female while in reality it has been a male character since always.


Super Man

Super Man has been the most famous hero character that has been created ever. This has been all time favorite for kids since it was created long ago. It is a super-human comic fictional character.

This was actually created by a Canadian artist and an American writer in 1932 and was later sold to detective comic incorporation in 1938, from where it started to appear as a comic character. Comic strips used to be published for this character first than many series of it came on radio.

Later television series were also made of this character and became famous world wide. Many huge budget films of Superman have also been produced from Hollywood in series. So from an animated cartoon character it turned out to be an animated movie character equally liked by adults and children.


Donald Duck

A white duck having yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet often found wearing sailor shirt, cap, and a red or black bow tie, yes you have guessed it right, it can be none other than the famous Donald duck.

This character came with Mickey and Minnie Mouse too with his love Daisy Duck. This is also series of animated movies produced by Walt Disney. The most famous thing related to Donald Duck is its most distinct voice that can be identified what so ever the way it appears.

These all are the old very famous cartoon characters and animated movie series that were designed and produced for children and were liked by elders too. These have been successful and famous since they were introduced. At least I find these old ones much better than the cartoon series that we experience to watch now, most of which are usually not suitable for kids even.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Superman vs "The Mad Scientist"

Run time: 10:20

When Lois is kidnapped by a mad scientist, she is given a demonstration of his energy cannon as he attacks Metropolis.

Only Superman can stop it in his first cinematic adventure Written by Kenneth Chisholm {kchishol@execulink.com}

The Mad Scientist threatens to use his Electrothanasia-Ray to cause "total destruction" to the fools who had laughed at him. Lois Lane pilots an airplane to his mountaintop laboratory, but The Scientist has her bound and gagged before she knows it.

He forces her to watch on a television screen as his ray destroys a famous bridge. Next, he uses the ray to topple over the Daily Planet, but Clark Kent changes to Superman in time to save the building and put his indestructible body in front of the ray.

The Mad Scientist is thrilled at the opportunity to pit his deadly machine against the Man of Steel. Written by J. Spurlin, imdb

Director: Dave Fleischer
Writers: Seymour Kneitel (writer)
Joe Shuster (characters)

Characters:
Joan Alexander...Lois Lane (voice) (uncredited)
Jackson Beck...Perry White / Narrator (voice) (uncredited)
Bud Collyer...Clark Kent / Superman (voice) (uncredited)
Jack Mercer...The Mad Scientist (voice) (uncredited)
Julian Noa...Perry White (voice) (uncredited)

Produced: September 26, 1941

Also known as:
Superman: The Introduction (UK) (video box title)
The Death Ray (UK) (video box title)
The Mad Scientist


Enjoy several original Superman movie cartoons from the 1940s.

Since the superhero's debut in "Action Comics" #1 in 1938, Superman has become a pop culture icon familiar to generations.

The Superman character has gone through many incarnations.

Following a mysterious absence of several years, the "Man of Steel" came back to Earth in 2006 in the epic action-adventure "Superman Returns," a soaring new chapter in the saga of one of the world's most beloved Super Heroes.

In this version, while an old enemy plots to render him powerless once and for all, Superman (Brandon Routh) faces the heartbreaking realization that the woman he loves, Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), has moved on with her life. Or has she?

Monday, October 11, 2010

100 greatest animated films:
1. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs - (1937) (Disney)
2. Fantasia - (1940) (Disney)
3. Toy Story - (1995) (Disney/Pixar)
4. Pinocchio - (1940) (Disney)
5. The Lion King - (1994) (Disney)
6. Princess Mononoke - (1999) (Miramax) (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (Japan)
7. Bambi - (1942) (Disney)
8. Beauty And The Beast - (1991) (Disney)
9. Spirited Away - (2001) (Japan)
10. Akira - (1988) (Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo) (Japan)
11. The Nightmare Before Christmas - (1993) (Writer/Producer, Tim Burton) (Touchstone Pictures)
12. Sleeping Beauty - (1959) (Disney)
13. Who Framed Roger Rabbit - (1988) (Disney)
14. Yellow Submarine - (1968) (MGM/UA Studios)
15. Cinderella - (1950) (Disney)
16. Grave Of The Fireflies - (1988) (Wea Corp) (Dir. Isao Takahata) (Japan)
17. Dumbo - (1941) (Disney)
18. My Neighbor Totoro - (1988)
19. Finding Nemo - (2003) (Disney/Pixar)
20. Aladdin - (1992) (Disney)
21. WALL-E - (2008) (Pixar)
22. Animal Farm - (1954) (UK)
23. Fritz the Cat - (1972) (Ralph Bakshi)
24. Fantastic Planet - (1973) (Anchor Bay Entertainment) (Dir. René Laloux) (France)
25. Waking Life - (2001) (Twentieth Century Fox)
26. The Little Mermaid - (1989) (Disney)
27. Shrek - (2001) (DreamWorks)
28. The Iron Giant - (1999) (Warner Home Video)
29. Ghost in the Shell - (1996) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Dir. Mamoru Oshii) (Japan)
30. Heavy Traffic - (1973) (Ralph Bakshi)
31. Monsters Inc. - (2001) (Disney/Pixar)
32. Song of the South - (1946) (Disney)
33. Up - (2009) (Disney)
34. Castle in the Sky - (1986)
35. Peter Pan - (1953) (Disney)
36. Watership Down - (1978) (Warner Studios)
37. Time Masters - (1982) (Image Entertainment) (Dir. René Laloux) (France)
38. Toy Story 2 - (1999) (Disney/Pixar)
39. James and the Giant Peach - (1996) (Producer, Tim Burton) (Disney)
40. The Triplets of Belleville - (2003) (Sony Pictures Classics) (France)
41. Ratatouille - (2007) (Disney/Pixar)
42. Kiki's Delivery Service - (1989) (Toei Animation) (Japan)
43. Coraline - (2009) (Focus Features)
44. Allegro Non Troppo - (1977) (Home Vision Entertainment) (Italy)
45. Coonskin - (1975) (Ralph Bakshi)
46. 101 Dalmatians - (1961) (Disney)
47. A Bug's Life - (1998) (Disney/Pixar)
48. Alice in Wonderland - (1951) (Disney)
49. Charlotte's Web - (1973) (Paramount) (Dir. Charles A. Nichols, Iwao Takamoto)
50. Tarzan - (1999) (Disney)
51. A Scanner Darkly - (2006) (Warner Home Video)
52. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - (1984) (Topcraft)
53. Whisper of the Heart - (1995) (Tokuma Shoten) (Japan)
54. The Phantom Tollbooth - (1969) (Warner Studios)
55. The Incredibles - (2004) (Disney)
56. The Secret of NIMH - (1982)
57. Ninja Scroll - (1996) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri) (Japan)
58. Lady and the Tramp - (1955) (Disney)
59. The Jungle Book - (1967) (Disney)
60. Perfect Blue - (1997) (Rex Entertainment) (Japan)
61. The Three Caballeros - (1945) (Disney)
62. Make Mine Music - (1946) (Disney)
63. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - (1949) (Disney)
64. Fun and Fancy Free - (1947) (Disney)
65. Lilo & Stitch - (2002) (Disney)
66. Anastasia - (1997) (Twentieth Century Fox)
67. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut - (1999) (Paramount Studio)
68. An American Tail - (1986) (Amblin Entertainment)
69. Metropolis - (2001) (Columbia Tristar) (Japan)
70. Ponyo - (2008) (Studio Ghibli) (Japan)
71. American Pop - (1981) (Ralph Bakshi)
72. Vampire Hunter D - (1993) (Urban Vision) (Dir. Carl Macek, Toyoo Ashida) (Japan)
73. Paprika - (2006) (Madhouse) (Japan)
74. Gulliver's Travels - (1939) (Fleischer Studios)
75. Hercules - (1997) (Disney)
76. Porco Rosso - (1992) (Japan Airlines) (Japan)
77. Antz - (1998) (DreamWorks)
78. Pocahontas - (1995) (Disney)
79. Howl's Moving Castle -(2004) (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (Japan)
80. The Land Before Time - (1988) (Amblin Entertainment)
81. The Prince of Egypt - (1998) (Dreamworks Skg)
82. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - (1996) (Disney)
83. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie - (2003 U.S.) (Japan)
84. The Lord of the Rings - (1978) (Ralph Bakshi)
85. Wicked City - (1993) (Urban Vision) (Dir.Yoshiaki Kawajiri) (Japan)
86. The Brave Little Toaster - (1987) (Hyperion Pictures)
87. All Dogs Go To Heaven - (1989) (Goldcrest Films International)
88. Wizards - (1977) (Ralph Bakshi)
89. Vampire Hunter D - Bloodlust - (2001) (Urban Vision Enterta) (Dir. Tai Kit Mak) (Japan)
90. Corpse Bride - (2005) (Writer/Director/Producer, Tim Burton) (Warner Bros.)
91. Gay Purr-ee - (1962) (Warner Studios)
92. The Plague Dogs - (1982) (Nepenthe Productions)
93. Twilight of the Cockroaches - (1987) (Dir. Hiroaki Yoshida) (Japan)
94. The Fox and the Hound - (1981) (Disney)
95. The Castle of Cagliostro - (1991) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Japan)
96. Ice Age - (2001) (Fox Home Entertainment)
97. The Rescuers Down Under - (1990) (Disney)
98. Aero-Troopers - (2003) (Monarch)
99. Robin Hood - (1973) (Disney)
100. Beavis & Butthead Do America - (1996) (Paramount Studio)
100 greatest animated films:
1. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs - (1937) (Disney)
2. Fantasia - (1940) (Disney)
3. Toy Story - (1995) (Disney/Pixar)
4. Pinocchio - (1940) (Disney)
5. The Lion King - (1994) (Disney)
6. Princess Mononoke - (1999) (Miramax) (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (Japan)
7. Bambi - (1942) (Disney)
8. Beauty And The Beast - (1991) (Disney)
9. Spirited Away - (2001) (Japan)
10. Akira - (1988) (Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo) (Japan)
11. The Nightmare Before Christmas - (1993) (Writer/Producer, Tim Burton) (Touchstone Pictures)
12. Sleeping Beauty - (1959) (Disney)
13. Who Framed Roger Rabbit - (1988) (Disney)
14. Yellow Submarine - (1968) (MGM/UA Studios)
15. Cinderella - (1950) (Disney)
16. Grave Of The Fireflies - (1988) (Wea Corp) (Dir. Isao Takahata) (Japan)
17. Dumbo - (1941) (Disney)
18. My Neighbor Totoro - (1988)
19. Finding Nemo - (2003) (Disney/Pixar)
20. Aladdin - (1992) (Disney)
21. WALL-E - (2008) (Pixar)
22. Animal Farm - (1954) (UK)
23. Fritz the Cat - (1972) (Ralph Bakshi)
24. Fantastic Planet - (1973) (Anchor Bay Entertainment) (Dir. René Laloux) (France)
25. Waking Life - (2001) (Twentieth Century Fox)
26. The Little Mermaid - (1989) (Disney)
27. Shrek - (2001) (DreamWorks)
28. The Iron Giant - (1999) (Warner Home Video)
29. Ghost in the Shell - (1996) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Dir. Mamoru Oshii) (Japan)
30. Heavy Traffic - (1973) (Ralph Bakshi)
31. Monsters Inc. - (2001) (Disney/Pixar)
32. Song of the South - (1946) (Disney)
33. Up - (2009) (Disney)
34. Castle in the Sky - (1986)
35. Peter Pan - (1953) (Disney)
36. Watership Down - (1978) (Warner Studios)
37. Time Masters - (1982) (Image Entertainment) (Dir. René Laloux) (France)
38. Toy Story 2 - (1999) (Disney/Pixar)
39. James and the Giant Peach - (1996) (Producer, Tim Burton) (Disney)
40. The Triplets of Belleville - (2003) (Sony Pictures Classics) (France)
41. Ratatouille - (2007) (Disney/Pixar)
42. Kiki's Delivery Service - (1989) (Toei Animation) (Japan)
43. Coraline - (2009) (Focus Features)
44. Allegro Non Troppo - (1977) (Home Vision Entertainment) (Italy)
45. Coonskin - (1975) (Ralph Bakshi)
46. 101 Dalmatians - (1961) (Disney)
47. A Bug's Life - (1998) (Disney/Pixar)
48. Alice in Wonderland - (1951) (Disney)
49. Charlotte's Web - (1973) (Paramount) (Dir. Charles A. Nichols, Iwao Takamoto)
50. Tarzan - (1999) (Disney)
51. A Scanner Darkly - (2006) (Warner Home Video)
52. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - (1984) (Topcraft)
53. Whisper of the Heart - (1995) (Tokuma Shoten) (Japan)
54. The Phantom Tollbooth - (1969) (Warner Studios)
55. The Incredibles - (2004) (Disney)
56. The Secret of NIMH - (1982)
57. Ninja Scroll - (1996) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri) (Japan)
58. Lady and the Tramp - (1955) (Disney)
59. The Jungle Book - (1967) (Disney)
60. Perfect Blue - (1997) (Rex Entertainment) (Japan)
61. The Three Caballeros - (1945) (Disney)
62. Make Mine Music - (1946) (Disney)
63. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - (1949) (Disney)
64. Fun and Fancy Free - (1947) (Disney)
65. Lilo & Stitch - (2002) (Disney)
66. Anastasia - (1997) (Twentieth Century Fox)
67. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut - (1999) (Paramount Studio)
68. An American Tail - (1986) (Amblin Entertainment)
69. Metropolis - (2001) (Columbia Tristar) (Japan)
70. Ponyo - (2008) (Studio Ghibli) (Japan)
71. American Pop - (1981) (Ralph Bakshi)
72. Vampire Hunter D - (1993) (Urban Vision) (Dir. Carl Macek, Toyoo Ashida) (Japan)
73. Paprika - (2006) (Madhouse) (Japan)
74. Gulliver's Travels - (1939) (Fleischer Studios)
75. Hercules - (1997) (Disney)
76. Porco Rosso - (1992) (Japan Airlines) (Japan)
77. Antz - (1998) (DreamWorks)
78. Pocahontas - (1995) (Disney)
79. Howl's Moving Castle -(2004) (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (Japan)
80. The Land Before Time - (1988) (Amblin Entertainment)
81. The Prince of Egypt - (1998) (Dreamworks Skg)
82. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - (1996) (Disney)
83. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie - (2003 U.S.) (Japan)
84. The Lord of the Rings - (1978) (Ralph Bakshi)
85. Wicked City - (1993) (Urban Vision) (Dir.Yoshiaki Kawajiri) (Japan)
86. The Brave Little Toaster - (1987) (Hyperion Pictures)
87. All Dogs Go To Heaven - (1989) (Goldcrest Films International)
88. Wizards - (1977) (Ralph Bakshi)
89. Vampire Hunter D - Bloodlust - (2001) (Urban Vision Enterta) (Dir. Tai Kit Mak) (Japan)
90. Corpse Bride - (2005) (Writer/Director/Producer, Tim Burton) (Warner Bros.)
91. Gay Purr-ee - (1962) (Warner Studios)
92. The Plague Dogs - (1982) (Nepenthe Productions)
93. Twilight of the Cockroaches - (1987) (Dir. Hiroaki Yoshida) (Japan)
94. The Fox and the Hound - (1981) (Disney)
95. The Castle of Cagliostro - (1991) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Japan)
96. Ice Age - (2001) (Fox Home Entertainment)
97. The Rescuers Down Under - (1990) (Disney)
98. Aero-Troopers - (2003) (Monarch)
99. Robin Hood - (1973) (Disney)
100. Beavis & Butthead Do America - (1996) (Paramount Studio)
100 greatest animated films:
1. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs - (1937) (Disney)
2. Fantasia - (1940) (Disney)
3. Toy Story - (1995) (Disney/Pixar)
4. Pinocchio - (1940) (Disney)
5. The Lion King - (1994) (Disney)
6. Princess Mononoke - (1999) (Miramax) (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (Japan)
7. Bambi - (1942) (Disney)
8. Beauty And The Beast - (1991) (Disney)
9. Spirited Away - (2001) (Japan)
10. Akira - (1988) (Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo) (Japan)
11. The Nightmare Before Christmas - (1993) (Writer/Producer, Tim Burton) (Touchstone Pictures)
12. Sleeping Beauty - (1959) (Disney)
13. Who Framed Roger Rabbit - (1988) (Disney)
14. Yellow Submarine - (1968) (MGM/UA Studios)
15. Cinderella - (1950) (Disney)
16. Grave Of The Fireflies - (1988) (Wea Corp) (Dir. Isao Takahata) (Japan)
17. Dumbo - (1941) (Disney)
18. My Neighbor Totoro - (1988)
19. Finding Nemo - (2003) (Disney/Pixar)
20. Aladdin - (1992) (Disney)
21. WALL-E - (2008) (Pixar)
22. Animal Farm - (1954) (UK)
23. Fritz the Cat - (1972) (Ralph Bakshi)
24. Fantastic Planet - (1973) (Anchor Bay Entertainment) (Dir. René Laloux) (France)
25. Waking Life - (2001) (Twentieth Century Fox)
26. The Little Mermaid - (1989) (Disney)
27. Shrek - (2001) (DreamWorks)
28. The Iron Giant - (1999) (Warner Home Video)
29. Ghost in the Shell - (1996) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Dir. Mamoru Oshii) (Japan)
30. Heavy Traffic - (1973) (Ralph Bakshi)
31. Monsters Inc. - (2001) (Disney/Pixar)
32. Song of the South - (1946) (Disney)
33. Up - (2009) (Disney)
34. Castle in the Sky - (1986)
35. Peter Pan - (1953) (Disney)
36. Watership Down - (1978) (Warner Studios)
37. Time Masters - (1982) (Image Entertainment) (Dir. René Laloux) (France)
38. Toy Story 2 - (1999) (Disney/Pixar)
39. James and the Giant Peach - (1996) (Producer, Tim Burton) (Disney)
40. The Triplets of Belleville - (2003) (Sony Pictures Classics) (France)
41. Ratatouille - (2007) (Disney/Pixar)
42. Kiki's Delivery Service - (1989) (Toei Animation) (Japan)
43. Coraline - (2009) (Focus Features)
44. Allegro Non Troppo - (1977) (Home Vision Entertainment) (Italy)
45. Coonskin - (1975) (Ralph Bakshi)
46. 101 Dalmatians - (1961) (Disney)
47. A Bug's Life - (1998) (Disney/Pixar)
48. Alice in Wonderland - (1951) (Disney)
49. Charlotte's Web - (1973) (Paramount) (Dir. Charles A. Nichols, Iwao Takamoto)
50. Tarzan - (1999) (Disney)
51. A Scanner Darkly - (2006) (Warner Home Video)
52. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - (1984) (Topcraft)
53. Whisper of the Heart - (1995) (Tokuma Shoten) (Japan)
54. The Phantom Tollbooth - (1969) (Warner Studios)
55. The Incredibles - (2004) (Disney)
56. The Secret of NIMH - (1982)
57. Ninja Scroll - (1996) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Dir. Yoshiaki Kawajiri) (Japan)
58. Lady and the Tramp - (1955) (Disney)
59. The Jungle Book - (1967) (Disney)
60. Perfect Blue - (1997) (Rex Entertainment) (Japan)
61. The Three Caballeros - (1945) (Disney)
62. Make Mine Music - (1946) (Disney)
63. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad - (1949) (Disney)
64. Fun and Fancy Free - (1947) (Disney)
65. Lilo & Stitch - (2002) (Disney)
66. Anastasia - (1997) (Twentieth Century Fox)
67. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut - (1999) (Paramount Studio)
68. An American Tail - (1986) (Amblin Entertainment)
69. Metropolis - (2001) (Columbia Tristar) (Japan)
70. Ponyo - (2008) (Studio Ghibli) (Japan)
71. American Pop - (1981) (Ralph Bakshi)
72. Vampire Hunter D - (1993) (Urban Vision) (Dir. Carl Macek, Toyoo Ashida) (Japan)
73. Paprika - (2006) (Madhouse) (Japan)
74. Gulliver's Travels - (1939) (Fleischer Studios)
75. Hercules - (1997) (Disney)
76. Porco Rosso - (1992) (Japan Airlines) (Japan)
77. Antz - (1998) (DreamWorks)
78. Pocahontas - (1995) (Disney)
79. Howl's Moving Castle -(2004) (Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) (Japan)
80. The Land Before Time - (1988) (Amblin Entertainment)
81. The Prince of Egypt - (1998) (Dreamworks Skg)
82. The Hunchback of Notre Dame - (1996) (Disney)
83. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie - (2003 U.S.) (Japan)
84. The Lord of the Rings - (1978) (Ralph Bakshi)
85. Wicked City - (1993) (Urban Vision) (Dir.Yoshiaki Kawajiri) (Japan)
86. The Brave Little Toaster - (1987) (Hyperion Pictures)
87. All Dogs Go To Heaven - (1989) (Goldcrest Films International)
88. Wizards - (1977) (Ralph Bakshi)
89. Vampire Hunter D - Bloodlust - (2001) (Urban Vision Enterta) (Dir. Tai Kit Mak) (Japan)
90. Corpse Bride - (2005) (Writer/Director/Producer, Tim Burton) (Warner Bros.)
91. Gay Purr-ee - (1962) (Warner Studios)
92. The Plague Dogs - (1982) (Nepenthe Productions)
93. Twilight of the Cockroaches - (1987) (Dir. Hiroaki Yoshida) (Japan)
94. The Fox and the Hound - (1981) (Disney)
95. The Castle of Cagliostro - (1991) (Palm Pictures/Manga Video) (Japan)
96. Ice Age - (2001) (Fox Home Entertainment)
97. The Rescuers Down Under - (1990) (Disney)
98. Aero-Troopers - (2003) (Monarch)
99. Robin Hood - (1973) (Disney)
100. Beavis & Butthead Do America - (1996) (Paramount Studio)
100 greatest animated films:
riteria: - Influence, Impact on Animated Cinema, Cultural Impact, Innovation, Popularity, Animation Quality. This list includes Animated films of all genres and styles, this includes: Standard Animated Films, CGI Animated Films, Stop Motion Animated Films, Rotoscope or Trace Animated Films, Live Action/Animated Films, R and X Rated Animated Films, Anime and other Foreign Animated Films, Made For Video/TV Animated Films.

Friday, October 8, 2010

More Recent Greatest Animated Films:
101 Dalmatians (1961)
Gay Purr-ee (1962)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
The Sword in the Stone (1963)
Mary Poppins (1964)
The Jungle Book (1967)
Asterix & Cleopatre (1968, Belg/Fr.)
A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1968)
Mad Monster Party? (1968)
Yellow Submarine (1968)
The Phantom Tollbooth (1969)
The Aristocats (1970)
Fritz the Cat (1972) - X-rated
Snoopy, Come Home (1972)
Charlotte's Web (1973)
Fantastic Planet (1973, Czech/Fr.)
Robin Hood (1973)
Streetfight (1975)
Allegro Non Troppo (1977, It.)
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
The Rescuers (1977)
The Lord of the Rings (1978)
Watership Down (1978)
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!) (1980)
American Pop (1981)
The Fox and the Hound (1981)
Heavy Metal (1981)
The Last Unicorn (1982)
The Plague Dogs (1982)
The Secret of N.I.M.H. (1982)
Fire and Ice (1983)
The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985)
The Black Cauldron (1985)
An American Tail (1986)
The Flight of Dragons (1986)
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Ninja Scroll (1986, Jp.)
Transformers: The Movie (1986)
The Brave Little Toaster (1987)
When the Wind Blows (1987)
Akira (Jp.) (1988)
Alice (1988, Czech.)
Grave of the Fireflies (1988, Jp.)
My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Jp.)
The Land Before Time (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Kiki's Delivery Service (1989, Jp.)
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Aladdin (1992)
Bebe's Kids (1992)
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
The Lion King (1994)
Arabian Knight (1995)
Babe (1995)
Balto (1995)
Pocahontas (1995)
Toy Story (1995)
Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996)
Ghost in the Shell (1996, Jp.) aka Kokaku Kidotai
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
Space Jam (1996)
Anastasia (1997)
Hercules (1997)
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Antz (1998)
A Bug's Life (1998)
Mulan (1998)
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Rugrats Movie (1998)
Fantasia 2000 (1999)
The Iron Giant (1999)
Perfect Blue (1999, Jp.)
South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut (1999)
Tarzan (1999)
Toy Story 2 (1999)
Chicken Run (2000)
Dinosaur (2000)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)
Titan A.E. (2000)
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)
Metropolis (2001, Jp.)
Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Osmosis Jones (2001)
Shrek (2001)
Spirited Away (2001, Jp.)
Waking Life (2001)
Ice Age (2002)
Lilo & Stitch (2002)
The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)
Treasure Planet (2002)
Finding Nemo (2003)
The Polar Express (2003)
The Incredibles (2004)
Shrek 2 (2004)
Corpse Bride (2005)
Madagascar (2005)
Robots (2005)
Cars (2006)
Happy Feet (2006)
Monster House (2006)
Persepolis (2007, Iran/US/Fr.)
Shrek the Third (2007)
Wall-E (2008)
Up (2009)
Toy Story 3 (2010)

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Classic Animated Films:
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Germ.)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Gulliver's Travels (1939)
Fantasia (1940) - and Fantasia 2000 (2000)
Pinocchio (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
The Three Caballeros (1945)
Song of the South (1946)
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Peter Pan (1953)
Animal Farm (1954)
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Animations at the Start of the New Century:

Walt Disney Pictures was very busy in the year 2000, releasing the computer-animated Dinosaur (2000) about prehistoric life, and the hand-drawn animated comedy-adventure The Emperor's New Groove (2000). DreamWorks also released its second feature-length animated film The Road to El Dorado (2000) (loosely based on The Man Who Would Be King (1975)), and Fox produced the visually-striking science fiction epic Titan A.E. (2000) combining classic animation and CGI (before closing down its traditional animation division).

Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within - 2001The second collaboration of DreamWorks and PDI was for the immensely successful (the box-office champ of 2001 and the first Best Animated Feature Film Oscar winner) and colorful fairy-tale farce Shrek (2001), a computer-animated film that added elements to CGI such as fire, liquids, digital humans, and clothing, and featured a green, swamp-living, misfit ogre (with voice of Mike Myers). The most talked-about (but commercially unsuccessful) computer-animated film of the early 21st century, however, was Sony's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), a photo-realistic (hyperReal), science-fiction tale by director Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of the interactive, role-playing, futuristic video game) that advertised itself as "Fantasy Becomes Reality." It simulated human actors with CG and was the first computer-generated feature film based entirely on original designs - no real locations, people, vehicles, or props were used.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2004), the first full-length 3D-generated animated film from France, with voices of Kirsten Dunst, Richard Harris, and Anjelica Huston, told a sci-fi fantasy tale about a free-spirited teenaged girl who must solve the mystery of a dying 100-mile tall tree. Writer/director Kerry Conran's feature film debut, the retro-futuristic sci-fi adventure film set in the late-1930s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was the first live-action studio release in which every scene was at least partly computer-generated - supplemented with human actors (including Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow). The entire special-effects laden movie was shot against blue/green screens with human actors in front.

Similar in sheer creative inventiveness was the ground-breaking Waking Life (2001), an impressionistic and stylized R-rated film from director Richard Linklater - it was first digitally shot as a live-action film before 30 artists graphically 'painted' the characters via computer (with a process called "interpolated rotoscoping") to create the illusion of a cartoon in motion. [Similarly, Sin City (2005) and Linklater's own A Scanner Darkly (2005) digitally rotoscoped live action.] Also, Paramount's Nickelodeon films introduced a totally-original computer-animated feature starring a whiz kid who saves his alien-kidnapped parents, titled Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001). And Warner Bros.' poorly-received summer release, Osmosis Jones (2001), with part live-action and part-animation, was about a white blood cell cop (voice of Chris Rock) who hunted down lethal germs in a zoo-worker's (Bill Murray) body.

Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), its first cartoon produced in 70 mm since The Black Cauldron (1985), blended CGI with traditional hand-drawn animation, and was based on the Jules Verne action epic, but it faced stiff competition from other animated features. Disney's hand-drawn, big-budget, sci-fi animation Treasure Planet (2002), an outer-space version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, flopped. Another Disney hand-drawn effort, Lilo & Stitch (2002), about a lonely Hawaiian girl and her blue extra-terrestrial friend, was the studio's sole box-office hit in recent memory.

Monsters, Inc. - 2001The widely-anticipated Monsters, Inc. (2001), Disney's fourth computer-animated comedy with Pixar, featured a one-eyed, lime-colored ball named Mike Wazowski (with voice of Billy Crystal), and his scare-factory buddy James P. "Sulley" Sullivan (voice of John Goodman). As of 2010, it was the eighth-highest grossing animation of all-time.

20th Century Fox's animation-adventure Ice Age (2002) starred creatures that are trying to reunite a human baby with its parents. The computer-generated characters include Manny - a woolly mammoth (voice of Ray Romano), Sid - a talkative sloth (voice of John Leguizamo), Diego - a saber-toothed tiger (voice of Denis Leary), along with Scrat - a prehistoric squirrel that desperately tries to stash an acorn. [It was followed by a sequel Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006).] The second film from the same team was Robots (2005), a slapstick, science-fiction animated film about clunky, nuts-and-bolts androids featuring Robin Williams (his first voice in an animated feature since 1992) as the voice of Fender.

Due to pressures brought to bear on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the reknowned organization finally acknowledged that full-length cartoons (animations!) deserve their own Oscar awards category, Best Animated Feature Film, beginning with films eligible in the year 2001. According to the Academy's rules, an 'animated film' must be at least 70 minutes in length, have a significant amount of major animated characters, and be at least 75% animated. The first animated feature film to win the Oscar in the new category was DreamWorks SKG' revisionistic Shrek (2001). It counteracted the traditional Disney animation formula for a fairy tale with its main character - an ugly, greenish ogre (voice of Mike Myers) who saved pouty, fiercely independent Princess Fiona (voice of Cameron Diaz) from a female, purple fire-breathing dragon, with a pop music soundtrack (featuring songs by Joan Jett, Smash Mouth, and others).

The wildly-successful Finding Nemo (2003) - Pixar's and Disney's fifth collaboration, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film! The undisputed box-office champ of its year, it was the tale of Marlin - a widowed clown fish's (voice by Albert Brooks) search in the Pacific Ocean, with a dopey and forgetful blue tang fish named Dory (voice by Ellen DeGeneres), for missing son Nemo with a withered fin. [It faced stiff competition from the wildly inventive and surreal French animated film The Triplets of Belleville (2003).] DreamWorks' version of Finding Nemo with an underwater gangster theme, the studio's first CGI-animated film, was the successful Shark Tale (2004), with voices provided by Will Smith, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Robert DeNiro and Angelina Jolie.

Director/screenwriter Brad Bird's ingenious Oscar-winning Best Animated Feature, the action-adventure The Incredibles (2004), Disney's and Pixar's sixth collaboration, was Pixar's first PG-rated film and the longest CG animated film to date (at 115 minutes). It told the tale of paunchy Bob "Mr. Incredible" Parr (voice of Craig T. Nelson), an ex-do-good Superhero suffering a mid-life crisis and living under-cover in suburbia, with his restless wife Helen (voice of Holly Hunter) - former rubber-limbed masked vigilante Elastigirl. Their children included long-haired daughter Violet (voice of Sarah Vowell) - capable of being invisible, son Dash (voice of Spencer Fox) - who could travel at supersonic speed, and baby Jack-Jack. The entire family was lured back into super-herodom against the evil Syndrome (voice of Jason Lee). With its four Oscar nominations (including Best Animated Feature Film), it was the most-nominated animated film since Aladdin (1992) (with five nominations). Another Pixar CGI marvel, the adventure comedy Cars (2006), directed by John Lasseter, told an anthropomorphic story about a stock-car (Lightning McQueen, voice of Owen Wilson) on a journey to the races - including nostalgia for Route 66 in a forgotten town called Radiator Springs.

Summary: Disney's Animated Collaborations with Pixar

In summary, Disney's run of successful animations with Pixar are provided below. Their first five feature films grossed more than $2.5 billion (worldwide), giving Pixar the highest per film average gross of any production company:

The Disney-Pixar Films
(chronological)
Disney-Pixar Collaborations
Millions of Dollars of Box-Office Gross (domestic)
Millions of Dollars of Box-Office Gross (worldwide)
Academy Awards
Domestic Notables
(in 2010)
1. Toy Story (1995)
$192
$362
Nominated for three Academy Awards with no wins: Best Original Musical Score, Best Song, and Best Original Screenplay
Recipient of Special Achievement Award (John Lasseter)
20th highest-grossing animated film of all time
2. A Bug's Life (1998)
$163
$363
Nominated for one Academy Award with no wins, Best Original Musical Score
31st highest-grossing animated film of all time
3. Toy Story 2 (1999)
$246
$485
Nominated for one Academy Award with no wins, Best Original Song
10th highest-grossing animated film of all time
4. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
$256
$525
Nominated for four Academy Awards with one win: Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Original Song (win), and New category: Best Animated Feature Film
9th highest-grossing animated film of all time
5. Finding Nemo (2003)
$340
$868
Nominated for four Academy Awards with one win: Best Animated Feature Film (win), Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing
3rd highest-grossing animated film of all time
6. The Incredibles (2004)
$261
$631
Nominated for four Academy Awards with two wins: Best Animated Feature Film (win), Best Sound Editing (win), Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing
8th highest-grossing animated film of all time
7. Cars (2006)
$244
$462
Nominated for two Academy Awards with no wins: Best Animated Feature Film, and Best Original Song
11th highest-grossing animated film of all time
8. Ratatouille (2007)
$206
$621
Nominated for five Academy Awards with one win: Best Animated Feature Film (win), Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing
18th highest-grossing animated film of all time
9. WALL•E (2008)
$224
$521
Nominated for six Academy Awards with one win: Best Animated Feature Film (win), Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
14th highest-grossing animated film of all time
10. Up (2009)
$293
$731
Nominated for five Academy Awards with two wins: Best Animated Feature Film (win), Best Original Score (win), Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, Best Original Screenplay
Note: the first Pixar film presented in Disney Digital 3-D
6th highest-grossing animated film of all time; the first animated film to get a Best Picture nomination since animated films received their own category in 2001
11. Toy Story 3 (2010)
$409
over
$1 billion
The highest-grossing G-rated movie ever. The first 2010 release to take in over $400 million (domestic) at the box-office.
2nd highest-grossing animated film of all time
12. Cars 2 (2011)
13. Brave (2012)
14. Monsters, Inc. 2 (2012)

RatatouilleIn early 2006, the Walt Disney Co. bought longtime partner Pixar Animation Studios Inc. for $7.4 billion in stock, after a twelve year relationship in which Disney co-financed and distributed Pixar’s animated films and split the profits (their previous deal expired in June 2006 after Pixar's delivery of Cars (2006)). After the purchase, the 8th, 9th, and 10th Pixar films were all consecutive Oscar winners as Best Animated Feature Film:

  • Ratatouille (2007) by writer/co-director Brad Bird, was a fable about a rat named Rémy (voice of Patton Oswalt) who lived in a Paris bistro-restaurant and had aspirations to be a chef.
  • WALL•E (2008) was about a waste-removal robot named WALL•E (meaning Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) who in the year 2700 discovered the key to planet Earth's future after it was vacated and he was the last robot on Earth doing cleanup. When WALL•E met up with a cold-hearted female search robot named EVE from a space probe and fell in love with her, he chased her across outer space. Best Animated Feature Film-winning WALL-E's six nominations tied it with Beauty and the Beast (1991) as the most-nominated animated film.
  • Up (2009), a CGI-animated film, was a coming-of-old-age tale. It told about a 70s year-old hero, cantankerous, bitter widower Carl Fredricksen (voice of Edward Asner) who launched his house into the air using hundreds of helium balloons to travel to South America, while slowly befriending an accidental stowaway Boy Scout named Russell -- it was the first animated film to get a Best Picture nomination since animated films received their own category in 2001.

Additional future projects for Pixar include Brave (2012) (aka The Bear and the Bow), and addtional sequels: Cars 2 (2011) and Monsters, Inc. 2 (2012).

A significant development may have been signaled when Walt Disney Studios, after releasing the great-looking, feature-length theatrical film animation Brother Bear (2003) in November (also a nominee for Best Animated Feature Film), announced that this would be their last 2-D animated film for the foreseeable future, since it was switching to the 3-D, full-CGI style originally popularized by Pixar. [However, Disney's last release in the traditional 2-D animation style was Home on the Range (2004).] Would traditionally-animated, old school cel-animated films (like this one) be destined to become non-existent and outdated relics of the last century? This question was answered with the release of Disney's animated The Princess and the Frog (2009) (with three Oscar nominations), a modern day retelling of the classic story The Frog Prince. It was the studio's first traditional 2-D animated film in 5 years. It also featured the studio's first-ever black female protagonist, an African-American princess named Tiana (voice of Anika Noni Rose). Its box-office was $103 million (domestic) and $188 million (worldwide).

The Present State of Animated Films:

Robert Zemekis directed The Polar Express (2004), a film that further developed motion capture technology. It was marked by the first innovative use of the process of 'Performance Capture' -- an advanced motion capture system by which an actor’s live performances were digitally captured by computerized cameras, and became a human blueprint for creating virtual, all-digital characters. This allowed actor Tom Hanks to play many very different characters (the boy, the father, the conductor, the hobo, and Santa Claus) in the same film. Zemeckis went even further with this technique in his later films (either produced or directed) including the haunted house film Monster House (2006), and the modern adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf (2007). As advances were made in the technique, it was clear that it would become more widespread and sophisticated as a special effects technique in the 2000s and into the future.

Disney released its first in-house computer-animated film, Chicken Little (2005), with a partial 3-D release, about a beleaguered young Chicken Little (voice by Zach Braff) who was humiliated by his claim that the sky was falling, and subjected to scorn by most of the town. The young cluck was estranged from his embarrassed single father Buck Cluck (voice of Gary Marshall) but vindicated when the "sky" actually falls, in a parody of a War of the Worlds-style invasion.

Curious GeorgeOne of the few big-budget cel-animated films being released in the crowd of CGI films was the adaptation of Margret and H.A. Rey's classic children's book series titled Curious George (2006), starring the inquisitive monkey named George and Will Ferrell as the kind Man in the Yellow Hat who transported the orphaned George from Africa to America for a series of misadventures. George Miller (known for Babe (1995)) directed Happy Feet (2006) - the best Animated Feature Oscar-winning CGI-animated song-and-dance musical. It told about a group of Antarctic Emperor Penguins (created by CGI) who prided themselves on each having a "heartsong" to attract a mate. One young and unique penguin, named Mumble (voice of Elijah Wood) - the son of Elvis-like Memphis (voice of Hugh Jackman) and breathy Norma Jean (voice of Nicole Kidman), was considered an outsider because he couldn't sing but his real talent was tap-dancing.

Sequels were inevitable for the most successful animations, so DreamWorks' Shrek 2 (2004) appeared, with its original character-voices including Mike Myers (as green ogre Shrek), Cameron Diaz (as Fiona), and Eddie Murphy (as wise-cracking Donkey). The fairy tale couple returned from their honeymoon to find the bride's family in the land of Far, Far Away - Shrek's in-laws King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen (Julie Andrews), who are unhappy with her decision to marry an ogre. Additional characters included talk-show host Larry King as the voice of Fiona's Ugly Stepsister, Rupert Everett as foppish Prince Charming, Antonio Banderas as Zorro-style assassin Puss-in-Boots, and Jennifer Saunders as a plotting fairy godmother. [The third installment was Shrek the Third (2007), which brought back the entire cast from the second film, as well as adding additional stars.]

DreamWorks Films
(chronological)
Films
Millions of Dollars of Box-Office Gross
(domestic)
Millions of Dollars of Box-Office Gross
(worldwide)
Domestic Notables
(in 2010)
1. Shrek (2001)
$268
$484
7th highest-grossing animation of all-time; PG-rated
2. Shrek 2 (2004)
$441
$920
Highest-grossing animation of all-time; PG-rated
3. Shrek the Third (2007)
$323
$799
5th highest-grossing animation of all-time; PG-rated
4. Shrek Forever After (2010)
$238+
$709
13th highest-grossing animation of all-time; PG-rated

Dreamworks/PDI would revisit the insect world, with Bee Movie (2007), about a bee named Barry B. Benson (voice of comedian Jerry Seinfeld) who had a forbidden friendship with a New York City florist named Vanessa (voice of Renée Zellweger), with an all-star cast including Alan Arkin, Kathy Bates, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Larry King, William H. Macy, and Oprah Winfrey, among others. The Oscar-nominated, dark, autobiographical black and white 2-D animated film Persepolis (2007, Iran/Fr./Us) based on her best-selling graphic novels, illustrated how political repression during the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran extended deeply into the life of the coming-of-age main female character, Marjane (or Marji) Satrapi (voice of Chiara Mastroianni), through various anecdotes.

With original storylines drying up, syndicated comic strip characters, such as the lazy, wise-cracking orange feline named Garfield (voice of Bill Murray), became an animated star in the live action/CGI hybrid film Garfield: The Movie (2004). The wacky and fast-paced, primitively-animated film The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), with its main character -- a yellow man-made sea sponge with legs and a red tie -- was a spin-off from the long-running Nickelodeon TV cartoon show. Another effort from the DreamWorks animation team (and released by Paramount), PG-rated Over the Hedge (2006), was a loose adaptation of a popular newspaper comic strip of the same name. It told the story of a group of wildlife forest animals, led by a turtle named Verne (Garry Shandling) and mischievous raccoon RJ (voiced by Bruce Willis), who felt the effects of encroaching human beings. It became the tenth highest grossing film of 2006, with the possibility of a sequel, but was overlooked for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Waltz with Bashir (2008) was the first animated film to be nominated in the Best Foreign Film Oscar category. Functioning partially as an oral-history documentary, the introspective, dream-like anti-war polemic was a confessional account of director Ari Folman's devastating and traumatic experience as a young Israeli soldier during his country's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and its massacre of Palestinian refugees. It took two years to animate, and was done by a team of artists who combined hand-drawing with the latest technology - resulting in thick-lined, near-monochromatic animated images frequently seen in strange yellowish light. The animators based their drawings on staged and videotaped interviews, although the end result looked similar in some ways to the rotoscope technique used in Linklater's film Waking Life (2001).

The SimpsonsThe longest-running, prime-time television cartoon series was The Simpsons - it premiered in December 1989 on the FOX channel. The iconic, culturally-significant animated show was created by Life in Hell cartoonist Matt Groening. An offshoot was their first feature length film, The Simpsons Movie (2007), starring the yellow-skinned, irreverent and misfit family featuring oafish father and nuclear plant manager Homer (voice of Dan Castellaneta), worrywart gravel-voiced, blue-haired mother Marge (voice of Julie Kavner), 10-year-old mischievous, troublemaker son Bart (voice of Nancy Cartwright), 8-year-old ecologically-minded, overachieving vegetarian Buddhist sister Lisa (voice of Yeardley Smith), and pacifier-sucking toddler Maggie.

Groening was also responsible for the science-fiction spoof Futurama that first aired in 1999 - a highly popular but less successful series set in the next millennium, starring "Generation-X" slacker Phillip J. Fry (voice of Billy West) - a 20th century NY pizza delivery boy who was cryogenically frozen by accident for 1,000 years, and woke up in a retro-futuristic world. It too was adapted into a feature-length film, Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007), the first of a planned four films.

The Ultimate 3-D:

The decade of the 2000s saw advancements in 3D and an explosion of releases of both 3-D films and IMAX films. There were many varieties of 3-D, including Disney Digital 3D, Real D 3D, InTru3D, D-BOX, and IMAX 3D. And with many more theatres converted to the 3D format, that meant increased demand and bookings (and ticket prices) for 3D films. Would 3D be the future of filmmaking, a logical extension of CGI?

Disney's and Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (2007) was released simultaneously in standard 2-D and non-Imax 3D versions and had the biggest 3-D rollout of any film in history (to date). Disney's and Zemeckis' 3-D A Christmas Carol (2009) was an adaptation of Dickens' 1843 classic story in which Jim Carrey played multiple roles, including old miser Scrooge (at different stages of his life) and the three Christmas ghosts; it was released in both Disney Digital 3-D and IMAX 3-D (it was the first Disney animated film released in this format).

The DreamWorks sci-fi spoof of 50s monster movies Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) was the first computer-animated feature film to be shot directly in stereoscopic 3-D -- dubbed the Ultimate 3-D. Previously, 3-D CGI films were made in a non 3-D version and then dimensionalized. The film was about the growth of Californian Susan Murphy (voice of Reese Witherspoon) who was hit by a meteor on her wedding day and grew to monstrous size (49 feet and 11 inches) and was named Ginormica.

Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003)More 3D animated releases in the 2000s included: The Polar Express (2004), Chicken Little (2005), Monster House (2006), Meet the Robinsons (2007), Bolt (2008), Coraline (2009), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), Up (2009), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), Disney's motion-capture A Christmas Carol (2009), James Cameron's and 20th Century Fox's science-fiction tale Avatar (2009), and Pixar's Toy Story 3 (2010) - to name just a few. Toy Story 3 (2010) quickly became the highest-grossing G-rated movie ever, and became the first 2010 release to cross $400 million in domestic gross box-office.

Older films were re-released in 3-D: The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (2006, original 1993), Toy Story in 3D (2009, original 1995), and Toy Story 2 in 3D (2009, original 1999), and there were indications that the next phase of the 3-D Renaissance would be more 3D re-releases of classic blockbusters, such as Star Wars (1977), The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), The Matrix (1999), Top Gun (1986), and Titanic (1997).

Wallace & Gromit Claymation and other Aardman Productions:

The British clay-animation studio Aardman Animations was most famous for the Wallace and Gromit series of 30-minute shorts with clay-animated characters, the first of which was A Grand Day Out (1989). Wallace was a befuddled, cheese-addicted Englishman inventor, with a silent, wily companion dog named Gromit. Before becoming recognized, Aardman produced by a series of popular television ads featuring singing California Raisins (named A.C., Red, Stretch and Bebop), along with claymation expert Will Vinton.

Wallace & GromitAardman's writer-director Nick Park was responsible for these hits: its first Oscar-winning Creature Comforts (1989) which examined how anthropomorphized zoo animals felt about being placed in confined locations. The thirty-minute mystery Wallace and Gromit - The Wrong Trousers (1993), its second Wallace and Gromit short, with a frantic toy-train finale - was the Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film. Likewise, Aardman's third half-hour short with Wallace and Gromit titled A Close Shave (1995) also won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.

And then along with DreamWorks, Aardman produced their first feature film - the remarkable prison-break parody Chicken Run (2000) about an imprisoned group of egg-laying chickens plotting an escape. Mel Gibson starred as a cocky Yankee rooster. Its denial of a Best Picture nomination led to the creation of the Best Animated Feature category - first available for eligible films in the year 2001. The horror spoof Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) was the first feature-length film starring the pair, and the first stop-motion/'claymation' film to win the Best Animated Feature Academy Award.

The animated comedy Flushed Away (2006), was co-produced by Aardman Feature Films and DreamWorks Animation - it was Aardman Films' first completely CGI film about an aristocratic rat named Roddy (voice of Hugh Jackman) whose life was ruined by a low-brow ruffian rat named Sid (voice of Shane Richie). The film was originally to be stop-motion claymation, but due to the abundance of water effects, the entire film was transformed into CGI -- however, the characters still resembled Aardman's trademark plasticene characters.

Don Bluth:

In the late 70s, a Disney-trained animator named Don Bluth, who was an animator for Disney's Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers (1977), Pete's Dragon (1977), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), and The Fox and the Hound (1981) broke away and formed Don Bluth Productions with a group of disgruntled animators. His first notable non-Disney work was the animation sequence of Xanadu (1980). His first independent feature-length animation was The Secret of N.I.M.H. (1982), and his first big hit was the Spielberg-co-produced animation An American Tail (1986), starring coincidentally, a Russian mouse character named Fievel. At the time of its release, it was the highest grossing animated feature film.

The followup film, also Spielberg co-produced (without Bluth), was An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), with James Stewart (in his last film before his death in 1997) as the voice of sheriff Wylie Burp. Other notable Bluth films included the Lucas/Spielberg production The Land Before Time (1988), All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), Rock-A-Doodle (1992), Thumbelina (1994), The Pebble and the Penguin (1995), Anastasia (1997), and Titan A.E. (2000). [In 1983, Bluth was also noted for the development of the first laserdisc animated video-arcade games with Cinematronics, including Dragon's Liar and Space Ace. These titles fused the state of the art in arcade game technology and traditional cell animation.]

Disney's Animation Renaissance into the 80s:

In the 1960s, Walt Disney Studios re-emerged as a triumphant box-office moneymaker and producer of a variety of expensive-to-produce, animated and likable, wholesome live-action family features during the decade, including Mary Poppins (1964), a delightful musical fantasy combining animation and live-action sequences (winning the Best Special Effects Oscar), and featuring Best Actress-winning Julie Andrews in her screen debut as an energetic, eccentric nanny with magical powers in Edwardian London; also with Dick Van Dyke, and the songs "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and the Oscar-winning "Chim-Chim Cher-ee."

Tron (1982)In the 60s through the 80s, Disney also released a second-tier of animated feature films, including the delightfully animated 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967) - the last film that Walt personally worked on before his death in 1966, The Aristocats (1970), another live-action and animation feature Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) similar to Mary Poppins (1964), Robin Hood (1973), and The Rescuers (1977) (with Disney's first official animated sequel The Rescuers Down Under (1990)).

Throughout most of the 1980s, Disney struggled, and continued to release fairly mediocre animations, including the following:

  • The Fox and the Hound (1981) - the first major effort by the "new generation" of Disney artists
  • the costly-to-produce The Black Cauldron (1985)
  • The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
  • Oliver & Company (1988).

Although not a classic animated film, Disney's TRON (1982), the studio's first PG-rated film and the first feature film to imaginatively attempt to represent a computer-generated 'cyberspace' world, was the first live action film with over 20 minutes of computer animation. It told about gladatorial-style combat between two individuals within a computer's virtual reality world, including a race on light bikes. [The fictional cyberpunk book (the first of the cyberpunk literary genre) credited with coining the word 'cyberspace' (referring to the Internet) was William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1984. The book also referred to cyberspace as the Matrix. One of Gibson's short stories was later turned into the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) with Keanu Reeves.] It was also the first film to popularize the idea of a computer or network in which one could experience virtual reality, and the first film to use the term 'hack' (the root of 'hacker' or 'hacking'), and to refer to the cyberuniverse as the 'matrix'. [Landmark composer Wendy (nee Walter) Carlos (who had collaborated earlier with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) - among others) provided a unique synthesized/orchestral score to accompany the pioneering, on-screen animation.] It was disqualified for a Best Visual Effects award because the old-fashioned Academy believed that it "cheated" by using a computer. (In fact, the film used a laborious, frame-by-frame process to produce its computer animation.) The concept of using computers to craft environments, rather than drawing them by hand, was considered inauthentic - until Cameron's computer-animated The Abyss (1989) won the Best Visual Effects Oscar.

A New Era of Disney Animation: The Late 80s and 90s

The Little Mermaid - 1989Disney Studios soon returned to the quality of its heyday of animation from the 30s and 40s with advanced, more mature animations in the late 80s and 90s, including the tale of the headstrong young mermaid Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989). The popular and highly successful film won two Oscars (Best Score and Best Song: "Under the Sea"), and earned $84 million (domestic) and $211 million (worldwide) at the box-office. The film recharged Disney, and insured the revival of animated films, with three more increasingly stronger hits for the studio in the early 1990s:.

  1. An updated version of Beauty and the Beast (1991) with a strong heroine, Belle and a Beast (a mix of buffalo, lion, and gorilla), was nominated for a well-deserved Best Picture Academy Award (the first nomination for Best Picture ever received for a full-length animated feature), and the theme song "Beauty and the Beast" won the Best Original Song Oscar (from its six Oscar nominations). It also had tremendous box-office: $146 million (domestic) and $377 million (worldwide).
  2. Aladdin (1992), a film that moved beyond the traditional fairy tale, used computer-generated imagery, and was designed for a more adult audience - it marked a significant change in Disney's output. It received a phenomenal five Oscar nominations (and won two for Best Original Song, "A Whole New World," and Best Score). At the time of its release, it was criticized for its negative, 'Americanized' representation of Arabs and non-western cultures. The film featured improvisational comic Robin Williams as the vocal for Aladdin's blue Genie. Its box-office was $217 million (domestic) and $504 million (worldwide).
  3. The complex, advanced The Lion King (1994) was the first Disney film based upon an in-house original story, rather than upon a well-known children's narrative, although its story-line was derived from elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet, classical mythology, various hero-quest tales, and African folk tales. And it was also Disney's first film to totally disregard human characters, although it received criticism for racial stereotyping (the voices of the evil hyenas were voiced by minority-ethnic performers). The wildebeest stampede scene integrated 3-D computer animation with traditional animation techniques. After setting a box-office record (of over $312 million (domestic) and $784 million (worldwide) at the box-office as the most commercially-successful animated film of the time) and winning two Academy Awards from its four music-related nominations, The Lion King spurred a boom in animation production and merchandising, and other animation production studios besides Disney entered the picture.

[Some Disney critics firmly believe that The Lion King was blatantly derived from Kimba the White Lion. Kimba was originally known as Jungle Emperor (Jungle Taitei) when it was serialized as a comic from 1950 to 1954, and it later became Japan's first color animated TV series in 1965. Fifty-two episodes were released in 1966 in English under the title Kimba The White Lion from Tezuka Productions. Disney supporters claimed that the similarities were only coincidences.]

Who Framed Roger Rabbit - 1988Another exceptional film (a coordinated effort released by Disney (Touchstone), produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin, live-action directed by Robert Zemeckis, and animated by Richard Williams) was the Oscar-winning Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a remarkable blend of animated imagery and live-action human characters. It was filmed as a tribute to the entire pantheon of cartoon characters from Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM, and other studios in the 1940s. Its animation was revolutionary in a number of ways: (1) it used light and shadows in new ways to produce remarkably realistic, 3-D effects; (2) it extensively panned and moved the camera to reduce a static look; and (3) it had the car'toon' characters interact flawlessly with real-world objects and flesh-and-blood people as much as possible.

Warner Bros.' Space Jam (1996) also featured Looney Tunes characters within a live-action film with basketball superstar Michael Jordan. Other films that used the same techniques to mix live-action and animation were: The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000) and Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003).

Japanimation or Anime:

One of the reasons for the popular emergence of Japanese animation was the successful animated Japanese-TV series Astro Boy (1963). The Western release of director Katsuhiro Otomo's cult favorite epic animated adventure Akira (1988), based on the science-fiction comic book (manga) series - a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk tale set in Neo-Tokyo, also contributed to the spread of Japanese anime (or "Japanimation") worldwide.

Excellent examples of feature length, science-fiction Japanese anime were directed by auteur animator and founder of the famed Ghibli Studios Hayao Miyazaki -- known as the "Japanese Walt Disney." His humanistic-oriented animations -- painstakingly detailed traditional cel animation during an era of CGI films -- were generally filled with magical and/or mythical settings, rich and fantastic characters (usually a young heroine), imaginative and visual renderings, fairy-tale motifs and plots with moral lessons, tales of the struggle between the strong and the weak, and environmental concerns. His films were actually bought for American distribution by Disney Studio, and include the following:

  • Miyazaki's second feature, the post-nuclear war tale Warriors of the Wind (1984) (aka Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind), based on the comic book (manga) Miyazaki had created years earlier, about the struggle of a peace-seeking warrior princess to keep two opposing kingdoms from destroying the planet
  • Princess Mononoke - 1997later works included Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Porco Rosso (1992) (translated as The Crimson Pig), and Whisper of the Heart (1995)
  • the powerful and poignant Grave of the Fireflies (1988), a tearjerking tale based on Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name about two orphaned Japanese children during the waning days of World War II: a teen-aged boy and his 4 year-old sister, and their slow and graphic deaths by starvation; it was the only Ghibli film not personally directed by Miyazaki - instead, it was written and directed by Isao Takahata for Studio Ghibli; animation historian Ernest Rister felt it was comparable to Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), and film critic Roger Ebert considered it one of the greatest (anti-) war films ever made
  • his $20 million animated adventure-fantasy epic Princess Mononoke (1997) opened in Japan and quickly became the highest grossing Japanese film in Japanese history to the time; it was a story set in the 14th century of a mythic battle between forest gods (led by the Wolf God named Moro) and humans who were destroying the Earth
  • the magical animated adventure Spirited Away (2001), one of the director's most revered, popular and honored films, was the Oscar winner for Best Animated Feature Film (it was the first anime feature film to win an Academy Award Oscar, awarded in 2002), and bested his previous film as the highest grossing Japanese film ever made; with its Alice-in-Wonderland like tale of a young 10 year-old girl (shojo) who found a mysterious spirit world amusement park where she attempted to save her parents (who were transformed into pigs) by changing them back into humans
  • The Cat Returns (2002), and Howl's Moving Castle (2005)

Others have created equally-inventive and beautiful animations, including:

  • director Yoshiaki Kawajiri's dark, excessively-violent and adult-oriented Wicked City (1987)
  • director Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday (1991) and Pom Poko (1994)
  • anime auteur Mamoru Oshii's cyber-punk, apocalyptic animated thriller, Ghost in the Shell (1995) - one of the most expensive anime films ever made, and the first made specifically for the international market

Satoshi Kon's Millenium Actress (2001) and the Pokemon series of children's films (beginning in 1999) are also notable examples of anime.

A Boom in CGI Animation in the 90s:

Cutting edge, computer-graphics imaging (CGI) has recently taken over the cinematic industry. A dazzling collection of state-of-the art computer animation footage in "The Mind's Eye" video series (from Miramar Productions) highlighted, documented, and showcased the vast array of computer artistry, CGI and visual magic in the early to mid-90s from various sources, with accompanying original music. The main videos in the showcase series included:

  • The Mind's Eye (1991)
  • Beyond the Mind's Eye (1992), including special effects clips from The Lawnmower Man (1992)
  • The Gate to the Mind's Eye (1994)
  • Odyssey into the Mind's Eye (1996)

Warner Bros' adult-oriented, dark animated adventure Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993) - aka Batman: The Animated Movie, with an opening CGI sequence, was based on the '90s Saturday morning animated television series, and was the successor to the original comic-book hero and the two Tim Burton feature-film versions: Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992). [Mark Hamill provided the humorous voice of the Joker.] Burton has become better known for his two ghoulishly clever stop-motion animation films with puppetry - The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Corpse Bride (2005) (with Johnny Depp as 19th century shy bridegroom Victor Van Dort who inadvertently marries a 'corpse bride' voiced by Helena Bonham Carter), as well as for his James and the Giant Peach (1996).

The Emergence of Pixar:

Disney-Pixar FilmsPixar Animation Studios, originally a division of Lucasfilm (and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM)), was purchased by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs and made an independent company in 1986. [ILM had created the startling, first completely CGI-animated character - the 'stained-glass knight' in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), bringing the film a Best Visual Effects nomination.]

Pixar Studios (and director John Lasseter) and Disney (with their first collaboration), in a 1991 deal worth $26 million, created the first completely computer-generated animated feature film - the landmark Toy Story (1995) - Pixar's feature debut. The visuals were entirely generated from computers, creating a wonderfully-realistic 3-D world with lighting, shading, and textures, that included real toys in supporting roles (Etch-A-Sketch, Slinky Dog, the plastic toy soldiers, Mr. Potato Head, etc.). The story itself dealt with the anxiety experienced by a toy (cowboy Woody) upon the arrival of a rival plaything (spacetoy Buzz Lightyear)-- mirroring the tension felt by a child when a younger sibling is born. The tale also referenced the historical change in genre emphasis in the 50s when westerns were supplanted by science-fiction films. It scored three Oscar nominations: Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Song ("You've Got a Friend"), and at the box-office totaled $192 million (domestic) and $362 million (worldwide).

DreamWorks and Pacific Data Images (PDI) released the second computer-animated feature film in history - the adult-oriented Antz (1998), with Woody Allen's voice for a misfit, individualist worker ant named Z. At about the same time, A Bug's Life (1998), a children's-oriented, computer animated tale based upon Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, was released by Pixar and Disney (their second teaming).

Disney also released in 1995 the hand-drawn animation Pocahontas (1995), the studio's 33rd feature-length animated movie and the first to be based on actual events and people. The surprise hit of 1995, however, was Best Picture-nominated Babe (1995), the charming and highly entertaining story of the title character - a talking barnyard pig with a talent for sheep herding. Disney released two hand-drawn animations in the next two years, the dark and ambitious Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) based upon the Victor Hugo novel, and Hercules (1997) about the mythological strong man, and Fox released the disappointing Anastasia (1997).

Toy Story 2 - 1999The year 1998 also showcased other animated films, including the low-budget Rugrats Movie (1998) (based upon the characters on Nickelodeon's TV series), Disney's hand-drawn animated Chinese folk tale Mulan (1998) (Disney's 36th feature-length animated film), and DreamWorks SKG's' epic - the animated musical feature The Prince of Egypt (1998) about the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt - and the most expensive classically-animated feature at the time, budgeted at $60 million.

Pixar's sequel to its successful 1995 computer-animated hit was released in 1999 with Disney (their third collaboration) - Toy Story 2 (1999), again with Woody the Cowboy and Buzz Lightyear. So were Disney's Tarzan (1999), the first full-length, hand-drawn animated feature about Edgar Rice Burrough's King of the Jungle, and two hand-drawn animations from Warner Bros: the critically-acclaimed animated adventure Iron Giant (1999) by director Brad Bird (his feature debut), about a fifty-foot robot befriended by a nine year-old boy, and the animated musical The King and I (1999). Sony Pictures brought to life E.B. White's classic children's story Stuart Little (1999) featuring a clothes-wearing and talking white mouse (voice of Michael J. Fox) - it was a hugely successful film, with a combination of computer animated characters and live action.