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).

The 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.

The 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)

In 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.

One 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 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.

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.

Aardman'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."

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

Disney 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.]

Another 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
• later 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:

Pixar 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).

The 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.

Bill Melendez and the Peanuts Animations:

Bill (J. C.) Melendez, who first worked at Walt Disney Studios during the classic animated 40s era, then moved to Leon Schlesinger Cartoons (AKA Warner Brothers Cartoons) in 1942 at the time of the Disney strike, where he made a number of notable Looney Tunes cartoons. But his biggest success was his collaboration with comic-strip cartoonist Charles M. Schultz, and the making of the first animated Peanuts special on CBS-TV, the irreplaceable Christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). Ultimately, he would be involved as director of about forty Charlie Brown TV specials after 1965, and the producer of a 1983 Saturday morning cartoon show called The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. He also 'acted' by providing the voices of Snoopy and Woodstock. [Jazz musician Vince Guaraldi scored the 1965 special and continued to score all the Charlie Brown television specials till his death in 1976. His distinctive scores were used on all subsequent specials, movies and TV series.]

Melendez' feature-length film collaborations with Schultz included:

• A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) - this was the first full-length animated film starring the Peanuts gang; it contained Vince Guaraldi's classic Oscar-nominated score (that featured lyrics by Rod McKuen)
• Snoopy, Come Home (1972) - often considered the best feature-length Peanuts film, featured the first appearance of Woodstock (named after the famous rock-music festival in 1969)
• Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977)
• Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!) (1980) - its sequel was a 23-minute TV special tribute to US veteran soldiers of WWII titled What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown? (1983), a Peabody Award winner

A stage version of the Peanuts comic strip, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, first appeared in 1967 in an off-Broadway Greenwich Village theatre, and remained for four years. The show was later revived on Broadway in 1999 for a short run, and won two Tony Awards. Melendez also directed the Emmy Award-winner for Outstanding Animated Program for PBS-TV's special The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe (1979) which was co-produced by the Children's Television Workshop (famed for two TV series, Sesame Street and The Electric Company). It was based upon the first story of C.S. Lewis' classic children's tales series, Chronicles of Narnia, and it was the first full-length animated feature film created directly for television's small screen. It was broadcast over two nights in April 1979 on US television.

Adults-Rated Animations in the 70s and After: Ralph Bakshi

Normally, animations are regarded as an innocent, innocuous form of entertainment, even though iconoclastic writer/director Ralph Bakshi's, adults-only rated-X feature (in its original release) Fritz the Cat (1972), based upon cartoonist Robert Crumb's underground comics character, was the first X-rated animated feature in Hollywood history. It was also the first independent animated film to gross more than $100 million at the box office. The film featured a hippie-like, sex and drug-loving cat.

Writer/director Bakshi's next X-rated animated feature (later re-cut and re-released with an R-rating) was the violent, gritty and misogynistic Heavy Traffic (1973), a semi-autobiographical tale about a misfit comic-book cartoonist that was loosely adapted from Hubert Selby's novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. It blended together animated and live-action sequences in its urban scenes, and also layered old film clips into cartoon backgrounds. The animation auteur also released the controversial Coonskin (1975) (aka Street Fight) that was accused of being racist and offensive. It contained urban-oriented, politically-oriented blaxploitation content about a rabbit that ruled the streets of Harlem.

The surrealistic animator Bakshi also directed the animated cult film Wizards (1977) - a tale of good vs. evil and a test run for his next animation - The Lord of the Rings (1978). This latter film had an adapted screenplay co-written by Peter Beagle (based, although incompletely, upon books in J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy), and was noted for its extensive use of the animation technique of rotoscoping, in which human actors were filmed and 'traced' as cartoon characters. [Tolkien’s earlier introductory work The Hobbit (1937) was filmed as an hour-long (78-minute) animated TV movie (broadcast in late November 1977) by the team of Arthur Rankin Jr.-Jules Bass in 1977 as The Hobbit (1977). Voices for the characters were: Orson Bean (the hobbit Bilbo Baggins), John Huston (the wizard Gandalf), Otto Preminger (Elvenking), Richard Boone (Smaug), Hans Conreid (Thorin), and Brother Theodore (Gollum). Rankin-Bass also concluded the story in the animated TV film The Return of the King (1979).]

Bakshi also released the not-for-children sword-and-scorcery animated Fire and Ice (1983), with work by fantasy design artist Frank Frazetta. (Bakshi also directed various dark and psychedelic-flavored episodes of the Spider-Man cartoon series on ABC-TV beginning in its second season in the late 1960s.) One of his later works was the Paramount studio-financed, poorly-received Cool World (1992), containing a plot with similarities to the parallel animated Toon World in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). It also raised the intriguing question of whether a live-action person could have sex with a cartoon character, and featured Brad Pitt as the voice of a Las Vegas cop, and Kim Basinger as cartoon sex symbol creation Holli Would, who wished to become a 'noid' in the human world.

Rankin-Bass:

The team of Arthur Rankin-Jules Bass was most known for its holiday specials aired on television, such as the object-animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) - with the voice of Burl Ives, Frosty the Snowman (1969) - with the voice of Jimmy Durante, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970) - with voices of Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, and Keenan Wynn. They also created the parody-spoof of monster films, their only feature-length animated film titled Mad Monster Party? (1967), with characters based upon many of the Universal 'monsters' - including Frankenstein (voiced by Boris Karloff), Count Dracula, The Wolf Man, King Kong, The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film used the stop-motion “animagic” process to animate the three-dimensional puppets. Two future Mad Magazine contributors, Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis, were responsible for co-writing the screenplay and design work. Reportedly, Tim Burton found this film to be extremely influential upon his own later work.

Also, the team of Rankin-Bass produced the anime-like mythological tale The Last Unicorn (1982). It was a sophisticated story from a screenplay by children's book novelist Peter Beagle about a lonely, last-remaining unicorn (voice of Mia Farrow) who set out on a quest to confront a beast of fire named Red Bull that had eliminated all the other unicorns.

Other Exceptional Animations with Mature Subject Matter in the Late 70s-Early 80s:

Nepenthe Productions and writer/director Martin Rosen (and animator Tony Guy) made two dark films with mature (serious-minded) subject matter - both based on Richard Adams' best-selling novels about animals and ecological concerns:

• Watership Down (1978), a bleak, allegorical animated fantasy film, the most successful British animated feature of its time. It told about the desperate quest of a warren of rabbits to find a new home, led by heroic Hazel (voice of John Hurt), a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver (voice of Richard Briers), and courageous Bigwig (voice of Michael Graham Cox). In the anthropomorphized tale, they must escape the destruction of their land during the construction of a housing development, and join a rival warren named Efrafa led by a vicious militaristic dictator, General Woundwort (voice of Harry Andrews). The film also included the last involvement in a motion picture for legendary actor Zero Mostel who played the voice of the cantankerous seagull Kehaar.
  
  
• The Plague Dogs (1982), the even darker, far more nihilistic, pro-animal rights film about two abused laboratory experiment dogs, a cynical, bitter black Labrador named Rowf (voice by Christopher Benjamin) and a brown and white dog named Snitter (voice of John Hurt). Both escape from captivity in a secret British government research lab (Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental) and become fugitives. While on the run, it is falsely reported and suspected that they carry the deadly bubonic plague and they are relentlessly pursued.
  
  
• the Adams' stories of the rabbits of Watership Down were retold in a short-lived animated TV series, produced by Rosen - 3 series of episodes aired beginning in 1999; with title music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

The French/Czech-made, science-fiction oriented Fantastic Planet (1973, Fr.) (aka La Planète Sauvage) possessed similarities to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) with its two-tiered society on a faraway planet of Ygam, consisting of enslaved humanoids called Oms and a ruling class of bizarre, blue-skinned alien giants named Traags. It was based upon the popular French newspaper serial (Stefan Wul's Oms en Serie ("Oms by the Dozen")), and was lauded with the Cannes Film Festival's special jury prize, the Grand Prix, when it was first released. Its animation technique was to move paper cutouts across backgrounds.

The inventive animated fantasy Twice Upon a Time (1983), executive produced by George Lucas, told a story about two heroes and their friends who tried to prevent a maniacal madman from giving children nightmares. It used the same cut-out paper animation that South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), the most profane animated film (with 399 swear-words) would also later employ.

The Stop-Motion Animation Work of Phil Tippett:

One of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen's animators was Phil Tippett, who followed in his mentor's footsteps with work on the following fantasy films, often for LucasFilms and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM): Star Wars (1977) especially in the chess-game sequence, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in the early Hoth snow battle sequence, the fantasy adventure Dragonslayer (1981) introducing the innovative, more fluid stop-motion filming technique of go-motion, Return of the Jedi (1983), director Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) in the mine car chase sequence, The Golden Child (1986), Howard the Duck (1986), RoboCop (1987) with its two-footed experimental enforcer robot ED209, Willow (1988), Jurassic Park (1993), and Starship Troopers (1997).

Rock-Oriented Animation Favorites:

Other pioneering animations in the early 80s relied heavily on rock music, adult themes of sex and violence, and capitalized on the post- Star Wars (1977) sci-fi fantasy boom. They have since become cult favorites for midnight movie fans:

• Gerald Potterton's uneven, multi-part anthology film Heavy Metal (1981) - based on the 70s fantasy, cyberpunk comic book of the same name, was heavy on adult-oriented content; it was produced by Ivan Reitman (who would soon become famous for directing Ghostbusters (1984)), and one of the stories was contributed by Dan O'Bannon - the screenwriter for Alien (1979); a midnight screening favorite, it featured hallucinatory images and a heavy rock soundtrack by performers Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Nazareth, Cheap Trick, Devo, and Grand Funk Railroad [Note: a computer-generated and cel animated sequel that went direct-to-cable TV, Heavy Metal 2000 (2000), featured a tough, buxom heroine named FAKK 2 (who was based upon the B-movie queen Julie Strain), frequent glimpses of cartoon nudity, and a heavy metal soundtrack by Pantera, Monster Magnet, MDFMK, Insane Clown Posse, Billy Idol, Bauhaus and others]
  
  
• Clive Smith's post-apocalyptic animated musical fantasy Rock & Rule (1983) - told about an aging R&R singer named Mok (voice of Don Francks) who searches for eternal life; other voices included singer Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Robin Zander of Cheap Trick, and Deborah Harry of Blondie; [Smith's company Nelvana had earlier produced a 27-minute short The Devil and Daniel Mouse (1978)]
  
  
• Gerald Scarfe's animation in the anti-authoritarian, anti-war Pink Floyd the Wall (1982) presented deeply adult content (on the subjects of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and violence) and psychosexual Freudian imagery
  

Early Claymation and Gumby:

Claymation is a type of animation that uses hand-crafted, sculpted plasticine or clay. This form of stop-motion animation was first associated with director Art Clokey's clay-hero character named Gumby for children's TV - a slant-headed bendable figure. (Clokey filmed the animated motion study Gumbasia at USC in the early 1950s. Gumby shorts were inaugurated in the mid-1950s - and the character first debuted on The Howdy Doody Show in 1956.)

Early on, the technique of claymation was mostly associated with the directorial work of Will Vinton, most recognized for his work on the TV commercial about California Raisins in the late 80s. He was the co-director of the first Claymation film, Closed Mondays (1974), which won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar award. His work was evidenced in the first full-length feature film showcasing claymation titled The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) (aka Comet Quest), a biography of the US humorist derived from Twain's own Huckleberry Finn sequel Tom Sawyer Abroad. James Whitmore provided the voice of the title character on a transcontinental, riverboat balloon journey to find Haley's Comet. Twain's classic tales were featured in various segments, such as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and "The Mysterious Stranger". The Vinton studio also provided claymation effects for the live-action fantasy Return to Oz (1985).

THE FILM OF ANIMATIONS

Tex Avery:

After co-creating some of the most notable cartoon characters of all time at Warners in the late 30s and early 40s (for Leon Schlesinger), Tex Avery moved to MGM Studios in 1941, where for about thirteen years (from 1941 to 1954), he accelerated the pace and scope of animations and adopted new characters: Adolf Wolf, Screwy Squirrel, a sexy red-headed beauty named Red, and a sad, droopy-eyed, dead-panning basset hound named Droopy (see below).

Avery's first cartoon for MGM, the anti-German propagandist short Blitzwolf (1942) brought him his sole Oscar nomination. It was a wartime semi-parody of Disney's earlier Three Little Pigs (1933) with Adolf Wolf (a thinly-disguised Hitler, portrayed as "one big stinker") threatening to invade the state of Pigmania and the house of Sergeant Pork (US).

Besides Tom & Jerry (see below), the other biggest MGM cartoon character, Tex Avery's most famous and long-lasting at the studio, was the meek, slow-moving and slow-talking Droopy Dog. The emotionless, deadpan-voiced, yet stoic Droopy (known as "Happy Hound") made his nameless debut in MGM's Dumb-Hounded (1943). His first line of dialogue was: "Hello all you happy people...you know what? I'm the hero." He finally received his proper name in his fifth cartoon, Senor Droopy (1949). Drag-Along Droopy (1954) was one of the classic Droopy cartoons, a spoof on range wars between sheepherders (Droopy) and ranchers (the Wolf's "Bear Butte Ranch"), as was Dixieland Droopy (1954) - the first Droopy cartoon in Cinemascope. One Droopy Knight (1957) was nominated for an Academy Award - the character's sole nomination (after Avery left the studio).

Later cartoons for MGM included Avery's controversially-sexy version of the well-known fairy tale Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) and Screwball Squirrel (1944). [Tex Avery's work heavily influenced director Chuck Russell's The Mask (1994) featuring Jim Carrey as mild-mannered bank clerk Stanley Ipkiss, who is obsessed with cartoons. When Stanley dons a magical mask, he turns into an alter ego composed of Tex Avery-like cartoon characters - the Wolf (including a famous double-take with his eyes popping out of his head and a wolf whistle), the Tasmanian Devil (whirling like a tornado), and others. He even re-enacts portions of a classic Avery cartoon that he earlier watched on his VCR, Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), in the nightclub scene. All special effects were compliments of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic.]

Walter Lantz Studios: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Woody Woodpecker, and Chilly Willy

Walter Lantz, an early animator, and Charles Mintz (representing Universal and boss Carl Laemmle), took over the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from Walt Disney in 1928 - it was the first animated character for Universal Pictures. The resemblance of Oswald to its biggest competitor, Mickey Mouse, was striking. Lantz made a series of black-and-white cartoons from 1929 to 1935, featuring the rubber-limbed, long-eared rabbit, including these early titles: Ozzie of the Circus (1929), Stage Stunt (1929), Stripes and Stars (1929), Wicked West (1929), Nuts and Bolts (1929), Ice Man's Luck (1929), Junegle Jingles (1929), Weary Willies (1929), Saucy Sausages (1929), Race Riot (1929), Oil's Well (1929), Permanent Wave (1929), Cold Turkey (1929), Amature Nite (1929), Snow Use (1929), Hurdy Gurdy (1929), and Nutty Notes (1929). Mickey Rooney was the first to do the character's voice. Lantz was noted for also making the first-ever Technicolor cartoon - the opening animated sequence to the live-action The King of Jazz (1930).

Another of Lantz' legendary creations was a new character - the red-headed, blue-bodied, long yellow-beaked, trouble-making Woody Woodpecker, with his distinctive trademarked laugh ("Ha-Ha-Ha-HA-Ha" by Mel Blanc) and voice (by Mel Blanc for the first four cartoons, and then by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway until 1948, and thereafter by Lantz' own wife Grace Stafford). Woody (looking slightly deranged and not like his later persona) first appeared in Lantz' Andy Panda cartoon Knock, Knock (1940) distributed by Universal Studios, in which he bedeviled the panda. The next year, the popular Woody became a starring character as "Woody Woodpecker" in The Cracked Nut (1941), and began to replace the waning Oswald the Rabbit.

Over the next three decades, Lantz made about 200 six-minute Woody cartoons. Woody's appearance and demeanor was somewhat softened in The Barber of Seville (1944), but he still maintained his usually aggressive and slightly sadistic, manic personality. A long-time adversary of Woody's, Wally Walrus, was introduced in The Beach Nut (1944), the same year. Two Woody shorts were Oscar-nominees:

• The Dizzy Acrobat (1943) - defeated by MGM's Tom & Jerry cartoon The Yankee Doodle Mouse
• Musical Moments From Chopin (1946) - defeated by MGM's Tom & Jerry cartoon The Cat Concerto

In 1948, the novelty tune, The Woody Woodpecker Song (written by George Tibble, Ramey Idriess and Danny Kaye) was released on record and became the #1 hit song (sung by Kay Kyser). The song was put into the latest cartoon, Wet Blanket Policy (1948) (with another new co-star arch-nemesis Buzz Buzzard) and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Song (it lost to Buttons and Bows in The Paleface (1948)). Young boys copied Woody's haircut, and fan clubs developed across the country. In the late 50s, The Woody Woodpecker Show first appeared on ABC-TV in 1957 , and led to further shows and syndication.

A less popular but distinctive Lantz cartoon character was Chilly Willy - a penguin, who first appeared in 1953 in a cartoon titled appropriately, Chilly Willy (1953). Chilly's popularity soared when animator Tex Avery joined the Lantz Studio the following year and directed Chilly's second and third cartoons: I'm Cold (1954) and Academy Award-nominated The Legend of Rock-a-bye Point (1955) for Best Short Subject Cartoon (it lost to Speedy Gonzales (1935), a Warner Bros.' Merrie Melodies cartoon). As with Woody, Chilly Willy cartoons appeared all the way until 1972 - the last year of production.

Tom and Jerry:

In their first full teaming together after first meeting at MGM and serving as co-directors in the studio's animation unit, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created the cat and mouse Tom and Jerry series (clearly influenced by the frenetic action in Tex Avery's work at Warners), comic adventures about Tom - a gray mangy cat, and Jerry - a wisely innocent mouse. When the cartoon series highlighting the love-hate relationship between the two animals was first introduced in 1940 with the 9-minute Puss Gets the Boot (1940), Hanna and Barbera received their first Oscar nomination. In this first appearance of the characters, Tom was called 'Jasper' and the mouse had no name.

Over 100 cartoons from 1940 to 1958 featured the two cartoon characters, and Hanna and Barbera were able to break Disney's Oscar monopoly for award-winning cartoons. They won more Academy Awards than any other cartoon series in history, except for Disney's Silly Symphonies. They won Oscars for Best Short Subject: Cartoon for the following animated cartoons, all in the Tom and Jerry series:

• Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943)
• Mouse Trouble (1944)
• Quiet, Please! (1945)
• The Cat Concerto (1946)
• The Little Orphan (1948)
• The Two Mouseketeers (1951)
• Johann Mouse (1952)

In The Cat Concerto (1946), Tom was a concert pianist, attempting to play Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 while Jerry the mouse was trying to sleep in the piano. And in the last film Johann Mouse (1952), Jerry - the mouse, can't resist waltzing when he hears music from the master of the house, Viennese composer Johann Strauss. Tom, also a resident in the household of the Maestro, takes piano lessons to keep Jerry dancing and entranced - so that he can snatch him. One of their most famous cartoons was Mouse in Manhattan (1945) that featured a score by Scott Bradley (made up mostly of Louis Alter's "Manhattan Serenade" later used in The Godfather (1972) and Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown's "Broadway Rhythm") and told about Jerry's adventures in the big city.

Later, in a few famous sequences, Jerry the mouse danced with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (1945) - the first instance of the combination of live action and animation in a feature film. Tom and Jerry also performed an underwater fantasy dance with Esther Williams in Dangerous When Wet (1953). Famed animator Chuck Jones was assigned to produce new episodes for Tom and Jerry cartoons in the 70s at MGM - but they had lost their spunk and spirit by that time - and were ultimately unsuccessful.

The First Full-Length Animated Film:

The earliest animated films that most people remember seeing are the later, more sophisticated Disney feature films that contain exquisite detail, flowing movements, gorgeous and rich color, enchanting characters, lovely musical songs and tunes, and stories drawn with magical or mythological plots. The first, full-length animated film was Disney's classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) released on December 21, 1937, which took four years to make and cost $1.5 million dollars. It was 1938's top moneymaker at $8 million.

It was financed due in part to the success of Disney's earlier animated short, The Three Little Pigs (1933). Although dubbed "Disney's Folly" during the three-four year production of the musical animation, Disney realized that he had to expand and alter the format of cartoons. He used a multi-plane camera, first utilized in his animated, Oscar-winning Silly Symphonies short, The Old Mill (1937) to create an illusion of depth and movement. His version of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale was the second of its kind - the first was a five-minute Snow White (1933) starring Betty Boop (with an appearance by Cab Calloway). Disney's risk-taking paid off when the film became a financial and critical success.

[It must be noted that another little-known but pioneering, oldest-surviving feature-length animated film that can be verified (with silhouette animation techniques and color tinting) was released more than a decade earlier by German film-maker and avante-garde artist Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (aka Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed) (1926, Germ.), based on the stories from the Arabian Nights.]

Disney's Golden Age of Hollywood Animations in the 40s:

The Golden Age of Hollywood cartoon comedy was in the late 1930s and 1940s. The critically-praised Pinocchio (1940) released on February 7, 1940 and based on Carlo Collodi's 1881 fable made a record $2.6 million and became the highest-earning film of the year. This second Disney animated feature also won two Oscars, for Best Original Score and Best Song (When You Wish Upon a Star). It was the rites of passage story of a wooden puppet (with Tyrolean britches) that came alive. The delinquent boy was accompanied by an ingenuous narrator/carpetbagger named Jiminy Cricket who served as the boy's conscience (and sounded like Benjamin Franklin). The ingenious animation used the multi-plane camera technique to create an amazingly life-like animation.

Disney experimented with other milestone, ground-breaking techniques that combined classical music and animation in seven separate episodes in the film Fantasia (1940), released on November 12, 1940. The film, with a production cost of more than $2 million (about four times more than an average live-action picture), featured Mickey Mouse as the star of the picture in Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the mouse's only appearance in a feature cartoon. It was the first film to be released in a multichannel stereo sound format called Fantasound - decades ahead of its time - requiring a special system devised for playback, although it was rarely shown that way due to the expense (and the fact that only 6 theaters were equipped to play Fantasound).

Fantasia was the fullest expression of Disney's earlier work on Silly Symphonies. [A sequel of sorts was released 60 years later, originally in the IMAX format, Fantasia/2000 (1999), with new interpretations of classical music (including Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance, Stravinsky's Firebird, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 - and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue), plus a replay of The Sorcerer's Apprentice.]

Other great classic Disney tales, animated features, and storybooks in the 40s included:

• Dumbo (1941) - the story of the baby elephant with big flying ears, released on October 23, 1941; Best Song nominee (Baby Mine) and Best Score Academy Award-winner
• Bambi (1942) - the masterfully poetic tale of woodland creatures and a deer, with the shattering scene of the killing of Bambi's mother; released on August 9, 1942; three-time Academy Award nominee: Best Song (Love is a Song), Best Score, Best Sound [Note: although the second Disney animated film to go into production, it ended up being the fifth release, due to extensive time-consuming research conducted on animals to make it appear exceedingly realistic]
• Saludos Amigos (1943), released on February 6, 1943; advertised as "Walt Disney Goes South American" with the introduction of Joe Carioca, the Brazilian Jitterbird; three-time Academy Award nominee: Best Sound, Best Score, and Best Song (Saludos Amigos)
• The Three Caballeros (1945), released on February 3, 1945; two-time Academy Award nominee: Best Sound and Best Score; in this animated and live-action combined film, Donald Duck danced with "Brazilian Girl" Aurora Miranda
• Make Mine Music (1946), released on August 15, 1946; a more modernized version of Fantasia (1940) with popular music by Benny Goodman, the Andrews Sisters, and Dinah Shore; the anthology included the classic tales Casey at the Bat, and Peter and the Wolf; also Blue Bayou, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met, The Martins and the Coys, All the Cats Join In, and Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet
• The Song of the South (1946), released on November 12, 1946, was Disney's first live-action feature film, but also contained three major segments of animation; it was based upon Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus folk tales regarding Br'er Rabbit; due to extensive protests (mostly by the NAACP) over the stereotypical representations of blacks in the film and the romanticizing of slavery, the controversial film was never released on home video for US audiences; the film's hit song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" won the Academy Awards Oscar for Best Song
• Fun and Fancy Free (1947), released on September 27, 1947; a combination of live-action and animation; included Mickey and the Beanstalk
• Melody Time (1948), released on May 27, 1948; included animated shorts about two American folk heroes: Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill; the last of Disney's large collections of animated shorts
• So Dear to My Heart (1949), released on January 19, 1949; a live-action film with some animation, starring Burl Ives; an Academy Award nominee for Best Song (Lavender Blue)
• The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), released on October 5, 1949; included the two shorts: The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The 1950s: Disney's Golden Age of Animation (continued)

In the 50s, Disney released more animated features, including the following full-length classics:

• Cinderella (1950), released on February 15, 1950; three-time Academy Award nominee: Best Score, Best Sound, Best Song (Bibbidy-Bobbidi-Boo) [Cinderella has been widely regarded as the most re-made storyline ever]
• Alice in Wonderland (1951), released on July 28, 1951; the Disney adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic; its failure at the box-office offset the profits from the previous years' successful Cinderella
• Peter Pan (1953), released on February 5, 1953; Disney's version of James M. Barrie's story
• Lady and the Tramp (1955), released on June 16, 1955; Disney's first animated feature in CinemaScope
• Sleeping Beauty (1959), released on January 29, 1959; also in widescreen format; Academy Award nominee: Best Score

In order, Lady and the Tramp (1955), Peter Pan (1953), and Cinderella (1950) were the top 3 grossing films of the 50s. [Taking into account reissues and re-releases over the years as well as the original releases, the order of these top-grossing animated films of all time has been rearranged, placing Cinderella (1950) first, followed by Lady and the Tramp (1955) and then Peter Pan (1953).]

Walt Disney achieved a milestone in the 1954 awards ceremony - as the individual with the most Oscar wins (4) in a single year. He won the award in four awards categories, including one film which was animated: Best Cartoon Short Subject: Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953).

UPA Productions - Columbia Studios:

Some who left Disney Studios around the time of the studio's 1941 strike later established United Productions of America (UPA), a studio for cartoons distributed by Columbia. It was known for simplified, stylized drawings of human characters in the Jolly Frolics cartoon series, such as Gerald McBoing-Boing (first seen in the cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951)) and the near-sighted Mister Magoo (with voice by Jim Backus).

Mister Magoo's first cartoon was Ragtime Bear (1949) - also in the same series of Jolly Frolics cartoons. The first of the Mister Magoo series of cartoons was Spellbound Hound (1950). Mister Magoo starred in UPA's first feature-length cartoon film, the 76-minute 1001 Arabian Nights (1959).

Jay Ward -- Crusader Rabbit and After:

Animator Jay Ward, working with Alexander Anderson, Jr (whose idea was first turned down at Terrytoon Studios), created the immensely-popular animated, serialized NBC-TV show Crusader Rabbit, through their new company Television Arts Productions. It was the first American animated series produced especially for television. The show originally aired from 1950 -1952 and also had a color version in 1957, with both Lucille Bliss and GeGe Pearson providing the voice of the Don Quixote-like title character. It told about knight-in-armor Crusader Rabbit and his tiger companion Rags, combatting nemesis Dudley Nightshade, with episodes ending in a cliffhanger. Ward went on to produce animated cartoon shows, such as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show - composed of Rocky and His Friends (1959-1961) and The Bullwinkle Show (1961-1964), Hoppity Hooper (1964-1967), George of the Jungle (1967), and The Dudley Do-Right Show (1969-1970) about a Canadian Mountie. The only live-action TV comedy show that he produced was Fractured Flickers (1963).

Hanna and Barbera:

In the late 50s after their success with Tom and Jerry cartoons, Hanna-Barbera formed their own company. They were one of the earliest animation studios to become successful producing animated cartoon TV shows for television, but were often criticized for their crude, low-budget animations. They became responsible for the following cartoon shows, and their related spin-offs:

• The Ruff 'n' Ready Show (1957-1960) - their first TV show
• The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1962)
• The Quick Draw McGraw Show (1959-1961)
• The Yogi Bear Show (1961-1963)
• The Flintstones (1960-1966) - loosely based upon the live-action sitcom The Honeymooners, also ABC-TV's first series to be televised in color
• Top Cat (1961-1962)
• The Jetsons (1962-1963)
• Jonny Quest (1964-1965)
• The Magilla Gorilla Show (1964-1967)
• The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show (1965-67)
• Scooby Doo (1969 and after)
• Hong Kong Phooey (1974-1976)

Based upon some of these cartoon shows, they also produced feature-length films, such as the animated musicals Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! (1964) and The Man Called Flintstone (1966) - a James Bond spoof, the Star Trek-like Jetsons: The Movie (1990), and the live-action Scooby-Doo (2002) (with a sequel in 2004).

Cold War Era Propagandistic Animations:

One of the most notorious propaganda films ever made, Duck and Cover (1951), was aimed at school children. The 9-minute Civil Defense film used an animated turtle named Bert to show children how to survive a nuclear explosion or atomic attack by using a "duck and cover" technique under their desks. Later, Bert became a cultural icon in the documentary The Atomic Cafe (1982), and it was cleverly spoofed in Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (1999) with a cartoon beaver. For its historical and cultural place within film history, it was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2004.

Advanced Animation Techniques in the 50s and 60s:

Ray Harryhausen and Others

In 1949, inspired by the stop-motion work of Willis O'Brien in King Kong (1933), Ray Harryhausen animated the stop-motion gorilla in Mighty Joe Young (1949), although the work was mostly credited to O'Brien. This was Harryhausen's first feature film for which he created stop-motion animation. His own distinctive brand of stop-motion animation was termed DynaMation - a process involving split-screen rear projection to insert the stop-motion characters into background live-action plates. He created the fantastic images in 15 films between 1953 and 1981, including:

Harryhausen's Films	Descriptions
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)	Warner Bros.' prehistoric fantasy - a pre-Godzilla monster story with a rhedosaurus threatening New York City
It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955)	about a giant radioactive squid-octopus (with only six arms instead of eight to save money) threatening San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge
Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956)	with flying saucers that destroyed the US capital in the spectacular finale
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)	with a threatening reptilian creature threatening Italy
The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959)	adapted from Jonathan Swift's novel about an adventurer who encountered the worlds of Lilliput, Brobdignag, and England
Mysterious Island (1961)	Jules Verne's oft-filmed tale about the ballooning journey of escaped convicts to an uncharted island inhabited by a giant crab and a mysterious Captain Nemo of the Nautilus
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)	Harryhausen's best film, with screeching harpies, a giant metal warrior (a cross between the Colossus of Rhodes and a bronzed stone giant Talos man), a 7-headed hydra, and sword-wielding skeletons doing battle against Jason (Todd Armstrong)
The First Men in the Moon (1964)	the H.G. Wells' adaptation about a space trip to the lunar surface (with an alien civilization) and back
One Million Years, BC (1966)	Harryhausen's most celebrated film, with Raquel Welch as a fur bikini-clad cavewoman, and a menagerie of prehistoric creatures
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)	about the unleashing of a giant, flesh-eating prehistoric monster unearthed by an archaeologist, that burns to death at a church altar in the fiery climax
Trog (1970)	a horror-monster film, noted as the last film of Joan Crawford
Sinbad Trilogy: (1) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)	featuring Harryhausen's Dynamation process, including the rescue of a miniature princess (Kathryn Grant) by handsome prince Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) on his seventh voyage, a young genie and many stop-motion animated figures (a giant horned Cyclops who spit-roasted a sailor, a dragon, a snake-woman, and a sword-battling skeleton - the first of his skeletal warriors)
(2) The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)	featuring a 6-armed statue, a one-eyed centaur, and a flying Griffin
(3) Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)	with three zomboids, a giant saber-toothed tiger, a horned prehistoric caveman named Troglodyte (Trog for short), three banshees, and Minoton (similar to the legendary Minotaur with a human body and bull's head) - among other creatures
Clash of the Titans (1981)	a mythological fantasy, with a memorable snake-haired Gorgon-Medusa, a Cyclops, and the winged horse Pegasus. this was Ray Harryhausen's swan song - his last film as Special Effects producer

Ray Harryhausen's films, such as his best known work Jason and the Argonauts (1963) with its skeletal warriors set-piece, perfected stop-motion animation. By the time the 61 year-old Harryhausen had finished Clash of the Titans (1981), he had worked on more than a dozen sci-fi and fantasy films with stop-motion animation.

George Pal, the father of screen science fiction fantasy films, artistically combined live acting cinematography, animation, puppets (e.g., Puppetoons produced for Paramount in the 30s), and other visual effects in films such as Tom Thumb (1958), the Cinerama-configured The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1963).

Animator-geniuses of recent years have used pixillation, the frame by frame animation of live subjects or objects and human beings by filming them incrementally in various fixed poses. Mary Poppins (1964) was a more recent, semi-animated kids musical with both live-action and animated characters.

The best-known work of the Halas & Batchelor (husband and wife) animation studios was the adult-themed and serious Animal Farm (1954), the first animated color feature film made in England. All of the character's voices were provided by actor Maurice Denham. The allegorical tale, based on George Orwell's 1945 satirical political novel, told of animals at Manor Farm who were led by fascist pigs Napoleon and Snowball to rebelliously overthrow oppressive Farmer Jones, take over the farm, and form a free, egalitarian socialist utopia. The new society was to be based upon seven principles: 1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 3. No animal shall wear clothes. 4. No animal shall sleep in a bed. 5. No animal shall drink alcohol. 6. No animal shall kill any other animal. 7. All animals are equal. However, the animals would learn that some animals were more equal than others. [After the success of the 'talking-animal' hit Babe (1995), the film was later remade as the live-action TNT-TV production, Animal Farm (1999). It featured creations of Jim Henson's Creature Shop (where director John Stephenson was a veteran supervisor), animatronics and computer animation.]

A classic family animation with similar animal characters, although a-political, was Charlotte's Web (1973), adapted from E.B. White's beloved tale about an intelligent spider (Charlotte, voiced by Debbie Reynolds), a rat (Templeton, voiced by Paul Lynde), and a bashful, ill-fated barnyard pig (Wilbur, voiced by Henry Gibson). It was noted for Charlotte's sacrificial saving of Wilbur with web-spinning creations ("Some Pig"), Wilbur's caring for Charlotte's egg sac and spiderlings upon her death, and memorable songs including "Mother Earth and Father Time."

The magical puppetry of Jim Henson's Muppet characters have also charmed audiences, first with The Muppet Movie (1979), then followed by more adventures with Kermit, Miss Piggy, and other delightful characters. [See section on Children's Films.]