stereosforgeeks wrote:Variety reports a 4th Shrek film 2010. A fifth one following.
Can't we just end this franchise yet. Damn.
tapehead wrote:stereosforgeeks wrote:Var iety reports a 4th Shrek film 2010. A fifth one following.
Can't we just end this franchise yet. Damn.
It's a shame, because he has done some good work, but at this point, we have to kill Mike Myers.
stereosforgeeks wrote:tapehead wrote:stereosforgeeks wrote:Var iety reports a 4th Shrek film 2010. A fifth one following.
Can't we just end this franchise yet. Damn.
It's a shame, because he has done some good work, but at this point, we have to kill Mike Myers.
I wonder if it's him or Dreamworks that want these franchise additions.
tapehead wrote:stereosforgeeks wrote:tapehead wrote:stereosforgeeks wrote:Variety reports a 4th Shrek film 2010. A fifth one following.
Can't we just end this franchise yet. Damn.
It's a shame, because he has done some good work, but at this point, we have to kill Mike Myers.
I wonder if it's him or Dreamworks that want these franchise additions.
If I could go into a room and read from a piece of paper for a day or two, and make millions of dollars from it, the temptation to do it again would be pretty strong.
clearly it's a profitable franchise for the studio.
Source :Newsarama- Any chance of a Batman: The Long Halloween animated? Levitz: "Yes."
If that title is unfamiliar to you ... Well, there's a good reason for that. It's been more than a decade since this Richard Williams film was last available for purchase. On VHS no less. And to my knowledge, because of some copyright-related problem, "Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure" has never officially been transferred over to DVD. And evidently this same copyright-related issue is currently preventing this 84-minute-long movie from being broadcast on television.
TheButcher wrote:ASIFA-Hollywood had a special screening and panel discussion to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Richard Williams’ "Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure" on 11/17/07.If that title is unfamiliar to you ... Well, there's a good reason for that. It's been more than a decade since this Richard Williams film was last available for purchase. On VHS no less. And to my knowledge, because of some copyright-related problem, "Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure" has never officially been transferred over to DVD. And evidently this same copyright-related issue is currently preventing this 84-minute-long movie from being broadcast on television.
ShockTilYouDrop.com is reporting that a direct-to-DVD animated feature based on Robert Kirkman's unlikely hit comic 'Marvel Zombies' may be in the work. The news comes "through the grapevine" so consider it a rumor at this point. No other details are revealed outside the notion that the project is in development.
TheButcher wrote:The Next Avengers trailer is here.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271543564/bctid1467273149
TonyWilson wrote:holy shit.
06/10/2008: "Five Kung Fu Panda sequels on the way?"
In news that will surprise noone, Jack Black told AAP while promoting Kung Fu Panda in Sydney earlier today that he was confident there would be a follow up: “My eight ball says signs point to yes.” Jack says he’d jump at the chance to be involved if “all the stars are aligned to make it. It’s easy for me, I just come in and do the acting voice, it’s those animators and directors that have to really make the sacrifice.” In much more surprising news however, Jeffrey Katzenberg stated that there could be up to FIVE more Kung Fu Panda movies if he gets his way. “There is a larger story here of which this is the first chapter. In the same way Shrek had five chapters from the beginning, this has six. Whether we get to tell those chapters or not isn’t something we determine, the movie-goers determine. It needs to be a big hit. It needs to be a blockbuster.” Which Kung Fu Panda is clearly on its way to become… Deservedly so since this timeless action comedy with heart marks a fresh departure for DreamWorks–so why spoil it, especially so early in its theatrical run, with the announcement of endless sequels? You may remember that Jeffrey Katzenberg stated four years ago that Shrek had been conceived from the beginning as a four-chapter story, later bumping up that number to five.
TheButcher wrote:Kung Fu Panda 5 news:06/10/2008: "Five Kung Fu Panda sequels on the way?"
In news that will surprise noone, Jack Black told AAP while promoting Kung Fu Panda in Sydney earlier today that he was confident there would be a follow up: “My eight ball says signs point to yes.” Jack says he’d jump at the chance to be involved if “all the stars are aligned to make it. It’s easy for me, I just come in and do the acting voice, it’s those animators and directors that have to really make the sacrifice.” In much more surprising news however, Jeffrey Katzenberg stated that there could be up to FIVE more Kung Fu Panda movies if he gets his way. “There is a larger story here of which this is the first chapter. In the same way Shrek had five chapters from the beginning, this has six. Whether we get to tell those chapters or not isn’t something we determine, the movie-goers determine. It needs to be a big hit. It needs to be a blockbuster.” Which Kung Fu Panda is clearly on its way to become… Deservedly so since this timeless action comedy with heart marks a fresh departure for DreamWorks–so why spoil it, especially so early in its theatrical run, with the announcement of endless sequels? You may remember that Jeffrey Katzenberg stated four years ago that Shrek had been conceived from the beginning as a four-chapter story, later bumping up that number to five.
source : Animated-News
yorrick brown wrote:TheButcher wrote:Kung Fu Panda 5 news:06/10/2008: "Five Kung Fu Panda sequels on the way?"
In news that will surprise noone, Jack Black told AAP while promoting Kung Fu Panda in Sydney earlier today that he was confident there would be a follow up: “My eight ball says signs point to yes.” Jack says he’d jump at the chance to be involved if “all the stars are aligned to make it. It’s easy for me, I just come in and do the acting voice, it’s those animators and directors that have to really make the sacrifice.” In much more surprising news however, Jeffrey Katzenberg stated that there could be up to FIVE more Kung Fu Panda movies if he gets his way. “There is a larger story here of which this is the first chapter. In the same way Shrek had five chapters from the beginning, this has six. Whether we get to tell those chapters or not isn’t something we determine, the movie-goers determine. It needs to be a big hit. It needs to be a blockbuster.” Which Kung Fu Panda is clearly on its way to become… Deservedly so since this timeless action comedy with heart marks a fresh departure for DreamWorks–so why spoil it, especially so early in its theatrical run, with the announcement of endless sequels? You may remember that Jeffrey Katzenberg stated four years ago that Shrek had been conceived from the beginning as a four-chapter story, later bumping up that number to five.
source : Animated-News
its only been out a week and they want four more movies,wow!.
LaDracul wrote:I'm thinking they might focus on a different member of the Furious Five.
Nachokoolaid wrote:LaDracul wrote:I'm thinking they might focus on a different member of the Furious Five.
Yeah, that's what I automatically assumed when I heard the announcement.
The closest-knit friends of one of the world's most highly recognized array of children's programming, Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street, will soon be reinvented in a new medium for audience fascination. A conscientious one with an egg-shaped head and a lovable oaf, these two characters have delighted children for years with their inventiveness, creativity and capacity to turn the mundane into a world of imagination and adventure unlike ever before. The two Sesame Street characters, soon to be clay animated characters in their own television program, currently under the working title The Adventures of Bert and Ernie, are scheduled to hit the airwaves around the world by the end of next year.
Steve Fritz wrote:As any horror fan knows, it’s just damn difficult to keep the undead down. If you don’t, ask Henry Sellick.
For those who don’t know, Sellick is one of the top stop-motion animation directors in the world, having comfortably settled in a position somewhere between golden age masters like Ray Harryhausen, George Pal and Art Clokey and modern day masters like Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay and Aardman Studios. It doesn’t take long to see he loves working in the genre that’s truly the oldest form of animation either.
“[As a kid I was inspired by] The early Harryhausen, Jason and the Argonauts in particular,” Sellick reminisced over a telephone conference this weekend. “I also love the Seventh Voyage, the best cyclops that will ever be done. There was just this wonderful sense that Harryhausen's monsters were real, despite the sort of lurching quality they had, they had an undeniable reality to them.
“I love all sorts of animation, probably the most beautiful would be the traditional hand drawn animation that Disney is known for. Stopmotion has a certain grittiness and is filled with imperfections, and yet their is an undeniable truth, that what you see really exits, even it if is posed by hand, 24 times a second. This truth is what I find most attractive about stop motion animation.”
Yet his first work experience would be in traditional animation. In 1980 he was part of the legendary animation team who created Disney’s The Fox and the Hound. This team also included Brad Bird, Don Bluth, John Lassiter and a number of others who would become movers and shakers in the cartoon universe.
There was another guy over there in the Magic Kingdom who Sellick also hung out with. His name was Tim Burton. Like Sellick, Burton was a stop motion fan. More important, Burton had convinced Disney to finance two shorts using the process, Frankenweenie and Vincent. Burton got the initial idea to also do Nightmare Before Christmas there. Sellick remembers it well.
“’Vincent’ was Tim's first stop motion film that he made with Rick Heinrichs,” Sellick recalled. “It had a striking look, bold design and was basically part of Tim's growth as an artist, which influence the look of Nightmare Before Christmas.
“I was working with Tim at Disney in the early 1980s when he first conceived the poem and idea of Jack Skellingon taking over Christmas,” said Sellick. Sculptor Rick Heinrichs took the original characters designed by Tim: Jack, Zero and Sandy Claws and created beautiful maquettes that showed what they'd be like as stop motion characters. It was originally pitched to Disney as a TV special but was rejected. I had moved to Northern California where I worked as storyboard artist and a stop motion filmmaker with short films, TV commercials and MTV. While Tim went on to achieve great success in live action.”
In fact, Burton was mega-hot. His first features films, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman, had both made tons of money. Batman II and Edward Scissorhands were in the wings. That didn’t mean cinching the Nightmare deal was a fait accompli.
“There was resistance to doing it all at first,” says Sellick. “When Tim first pitched it to Disney in the early 1980s there was resistance to the project in any medium. But 10 years later when the film was made there was never an issue about it being stop motion. It was simply a case of that is how Tim conceived it.”
Apparently, both Burton and Heinrichs hadn’t forgotten their old buddy Sellick either, who was making waves with his short “Slow Bob In The Lower Dimensions.”
“I got a call from Rick and he said there was something important we must talk about in person. He flew to San Francisco and said Tim is making Nightmare Before Christmas and wants you to direct it. I met with Tim and Danny Elfman and my small crew that I had been working with immediately became supervisors on a feature film.”
The film would then take the next three years of Sellick’s life. Part of the process was finding enough animators familiar with stop motion. In an interview conducted a year ago, part of this problem was solved through hiring people who worked for Art and Joe Clokey, the creators of the last Gumby series.
“Directing stop motion animation is actually a sort of combination of directing live action and 'regular' animation,” says Sellick. “We have real sets, real lights, real cameras. There is a costume department, a hair department and our puppets are the actors. Like regular animation it is a divide and conquer. It is all divided up into manageable pieces, edited in storyboards before the movie is made and then shot a frame a time like traditional animation.
“There was a Gumby revival by Art Clokey in the 80s and a new TV series that followed, which attracted a lot of young stop motion animators to California. Many of the animators for Nightmare Before Christmas came from that group...because the Gumby project had been over for almost three years so we did not 'take' anyone. We [also] hired several ILM veterans to work on the original film however.
“We don't think we actually achieved a very fluid motion. It was basically made the same way the original King Kong was made or any of Ray Harryhausen's creatures. Virtually all animation is labor intensive, since it was what I do it did not seem any harder than others. The small army topped out at under 200 people. Because the range of talents and abilities, there was always something amazing and wonderful to see virtually every day, so that the long journey of production was re-inspired regularly. We used Disney's fledgling effects unit in Burbank and they created the very simple snow that falls at the end of the film. Other than that it was all pretty much done by hand in house.”
Not that there weren’t other challenges, either.
“While virtually every bit of the stop motion animation was challenging, there were several particularly difficult scenes to pull off,” Sellick recalled. “One began where Jack is shot out of the sky with his Skellington Reindeer flying over head and being shot down and lands in the arms of the angel statue in a graveyard and goes on to sing a song there while the camera continuously circles him. The opening song of the film ‘This is Halloween’ was monstrously challenging as it introduced all the Halloween Town monsters to the audience. We were [also] desperate to flesh out the town, after you go through the mummy and vampires etc it gets slim. We used everything we came up with.”
One character in particular, Oogie Boogie, was not only a villain in the film, but a monster to animate.
“Oogie started out as the size of a pillowcase and not that scary or evil or important,” said Sellick, “but as the story developed I felt the need to grow him in both his scale and his role. Ultimately Danny Eflman's ‘Oogie Boogie’ song is what truly defined his character as the villain and Jack's role was fully defined as a misguided hero. [Still], he was a huge puppet, very difficult to muscle around it was almost as if he was trying to push back while you were animating him.”
Sellick also recalls that Disney itself was generally highly cooperative on the project. He recalled the Mouse Works had only one truly objectionable note, for the man with the Tear Away Face, which they thought was too terrifying for kids. Burton also only made some minor modifications.
“Working with Tim was great, he came up with a brilliant idea, designed the main characters, fleshed out the story, got Danny Elfman to write a bunch of great songs,” said Sellick. “He got the project on its feet and then stood back and watched us fly with it. Tim, who made two live-action features in LA while we were in San Francisco making Nightmare, was kept in the loop throughout the process, reviewing storyboards and animation. When we completed the film Tim came in with his editor Chris to pace up the film and make a particular story adjust to make Lock, Shock, and Barrel just a touch nicer.”
Then it was time for release. Mind you, Disney was on one of the hottest streaks in the history of the studio. It had already set box office records with its release of Aladdin, who’s opening weekend brought in $19 million. In 1993, that was not chump change by anyone’s standards. Powered by the voice work of Robin Williams, it would eventually bring in $500 million internationally. Word on the street that their next traditional animated project, 1994’s The Lion King could potentially be bigger (which it eventually was at $783 million). Yet inbetween was this very, very, exceedingly strange movie about monsters delivering shrunken heads during Christmas. To top it, Disney didn’t even brand the film as one of its own. They shipped it over to their more adult Touchstone subsidiary.
Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas actually didn’t do bad for its full wide screen debut. It brought in $8 million. From there though it only went on to do a lifetime box office of $73 million, not even 15% of what Aladdin grossed, and Nightmare was the Christmas release to boot.
“Nightmare was just too different from what Disney was having success with,” Sellick opined, “although I don't think Walt Disney himself would have had a problem with it being labeled a Disney film. Just check out some of the sequences from Fantasia, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Ward Kimball's goons and monsters in Sleeping Beauty and you'll see Nightmare and it's characters were carrying on in the same tradition. While it took sometime, about seven years ago when the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland was transformed into a Nightmare extravaganza, we then felt we were truly loved by the Disney label.”
But as said before, it’s truly hard to keep the undead down. One could say that after it’s inauspicious start, Nightmare developed a life of its own.
“At this point, 15 years later after the original release, I've grown used to seeing Jack and Sallie turn up all over the place,” says Sellick. “This did not happen right away it has taken years for our initial cult audience to grow into a pop culture phenomenon. Just this past Halloween, we had some girls show up at the house in NBChristmas costumes and my wife and I pointed out one of the original Jack Skellington and the Skellington Reindeer which was in our office. It blew their minds and they screamed with joy, taking their handfuls of candy and went away just full of life.”
End of Part 1. The Nightmare Before Christmas 15th Anniversary Edition is due in stores on August 26th.
MTV wrote:William Shatner will star as the voice of Santa Claus in Steven de Souza’s Rankin-Bass-esque animated “Gotta Catch Santa,” the filmmaker revealed, detailing a science-fiction fantasy plot which owes as much to quantum mechanics as it does to Christmas cheer.
“You know the emails you always get around Christmas that explain why Santa Claus can’t really exist – not because there’s no such thing as Santa Claus – but because in order to carry that payload of toys on re-entry, the reindeers would burn up. And then there’s a formula that proves this. Or other messages say that the problem isn’t re-entry, but launch, and there’s a formula about the energy a healthy male reindeer would be able to produce?” de Souza asked.
“Well, we start with a bunch of brainy kids kicking this idea around, and they stumble upon the actual method Santa uses – which involves quantum mechanics and a lot of dialogue that only William Shatner can say,” he continued. “And by attempting to get a photograph of Santa in order to win a contest or to prove his existence, they say, ‘We’ll just delay him for 10 seconds when he’s at our chimney.’ But we’re dealing with quantum physics here!
“You know this Collider they just opened up in France? People said, ‘That’s going to bring about the end of the world!’ Well, it’s not the Collider – it’s stopping Santa on his appointed rounds!”
It’s the end of the world as we know it only the kids and can save the holiday season by “joining up with Santa to stop an existential threat to our universe from entities that only an animator can provide because they’re too horrible to describe,” de Souza laughed.
What kind of entities? Think “Frosty meets Cthulhu,” de Souza said.
“Gotta Catch Santa” will air on a major network this Christmas.
BuckyO'harre wrote:Gotta Catch Santa.
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