Animation

I never quite got anime. Yes, I watched the Japanese animated series "Speed Racer" growing up, and I'm impressed by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of the anime films "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro." But if I happen to visit a comic book store, I gravitate to Marvel and DC, steering far clear of the anime-style Japanese comic books known as manga. A newish San Francisco hotel was about to challenge my thinking and prove what a global pop culture phenomenon anime is. Two years ago, boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre reopened the Best Western Miyako Inn in Japantown as the anime-infused Hotel Tomo.

The smiling boy with the pointy hairdo flying into theaters today in David Bowers' computer-generated film "Astro Boy" isn't just a clever diversion for the kids. He's got a storied past that helped revolutionize manga and launch the artistic explosion that became anime. He also paved the way for the "Pokemon," "Naruto" and "Yu-Gi-Oh" cartoons currently on American airwaves. After a failed outing early in 1951, when graphic novelist and filmmaker Osamu Tezuka first introduced the robot as the peacemaking Ambassador Atom in a Japanese magazine for boys, "Astro Boy" as we know him was launched a year later.

Dave Thomas has kept a mostly low profile since his "SCTV" days in the '80s, but now the Canadian comic is back with a new animated MTV series, "Popzilla," which spoofs celebrities in the age of Twitter. Sample: A parody of Ashton Kutcher promoting the next social-networking craze, where users will update their status simply by posting icons of a duck, clown or fern. You created "Popzilla" to make fun of celebrity culture. But haven't we reached the point where celebs are almost beyond parody?

"Fanboy and Chum Chum," which premieres tonight on Nickelodeon before taking up its regular post Saturday morning, is a cartoon about two kids who live in a permanent state of playing. They dress as superheroes, wearing their underwear on the outside for that Superman look. (They have no out-of-costume alter egos.) Their collective mental landscape is littered with the detritus of sci-fi and fantasy, with the stuff of comics and movies, toys and TV shows. But we don't see the world as they imagine it, Walter Mitty-style; we just see them in their world, imagining.

Heinz Edelmann obituary: The obituary of graphic designer Heinz Edelmann in the July 22 Section A said Ron Campbell did the animation for the 1968 Beatles film "Yellow Submarine." Campbell was one of many animators who worked on the film. Additionally, Edelmann's quote that he had never taken drugs was said to have been from an interview in the magazine Design Week. The quote originally came from a 1994 interview with author Bob Hieronimus for his book "Inside the Yellow Submarine."

The Emmy Awards ceremony is still a few weeks away, but the Cartoon Network claimed a handful of prizes Monday when the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced winners in select animation and costume categories. The categories are juried awards, meaning there were no nominations announced. The awards will be presented at the Creative Arts Awards ceremony Sept. 12 at the Nokia Theatre in downtown L.A. Animators for two Cartoon Network series won Emmys for background painting: Joe Binggeli for "Chowder" and Chris Roszak for "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack."

A self-described "total novice" in stop-motion animation, Wes Anderson severely tested the patience of his crew of stop-motion top guns by forgoing many of the most modern animation methods and new innovations in the genre to give his family thriller "Fantastic Mr. Fox" what he calls a more "rudimentary" feel. But even while exasperating his underlings -- "He has made our lives miserable," director of animation Mark Gustafson said on the movie's London set last spring -- Anderson's aesthetic mandate had an unexpected upshot.

The painstaking process known as stop-motion animation has brought all kinds of things to life, from that big ape King Kong to the very British Wallace and Gromit, but in the playful and funny "Fantastic Mr. Fox" it goes those feats one better: It reanimates filmmaker Wes Anderson's career. With George Clooney and Meryl Streep voicing the Foxes, the ultra-sophisticated Nick and Nora Charles of the vulpine world, this adaptation of the Roald Dahl tale does more than occupy its own particular space between the worlds of childhood and adults.

For "2012," concept artist Warren Flanagan created images of a tidal wave engulfing the Himalayas and a chasm in the Earth swallowing up Los Angeles. But early in his career, Flanagan exerted his destructive influence on a much smaller scale as a barman at Ireland's Ardmore Studios. "I was up there for the wrap parties for 'Braveheart' and 'Far and Away,' and Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise would be walking into the bar, so it was pretty cool," he said. The barman, who attended the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design, soon landed a job in one of Ardmore's animation studios and moved on to several other Irish animation houses before relocating to Canada, where he worked as a storyboard artist on 2004's "I, Robot."

Walt Disney Co., the world's biggest producer of animated films, will release a 3-D version of "Toy Story 3" from its Pixar studio. The third installment will open in theaters in 2010, and 3-D versions of the prior two "Toy Story" films will begin playing next year, Burbank-based Disney said Thursday. "Toy Story 3" will be the first 3-D film from Pixar, which was purchased for $8.06 billion in 2006.