Animation

Walt Disney Co. started a new company with the producers of "Polar Express" to make animated films based in part on the movements of actors. Producer-director Robert Zemeckis, with Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey, will make films that Disney will market and distribute, the Burbank-based company said.

Tinker Bell finally has something to say. The famed fairy from "Peter Pan" will speak for the first time in "Tinker Bell," a computer-generated animated movie that Disney said Friday it planned to release on the home video market in the fall of 2008. Brittany Murphy will provide the voice. The movie is part of the rollout of the Disney Fairies franchise that already comprises books, toys and clothes.

Apryle Knobbe Digital artist at Sony Pictures Animation "I'm a senior technical director, but I am kind of specialized. I am a texture paint lead." Current credit: Sony's computer-generated animated film "Open Season," now out on DVD. "I was pretty much the digital paint supervisor because I covered not only texture painting but matte painting backgrounds. We're kind of a jack-of-all-trades."

It's back to the drawing board for Walt Disney Co. Disney plans to release a 2009 movie that will be animated the old-fashioned way, by hand-drawing the images rather than letting computer wizardry do the job, the company announced Tuesday at its annual shareholders' meeting in New Orleans.

In the new Disney animated film "Meet the Robinsons," which opens Friday, a boy genius orphan named Lewis travels to the not-so-distant future, where he encounters a warm, loving and totally eccentric family. Director Stephen J. Anderson admits one of the inspirations for the Robinson family was "You Can't Take It With You," the 71-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy play and subsequent 1938 Oscar-winning best-film adaptation directed by Frank Capra.

Wallace and Gromit have a new home in Hollywood. Aardman Features, the Oscar-winning British animation house, is poised to enter a three-year deal to produce animated movies financed and distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment, the companies said Monday. "It's pretty much a unique voice in the world of animation," said Michael Lynton, Sony Pictures chairman and chief executive. The announcement comes two months after DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.

Behind every "Lion King" or "Kim Possible," tens if not hundreds of animators go largely unrecognized by the public. Tonight, however, animation fans will have an opportunity to learn more about and meet many of the artists who help create their favorite movie and TV shows at the Van Eaton Galleries' Animation Book Look. A mini animation convention, the event brings together 19 artists and authors who will sign and talk about their latest animation-related books.

THE moviegoing public caught a bad case of chatty mammal fatigue last year when more than a dozen computer-animated films were released in succession. There were rats and penguins, bears and cows -- a veritable blur of fur and feathers. In fact, more four-legged stars and their winged friends crowded theaters in those 12 months than in the last four years combined.

In a dark room inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, Koji Kuramura is giving space exploration the showbiz treatment. The 41-year-old animator once guided the starship Enterprise when he helped craft "Star Trek" episodes. Now he's building a virtual launch pad for the Phoenix rocket that will blast off in August to survey Mars' polar ice caps. His work will be part of a five-minute computer-animated film that will simulate a front-row view.

BOTH dread and delight course through the anime films of Satoshi Kon, who is widely recognized as a master of the genre. The Japanese director ("Millennium Actress," "Tokyo Godfathers") explores the polarity further in his newest film, "Paprika," in which sleeping and waking, fantasy and nightmare collide. Adapted from a popular novel by sci-fi notable Yasutaka Tsutsui, Kon took the tale for his own.