Animation

What's your favorite animated movie? Chances are, the team behind it was influenced by stop-motion and visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, with maybe a dash of Looney Tunes titan Chuck Jones thrown in. And now you can see why. Two exhibitions curated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — "The Fantastical Worlds of Ray Harryhausen" and "Chuck Jones: An Animator's Life From A to Z-Z-Z-Z" — will display sketches, animation...

Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck get back to work next year when the boss opens a second animation studio in Florida. As part of the Disney Studios' "animation renaissance," a crew of about 70 directors, designers, animators, assistants, background painters and ink-and-paint artists will produce 22-minute featurettes starring the familiar Disney characters. And getting the star treatment themselves will be the creators of Mickey and Donald.

Once upon a time, cartoons were a popular, if minor, art form. At movie houses you could always see, in addition to the main feature, that "wasscawy wabbit," Bugs Bunny, run rabbit circles around poor befuddled Elmer Fudd. Or watch as sweet Tweetie Pie naively sent Sylvester the Cat on one more headlong plunge down the stairs just for his efforts to have a yellow bird for lunch. Cartoons--or animation, as it is called now--are rarely seen in commercial theaters these days.

Animated features have long been the favored medium for telling kid-friendly stories about princesses and cuddly creatures. But if New York-based animator Bill Plympton were to have his way, moviegoers would also see more hand-drawn offerings depicting hard drinking, fooling around, murder and deception. "As a kid, I loved kids animation, but now I'm an adult," Plympton, 64, said by phone. "Idiots and Angels," Plympton's fifth independent animated feature, follows a bitter, lonely man named Angel who discovers he is growing wings.

ECommercial.com Inc., a streaming-media start-up based in Aliso Viejo, signed a strategic partnership late last week with a New York firm to launch an online animation series for children. Financial details of the deal with Eurpsville USA Inc., which creates children's storybooks, were not disclosed.

Ten animated movies have been accepted to compete for the Oscar in the best animated feature film category, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Thursday. The selected films are "Chicken Little," "Gulliver's Travels," "Hoodwinked," "Howl's Moving Castle," "Madagascar," "Robots," "Steamboy," "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," "Valiant" and "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." The three finalists will be announced with other Academy Award nominees Jan. 31.

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's ... the superhero monkey god? While Bollywood stars often achieve a mythical status in film-crazy India, Hanuman, the star of India's first animation feature film, is a genuine deity drawn from the Hindu pantheon. Over the years, India's burgeoning animation and special effects industry has cut its teeth working for foreign production houses -- drawn to South Asia by lower costs -- but "Hanuman" is the industry's first full-length, homegrown animation feature.

The nighttime Emmy Awards are a month away, but it's never too early for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to begin handing them out. The organization announced three Monday in animation. Hank Azaria was awarded an Emmy for outstanding voice-over performance, winning for an episode of Fox's "The Simpsons" called "Moe Baby Blues," in which he played several characters.

In "Drawing on Creativity" [April 2], new Film Roman CEO David Pritchard is quoted as stating: "Disney and Warner Bros. put so many people under contract I can't compete for talent." Actually, the reason Film Roman finds it tough competing for top talent is that it's a nonunion studio, which means it cuts itself off from veteran union animation talent (such as the employees of Disney and Warners) who have an understandable reluctance to walk away from high-quality health and retirement benefits to work under the skim-milk working conditions and health and pension package offered by Mr. Pritchard's studio.

When did it become so all-fire important that big-name movie stars provide the voices for animated features? Trailers for the upcoming "Open Season," the story of a domesticated bear that suddenly finds himself living in the wild, proudly proclaim that it stars Martin Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher, Debra Messing and Gary Sinise. But does it really?