Saturday, April 16, 2011

Your Weekend Linkorama (April edition)

Once again, we catch you up on some of the animation tidbits floating across the Web.

Comic Book Resources asks:

Will Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns return in a new DC animated feature? ...

The answer is known to Bruce Timm and a chosen few ...

The Anime News Network shares a religious animated short in which Disney director Barry Cook at a hand:

... Japan's Studio 4°C (Genius Party, Tekkonkinkreet, segments of The Animatrix) animated a nine-minute adaptation of Jesus, the 1979 live-action film version of Jesus Christ's story ... [Mr.] Cook wrote the short's screenplay for CCC's Jesus Film Project ministry. ...

Bleeding Cool reviews and reports on a new movie release in Great Britain:

With considerably less fanfare than greeted The Princess and the Frog, Disney are today releasing another, hand-drawn animation. Indeed, as Winnie The Pooh rolls out in British cinemas, it’s the second feature length Disney toon of 2011 to screen in the UK, where Tangled was released just this January.

What have we Brits done to deserve this? Surely it’s not just that Pooh is “ours”, based as it is on classic English nursery books by AA Milne and EH Shepherd? (I’m suddenly feeling the closest to patriotic that I have in some time.) ...

The Los Angeles Times notes the 100th anniversary of Winsor McCay's plunge into animation. (Anybody know where Winsor is working now?)

This month marks the 100th anniversary of Winsor McCay’s short film “Little Nemo.” It was not the first drawn animated film — J. Stuart Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” preceded it by five years — but it was the film that demonstrated the potential of animation as art form. ...

The Globe highlights cartoons from foreign lands.

“Nine Nation Animation," is the exception that proves the rule: a traveling road-show of (duh) nine shorts from nine countries that gets points for both style and content. Curated and distributed by the World According to Shorts, an initiative of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the program concentrates primarily on Europe with one side trip to South Africa. ...

Brad Bird speaks ... about the Incredibles, Mission Impossible, and other things.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Looking back, what are you most proud of accomplishing with The Incredibles?

BRAD BIRD: I think we changed a little bit what people thought these [animated] films should be about. There are a number of things that were considered against the grain at the time. First of all, the last time anybody spent money on an animated superhero [movie] was the very first superhero movie — the animated Superman [shorts] done by the Fleischers [Fleischer Studios released 17 shorts from 1941-43]. Every bit of animation on superheroes done since then has been on television kind of budgets, and nobody had really thought about doing a feature animated film about superheroes, so that was thing No. 1. ...

Lastly and bestly: The generosity of the animation community is a good thing:

Save the Children today announced that it has received $400,000 from employees of DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (Nasdaq: DWA) to provide relief to children and families affected by the disaster in Japan and earthquake in New Zealand.

"The generosity of the Dream Works Animation employees is much appreciated," said Charles MacCormack, the President and CEO of Save the Children. "This money is going to help thousands of Japanese children return to school and their families rebuild their lives in the months and years to come." ...

Have a zestful yet restful weekend.

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