The St. Albert Gazette recently interviewed a hometown Disney animator named Brian Ferguson. In part one he discusses his early career. In part two he talks about the transition between hand-drawn animation and computer generated from the perspective of an animator who has been with the Mouse House since the early 1990s.

NPR has a report on Pamela Thomas who for the past 12 years has been collecting black animation art. She later began sharing the collection online with her Museum of UnCut Funk. A traveling show titled “Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution Exhibition” begins touring next month. A sidebar to the article discusses animator Leo […]

DreamWorks’ new TV series Turbo FAST debuts today exclusively on Netflix. GigaOm looks into the making of the show. Forbes has an in-depth piece about the strategy DreamWorks is employing. And the New York Times has a review.

Deadline breaks down the Oscar race for Best Animated Feature. “This year, there are lots of indies entered, but expect the battle to continue among the titans, especially studios who are pouring money into campaigns for their box office behemoths. So when it comes to predicting a surefire winner, there just doesn’t seem to be […]

The Wrap reports that Disney’s Frozen will reach the Chinese box office in 2014. The Chinese government regulates foreign films, only letting about 34 approved movies in per year. Getting one of those slots in the world’s second-largest movie market is a high priority for Hollywood filmmakers.

Saving Mr. Banks opens wide today in 2,110 theaters according to Box Office Mojo. The film is doing well with the critics, earning an 80% at Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus review of the movie is: “Aggressively likable and sentimental to a fault, Saving Mr. Banks pays tribute to the Disney legacy with excellent performances […]

The soundtrack for Disney’s film Frozen has joined a rare club — it’s beome just the 10th soundtrack from an animated film to crack Billboard’s Top Ten list. The last film to accomplish the feat was Cars in 2006. Meanwhile, Idina Menzel’s version of Let It Go is climbing the singles chart. It’s upo to […]

The L.A. Times profiles Fred Seibert, who produced or gave a leg up to shows such as Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, The Fairly OddParents, and Adventure Time. His latest focus is online video where his company, Frederator Studios, runs Cartoon Hangover, one of the fastest-growing channels on YouTube. “The Internet is ushering […]

Two articles detailing Disney’s involvement in the film Saving Mr. Banks hit the web this week. The Hollywood Reporter looks at it from the point of view of the writers who worried the studio might kill the project or bury it so it couldn’t be made elsewhere. The Wrap has more from Disney’s perspective, who […]

Variety reports that Cartoon Network is bringing back the Powerpuff Girls for a special episode on January 20th. The episode will reunite the original voice cast and include special guest Ringo Starr. Titled Dance Pantsed, the special “follows Mojo Jojo as he kidnaps a mathematician, an opera singer and a badger to steal Chemical X […]

Seventy-five songs from 2013 films have been shortlisted for nominations in the Original Song category at the Oscars, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Those from animated movies are: Shine Your Way from The Croods Happy from Despicable Me 2 Gonna Be Alright from Epic Rise Up from Epic What Matters […]

With Iron Man 3’s billion dollar take leading the way, Disney has broken its company records for best domestic, international, and worldwide box office according to Variety. Along with Iron Man, Monsters University brought in over $700 million worldwide, the latest Thor sequel took in over $600 million, Oz almost reached $500 million, and Frozen […]

The Disney Animated app was named the iPad App of the Year by Apple in their Best of 2013 Editor’s Choice iTunes Rankings. “This enchanting tour of Disney’s legendary film vault awes with a bounty of animated sequences, interactive character models, and a spellbinding presentation”. Despicable Me 2 was chosen as the Best Animated Movie. […]

A new trailer for The Nut Job is online at iTunes. The story “follows the travails of Surly (voiced by Will Arnett), a mischievous squirrel, and his rat friend Buddy, who plan a nut store heist of outrageous proportions and unwittingly find themselves embroiled in a much more complicated and hilarious adventure”. It opens on […]

The Croods director Chris Sanders talks with Deadline about the film, including the film’s theme about family, the original plot, the difficulties in keeping up with star Nicolas Cage’s schedule, his CG learning curve, and much more. “For me, working on this film must be what it feels like to build either a 747 or […]

An L.A. Times interview brings together five of this year’s top animation directors — Frozen’s Jennifer Lee, Despicable Me 2’s Chris Renaud, The Croods’ Chris Sanders, Monsters University’s Dan Scanlon, and Epic’s Chris Wedge — to discuss topics such as “the challenges of female characters, the effect of celebrity voice actors, and the changing economics […]

Christopher Finch’s new book The CG Story: Computer Generated Animation and Special Effects, “which peels the curtain back on CG pioneers like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Pixar founders John Lasseter and Ed Catmull and their respective contributions to film”, gets an exclusive excerpt this week at Deadline. The extended sample details “the […]

NPR has more on the 90th anniversary of Disney Animation. In an audio interview with John Lasseter (with some printed excerpts as well) he discusses many topics including: the creation of Mickey Mouse, the impact of Snow White, his own first interaction with Disney as a teenager, leaving Disney for Pixar, the recent Disney revitalization, […]

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced this year’s nominees for the Golden Globe Awards. The nominees for Best Animated Feature are The Croods, Despicable Me 2, and Frozen. The Wind Rises got a nod in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Frozen was the only animated film to receive any other nominations. It was […]

With The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug now in theatres, Joe Letteri, the Oscar-winning co-creator of Gollum on screen, writes for the journal Nature about the evolution of computer animation. “Computer animation is a natural extension of hand-drawn methods developed during the early-twentieth-century golden age of ‘cel’ animation ushered in by Walt Disney, in which […]

Babble takes readers on a tour of the Walt Disney Studios Lot. “Jeffrey Epstein, spokesperson for D23, the official Disney Fan Club, showed us around the lot giving us the history and fun facts that you might not have known”.

Bleeding Cool sits down with Frozen producer Peter Del Vecho and discusses not only the role he played in this film, but how exactly the Disney system works from the inside — the typical day of a producer, ratings, scheduling, the Disney brand and legacy, and more.

The Boston Society of Film Critics named Hayao Miyazaki‘s The Wind Rises as Best Animated Feature — but not without controversy, according to IndieWire. Before the vote Village Voice critic Inkoo Kang read aloud a statement calling out the film for being “morally egregious” in ignoring the atrocities committed during the war by the Japanese […]

The Hollywood Reporter looks at the “Tricky Tug-of-War” John Lasseter is in the middle of in running both Disney Animation and Pixar. “Borrowing a page from Pixar, Lasseter is hands-on at WDAS. He gives extensive notes, pores over story reels and even does the first reading with actors and directors. Initially, Pixar animators worried that […]