When I watched this show being created years ago, the crew was really, REALLY into it. And its continuing popularity on Netflix today makes it "red hot" a decade after its production.
For months, “Avatar” has consistently appeared in Netflix’s top 10 most-watched shows, the company says. Forums dedicated to the show have been active since its initial run, and since the spring, fans new and old have taken to TikTok, Reddit and Twitter to discuss their favorite characters and moments. But its immense popularity isn’t just the result of a wave of nostalgia. Fans say its reflection in current events has been a grounding force in a tumultuous time. ...
“In some ways, I’m surprised by how relevant the show still is to people, but in other ways, not at all,” one of the creators, Michael Dante DiMartino, writes in an email. “The major issues in the stories — genocide, totalitarianism, systemic injustice, abuse — sadly, these have been pervasive issues throughout history and continue to be. The show is a reflection of our world. But now, we happen to be living through a time in which all these problems have been exacerbated.”
Another good example of older animation that still draws lots and lots of eyeballs.
Note: What follows is about a live-action flick...
Always useful to open your movie with a bang...
On this day 8 decades back, The Sea Hawk is released.
A blockbuster silent film called The Sea Hawk was produced in 1924, starring the long-forgotten Milton Sills. The flick was based on a Rafael Sabatini novel of the same name and Warners scooped up the rights. Writer (later director) Delmer Daves was put to work writing a new adaptation for Errol Flynn.
But then along came writer Seton (The Adventures of Robin Hood) Miller with an original script called Beggars of the Sea, and Warner production head Hal Wallis thought "Ah HA!" The studio bought Miller's screenplay, and, as often happens in Hollywoodland, Wallis directed staff writer Howard Koch (later to win the "Best Screenplay" Oscar for "Casablanca") to rewrite the epic. Koch turned the story into an allegory for the war in Europe: King Philip's Spain standing in for Hitler's Germany and Elizabeth's England repping Britain under Churchill. (Not for nothing was this film one of Winston's favorite flicks.)
A huge new soundstage -- complete with water tanks -- was constructed to house the sea battle that opens the film, and production commenced on January 31, 1940. The film had the usual problems with its star: Flynn came in late, Flynn left early, Flynn didn't know his lines. Director Michael Curtiz tore out his hair and Hal Wallis fired off brusque memos: "Why don't you do something about this? ... Why don't you at least let me in on it so that I can? ..." (etc.) And there were other complications. When they were shooting the film's climax, it became obvious that the villain, played by Henry Danielle, could fence. The movie’s unit manager detailed the problems in a February 19, 1940 production memo:
To: T.C. Wright
From: Frank Mattinson
Subject: The Sea Hawk
Saturday … the company … made 16 set-ups … of the duel. … This duel has turned into a matter of a walk. Mr. [Henry] Daniell is absolutely helpless and his closeup in the duel will be mostly from the elbows up.
Mr. Curtiz was greatly discouraged with his results on Saturday, as well as Friday, but there is nothing we can do as it will be impossible to go back and change to someone else in this part. …
The Casting Office and everyone connected with the picture were duly warned of Mr. Daniell’s inability to fence long before the picture started, and we knew of him being taken out of a part in Romeo and Juliet [1936] because he could not handle a sword. Nevertheless he is playing the part and it is going to take two more full days to finish the duel at the rate we worked on it Saturday and last Thursday.
Frank Mattinson
After navigating the duel problem in February, the stupendous sea battle was shot in March, and production finally wrapped in April. TSH went on to become one of Warners' top grossers of the year (which maybe explains why Errol Flynn could come in late and go home early?) Released again in 1947, it was a big earner once more.
As the coronavirus romps along, we'll see more and more movies moved to streaming platforms. Movie theaters? Not a lot of people rushing down to their local AMC, and who's going to be in the multiplex?
Paramount is taking The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run off the theatrical calendar and sending it straight into homes for an early 2021 release. We heard sources talking about this earlier today. Sponge on the Run will go on PVOD before it hits CBS All Access.
The movie was originally scheduled to play over Memorial Day weekend before COVID-19, but was rescheduled for Aug. 7.
Better pay per view than no views at all. No doubt Paramount is kicking itself that it didn't get this movie ... which has been in work for years, done way earlier ...
The overarching reality for cartoons in the 21st Century (for both large screen and small screen, kid animation and adult animation)? It's roaring along like a high-powered locomotive.
And multiple Los Angeles studios are producing large amounts of work, much of it Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD), from Disney+ to Netflix to HBO Max, Hulu and others. Plus there are still ongoing productions for Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, Fox Primetime, etc. (The other "distribution platforms"). This holds true for Cartoon Network, Disney Television Animation and multiple others. Also, too: the Animation Guild continues to expand, rising to 5300+ members, while its members continue to be employed through the pandemic. (While the animation studios in Los Angeles stand empty during the pandemic, animation work goes on in bedrooms and offices, on dining room tables and converted playrooms. This makes L.A.'s animation union one of the few entertainment guilds that is currently functioning.)
Bento Box
Purchased by the new Fox Corporation (the company not owned by Disney) in August, 2019, Bento Box performs pre-production on a variety of shows. BB was founded in 2009 by Scott Greenberg (CEO) and Joel Kuwahara (president of production), both of whom will keep leading the company as it becomes a stand-alone division of Fox Entertainment.
The Great North -- ongoing (newer show)
Duncanville -- ongoing (newer show)
Bob's Burgers -- ongoing
Cartoon Network --
Cartoon Network anticipates placing three new shows in work in 2020 (projects to be decided.)
The studio produces content for a variety of distribution platforms, but it's been creating more content for HBO Max. Most series are now created as 11-minute episodes.
Adventure Time -- spin-off specials now in work.
Apple & Onion -- season #2 in work.
Ben 10 -- completed; Kevin 11 spin-off awaiting possible pick up.
Close Enough -- ending Season #2, awaiting possible pickup for #3.
Craig of the Creek -- more than 100 11-minute episodes completed and could be near the end of its run. (No final decisions about end.)
Fungies -- Season #2.
Infinity Train -- HBO Max -- 10 11-minute serialized episodes. There is talk of doing a long-form special.
Steven Universe Future -- series completed. New episodes still airing.
Summer Camp Island -- in production season #3
J. J. Vallard's Fairy Tales -- 10 limited animation episodes.
Summer Camp Island -- Season #2
Tig 'n Seek -- in production season #2
Victor and Valentino -- ongoing
We Bare Bears long-form special near completion.
Wee Baby Bears -- season #1.
Update: Cartoon Network is in negotiations with Titmouse Studios to do more episodes of Mao Mao: Heroes Of Pure Heart.
Disney Television Animation --
Located in Glendale and Burbank, California, the Disney TVA was founded in 1984 (at the dawn of the Michael Eisner-Jeffrey Katzenberg era); DTVA currently has three locations in two Southern California cities. A few years ago, decisions were made to cap the number of Disney small-screen shows done in-house, and several series are now done by sub-contractors (see below).
Elena of Avalor -- from 2016 -- ongoing
Duck Tales -- reboot from 2017 -- ongoing
Big Hero 6: the Series -- from 2017 -- ongoing
Big City Greens -- from 2018 -- ongoing
Fancy Nancy -- from 2018 -- ongoing
Muppet Babies -- reboot from 2018 -- ongoing
Amphibia -- from 2019 -- ongoing
Marvel's Moongirl and Devil Dinosaur -- from 2020 -- ongoing (Marvel/Disney, subcontracted to Titmouse Animation.
The Curse of Molly McGee -- from 2019-2020 -- ongoing for Disney Channel
Monsters at Work -- from 2020 (with Pixar) -- ongoing
The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder -- #3 -- the relaunch was announced on February 27th, with creator Bruce Smith and writer Calvin Brown Jr. returning.
Disney TVA's Los Angeles Subcontractors
Rough Draft Animation Studios
RDS, Inc. was founded in Van Nuys, California in 1991. Currently it has studios in South Korea where it functions as a major overseas production facility, and a second studio on the Glendale-Burbank city line. (For many years its L.A.-area studio was located on Brand Boulevard in Glendale.)
Big City Greens -- from 2018 -- ongoing with Disney TV Animation
The Owl House -- from 2020 -- ongoing with Disney TV Animation
Wild Canary Animation --
Started in 2008, Wild Canary Animation is located on Riverside Drive on the Burbank side of Toluca Lake. It's a long-time subcontractor for Disney Television Animation, previously producing Sheriff Callie's Wild West, Miles From Tomorrowland, and Puppy Dog Pals for the Mouse House.
Mira, Royal Detective -- from 2020 -- ongoing with Disney Jr.
The Chicken Squad -- from 2020 -- ongoing with Disney Jr.
The Rocketeer -- from 2019 -- ongoing with Disney Jr.)
Fox Television Animation
Fox Television Animation -- now owned by Disney (in't most everything?) -- has two facilities: one in Burbank, California; one in Los Angeles, California.
The Simpsons -- thirty-second season (Burbank studio)
Family Guy -- eighteenth season currently airing -- season 19 to be announced (Los Angeles Studio)
American Dad -- renewed for 18th and 19th seasons (Los Angeles Studio)
Marvel Animation
Also Disney owned, the present iteration of Marvel Animation Studios is in Glendale on Flower Street, across the street from Disney's tech campus. (Different versions of "Marvel Animation" have existed since the 1990s; before that, Marvel licensed characters to various animation studios.) The reorganization of Marvel Television and Marvel Animation under the purview of Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios has been ongoing during the last couple of months, with longtime Marvel Animation executive Cort Lane exiting his position as Marvel's Vice President of Animation and Family Entertainment last January. Middle management at the Glendale studio remains (mostly) the same.
Spidey and his Amazing Friends -- 3-D show for Disney Jr., in work with a small crew
DreamWorks Animation [features]
DreamWorks Animation's feature division is located on a custom-built campus in Glendale that is leased, not owned. (The campus was sold before the company's sale to Universal-Comcast, then leased back under a twenty-year agreement.)
The Croods 2 -- ongoing
Boss Baby 2 -- ongoing
Spirit Riding Free -- ongoing (based on the tv series based on the original hand-drawn feature. Are we keeping this straight?)
The Bad Guys -- ongoing
Also various other projects in development.
DreamWorks Animation TV
DreamWorks Animation Television came into existence in 2013 when DWA cut a deal with Netflix to produce 300 hours of animation for the streaming service. The division has been going strong ever since. The division was a good part of why Universal-Comcast was interested in buying the company a couple of years later, and it's been going strong ever since.
Formerly Illumination Entertainment, and owned by UniversalComcast, the animation powerhouse has been creating high-brossing animated features made on a tight budget ($65-$80 million, since Despicable Me came into existence in 2010. Its principle production studio is Illumination MacGuff in Paris, France.
Minions: the Rise of Gru -- ongoing
Despicable Me 4 -- ongoing
Sing 2 -- ongoing
Mario feature -- ongoing
Netflix Animation
Netflix has increased its animation profile in stages. First it contracted with Dreamworks Animation to create multiple new animated series for its streaming platform. (This pretty much pulled DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg's fat out of the fire and made DreamWorks Animation attractive to NBC-Universal-Comcast, which now owns it.) It has now made deal with a number of animation studio, including Titmouse in L.A. and Studio Ghibli in Tokyo to create new animated product. It's also set up its own cartoon studio in Hollywood, which is making a plethora of animated cartoons.
Over the Moon -- post production -- director, Glen Keane (Netflix/Pearl Studios)
Love, Death and Robots -- two seasons (Netflix/Blur Studios)
The Cuphead Show -- new show ongoing
Nickelodeon Animation Studios
Nick Animation began life in rented space in Studio City, way back in the early '90s. It's been headquartered in Burbank, California on Olive Avenue for decades now, and houses much of its staff in a refurbished one-story facility and glass-sheathed skyscraper that surround rectangle of open space that used to hold a miniature golf course (but that was years ago).
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- ongoing (two seasons to date)
Pinky Malinky -- wrapped (or close to ...) -- 60 episodes on Netflix
The Casagrandes -- ongoing -- second season
Glitch Tech -- finishing up (with hiccups) -- streaming Netflix
Kamp Koral -- ongoing Sponge Bob prequel
Adventures in Wonder Park -- ongoing -- Spinoff from the Paramount animated feature; season one premieres in June
Man of the House -- Norman Lear project announced in '18. Informants say it's ongoing, but?? ...
Middle School Moguls -- ongoing -- Season one wrapped
Big Nate -- ongoing (26 episodes)
Untitled CG Star Trekseries -- in continuing development.
Star Trek: Lower Decks -- Seasons 1 & 2 -- Nick and CBS Eye Animation -- The adventures of junior Starfleet officers on the starship USS Cerritos.
Blue's Clues and You! -- ongoing -- Nickelodeon is adding "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "Blue’s Clues & You!: Bedtime Stories" to its growing podcast playlist.
The trades have released a long roster of shows that have been cancelled and renewed on various networks and streaming sites; you will find various animated shows on it.
(Note: The list above should be for Nick shows with pre-production in Burbank, so product created elsewhere ("Butterbean's Cafe, etc.) should be found there. No doubt I've made mistakes along the way. As with the other lists, corrected as we go along.
Crossing Swords -- ongoing (for Sony Pictures Television/Hulu)
Micro Mayhem -- ongoing (for Quibi)
Gloop World -- ongoing
Filthy Animals -- ongoing
Timouse, Inc., was started in New York in 2000. It now has studios in Los Angeles, Vancouver and on the east coast, and sub-contracts work from a variety of companies and conglomerates. It signed a deal with Netflix to create new shows in January.
Titmouse Animation
Big Mouth -- (new show for Netflix) ongoing
The Midnight Gospel (new show for Netflix) ongoing
Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina -- ongoing, though delayed by the pandemic
Warner Bros. has been in the cartoon business for ninety freaking years, and today has two animation subsidiaries. The older one is Warner Bros. Animation, which concentrates on home-screen product (broadcast, cable, streaming, etc.). The new one is Warner Animation Group, which focuses on theatrical releases, though the movies-in-theaters thing is temporarily suspended, since most of the world is "sheltering in place".
Nevertheless, here's a summary of what Warners two studios currently produce. Expect changes as I gather more info. (Cartoon Network Studios, part of the same conglomerate, has these things in work.)
WARNER ANIMATION GROUP
WAG -- Warners-A.T.&T.'s newer feature division, has facilities in Hollywood and Burbank, CA. Most of its employees work on the Warner lot.
Scoob! -- in development -- no announced release date
Tom and Jerry -- in production -- Christmas release (we'll see if that changes, eh?)
Space Jam 2 -- in work -- summer '21 release
Lego Batman 2 -- ongoing development -- no release date; both summer 2021 and 2022 releases have been mentioned, but there is nothing official.
DC Super Pets -- in development -- Spring '22
WARNER BROS. ANIMATION
Multiple production facilities in Burbank, CA. (Warner Ranch, former NBC studios, etc.)
Animaniacs -- ongoing -- artists, as on other Warner series, working from home during the pandemic.
Unikitty! -- ongoing -- currently in Season #3
Teen Titans Go! -- ongoing -- Season 6
D.C. Super Hero Girls -- ongoing -- newer episodes now unspooling on Cartoon Network.
Scooby Doo and Guess Who? -- ongoing -- An official release date for Season 2 hasn't been confirmed; it likely air later this year. Warner Bros. is also releasing their animated movie SCOOB! in a few months, backgrounding how Scooby and Shaggy met and the beginnings of Mystery, Inc.
Little Ellen -- ongoing
Jellystone! -- ongoing -- Season 1
Looney Tunes Cartoons -- ongoing
Green Eggs and Ham -- ongoing -- Season 2
Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz -- three seasons (60 episodes plus special)
The IATSE, the mother international of the Animation Guild, has many of the entertainment unions under its wide umbrella performing little or no work because COVID-19 has shut down sets, shut down one hell of a lot of live-action movie production. But there is an area of movie work that goes right on thriving ....
IATSE Local 839, also known as the Animation Guild, represents more than 5,800 animation artists, writers, character designers, art directors, storyboard artists, visual effects supervisors and other technicians. Guild business representative Steve Kaplan says that animation has not suffered the same levels of employment losses that have hit live-action production over the past few months.
“It’s very possible that we’re one of a handful of IATSE locals that have members working, and we’re probably the only one whose entire membership has not, by my view, been affected by the pandemic,” says Kaplan. “This is because the industry itself realized that it’s not necessary to be in the studio — it’s not necessary to be next to each other — and animation production can continue under these adverse conditions for people working from home.”
The Animation Guild’s membership grew by a little less than 100 members in the first quarter of the year, and new members are being added every week. Studios continue to post job listings, and the guild has signed new productions to agreements. Local 839’s office manager is “furiously setting up members,” says Kaplan — notably, those who are new to the guild as well as those who have found work and are reactivating their membership. ...
The growth of new animation styles and adult animation projects over the past five years has meant “big strides” for the industry, says Fletcher Moules, the supervising director on Sony Pictures Animation and Netflix’s “Agent King.” Along those lines, several animation artists who spoke to Variety highlighted the relatively robust video-game job market, which relies on animation, and an uptick in interest in animated commercials during the shutdown. ...
So on top of being cost-efficient, in addition to drawing lots of audience eyeballs, it turns out animation can continue right on during pandemic lockdowns. And The Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE, is larger than its ever been in its sixty-eight year existence.
A second season for the Adult Swim show has been greenlit:
...Adult Swim has ordered 10 episodes of the adult series [Tuca & Bertie] that revolves around two birds who are best friends and live in the same apartment building. The sophomore season is targeted to premiere next year. ...
Netflix’s decision to drop the series was a surprise last summer. The first season of Tuca & Bertie will remain on Netflix. Adult Swim has domestic rights to the second season. ...
Animation, of course, continues to be a hot commodity, especially with the pandemic shuttering live action production. Even live action shows have turned to animation to fill the gap:
[The Blacklist] showrunners John Eisendrath and Jon Bokenkamp decided that if they couldn’t make it to the season-ending Episode 22, the narrative in Episode 19, which they had already begun shooting, would work as the Season 7 finale. But they had only shot half of its scenes, and out of order. ...
“The show is sort of a graphic novel to begin with,” Eisendrath said. “It has a larger-than-life antihero and Gotham-style side villains. Why not try to animate it?
[But we found that animation] has been far more work than most of our episodes. I’m surprised at how intricate it is. Not that it’s not a reason to do it in the future, but it has been a totally different process, in terms of time and the way we use resources. ... We didn’t have a narrative reason to make [the episode] half-animated, and so we decided not to pretend that we did. And two, we took liberties that we would not have been able to do in live action. It turned out, fortuitously, that the large action sequences had yet to be filmed, and we were able to make those considerably larger." ...
As I write, L.A. animation continues to buzz along at full tilt. More and more, cable networks and streaming companies see that the costs-benefits of animation remain high, so why decelerate, particularly when productions in Los Angeles can continue from remote locations. And artists? They work at home in their robes and slippers, and learn to adapt.
Nick Animation began life in rented space in Studio City, way back in the early '90s. It's been headquartered in Burbank, California on Olive Avenue for decades now, and houses much of its staff in a refurbished one-story facility and glass-sheathed skyscraper that surround rectangle of open space that used to hold a miniature golf course (but that was years ago).
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- ongoing (two seasons to date)
Pinky Malinky -- wrapped (or close to ...) -- 60 episodes on Netflix
Man of the House -- Norman Lear project announced in '18. Informants say it's ongoing, but?? ...
Middle School Moguls -- ongoing -- Season one wrapped
Big Nate -- ongoing (26 episodes)
Untitled CG Star Trekseries -- in continuing development.
Star Trek: Lower Decks -- Seasons 1 & 2 -- Nick and CBS Eye Animation -- The adventures of junior Starfleet officers on the starship USS Cerritos.
Blue's Clues and You! -- ongoing -- Nickelodeon is adding "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "Blue’s Clues & You!: Bedtime Stories" to its growing podcast playlist.
My usual spies and stoolies, currently hamstrung by the ongoing COVID lockdown, have done the best they cAN. But since everyone works at home, this list is what it is.
The trades have released a long roster of shows that have been cancelled and renewed on various networks and streaming sites; you will find various animated shows on it.
(Note: The list above should be for Nick shows with pre-production in Burbank, so product created elsewhere ("Butterbean's Cafe, etc.) should be found there. No doubt I've made mistakes along the way. As with the other lists, corrected as we go along.
Popeye, the Feature was always a passion project for Genndy Tartakovsky: he wanted badly to do it, and Sony Pictures Animation was all in to have Genndy do it ... until SPA wasn't. But now it seems, Popeye might end up on the big screenanyway:
... Genndy Tartakovsky is teaming up with King Features to go back to the drawing board on his long-awaited Popeye animated feature, close sources have revealed to Animation Magazine. The Annie and Emmy award-winning, Golden Globe-nominated animation visionary directed Sony Pictures Animation’s hit Hotel Transylvania trilogy and created celebrated series Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack (both Cartoon Network), Primal (Adult Swim) and, in collaboration with Lucasfilm, Star Wars: Clone Wars (CN). ...
“I just wanted him to be Popeye," [Tartakosky said]. "It’s a very deep, dark, and long story, but it was obvious they didn’t want it and it was obvious they didn’t have a lot of respect for me and I was handling their number one franchise [Hotel Transylvania],” Tartakovsky told Newsarama in 2017. “It wasn’t going to work because they didn’t really believe in it. It was a tough loss for me. We had a proof of concept, we had an amazing story reel all done that everybody loved. The whole studio was excited and the marketing was gearing up, but then the [North Korea-Sony] hack happened” ...
Yet now, perhaps, that loss can be turned around with rights-holder King Features and made into box office gold.
The last feature the Fleischer Studio completed at their Miami studio ... where the Fleischers moved after their New York studio was unionized.
Professor (and animation veteran) Tom Sito writes:
May 6th, 1937- THE FLEISCHER STRIKE - Cartoonists vote to strike Max Fleischers Studio after Max fires 13 animators for union activity and complaining about their 6 day work week.
The strike was settled several weeks later when parent company Paramount forced Max to concede. Strikers sang "We're Popeye the Union Man! We're Popeye the Union Man! We'll Fight to the Finish, Cause We Can't Live on Spinach! We're Popeye...etc."
The Strike began with fistfights on Broadway in front of the studio, but it didn't get that much press because of the Hindenberg Disaster happening at the same time.
Animation Checker Ellen Jensen told me she was arrested for biting a cop. " One officer pinned my arms back, and another knocked my hat off when he hit me with his billy club, so I sank my teeth into his arm."
Ultimately, the cartoonists secured a contract with the Fleischer brothers, but it was a short-lived victory. The Fleischers relocated to Miami, Florida and set up a non-union studio. There they produced the features Gulliver's Travels, Mr. Bug Goes to Town and a sloew of iconic Superman shorts before being shut down by their owner Paramount Pictures and shoved into retirement.
The Fleischers deserved better. One of the ironies of the failure of their Miami studio was, when they moved South, they had to offer artists larger salaries to lure them to the smallish city on the Florida coast.
Disney survived World War II, aided by government contracts for hundreds of training films. A decade later, Max Fleischer's son Richard directed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, one of Walt Disney Production's biggest live-action hits. Unfortunately for the Fleischer brothers themselves there were no third acts. The flight from the union that struck the Fleischers' Manhattan studio on a May morning in 1937 turned out to be a bad move, and the cartoon studio that had started during the teenaged years of the 20th century ceased to exist.
"Sleeping Beauty" (1959) Disney's last hand-inked animated feature. From its release until the introduction of digital ink and paint, Xerography prevailed in House of Mouse long-form cartoons.
There were two dark periods of job losses for employees of Disney Feature Animation.
The first was in the time of the founder, Walt Disney; the second happened at the tail end of "The Second Golden Age" of Disney hand-drawn animation, when Michael Eisner wielded the scepter inside the kingdom.
Regarding the first: The 1950s was a time of expansion for Walt Disney Productions. After a tenuous corporate existence in the 1940s, the company successfully expanded into live-action production (Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, etc.), television (Disneyland, The Mickey Mouse Club, Zorro) and a cutting-edge amusement park, but its core competency -- animation -- was getting cut back. Shorts were phased out in the second half of the fifties due to rising costs, and Sleeping Beauty, Walt Disney Production's wide-screen animated epic from 1959, was so expensive that it failed to turn a profit.
Disney veteran Dave Michener, an assistant animator at the time, told me:
I remember seeing Walt down in front of the animation building just shaking his head, saying "What happened?"
Shortly after, the department had 2/3 of its staff cut, going from over 500 artists to 160. The feature immediately after Beauty was 101 Dalmations, and cost a fraction of what the wide-screen fairy tale was produced for. (Walt Disney hated the look of Xerox and much preferred hand-inked cartoons, but he knew he had to reduce the budgets of his animated features, and so swallowed his dislike.)
What happened to the artists who were let go? For many, fast-growing Hanna-Barbera was their next destination. Don Lusk, a Disney employee for almost thirty years, move to H-B and directed TV cartoons for the next quarter century. Iwao Takamoto, longtime assistant to Milt Kahl, departed Disney to become a top Hanna-Barbera character designer.
A smaller animation crew, turning out a cartoon feature every 3-4 years, was the norm for Walt Disney Productions over the next quarter century, at which point Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg stepped into the Disney wheelhouse and the pace of production quickened. By the 1990s, staff had grown to over a thousand people and the company was turning out a full-length feature every year.
This happy reality lasted a decade. For a time, each new feature made more money than the one before. But by the time Pocahontas was released in 1995, the trajectory was down instead of up. Audiences fell in love with Pixar's CGI animated features; the grosses of hand-drawn product continued to fall.
Comedic cows starred in the last animated feature from Disney Features "Second Golden Age" ...
The second Disney Animation blood-letting: As a new century loomed up, the red ink inside Disney Feature Animation was sloshing higher .. and alarms sounded inside executive suites. A lot of Disney animation artists, many employed at Disney Feature Animation for decades, were laid off in waves between 2001 and 2003, when Home On The Range completed production.
It was an era similar to the late '50s, but it went on longer. Disney employees had suspected change was coming, but management assured people: “Oh, we’re going to keep making hand-drawn features”, even as the company cut wages. People could see that CGI features like Shrek and Monsters, Inc. were killing at the box office, while Atlantis and Treasure Planet were not. Yet artists were hopeful, based on what they were being told.
But then significant pruning of animation staff commenced, and the company line became “Oh, we’ll be making fewer hand-drawn features, but we’ll still be making them.” Animation President Tom Schumacher held meetings with staff offering reassurances to survivors of the initial rounds of layoffs.
And the company’s tune changed yet again. The Higher Ups decided that Home on the Range would be the last hand-drawn feature out of the Burbank studio and the refrain of “We’ll still be making them” changed to “We’re done, thank you for services rendered, drive safely.” (Two more hand-drawn features would ultimately done after HotR during the Lasseter-Catmull era: The Princess and the Frog and Winnie-the-Pooh. Neither performed as well as CGI features at the box office and it doesn't look as though more hand-drawn features will go into production anytime soon.)
As in 1958-59, there was an abundance of pink slips, but not everybody was let go. Some animators on traditional features retrained to be CG animators. But many wanted to keep drawing, not become “digital puppeteers”, so a number of employees shifted to design work or storyboarding, some in the feature division but many in television animation studios around town.
The early oughts marked the most recent “animation recession” in Los Angeles-based cartoon studios. Today, animation employment is near all-time highs. Even though live-action movie employment is on hold because of the pandemic, much of the animation industry continues to work at home.
Netflix might have lost Disney animated properties, and Warner stuff might be migrating to AT&T/Warner streaming services, but the world's biggest streamer is still bound and determined to be a Player in animation:
Netflix will cede no ground to Disney+ or other animation streamers without a fight. But it's not just Pokemon:
... Netflix announced that they are getting access to all seasons of one of the best television series of all time this coming May, Avatar: The Last Airbender.
All three seasons of the show will arrive in the US on Netflix on May 15, which is 61 episodes in total.
Forbes is being a little breathless here, I think. "The best television series of all time"? I don't recall anybody working on it all those years ago when I was wandering around Nick on a weekly basis rushing up to me and gushing: "We're working on the best television series of all time!" (I mean, the crew liked it, thought it was good, but nobody went into screaming fits about it.)
Be that as it may, Netflix is making a hard run at the House of Mouse and others in the battle to be an animation standard-bearer. It's also got its own development slate of animation, produced in their Hollywood studio, and it's been aggressive in long-form animation as well, underwriting Klaus and the oncoming Glen Keane project.
Which, of course, bodes well for long-term animation employment in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
So it turns out that this virus thing bites deep, as more and more animated features shift to online rollouts, rather than in multiplexes...
Warner Bros. has decided to send its animated film Scoob! straight to premium on-demand, versus waiting for theaters to reopen en masse once the coronavirus pandemic begins to subside.
The studio on Tuesday announced that the Scooby Doo movie will become available both to rent and to buy in the home on May 15. ... Both Warner Bros. and Universal — similar to the other major Hollywood studios — have delayed the vast majority of their movies in order to give them a proper theatrical release. ...
Not ideal, of course, but how long does an entertainment conglomerate want to sit on product? (Six months? A year??) Multiplexes probably won't be open for months. And even when they do take down the yellow tape and start selling tickets, how many people are going to show up??
Warner Bros. has been in the cartoon business for ninety freaking years, and today has two animation subsidiaries. The older one is Warner Bros. Animation, which concentrates on home-screen product (broadcast, cable, streaming, etc.). The new one is Warner Animation Group, which focuses on theatrical releases, though the movies-in-theaters thing is temporarily suspended, since most of the world is "sheltering in place".
Nevertheless, here's a summary of what Warners two studios currently produce. Expect changes as I gather more info. (Cartoon Network Studios, part of the same conglomerate has these things in work.)
WARNER ANIMATION GROUP
It has facilities in Hollywood and Burbank, CA. Most of its employees work on the Warner lot.
Scoob! -- in development -- no announced release date
Tom and Jerry -- in production -- Christmas release (we'll see if that changes, eh?)
Space Jam 2 -- in work -- summer '21 release
Lego Batman 2 -- ongoing development -- no release date; both summer 2021 and 2022 releases have been mentioned, but there is nothing official.
DC Super Pets -- in development -- Spring '22
WARNER BROS. ANIMATION
Multiple production facilities in Burbank, CA.
Animaniacs -- ongoing -- artists, as on other Warner series, working from home during the pandemic.
Unikitty! -- ongoing -- currently in Season #3
Teen Titans Go -- ongoing -- Season 6
D.C. Super Hero Girls -- ongoing -- newer episodes now unspooling on Cartoon Network.
Scooby Doo and Guess Who? -- ongoing -- An official release date for Season 2 hasn't been confirmed; it likely air later this year. Warner Bros. is also releasing their animated movie SCOOB! in a few months, backgrounding how Scooby and Shaggy met and the beginnings of Mystery, Inc.
Little Ellen -- ongoing
Jellystone! -- ongoing -- Season 1
Looney Tunes Cartoons -- ongoing
Green Eggs and Ham -- ongoing -- Season 2
Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz -- three seasons (60 episodes plus special)
Disney is making plans to sequelize one of their 1970s animated features:
Disney+ is in the early development stage of a live-action/CG hybrid remake to the 1976 animated classic Robin Hood. The studio is bringing back Kari Granlund, who penned the Lady and the Tramp remake, to write the screenplay. ...
Disney legend once said that Robin Hood was his favorite animated films because he loved the animation in it. Trouble is, while the animation is terrific, the story, voice-acting and overall momentum of the feature leave many things to be desired.
RH was released in 1973, the third full-length cartoon production to come out after Walt Disney's death, and the first he had nod hand in. It made a handsome profit for the studio, and was re-released once before finding its way to home video.
The Disney streaming service is a voracious creature, so it makes sense to mine everything in the catalogue. What made money in 1973 can make money in 2021 (or whenever the new iteration gets released.
Since animation is the one segment of entertainment that is still in production, companies appear to find it advantageous to send out a few renewal slips.
Fox has ordered a second season of its animated family comedy Duncanville for 2021-22. ... [The show] joins fellow Fox freshman animated series Bless the Harts, which also has already been renewed for a second season.
The network has been ramping up its animated portfolio over the past two years and currently has five series on the air — veterans The Simpsons, Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers, and newcomers Bless the Harts and Duncanville — with two more, Housebroken and The Great North, set to join the lineup next season. Animation is one film/TV area that still is going during the pandemic-related Hollywood shutdown. ...
As noted previously, animation directors, board artists, and designers (among others) have been working remotely from home. At least one veteran says he misses the studio ambience, but under the circumstances is happy to take the working conditions his usual place of business is handing out.
In these challenging times, money made in a cramped home studio is far better than unemployment ... or no money at all
The Directors Guild of America (DGA) has ratified a new three-year agreement that was negotiated just before the pandemic. A few of its highlights...
DGA CONTRACT BULLET POINTS
* Wage and residual base increases of 2.5% in first year of contract; 3% in the second and third years.
* A nearly 50% increase in residuals for members working on original SVOD series.
* Employer contribution rate to the Pension Plan will permanently increase by 1% in the first year of the agreement – from 7% to 8%.
* DGA will have the right to allocate up to 0.5% of the negotiated increases in salary rates -- second and third years of contract -- to either pension plan or health plan.
The short summary of the DGA Agreement is similar to many other agreements of various entertainment guilds and unions: 3%/3%/3% increases in wages and benefits, changes to low SVOD payouts, the ability for money to be taken from contract wage bump-ups if they're needed, because who knows what the future holds?
I would expect many pension/health plans, both corporate and Taft-Hartley [i.e. union] plans, have been hit pretty hard the last five weeks. All or most invest in stocks, and stocks have been slammed. (You may have noticed.)
My crystal ball is cloudy, but upcoming labor negotiations between the studios and the Writers Guild, Screen Actors Guild, and IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees) will not be easy. The studios will make a stab at arguing that, due to the Recession/Depression and ongoing financial pain, the deal struck with the DGA is inoperative for everybody else.
That should go over well.
But we will see how the other talks pan out. Maybe the economy will be back on its feet by the time the other guilds and unions sit themselves down at the negotiating table. Maybe pigs will fly. Just have to wait and see.
The animated feature "Tangled" is often touted as the most expensive animated feature ever. ($260 million or thereabouts). People have asked, "Why is this particular Disney fairy tale so costly?" Here's the answer:
The reason that Tangled ended up being so costly (260 million smackeroos, more or less) is not because of CGI startup costs (those had already been done via the CGI features Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, etc.), but because development for Tangled went on … and on … and then on some more.
Early work on the picture that started out known as Rapunzel, then Rapunzel Unbraided, and finally Tangled, began in the mid ‘90s, and the story got redone multiple times. What started as a hand-drawn feature soon morphed into a CGI feature. The Tangled Wikipedia entry gives a lot of details and dates, but one tidbit that I heard from Disney staffers is: ’Twas Michael Eisner who wanted a Shrekish approach to the story, especially after DreamWorks’ Shrek came out in early 2001 and made a boatload of money. Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood.
Then the picture was briefly shelved, then Ed Catmull and John Lasseter rolled in, then directors changed. And whattayaknow. More than a decade had gone by.
When development plods on for what seems like forever, with directors, writers, board artists, designers, music composers, musicians, animators, and various technicians charging all of parts of their salaries to Tangled’s studio production number, costs escalate. (Studio trivia: when a feature is greenlit, a production number is opened, and all of a sudden various departments begin charging to it. (“Hot damn! There’s a new production on the list! We can charge five hours to it! Nobody’ll even notice!”)
Then, of course, there is well-loved “studio overhead”.
The practice of charging everything under the sun to a big-budget motion picture is not new, by the way. It’s been going on for more than a century. In 1912, a director named Sidney Olcott was making a silent epic on the life of Christ. An exec at the now-defunct Kalem film Company wrote Mr. Olcott the following:
“As the ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ production will be put out as a special it will be necessary to have from you at an early date an estimate of its cost. This should be just as high as you can possibly make it and every item that you can possibly think of which can reasonably be charged to this negative should be added, as under the new system governing such releases by the General Film Company, we are paid our negative expenses, whatever they may be, and we supply the prints at cost. The profit, if any, comes out of a division of the percentage earned by the General Film Company. …”
Budget-padding never goes out of style. But I digress.
Tangled was in work from 1996 to 2010. So do the math. There were fourteen years where employee and studio costs could be charged to the picture. Where “studio overhead” could be tacked on. When you total up all those jams and jellies, the question becomes not “Why was ‘Tangled’ so costly?” but …
... Wherein I talk about life at Walt Disney Productions in the 1970s, Woolie Reitherman, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Joe Ranft, Ron Clements and John Musker, Don Bluth, and a whole raft of other people.
Also too, Disney veteran Ken Anderson burning most of Walt Disney's moustache cleaaan off ...
And I do it all through an old hand-cranked phone that sounds like it's 1912 all over again. But the pictures are nice, and if you want new info on the artistic staff that worked at Disney's animation studio from the 1930s to the 19701 and 1980s, you will find some here.
The Los Angeles animation industry, unlike its live-action counterpart, is still on its feet and employing people:
As Hollywood production has ground to a halt over the escalating COVID-19 pandemic, there is one area that been able to keep the lights on for the most part — animation.
As new episodes of The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers and more just this past weekend made it to air, many animated series are still in production, with their creative teams working in sync from home. And voiceover jobs are among the very few opportunities for actors right now, as many in that field have recording facilities in their own homes.
“Disney Television Animation is fully functioning with the team successfully working on a remote basis,” the company said in a statement to Deadline. “It took a few days to smooth some wrinkles but with strong studio leadership, the team of animation pros and support from IT and HR, the animation and editing is on schedule.” ...
For decades, television animation has had crews "working remotely". Once upon a time, all L.S. animation, start to finish, was reated under one roof. Hanna-Barbera employed writers, board artists, animators, layout artists, painters, editors, sound technicians. As far back as the late 1950s, some of them worked from home, but the bulk of the staf went to the studio each day.
Those things slowly changed. In the 70s, ink-and-paint departed to overseas studios; animation eventually followed.
As for the artists who remained in L.A.-based jobs, working situations varied widely. Some drew storyboards or character designs or wrote scripts from home when they free-lanced, others worked from home (sometimes) when they held staff jobs. (One rule of the biz: when you work in-house and when you work out of your house varies widely job to job and studio to studio.)
Now, of course, the draw-at-home regimen is coming in handy, as it side-steps layoffs, an option that on-set crews on back lots and sound stages don't have. As former Animation Guild President Tom Sito quips: "A job that forces you to stay indoors and do nothing but work at your desk. For animators, it's a cinch!"
COVID19 makes the Mouse change its plans (yikes) ...
... Onward will be added to Disney Plus on April 3, after Disney already released the Pixar movie for online purchase just two weeks after its premiere in theaters. ... Frozen 2 is already available to stream in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. That's three months earlier than its original streaming date planned for June 26, and it comes just a few weeks after the movie became available for purchase as download, DVD or Blu-ray in February. ...
[Disney] has temporarily shut down its theme parks like Disneyland, delayed releasings big films like Mulan and Black Widow, and paused production on films and movies including Disney Plus' first Marvel original series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that was supposed to be released in August.
Disney Plus was forced to cancel a London launch event in early March because of coronavirus concerns. ...
As stated elsewhere, the virus has brought live-action production to a halt globally, and caused L.A. animatin studios to have employees work from home.
The Walt Disney Company continues to spread its large umbrella over different animation facilities not named Disney, yet owned by Disney. In alphabetical order, we have ...
Blue Sky Animation Studios *
Nimona -- in production; scheduled for a 2022 release. Based on the web comic by Noelle Stevenson (later published as a graphic novel by HarperCollins). Nimona is a frisky young shape shifter who works for (with) bad guy Lord Ballister Blackheart.
No other Blue Sky projects announced.
* Not an L.A.-based studio, but oh well. Blue Sky is located in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the earlier oughts, the studio was headquartered in White Plains, New York. It belonged to 20th Century Fox until Fox was absorbed by the Walt Disney Company. The House of Mouse isn't revealing how long the studio will continue to turn out features.
Fox Television Animation
Fox Television Animation -- now owned by Disney -- has two facilities: one in Burbank, California; one in Los Angeles, California.
The Simpsons -- thirty-second season (Burbank studio)
Family Guy -- eighteenth season currently airing -- season 19 to be announced (Los Angeles Studio)
American Dad -- renewed for 18th and 19th seasons (Los Angeles Studio)
Marvel Animation
The present iteration of Marvel Animation Studios is in Glendale on Flower Street, across the street from Disney's tech campus. (Different versions of "Marvel Animation" have existed since the 1990s; before that, Marvel licensed characters to various animation studios.) The reorganization of Marvel Television and Marvel Animation under the purview of Chief Creative Officer Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios has been ongoing during the last couple of months, with longtime Marvel Animation executive Cort Lane exiting his position as Marvel's Vice President of Animation and Family Entertainment last January. Middle management at the Glendale studio remains (mostly) the same.
Spidey and his Amazing Friends -- 3-D show for Disney Jr., in work with a small crew
People who work for a living are currently eating it.
... IATSE reported Tuesday that the COVID-19-related production suspensions snd event cancellations have resulted in the loss of 120,000 jobs held by its 150,000 members. A large number of those affected work in Hollywood production but IATSE also covers live events, conventions and all people-facing businesses that have been hard hit by the coronavirus outbreak. ...
“As social distancing measures are enacted and events and projects across all sectors of the entertainment industry are cancelled, it’s become clear that the COVID-19 crisis requires decisive action from our federal government to support displaced entertainment workers,” [I.A.President Matt Loeb] said in a statement.
Huge swaths of the country are shutting down. Animation employees are (relatively) fortunate in that many of them can work at home *. When you're a crew member on-set and your movie halts production, you are Shit Out Of Luck.
* Anecdotally I'm hearing that several studios have already sent animation employees home to work. Word also reaches me that the Animation Guild is raising the "work from your bedroom/home office/basement" strategy with other studios.
** Cartoon Brew has pulled together a partial list of studios who are allowing artists to work from home. There are other studios who still have employees working in; that will likely change, and soon.
*** Update -- Indiewire gives a newer rundown of what L.A. animation studios are doing right here. In a nutshell:
Disney animation Studios staff that can work at home, do work at home; Pixar and other Disney bay area units are complying with state decree to "shelter in place" and have employees work at home.
DWA open -- as many employees as possible work at home.
Paramount Animation having employees work at home.
Sony Picture Animation having as much staff as possible work at home.
Warner Animation -- ditto.
And the number of virus victims continues to rise.
The new Pixar offering performed okay in overseas markets, but it didn't open everywhere. (China is currently a bust due to a spiky virus galloping around the Middle Kingdom, but other hybrid movies continue to perform.) The worldwide numbers:
Global Grosses
Sonic the Hedgehog -- $297.3M
Call of the Wild -- $99.5M
Onward -- $69M
Dolittle -- $221.6M
M-G-M/UA has moved the new Bond feature from Spring to November, the better to avoid rampaging flu-bugs. We'll see if that works.
Disney's feature animation unit created an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture with Beauty and the Beast. And that hand-drawn feature from 1991? It has spawned a billion dollar live-action/animated hybrid in 2017, and now ...p>
Gaston and LeFou are getting an origin story.
Streaming service Disney+ is teaming with Once Upon a Time creators Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz as well as stars Josh Gad and Luke Evans for a Beauty and the Beast prequel limited series to the 2017 feature film in which the latter pair starred.
The untitled limited series will be a six-episode musical event, with composer Alan Menken in talks to return as well. Sources say the project, which is currently in the early development stage, will take place well before the events of the film and also expand the Beauty and the Beast universe. No other stars from the film — like Emma Watson and Dan Stevens — are currently attached, though sources say there is a possibility that they could pop in for a guest spot.
Here in the 21st century, with broadcast networks, cable networks, and multiple streaming services in frantic search of material that global eyeballs will watch, the House of Mouse once again dips into the IP developed by animation story artists way back when.
Because, you know, the material has a proven track record. And the characters are known. And it beats hell out of developing unfamiliar content from scratch that a fickle public may or may not watch.
The trades, of course, reference "the live-action film", but let's be honest. The whole shebang derives from the full-length feature film that Disney feature artists, writers, animators, designers and crew created on a tight schedule and budget almost thirty years ago.
Part 2 of "Work Around Town 2020". This post is a work in progress, and will change as new information comes in.
Disney Television Animation --
Located in Glendale and Burbank, California, the Disney TVA was founded in 1984 (at the dawn of the Michael Eisner-Jeffrey Katzenberg era); DTVA currently has three locations in two Southern California cities. A few years ago, decisions were made to cap the number of Disney small-screen shows done in-house, and several series are now done by sub-contractors (see below).
Elena of Avalor -- from 2016 -- ongoing
Duck Tales -- reboot from 2017 -- ongoing
Big Hero 6: the Series -- from 2017 -- ongoing
Big City Greens -- from 2018 -- ongoing
Fancy Nancy -- from 2018 -- ongoing
Muppet Babies -- reboot from 2018 -- ongoing
Amphibia -- from 2019 -- ongoing
Marvel's Moongirl and Devil Dinosaur -- from 2020 -- ongoing (Marvel/Disney, subcontracted to Titmouse Animation.
The Curse of Molly McGee -- from 2019-2020 -- ongoing for Disney Channel
Monsters at Work -- from 2020 (with Pixar) -- ongoing
The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder -- #3 -- the relaunch was announced on February 27th, with creator Bruce Smith and writer Calvin Brown Jr. returning.
Disney TVA's Los Angeles Subcontractors
Rough Draft Animation Studios
RDS, Inc. was founded in Van Nuys, California in 1991. Currently it has studios in South Korea where it functions as a major overseas production facility, and a second studio on the Glendale-Burbank city line. (For many years its L.A.-area studio was located on Brand Boulevard in Glendale.)
Big City Greens -- from 2018 -- ongoing with Disney TV Animation
The Owl House -- from 2020 -- ongoing with Disney TV Animation
Wild Canary Animation --
Started in 2008, Wild Canary Animation is located on Riverside Drive on the Burbank side of Toluca Lake. It's a long-time subcontractor for Disney Television Animation, previously producing Sheriff Callie's Wild West, Miles From Tomorrowland, and Puppy Dog Pals for the Mouse House.
Mira, Royal Detective -- from 2020 -- ongoing with Disney Jr.
The Chicken Squad -- from 2020 -- ongoing with Disney Jr.
The Rocketeer -- from 2019 -- ongoing with Disney Jr.)
Addendum: Animation production in Southern California continues to roar along, much of it driven by streaming companies who have elbowed their way into the business. This has caused older studios to sign key talent to exclusive, long-term contracts, something that hasn't occured since the 1990s.
As of last summer, Disney has signed a multitude of artists and writers to contracts. They include Bruce Smith (The Proud Family), Jeff Howard (Planes), Kate Kondell (The Pirate Fairy), Stevie Wermers (Prep & Landing), Kevin Deters (Prep & Landing), Howy Parkins (The Lion Guard), Amy Higgins (Star vs. The Forces of Evil), Devin Bunje and Nick Stanton (Prince of Peoria), Noah Z. Jones (Pickle & Peanut), Mike Roth (Regular Show), John Infantino (Star vs. The Forces of Evil), Jeremy Shipp (Kung Fu Panda), Ryan Gillis (Pickle & Peanut), Steve Marmel (The Fairly OddParents), Natasha Kline (Big City Greens) and Sabrina Cotugno (The Owl House).
9) Brahms: Boy II -- 2,151 -- $2.63M (-55%) -- $9.77M
10) Fantasy Island -- 2,724 (-60) -- $2.33M (-45%) -- $24M
Meantime, on the international front, Invisible Man has a world wide total of $49.2 million, while the live-action movies with animated animals accumulated currency as follows:
Live-Action With Animated Animals
Sonic the Hedgehog -- $265.5M
Call of the Wild -- $79.3M
Dolittle -- $217.4M
Next week, the new Pixar epic drops, and we'll see how much new cash the House of Mouse is able to rake in.
The trade press is saying the new Harrison Ford pic with the big furry dog will lose $100 million after all the greenbacks flutter to earth. Ruh roh...
Three Days of Grosses
1) Sonic The Hedgehog -- 4,198 theaters (+31) -- $26.3M (-55%) -- $106.6M
2) Call Of The Wild -- 3,752 -- $24.8M -- $24.8M (1st weekend)
10) The Photograph -- 2,516 -- $2.8M (-77%) -- $17.6M
So there are three animation hybrids on the big board right now: Sonic, Call of the Wild, and Jumanji. Sonic the Hedgehog is sprinting along nicely, propelled by a vintage Jim Carrey performance. Disney managed to muscle CotW above its projected numbers, but the trades are tut-tutting that the flick -- a pickup by the House of Mouse from recently-acquired 20th Century Fox, will end up a money-loser.
On the other hand, Jumanji: Next Level will be making Paramount Pictures a nice bundle of cash.
This week in 1933, the last two-strip Technicolor feature to be made is released by Warner Bros.
The Mystery of the Wax Museum, starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Glenda Farrell, directed by the omnipresent Michael Curtiz, opens across the fruited plain and ends up making the brothers Warner a profit of $800,000, much of that profit coming from Europe.
Mystery tells the story of Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) who arrives in New York to reestablish a Wax Museum he lost in a fire in London. Bodies begin disappearing from the morgue, with close facsimiles of the dearly departed showing up in museum exhibits. Hard-driving reporter G. Farrell begins to suspect something is amiss ...
Production began the second week of October, 1932 with Curtiz directing in his usual dynamic way. The stylish art direction was done by Anton Grot, a Polish emigre who's first Hollywood assignment was on Douglas Fairbanks's Robin Hood. (Grot worked on multiple DeMille features, then became a prolific Warner Bros. art director, designing Noah's Ark, Captain Blood, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and The Sea Hawk among numerous others.)
At the time of The Mystery of the Wax Museum's release, Technicolor was phasing out its two-strip color work, and full, three-strip Technicolor was on its way.
In fact, the complete color spectrum had already arrived. By the time Museum came out in early '33, Walt Disney Productions had released five full-color shorts in the Technicolor's new process. Disney would continue to produce color cartoons straight into the 21st Century. The first live-action feature in three-strip Technicolor, a sample of which is seen directly below, would not be released until June, 1935. (Snow White, Disney's first color feature, would arrive eighteen months later.)
Walt had an exclusive contract for producing full-color cartoons until 1935. The Fleischer brothers (and other animation rivals) were forced to limp along with two-color animated shorts until Disney's lock on full Technicolor expired. Some cartoon studios used the two-color option until the late 1930s.
As for the last two-color live action film, a complete color copy of Wax Museum was considered non-existent for decades. But after Jack Warner's death, a well-preserved print was discovered in Warner's personal film collection. Since then, the flick has been released on DVD and shown on Turner Classic Movies in all its original glory.
Globally Sonic the Hedgehog has collected $111 million in its various rollouts, the bulk coming from the United States and Canada. It apparently helps to have the '90's version of Mr. Carrey in support of an iconic video game character. Meantime, the partially-animated Jumanji: the Next Level has made $780,016,286 on a worldwide basis.
Then there are the two animated features from different Disney-owned studios. Spies in Disguise from Connecticut-based Blue Sky studios ha earner $166.8 million around the world, while its cousin Frozen II racked up $1,438,869,773 in its recent run. (Contrary to popular opinion, long-form cartoons from the House of Mouse are not all smash hits.)
Apparently Sonic the Hedgehog has (apparently) a character funnier than the title performer:
... Carrey out-cartoons the cartoons. Watching Carrey in a mainstream kiddie comedy again feels a little like comparing the mostly hand-drawn animation of The Lion King to the soulless photorealism of its recent remake: It’s less technologically advanced, yet more impressive. ...
Carrey once had the broad appeal of a Warner Bros. cartoon character in his early pictures, then somewhere he wandered off into the tall weeds and disappeared from view.
Nice to see Jim Carrey is back, older but (happily) no wiser ... or more toned down.
And was anyone surprised? Good film, but the Walt Disney Company has the gravitational pull of a large, hungry sun, so it was pretty much inevitable, yes?
The other candidates? The ones that lost? Klaus, Missing Link, I Lost My Body, How To Train Your Dragon: the Hidden World
Best Animated Short
Hair Love
The rest of the field: Daughter, Kitbull, Memorable, Sister
Matthew A. Cherry, director of Hair Love is the first African-American to earn an Oscar in the category as a director. (The late Kobe Bryant won as producer.)
This week in 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.), Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffth, join forces to form United Artists. Other studio moguls declare that the lunatics (i.e., the artistic creators) have taken over the asylum, but UA takes hold and goes on for decades and decades, outliving its founders, seen above in pristine newsreel footage.
While United Artists has a very long run, its four founders end up traveling way different paths through Hollywood.
At the time the company is formed, Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are in the middle of a tempestuous extra-marital affair that's been going on for a year. They divorce their respective spouses thirteen months later, marry each other, and become Tinsel Town's first super-star power couple. Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks jointly own the Pickford-Fairbanks studio and turn out a string of hit films through the 1920s, preside like royalty over Hollywood social events, and help found the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (Mary wins a "Best Actor" Oscar in the Academy's second year).
They both become very very rich.
But then sound comes in and their stardom fades. Mary stops making films and hits the bottle. Doug stops making films and becomes a globe-trotting Anglophile. He divorces Mary, hangs out in London a lot, and hooks up with Lady Sylvia Ashley. By the end of 1939 Doug Fairbanks is dead of a heart attack at 56, and Mary has tied the knot with actor Buddy Rogers. Thereafter, Little Mary slowly becomes a recluse, and dies of a stroke in 1979 at age 87.
Griffith, oldest of the group, is already near the end of his time as a big commercial filmmaker. There is still the block-buster Way Down East immediately ahead, but by the mid-twenties he is eased out of UA and by 1931 (and two failed talkies), he is a former big-deal movie director. He dies alone and pretty much forgotten in July, 1948, age 73.
Only Charlie Chaplin forges successfully on into the sound era. From the founding of UA through 1940, almost every feature he makes (The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator) is a sizable hit. Hounded out of the United States in the early fifties, Chaplin takes up residence in Switzerland, returning in triumph to Hollywood to pick up an honorary Oscar. (Victory is the best revenge.)
Charlie dies on Christmas day, five-and-a-half years later. He is 88.
At its beginning, United Artists distributed all of the Big Four's films. But there wasn't enough output between Fairbanks-Pickford-Griffith-Chaplin to sustain a distribution company, so outside producers were brought into the mix. UA distributed (among others) the films of Sam Goldwyn, Buster Keaton, Walt Disney, and David Selznick to name a few. What did serious damage to United Artists in its later years was the epic money-loser "Heavens Gate". The corporation was among the barely-crawling wounded after that fiasco.
Addendum: UA had an interesting history with Walt Disney. The company began distributing Disney shorts in the early thirties, and for a brief moment in 1933, Mary Pickford was going to do an animated/live-action version of "Alice In Wonderland" with Walt. But then Paramount did their star-studded, black-and-white version and the idea was shelved.
And then in 1937, UA and Disney couldn't come to an agreement on television rights. (Walt and Roy weren't sure what those were, but they didn't want to cede them to United Artists.) So Chaplin-Pickford-Fairbanks got a divorce, and RKO got a nice percentage for distributing "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".
It's increasingly evident that large entertainment companies (old and new) are creating more intellectual property that attracts eyeballs. And (here's a surprise) they all seem to know what those intellectual properties need to be:
... More than half of Netflix’s global audience watches family content [read: animation] every month, and such movies and shows tend to be quite sticky, driving not just subscriptions but renewals as well. Until recently, Netflix’s animated offerings included a lot of Disney classics; now, those films are slowly migrating back to their ancestral home. ...
There have been big increases in animation production before. The last big one occurred from 1990 to 2000. But then the general euphoria and profits sank back to earth, and artists who had been making $2700 per week were suddenly making half that, or working at Trader Joe's.
The expansion of cartoons in the second decade of the 21st Century has a different feel than the one which happened a quarter century ago. Then, the increases were driven by Disney's high-profit animated features that many other movie corporations chased with ultimately dire results. (Warner Bros. Feature Animation? We're talking about you); there was also a surge in syndicated and cable animation that faded as the 1990s came to a close.
This time, however, the super-sizing of L.A.'s animation industry has come about due to torrents of Subscription Video On Demand, and the fact that audiences seek animation out, watch it, and then keep watching it (SVOD's holy grail of "stickiness", as noted above).
No boom, of course, lasts forever. But this one shows every indication of lasting longer than its cousin of twenty-five years ago. And it's impacting both large companies and small:
Titmouse, the independent animation house known for cult shows such as the edgy comedy series “Big Mouth” and “Metalocalypse,” is expanding its footprint in Los Angeles.
The Emmy-winning producer, first established in Hollywood in 2000, plans to occupy a new 95,000-square-foot office space in Burbank, its fourth office in North America, later this year.
The company struck a deal with property developer GPI Cos. for a new long-term lease on the North Naomi Street building, the companies said in a statement Friday.
Titmouse needs the extra space because of a growing slate of cartoons and to accommodate an additional 250 staff members who will join the animator’s 700-person workforce spread among offices in New York, Vancouver and Hollywood, where its headquarters will remain. ...
The steady growth of L.A. jobs in Cartoonland has now gone on for the better part of a decade (and the Animation Guild now has the largest member base in its 68-year history). A continuation of this phenomenon over another decade? It would not be a major surprise.
Harry Hester, known to most people as "Bud", passed away over the weekend at age 91.
An army veteran, Bud joined the Disney animation staff in early 1954 and worked there until the 1970s, when he was elected Business Representative of the Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE. (It was then called "The Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists".)
Mr. Hester headed the Guild for a dozen years, leading it through studio strikes in 1979 and again in 1982. He retired in 1989, thereafter spending time restoring classic cars and enjoying his numerous grandchildren. Though his career was long, his favorite professional memories centered on his years in the Disney Animation Building's D-Wing, where he worked with many of Walt's "Nine Old Men" on multiple animated features.
In 1960, Bud left the Mouse House during a slow-down and spent a year animating for Bob Clampett on Beany and Cecil, which he found to be an invigorating change from Walt Disney Production's D-Wing. "We had to do seventy-five feet of animation a week, but we had fun doing it. Bob had a fire bell that went off at every break..."
Bud's favorite animator was Milt Kahl, with whom he worked for almost a decade. Mr. Hester said that Milt could be tough, and also profane, "but you always knew where you stood with Milt", which Bud found refreshing.
One of his more vivid memories came early in his career: Walt Disney would come down to his D-Wing office to view progress on clay sculptures that Bud's roommate Blaine Gibson was preparing for the embryonic Disneyland amusement park. Walt would occasionally zip into the room when Gibson was spraying down the clay ... and get doused with water.
Times, and the Disney studio, were simpler then.
(You will find Bud Hester's "Tales of D-Wing", recorded in March 2011, here.)
On this date in 1959, "Sleeping Beauty" is released by Walt Disney Productions, the studio's first animated fairy tale in eons.
The picture went into development in 1953 and took forever to reach completion. Walt was off building an amusement park, so newer animated features in the process of becoming didn't get the priority that happened in earlier times. Supervisors groused that Disney didn't hold story meetings often enough, so progress lagged. (Worth noting: Walt Disney had a pattern: he was fully focused on animated shorts until animated features gained his interest; he spent most of his time on animated features until live-action and an elaborate amusement park came along. And Walt would likely have devoted large amounts of his time on Disney World if he had lived longer.)
Another reason for the length of production? "Sleeping Beauty" was big (70 mm!) and complicated (intricate backgrounds, character designs!) Old timers said that doing a handful of cleanup drawings per week was a good result, what with the complexity of the designs. Joe Hale said: "When Iwo [Takamoto] was showing an assistant how to draw Aurora, he'd draw three inches of pencil line, crumple up the paper and start over." (Joe was perhaps being a teensy bit hyperbolic.)
Sleeping Beauty was the first feature on which Woolie Reitherman served as a sequence director. An action specialist during his decades as a supervising animator, Wolfgang oversaw the battle with the dragon that climaxes the film. Walt was well-pleased, and for the next twenty years, Woolie supervised every animated feature produced by WDP, heading up the animation division for a decade and a half.
The story that SB was a flop isn't exactly true. It had theatrical rentals of $5.3 million, but its $6 million cost was caused the pic to be a contributor to the studio's net loss in '59. (Darby O'Gill and the Little People, released the same year and now considered a classic, failed to make its costs back. The BIG Disney picture in 1959, profit-wise, was the black-and-white comedy The Shaggy Dog, which had started life as TV product.)
Beauty turned out to be the last hurrah for big, hand-inked, animated fairy tales during Walt Disney's lifetime. After Sleeping Beauty, the Disney studio laid off lots of animation staff. The next feature 101 Dalmatians was produced for a fraction of the cost and made almost a million dollars more in rental receipts. Today, with all its re-releases, Sleeping Beauty stands as the second highest-grossing film of its year, second only to "Ben-Hur."
