19th -- Toy Story 4 -- 243 -- $215,000 -- $433M (15th week)
Angry Birds 2 is pretty much gone from domestic box office competition, ending up with a domestic total of $40,723,283, and a worldwide accumulation of $123,723,283.
DreamWorks Animation/NBC-Universal/Comcast is teeing up a new animated feature, co-produced with Pearl Animation in China:
“Abominable” marks the first film from Pearl Studio, formerly known as Oriental DreamWorks, the joint venture DreamWorks Animation founder Jeffrey Katzenberg launched in 2012. ...
Now Pearl ... is looking to make its mark on the growing, increasingly global feature animation business with movies that can resonate in China and abroad. ...
The co-production model has been tried numerous times, going back to the days of hand-drawn animation. With the notable exception of Illumination Entertainment and its fusion of L.A. and Parisian animation studios, co-productions have not had gangbuster results at the global box office.
Co-productions have done fine in the lower budget, episodic TV world (it's been a way of life for decades), but it's laid an egg in the theatrical features universe. Hanna-Barbera had no luck with Page-Master in the early nineties. Disney tried and failed to do CG-animated features for the Indian market (anybody recall Roadside Romeo? Thought not.) More recently, micro-budgeted CG features have done okay in niche markets, but Illumination Entertainment Entertainment with its Despicable Me series is the first cartoon studio that has boosted jointly-produced features into the stratosphere.
DWA's Abominable, per current projections, is not slated to do anything close to what the Illumination Entertainment Entertainment blockbusters have done. But if the picture makes a tidy profit, Universal/Comcast will not be distraught with grief.
#6 -- The Lion King 2019 -- $537.6M -- ($1,629,492,304)
#16 -- Angry Birds Movie 2 -- $40.5M -- ($118,625,591)
#20 -- Toy Story 4 -- $432.8M -- (1,058,493,220)
Of the animated features now in release, the only weak performer is Angry Birds #2. But since it cost a mere $65 million to make, it will likely eke out a profit when all revenue streams are squeezed to the max.
As for the top box office performers year-to-date, it's all super hero movies and animated features as far as the eye can see:
Top Domestic Grossers -- 2019
1) Avengers: Endgame -- $858,373,000
2) The Lion King (2019) -- $537,592,304
3) Toy Story 4 -- $432,776,979
4) Captain Marvel -- $426,829,839
5) Spider-Man: Far from Home -- $389,716,018
6) Aladdin (2019) -- $355,264,942
Let's face facts squarely: in movieland, there is the Walt Disney Company, and then there is everybody else.
With streaming sites (Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Peacock and numerous others) hungry for shows, shows, freaking SHOWS! of the animated persuasion) this comes as little surprise:
A new animated version The Boondocks on HBO Max [is coming].
This new version of The Boondocks from creator Aaron McGruder (which is a two season, 24 episode order) will launch in fall 2020 with a 50-minute special. Originally airing on Adult Swim from 2005 to 2014, the series follows an African American family named the Freemans who settle into a predominantly white suburb called Woodcrest. And the storylines are themed to the mixture of cultures, lifestyles, social classes, stereotypes and viewpoints.
The Boondocks had a lengthy run in its first incarnation, so it's hardly surprising the series is being duested off and reconfigured. The various distribution outlets clawing for content often reach for what worked before.
Disney, of course, has a library to draw from, as does Warner Bros, which owns the Hanna-Barbera stash. (Which reminds me. Why haven't Top Cat and Ruff and Reddy been resuscitated?) And Dreamworks Animation Television has been creating shows for Netflix for years. Those piles of half-hours will now migrate to Universal-Comcast's streaming services.
There's a reason our fine, entertainment conglomerates are making details with animated show creators with street cred. But even with all the reboots, there aren't enough old figs to eat, so the big companies have to corral farmers to grow new ones.
Frederick C. Quimby, longtime head of M-G-M animation, dies on this day in 1965. He is 79 years old.
Mr. Quimby started his professional life as a journalist, but soon began working for movie companies. He found employment with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the "Tiffany of movie studios", in the late 1920s.
Time rolled on, and in 1937 Fred Q. was assigned to set up an animation division at the studio, being as how animation was an up and coming thing. He had little interest in cartoons, but Quimby was a good corporate soldier and put together an animation department.
And then, a series of amazing things happened.
Artists Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had the idea for a bunch of cartoon shorts built around a cat and mouse, and Fred half-heartedly approved the production of one. The cartoon was successful and got nominated for an Academy Award. So, since Fred wasn't a complete idiot, he okayed doing some more.
And over the next thirteen years, Frederick Clinton Quimby won SEVEN Academy Awards as the producer of M-G-M's "Tom and Jerry" cartoons. Cartoons with which he had virtually nothing to do with.
"How many times in your life can you win SEVEN Academy Awards, and somebody else takes them?"
-- Joe Barbera
Which is, when you think about it, pretty damn amazing.
Especially when you consider Quimby didn't much care for the original premise, didn't have much interest in cartoons in general, and certainly had minimal respect from the artists who actually created those "Tom and Jerry" shorts.
Amazon has a new animation series, and because its approach isn't done a lot anymore, it gets awed attention:
Undone's rotoscoped animation style, which was produced by the studio Minnow Mountain and involves drawing over live-action footage. ... Thanks to lush watercolor backgrounds and immersive three-dimensional environments. Undone is such a revelation I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to a revival of rotoscoping, a technique pioneered by the early 20th century animator Max Fleischer. ...
Of course, there are animated features with rotoscope and "lush watercolor backgrounds". (Snow White and Gulliver's Travels come to mind. Also Don Bluth's Anastasia and a bunch of Zemeckis features such as A Christmas Carol ... and let's not forget Spielberg's Tin Tin.
But memories, also attention spans, are short. The only thing that's true with the engadget.com piece is rotoscoping doesn't get used on the small screen a lot.)
However, let's get over a notion that Undone is pushing the rotoscope process to "new heights". Methinks it's already been pushed. It's just that nobody has much noticed. (Which I'm sure is a major sadness to Robert Zemeckis, since he was enamored with rotoscope. It's just that, few others were.)
The usual meme, presented in the usual way regarding China's hit animated feature:
... Considering the high levels of money and time needed to turn out a good animated film, many fear “Nezha” may be a one-off success story. Investment in Chinese animation saw a boom after 2015’s summer blockbuster “Monkey King: Hero Is Back,” which grossed $134 million, but that wave of interest died down. ...
"Can these Chinese animation creators do it again?"
You could substitute lots of other names: Walt Disney, Blue Sky Animation, Pixar (etc.) and do pretty much the same article at various points of entertainment history.
And the answer is always the same: "it depends."
It depends on if you have a compelling story.
It depends if you have characters audiences want to spend eighty-five minutes with.
It depends if your movie is released on the same weekend as the latest Avengers extravaganza.
Stories grow organically. They can't be paint-by-number affairs. Generally there's a lot of wrong turns and sequences that don't work and characters that don't play before the creators get the project "right". And sometimes it's never right. Even Pixar made a flop dinosaur movie, just like Spielberg's London animation studio Amblimation made a flop dinosaur movie (after making the hit dinosaur movie "Land Before Time".)
So the question of whether a Chinese animation studio can do it again is easily answered. Of COURSE it can do it again. But whether a studio in the middle Kingdom does has the same set of variable attached to it as every other creative entity on the globe.
