So there are three animated features out in the world market place, all three doing good to great business at the box office.
The entry with the longest run is Trolls, the DreamWorks Animation musical under the baton of Justin Timberlake. To date, it's taken in $333,179,715 ($151,277,527 domestic) and will likely nose into profits before all its distribution platforms have been exhausted.
Disney's Moana has been out since Thanksgiving, so far grossing a total of $450,094,182, half from the U.S. of A. and half from everywhere else. The picture will likely climb to $600+ million before its out of release.
Finally there is Sing, the latest from Illumination Entertainment, which arrived at Christmas and to date has $356,873,315 in the till. Sixty percent ($213,373,315) of its world gross comes from the United States and Canada.
No doubt about it. We're seeing serious cannibalization. (Not).
Tyrus Wong was many things. Builder of fantastical kites. Gifted watercolorist. Designer of the animated feature Bambi.
Beyond those things, He was a creator of wonderful Christmas cards and a longtime art director in live action and a man who lived to the ripe old age of 106. But as all mortals do, he passed away recently, and services will be held for him next week:
Dear Friends,
Tyrus's service will be held on Friday, Jan 13th, 2:30pm at Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills. Please join us in celebrating his long and extraordinary life. The service is public, so please feel free to share.
Friday, Jan, 13, 2017 at 2:30pm
Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills - Hall of Liberty
6300 Forest Lawn Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90068
Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills overlooks the Disney Studios.
So Diz Co. released its movie slate for '17, and whattayaknow?
Most of its offerings are either A) animated productions or B) animated productions masquerading as live-action features. (Is this a 21st century version of the late forties? When the studio offered up hand-drawn shorts, compilation and hybrid animated/live-action features, and -- at the end of the decade -- was prepping the fairy tale Cinderella?)
In 2017, there's the (partial) live-action remake for Beauty an the Beast, where live-action and CG animation recreates the hand-drawn blockbuster of 1991. No further comment required.
And there's Guardians Of The Galaxy, Volume 2, which will be heavy with visual effects and digital sets and animated characters. But Chris Pratt is a live-action figure, so it (kind of) falls into the flesh-and-blood category.
This baby will very likely best Pratt's other sci-fi offering Passengers, released to less than total audience enthusiasm the end of last year.
Then we have Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell Tall Tales (or something). Because there is a desire to keep budgets of these later episodes of the franchise in check, the CG animated effects might be be reined in a bit.
Walt Disney Animation Studios steps back in 2017 and Pixar comes forward with two releases. The first will be the third installment of the Cars franchise. Never underestimate the power of toys flying off the shelves to power multiple episodes of one of the Emeryville studio's weaker multi-part sagas.
Then near the end of 2017, Pixar releases an original titled Coco ...
... followed by the next episode of Star Wars. This will be Ms. Fisher's last installment, unless the producers decide she can become an animated character and continue on.
Yeah, there are non-animated elements in the release schedule, even a documentary. But if we're honest, the amount of pure animation and animation that's sprinkled among the real-life actors takes us back to those happy times when America and its allies had beaten the Axis powers and all was sunlight and flowers. And Disney, paddling fiercely to keep its small corporate head above water, was making animated/live-action movies similar to the ones we're seeing seventy years later.
Television animation goes with original material more often than not. Tut the feature versions of cartoons lean toward adaptations and sequels, which makes sense from a commercial point-of-view, since there are large budgets on the line and the chance of a major bomb is ever present.
So it's refreshing when originals get made, be they South Seas adventures centered around ancient myths, or stories about talking animals living in cities. And nice to read about the creation of all that:
... We went to Africa [for research on Zootopia, and we were camping about 30 yards from a watering hole, and we would see during the day, lions would come right in and drink next the gazelle and zebra they normally eat, and there was no funny business.
They would just go about their business, and they would part ways, because they needed something, just like different groups of people living together in cities. People need to work, they need to come to these cities to live, and they have to find ways to get along, so finding those kinds of key things that tied our own experience as human beings to the animal world, that’s where the movie got really deep and clever. ...
The strongest attributes of Zootopia?
It works as a mystery with a twist at the end.
As a police procedural.
As a comedy.
And as an allegory about life in the twenty-first century.
Beyond all that, the visuals and characters are astounding.
... The Directors Guild of America has approved a new contract that will allow its more than 16,000 members to take a bigger slice of a growing pie by boosting residuals while also increasing wages. ...
If three years of reuse of original content would yield less than $15,000 in residuals for a DGA member under the current contract, the amount would more than triple to $50,000 under the new contract, according to the guild.
The new contract also increases residuals for feature-length streaming movies and establishes for the first time residuals for DGA members whose content streams overseas. ...
The new contract will boost wages, with an increase of 2.5% in the first year of the agreement and 3% in the second and third years of the agreement. The deal also will increase employer contributions to the guild’s pension plan. ...
So what seems to be unspooling here?
Looks like the usual 3%/3%/3% happened, except the DGA took a half percent from year one and plunked it into its pension and health plans (and yeah, obviously I'm making an educated guess).
The way negotiations usually work, there's a certain amount of money on the table and the union/guild decides where it wants the moolah to go. Betting that's what happened at this negotiation.
Judging from the information that's been released, higher residuals are triggered by budget thresholds being hit. Live action thresholds. How this part of the DGA contract will impact the Animation Guild is hard to say, since the Guild doesn't receive DGA-style residuals. But live-action budget levels did nothing for animators in the last negotiations, since animation budgets are in a different universe.
This contract and others will impact the Animation Guild's next agreement come 2018.
I spent 27 years and 3 weeks (but who's counting?) working as the Business Representative for the Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE. (That's a labor union for those wondering if such rare and exotic organizations still exist. And the term "Business Representative"? Which is a synonym for "union thug", if various politicians are to be believed).
What I found out doing the gig, in descending order:
1) You get what you have the leverage to get, and little more. (And it's useful to know, if possible, what your leverage is).
2) There is no "fair" and "unfair". Those words are sales devices. (See #1).
3) Employees performing free work is an ongoing reality of the animation workplace (and many other workplaces), loosely proportional to the fear employees have of losing their jobs. Sometimes free work is done when there is little risk of layoff. Then its usually done to keep up with other artists, the better to avoid some future, if indefinite, job loss.
4) Politics is always a part of the work environment. "Playing well with others" is important to mantining a health career, and some employees never learn this basic strategy. "Being right" takes a higher priority.
5) Studios usually hire good artists over great artists if the great artist is a constant pain in the backside. (See #4)
If the above sounds like things I've said at different times and places, it is. And you're welcome.
That there are millions upon millions of views for "Sing" trailers might be good indicators the picture could do well, yes?
One more fine example of the overcrowded market for animated features (Not):
... Whistling a happy tune, Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures’ Sing has pulled in an estimated $24.3M in 56 territories through today. With a $97.8M offshore gross, the Garth Jennings-helmed pic will pass $100M tomorrow. It’s estimated that the worldwide total through Monday will be $281.3M. ...
For people keeping spreadsheets about how long-form cartoons are doing box office-wise, please note that Moana has taken in $355,781,943, and Trolls has taken in $330,261,850. both pictures continue in wide release. The Disney South Seas adventure is #4 at the box office, with $212,500,000 in the till.
Audience just don't get that they're only supposed to watch one animated flick a month, because cannibalization.
