Legendary Animator & Oscar-Nominee Glen Keane on Teaming up With Kobe Bryant, his Disney Past & More—Part I
Glen Keane is not just a living legend. He’s a Disney Legend (yes, that is an official title). He worked for the studio that Mickey Mouse built starting in the ‘70s as a character animator on such features as The Rescuers and Pete’s Dragon and played a huge role during the second Golden Age of ...
Know Your 2017 Oscar Nominees: Animated Feature
Our Oscars coverage this year has gone big. Our annual "Know Your Nominee" series will once again touch upon every category, giving you the information you need to conquer your Oscars pool. Learn more about the nominees for Lead Actor, Foreign Language Film, Costume Designers, Documentary Short, Editing, Live Action Short, Actress in a Supporting Role and Makeup & Hairstyling. Now we turn ...
This Video Shows the Easter Eggs That Link Every Pixar Movie
You've heard the theory. Everyone's heard the theory. It's a great theory. The one that states that every single Pixar film, from the original Toy Story through Ratatouille and Wall-E to Finding Dory (and all the films in between) exist in the same universe. Folks call it The Pixar Theory, built on a huge nest ...
Pixar’s Magic Touch Displayed in This Storyboard-to-Screen Video
There is no film, no final, fluid story, without concept art and storyboards. They are a film's first line of artistic offense, helping imagine the world the rest of the filmmaking team will create on the big screen. Whether it's illustrations that design work that went into imagining what the heptapods in Arrival would look like or the ...
Gorgeous Early Concept art for Arrival
If you haven't seen director Denis Villeneuve's brilliant sci-fi film Arrival yet, you're in for a treat. The short and sweet synopsis is this: Linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks ...
Annie Awards: Zootopia & Kubo and the Two Strings Lead the Pack
Walt Disney Animation’s rollicking Zootopia was a critical and commercial success, and now the film is feeling the love from the International Animated Film Society—Zootopia leads all the feature nominees for the 44th annual Annie Awards with 11 nominations. (You can read our interview with Zootopia's animator Darrin Butters here, and the animation supervisors here.) Right ...
From Storyboard to Screen: Behind the Scenes of Disney’s Moana
Disney is in on the joke about “princess movies” in the new animated feature Moana (in theaters Nov. 23). In the film, a road trip by sea in which a young Polynesian woman named Moana leaves her island home to find the demi-god Maui and return a lost object to its right home, there is ...
Watch This Stunning, Devastating Pixar Short
Pixar animators Lou Hamou-Lhadj and Andrew Coates quietly released their short film, Borrowed Time, on Vimeo for a limited time only, just a few days ago. It's crushing. Pixar has long established itself as a studio that manages to mix the existential with the exciting, the melancholy with the mercurial. At their best, from Toy Story ...
From Storyboard to Animation: See how Pixar Created Toy Story 2
Storyboards are an essential part of the filmmaking process, and perhaps no studio on the planet relies on them quite the way that Pixar does. A Pixar storyboard is essentially a hand-drawn version of the movie, and helps the artists making diagram the action and the dialogue. The storyboard is basically the blueprint for the film. ...
See how the Gorgeous Opening of Kubo and the Two Strings was Created
Travis Knight's Kubo and the two Strings is a gorgeous, animated meditation on the love between a mother and a son. The luscious look of the film, created by Laika's brilliant stop-motion animation, is something to behold (this is to say nothing of the the sound of the film, which includes a glorious theme song by Regina Spektor). Knight is ...
Pixar Reveals it’s Been Hiding a Single Character in Every one of its Films
We already knew Pixar films have been talking to one another, so to speak, over the years. The animation studio has been hiding Easter eggs like the Luxo Ball, the Pizza Planet Truck and A113 (which is a nod to the animation classroom at CalArts where several Pixar filmmakers went) in one film after another, creating a ...
Go Behind-the-Scenes of The Jungle Book
On Wednesday we shared the first clip of Idris Elba's magnificent tiger, Shere Khan, who is the central antagonist in Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book. In this new featurette, Favreau talks about how, thanks to the huge leap in technology in the past few years, photo real animation has made it possible, and worthwhile, to remake the classic ...
Zootopia Animator Darrin Butters on Drawing From Disney’s Rich Heritage
Disney’s latest animated film Zootopia imagines a world where predator and prey live together in harmony- not to mention talk and wear pants. We talk to animator Darrin Butters about drawing on Disney’s rich heritage, the benefits of CGI animation and his side gig as a warm-up guy. Zootopia is such a richly drawn world: ...
Animation Supervisors Are the Zookeepers On Disney’s Zootopia
Kira Lehtomaki likes the idea of her role as the protector of “Judy Hopps.” Lehtomaki, an animation supervisor on Disney’s upcoming Zootopia, animated and supervised multiple segments of the feature film but was mainly responsible to oversee the female bunny police officer voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin. Zootopia is Lehtomaki’s first credit as an animation supervisor ...
New Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 Image Released, Filming Underway
While Deadpool might be your favorite irreverent Marvel superhero at the moment, let’s not forget the mouthy, motley space crew who proved comic book characters could not only be truly funny, but lovable, too (we’re looking at you, Groot.) Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Groot (Vin Diesel), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave ...
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Summarized in Awesome 60 Second Animation
If you've never watched a super sped up illustrated animation by 1A4 studio, today's your lucky day. The awesome animation studio takes beloved films, television episodes, characters, and the like and summarizes them in hilariously quick, deceptively simple illustrated animation that boil said film or show or character down to its' most essential sequences. They've now ...
Not Just For Kids: Best Animated Feature Nominees
Though it wasn’t added to the Oscars slate until 2001 (when Shrek took home the statue), the Best Animated Feature category is more interesting than ever this year, pitting Inside Out, Pixar’s most astonishing and well-reviewed film in quite a few years, against the equally beloved but decidedly adult Anomalisa. Outside of the two front runners, ...
Creating Clouds, Cigarettes, Feet & More in Anomalisa
We've already written about Starburns Industries, the mechanics behind the magic of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's Anomalisa. It's a film of tiny things. In order to populate every frame of Michael Stone's business trip to Cincinnati with those life-like things, the creators of Anomalisa were tasked with creating thousands of beautiful, identifiable elements in exacting, miniature detail. Thanks to ...
Get to Know Your Golden Globes Nominees for Best Motion Picture, Animated
Yesterday we delighted and thrilled you with two Golden Globe primers to make you the toast/scourge of your friends and/or family. Our primer for the Best Motion Picture, Drama and Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy categories were designed to give you the tools (in the form of interviews we've done with the below-the-line artists who ...
The Mechanics Behind the Magic of Anomalisa
Watching Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman’s first theatrical effort since Synecdoche, New York seven years ago, it’s hard to shake the impression that you’re watching something wholly unique. Built around a simple enough concept: the exploration of a man’s midlife crisis and extra-marital affair, Anomalisa’s stop-motion puppet animation and meticulously built approach makes the film far more ...
