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Impressive visuals dominate first trailer for live action "Ghost in the Shell."

The post Live-Action Adaptation of ‘Ghost in the Shell’ Delivers Action-Packed Trailer appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Audiences in LA and NY have voted with their wallets: they are ready for mature and intelligent feature animation.

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It's the second high-profile feature directing gig for Patrick Osborne this year.

Click to enlarge this newly released limited edition Paramount Pictures 100th Anniversary Poster, created by L.A.’s Gallery 1988. Comprised of graphic icons representing the studios biggest films – and I’m happy to report animation is well represented (I’m mean, all things considered – there’s no Popeye, Betty Boop or Casper but those were shorts and these buttons represent features). Look close and you’ll spot Max Fleischer’s 1939 Gulliver’s Travels, George Pal’s 1953 War of The Worlds; Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996), South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999) and The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004) also make the cut. Our condolences to Tintin, Rugrats and Jimmy Neutron – maybe next time.

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The standoff between DreamWorks Animation and Paramount is explored in this piece in the Hollywood Reporter. It’s a good primer on the situation, and interestingly, positions it mostly as a battle of egos between Jeffrey Katzenberg and Paramount head Brad Grey. Unidentified insiders in the piece also support my contention from earlier this week that Paramount is kidding itself if it thinks it can start producing animated blockbusters like DreamWorks by 2014.

COMMENTARY: Thoughts on DreamWorks Negotiations with Paramount

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Brad Grey, dreamworks, DreamWorks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Paramount Pictures

The drama beween DreamWorks Animation and its distributor Paramount continues with plenty of unsubstantiated rumors, but no hard details of the negotiations. Paramount, of course, recently launched its own in-house animation studio, which strikes me as a bargaining chip more than anything else. We’ve also heard rumors that Paramount has just appointed a new studio president, and if it’s who people are claiming, it’s someone with one of the most disastrous track records of any recent executive to work in the animation industry.

The situation reminds me a lot of what Disney did when they started contract renewal talks with Pixar some years ago. Disney launched a new studio, Circle 7, and tried to make their own Toy Story sequel before coming to the conclusion that Pixar’s creative culture couldn’t be replicated with deep pockets alone. I’m not suggesting that Paramount will buy DreamWorks, but I am saying that Paramount is sorely mistaken if they think they can just launch an animation studio and start churning out consistent box office winners like DreamWorks.

This morning, an anonymous commenter on the Animation Guild blog posted a list of thirty properties currently optioned or in development at DreamWorks. The list is printed below. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but I’ve heard of at least half of the projects on the list. Allowing for some fluctuations in the nebulous nature of options and development, it appears to be fairly accurate.

This list to me is indicative of the infrastructure that DreamWorks has built and the underlying strength of the company. In spite of personal reservations about the creative content of the studio’s films, it would be foolish to not acknowledge that the studio has one of the strongest creative foundations of any animation company currently in operation. It would take Paramount years, if not decades, to develop as robust a development slate as DreamWorks. In nearly a decade of operations, Sony Pictures Animation has managed to release a handful of middling features and doesn’t appear to have a development slate anywhere near the size of DreamWorks’s.

I don’t think anybody on the outside knows for certain how the deal between DreamWorks and Paramount will conclude, but looking at what DreamWorks Animation has achieved, I’d like to believe that the cards are stacked in its favor over the long term.

What follows is the list of DreamWorks films in development:

Puss in Boots
Madagascar 3
Rise of the Guardians
The Croods
Turbo
Me and My Shadow
Mr. Peabody & Sherman
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Pig Scrolls
InterWorld
Dinotrux
Gil’s All Fright Diner
Good Luck Trolls
Boo U
Truckers
Imaginary Enemies
Trollhunters
Alma
Maintenance
Monkeys of Mumbai
Lidsville
Flawed Dogs
Rumblewick
The Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie
Madagascar 4
How to Train Your Dragon 3
Kung Fu Panda 3, 4, 5, 6

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink |

In another sign of Hollywood’s slow recognition of animation as a money-making powerhouse: Paramount Pictures announced today the formation of a new in-house animation studio to create animated features, mainly (but not entirely) in conjunction with its Nickelodeon Movies unit. Their goal is one feature per year.

Paramount has been releasing Dreamworks Animation films for the last several years, but that arrangement is said to be ending. Warner Bros. is a potential distributor for Dreamworks post-2012. Disney, which is distributing Dreamworks live action movies, will never touch the Dreamworks Animation films.

Paramount has been releasing Nickelodeon Movies animated features – as well as films spawned by other Viacom Networks, MTV (Beavis and Butt-head) and Comedy Central (South Park) – for years now. The success of ILM/Nick’s Rango this past spring, and the potential of the forthcoming Spielberg/ Jackson Tintin movie has spurred this new division.

Longtime readers of this site know that Paramount has long ties with animation, going back to the 1917. It’s relationship with Max Fleischer was its most significant commitment to the form (yielding Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman and Gulliver’s Travels, and its in-house Famous Studios created Casper the Friendly Ghost). Paramount released several Hanna Barbera and Peanuts features in the 1970s and 80s, and had a long series of Nick spin-offs (Rugrats, Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron, etc.) since.

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