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The Eighties are back in a big way. Totally rad!

The post A New Villain, Balthazar Bratt, Steals the Show In ‘Despicable Me 3’ Trailer appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The new "Powerpuff Girls" revival gets its first Emmy nod, and so does the last episode of "Phineas and Ferb."

The post 2016 Emmy Nominations: Just the Animation Categories, Please appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Is the Peabody Awards the only prestigious awards event that actually 'gets' animation?

These cartoonists stood up against intimidation and fought for their right to freedom of expression. Let us celebrate their victories.

“This is, flat out, one of the best Hollywood memoirs ever written… An absolute treasure,” raves Booklist in a starred review of Norman Lear’s memoir, Even This I Get to Experience.

The creator of such iconic and unprecedented hit shows as “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “Good Times,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” Lear reinvented television comedy in the ‘70s. At one point, he had nine shows on the air, and at their peak, his programs were watched by 120 million people a week.

Now, Lear is telling his story, from his Depression-era days growing up with a dad sent to jail for scheming to sell fake bonds, to becoming the highest-paid comedy writer in the country, working for Danny Thomas, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Martha Raye, and George Gobel. A member of a B-17 bomber crew in WWII, Lear made it onto Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and was presented with the National Medal of the Arts by President Clinton.

Dave Itzkoff, writing about Even This I Get to Experience in the New York Times, cites Lear’s influence on Roseanne Barr, Rob Reiner, and Trey Parker. Itzkoff quotes Parker, creator and producer of “South Park” with Matt Stone, as saying that Lear’s work “had an immeasurable impact on that show and its satirical, scared-cow-slaughtering sensibility.”

Now, in his book out today from Penguin Press, we all can read of the events and people that had an immeasurable impact on Norman Lear, and shaped his sensibility.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This is a great presentation from South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker on plotting using the key words “but” and “therefore.” It’s brilliant. Watch it.

Whether it be for lack of budget or a desire to take center stage, series creators lending their own voices to their animated television shows has always been fairly commonplace – Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill), John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy), Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) and Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park) immediately spring to mind. However, in recent years, more and more feature directors have started getting in on the trend. From throwaway one-liners to continuous roles throughout entire franchises, here is a list of some animation directors and the characters they brought to life in their own films.

1. Eric Goldberg

As the animation director for Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Goldberg not only supervised the animation of the WB’s classic characters but he voiced some of them as well. Goldberg recorded the dialogue of Marvin the Martian, Tweety Bird and Speedy Gonzalez.

2. Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud

The distinctive sputters, spurts and high-speed mutterings of The Minions in Despicable Me (2010) and Despicable Me 2 (2013) belong to the films’ co-directors Pierre Coffin (above left) and Chris Renaud. And as the character’s popularity grows, so does their vocal commitment, as the two will reprise their roles in next year’s prequel Minions.

3. Ralph Bakshi

In his debut film Fritz the Cat (1972), director Ralph Bakshi voiced one of the boorish antagonist Pig Cops, who is also referred to as “Ralph” multiple times in his scenes.

4. Brad Bird

Agnes Gooch, Edith Head, Patricia Highsmith, Linda Hunt – when it comes to figuring out who inspired the character of Edna Mode, people love to toss out many names, but in the end, the cutthroat designer of superhero fashion was brought to life by The Incredibles (2004) director Brad Bird.

5. Rich Moore

Rich Moore, director of Wreck-It Ralph (2012) provided the dreary monotone of acidic jawbreaker Sour Bill, the henchman to the bombastic King Candy.

6. Richard Williams

Even to this day, the toon celebrity cameos in Who Framed Roger Rabbit(1988) remain some of the best nods to the golden age of cartoons, especially that of Droopy Dog, who gets his opportunity to best Eddie Valiant with some traditional ‘toon high-jinks as a tricky elevator operator, sluggishly voiced by the film’s animation director Richard Williams.

7. Chris Wedge

What began as the high-strung snivels and snarls of Scrat in Ice Age (2002) has become a second career for director Chris Wedge who has gone on to vocally personify the prehistoric rodent in 3 sequels, 6 short films, 2 video games and in a walk-on role in an episode of Family Guy.

8. Chris Miller

Royal messengers, tower guards, army commanders, friars and penguins, story artist Chris Miller has lent his voice-over skills to numerous animated films, most notably his returning roles as Geppetto and The Magic Mirror in the Shrek franchise, including Shrek the Third (2007), which he co-directed.

9. Mark Dindal

The often ignored and underrated animated film Cats Don’t Dance (1997) features some beautiful hand-drawn work and stellar vocal performances, including that of director Mark Dindal as the tight-lipped bodyguard/butler Max.

10. Joe Ranft

Pixar story artist, the late Joe Ranft, brought a handful of memorable animated characters to life, including Heimlich (A Bug’s Life), Wheezy the Penguin (Toy Story 2) and Jacques the Cleaner Shrimp (Finding Nemo). But it was in Cars (2006), which he co-directed, that he voiced three characters including the semi-truck Jerry Recycled Batteries.

11. Chris Sanders

In Lilo & Stitch (2002) co-director Chris Sanders takes on the nuanced role of Alien Experiment 626, aka “Stitch,” who escapes from an intergalactic prison only to find himself trapped on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

12. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard

Nathan Greno (above right) and Byron Howard not only paired up as co-directors of Tangled (2010) but also doubled as duos of Thugs and Guards in the animated picture.

13. John Lasseter

With five features under his belt, John Lasseter has had plenty of opportunity to throw himself behind the microphone, however upon review of his filmography, you’ll find he has chosen his roles very carefully, as the role of John Lassetire in Cars 2 (2011) and the hilariously bug-zapped Harry the Mosquito in A Bug’s Life (1998).

I’ve always known that South Park is produced on an uncommonly fast production schedule, but I never realized how brutal that schedule is until I watched The Making of South Park: 6 Days to Air. The 42-minute documentary, which debuted last fall on Comedy Central, is currently available to view on Netflix streaming, which is where I saw it.

The bulk of the behind-the-scenes footage was filmed over the course of a week in April 2011 as Trey Parker and Matt Stone worked on the season 15 premiere episode “HumancentiPad.” Directed by Arthur Bradford, the film is filtered through the experiences of Parker and Stone, who lead the writing and production team through the show’s insane six-day production schedule, in which an entire half-hour episode is written, recorded, and animated entirely in Los Angeles. To put that into perpsective, most other animated TV shows have production cycles that last anywhere between 3 to 10 months, and are animated in far-flung studios halfway around the world. It’s understandable why South Park seasons are broken down into seven-week cycles because it’s hard to imagine them maintaining that pressure cooker environment for fourteen weeks in a row.

The production schedule, however, also plays a role in the show’s ability to remain timely and relevant in a way that few other animated shows could ever hope to be. In many ways, the pace of production—and resulting comedy—resembles live-action productions like Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and other late-night talkshows. Parker, who is the show’s primary writer, discussed how the discipline of a tight schedule prevented him from overthinking ideas:

“I always feel like, ‘Wow I wish I had another day with this show.’ That’s the reason that there’s so many episodes of South Park we’re able to get done because there just is a deadline and you can’t keep going. Because there’d be so many shows that I’m like, ‘No no it’s not ready yet, not ready,’ and I would have spent four weeks on one show. All you do is start second guessing yourself and rewriting stuff and it’s get overthought and it would have been 5 percent better.”

Also surprising was how creatively involved Parker and Stone remain in their creation. After sixteen seasons, they are still calling the shots, and they don’t appear to have surrendered their creativity to the big Hollywood machine. Compare that to a show like The Simpsons, which is run by a gaggle of writers and producers, and would probably roll along fine even if its creator Matt Groening ceased his involvement.

The documentary left me with some questions, too. For example, I had always considered Trey Parker and Matt Stone to be equal creative partners, but Bradford’s film portrays Parker as the captain of the ship. In fact, it’s never made implicity clear what Stone does while Parker is working on the script. Clearly, their collaboration works, but I would have liked to see their unique partnership explored further.

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