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Pop culture references abound in the new teaser trailer for The LEGO Movie directed by the creative team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Clone High TV series, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street). Warner Bros. will release the film in the U.S. on February 7, 2014. The highlight in this teaser is the animation, which has the chunky staccato rhythms one might expect of LEGOs animated in stop motion though it is actually achieved through computer animation.

And here it is…the teaser trailer for Disney’s Frozen:

SEE ALSO: First Stills From Disney’s Frozen

USA Today published an article this afternoon with these five stills from Frozen, the Disney studio’s adaptatation of The Snow Queen that will open on November 27, 2013.

Disney announced this afternoon that they will release Planes: Fire & Rescue as a 3D theatrical feature on July 18, 2014. The film is a sequel to Planes, itself a spin-off of Pixar’s Cars, that will open in theaters on August 9. Both of the Planes films are produced by Disneytoon, the John Lasseter-run division that handles all the projects that Pixar and Disney Feature won’t touch with a ten-foot-pole. It should also be noted that Planes 2 wasn’t among the 15-feature release slate that Disney announced last month so we can only guess how many more Disneytoon features will flood theaters over the coming years in addition to the Disney and Pixar features.

(via Deadline)

It’s always fascinating to see how the animation process is explained to the general public. Here’s the latest example: actor Steve Carell, who was last seen dressed as a cartoon character, talks about the making of Despicable Me 2.

The Hollywood Reporter published a lengthy piece that suggests an impending feature animation war:

The unprecedented glut of product points to a seismic shift in the animation business as new players such as Universal and Sony finally gain a stronghold and established companies like DreamWorks Animation, Fox, Disney Animation Studios and Pixar up their games. Family franchises can be incredibly lucrative if done right — between global theatrical sales (particularly international), home entertainment and merchandising. Pixar’s Cars franchise, for example, moved north of $10 billion in merchandise alone. If they don’t work, studios can lose tens upon tens of millions, with hundreds of jobs at risk.

Late last month, Pixar and Disney Animation chief creative officer John Lasseter essentially declared war on Katzenberg by dating a slew of untitled Pixar and Disney Animation Studios films through 2018, going so far as to claim June 17, 2016, even though DWA already had put How to Train Your Dragon 3 there. Never before have a Pixar and DWA movie gone up against one another. Katzenberg and Fox, where Vanessa Morrison heads up Fox Animation Studios, retaliated by flooding the calendar through 2018 with their own untitled films, even planting one on June 16, 2017, a Pixar date.

The Reporter doesn’t have all their facts straight. They wrote that, “For the past handful of years, there have been no more than four or five studio animated films a year, plus a handful of indie titles. There are eight releases this year and 10 next year.” However, there have easily been eight to ten major studio animation releases per year in recent times. Just take a look at the 2011 and 2012 release slates.

Of course, the other argument is that there aren’t too many tentpole animated features, only too many features that are cut from the same cloth. Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks and Blue Sky each use their own finely tuned formulas, and audiences are guaranteed to tire of those sooner than they do of animation itself.

The Congress, the experimental animation/live-action hybrid by Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), has nabbed itself a North American distributor. The deal is a co-acquisition between Drafthouse Films and Films We Like, with Drafthouse handling the U.S. theatrical and VOD/digital release in 2014 and Films We Like covering distribution for Canada.

The opening film of last month’s the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, The Congress is a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, about an aging actress preserving her digital image for a future Hollywood. It stars Robin Wright, Jon Hamm, Paul Giamatti and Harvey Keitel.

DreamWorks Animation is moving into live-action. At a Beijing news conference last week, Jeffrey Katzenberg announced a co-production agreement between Oriental DreamWorks and the Chinese state-owned China Film Group Corp. The deal will result in a movie franchise based on the bestselling Chinese book series Tibet Code.

Katzenberg said that the film will become “China’s Indiana Jones,” while China Film Group chairman Han Sanping proclaimed that the film’s “characters represent traditional Chinese culture and Chinese morality.”

The Wall Street Journal offers the most in-depth piece I’ve read about the new Tibet Code deal. In the same article, they report that Oriental DreamWorks is taking the lead on the production of Kung Fu Panda 3.

Annecy, the longest-running and largest animation fesival, has announced the feature film selections for their upcoming festival in June. Nine films were chosen to compete for the Cristal award for feature film, which will be decided by a jury consisting of producer Didier Brunner (Les Armateurs), Cartoon Network exec Brian Miller and director Robert Morgan (The Cat with Hands, The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph). An additional fourteen features will screen out of competition.

Marcel Jean, the festival’s artistic director, said of this year’s feature selections:

“Many films have been created in a totally independent way, using traditional means, which illustrates the change in production habits that is opening the way for smaller companies and happening at the same moment as the production of digital 3D features is becoming more accessible. Japanese production has also particularly stood out through the number and quality of science fiction, horror or genre films.”

Feature Films—In Competition

• Arjun, The Warrior Prince
  Directed by Arnab Chaudhuri (India)

Feature Films—Out of Competition

• After School Midnighters
  Directed by Hitoshi Takekiyo (Japan)

South Korean director Jin Sung Choi (Tom N Jerry, Entering the Mind Through the Mouth

Chun Jaeyoung and Chun Yusun visit the unusual drama company, which produces the customized play for each client. They ask the boss of the troupe to make the play for their father, Chun Jongsik, who is having his 70th birthday. The boss creates the customized play through interviews with their father and his acquaintances. In the play, Chun Jongsik, experiences fiction and truth from the past, and realizes what he has done and what he has been feeling sincerely,and eventually faces the trauma that has harassed him.

The film is being made with a crew of just a half-dozen artists, but you’d never guess how small the team by looking at the film’s lush, complex visual style:

(via Catsuka)

The Walt Disney Company has offered a first look at their upcoming animated superhero feature, Big Hero 6, an adaptation of an obscure Marvel Comics property of the same name. The CG film, directed by Disney veteran Don Hall (director, Winnie the Pooh; story supervisor, The Princess and the Frog), is described as “an action comedy adventure about brilliant robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, who finds himself in the grips of a criminal plot that threatens to destroy the fast-paced, high-tech city of San Fransokyo. With the help of his closest companion — a robot named Baymax — Hiro joins forces with a reluctant team of first-time crime fighters on a mission to save their city.”

While Big Hero 6 has a release date of November 7, 2014 you can take the sneak peek-iest of sneek peeks below:

A promising trailer was released today for The Congress, the new live-action/animated hybrid directed by Waltz with Bashir helmer Ari Folman. The film will premiere this Thursday at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival. No theatrical release dates have been set so far beyond France, where it will open on July 3.

The Congress is loosely adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, and follows an aging actress (Robin Wright) who agrees to sell a digital version of herself to a movie studio with the stipulation that she can never act again. The live-action portions of the film also star Harvey Keitel, Jon Hamm, and Paul Giamatti.

The film was produced as a co-production between Israel, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Luxembourg, but the creative heavylifting appears to have been done in Israel. Folman’s collaborators on Bashir rejoined him for this film, including animation director Yoni Goodman, production designer David Polonsky
, editor Nili Feller, composer Max Richter and sound designer Aviv Aldema. The Israeli paper Haaretz offers an in-depth article about how the film was conceived and produced.

I returned a few days ago from the Czech Republic where I judged the feature film categories at Anifilm, a fun festival filled with great people and positive energy that is situated in the quaint lakeside resort town of Trebon. The three-person feature film jury consisted of Portuguese filmmaker Regina Pessoa (Tragic Story with Happy Ending, Kali the Little Vampire), Slovenian festival director Igor Prassel (Animateka International Animated Film Festival) and myself. (That’s us in the photo above.)

The Anifilm organizers smartly divided features into two categories: adult and children’s films. We watched five films in each category. In the Adult category, we awarded the top prize to Chris Sullivan’s sweeping and uncompromising Southern Gothic tale Consuming Spirits, and also gave special mention to Don Hertzfeldt’s feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day. These two films alone don’t make a trend, but add Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip and Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues to the list, and you could argue that American indie feature animation is experiencing a renaissance right now. All of these films utilize animation effectively to express deeply personal visions.

The other three features in the Adult category—O Apóstolo from Spain, A Liar’s Autobiography from the United Kingdom and Fat Bald Short Man from Colombia—each had positive qualities and exhibited the kind of maturity and narrative ambition that is often lacking in mainstream feature animation fare.

The children’s category was less impressive. The five features were European co-productions that relied on cliches borrowed from popular American films. Three of the films featured hot air balloons (UP, of course), and a number of them used the ‘dead parents’ trope that is an all-too-common fallback for lazy animation scriptwriters. We awarded the children’s prize to The Day of Crows (Le jour des corneilles) which was unquestionably the most interesting film of the bunch. The hand-drawn animated film featured appealing (if inconsistent) animation and character designs, along with gorgeous backgrounds. It reached for Miyazaki-style mysticism before attempting to hamhandedly explain everything in the last act. Imperfect, but worth a look.

Animation director Bill Plympton wrote about his recent experience judging the feature animation categories at the Stuttgart Animation Festival in Germany. He watched eight features at that festival, and it’s interesting to note that not a single one of those films was in competition at Anifilm. It’s a reminder that feature animation is a flourishing art form today. The handful of mega-budget corporate-studio films that dominate American multiplexes barely scratch the surface of what’s available in the marketplace.

The good news is that institutional support is growing for more diverse types of feature animation. Most major animation festivals now have feature film categories, and of course, there’s the Oscars, which hands out an Academy Award specifically for animated features. The American distributor GKIDS has made a commitment to distributing foreign animated features, and this site you’re reading attempts to cover independent and foreign animated features as few other major animation media outlets have in the past.

More and more companies are turning their attention to the rich world of feature animation, but there is still plenty of room for others to join. For example, when will Criterion begin releasing art house animated features? When will distributors bring foreign animated features into multiplexes across the country? Exciting times are ahead in the feature animation field.

(Jury photo by Jan Hromádko)

Blue Sky’s eighth feature film, Epic, directed by Chris Wedge and based on a book by children’s author Bill Joyce, opens in the United States today. Reception to the film has been fair to middling. The film currently owns a 63% critics’ rating and 74% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Stephen Holden in the NY Times sums up the majority viewpoint: “As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.”

Check out the film and report back here with your opinion in the comments below. As always, this talkback is open only to those who have seen the film and wish to share an opinion about it.

(Billboard via Daily Billboard)

Blue Sky’s Epic, directed by Chris Wedge, opened its U.S. box office run in fourth place with a respectable weekend take of $33.5 million. If you add in earnings from Monday, which was a holiday in the States, Epic’s 4-day total stands at $42.8M.

The film was based on a story by children’s author/illustrator Bill Joyce, whose movie projects have had difficulty capturing the attention of audiences. Similarly, Epic is the weakest opening ever for a Blue Sky feature. While Epic outperformed the dismal openings of the last two films based on Joyce properties—DreamWorks’ Rise of the Guardians ($23.8M) and Disney’s Meet the Robinsons ($25.1M)—it still failed to match the opening weekend of the Blue Sky/Bill Joyce collaboration Robots which had a 3-day total of $36 million in 2005.

Fox president of dommestic distribution, Chris Aronson, was optimistic about the film’s long-term potential, telling the Hollywood Reporter, “I think it’s a fantastic start. We have a four week run before Monsters University opens, and I’m very bullish on where Epic goes.”

In other box office news, after ten weeks in theaters, DreamWorks’ The Croods continues to show great legs and remains in the top ten. The film took ninth place last weekend with $1.2 million. As of yesterday, its U.S. total stands at $179.6 million and its foreign total is $383.4 million for a grand total of $563 million.

Finally, GKIDS is headed for its first million dollar-grossing release in the U.S. with Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill. The film earned $17,281 last weekend pushing its grand total to $958,610.

This afternoon, Disney announced release dates for all of its animated features produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar through 2018. The two studios will be responsible for fifteen theatrical releases over the next six years. During the previous six-year period (2007-2012), Disney and Pixar released a total of 12 films.

Here’s what we know so far based on available information:

• Pixar’s Monsters University – June 21, 2013

(via @ERCboxoffice and /Film)

In its second weekend at the U.S. box office, Blue Sky’s Epic plummeted a troubling 51.1% for an estimated take of $16.4 million. The week two drop is far more substantial than other recent animated originals like Wreck-It Ralph (-32.7%), Hotel Transylvania (-36.4%), and The Croods (-38.8%). Even the DreamWorks dud Rise of the Guardians only dropped 43.7% in its second weekend. In the U.S., Epic has grossed $65.1 million and could potentially become Blue Sky’s lowest-grossing domestic feature.

The LA Times notes that Epic has also struggled to connect with overseas audiences. Craig Dehmel, a Fox v-p, suggested to the Times that, “Epic is unique and a more complex story than much of the typical animated fare and that can sometimes make it more challenging for international audiences to discover.” The film expanded into 57 international territories last weekend, but managed to pull in just $28.5 million for a fourth-place finish. Its foreign total is now $86.3 million.

The final trailer (in Spanish) was released today for the Argentinian/Spanish animated feature Metegol (Foosball). The US$21 million film may be most interesting for its unconventional director, Juan José Campanella, whose last film El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. He is also a veteran director of American TV series like House M.D., Law & Order and 30 Rock.

As of mid-May, the film’s producers were still negotiating for an American theatrical release, but Metegol is set to open this summer and fall in Argentina, Peru, Spain, Russia, Turkey, the Middle East and Brazil, among other territories. For more, visit the film’s official website or its Facebook page.

Here’s a new way of promoting an animated movie: having a voice actor dress up as their character for a talk show appearance. That’s what Steve Carell did on The Ellen DeGeneres Show last week when he appeared as Despicable Me 2′s Gru.

(Thanks, Jen Hurler, via Cartoon Brew’s News Submission Forum)

Polish CG/VFX studio Platige Image, producer of acclaimed shorts such as Paths of Hate, Fallen Art, and The Cathedral, is currently in production on its first feature, Another Day of Life. The film will challenge audience’s perceptions of what types of stories can be told through animation. It is based on the book of the same name by renegade Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, who, according to another one of his books that I own, “befriended Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, and Patrice Lumumba; witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions; and was sentenced to death four times.”

The film, an animation/live-action hybrid, will recount Kapuściński’s life-altering experiences during the Angolan Civil War in 1975. The directors attached to the project are Spanish filmmaker Raul de la Fuente (Nömadak Tx) and Platige’s Damian Nenow (Paths of Hate). Nenow and the producers of the film will discuss the project next week at Annecy.

For more details, go to AnotherDayofLifeFilm.com.

Onyx Films, the Paris-based producer of the fantasy film Upside Down and the low-budget animated sci-fi Renaissance, is currently working on an animated film adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella The Little Prince.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film has now gained a voice cast comprised of James Franco, Rachel McAdams, Jeff Bridges, Benicio Del Toro and Paul Giamatti. More notably, the film is to be directed by Mark Osborne, co-director of Dreamworks’ 2008 hit action-comedy Kung Fu Panda.

Some may consider it unusual for the director of a successful animated film from a major American studio to move on to a project from a small foreign studio, however when you consider the diversity of Osborne’s previous work: live action sequences in Spongebob Squarepants, music video work for “Weird Al” Yankovic and a half-dozen live action and stop motion film projects, it seems like his experience may aid a project of any size.

Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres announced on her show today that Disney-Pixar will make an Andrew Stanton-directed sequel to Finding Nemo called Finding Dory.

Of course, Ellen’s fans went crazy:

Reactions outside of her studio audience were somewhat different:

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the feature directorial debut of Terence Nance. The film mixes live-action with a wide array of animation styles to explore “the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through Terence’s mind as he examines and re-examines a singular moment in time.” After a healthy festival run, Oversimplification was recently picked up for distribution by Variance Films, which will open the film in New York on April 26, and expand to other cities on May 17.

Reel FX and Relativity Media are sparing no expense when it comes to promoting Free Birds, Reel FX’s first animated feature which will be released theatrically in November. At CinemaCon, the Las Vegas convention for theater owners, they unveiled a 3D-printed display of the film’s main characters, who are voiced by Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson. It certainly puts your average cardboard-based theater display to shame, and gives one optimism that they’re putting a high level of effort and care into the actual film itself. These photos of the display appeared on Collider.com.

(h/t, Sarah Marino)

Bibo Bergeron’s A Monster in Paris is releasing on DVD today in the United States through Shout! Factory. The 2011 French animated feature was unable to secure theatrical distribution in the competitive U.S. market, but Bergeron’s earlier directorial efforts will no doubt be familiar to American viewers—DreamWorks’ The Road to El Dorado and Shark Tale. A blog featuring artwork from the A Monster in Paris can be viewed HERE.

Order A Monster in Paris for $10.49 on Amazon.com.