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Today’s news from around the industry:

→ Buzzco Creates Animation for TED’s Ted Ed Initiative

→ Cartoon Network Promotes Jason DeMarco to VP of Strategic Marketing & Promotions

→ “Transformers Prime: One Shall Stand” Coming to DVD on July 31, 2012 from Shout! Factory

→ “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: Series 2, Season 2″ Coming to DVD on July 10, 2012

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Today’s news from around the industry, only on CB Biz:

→ Pixar Releases Upcoming Film Slate at CinemaCon

→ Columbia College Chicago Honors Outstanding Alumni At Commencement Ceremonies, Including Disney Animator Marlon West

→ The One Club Announces Judging Panel For 4th Annual One Show Awards

→ Anaheim’s Promenade Gallery Hosts Disneyland-themed “Rat Trap Gallery” Show

→ New Zealand Animation/VFX Company Toybox Hires Bruce Carter & Leoni Willis

→ DreamWorks Animation Releases iOs App For “Rise of the Guardians”

→ Korea Announces Government Funding For Dubbing Of Korean Films For Foreign Release

→ Call For Entries: Philadelphia Film & Animation Festival

→ Call For Entries: Athens Animation Festival

→ New York Int’l Children’s Festival Invited Adults For Claymation Workshop Benefit For Scholarship Program

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Quick reminder: we’re soon going to begin accepting submissions for the 3rd annual Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival. Last year’s selections were fantastic and we’re planning to put together another showcase of outstanding student animation from around the globe. If you’re finishing up a student film this year, we hope you’ll submit to Cartoon Brew’s festival. Any student film completed after May 1, 2011 and not yet posted on-line is eligible. Full details coming soon!

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This past month we not only commemorated Cartoon Brew’s eighth anniversary, we also achieved the highest month of traffic in our site’s history. The twenty posts below were the individual posts that you viewed most frequently during March. Three of the posts, including the top one, were related to Glen Keane’s departure from Disney, but the pageviews were spread out across plenty of other big stories as well.

1. EXCLUSIVE: The Full Text of Glen Keane’s Disney Resignation Letter
2. The Sweatbox, The Documentary That Disney Doesn’t Want You to See
3. Digital Domain’s John Textor Brags to Investors About Exploiting Animation Student Labor
4. The Poster For The Walt Disney Biopic You’ll Never See
5. The Failure of John Carter and Analyzing Andrew Stanton
6. Why Kids Today Think Disney Was A Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist
7. How Much Money Animated Shorts Earn on YouTube
8. BREAKING: Glen Keane Left Disney Today
9. First Look at Genndy Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania
10. Ricky Garduno, RIP
11. Pete Docter’s Flipbook Animation Set
12. Dick Clark is Selling His Flintstones Home
13. FIRST LOOK: Rise of the Guardians Trailer
14. Let’s Cast the Walt Disney Biopic
15. An Open Letter to Glen Keane
16. EXCLUSIVE: Nickelodeon’s New Shorts Program
17. Frankenweenie Teaser
18. Japanese Brave trailer
19. Brad Bird on Ollie Johnston
20. The Lorax Talkback

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Through the first 70 days of 2012, we’re averaging 2.8 posts per day on Cartoon Brew’s homepage. That’s not counting all the posts on our industry news section CB Biz. For the curious reader, here are Cartoon Brew’s most viewed and most commented posts through the first two-and-a-half months of 2012.

MOST VIEWED POSTS IN 2012
1. Ricky Garduno, RIP
2. A Tale of Two Titmouses: A Cartoon Brew Investigation
3. Preview: 2012 US Animated Features
4. Why Kids Today Think Walt Disney was a Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist
5. Web Premiere: “Wild Life” by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
6. Stephen Colbert’s Must-See Interview with Maurice Sendak
7. Rediscovered: Long-Lost Version of “The Hobbit” by Gene Deitch
8. The End of the Creator-Driven Era in Animation
9. Out of Context Animation
10. Ghostshrimp Exposes the Hypocrisy of Cartoon Network

MOST COMMENTED POSTS IN 2012
1. A Tale of Two Titmouses: A Cartoon Brew Investigation – 350 comments
2. Ghostshrimp Exposes the Hypocrisy of Cartoon Network – 135 comments
3. New Brave Trailer – “The Prize” – 112 comments
4. Lou Dobbs Says “The Lorax” and “Arrietty” Indoctrinate Children – 100 comments
5. My Favorite Super Bowl Commercial – 95 comments
6. The Oscars: Animated Feature Nominees – 90 comments
7. Academy Award Talkback; RANGO and MORRIS LESSMORE win – 86 comments
8. Joe Murray’s Kaboing Goes Kaput – 75 comments
9. “The Adventures of Tintin” Wins Golden Globe – 74 comments
10. How Cartoon Brew Spawned Bronies – 68 comments

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Have an animated film or a piece of news to share? Here are some helpful tips for submitting to Cartoon Brew:

* If you are submitting an item, DO NOT SUBMIT using our personal contact forms or Twitter accounts. Submissions via our personal forms will be junked. Use our SUGGEST A STORY form, which is conveniently located in the right sidebar.

* An easier way to get our attention is to submit items via Cartoon Brew’s Facebook page. The benefit is that even if we can’t post it, it becomes part of the public discussion among nearly 5,000 Brew readers. Our FB page is quite active and we both both haunt it regularly.

* If you have a company press release, submit it to our CB BIZ news editor Chris at PR [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com

* Do not send links to film fundraising campaigns.We haven’t linked to a single fundraising campaign in over 18 months. That includes Kickstarter, IndieGogo and all their imitators. We instituted the no-fundraising policy as a fair way of dealing with the barrage of requests. If a film project is newsworthy for a reason other than the fact that it needs money, we may write about it AFTER the fundraising campaign is over, or we’ll post about the project without promoting the fundraising effort.

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Join Cartoon Brew this Monday, October 3, for a FREE screening of this year’s selections in Cartoon Brew’s Student Animation Festival. Sure, you can see them all on-line (we’re posting the last one this Monday), but we think the films are even cooler viewed with an audience on a giant HD-format LED screen against the side of a building in midtown Manhattan.

We’re putting on the show in collaboration with the fine film purveyors at the Big Screen Plaza who have been hosting a solid line-up of animation and live-action films all summer long. Most of the films they show are professional productions, and we’re extremely delighted that they’re celebrating the quality of these student productions alongside their other programs.

Screening starts at 7pm and the location is 851 6th Avenue (between 29th and 30th St., behind the Eventi Hotel). If you’re coming from work and hungry, rest assured there’s an indoor cafe where you can grab a bite before or during the screening. And if you see Amid, say hi. (He’s friendly as long as you don’t talk about animation with him.) Here’s the Facebook invite page.

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We’ve updated our new one-stop guide for short filmmakers. More international animation festivals and submission deadlines have been added to the list. We’ve also created a section of additional resources with links about posting your short film online and rules for qualifying films for the 2011 Oscar consideration. (Hint: If you want to do the latter, you don’t have much time left.) Bookmark the page because it’s going to grow in the coming months. And if you’re a short filmmaker, let us know what you’d like to see added to the page.

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One of the questions that we get asked most frequently is, Which animation festivals should I submit my animated short to? Withoutabox offers an unedited list of thousands of regional and niche film festivals, but there’s no clear hierarchy of which festivals are important to the animation community. Considering the time and expense required to submit films, we thought it would be helpful to create a simple guide for filmmakers who wish to participate in the most significant animation festivals around the globe. So, let us introduce Cartoon Brew’s Animation Festival Guide.

We’ll update the list regularly with submission deadlines, and add more international animation festivals to the list. We encourage festival organizers to keep us up to date. Though the list will grow, it will also remain carefully curated to include only major international festivals that have diverse programming slates and invite guests and attendees from around the world. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and unedited list of every film festival in the world, there are other places to find that.

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Are you following Cartoon Brew on Twitter and Facebook? Both communities have grown a lot in the past few months and we’d love to have you be a part of them too.

And if you prefer a more personal connection, both of the Brewmasters now have Twitter accounts: @Amid and @JerryBeck.

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We’ve extended the deadline for our 2011 reader poll through this Sunday, August 7. So far, over 2,500 of you have responded. If you read the site, we’d really appreciate if you took a few moments to add your input below.

IMPORTANT: You may take the survey anonymously. However, we are also giving away four $50 Amazon gift certificates. If you would like to be entered into the drawing, include your email address in the last question. We’ll only use the email address to contact you if you are chosen in the drawing. It will not be used for any other purpose.

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Are you following Cartoon Brew on Twitter and Facebook? We’re active on both!

And if you prefer, both of the Brewmasters have Twitter accounts now too. Take your pick: Jerry or Amid.

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The last time we ran a reader survey on this site was five years ago. In that time, our traffic has skyrocketed, and we’ve grown from thousands of readers a day to many tens of thousands. Instead of just numbers, we’d like you to tell us more about yourselves.

Please take a few moments to fill out the survey below. Your input is valuable to us for many reasons. We’re getting ready to embark on a redesign of the site and understanding how you use the site and what you’d like to see more of will help us as we move forward. Your input will also help us to find advertisers who are most suited to your interests. Additionally, we’re ijust plain interested in learning more about who reads the site. We’ll compile the results and share some of the highlights with everyone once the survey is complete.

IMPORTANT: You may take the survey anonymously. However, we are also giving away four $50 Amazon gift certificates. If you would like to be entered into the drawing, include your email address in the last question. We’ll only use the email address to contact you if you are chosen in the drawing. It will not be used for any other purpose. Survey will be closed on July 25, 2011.

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Our first attempt at creating a striking yet subtle animated logo for this year’s Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival didn’t turn out exactly as we’d hoped. We hope the vfx house refunds our $7,000.

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This morning, Cartoon Network announced an agreement with producer Joel Silver and Silver Pictures to develop a live-action feature based on its series Ben 10. Read Cartoon Network’s press release on CB Biz.

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This morning, Walt Disney Feature Animation announced a new CG feature Wreck-It Ralph to be directed by The Simpsons’ Rich Moore. Read Disney’s press release on CB Biz.

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Cartoon Brew is pleased to announce a call for entries for our second annual Student Film Festival. We launched the Student Film Festival last year and the response exceeded our wildest expectations with over 120 entries from around the world.

Our mission for the festival is simple: to share and promote student-produced animated shorts of the highest caliber…the most original, the most thought-provoking, the ones that make us laugh hardest and engage us emotionally. We know that students are producing some of the most exciting work in the animation art form today and we want to show this work to our broad community of industry artists and animation aficionados. This year, not only will our festival selections debut on the Cartoon Brew home page, we’ve also arranged real world screenings of the films at the new TRICKSTER festival in San Diego and at The Cinefamily theater in Los Angeles.

Here’s all the info you need:

RULES

1. It has to be animated. (Obviously.)
2. It has to be a student film. (Even more obvious.)
3. Must have been completed after March 1, 2010.
4. Must be an online premiere. (Films that are accessible online to the public will not be considered.)
5. Submissions due by Tuesday, May 31, 2011

SUBMIT
To submit, send an email to studentfest (at) cartoonbrew (dot) com with the following info:

• Your name, school and country
• Film title and synopsis
• Private link and password (ex: Password-Protected Vimeo link, Private or Unlisted YouTube link, or a website download link).

WHAT HAPPENS IF I’M SELECTED
We will announce the festival selections in early June. Screenings will begin on Cartoon Brew later in June. Every film that is selected to screen as part of the Cartoon Brew Student Film Festival will be paid a screening fee of $300(US). We don’t take any exclusivity over your film. In other words, you are still free to submit to festivals, sell it to distributors, and post it anywhere on-line after its debut in our festival.

ONE FINAL NOTE
Many students are erroneously informed in school that posting their film on-line ruins their festival chances. We’ve explored the issue before by speaking with festival directors and recommend reading this. None of the major animation festivals enforce such a rule today. However, some non-animation festivals, like Sundance, ask that a film be taken off-line during the course of their festival (although we know for a fact that they have not enforced the rule in the past). As far as we know, the only awards organization that strictly demands films remain off-line is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, so if you’re trying to qualify for a Student Academy Award, you don’t want to post your film on-line.

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Cartoon Brew is growing. We’re currently hiring a Sales Account Executive. More details after the jump:

The qualified candidate should be ready to engage with agencies and advertisers to deliver great value for their brands. The candidate will need exceptional communication skills and a strong record of relationship building with agencies and/or direct advertiser contacts. This candidate should have a proven track record of successful digital advertising sales performance, solid negotiation skills and an understanding of media math. Knowledge of the animation industry a definite PLUS. We are looking for a self-starter who can get up to speed quickly, work independently and as part of a team. Candidate must have a minimum of 1+ year(s) Internet sales experience. May work remotely, but will preferably be based in NY or LA.

To apply, please contact us with your resume and contact details at jobs [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com

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We are happy to announce that a new member has joined Cartoon Brew’s editorial team. Chris Arrant is the editor of CB Biz where he curates a daily collection of breaking news releases from across the industry. His addition to our editorial team addresses one of the most common requests we receive, which is to offer a broader spectrum of straight industry coverage. His posts can be conveniently accessed via the INDUSTRY HEADLINES box in the right-hand column.

A little more about him: Chris Arrant is a freelance writer specializing in comics, animation and film. In addition to being the editor of CB Biz for CartoonBrew.com, he writes about entertainment for Newsarama.com, MTVGeek.Com, CBR’s Robot 6 blog, iFanboy.com and Marvel’s Marvel Spotlight magazine and website. He is also a published comics writer, writing 2008’s Female Force: Princess Diana and doing stories in anthologies such as Tori Amos’ Comic Book Tattoo, 24seven Vol. 2 and Negative Burn.

Publicists may submit their press releases directly to Chris at the following e-mail: PR [at] cartoonbrew [dot] com

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During the past few months, we’ve experienced a triple fold increase in reader comments on Cartoon Brew which has meant a lot more moderation work for us. We appreciate and encourage your participation, but as a respectful community of animation lovers, we request that you follow a few basic guidelines. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with those guidelines HERE. Better yet, we’ll save you a click and just reprint them below:

* Comments are moderated and will not appear immediately on the site. Please be patient.

* Be considerate and respectful of others in the discussion. Defamatory, rude or unnecessarily antagonistic comments will be deleted.

* It is OK to post with a nickname or alias, but your email address (which we will NEVER share publicly), must be a real, permanent email address.

* Stay on-topic. Comments are not a place to post random thoughts, “say hi,” or discuss ideas not directly related to the post.

* Short comments that don’t add anything to the discussion (for example, “Blecch” or “This sucks”) may be deleted without comment. Also beware the word “meh”; we know you can do better than that.

* The comments are a place for discussion, not promotion. Self-links are okay if they’re acknowledged as such and are relevant to the discussion.

* A half-dozen comments on a single topic are unnecessary. Think about what you want to say and say it once. You can influence a discussion by the quality of your writing, not by how many times you repeat yourself.

* Spelling and grammar count. Numerous egregious spelling/grammatical errors will result in deletion of comment.

* Comments should NOT have signatures. There are fields provided for your name and the URL of your site right above the comment text area, so please don’t duplicate that info in your actual comment.

* If you are recommending or discussing something, disclose any relationship you may have to the artist, film project or company. This includes friends, family, co-workers, employers, etc.

* We reserve the right to edit or delete comments at our sole discretion.

NOTE: On rare occasions, your comments become caught in our spam filter and are inadvertently deleted. Unfortunately, due to the sheer volume of spam, sorting out legitimate comments is beyond our control. If your comments are persistently caught in our spam filtering system, please contact us via our tech support page and we’ll look into it.

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It’s the time of month where we take a moment to thank the companies that are currently advertising on Cartoon Brew. Our major site sponsors for March 2011 are:

Animation Mentor

Amazon Studios

Max the Mutt Animation School

The Cinefamily

If your business is looking to reach the largest and most knowledgeable on-line community of animation pros, students and fans, please contact our friendly ad rep, Reachout Media.

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Today on Cartoon Brew Biz:

* New On-Line School: Entertainment Arts Academy

* Starz Animation Toronto Opens VFX wing

* Zoo Atlanta names newborn panda after character in “Kung Fu Panda 2″

* Tokyo International Anime Fair Announces 10th Annual Event

Read more CartoonBrew.com/biz

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist Berkeley Breathed Brings Flawed Dogs to DreamWorks Animation

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Today on Cartoon Brew Biz:

* 2011 SXSW Film Festival announces animated shorts line-up

* J.J. Sedelmaier to speak at Society of Illustrators

* Anime Dream Eater Merry gets U.S. Distribution

* Anime series Cat Shit One posted on YouTube for free viewing

Read more CartoonBrew.com/biz

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It’s the time of month where we take a moment to thank the companies that have chosen to advertise on Cartoon Brew. It’s awards season and our two biggest sponsors this month are the Walt Disney Company and Universal Pictures. We appreciate each and every company’s support, and we encourage our readers to spend some [...]