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Some good news to end the year: "Incredibles 2" voice record sessions have started!

The post ‘The Incredibles 2’ Recording Sessions Have Started: Samuel L. Jackson Posts First-Day Photo appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Berkeley, California is the place to be in early March 2017.

The post Brad Bird and Masaaki Yuasa Confirmed As Guests at GLAS 2017 appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Inspiring thoughts from one of the best.

The post Brad Bird In His Own Words appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Check out an exclusive video preview of one of the year's most hotly anticipated animation books.

The post ‘The Art of the Iron Giant’ (Exclusive Video Preview) appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Brad Bird, virtual reality, storyboarding, and true animation legends are part of our must-see Comic-Con events.

The post Comic-Con 2016: Five Must-See Animation Panels appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

It only took Warner Bros. 17 years to do this.

The post Warner Bros. Announces ‘The Iron Giant’ Ultimate Collector’s Edition appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Is your holiday tree lacking that extra special something? Tired of the same old ornaments and toppers? Add an animation director to it.

The post Holiday Decorating Idea: Animation Director Angels appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

"The Iron Giant: Signature Edition," director Brad Bird's remastered masterpiece of war, peace, and paranoia, returns to theaters this Wednesday and Sunday, with new scenes courtesy of Duncan Studio.

If you worked on the film, now would be a good time to share memories and archival materials.

Warner Bros. and director Brad Bird have both confirmed that the anticipated Blu-ray release of 'The Iron Giant: Signature Edition' is indeed on the way.

The signature edition of "Iron Giant" will have its world premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Remastered with two new scenes, Brad Bird's animated masterpiece of war and peace is returning for a very limited engagement.

The silver lining: Brad Bird is returning to animation.

It’s often said that the writers on Lost were just making it up as they went along; weaving the most impossible scenarios into the yarns of the story, hoping an explanation or ending might surface after-the-fact.

If that is, in fact, how Lost was written, it’s easy to argue that Damon Lindelof‘s latest writing venture takes the opposite approach. With a script credited to Lindelof, Jeff Jensen, and director Brad Bird, Tomorrowland feels like a concept or idea (or a philosophy, even) that was fleshed out into 15 minutes of story in the writers’ room. That 15 minutes of story was nestled into the movie’s ending, and 90 minutes of “robots-are-chasing-you-run!” were tacked on ahead of it. A movie that knew where it wanted to go, but had no idea how to get there.

Given the movie’s title and inspiration, it’s awfully hard not to compare it to one of Disney’s rides – waiting more than an hour for an experience that lasts minutes.

The premise of Tomorrowland centers around Casey (Britt Robertson), a rebellious, intelligent teenager who has a knack for understanding how things work. When Casey is gifted a mysterious pin by a child named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), she realizes she has a key to another world where ambitious minds can meet. She enlists the help of a grumpy man named Frank (George Clooney) to help her escape a gang of robots that have started chasing her for the pin (…it’s genuinely as abrupt as it sounds), and they work together to get back to Tomorrowland.

It’s also worth mentioning that several people (primarily bystanders) die on-screen in Tomorrowland, but the violence is glossed over so quickly that it’s simultaneously jarring and forgettable. I’m not opposed to violence showing up in movies, but I prefer if it has a purpose in the story. Here it’s to show that bad robots are bad. Got it? Bad robots. Bad.

It’s not all bad stuff, mind you – the movie’s peak features a Home Alone style house that’s been booby-trapped by Clooney’s character – but after several successful directorial efforts from Bird, including The Incredibles, it’s hard not to consider this one a misfire.

The break-out success of this film, if anything is to be remembered from it, will likely be Robertson’s performance. For a hollow character in a hollow film, Robertson manages to lend enough personal ticks and mannerisms to Casey to make her likable. It may not be a particularly challenging part, but Robertson’s Jennifer-Lawrence-like persona shines through.

Lindelof has already taken to the press to say that this is a movie fanboys will be too cynical to like. While it’s true that Tomorrowland offers a more optimistic look at our future, rather than pining over a world of zombies and destruction, I don’t think it’s the premise that will kill the film’s good will. In fact, I think that’s one of the few and only reasons I’ve seen cited for people enjoying it.

Instead, Tomorrowland spends the majority of it’s running time on bad action (pro-tip: don’t see this movie right after Mad Max: Fury Road) and then decides to clumsily tell, rather than show, its message in a few final moments. Regardless of Lindelof’s claim that this movie isn’t for cynics, the problem isn’t with the viewers. The problem is that a fortune cookie philosophy served at the end of a bad meal doesn’t make the food taste good.

The "Iron Giant" director has revealed that he's not done yet with hand-drawn animation.

The director will be slipping back into the animation spandex very, very soon.

The sequences were originally supposed to appear in the film itself.

A much sought-after piece of animation history has surfaced on YouTube at last.

It is 1939 and Lee, who is on vacation, has been given a mysterious comic book that contains a secret that could change the world. Full of science and intrigue, it all happens in a place called Tomorrowland, and the novel contains the secret comic. Books mentioned in this post Before Tomorrowland Jeff Jensen Sale [...]

Colleagues and admirers are remembering the creative genius of the man who helped create "The Simpsons."

The full trailer for Disney and Brad Bird's 'Tomorrowland' has arrived.

At the Oscars tonight, The Rock called animation a genre. It's not.

"LEGO Movie" Phil Lord and Chris Miller turned down an offer to run Sony Animation because "it’s too hard to do great work there."

New chapters of Mouse in Transition will be published every Friday on Cartoon Brew. It is the story of Disney Feature Animation—from the Nine Old Men to the coming of Jeffrey Katzenberg. Ten lost years of Walt Disney Production’s animation studio, through the eyes of a green animation writer. Steve Hulett spent a decade in Disney Feature Animation’s story department writing animated features, first under the tutelage and supervision of Disney veterans Woolie Reitherman and Larry Clemmons, then under the watchful eye of young Jeffrey Katzenberg. Since 1989, Hulett has served as the business representative of the Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE, a labor organization which represents Los Angeles-based animation artists, writers and technicians. Read Chapter 1: Disney’s Newest Hire Read Chapter 2: Larry Clemmons Read Chapter 3: The Disney Animation Story Crew Read Chapter 4: And Then There Was…Ken! Read Chapter 5: The Marathon Meetings of Woolie Reitherman Read Chapter 6: Detour into Disney History Read Chapter 7: When Everyone Left Disney Read Chapter 8: Mickey Rooney, Pearl Bailey and Kurt Russell “Chief has to DIE,” Ron Clements said. “The picture doesn’t work if he just breaks his LEG. Copper doesn’t have enough motivation to hate the fox.” Ron looked at me intently, shaking his head. He was a supervising animator on The Fox and the Hound, and was just then in the process of making a jump into the story department. He was something of a perfectionist and (for some reason) wanted the story to be better. Ron had worked for a season at Hanna-Barbera and then entered the Disney training program, apprenticing with veteran animator Frank Thomas. Within a decade he would be co-directing Disney’s breakout blockbuster The Little Mermaid, but at this moment he was unhappy with the story arc of The Fox and the Hound. “I agree with you, Ron,” I said. “Agree completely. But do you think Art Stevens will buy a change like that?” “I don’t know. But we have to try. The picture needs to be stronger.” The Fox and the Hound had a three-act structure. The second act had the fox, Tod, involved with a railroad accident. The old dog Chief gets knocked off a tall bridge by a thundering locomotive, and Tod gets unfairly blamed for the accident. Chief dies in the book on which the movie is based, but in the Disney version, the elderly dog only suffers a broken leg. Even so, Copper (the young bloodhound) angrily vows revenge against his friend Tod. Ron and most of the younger story crew thought Copper’s anger and lust for revenge was several clicks over the top, considering Tod’s minor sin. So Ron and the rest of us pleaded the case to the lead director: “Please let’s have Chief DIE.” Art was skittish about it, and said no. No surprise there. So the same argument was hauled upstairs to Disney’s management, with the same reaction: “You can’t kill off a lovable central character! Children will FREAK OUT! Parents will hate us! WE’LL GET LETTERS!!” Neither tearful pleas nor the example of Bambi’s mother catching a bullet could change the directors’ or the top brass’s minds. They wouldn’t kill Chief, and that was final. Ron Clements was not a guy who easily took “No” for an answer, but after a protracted campaign, he dropped the issue. Arguing was as pointless as jousting with windmills. (I had dropped the issue earlier. I am not a big believer in banging my head against hard, thick walls.) But it was one more point of dissatisfaction between the recently-arrived Young Turks and the Disney Animation establishment. The old timers from the 1930s were gone, but the generation that had rolled in during the 1940s and 1950s was finally holding the tiller, and they were bound and determined not to cede their newly acquired power and leverage to a bunch of goddamn kids in their goddamn twenties. Many of the “kids” were from California Institute of the Arts, the Disney-funded college in Valencia, California that served as a training ground for a lot of the animation industry. Walt Disney Productions had, in recent years, skimmed off the cream of the CalArts crop, and recent grads like John Musker, Henry Selick, Brian McEntee, Bruce Morris, Joe Ranft, Mikes Cedeno, Mike Giamo, Tim Burton, Jerry Rees, and an ebullient CalArts star named John Lasseter (among numerous others) populated the animation building. A 1980 volleyball game between the Disney producers and artists. The color commentary and play-by-play by John Musker reveals the underlying tensions between the two camps. Video by Randy Cartwright. Most of the CalArts group groused about the old-timers’ stodgy, moldy fig attitudes, and the stodgy, moldy fig product that resulted therefrom. They had been against the Bluth forces; now they chafed against the veterans’ tightly-held reins. Brad Bird had already gotten his ass fired for making his gripes too loud and too public, but the general mood of frustration and desire to try something fresh, new, and different continued. Even with the bad feelings, various CalArts graduates were being groomed for better things. Early on, John Musker jumped on a career track pointed toward director. John Lasseter was assigned to different projects in development. Bruce Morris and Joe Ranft quickly worked their way into story development. But the veterans remained territorial…and a touch paranoid. I remember Art Stevens saying, “Who do these pipsqueaks think they ARE?! They’re not geniuses. They can’t come in here and have their way after fifteen minutes!” (Another old-timer told me: “Art spent years in John Lounsbery’s unit as his key assistant. And Art would get furious if artists in their group tried to move up and out. He always wanted everybody to stay where they were, to not change anything. He’d get offended if anybody tried to jump ship.”) Tim Burton, bent over a light board down on the first floor, was becoming known for his very un-Disney character sketches. Joe Ranft, Darrell van Citters, Brian McEntee, Mike Giamo, Jim Mitchell, and …

On a couple occasions throughout the years, people have asked me, Why do so many animated films have dead mothers in them?