Animation – Page 2 – Below the Line

Animation Guild Strikes New Deal With AMPTP That Provides “Significant Gains” for Writers

May 28, 2022 Staff Comments Off

The Animation Guild has tentatively reached a new deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) following prolonged negotiations that prompted the guild’s first rally in decades. Announced on Friday, the deal provides “significant gains for animation writers,” including wage increases, the addition of MLK Day as a recognized holiday, and the creator of a Labor-Management Cooperative Committee that will help pave “a path forward for Union-covered remote work.” In […]

Annie Awards: Mitchells vs. the Machines Upsets Encanto as Flee Wins Again

March 13, 2022 Jeff Sneider Comments Off

Netflix’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines and Neon’s animated documentary Flee won the top feature prizes at this year’s Annie Awards, where Netflix’s Arcane earned nine statues on the TV side. In addition to Best Feature, The Mitchells vs. the Machines won awards for writing, FX, character design, production design, voice acting, and editorial, indicating that the Oscar race for Best Animated Feature may be closer than most pundits think. Encanto […]

The Year’s Most Anticipated Movies From a Below-the-Line Perspective

March 11, 2022 Jeff Sneider Comments Off

The Batman and Scream were my two most anticipated movies of the year, and with the former currently playing in theaters and the latter now available On Demand, it’s time to turn our attention to my other Most Anticipated Movies of the Year, albeit with a below-the-line twist this time around. Rather than simply discuss the movies I can’t wait to see, I thought I’d highlight the crafts and below-the-line […]

Maya and the Three Composer Tim Davies on His Journey From Arranging and Conducting

February 1, 2022 Edward Douglas Comments Off

Tim Davies is one of those rare composers who does it all, using his background as an orchestrator, arranger, and conductor on many big movies and TV shows to carve out a career for himself — a career that includes working on the music for animated shows such as Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters and Jorge Gonzalez’s Maya and the Three, both of which are on Netflix. Davies’ instrumentation for both shows runs the gamut, […]

The Accidental Turitz: For Disney, Sending Pixar’s Turning Red to Streaming Is All About Green

January 19, 2022 Neil Turitz Comments Off

About a week and a half ago, Disney announced that it would be relegating yet another Pixar movie to its streaming platform. Turning Red was supposed to be the first theatrical Pixar flick since … um … wait, I know this one. Soul? No. Luca? No. Onward! Right, it was Onward, in March of 2020. That was the last time Disney put one of Pixar’s movies in multiplexes, and the folks […]

Oscars Shortlists: Academy Unveils Contenders in 10 Categories Including Score, Sound and VFX

December 21, 2021 Jeff Sneider Comments Off

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled its shortlists in 10 awards categories on Tuesday, including potential nominees in crafts categories such as Sound, Visual Effects, and Makeup and Hairstyling. The Academy also whittled down the list of contenders in the Documentary Feature and International Feature categories, as well as all three shorts categories (live-action, animated, documentary) in addition to Original Score and Original Song. Notably, France’s submission […]

Annie Awards Nominations: Raya and the Last Dragon and Arcane Lead the Field

December 21, 2021 Jeff Sneider Comments Off

The nominees for the 49th Annie Awards were unveiled on Tuesday, with Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon leading the pack with 10 nominations, though it was Netflix that dominated the lineup with 52 nominations overall (compared to 29 for Disney). The Netflix series Arcane, which is based on Riot Games’ online multiplayer game League of Legends, earned nine nominations, tied with Disney’s Encanto for second-most overall. Netflix also earned […]

Sing 2 Director Garth Jennings on Rerecording Bono’s Iconic Vocals

December 20, 2021 Edward Douglas Comments Off

One of the big movies hitting theaters this holiday season is Sing 2, the animated sequel to the Illumination Entertainment movie Sing, which ruled at the box office over the holidays in 2016. The film’s director, Garth Jennings, came from the world of music videos (as one half of the duo Hammer and Tongs) and directing live-action features like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and Son of Rambow […]

Over the Weekend 12/06/21: Animation Guild Ends Contract Talks until ’22, New York Film Critics Vote, and More News

December 6, 2021 Edward Douglas Comments Off

You’re going to hear this a lot over the next month, but we’ve reached the holiday portion of the year where things inevitably slow down in Hollywood. This year will likely see more of that than last year when people were still trying to catch up on production due to COVID shutdowns earlier in the year. Although the long negotiations between IATSE and AMPTP were resolved in order to generate […]

Flee: Filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen Mixes Documentary with Animation to Tell a Moving True Story

December 3, 2021 Edward Douglas Comments Off

When Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s film Flee was listed as one of the films selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 2020 (which ended up being cancelled), very few were paying attention to it, and when it finally premiered at Sundance earlier this year, it probably also didn’t have quite the expectations of other films. As people quickly learned, Flee was unlike all the other documentaries that debuted at Sundance, being […]