Healthy happy you.
ILM lead animator, Maia Kayserr, sat down with me last week to give us an inside look at the making of Rango, and while it seems that this particular project was unique in the way it was made, the life of a feature film animator is one that requires a lot of skill, patience, and a good sense of humor. Maia was first interested in studying medicine, but after seeing Jurassic Park, she was turned Read more
Everyone needs a little pick-me-up during the workday; mine are Lady Gaga videos and movie trailers for comic book and sci-fi flicks. On heavy rotation these days is the trailer for the highly anticipated sci-fi film, Tron Legacy. Being totally OK in my world of geekdom, I'll admit to you that just thinking about the movie gets me excited, really excited. While I was too young to watch the Read more
If you can't get enough of Anthony Bourdain, know that there'll soon be even more to love. The food industry's most opinionated figure is now getting his own cartoon series. The six-part animated web series, titled Anthony Bourdain's Alternate Universe, will reveal Bourdain's "personal and unique view of the world that lives in his imagination." It's arrived out of thin air, even beating Gordon Read more
The whole point of Scrabble for word nerd devotees, though, is the game's extreme nerdiness. Instead of going out on a Saturday night, you hang out with friends and/or a sweetie and string together words unrelated outside of their common letters. In this Ogilvy ad from France, animators imagine a whole array of creatures borne of these disparate words that meet up in a colorful cartoon set to Read more
Just as we're getting a Three Stooges movie for a new generation of moviegoers, The Wizard of Oz will also be reappearing on the big screen — in CG animation. The $25 million project is backed by a French production company and will be based on Frank Baum's original novel. The Variety article adds, "The English-language adaptation maintains the tale's main characters and settings. Unlike the Read more
We've been hearing about Disney's first black princess for a while now, and today they've released a brief teaser trailer that introduces us to both princess and frog in the animated Princess and the Frog. The story is described as "a fairy tale centered on a young girl named Princess Tiana who lives in New Orleans' French Quarter during the Jazz Age." Tiana is voiced by Dreamgirls's Anika Noni Read more
When a flying snowball pelted the dude below, one of the lenses in his glasses took the hit and broke. Whoops! Not only did nerd boy take this super serious flyby snowballing case to court, he made an animated 3-D reenactment of the "crime" to give the judge and viewers at home some sense of the pain and trauma he endured that dreadful day. (Cuz a one-sided snowball fight is hard to visualize, Read more
It didn't happen very long ago, but Tyra's "big" beauty giveaway already warrants a flashback. She gave every member in her audience — wait for it, wait for it — a crystal bedazzled jar of Vaseline. You're jealous, I'm sure. But Tyra went wild, her audience went wild, and I wouldn't be surprised if the producers had to bring in stink bombs and taser guns to halt the nonsensical madness that Read more
Turning a classic children's story into a mass-market, big-screen movie is always a risky proposition. So many never live up to the promise of the original — or, worse, change it into something unrecognizable. But luckily, Horton Hears A Who is on the other end of that spectrum. 20th Century Fox's animated adaptation balances Seuss's sweet story with stunning visuals, deftly sharing its Read more
I'm generally of the opinion that everything Pixar touches turns to (shockingly well-animated) gold, so I'm excited that a full trailer has been released for Wall-E, the studio's upcoming release. The film, from Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton, follows a robot named Wall-E who's been left in a post-apocalyptic world for 700 years, sorting trash all alone. Alone, that is, until a probe sent Read more
