The One Lovely Blog Award!

Well, fancy that! A few months into running this place, and I've been nominated! I was nominated by my very good friend Simoa, who currently runs Champagne for Lunch. Whenever you get the chance, definitely check out her work. She, like me, is passionate about animation, especially that of Pixar's! Like myself, she is also …

First 10 Songs on Shuffle – Week #1

#1. 'Surrender' - Cheap Trick, Heaven Tonight (1978) - Of course shuffle starts me off with a recognizable hit that fits into the "classic rock" pool, a term I really don't care for, but yes... 'Surrender', you want to rock out to it when it blares out your speaker. Cheap Trick knew how to mix …

Why Movies Like ‘Storks’ Give Me Hope for Animation… [ADD-ON]

The add-on to this article appears at the end... Warner Animation Group's latest film is entering its second weekend of release. The picture, mainly made by Sony ImageWorks up in Vancouver, cost a good $70 million to produce. Warner Animation Group farms the animation for their projects out to various studios. Storks is only their …

The Typography of Pixar’s Film Logos

Often not talked about, I think, are the logos for Pixar's animated features. As a graphic design student, I'm finding more and more to appreciate in these very logos and how they work on viewers. Now, the reason I'm going over Pixar's logos, and not Walt Disney Animation Studios' logos, is because with Pixar, there's …

A Meandering Discussion on ‘The Good Dinosaur’, Continued…

In the previous ramble, I talked a lot about how The Good Dinosaur defies a lot of modern animation conventions, whilst going over the expectations that Pixar's films normally get. Now I want to dive more into the film itself... One of the things that makes The Good Dinosaur work so well amongst modern animated …

A Meandering Discussion on ‘The Good Dinosaur’

I always felt that Pixar was sort of a victim of their own success. Think about it. You dash out of the gate with your debut feature, which was innovative in the world of both animation and cinema. You follow that up with fifteen years of critically acclaimed box office smashes, each and every one …

Retrospective: ‘Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage!’

Insomniac Games scored a big success with their PlayStation platformer Spyro the Dragon during the holiday season of 1998. Naturally, a sequel was immediately put into development, following buddy studio Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot trajectory. Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! (or Spyro: Gateway to Glimmer in the UK) was speedily readied for fall 1999, and ended …

‘The Jungle Book’, ‘The Lion King’ and the Future of Animation

Updates made to this article on September 28, 2016 following the announcement of a remake of 'The Lion King'... Original article follows, then the updated thoughts... The other day, I finally got around to watching Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book, which was made by Walt Disney Pictures and released earlier this year to unanimous critical …

Disney’s Marketing Problem…

Back in April of 2013, Disney had excitedly announced at the annual CinemaCon expo that their plan was to release at least *eight* tentpole films every calendar year. This was when movie division chairman Alan Horn - pictured above - was relatively new to the studio. A veteran from Warner Bros.' heyday, Horn was the …

A Better Beast?

The 2017, Disney-made live-action Beauty and the Beast remake is only happening for one reason, and it rhymes with honey. Disney's animated adaptation of Beauty and the Beast is still loved 25 years after its 1991 theatrical debut, and is often called one of the greatest animated films. Of course Disney wants to mine from …