Earn Big Money At Last! Learn Animation!

"If you can draw a circle, we can teach you animated cartooning."

Animators, the 1938 ad claims, can earn up $20,000 a year, which would be the equivalent of nearly $700,000 in today's money. That probably didn't happen very often, if at all, but animator Art Babbitt did make $11,363 at Disney in 1936, which would be $455,000 today. That's nothing though compared to what comic strip artists used to earn. Mutt and Jeff creator Bud Fisher pulled in $150,000 in 1916, or $11.9 million in today's dollars.

Alvin Epstein, the co-owner of the animation school in the ad, published How to Draw Animated Cartoons in 1945:

New Trend? Looney Tunes Characters With Human Bodies

Twenty Years ago, we had 'urban' versions of the Looney Tunes plastered onto merchandise. Today, we have the characters being pasted on top of human bodies. Bugs, who is traditionally male, is gender-fluid now, with a male head and female body. These shirts are being sold by Spanish clothing retailer Pull & Bear. Click on any of the images for a larger version.

Netflix, Scholastic Reboot 'The Magic School Bus'

Just in case you were worries that Netflix's slate of upcoming animated programming was looking a little too Dreamworks heavy, the streaming site has announced plans to launch an updated version of the Scholastic Media educational series The Magic School Bus.

The new iteration, which reflects Netflix's continuing growth as a children's broadcaster, will be a computer animated show entitled The Magic School Bus 360 degree. Twenty-six half-hour episodes will launch in 2016. Like the original show, it will teach kids about science by way of an anthropomorphic school bus and a kooky educator named Ms, Frizzle, however, the new bus will be upgraded to reflect the advancements in robotics, wearables, and camera technology. The original series was produced for PBS between 1994 to 1997 and remained in syndication until 2012. Since Netflix acquired the streaming rights in 2013, it has become one of their most watched educational shows.

'Paddington' Trailer Generates Entire Tumblr Devoted To Its Creepiness

Based on Michael Bond's 1958 children's book A Bear Called Paddington, the live-action/CG hybrid Paddington tells the story of a Peruvian bear who finds himself living in London. The film will be released on November 28, 2014 in the UK, followed by a Christmas Day release in the United Stated by the Weinstein Company/ Dimension Films.

The characters has had remarkable longevity. The orginal book had over twenty sequels and inspired three television series-the first of which ran from 1975 to 1986 and featured an innovative stop-motion style in which Paddington himself was a model while the human characters were illustrated cut-outs. The film version instead goes for the now commonplace approach of combining live action with a quasi-realistic anthropomorphized CGI animal.

The first images from the film were released earlier this week, to a less than positive reception. Certain viewers found the new-look Paddington just a tiny bit creepy, as evidenced by an entire Tumblr devoted to images of the CGI bear Photoshopped into scenes from horror films. He looks a little better in motion, although gags involving him tasting his own earwax and immersing his head in toilet water continue an unfortunate trend that previously gave us Alvin eating Theodore's droppings and Hong Kong Phooey chomping on a urinal cake. I don't remember Paddington Bear's creator Michael Bond ever making use of gross-out humor, although admittedly I am unfamiliar with the later books in the series.

The film is due to be released in November and is helmed by Paul King, who previously worked as a director on the television series The Mighty Boosh. Colin Firth, of all people, stars as the voice of Paddington, while Framestore provides the film's effects.

Disney Junior To Premiere 'Lion King" Spinoff Series in 2015

"It's kind of like The Lion King meets The Avengers," says Nancy Kanter, general manager of Disney Junior, when describing their upcoming preschool series The Lion Guard.

A sequel series to The Lion King and its two direct-to-video sequels, The Lion Guard follows the second child of Simba and Nala, Kion, who assembles an assortment of jungle animals to protect the Pride Lands.

The idea was conceived a couple of years ago when Disney CEO Robert Iger suggested Disney Junior come up with something that could correlate with the 20th anniversary of The Lion King. Kanter points out that tying new content into the company's "heritage" has proven successful with shows like Jake and the Never Land Pirates and Sofia the First, whose main character is taught by the fairies from Sleeping Beauty.

The story will premiere as a TV movie in fall of 2015 before going to series the following year on Disney Channel and Disney Junior. While Timon, Pumbaa, Rafiki, Zazu, and Mufasa are set to make appearances, the show will feature an all-new cast of characters that include "Fuli, a confident cheetah; Beshte, a happy-go-lucky hippo; Ono, an intellectual egret; and Bunga, a fearless honey badger," who may or may not give a crap.

DreamWorks Releases 'Home' Trailer

DreamWorks Animation released a trailer on June 12th for Home. The Tim Johnson-directed film will be released on March 27 2015. In the credits provided with the trailer, the screenplay is listed by "to be determined, based upon the novel The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex." This is the latest in a film's production process that I've seen this credit remain undetermined, and leads one to wonder what exactly is going on at DreamWorks. Have there been significant rewrites or some other situation that has prevented them from crediting the film's writers?

Here's the official synopsis:

When Earth is taken over by the overly-confident Boov, an alien race

in search of a new place to call home, all humans are promptly

relocated, while all Boov get busy reorganizing the planet. But when

one resourceful girl, Tip, (Rihanna, who also contributes a song)

manages to avoid capture, she finds herself the accidental

accomplice of a banished Boov named Oh (Jim Parsons). The two

fugitives realize there's a lot more at stake than intergalactic relations

as they embark on the road trip of a lifetime.

Short Film Review: Disney's 'Feast'

Disney's Feast debuted yesterday to a raucous packed house at the Annecy International Animation Festival, alongside some never-before-seen clips from the studio's next feature Big Hero 6. After its premiere, Feast's director Patrick Osborne and the production designer Jeff Turley delivered a presentation about the project's conception and production techniques.

As suggested in the sparse teaser image that has been released for the film (above), the film uses some of the same non-photo-realistic rendering techniques that were explored in the studio's earlier Oscar-winning short Paperman, but the effect this time is more lush and immersive. Unlike Paperman, which relied heavily on character outlines, Feast explores an aggressive stylization, minimizing the exterior line and steeping itself in the possibilities of color, shape and form. If you've ever looked at the concept art in an 'art of' book and wondered why the finished film couldn't look like that, you'll wonder no longer. This film is concept art come to life.

Without giving anything away that's not already in the synopsis, the story is fundamentally the same as Paperman or even Pixar's The Blue Umbrella-boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. Osborne's deft directorial choices avoid sappy sentimentality and expand the scope of this time-tested tale with a willingness to push cinematic language beyond the usual tendencies of Hollywood animated film-making. Osborne employs a unique point of view, showing us the world from the shallow depth of field perspective of the owner's dog, Winston, and makes striking use of quick-cuts and time compression techniques. The narrative fragmentation lends the film a contemporary feeling that evokes the eye-blink editing of a Vine or instagram video. (This technique was, in fact, inspired by one of Osborne's personal digital projects: a video diary that he created over the course of a year documenting one-second daily snapshots of his meals.)

Food plays a key role in the film. During their presentation, Jeff Turley joked that all the artists who worked on the film gained weight during the production because of the 'research' that they had to do. Their weight gain paid off though. Feast is the first time in my memory that CGI food has actually looked appetizing onscreen. It's certainly Disney's strongest effort in their nascent revival of short film-making, and suggests exciting possibilities for how the studio could blend hand-drawn craftsmanship and digital technology in future projects.