Talk to the Snail

I’m going to wrap up tonight writing about my trip last week to the Ottawa International Animation Festival. There was way too much I enjoyed to allow me to write about even five percent of it. It’s been tough picking what I wanted to mention here. Melissa returns tomorrow to the big ol’ cartoon factory, and I’m sure she’ll blog about some of her favorite Ottawa moments.

First, a film I’d actually been well aware of: Xploding Plasitx ‘Joy Comes in the Morning’. Southern California-based Scott Friedman and Joe Ledbetter created this film inspired by the song by Xploding Plastix. It’s funny, attractive to look at, and exciting to listen to. You can watch it here.

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After a terrible (but in a good way) screening of Jerry Beck’s “Worst Cartoons Ever” Saturday night, I got to meet one of the folks behind one of the half dozen blogs I check on a daily basis. His name is Ward Jenkins and he’s a contributer to Drawn!, a site which I’m guessing is already bookmarked by nearly everyone who’s interested in cool art. Ward’s pretty cool himself, and besides his Drawn! work, he has his own blog and is a director & designer at Primal Screen, an animation and design company in Atlanta. It was good meeting you, Ward.

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This week I’m highlighting just a few of my favorite things from last week’s Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Meet filmmaker JJ Villard. I met him a couple of years ago when his film, Son of Satan, was shown as part of the CalArts Producers’ Show. Being a Charles Bukowski fan, I liked the film because it’s based on a Buk short story. But I loved it because of JJ’s style and point-of-view. This year, JJ had in the festival’s competition his latest film, Chestnuts Icelolly. I’ve seen it many times, and was more than happy to watch it again. The festival’s jury was pleased with it, too: Chestnuts Icelolly won the Grand Prize for Student Animation. JJ’s currently doing something over at DreamWorks. Good for them.

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Let’s all give a big OY! sa-lute to Mr Pen Ward, the newest creator at Oh Yeah! Cartoons! He’s dripping wet from CalArts and is now busy working on a little short he calls Adventure Time. Out of all the cartoon companies in town, Frederator’s the one lucky enough to have him. I, for one, hope to be riding his coattails to cartoon superstardom for a long time to come.

I returned from the gorgeous city of Ottawa yesterday after watching more than a hundred films and meeting just about as many filmmakers as part of the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Over the next few days I’ll try to mention just of few of those shorts, people, and short people.

First, a guy I’ve traded emails with for a while yet have never met. I’ve enjoyed Patrick Smith’s movies since I first saw Delivery about two years ago. His film Handshake was in competition and I ran into him a couple of times over the festival. Now that I met him, I’m an even bigger fan of his work.

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Project Firefly, the Orlando-based animation studio, is the winner of this year’s Nextoons: The Nicktoons Film Festival Viewers’ Choice Award for their film, “Farm Force: Send in the Clones”. Congratulations to creator Ethan Long and directors Dominic Carola and Paulo Alvarado for such a cool short (and for submitting it to us).

One more thing: we’re currently talking with the folks at Nicktoons about next’s year’s Festival, so, if you haven’t already begun to, start animating now.

In my previous post I mentioned our recent spate of pitches with fishbowl-headed characters. So today one of animation’s leading authors/critics referred me to the 2004 Masaaki Yuasa film Mind Game, featuring in a brief cameo - you guessed it - a fishbowl-headed character. Again, not too similar to the concepts I’ve seen recently, but still a little odd when you think about it.

When it comes to cartoon concepts, there are a few ideas we get pitched over and over again: superheroes with wacky powers, buddy comedies starring Frank ‘n’ Stein, and, of course, anything with monkeys. Now our motto is “It’s not the idea, it’s the execution.” I always say that if our favorite 39 cartoon pitches were about pink hippo detectives, then we’d be The Pink Hippo Detective Cartoon Show.

That said (or typed), I still do a double-take when I see similar concepts come into our posh Burbank offices. Take the past week, for instance. In the past eight days, I was asked to consider - count ‘em - three cartoons where the lead character(s) had fishbowls for heads. Now, each was very, very different from the others (at least as different as cartoons with fishbowl-headed characters can be). But, I mean, is there something in the water or what? This certainly tops [Read more…]

Yesterday, Melissa and I had the absolute pleasure to meet some key players from the Florida animation studio Project Firefly during their current Southern California trip. Dom, Paulo, and Mike got us up to date on their latest projects, including their work on the new Curious George film. However, we at Frederator already knew them from Farm Force, their fantastic short film directed by Dom and Paulo and submitted to Nextoons: The Nicktoons Film Festival. Farm Force was among the top ten Nextoons films for this year and is in the running for the Viewers’ Choice Award to be announced this weekend on Nicktoons (watch and vote for it here, screening 7). Best of luck, guys. I’m looking forward to when we get to work together.

A) 50
B) 100
C) 150
D) More than 300

A: D, more than 300

Mind-boggling, isn’t it? But remember, Oh Yeah! isn’t a production, really. It’s actually 39 productions, each one with it’s own crew of artists. Sure, there’ll be some crossover between cartoons, but when you begin to add up all the drawers, production folk, post-production people, voice actors, etc., the number grows kind of quickly. Oh, and I’m not even including all our international support from various animation studios overseas.

So maybe it’s appropriate to tip our hat now to Therese Trujillo, OY!’s busy Line Producer. It’s her Herculean job to keep tabs on all these OY! citizens (and to make sure they get paid). Thanks, Therese. Better you than me.