If the only school that you can get into is an online school or a school with no acceptance requirements similar to major, accredited universities and colleges, DO NOT GO. You will receive a degree that is nearly useless. Any school, ANY school worth its salt will have acceptance requirements. If you do not meet them, go to a community college. The art world is far too competitive to saddle yourself with something that is both expensive and useless. Avoid for-profit schools like the plague.
I completely forgot to do this when they were announced, but better late than never. The Annie Awards have been handed out (!) and I agree with damn-near all of their choices.
As I wanted, Rango won for best picture. Adam And Dog pulled something of an upset for the short form animation, but I think that it was a good choice among a tough crowd.
I was surprised to see The Simpsons take the award for television work. The Simpsons has been near the bottom of its quality for some time. A few episodes here and there still capture the old Simpsons magic, but nothing like the rejuvenation of creativity that happened in the early 2000's.
The Amazing World of Gumball won for best children's show in a group of total crap, so, kudos?
The technical awards are difficult for me to judge. TinTin won for best effects, and rightfully so. It was a tour-de-force of cool shit on screen. Jennifer Yuh Nelson's win for best director is something that I don't entirely agree with. Again, Rango was a complete paradigm shift. A live action director applied his craft to animation, and the difference in texture was apparent.
Kung Fu Panda 2 had some set pieces and action scenes that were eye-popping, though. It's a close call, but I'd still have to go with Rango. Their final choice is made doubly odd with Rango having won both best picture and best writing, but not best director.
It was a good year. There was a lot of quality and I hope that this momentum holds up going into 2012. Because, man, during the transition from traditional animation to CGI, there was piles and piles of crap clogging up theaters and TV screens. 2011 gave me hope for the future.
I propose a new, quasi-quantifiable rule for the determination of quality in movies. I call it the Fifty-Percent Rule. Basically, if you, as a viewer, can enter a movie at the halfway point and find that anything that you missed is either deducible or irrelevant, the movie is necessarily a bad movie.
Much like Modus Tollens, though, just because the first 50% proves important does not mean that the movie is necessarily good. For example: Titanic.
I have developed this rule, as I'm sure many have, compliments of having movie channels available from my cable provider. If you have an hour to blow, sometimes you just throw on the boob-tube, which never provides you with a movie that is just starting. They are somehow always halfway done.
This has actually been a huge blessing in disguise. I can't even count the number of movies that I have watched from the halfway point, thus saving half the time, and made a determination of quality. If it was good, I am now surely motivated to go and watch the first half.
This partially-reversed way of watching has, oddly, proven to be an even richer way of experiencing movies. By knowing what's coming, but not what has been, provides a unique depth to narratives. Almost like you are watching characters fulfill their destinies of which you have perfect knowledge. There's something very tragic to it.
This applies to all forms of entertainment: books, TV shows, plays, even comics. Give it a shot. Pick up a new book and start reading from the 50% point.
I guess that it is official, what with Disney setting a release date, although in this day and age, release dates are meaning less and less. Regardless, the studio's rendition of The Snow Queen will be coming out November 27th, 2013. It's nice to hear that their next hand-drawn production hasn't been relegated to development hell, since starting a new project fresh would have pushed any release into 2014, or possibly even 2015.
I also like that they are dipping into the MASSIVE trove of untouched fairy tales for this one, with one of Hans Christian Anderson's coolest stories. But, this is Disney, afterall, so simply calling it The Snow Queen isn't enough. The fact that the original name is well-known and totally badass-sounding makes no difference to a studio that needs to desperately excrete pop-culture bile from every pore in an attempt to prove that they are hip, and as such they are naming it Frozen. Their lameness truly knows no bounds.
There's very little information as yet. We have a single picture, of what is, I'm assuming, the Snow Queen herself, which you can see right here, and a very brief mention in the included video.
The Snow Queen is a dark tale, and I hope that they keep some of that in the film, as opposed to candy-coating the plot like they did for The Little Mermaid. In their defense, the laughable sexism of The Little Mermaid was probably best excised. I'd love to see some shades of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (which I'm sure would have been named Lunch With The Hunch by Disney's current executive team) or The Lion King, both of which were wonderfully dark in many places.
I shall withhold any judgment until I see who comprises the producing team. I hope that Lasseter et al. are directly involved.
A combined CGI/Live action production from the Media Design School. Very, very well done. Certainly better than most of the crap on SyFy, although, to be fair, SyFy is shooting for that.
The nominations for the 2011 Annie Awards have been announced, and there are, of course, no real surprises in store. As usual, almost every major animated film has been nominated for something. Kung Fu Panda 2 is leading the nominations, but seeing as many of the awards are technical, this isn't surprising; Kung Fu Panda 2 was a technical marvel. I don't think that it deserves Best Picture, though. I think that honor certainly belongs in the hands of Rango.
On television, I find it absurd that Star Wars: The Clone Wars was even nominated. It is terrible. This isn't coming from a Star Wars fanatic, either. It's just a bad show. How they could nominate that and ignore The Venture Bros. is beyond me. Moreover, nominations for the Kung Fu Panda and Penguins of Madagascar television cartoons is a travesty. There are children's cartoons that so wildly exceed both of them in every way as to make these nominations a crime. Where's Adventure Time? Where's Thundercats?
I started this blog to celebrate a likely-unhealthy obsession with cartoon vixens. I also started it to share high-quality, high-resolution images of said cartoon characters since they're usually pretty hard to find online. I'll upload the images and also the vector files (either .png or .psd) so you can mess around with them yourself.
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