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The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF), North America’s leading animation film festival, is now accepting entries for competition in 2017. With over 8 categories of competition, animators and other creators of all levels have a great and auspicious festival to show off their work.  Entries are due May 26, and there is no entry fee….

Lighthouse Studios is a newly announced animation studio to be based in Kilkenny, Ireland. A joint venture of Cartoon Saloon (also of Kilkenny) and the Canadian animation studio Mercury Filmworks, the new studio is expected to open up at least 140 new jobs in Ireland. Both partners will continue their own separate TV and film operations, and use the new studio to develop children’s and family TV entertainment, for multi-platform global distribution.

Zootopia took home six awards at last nights ASIFA-Hollywood’s 44th annual Annie Awards, which were presented at Royce Hall on campus of University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to Best Feature Film, the Disney film also won Best Director, Outstanding Achievement in Character Design, Storyboarding, Voice Acting (Jason Bateman) and Writing in an animated feature. This pushed Disney to eleven wins out of the 31 awards at the show.

Pixar has announced the new short to accompany the theatrical release on Cars 3 in June. The six-minute short Lou looks to be a journey into familiar territory for Pixar- toys being abused by a bully, and a good-natured hero teaching the bully a lesson.

This morning the nominees for the 89th Academy Awards were announced in Beverly Hills California. In animation, we saw a good mix of big budget, popular films and smaller film releases. Disney came in with two nominations for best animated film, and Pixar struck out after wining last year with Inside Out. 

Illumination Entertainment’s The Secret Life of Pets jumped through movie theaters this weekend, topping the record for the biggest opening weekend ever for an original animated film. With a weekend take of $103.17 million for its first three days, Pets surpassed the $90.4 million record made by Pixar’s Inside Out last year. Pets also had the widest opening ever for an animated film, opening in 4,370 theaters this weekend.

Disney announced via Facebook Live that Oscar-winning animated film Wreck-It Ralph will be treated to a sequel in 2018. Though currently unofficially titled Wreck-It Ralph 2, the film will see the return of John C. Reilly as Ralph and the anticipated return of Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer, and Jane Lynch as Vanellope von Schweetz, Fix-It Felix, Jr., and Sergeant Calhoun, respectively.

With the seeming unstoppable success of Disney’s live-action adaption The Jungle Book, and previous box-office toppers Maleficent and Cinderella– Disney is sifting through a lot of old animation classics with an eye to live-action remakes. With the box office success of each successive live-action adaption, it is no surprise at all that we see more adaptions on the horizon. Now Disney is saying they are already working on The Jungle Book 2, with both director Jon Favreau and writer Justin Marks returning to the film.

The video-game inspired animated film Ratchet & Clank opened this weekend, but could not overpower the 1-2 punch of Disney animation. Despite opening on nearly 2900 screens, the Rainmaker Entertainment and Blockade Entertainment production could not overcome the almost universal panning by critics, and the film only took in 4.8 million, and coming in at 7th in the box office.

In a stunning shake-up of animation studios, NBCUniversal has picked up DreamWorks Animation for 3.8 billion dollars, in a deal announced April 28th. Comcast- the parent company of NBCUniversal- says that Dreamworks “will become part of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group.