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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.

Hal Geer, a film editor, writer, director and producer at both Warner Bros. and Disney, has passed away at this home in Simi Valley California on January 26. He was 100. Over the course of his career, Geer worked on 25 feature films and over 500 TV shows, 400 commercials and 100 short films. Related…

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. 

It was not until 1934 when the things actually started to be serious about the code. Scenes, scripts, shoots even whole films were banned. Nude, violence, racial points of view or religious critics were cut. And, of course, that was for animation as well. But, unlike films, animation fed on irony, social and political criticism,…

From the late 19th century everything had changed in the new world. The working class had been growing fed by thousands and thousands of new immigrants, who, unlike the first ones who came from Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Scandinavia, these arrived from Hungary, Italy, Poland and Russian. The new immigrants were often Catholics and Jewish and, often as well, their cultural and religious heritage collided with the one of the first colonists.

The idea that cartoons are created only for children is a pretty common one. However you may find that this preconception is a lot farther away from reality than you would think. Disney became the king of cartoon- land, and in doing so turn animation into an integral part of the film industry, with his philosophy dominating the market until the end of the century. But animation- not even in Walt Disney original intentions- was never intended only for kids.

The Annies really like Pixar. A lot. In pretty well every category that the Pixar film Inside Out competed in, it won. Except for Animated Effects, where it was beat by The Good Dinosaur, also from Pixar.