Mousekingdom Blog

Disney has started a new film label to produce nature documents from world top documentary filmmakers. The label, named DisneyNature, will release movies about the beauty of our planet. On of them called simply “Earth” (April 22, 2009)., a movie that will be produced an directed by the award winning British Alastair Fothergill who already gave us the “Blue Planet” and the “Planet Earth” series. Darth Vader, oeps, I meant James Earl Jones will be the narrator of this new production.

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We are still waiting for the May 16 opening of the second installment of the “Narnia”-series, titled “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” (or even longer for some of us here in Eruope, where at least in Germany the movie won’t open till July!) … but the powers at Disney and Walden (the partner of Disney for this franchise) already proof all the gloom sayers on the internet wrong by announcing, that Disney and Walden are NOT abandoning the franchise!!

While some popular sites already declared the series dead or nearly dead unless the second movie did outstanding business the partners used the Comic Con in New York to announce that filming for the third movie in the series will commence as early as October of this year!

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Pixar continues to astonish the market by collecting award after award (not counting high presitge nominations here) not only for its movies but also for its various members of the creative staff. The latest addition to this collection goes to Pixar writer / director Brad Bird. He already collected the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film earlier this year for Ratatouille. However, this time the 50 year old (birth name: Phillip Bradley Bird) didn’t receive an award for any specific work of his … instead the Writers Guild of America West’s Animation Writers Caucus (AWC) has awarded him its 10th annual Animation Writing Award for lifetime achievement. He will honored with the award at the Guild’s 2008 Honorary Awards Luncheon on April 23 at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles

Congratulations … and one appeal: please keep that lifetime achievement growing, the public wants more
Information found via the Deadline Hollywood Daily blog.

If you are living or are going to be in or around Newport Beach during the Newport Beach Film Festival and you’re a Disney animation fan you might want to check out a special Evening of “Disney Animation Rarities” presentation. Many of the clips are treasures not available on DVD or have never been released in the cinema’s

Join noted filmmakers and Academy Award nominees Roy E. Disney and Don Hahn as they present an unforgettable evening of rarely seen Disney animated shorts and experimental films. Roy and Don will screen a collection of short animated films that had limited theatrical presentations, many of which are not available for viewing on DVD. (Newport Beach Filmfest)

Screening of “An Evening of Disney Animation Rarities with Roy E. Disney and Don Hahn” will take place on Wednesday April 30 at 7:30

Disney released their plans for the next 12 animated movies they will release. Some of theme have already been shown in the past but these, namely Toy Story I and II, will be converted in 3-D. The next movie to be release is WALL-E, and together with the hand drawn animated “The Princess and the Frog” will be the only two not undergoing the 3-D treatement.

The following list has all 12 titles and their expected release dates on it.

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Disney picked Orlando Bloom for the lead in their next trilogy, Prince of Persia. Other actors interested in the role where Zac Efron from the High School Musical fame and David K. Zandi who is a member of the Persian royal family and (if this rumor/news is correct) claims that he, during a campaign for the role, won a poll of 17 million viewers.

At this time the first part of the trilogy is titled “Prince of Persia; the Sands of Time”

Update: Disney says Orlando Bloom not in Prince of Persia (thank you Daniel for pointed that out)

Comic fans might not need the introduction to the New York Comic Con, but Disney fan should also take note of this convention as there will be some special “Narnia; Prince Caspian“ and “WALL-E” footage being shown. There will also be a Q&A with some of the actors and the producer of the Narnia movie…

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN and WALL-E: One year later for the Pevensie siblings. 1,300 years later in Narnia. Watch exclusive new film footage from this epic adventure series and join Ben Barnes (Prince Caspian), William Moseley (Peter Pevensie), Peter Dinklage (Trumpkin), and producer Mark Johnson for an exclusive audience Q & A. (Superherohype)

Picture Copyrights Disney

Disney / Pixar recently managed to fill all five spots in the all time top 5 list for the opening weekend grossing, pushing out Dreamworks’ Shrek. But last weekend Fox / BlueSky Animation (the studio behind Ice Age as well as Robots) moved into this “Disney / Pixar only territory”. As USA Today reports Fox’ “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!” managed claim the highed weekend opening of the year for any movie with $-US 45.1 million (in the US, excluding the international box office). With this performance, which was way more than projected, it moved into the top 5 on rank 5.

The new Top 5 of the hiest opening weekend grossing in the US consist of Finding Nemo, Monsters, In.c, Cars, Ratatouille and finally “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!”. It will be interesting to see, whether Disney manages to reclaim total control of the Top 5 with the upcoming Wal-E release and how Dreamworks’ next Shrek release will fare…

Imagine you could own a piece of Disney animated art for only a couple of dollars! This was the case back in the 1960 when fans could buy the art in Disneyland for only a couple of dollars. Today this original art would make more into the region on $20.000 to $30.000.

Nearly 5 decades ago Disney shipped some of its 1959 animated movie Sleeping Beauty artwork to Japan. It was presented to the public at Mitsukoshi Department Store and toured to another16 stores after that. Once the exhibition finished the artwork stayed in Japan, locked away for most of the time, an “almost” forgotten treasure.

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Condolences to all family and friends of Dave Stevens, born July 29, 1955 in Lynwood, California, who died way too young at the age of 52 on March 10, 2008. The Illustrator, comic book and graphic artist Dave Stevens might be best known for his 1982 created character “The Rocketeer” (the same year in which he received the Comic Con International’s Russ Manning Award). In the early 1980s he worked as a storyboard artist for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as well as for “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”) before he started developing a “Rocketeer” movie proposal in 1985. He finally managed to sell the rights in it to The Walt Disney Company, which lead to the 1991 movie “The Rocketeer”.

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A new WALL.E High Definition trailer has been put online (regular versions available too). We get to see his girlfriend and a lot of the other places he is going to visit during his adventure. The Trailer is fun, but I think filled with spoilers, so if you want to be surprised stay away from the trailer, otherwise enjoy it.

Picture copyrights Disney (Via apple.com)

You might be in luck if you have experience with hand drawn (aka traditional, aka 2-D) animation and happen to be in the greater LA area. Your potential employer? The Mouse House!

After cutting down its force of animators at feature animation in the past years to transition from 2D animation to CGI The Walt Disney Company is now back on track to re-establish what used to be at its core with several 2D projects in different phases of preparation or production.

And those upcoming hand-drawn features just require more animators again. As the The New Zealand Herald says “Disney’s Burbank animation studio today is still not bursting with animators as it was in its heyday, but many of the laid-off employees are back working” - and it should be more soon, as the paper in its March 8, 2008 story cites Andreas Deja saying “Right now we have a basic staff, but we are adding on more this month”. Great news!

P.S.: once again, credit where credit is due - the TAG Blog pointed me to the interesting article of the New Zealand Herald.

It’s part of the business - and part of the real world: just as brands are ubiquitous in today’s world (just look around your desk, there is a brand on your monitor, your keyboard and many other items lying around) so are they in the movies. The only difference between the movies and the real world: movie producers in some cases get paid to present certain brands and their products in a favorous position. Sure, not all brands popping up in a movie (or tv series) might actually be paid for product placements as some might just be necessary in a director’s view to present ouor real world corrently, but quite a few are paid for.

Anyway, everytime a brand pops up on the screen (whether paid for or not) influences the image of the brand and how we as viewers recognize it. Therefore it is really interesting to see which brands show up in which movie. BrandChannel.com does a great job with this in its weekly BrandCameo category for the movies ruling the US box office. Right now there are two Disney features in the list…
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Let’s get this out of the way first: besides families animated Disney features and the theme parks always have had a notable amount of gay fans. But while some minorities regularly raise a ruckus about their underrepresentation or any supposed to be “inacceptable” representation there has been but a peep from the GLBT corner - and when was it that you saw a character in an animated Disney feature that would be a member of the GLBT team?

[Keep reading after the break ... especially if you want to find one of the best spoofs ever of a scene from Aladdin!!]

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Dirk beat me on the Tron story; and boy am I excited (about the movie )!

Don’t blow it Disney! Make this one work. Like I said. I was late on the story (second time Dirk beats me on a story this week – see the Shamu story ), but I couldn’t resist sharing one of those memorable moments I love in the movie with the above picture.

Picture copyrights Disney

As you can see I am filling in for Andy for a change to keep his back covered for a bit as the real life keeps him busy - this allows me to also provide you with an update on one of Andy’s pet topics: Disney’s 80’s classic TRON!

Today’s TRON update comes courtsey of the TAG blog I already mentioned last week (which has some critical comment regarding the scoop factor of this news). The TAG blog in turn points us to the report by Neil Miller on FilmSchoolRejects which got his information from the well known site Ain’t It Cool News - it’s funny how “news” and “rumors” travel on the internet… But back to the real story here…

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Once upon a time there were two formats fighting about the future of high defintion DVDs: BluRay and HD DVD. Each of the formats was playing with al tricks it could do gain the upperhand, while the majority of us customers waited in the wings. Soon enough both formats got the idea to sign up studios exclusively to release their films only in one of the two formats. Disney signed up with BluRay which makes all the Disney fans rather happy - now that BlueRay has won and they know that their nifty BluRay players will be useful for more than only their collection of Disney releases.

Disney did gamble here by throwing their weight around - and won. What could have happened if Toshiba’s HD DVD would have won … well better don’t think about it. But if you are really curious - just take a look at the dismal situation DreamWorks is suddenly facing…

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In my first post yesterday (yep, I am back … finally after several weeks crushing under the workload unrelated to this project and DLP.info) I mentioned that Disney in all its different animation units is busy and has various projects under preparation for the coming years. I didn’t go into any further detail as I assumed that most of you already know the list and would be bored … but after I got some questions … let’s take a look what is known to be in production or development:

Certainly there are numerous rumors on various blogs and sites, not to mention the real word of mouth. I don’t even want to try to sum all of those up, especially since I am in no position to judge on their credibility. BUT there is that great TAG blog … a daily must-read for anyone interested in animation. It published one of its Toon Studios Overviews of projects in various Los Angeles area studios nearly two weeks ago.

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… but not about the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise he helmed for Disney … instead in an upcoming project! Well that could be great news for Disney - after delivering treasures to Disney that even Jack Sparrow could only dream of he now joins the heart of Disney - animation. But let’s not be too fast here … because his animated feature is NOT a Disney project.

As the Hollywood Reporter announced GoreVerbinski developbed the (at this point) undisclosed idea for the animated action-adventure through his own company, Blind Wink Productions jointly with producer John B. Carls. They are supposed to be in talks with screenwriter John Logan (who just scored big with the movie script for “Sweeney Todd”, based on the Sondheim musical)  to write the script for the film. Little side note: one of the secret of early hit movies in animation was the storyboarding … so …

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Ratatouille for best animated feature film of the year. Surprised? I didn’t think so. Ratatouille has been wining them all and the Oscar proofs yet again it is the best animated movie of the year. Looking at the movie again, I wonder if this could well be on top of the list for best animation ever? The movie is so much fun and it stays fun even after seeing it multiple times.

Unfortunately it didn’t get the Oscar for the original screenplay (it went to Juno), but that was to be expected. Even with such a great script, I didn’t think an animation would be honored with that title. The Oscar for Original score, Achievement in sound editing and Achievement in sound mixing has also passed to others, but still, the most important one is on the Disney/Pixar shelves

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