Where is the buzz for "My Father's Dragon"?

by Nathaniel R

"Too much of a good thing" sounds like an oxymoron but it's something that can happen. It's difficult to look at this year's Best Animated Feature Race for instance and not wonder whether Netflix's endless supply of movies is not totally working. This year alone they have enough contenders to fill up literally that entire Oscar category all by themselves and all of them come from previous Oscar nominees: Richard Linklater's nostalgia piece Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, Chris Williams' animated adventure The Sea Beast, Henry Selick's horror-comedy Wendell & Wild and Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio next month.

Somehow Netflix's fifth contender, Cartoon Saloon's My Father's Dragon (which began streaming this month) has generated little press despite being quite charming, beautiful to look at, and also arriving with a ready made Oscar pedigree...

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Behind the Scenes of "Wolfwalkers"

by Nathaniel R

Today's must read is a memoir piece from storyboard artist Iker Madigan about working on Cartoon Saloon's Wolfwalkers.  There are all sorts of interesting tidbits including how difficult compositional choices are with the two dimensional "flat graphic style" that Cartoon Saloon is known for. Here's another interesting note. I've never heard animators described like this but it makes emotional sense:

Depending on the degree of freedom entrusted to them, story artists can exhibit qualities from both directors and writers. Truth is, they can be something like a cross between a second unit director and a script doctor. 

And the following, about artists who are part of "story teams" that most animated features employ, is the type of honesty you rarely get in such pieces...

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Cartoon Saloon: A Dream of Irish Animation

by Cláudio Alves

In the past decade, Cartoon Saloon has managed to become one of the most important studios of western animation. It all started back in 2009 when the Belgian-French-Irish co-production The Secret of Kells premiered at the Gérardmer Film Festival. That medieval fantasy went on to conquer a surprising, though amply deserved, Academy Award nomination, as have all the studios' subsequent features – 2014's Song of the Sea, 2017's The Breadwinner, and this year's Wolfwalkers.

With that last picture upon us, it feels like an appropriate time to recall the short history of this splendid studio...

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April Foolish Predix Pt 1: The Toons!

by Nathaniel R

Last year's animation race proved, just as we predicted, that the Academy's animated branch will only put up with a couple of sequels in any given year. For 2020 that wasn't going to be an issue as the scheduling wasn't sequel heavy. But then COVID-19 happened and the release schedules of everything got pushed back -- the latest calendar move is Disney/Pixar's Soul power-walking to Thanksgiving week where it will replace Disney's Raya and the Dragon, now pushed to 2021...

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16 days til Oscar. Ranking the 16 Animated Feature Winners

by Nathaniel R

which movies willed this category into existence?

With just 16 days to go until Coco wins Pixar its 9th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature let's look back over the first 16 years of the category. (Yes, that's right math geniuses, Pixar has won a full 50% of the animated Oscars thus far.)

The History, Chronologically

1988-2000 The category didn't exist until 2001 but it wasn't just created on a whim. The previous dozen years which included the renaissance of Disney, the sizeable popularity influence and beauty of what was happening in Japanese animation, the explosion of new animation studios all over the map, and the rise of Pixar in particular, all led us to the inevitable: an Oscar category for animated features...

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