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02 Aug 2011 16:37

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Culture: DreamWorks CEO speaks out about why movies suck

  • Let’s have a semi-realistic rat in a kitchen cooking shit to eat. No one in their right mind is going to say, ‘Well, that’s a good idea.’ It’s a bad idea, but it’s so beautiful in its execution and such a great piece of storytelling. And actually, I think it’s one of the great pieces of animation of our time.
  • Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation • In a really good speech about why movies today suck. Here he’s saying that “Ratatouille” was a bad idea that was executed perfectly, but most movies today are focused too much on marketability. That is, producers don’t care so much about the story, they only care about how much money they can make out of it. Katzenberg goes on to say that movies should get better, based on consumer response to the crap that’s come out lately.  source

29 Mar 2011 14:17

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Offbeat: Presenting “The Three Big Pigs,” “Angry Birds”-style

  • Three Little Pigs you might dislike: Angry Birds is the motif of this animation describing the uprising in the Middle East. Easily the best take on the classic storyline since Green Jellÿ. Be sure not to miss the North Korea reference at the end. (via ProducerMatthew) source

20 Jan 2011 13:54

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Tech: Wikipedia celebrates a decade, gets animated

  • It’s hard to believe it’s already ten years old: Wikipedia has been with us for a while now, and over its decade lifespan it has left an indelible mark on the culture of online information. We’ll let this beautifully animated video take it from here (thanks Simon Owens of Bloggasm).

16 Dec 2010 11:21

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Offbeat: Crazy animators make crazy animation with Google Docs

  • The people who made this are supremely clever, but have way too much time on their hands, honestly. Google Apps wasn’t designed for something this crazy. (thanks drawnblog)

28 Jul 2010 23:05

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Tech: Jeff Bezos: Screw competing with the iPad, Kindle does it right

  • For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.
  • Amazon founder Jeff Bezos • Explaining why the new version of the Kindle basically looks like a slicker, cheaper version of the last Kindle. That’s right, no color. No display prowess. Just a sleeker version of the wheel. Anyway, $139 for a wi-fi only version? Sounds like someone’s trying to court the very mass market the device wasn’t priced for in its first two iterations. source

09 Jan 2010 14:42

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04 Dec 2009 18:52

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World: Did a 3D animation get Amanda Knox convicted?

The New York Times reports that the prosecution’s closing arguments were peppered by a video-game style animation of the killing. Like this? source
 

23 Nov 2009 20:13

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Culture: Meet the sad, miserable face of anime’s popular decline ^_^

22-year-old Rie Otani spends long hours at low wages drawing anime characters for a market that doesn’t give a crap anymore. We never did. Sorry Rie. ^_^ source

12 Nov 2009 11:19

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Culture: CollegeHumor nails Seth MacFarlane’s cookie-cutter animation niche

  • Is it us, or has CollegeHumor gotten funnier over time? On this particular clip, they hit really close to home for Seth MacFarlane’s empire of cookie-cutter Fox shows. We have to admit, though, if they got rid of the families and just had the talking snowmen and blenders, we’d probably watch it.

27 Sep 2009 19:57

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Culture: “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” has a sunny box-office outlook

  • -19% week-two dip, good enough for a second week on top in a week with a lot of wide releases
  • -30% average week-two dip for the average Pixar film; Entertainment Weekly credits the solid writing source