The show follows Luz Noceda, a magic obsessed a 14-year-old Dominican-American human girl who accidentally stumbles upon a portal to the demon realm, known as the Boiling Isles. There she befriends - and becomes an apprentice to - a rebellious witch named Eda Cawthorne and starts studying at Hexside School of Magic and Demonics, despite not having magical abilities. The series aired on Disney Channel between 2020 and 2023 and was widely praised during its run for its writing, world-building and LGBTQ+ representation.
At the event, you can expect talks from Daniel Savage, a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and animator whose work often focuses on exploring modular animation systems and process-driven work. As well as that, the graphic designer Sarah Elawad will be joining the stage to share the process behind her ultra-neon and kitsch graphic work which celebrates beauty, love and her culture through experimental prints, garments, video art and collage.
"Roger Allers was a creative visionary whose many contributions to Disney will live on for generations to come," Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement. "He understood the power of great storytelling - how unforgettable characters, emotion and music can come together to create something timeless. His work helped define an era of animation that continues to inspire audiences around the world, and we are deeply grateful for everything he gave to Disney. Our hearts are with his family, friends and collaborators."
"I don't trust my imagination very much, so I often create works based on things I've actually experienced," says Hewa. "I want to animate those indescribable states where all sorts of emotions get mixed up together." In these micro-animations (that do well on social media, both because of their quick runtimes and windows into varyingly haunted and serene worlds), Hewa animates women dreaming of other realities, dinner guests locked into a perpetual state of laughing and empty streets lined with crooked houses.
BERKELEY, Calif. -- As a student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, writer and director Alex Woo's goal was to make an animated feature film. "Every film student and every aspiring filmmaker, what they want to do is they want to make a feature film on the biggest scale. That was always the dream," Woo shares. After partnering with fellow animators Stanley Moore and Tim Hahn, Woo started Kuku Studios in Berkeley, California.
Could the students who snickered their way through those first SpongeBob adventures have foreseen the franchise persisting 25 years on, even after metabolising the most lysergic pharmaceuticals? Such longevity is partly down to extra-commercial considerations, in that the series has a capacity for tickling adults' funny bones possibly even those now fully grown students as well as the very young. Though it can't claim anything quite as unexpected as the David Hasselhoff cameo in 2004's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie not so much a high bar as an unforgettably wonky one feature four thinks nothing of making Clancy Brown talk like a pirate while handing royalty cheques to Barbra Streisand and Yello. Anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom.
What do you want to express that you feel you can't in everyday life? That's the question composer and producer Max Cooper posed to his audience in hopes of unearthing some of the hidden parts of our shared emotional landscape. In return, he received more responses than expected, many of which tapped into passionate displays of pleasure and pain. "It was like finding a secret window into our collective psyches," he writes.
One clip shows a male character detach a "LomBike"--likely a parody of the IRL LimeBike rental service--from its docking station, turn it around, and sit on it. Seconds later, that same character returns the bike to its dock. The other two clips show a female character getting off a pick-up truck in two different ways. In the first, she swings her legs out from inside the bed and jumps down.
"At its core, the work is about connecting with a parent in that unspoken, unconditional way, and about daring to take the past into your own hands in order to bend destiny," shares Hanaé. "Some might see the film as slightly experimental, especially in a world of instantaneity where you're expected to get your point across in seconds. But for me, that's precisely the point: the past, though unchangeable, is always being rewritten in the present."
In it, viewers get a closer look at Mabel, an animal lover who seizes an opportunity to use a new technology to "hop" her consciousness into a life-like robotic beaver and communicate directly with animals.
From cool concerts and shows to delightful animation and apple tart deliciousness, there is a lot to do and eat this weekend. So let's get to it, shall we? (As always, be sure to double check event and venue websites for any last-minute changes in health guidelines or other details.) Meanwhile, if you'd like to have this Weekender lineup delivered to your inbox every Thursday morning for free, just sign up at www.mercurynews.com/newsletters or www.eastbaytimes.com/newsletters.
From cool concerts and shows to delightful animation and apple tart deliciousness, there is a lot to do and eat this weekend. So let's get to it, shall we? (As always, be sure to double check event and venue websites for any last-minute changes in health guidelines or other details.) Meanwhile, if you'd like to have this Weekender lineup delivered to your inbox every Thursday morning for free, just sign up at www.mercurynews.com/newsletters or w.eastbaytimes.com/newsletters .
On Snotmotions subject matter Kate says: "The aesthetics of sport, the motion and movements in sport, and the fact that there isn't much talking is very interesting from an animation point of view." Tennis is known for powered pitches and anime-fight-scene-like grunting; a ripe playground for Snotmotion's N° 02 short. "Animating a tennis serve was surprisingly tricky, but it forced us to study the timing and rhythm of the action in a new way," Jordy says. Paying close attention to timing, both Kate and Jordy switch hats from animators to foley artists. "We sit upstairs, at our desk making all sorts of strange noises to match the scenes," says Kate.
It's been a hilarious and poignant journey exploring how our favorite team of legacy toys might respond to today's world of technology, and we're thrilled to share this first glimpse with audiences. Having the remarkably talented Greta Lee bring Lilypad to life - balancing a playfully antagonistic tone with humor and heart - has been incredible.
"The two of us are half-smart so I think the dynamic is we need two of us to just get to a baseline that most people have," Bush joked. "That's right," agreed Howard. "Left brain, right brain, yeah, it's a good point. In all honesty, we are a really good partnership because we trust each other and we share our sense of humor, our sense of storytelling."
"Au 8ème Jour," which translates to "On the 8th Day" in French, uses CG, or computer-generated animation techniques to create a three-dimensional world in a stop-motion style. A multitude of vibrant animals and landscapes appear sewn from fabric in the film's otherworldly realm, each tethered to a single piece of yarn that connects it to a kind of central energy force-a vibrant, tightly-wrapped skein in the sky. But when mysteriously dark tendrils of black fiber begin to leech into this idyllic world, families and herds must run for their lives.
Global creative company Buck has joined with LinkedIn to give a visual refresh to the platform's in-app milestone moments. Described as "a big glow-up" by LinkedIn's director of product design Audrey Davis, the redesign includes a new suite of animations that hope to make celebrating on LinkedIn a more expressive and engaging experience. Prioritising inclusive character representation, creative metaphors that "connect across cultures", and the blue of the LinkedIn brand, these new illustrations capture a range of milestones and emotions.
They like how he thinks, they like how he talks, and the jokes he makes. People can tell it's not a decision made by a committee. It's this one person's sense of humor. Probably not the best sense of humor, but it's his sense of humor. Doing this animation, I need to bring that ethos.
"We made this in an academic space," Magbanua says. "To have it be screened and experienced in a space surrounded by professionals and people who are established, seasoned and esteemed, it's really surreal, because we were just making this in a classroom a couple months ago."
Dispatch, an interactive superhero workplace comedy from Adhoc Studios, is an ambitious project. The story has to balance comedy and personal drama, the animation needs polish worthy of a high-budget TV series, and the cast must be strong enough to support the lofty vision. When creative director Nick Herman and director Dennis Lenart were looking for a lead, one actor stood out above all the others: Aaron Paul, star of Breaking Bad and Bojack Horseman. There was just one problem.
It's something Loren and I spoke about for ages. We've always wanted to do one. And, then we really wanted to do one for the movie. And unfortunately, we just never got around to it. We're too busy making the show. So, this was just a great opportunity to do everything we've done on the show from the very start, and also include all the stuff we did on the movie, which is awesome,
Over the course of the first two volumes, we've seen alien rock bands, samurai Jedi, and plenty of adorable creatures, but the show's biggest strength is how it pushes action scenes to their limits. With the shorts being non-canon, literally anything is on the table, while the medium of animation means the laws of physics can be broken at will.
Back to selectionMeriem Bennani and Orian Barki made Filmmaker's 25 New Faces list in 2020 off their improbably delightful pandemic-set 2 Lizards, a viral web series in which the filmmakers, week by week, transposed the time's various masking and social distancing rituals into an animal-centric parallel NYC. In our profile, Bennani teased a new work, saying, "There's something we spontaneously found together in terms of an animation technique and a certain tone that could be developed into another project."
Sony Pictures has officially confirmed that Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse will swing into theaters on June 18, 2027, delivering the long-awaited conclusion to the groundbreaking animated trilogy. The announcement, made during CinemaCon, was accompanied by an exclusive first-look preview for attendees, offering a tantalizing glimpse at what's to come in the next chapter of Miles Morales' multiversal journey. While the footage remains under wraps, the news signals that the film is finally on track after years of delays and development hurdles.
Opening night Fri/19 at Oakland's Shapeshifters Cinema features a range of shorts by alumni including Juan Luis Matos, Julie McNeil, Rye Purvis, and Nao Bustamente that "explore themes of performance, queer identity, and artistic legacy." The next day brings three programs at SF's Roxie Theater, including films by the festival's own jurors and curators; their selection of shorts submitted via open call that span nearly half a century SFAI inspiration; and two works by Gunvor Nelson, the Swedish-emigre-turned-longtime-Bay-Area-resident who passed away earlier this year.
all the characters on the show are human, and they inhabit a world that (mostly) resembles our own. Avi Shwooper, a lapsed Jew and a father working for a Spotify stand-in, is the closest thing the show has to a main character. But rather than focusing on just Avi, "Long Story Short" ambitiously delves into the lives of three generations of Avi's family across a timeline that jumps around from the 1990s to the 2020s.
Arriving in time for peak candy season at Halloween, the new Tootsie Pop ad follows the exact same storyline as the original, with a child asking Mr. Owl how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, only for the owl to scoff the whole thing after just three licks. Over five decades later, will we ever know the answer?
The film picks up from a thrilling cliffhanger of the fourth season, where Tanjiro and his fellow comrades are thrust into the lair of the demon-in-chief, the cunning and all-powerful Muzan Kibutsuji. Much of the film is structured around various battles between the series regulars and their sworn enemies. The challenge of sustaining the narrative is tempered by the use of flashbacks, providing a backstory for each of the formidable foes.
In writer / director Julian Glander's new animated sci-fi feature Boys Go to Jupiter, a young gig worker named Billy 5000 ( Planet Money's Jack Corbett) hoverboards his way through life in Florida with only one thing on his mind: he needs $5,000 and is willing to deliver as much food as it takes to make the cash. At first, the delivery guy's semi-magical, "let's get this bread" style of thinking seems to stem from his fixation on a hustlebro streamer's videos.
