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Catch Up with AWN's Oscar Showcase Videos on AWNtv

By Dan Sarto | Friday, March 12, 2010 at 10:48am

Now with the crazy award season over, AWN offers readers a chance to catch up with all the adventures of the animation nominees. Watch interviews with the nominees and a who's who of the animation community as part of AWN's Oscar Showcase videoblog! New episodes will be posting weekly. Check them out on AWNtv.

Blogs

Dimensionalizing Conventional 2D into Stereoscopic 3D

Currently a lot of our colleagues are involved with “dimensionalizing” conventional 2D films into being stereoscopic or so called 3D movies. While most of the artists I spoke with tended to mumble something about “colorizing Shirley Temple” all are glad to have the work.

Blogs

Blu-ray: PONYO (2009)

Read my original PONYO review.

I say this a lot, but animation was made for Blu-ray. Disney does a remarkable job transferring Hayao Miyazaki's latest world of wonder and whimsy to 1080p. The artists' rich color palette pops. Look at Lisa's pink car. Look at the deep blues of the fish waves. None of the details of the gorgeous hand painted art are lost. One can see the brush strokes in the backgrounds. The underwater scenes come alive with Studio Ghibli's attention to detail from the particles in the water to flow of the water. The audio matches the picture very well. The English track is in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and the Japanese track is in Dolby Digital 5.1. Or course the former is far better than the latter. The English track has clear dialog and great directionality. At one moment a call from the rear speaker actually made me turn. The English version simply balances all the elements of the soundtrack from the dialog to the music to the sound effects better.

Blogs

ANTICHRIST (2009) (***1/2)

Lars von Trier's disturbing film was the most controversial film at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Reactions were love it or hate it. The French reviewers who lean toward art films generally loathed it, while American reviewers were the most kind. Some called it torture porn. Others complained it was violently misogynistic. I found it a brave, unblinking decent into the abyss of the worst of human experience.

The story begins with He (Willem Dafoe, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 1996's JANE EYRE) having passionate sex. It's snowing outside and their young son crawls out of his crib to get a closer look out the window. The child falls to his death. She sinks into unbearable grief. He is a therapist who doesn't agree with the way the doctors are treating his wife and decides to treat her himself. He forces her to confront her greatest fears. The scariest place she can now imagine is their cabin in the deep woods called Eden, where she spent the previous summer with her son working on her thesis about gynocide. The more callously He pushes her, the more disturbed she becomes, which leads to violence both mental and physical.

Blogs

GREEN ZONE (2010) (***1/2)

While it stars Matt Damon and is directed by Paul Greengrass, GREEN ZONE isn't Jason Bourne in Iraq as the ads make it out to be. It is more akin to conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. There is something fishy going on in Baghdad and one soldier is dedicated to getting to the bottom of it.

CWO Roy Miller (Damon) is that soldier. The story begins with his undaunted effort to investigate an alleged WMD location while the area is being looted. When his unit comes up empty handed again, he questions the intel, but his superiors stand by the reports. His determination to not settle piques the interest of CIA agent Brown (Brendan Gleeson, IN BRUGES), who too questions the intel.

Meanwhile, reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan, GONE BABY GONE) is looking into the source of the intelligence that confirmed Iraq still had a WMD program. She was the one to break the story, which made the case for war, in the first place. She received the information from provisional government officer Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear, BABY MAMA), who knows who the source, Magellan, really is, and she wants an interview.

Kids Blogs

'Brownstones to Red Dirt' eBay auction

By Joe Strike | Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 11:14am

Blue Sky’s David LaMattina and Chad Walker are the creators of Brownstones to Red Dirt, a documentary centering on a pen pal program linking kids an ocean apart who have the odds stacked against them: at-risk Brooklyn sixth graders and African war orphans. Want to do something nice for kids in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn and Sierra Leone Africa at the same time – and come away with a beautiful piece of art for your troubles? It’ll cost you a few well-worth-it bucks,

Blogs

Tomm Moore Talks 'Secret of the Kells'

It’s a neat trick for a small Irish studio to snag an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature and go head to head with Pixar, Disney, Henry Selick and Wes Anderson, not to mention beat out Hayao Miyazaki for a slot. It’s even more impressive when it’s the first time you’ve directed anything longer than a few commercials or TV segments. But that’s what Tomm Moore has done with Secret of the Kells - and on a budget that’s probably less than what any of the other films spent promoting themselves.

Blogs

Sample Long Title

By Lisa Kaye | Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 10:14am

This is the abstract that displays elsewhere on AWN - in our department and creative-focus listings as well as on our home page in the blog section. You should keep this to 1 or 2 sentences (about the size of the box provided) and make it snappy - this will be seen outside the context of your blog and the title of the post plus this abstract should entice people who see it to read it.

Blogs

Sample Long Title

This is the abstract that displays elsewhere on AWN - in our department and creative-focus listings as well as on our home page in the blog section. You should keep this to 1 or 2 sentences (about the size of the box provided) and make it snappy - this will be seen outside the context of your blog and the title of the post plus this abstract should entice people who see it to read it.

Blogs

MOON (2009) (***1/2)

Sam Bell has been on the moon for nearly three years. He's about to rejoin his family on Earth. He seems to be starting to develop a twitch. Has the years of loneliness made him lose his mind? He ventures out onto the surface to fix a mining vehicle and has an accident. When Sam wakes up, he ventures back out and finds someone who looks just like him.

Sam Rockwell (CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND) plays the dual role as Sam Bell and the second Sam Bell. The second Sam Bell is cocky and angered by the existence of the original scruffy Sam, who seems very calm about having a doppelganger. Second Sam wants to discover the truth. Their A.I. computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey, THE USUAL SUSPECTS) might know the answers, but has conflicting programming. The original Sam wants to ignore the new Sam and just get back to his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott, LEAP YEAR) and daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw).

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