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Part of what made SHREK 2 work was the addition of Puss in Boots to the franchise. It's not surprising that he would get his own film. Unfortunately some of the sharpness the character brought to that film has been declawed for this one. The irreverent take on fairy tales is gone. In its place — cat jokes.

Don't get me wrong the cat gags are the funniest bits, but they don't have the layers that made the first two SHREK films special. In this origin story, Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas, DESPERADO) is cast as an orphan who becomes blood brothers with fellow orphan outcast Humpty Dumpty (Zack Galifianakis, THE HANGOVER). They are in search of the magic beans of legend. The duo continuously get in trouble until one day Puss gets a taste of being a hero and vows to go straight. Bad blood forms and Puss is wrongfully believed an outlaw. Years later he is reunited with Humpty, who now has a female feline thief sidekick named Kitty Softpaws (Selma Hayek, DESPERADO). Humpty wants to put their past behind them and work together to steal the magic beans from the notorious murderers Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thonrton, SLINGBLADE & Amy Sedaris, STRANGERS WITH CANDY).

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.

Still image from the animated short Diary 1 by Tsvika Oren.

Tsvika Oren has been deeply involved in animation for the better part of 30 years - creating, teaching, writing, judging, jurying…

©1999 Miramax Films

Do you write part time?  Do you write for just a few hours a day?  Are you writing a spec screenplay a few days a week or month?

If you answered any of these questions in the affirmative you may be losing more time (and creativity) than you think.

Let me give you a few suggestions that will help you get a lot more writing done...

Special Guests:  Signe Baumane & Isaac Short

On this episode of the Forum, Joel and Alan prognosticate the future of cinema and how podcasts are this century's booming artform.  Then, independent animator and bunny-lover, Signe Baumane, presents her perspective on animation as art, art as animation, sex ed, the animated short vs. feature, how to finance your independent animation career, animation as a drug-habit, and how not to be a lonely rapist.  All are then joined by 6-year old Isaac Short as he works through his unhealthy obsession with early pioneers of animation.

Change always accompanies the new year. And The Anime Beat is no different. That's right folks, I'm continuously expanding this little dog and pony show! 

This post, together with the last one, is intended to elicit feedback and comments from institutions and companies interested in exploring standards as a framework for further development and to promote discussion on standards development. It describes a simple standards system for discussion. 

So I headed on down to Hollywood because Gnomon was showing off an art gallery featuring art from Transformers: War for Cybertron. Hit the jump to see exactly what I saw.