AWN Headline News

Next summer the third feature installment of the POKEMON trilogy will makeits way to Japanese theatres. POCKET MONSTER: THE LORD OF THE UNKNOWN TOWERwill introduce yet another of those little "pocket things" to kids andmerchandising execs around the world. Kunihiko Yuyama is set to direct thefilm, which will feature a short tentatively titled POKEMON 2000. If in theU.S. or Europe one may ask, whatever happened to POKEMON 2? Well, fear notCharmander chums, the second POKEMON feature, which was released in Japan

Harvey Entertainment Company has inked a deal with San Francisco-basedSpunky Productions, Inc., a digital media company, to produce anddistribute Richie Rich Web cartoons. The new toons will be available onboth SpunkyTown.com and the Harvey site. Spunky will adapt early comic bookadventures of the world's richest kid into 2 - 5 minute episodes to startairing during the holiday season. Product tie-ins will be developed by bothcompanies to be sold on both of their Web sites. Dan March, Director of New

LIPSinc., the producer of Ventriloquist for 3D Studio MAX, recentlyannounced that they had launched a new lip-synching program called Echo.Whereas Ventriloquist is a plug-in for 3D Studio MAX, Echo is a standaloneprogram which outputs in flipbook, dope sheet and function curve animationdata for animation platforms, interactive 3D game engines, and multimediaapplications. Timeline Studios, a company founded by best-selling authorMichael Crichton, is using Echo in the company's first title, slated for

On November 18, 1999, LEAF, the London Effects & Animation Festival,bestowed their award for best effects in a feature film on STAR WARS:PHANTOM MENACE. Over 700 industry personalities watched LEAF's finale, anhour long visual effects smorgasbord from around the world. Rob Coleman wason hand to except the award for Industrial Light & Magic's work on thePHANTOM MENACE. Other winners included: AKA Pizazz's "Megalomaniac" forbest commercial animation; Jason Shulman's HOLLOW for best student film;

Charles Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the entirePEANUTS gang, has decided that he will retire in order to concentrate onbeating his newly diagnosed cancer. This desicion will end almost fivedecades of Schulz's world-famous comic. Schulz, who has always refused tolet another artist draw PEANUTS, said he would stop producing new dailypanels as of January 3, 2000 but allow his syndicators to recycle comicstrips from 1974 if newspapers still wanted to run the strip. On a daily

As part of the International Children's Film Festival in Hyderabad, Indiaon November 17 - 18, 1999, 45 children ages 5 - 15 years old came togetherto create a wildly imaginative, 5 minute animated short titled TOONED IN 2DAYS. The feat was done at a 2 day workshop on animation conducted by Dr.Neeraj's Animation Studios, the digital animation production facility ofSriven Multi-Tech Limited. Twenty of the studio's top animators, led byDhimant Vyas and Rajsekhar took on the responsibility of guiding the