Joe Tully
12-18-2005, 02:25 PM
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-animations1215.artdec15,0,1668466.story
SAN FRANCISCO -- Genndy Tartakovsky is a 35-year-old man who still wakes up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. He confesses: "I can't outgrow them."
Even a night of hard drinking when he was younger couldn't keep him from dragging himself out of bed the next morning to watch his favorite shows.
That passion and persistence paid off for Tartakovsky, whose credits include the hit animated television shows "Samurai Jack" and "Star Wars: Clone Wars."
As creative director at Orphanage Animation Studios Inc. he is among a small group of northern California artists hoping to rival the towering front-runners in Hollywood computer animation: Pixar Animation Studios Inc. and Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc.
While the Bay Area upstarts have yet to make a feature-length film, companies such as Orphanage, Wild Brain Inc. and CritterPix Inc. have recently announced separate plans to make computer-animated feature films with characters they hope moviegoers will embrace as fondly as Pixar's Buzz Lightyear and Dreamworks' Shrek.
The rub is that the new players are working on shoestring budgets, often with hand-me-down technology and under noose-tight deadlines.
"You can't look at Wild Brain in its current state and say we're going to be competitors to Pixar," said Charles Rivkin, who was named CEO of the San Francisco-based company in September. "On the other hand, we would hope in the near future we make it into their rearview mirror."
Consider the competition: Dreamworks produced "Shrek 2," the third highest-grossing movie ever ($436 million) and the No. 1 animation film of all time, and the company is only No. 2 in the market.
Pixar emerged as the industry heavyweight by releasing the first computer-generated movie, "Toy Story," in 1995. It has since produced an unprecedented string of five hits, including "A Bug's Life," "Monsters Inc." and "Finding Nemo," which made about $3.2 billion worldwide.
Pixar and Dreamworks, whose executives declined to comment for this story, benefit from technological prowess that cost them millions to develop. Their rendering software allows characters to interact in three dimensions, adding lifelike qualities that impress audiences.
Wild Brain and the Orphanage rely on off-the-shelf software and building other digital tools to enhance the quality, said BZ Petroff, Wild Brain's production director, who worked on Toy Story while at Pixar.
Wild Brain has the same improvisational spirit that Pixar had back before anyone had coined the term computer animation, she said.
"Pixar had practically nobody who had worked on a motion picture before," Petroff recalled. "They had an industrial designer who worked on cars. Not 'Cars' the Pixar movie, but cars in Detroit. ... Nobody was doing this kind of work then."
In 2001, the company released "Hubert's Brain," a dark comedy about a lonely boy who finds a talking brain. The 17-minute film won Best Professional Computer Generated Short Film at the 2001 World Animation Celebration in Los Angeles.
The Orphanage, founded in 1999 by three former employees of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, is further behind Wild Brain in its evolution. The company is best known for supplying special effects for live-action films, such as "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Sin City."
Hiring Tartakovsky, a golden boy at the Cartoon Network who will anchor the company's foray into features, has given Orphanage credibility within animation circles.
The process of creating computer-generated characters begins with a hand drawing. A clay model of the character is sculpted and then three-dimensional features are plotted by a software program. Once the character exists as a digital file, a computer-animation artist becomes an electronic puppeteer, manipulating the character's movement with a computer mouse and keyboard instead of strings.
Computers, however, have done little to speed up the process or reduce the costs of making animated films. Emeryville-based Pixar has produced only six films in 11 years and spent an average of $77 million for each movie, according to Bruce Nash, who runs The Numbers, an online movie information data tracker.
Lacking those kind of resources, Wild Brain and Orphanage plan to leverage their expertise animating television shows, which require a faster turnaround, to produce films for about half as much money, executives from both companies said.
After spending 11 years producing mostly commercials, Wild Brain made its first significant strides toward the big screen when it signed a five-picture deal last year with Dimension Films, a unit of Walt Disney Co.'s Miramax Films.
Under the terms of the agreement, each company will co-finance and co-produce films that Miramax will distribute.
Orphanage, which has headquarters in San Francisco, will seek a similar financing and distribution partnership once the company's story ideas are ready for production, Tartakovsky said.
Wild Brain plans to keep its costs down by hiring artists in Korea, China and Malaysia to draw background and other scenes that can be easily mass-produced.
Some of the work for Wild Brain's "Higglytown Heroes," a daily Disney Channel show for preschoolers, is done in Korea, Rivkin said. Sending work overseas does not hurt the quality.
Others are not so sure.
"It all starts with the story," said Ralph Schackart, analyst with William Blair & Co. "You or I can go buy off-the-shelf software and make an animated film. The barrier to entry for this industry is the story."
SAN FRANCISCO -- Genndy Tartakovsky is a 35-year-old man who still wakes up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. He confesses: "I can't outgrow them."
Even a night of hard drinking when he was younger couldn't keep him from dragging himself out of bed the next morning to watch his favorite shows.
That passion and persistence paid off for Tartakovsky, whose credits include the hit animated television shows "Samurai Jack" and "Star Wars: Clone Wars."
As creative director at Orphanage Animation Studios Inc. he is among a small group of northern California artists hoping to rival the towering front-runners in Hollywood computer animation: Pixar Animation Studios Inc. and Dreamworks Animation SKG Inc.
While the Bay Area upstarts have yet to make a feature-length film, companies such as Orphanage, Wild Brain Inc. and CritterPix Inc. have recently announced separate plans to make computer-animated feature films with characters they hope moviegoers will embrace as fondly as Pixar's Buzz Lightyear and Dreamworks' Shrek.
The rub is that the new players are working on shoestring budgets, often with hand-me-down technology and under noose-tight deadlines.
"You can't look at Wild Brain in its current state and say we're going to be competitors to Pixar," said Charles Rivkin, who was named CEO of the San Francisco-based company in September. "On the other hand, we would hope in the near future we make it into their rearview mirror."
Consider the competition: Dreamworks produced "Shrek 2," the third highest-grossing movie ever ($436 million) and the No. 1 animation film of all time, and the company is only No. 2 in the market.
Pixar emerged as the industry heavyweight by releasing the first computer-generated movie, "Toy Story," in 1995. It has since produced an unprecedented string of five hits, including "A Bug's Life," "Monsters Inc." and "Finding Nemo," which made about $3.2 billion worldwide.
Pixar and Dreamworks, whose executives declined to comment for this story, benefit from technological prowess that cost them millions to develop. Their rendering software allows characters to interact in three dimensions, adding lifelike qualities that impress audiences.
Wild Brain and the Orphanage rely on off-the-shelf software and building other digital tools to enhance the quality, said BZ Petroff, Wild Brain's production director, who worked on Toy Story while at Pixar.
Wild Brain has the same improvisational spirit that Pixar had back before anyone had coined the term computer animation, she said.
"Pixar had practically nobody who had worked on a motion picture before," Petroff recalled. "They had an industrial designer who worked on cars. Not 'Cars' the Pixar movie, but cars in Detroit. ... Nobody was doing this kind of work then."
In 2001, the company released "Hubert's Brain," a dark comedy about a lonely boy who finds a talking brain. The 17-minute film won Best Professional Computer Generated Short Film at the 2001 World Animation Celebration in Los Angeles.
The Orphanage, founded in 1999 by three former employees of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, is further behind Wild Brain in its evolution. The company is best known for supplying special effects for live-action films, such as "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Sin City."
Hiring Tartakovsky, a golden boy at the Cartoon Network who will anchor the company's foray into features, has given Orphanage credibility within animation circles.
The process of creating computer-generated characters begins with a hand drawing. A clay model of the character is sculpted and then three-dimensional features are plotted by a software program. Once the character exists as a digital file, a computer-animation artist becomes an electronic puppeteer, manipulating the character's movement with a computer mouse and keyboard instead of strings.
Computers, however, have done little to speed up the process or reduce the costs of making animated films. Emeryville-based Pixar has produced only six films in 11 years and spent an average of $77 million for each movie, according to Bruce Nash, who runs The Numbers, an online movie information data tracker.
Lacking those kind of resources, Wild Brain and Orphanage plan to leverage their expertise animating television shows, which require a faster turnaround, to produce films for about half as much money, executives from both companies said.
After spending 11 years producing mostly commercials, Wild Brain made its first significant strides toward the big screen when it signed a five-picture deal last year with Dimension Films, a unit of Walt Disney Co.'s Miramax Films.
Under the terms of the agreement, each company will co-finance and co-produce films that Miramax will distribute.
Orphanage, which has headquarters in San Francisco, will seek a similar financing and distribution partnership once the company's story ideas are ready for production, Tartakovsky said.
Wild Brain plans to keep its costs down by hiring artists in Korea, China and Malaysia to draw background and other scenes that can be easily mass-produced.
Some of the work for Wild Brain's "Higglytown Heroes," a daily Disney Channel show for preschoolers, is done in Korea, Rivkin said. Sending work overseas does not hurt the quality.
Others are not so sure.
"It all starts with the story," said Ralph Schackart, analyst with William Blair & Co. "You or I can go buy off-the-shelf software and make an animated film. The barrier to entry for this industry is the story."