Anime Cartoons

A lot of people hear “anime” and instantly make associations. They think of kids and cartoons, Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z. But to over 25 students at KU, anime is a lot deeper than a simple kids cartoon.

For junior Chemistry major and president of the KU Anime Club, Kyle Lilley, watching anime has been a lifelong interest. He said it wasn’t until around 10th grade, however, when he realized that anime was more than just kids’ entertainment, but rather a large genre with an expansive adult following.

The KU Anime Club attempts to take its members’ interest in anime and broaden it to a more in-depth look at the genre. Their one rule: the shows they choose cannot have aired in the U.S. within the last five years. Lilley says that this helps to introduce variety to the club and expose the members to newer – and, often, more in-depth – shows.

So what’s the draw to anime? According to Lilley, his interest in anime is no different than having an interest in any other genre. “Why not anime as opposed to someone who likes horror?” Lilley asked. For Abraham Klein, junior Psychology major and the club’s self-proclaimed “one-man welcome-wagon,” anime is also about an interest in the aesthetic of the cartoon as well as an interest in Japanese culture.

‘6teen’ cartoon End Finally

Having defied the aging process by remaining 6teen since 2004, the end finally has come.

The Canadian “tween”-focused animated series 6teen airs its last episode Thursday night on Teletoon, preceded by a marathon featuring episodes from the final season. 6teen focuses on six 16-year-old friends who work at a mall and find ways to amuse themselves, despite their mundane jobs.

6teen’s run has spanned four seasons and 93 episodes, and it has aired in many other countries around the world. Through its run on the Cartoon Network in the United States, 6teen won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2009 for best original song.

The series also collected two Gemini nominations in 2008 and in both 2006 and 2007 won the Alliance for Children and Television Award of Excellence for animation ages 9-14.

Fresh TV's current productions include the 'Total Drama' franchise, '6teen', 'Stoked' and the live action feature, 'My Babysitter's a Vampire'.

Lego Harry Potter Cartoon Game

There’s always seemed to be an unfortunate mentality on the part of the creators of games for younger children that the game doesn’t need to be especially good, because parents are just looking for the license on the box and kids will play anything. The really unfortunate part about this is that they’re right, so what’s the motivation to do any better when there’s no need to?

With all the cards in the deck stacked against the development of high-quality kids’ games, it’s good to see things like Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PC. I got to see a hands-off demo of the game running on the 360, and it’s what you’d expect from the group that turned Star Wars and Indiana Jones into goofy plastic brick parodies: a polished, funny game, but one that’s much more for kids rather than adult fans of the franchises.

First of all, it looks really nice. Developer Traveller’s Tales mastered the look of virtual Lego bricks long ago, but the Potter world around them is also elegantly illustrated with tons of cute little details (the Lego paintings in the Hogwarts castle corridors, for example).

The silliness of the Lego action games is also a perfect fit for this franchise. Building things out of Lego bricks in Indiana Jones doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. In the magic-fueled chaos of the Potterverse, in which things are broken and magically put back together on a regular basis, the mechanic fits.

Attending lessons at Hogwarts, you’ll able to add all kinds of magic spells to your inventory, using them as you travel through the game. Unlike the earlier games, there’s no life meter — while there are a couple times in the game where you can die, in general you’re not in danger of much anything bad happening to you.

In short, kids will love it; they’ll love smashing and bashing their way through Hogwarts and all the assorted levels and they’ll think it’s all a laugh riot. And the drop-in, drop-out cooperative game play means parents and siblings can help, too

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Annie Awards for Best Animated Cartoon

Often a predictor of the annual Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the Annie Awards recognize the year's best animated features, television productions, commercials, short subjects and outstanding individual achievements in the field of animation.

The travel adventure "Up" was the winner of the best animated feature at the 37th annual Annie Awards.
"Up" director Pete Docter won the award for directing in a feature production.

Also competing for top honors at the Annies, presented exclusively for animated films, were the musical fairy tale "The Princess and the Frog," the storybook adaptations "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," the dark family tale "Coraline" and the Irish adventure "The Secret of Kells."

All the films, except "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," are nominees for best animated feature film at this year's Academy Awards. "Up" is also nominated for best picture at the Oscars.

"Coraline" and "The Princess and the Frog" won three Annies apiece, including Shane Prigmore for character design in a feature production for "Coraline" and James Mansfield for animated effects for "The Princess and the Frog."

Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach won the Annie for best writing in a feature presentation for "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

The winners of the Annie Awards, presented by the International Animated Film Society, were announced Saturday at a ceremony in Los Angeles.

ThunderCats Cartoons Moral

A writer from the UK contacted recently with the news that he is writing a book about ThunderCats.

Thundercats was one of the blended their moral into the episode more subtly cartoons. The characters would never address the audience, but each other, and did not suddenly monologue about what we should have learned. “Berbils”, an early episode, is pretty apt. Lion-O insists that the Thundercats build their new headquarters themselves. However, one of the berbils interjects (in really cool, synthesized voice), “We're friends. Friends help each other.” To which Tigra quips, “You know, he has a point”.

Every ThunderCats script was reviewed by a psychologist to be sure it would be a positive experience for the young viewer. It worked! If you check the statistics during the period the cartoon aired, you'll see that murder rates went down, school attendance went up and SAT scores went through the roof. When kids weren't scoring really high on their SATs or busy not committing crimes they were peeing their beds, scared to death with nightmares of Mumm-Ra, the bad guy of ThunderCats.

Actor Jeffrey Combs-Upcoming Cartoon Transformers: Prime

According to actor Jeffrey Combs, the upcoming Transformers cartoon set to debut in fall 2010 on the Hasbro Inc. /Discovery Communications. The Hub will be called Transformers: Prime.

Mr. Combs will lend his voice to Ratchet a very well known character in the Transformers world and that 26 episodes of the series have been ordered for the first season.

"It is an honor and a privilege to be a part of such a prestigious project," Mr. Combs.

Jeffrey is quite thrilled with the opportunity to be cast in the role of Ratchet. He's not able to talk too much about the show this early in the production but did have this quote: "What I can say is that it is an honor and a privilege to be a part of such a prestigious project."

Jeffrey Combs is known mostly for his role in acting in the horror film genre as well as playing several alien characters in the popular Star Trek franchise. In the world of cartoons, Combs has lent his voice to Scaregrow in Batman: The Animated Series and several others.

Disney's Return to Hand-drawn Animation

Disney's return to old-fashioned hand drawn animation may take the rare step of pitching an African-American character in the lead, but some critics reckon it's a pretty formulaic concoction. Yet others point out that the film is filled with rich, vibrant characters and ravishing images from the paintbrushes of legendary animation directors Ron Clements and John Musker.

The Princess and the Frog is a traditional musical romance (only loosely connected to the Grimm Brothers fairy tale The Frog Prince) which recalls a cavalcade of similar Disney offerings stretching all the way back to 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

The Princess and the Frog marks Disney’s triumphant return to hand-drawn animation, features its first African-American lead and the voice of Oprah. Its directors talk to DONALD CLARKE

Treasure Planet, the team’s latest 2-D animation, had cost a fortune and looked very creaky when set beside digitally animated Pixar features such as Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc. Sure enough, the picture flopped and pundits declared that John Lasseter, the Pixar supremo, had made hand-drawn animation as redundant as tableaux vivant.

Disney superwoman Princess and Frog

Five decades after the civil human rights movement - so debatably 50 years too late - Disney has lastly made a cartoon with an Afro-American superwoman. Welcome to the contemporary world, guys.

Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) is a waitress with a burning goal to govern America. Oh, all right, that's too much for any Disney superwoman to want. She'll settle for opening her own cabaret restaurant.

Her affectionate father (Terrence Howard), turn-of-the-century America’s answer to Ainsley Harriott, gets himself killed in the Great War. Her mother (Oprah Winfrey), a seamstress, thinks Tiana should dedicate herself to finding her Prince Charming.

Charlie Chaplin 3-D cartoon

Charlie Chaplin is to be brought to life as a cartoon character via an Indian-French collaboration that will see the legendary British comedian featured in an animated television series. DQ Entertainment, an animation and special effects firm based in the southern city of Hyderabad, says it is to reproduce the entertainer’s slapstick in 3D and computer-generated images for television.

The 7 million pound project will feature computer-generated images in more than 104 six-minute episodes that are aimed at children aged six and above.

“It won’t be a realistic portrayal but more like a puppet in an offbeat universe,”

The companies plan to make some 104 episodes of six-minutes each, using Chaplin's vagabond character known as The Tramp with his trademark bowler hat and handlebar moustache. Chaplin's hapless, homeless character was made famous in movies such as The Kid, City Lights, The Gold Rush and Modern Times Original stories will also be created for the series.

The power of cartoons caricature

It's a long way from Honoré Daumier's caricatures satirizing the previous king of France to today's digital animations. But the history of political cartooning remnants the same: the serious business of poking fun at the high and powerful.

An exhibition gap this week at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University examines the state of political caricature at two essential moments: The birth of the form in comic journals such as La Caricature in 1830s France, and the beginning of a new era in which today's artists work in journalism's shifting landscape.

Among the contemporary artist featured in the show are "Doonesbury's" Garry Trudeau; veteran political cartoonists Steve Bell, Steve Brodner, Jeff Danziger and Pat Oliphant, and The News & Observer's recently retired Dwane Powell. The 19th-century illustrations center on the work of Daumier satirizing Louis-Philippe and that of his contemporaries.

Best Animated Feature Film in Cartoon Art Museum

The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco will be unveiling a new exhibit showcasing different visions of the samurai warrior, from woodblock prints and feature films to Japanese manga and anime and American comics superheroes. Drawing the Sword: Samurai in Manga and Anime.

The Cartoon Art Museum and the Hero Initiative proudly present Ed Hannigan: Covered, a retrospective exhibition celebrating the art of Ed Hannigan. This retrospective features a selection of covers and original artwork created by Hannigan for Marvel Comics and DC Comics in the 1970s and 1980s, including such popular characters as Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and The Defenders.

Drawing the Sword was curate by Julian Bermudez, a Los Angeles-based independent curator and producer. The exhibit will feature artwork, production stills, comic books and toys that show a range of samurai-influenced comics and anime creations, including Afro Samurai, Bleach, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Mobile Suit Gundam, Rurouni Kenshin, Samurai Champloo, Samurai Jack, Lone Wolf and Cub, Usagi Yojimbo, and Wolverine.

Groundhog Day: “Punxsutawney Phil”

Among the strange new American animals that added so much to the vocabulary of American English, the groundhog does not loom large. The Skunk (1588) and the Opossum (1610) are more colorful, the Buffalo (1633) and the grizzly bear more awe-inspiring. But of all the animals on the continent, only the lowly, unremarkable groundhog has its own day.

The groundhog also has an older, more curious name. Settlers as long ago as 1674 referred to it as a woodchuck, borrowing the name from one of the Algonquian Indian languages but spelling it as a combination of two English words. This attempt to make sense of the borrowing resulted in such nonsense as the tongue twister, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

Meanwhile, in the middle colonies, the wood-chucking creature acquired another name, groundhog, that goes back at least as far as 1742. In that year the Pennsylvania botanist John Bartram wrote, "The Monac or groundhog...will be as tame as a cat." Groundhog may have been a translation from the Dutch aardvarken, meaning "earth pig," or it may just have been inspired by the observation that this pudgy rodent burrows in the ground. In any case, it was as a groundhog that it got its day, February 2. The ceremony has remained as it was in this 1871 explanation: "On that day the ground-hog comes annually out of his hole, after a long winter nap, to look for his shadow. If he perceives it, he retires again to his burrow, which he does not leave for six weeks--weeks necessarily of stormy weather. But if he does not see his shadow, he stays out of his hole till he can, and the weather is sure to become mild and pleasant." In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, "Punxsutawney Phil" now does the Groundhog Day forecasting for the whole nation.