Toy Story Hawaiian Vacation

Here's two just-released stills from Toy Story Hawaiian Vacation, the Pixar short that will be shown in front of Cars 2:

I think shorts like this are a great way for people to see familiar characters again without the weight and potential drag of another complete feature film. I impetuously wrote Brad Bird one time saying he should do some shorts based on The Incredibles. Maybe that will still happen. Or maybe not. But it would be nice.

Click on the images to see a bigger version.

Polar bears on their way

I suppose this is an official Coca-Cola commercial from Brazil set to a tune from Disney's Brother Bear:

DCA Renovation Boards

38th Annual Annie Award Highlights

Sooooo... I made it to the Annies this year after missing last year. This was my first time going without a press pass so I was just kicking back as a casual observer. DreamWorks Animation's How To Train Your Dragon was the big winner of the evening. Some of the other highlights were:

• Tom Hatten accepting the award for Pixar winning Best Animated Short for Day & Night. Tom Hatten was my animation hero when I was younger, introducing the Popeye cartoons on KTLA, giving some history behind them, taking sketch requests, etc. This was back when local TV heroes were a little more common than they are now
• Knowing ahead of time who the Winsor McCay Award recipients would be for the evening (Brad Bird, Eric Goldberg, and Matt Groening) I was very interested in hearing from all of them and was disappointed to find out Brad Bird wasn't there; well, his hilarious acceptance speech video more than made up for his absence; I hope it can get posted online
• James Hong; It's ridiculous how long his IMDb credits are; I still think of him as Fifth Brother in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing from 1955 and as Wayne's potential future father-in-law in Wayne's World 2; he was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but comes across as though he just moved here from China; I've seen him as a presenter and also as an award-receiver at the Annies a few times and he's always hilarious
• Corey Burton with his spot-on voice characterization of Captain Hook was a real treat
• Talked briefly with Dave Filoni, director of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars series; told him that I was looking forward to seeing the pit droids make an appearance in the series and he said he is hoping to be able to work them in; he also rightly noted that the pit droids are George Lucas' favorite characters from Episode I; one thing I like about Dave's work is that he does a good job (of course with plenty of help from his crew) of stitching together the visual elements of the two Star Wars trilogies
• Oh, and I also bumped into Lisa Williams there; she's the one that made the Christian the Lion video famous on YouTube and got to meet John and Ace; see more about that here

UPDATE: Here's the video of Brad Bird's acceptance speech. This is worth watching the whole thing. There's an unexpected cameo in there somewhere from a very well-known movie star:



The video was originally posted here at Cartoon Brew, so you can go there next and read all the comments.

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