Latest in Animation

Nickelodeon Animation Studios has penciled in Brian Keane for its newly created post of EVP Production & Operations. Keane, who spent a decade-plus as EVP/COO of Blue Sky Studios, will oversee plans to scale, manage and support productions across Nickelodeon series, movies and its Studio business in Burbank and New…

In his first collaboration with Arnon Manor on the animated short Cops and Robbers, actor Timothy Ware-Hill adapted a spoken word poem he'd written into a stunning eight-minute piece, meditating on rampant displays of police violence within the United States, and the systemic racism behind them. After publishing his…

EXCLUSIVE: Pixar’s Soul takes viewers to The Great Before, a world where souls find their quirks and passions before manifesting on Earth. The colorful realm rife with pastel-hued spirits was 23 years in the making, when director Pete Docter wondered how his son came into the world with a personality. “Where did that…

Sam Bergen, whose background includes executive stints at Vice Media and Beats by Dr. Dre, has been named chief marketing officer at Illumination. He will oversee all aspects of the company's creative and business marketing, overseeing print and audio-visual advertising as well as graphic and product design.  Gail…

Throughout their careers in animation, directors Max Lang and Daniel Snaddon have maintained a strong collaborative relationship with children's book author Julia Donaldson. After bringing four of her works to the screen—two of which garnered Oscar nominations—they return to the awards conversation this year with The S…

Coming off the heat of the first DreamWorks Animation movie Trolls, a bonanza musical that saw its tune “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Justin Timberlake get nominated for a Best Song Oscar on top of going quadruple platinum, the sequel Trolls World Tour was always going to be more music, more color, more glitz and more…

“A lot of Pixar films are based on personal experiences,” says Onward director Dan Scanlon at Deadline’s Contenders Film awards-season event. “This might be more blatantly autobiographical in some ways.” That’s not to say that Scanlon descended from elves. Rather, his movie follows two brothers – the younger Ian…

After years of helping deliver some of the more legendary Disney animated characters like Aladdin and The Beast, Over the Moon director Glen Keane knew early on he had found his next great animated character to help bring to life. “Fei Fei was a character that immediately, I was drawn to,” Keane says during the Netflix…

Irish outfit Cartoon Saloon has established itself as one of the world’s most consistently excellent animation studios, having received Oscar nominations across projects including Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells and The Breadwinner. Their latest project Wolfwalkers, which sold in a glossy deal to Apple TV+, is a…

Oscar-winning director Pete Docter shared that the idea behind Soul, his latest Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar animated film, came from his own self-reflection. “I was at a point in my life where I started to question, OK I’ve always been taught — everybody I think has — to follow your passion, do what you love and…

It took seven years for a sequel to come to fruition from DreamWorks Animation for its 2013 hit The Croods, but as it turns out the timing was just right. The coronavirus pandemic not only impacted the production process for the follow-up The Croods: A New Age, it also actually wound up giving it more gravitas and…

After publishing his book The Torture Letters in January of 2020, Laurence Ralph decided to adapt it into an animated short—reckoning in both cases with systemic racism in America, in hopes that society at large will address it, and take meaningful action to stop the violence it perpetuates. Based on over a decade of…