AWN Headline News

Hibbert Ralph Animations The First Snow of Winter will premiere in the U.K. on BBC1 on Christmas Day, December 25, at 4:40 p.m. The half-hour animated special from director Graham Ralph features the voices of Miriam Margolyes, Sorcha Cusack, and the late Dermot Morgan. The film follows the tale of Sean, a little Irish duck who becomes separated from his parents and misses the annual migration south. Thus, he is left alone to face the hostile climate of the bitter Irish winter. The special also airs in the U.S. on the Disney Channel on December 23 at 7 p.m.

San Francisco-based (Colossal) Pictures created a new animated Nickelodeon theatrical open, which premiered with Paramounts The Rugrats Movie, and stars Slap D. Pooch, a blue-balloon-nosed dog who was featured in his own short film as part of Nickelodeons Oh Yeah! Cartoons! series. The 16-second open, Slaps Fleck, was directed by Colossals Charlie Canfield, creative directed by George Evelyn, and animated by Chuck Gammage Animation based on a character created by Bill Burnett and designed by Vincent Waller.

This year's final and quite possibly, most anticipated, animated feature, DreamWorks' "The Prince of Egypt" debuted this past weekend at number two with a respectable but not stellar $14.5M. While DreamWorks reps blame the impeachment proceedings, the White House affair didn't seem to have much effect on the strong $18.4M number one opening for the live-action Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan film, "You've Got Mail." It is too early to make any guesses on the success of DreamWorks' 'Prince' and the next few holiday weeks will be integral in determining the film's profitability.

Hong Kong-born animation director and illustrator Paul Chung completed a French bubblegum spot, "Rainforest," for Passion Pictures through Young and Rubicam (Paris, France). The ad takes place in a brightly colored South American jungle setting as Indian natives watch their jungle being destroyed by an army of loggers. To thwart the loggers, a native opens a pack of Malabar bubblegum and from the pack jumps the superhero Malabar Man who proceeds to block the bulldozers with gum. The 30-second spot which combines traditional 2D with computer animation, will air in France starting in 1999.

By special arrangement with Nielsen Media Research, AWN publishes the Nielsen ratings for animated programs on a monthly basis in the Animation Flash. The ratings included herein are only for U.S. national network television. The following list of animated national network programs is ranked by Household Ratings. A Rating is the percentage of households that tuned into the program. This percentage can provide us with the number of households that tuned into the program on average during the month. The universe estimate for the 1997-98 television season is 98 million TV homes.

MEDIALAB, a real-time performance animation production company, and Cine-Groupe, a production house and distributor of animation, have joined forces for the first time in a co-production deal that will see two properties, Pinocchio 3001 and Sphinx@com, developed into computer-generated animated feature films and television series. These projects will be produced over the next four years using MEDIALABs propietary performance animation techniques.

Coming off their successful animated feature, Antz, Pacific Data Images (PDI) and DreamWorks have announced that their next collaboration will be Tusker, directed by Tim Johnson (co-director of Antz) and Brad Lewis (producer of Antz). The film will be PDI/DreamWorks third project and will follow the release of Shrek, which is currently in production. Tusker follows a herd of elephants as they make a perilous trek across Southeast Asia confronting numerous dangers including a malevolent group of poachers.

* Monday, November 30 - Thursday, December 3. La Reunion Island, France.

The biennial 3rd Encounters of the Indian Ocean Institute of the Image isexceptionally well organized this year, featuring a tribute to the lateanimation teacher Pierry Ayma, a co-founder of the Indian Ocean Institute.Fifty European professionals will meet to discuss the following theme:real-time data and sound transfer for production and [long distance]training purposes. AWN's General Manager Annick Teninge, will attend the

After two weekends at No. 1, "A Bug's Life" slipped to second with $11 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period due to a strong opening for "Star Trek: Insurrection," the ninth entry in the consistently profitable sci-fi franchise. Warner Bros.' effects-laden film "Jack Frost" had an acceptable but underwhelming $7 million opening. Paramount's "The Rugrats Movie" continued to attract little tykes taking fifth place with $4.5 million. "A Bug's Life" has now grossed a total of $83.3 million in 24 days of release while "The Rugrats Movie" has brought in $73.2 million in the same amount of time.

* Sunday, December 13. Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

Hollywood Shorts, a monthly film festival dedicated to independent short films and videos, will take place 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at The Joint (8771 West Pico Boulevard in West LA). The screening includes the animated film "Call Me Fishmael." A holiday party follows the screening. If you don't live in L.A. and would still like to still see the films, they can be seen through the Internet at http://www.lalive.com.

Savage Steve Holland, co-creator of "Eek! the Cat," has signed on with the William Morris Agency for representation in all fields. He will be repped by Rob Wolken, Spencer Baumgarten and Greg Lipstone. He is currently creating, writing and directing DIC's "Sabrina, the Animated Series." In addition, he's also written and directed live-action films including "Better Off Dead" (1985) and "One Crazy Summer" (1986).

A.D.V. Films has announced the acquisition of "Queen Emeraldas," a new film from Leiji Matsumoto (creator of the '70s animated series "Space Cruiser Yamato," a.k.a. "Starblazers"). The film features Matsumoto's unique sense of character design utilizing traditional and computer animation. The story takes place in the far future when humanity has expanded into space and colonized the stars. Since pirates ply the space routes preying on the weak and helpless, the rebel Emeraldas sails the Sea of Stars fighting evil using her array of futuristic weapons.