News

DreamWorks Animation’s live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon flew to the top of the North American charts at the weekend, establishing a new franchise opening record to maintain the positive early start to summer blockbuster season.

Opening on a confirmed $84.6m in 4,365 locations through Universal, the film has become the fourth biggest debut of the year so far behind A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch, and Captain America: Brave New World, and the eighth highest opening weekend for a live-action remake.

Total three-day weekendbox office amounted to an estimated $151.7m, with North Americangenerating $3.7bn so far to...

Arco, a French animated feature about of unexpected friendship and the fate of a world impacted by climate change, has won the Cristal for best film at this year’s Annecy film festival.

The feature debut of famed French illustrator Ugo Bienvenu, which premiered in Cannes and counts Natalie Portman among its producers, follows Arco, a 10‑year‑old boy from the year 2932 who inadvertently travels back in time, via a rainbow, to 2075, where he encounters Iris, a young girl living through environmental collapse. Their burgeoning friendship becomes a tender yet urgent bond across time, rooted in innocence, curiosity and shared heartbreak. In her rave Hollywood Reporter review, Lovia Gyarkye called Arco “a considered meditation on ecological disaster within the dulcet grooves of a charming story about adolescent friendship.”

‘Endless Cookie’ Courtesy of the Annecy Film Festival

The top prize for the Contrechamp sidebar section went to Endless Cookie, a Canadian...

The Annecy Film Festival’s tribute to the legendary Matt Groening and the creators of The Simpsons played like an episode of the iconic animated series: Funny, joyous and heartfelt, with lots of silliness and at least one unexpected fart joke.

Groening was named an “icon of animation,” and presented with an honorary Cristal award for his lifetime contribution to the form.

“40 years ago, Matt Groening dropped a bomb on animation,” said Annecy artistic director Michael Jean, referring to the launch of The Simpsons back in 1987 — first as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, later as the long-running primetime series on Fox. “And since then, he has continued to work at the cutting edge of animation.”‘

In tribute, Annecy screened a few Frenchified shorts of Groening’s work, including a Simpsons intro with an accordion-playing Lisa and a snail-slurping Homer and a Tin-Tin-inspired spin on Futurama. They...

UK filmmaker Joanna Quinn paid tribute to Gaza animator Haneen Koraz as she received the Annecy International Animation Film Festival’s Honorary Cristal at its opening ceremony on Sunday evening.

The Bafta-winning and three-time Oscar-nominated The Canterbury Tales and Affairs of the Art director praised Koraz’s work in the Gaza Strip spearheading women-run animation workshops for children.

“One day, she’ll be stood here, holding one of these, hint, hint,” she continued, referring to her Cristal award. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the kids could come here and watch their films.”

Quinn’s was speaking amid growing international criticism of Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian territory – aimed at annihilating Islamist militant group Hamas in response to its October 7, 2023 attacks and retrieving Israeli hostages – which has left more than 54,000 people dead and the population on the brink of starvation.

Speaking to Deadline afterwards at the opening night party,...

It’s another year of high-profile animated sequels, led by Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” DreamWorks’ “The Bad Guys 2,” and Nickelodeon/Paramount’s “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Square Pants,” and the “Smurfs” film.

But there are plenty of attention-grabbing non-sequels in 2025: “Pixar’s intergalactic “Elio,” DreamWorks’ “Dog Man,” Neon’s French “Arco,” Sony Pictures Classics’ “A Magnificent Life,” Sylvain Chomet’s biopic about French author-filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, and Sony Picture’s “Scarlet,” the latest anime from Mamoru Hosoda (“Belle”).

In addition, Netflix delivers another diverse slate: “In Your Dreams,” “KPop Demon Hunters” (with Sony Pictures), Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D adult comedy, “Fixed,” “Lost in Starlight” (the streamer’s first Korean-language animated film), “Plankton: The Movie” (with Nickelodeon), and “The Twits” adapted from Roald Dahl.

Also, there are three Oscar-qualifying holdovers from 2024: “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” “The Colors Within,” and “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.

The San Sebastian film festival has cherry-picked the best of Cannes’ competition lineup for its Perlak section this year.

Virtually every film that scooped up an award in Cannes, from Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (grand prize), Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (special jury prize) and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (best screenplay) to Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, will screen in the Spanish festival’s sidebar, and compete for San Sebastian’s audience awards.

Jacques Audiard’s transgender crime musical Emilia Pérez, which won Cannes’ jury prize and the best actress honors for its ensemble cast, will open the Perlak section on Sept. 20.

Other Cannes titles, including Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, Parthenope from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, and Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive opus Megalopolis, will also screen in the Perlak section. As will...

Though it is not as widely discussed as Sundance or Cannes, The Annecy Animated Film Festival showcases a host of animated features from around the world outside the big studios that don't get the love and attention they deserve. Winning the Cristal Award, Annecy's Palme d'Or, was the 2024 film Memoir of a Snail, which will open the Melbourne International Film Festival in August. The story of a lonely woman with a cleft lip and an obsession with collecting snails is directed by Adam Elliot, with this being his second Cristal winner and his second feature release. He has been one of Australia's most celebrated animators, with his 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet winning the Academy Award for best animated short. Every frame of his "clayographies" is sculpted with love, and all of them are the stories of eccentric outcasts, sharing themes of loss, loneliness, and the trials that sprout from living with disability and mental illness.

Inside Out 2 was a litmus test for Pixar and it delivered, grossing a monster $155m estimated bow in North America for the highest opening of the year to date and the second highest three-day launch of all time by an animated film.

After a mighty $140m yield from international markets resulting in a $295m global debut, industry executives will be in a buoyant mood this week at CineEurope. Screen will post a full international report on Monday.

The latest escapades of Joy and her cohorts of core emotions inside the mind of the now adolescent Riley scored the highest...

Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animation Memoir Of A Snail has won the Cristal for best film at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

The Australian film was selected from 12 titles in the main Competition. Elliot’s second feature Memoir follows Grace, a lonely misfit who hoards snails and who strikes up an enduring friendship with Pinky, an eccentric elderly woman.

Anton and Charades co-represent sales on the film, and secured multiple key deals shortly prior to the festival opening including Benelux, Spain and Scandinavian territories.

Memoir had its world premiere in Annecy on Monday, June 10, and will open Australia’s...

Adam Elliot’s oddball Aussie feature Memoir of a Snail has won the Cristal award for best feature film at the 2024 Annecy Film Festival, the world’s leading international animation fest.

The dark dramedy, about a lonely, snail-obsessed hoarder — voiced by Succession star Sarah Snook — recounting her life story to one of her beloved gastropods, is Elliot’s first feature since 2009’s Mary and Max, which also won the top honor at Annecy. An impressive group of Australian A-listers, including Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana and Nick Cave provide supporting voice work. IFC Films picked up North American rights to Memoir of a Snail ahead of the festival.

Flow, a drama from Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis (Away), which follows a cat that survives a world-destroying deluge on a boat with a collection of other animals, won this year’s jury award and audience prize, voted on by Annecy attendees.

The Annecy Animation Festival hosted its closing ceremony on Saturday, where there were two clear winners from the main feature film competition. Adam Elliot’s “Memoir of a Snail” took Annecy’s top award, the Cristal for best feature, and Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow” scooped just about everything else.

Australian stop-motion feature “Memoir of a Snail” is the latest from Elliot, an Academy Award winner who scored the animated short statue in 2004 with his stop-motion film “Harvie Krumpet.” This time around, the director offers the heartstring-pulling story of Grace Pudel, a lonely misfit who loves collecting snails.

“There’s a magic to 100%-CG-free stop-motion, with its cellophane flames and tears made of sexual lubricant,” wrote Variety Chief Film Critic Peter Debruge in his review of the film. “Don’t be surprised if ‘Memoir’ has you shedding real ones in your seat.”

Zilbalodis’ “Flow” won a four-pack of honors at this year...

Taiwan has delivered outstanding and unprecedented performances in the 2024 edition of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Market. Two titles are selected in Short Films in Competition, including Hey Dad (Perspectives section) and Is This Now the Time I Should Let You Go? (Graduation Films section). Besides, two projects, Lost and Found and Long Distance Call, are included in Mifa Pitches, seeking international development resources.

As the annual highlight in the animation industry, this year's Annecy starts from June 9th to June 15th. Taiwan Creative Content Agency (Taicca) continues to set up an on-site pavilion and holds Partners Pitches: Taiwan Spotlight with the Mifa for five projects from Taiwan. Additionally, this year Taicca also arranges Taiwan Talents Showcase screening session, showcasing two short films eligible for Oscar nominations next year aiming to connect with international networks, including Ghost of the Dark Path by Fish Wang, the winner of Cristal...

Henry Selick’s modern classic “Coraline” turns 15 this year, and a new 3D remaster of the stop-motion feature (announced in February) will get a worldwide theatrical release this fall by Fathom in the U.S and Trafalgar Releasing in the rest of the world.

Limited screenings will begin on August 15 and feature an early glimpse of Laika’s upcoming film, “Wildwood.” Ticket sales kick off on June 21. A 2D version of the film will also be available to exhibitors.

“Coraline”

In 2023, Fathom re-released the original version of “Coraline” in the U.S., which netted over $7 million at the box office, a record for the event-based distributor. The film is also screening in this year’s Annecy Classics program, marking a return to the French festival where it won the Cristal for a feature film in 2009.

“Coraline” was written by Neil Gaiman and Selick and stars voice actors Dakota Fanning, Ian McShane,...

"Star Wars" has infiltrated every aspect of pop culture, whether it's lightsabers or just the "pew pew pew" sound effect that blasters make. Still, for the most part, our universe is pretty separate from George Lucas' galaxy far, far away. We (sadly) don't have blue milk, and jizz is not the number one music genre in the world. We don't have droids either, although the "Star Wars" galaxy doesn't have cellphones or the internet.

And yet, it seems there is one thing all universes, fictional and otherwise, can agree on — how refreshing it is to have a cold beer. Sometimes, when you're fighting the Empire, you need to relax. Some people take to death sticks. Others take to Cerveza Cristal.

Indeed, the latest online "Star Wars" sensation is a series of commercials that aired on Chilean Canal 13 in the early 2000s. When the original trilogy aired in the country,...

As a young boy growing up in Budapest, a town that would come to be known as “Hollywood on the Danube,” Béla Bunyik dreamed of being in the pictures. “I fell in love with movies in Hungary back in the ’50s,” Bunyik tells Variety. “When I was 12 years old, I started to work as an extra in a few movies…. In 1953, I spent a whole summer with a bunch of kids and some of the best Hungarian actors at the time.”

He recalls being picked up after school by talent scouts and cutting his teeth on the sets of films like Viktor Gertler’s 1954 adventure-comedy “Me and My Grandfather.” “Seeing how a movie was done was very exciting for me and I was sad when the summer ended, and the film was shut,” he says. But those formative years sparked a lifelong obsession. “I got hooked.”

Bunyik would later emigrate to the U.

Animation Is Film revealed Thursday that its 2023 edition next month will open with Gkids and Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron, the latest film from Hayao Miyazaki that just opened the Toronto Film Festival. It is getting its U.S. Imax premiere at Tcl’s Chinese 6.

The festival, set to run October 18-22 in Hollywood, will close with Netflix’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, to be followed by a Q&a with director Sam Fell and executive producer Peter Lord.

Aif’s annual lineup of theatrical presentations, special events, and shorts showcase includes two Annecy International Animation Film Festival prize winners, Neon’s film Robot Dreams and Gkids’ Chicken for Linda!, which will make their West Coast and U.S. debuts. Other titles include Phoenix: Reminiscence of Flower (Japan), making its North American theatrical premiere.

DreamWorks Animation will host a special presentation of its latest film,...

Chicken for Linda! a French and Italian kids feature from directors Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, has won top prize, the Cristal award, for best film at the 2023 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

The 2D feature follows a mother struggling to make a chicken dinner for her daughter Linda, despite the fact that she doesn’t know how to cook and has picked a day when the whole country is on strike, making it nearly impossible to find a chicken to buy. Produced by Dolce Vita Films, Chicken for Linda! also picked up Annecy’s Gan Foundation Award for distribution.

Four Souls of Coyote, a 2D feature about Indigenous creation tales, from director Áron Gauder, took the jury prize, while Japanese feature The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes, from director Tomohisa Taguchi, took the Paul Grimault Award.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams from French director Benoît Chieux,...

The 47th edition of the Annecy International Film Festival opened on a defiantly upbeat note on Sunday evening just three three days after its picturesque lakeside home was rocked by a violent knife attack.

“Three days ago, Annecy’s joie de vivre was attacked. I’m convinced that the best response to this drama is to live life even more to the full and more intensely,” Annecy mayor François Astorg told a packed Bonlieu auditorium.

“With this conviction, I believe that art and culture celebrates life, questions it and allows us to make it better,” he added, saying this year’s edition was an act of resistance.

The atmosphere in the auditorium was positive and fun as the youthful audience kept up the festival tradition of firing paper planes at the stage.

Thursday’s attack by a lone knifeman on four nursery age children and two adults, took place just...

“My Life As a Zucchini” director Claude Barras has set up his latest stop-motion animated feature, “Savages!”

Production company Gebeka International — a Hildegarde-Goodfellas company formed in 2021 — and production, financing and sales studio Anton are behind the project, which will be written by Barras and Catherine Paille (“Magnetic Beasts”). The project will be shopped to buyers in Cannes next week.

“Savages!” follows the emotional journey of a girl, her father and a rescued baby orangutan. The film has a strong environmental and conservationist message, exploring the crisis of the destruction of rainforests.

An official synopsis for the film reads as follows: “In Borneo, at the edge of the tropical forest, Kéria is given a baby orangutan that has been rescued from the palm oil plantation where her father works. At the same time, Kéria’s younger cousin Selaï comes to live with her and her father as he seeks refuge from...

New York-based conglomerate Big Media has signed with Rctv International Corp. to become the exclusive distribution partner to parent company Rctv’s catalog for Fast and AVOD platforms worldwide.

Under the terms of the agreement, Big Media will distribute over 7,000 hours of telenovelas to streaming platforms around the world. It will also serve as the exclusive distributor of Rctv’s catalogue for all forms of broadcast in Europe and Asia.

“Our partnership with Rctv International is one of the most significant in our company’s 14-year history. Rctv’s catalog of telenovelas is unparalleled, both in terms of quality and quantity,” said Juan Fernández, Big Media’s head of Latin America and Spanish-speaking U.S. distribution.

“We are honored to represent this enormous content library around the world. In addition, the company has thousands of hours of classic Latin American movies and entertainment programming which Big Media will make available...

Dynasty is giving us a showdown 37 years in the making. As teased in the synopsis for Friday’s episode (The CW, 9/8c), “Cristal and Alexis have a historically epic encounter,” and now TVLine has your exclusive first look at Blake Carrington’s wives’ waterlogged smackdown.

For you non-historians, the reboot is recreating an iconic brawl from the original Dynasty, which found Alexis (played by Joan Collins) and Krystle (played by Linda Evans) duking it out in the lily pond. That episode, appropriately titled “The Threat,” aired in 1983.

More from TVLineRatings: Nancy Drew Eyes Smallest Audience, Riverdale Returns SteadyRiverdale Recap: Friday...