AWN Headline News

* Saturday, February 6 - Saturday, February 13. New York City, New York, USA.

"The 1999 New York International Children's Film Festival (NYICFF) will be held at Cantor Film Center in Manhattan. Among the highlights are a screening of Hayao Miyazaki's feature "Kiki's Delivery Service" and an Ub Iwerks Retrospective in Animation. Forty-two films will be in competition including such animated entries as "Mario the Show Cleaner," "Pingu Steals," "A Dog Cartoon" [AF 12/22/98], "Frank the Wrabbit" and "Furious George." For further information call (212) 677-6478.

* Friday, February 12 - Thursday, February 18. London, UK.

"Art & Animation: An International Symposium & Week of Film Screenings takes place at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The event kicks off on Friday with a lecture on Art & Animation by Russian filmmaker Yuri Norstein. Speakers in the symposium include Dr. William Moritz, Christine Panushka, Ruth Lingford, Stuart Hilton, Erica Russell and Simon Pummell. To find out more, contact Jayne Pilling at jsp@easynet.co.uk or call 0171 930 3647 to book symposium tickets.

HBO Family, a new 24-hour commercial-free channel dedicated exclusively to family programming, launched February 1. The channel is teaming up with producers like Nelvana, Cinar, S4C and Hit Entertainment to deliver original animated programming. Among the new animated series premiering are "George and Martha," "The Adventures of Paddington Bear" and "Anthony Ant," as well as a new mixed-media pre-school series from Curious Pictures, "A Little Curious." In addition, a variety of original specials will have a "sneak preview" on HBO Family Channel before they premiere on the main HBO channel.

Mark Osborne's animated short film, "MORE," has won the Jury Award for Special Recognition for Short Filmmaking at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The 6-minute film, about an inventor's struggle to find meaning in a grey emotion-less world, is the world's first stop motion short produced for exhibition on 70mm/15 perf (IMAX). "MORE" is inspired by and features the instrumental song "Elegia" by British electronic pop group New Order.

After the success of "The Rugrats Movie" and plenty of hit television shows, Klasky Csupo is relocating to a bigger building at 6353-57 Sunset Boulevard, across from the Hollywood Cinerama Dome. The 6-floor, 95,000 square ft., state-of-the-art glass and steel structure was originally designed as an auto showroom for Mercedes-Benz, but will now hold up to 500 Klasky Csupo employees. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan says, "This is great news for the heart of Hollywood.

New York-based Spontaneous Combustion has hired 3D modeler/animator Brian Austin in a further expansion of the company's CGI capabilities. Austin, who had been freelancing in the New York City area for the past couple years, is an accomplished fine artist as well as a digital artist and has works in the permanent collection of New York's The Museum of Modern Art.

1999 marks the 40th anniversary of the longest running television series in history, "Bonanza," and New York-based Abrams/Gentile Entertainment is producing a new animated series based on the perennial Western. The show is a prequel of sorts taking place on the Ponderosa Ranch with a young Ben Cartwright and his teenage sons. Abrams/Gentile also presents numerous other new projects including:"Open Call" (13 x 22 minutes): a comedy about two divorcees who become casting directors, as unqualified as they may be, in a unique blend of "real-time" animation and live-action.

GoodTimes Entertainment announced that "Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Movie," made its Latin American debut this Christmas on Cinecanal and Sky. This marked Cinecanal's first acquisition of an independently-produced animated feature and was the first time Cinecanal ran two versions of a single animated feature: neutral Spanish dubbed version for children and the original, English-language version with Spanish subtitles for family audiences.

* Saturday, January 30. Hollywood, California, USA.

* Monday, January 25 - Thursday, January 29, 1999. New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

Barcelona, Spain-based animation company D'Ocon Films Productions announces the launch of a co-production with Sony Wonder on Myths&Legends, a 13-episode series (with an option of a second set of 13), about two kids who discover a magic cavern which allows them to travel back through history. Their adventures take them to ancient Greece, the shores of Loch Ness and amongst the Knights of the Round Table; in each case making sure that good triumphs over evil.

After nine holiday-themed specials, Encore Enterprises has created 26 new episodes of Chucklewood Critters with educational structures and guidance provided by the UCLA Department of Education. The show has been pre-sold to Ravensburger Film & TV in Germany, BBC in the UK and Daro Film in the rest of the world. Additionally, Encore has two hundred 1-minute fillers of Goofballs, a dialogue-less, gag-driven series featuring two handymen - Tiny the elephant and Jake the lizard. The show is a co-production between Riverstar Entertainment and SPI International.