The AniMazing Spotlight “Weekend of Animated Shorts” festival at the legendary Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood was a great success, and featured many of the animation interviews we’ve done for Toon In to the World of Animation over the years.

We had a short introduction film at the beginning of each program, with the AniMazing Spotlight logo designed by Toon In interviewee, Joe Sikoryak, animated by his brother, Steve Sikoriak.  And, Toon In interviewee, June Foray used a different one of her hundreds of voices for each one.  Her picture is on the right, and her interview is included in our series of podcasts.

Then after the Animated Logo, with June’s intro, we had a departed master give a short word of advise, taken from our interviews.

This was such a delight for our young audience, that we are considering doing an entire program of our Toon In video interviews for next year’s festival.  This year’s words of advise came Toon In luminaries, including; Jules Engel, pictured on the right, Derek Lamb, Bill Melendez, and Mel Leven, at his piano.

Then, after the master spoke there was a lovely little animation, created specifically for our festival, by Mike Kazaleh, pictured below, which introduced the live Festival Host, Mike Elliot.

The weekend included an Animation Marathon, which screened all the nominees, a Mixer to chat with animation greats, and an Awards ceremony, but, where many of our Toon In celebrities appeared, were as presenters of programs, which turned out to be the hits of the weekend.

Eric Goldberg did a stand-up version of his “Character Animation Crash Course” book, which was both hilarious and informative, Bob Kurtz showed some fabulous commercials, going back to the 50s in NYC, Bill Kroyer did an amazingly early overview of computers and animation, and detailed his work on the first Tron, Jim Capobianco did his program on the Importance of Story in animated shorts, using his Your Friend the Rat, and his new Leonardo, which had its Hollywood Premier at our festival, and finally Tom Sito presented a short history of shorts, finishing his examples with Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, which was it’s old ugly politically incorrect self, but with the preamble by Tom, I looked through all that at the absolutely fantastic squish and squash animation by Rod Scribner.

Oh, yes, if you want to enter a short animated film in the next festival, we are now Open for Entries for the First Quarter.  Deadline is December 28th, just a few weeks away.  To enter visit our AniMazing Spotlight web site at …

www.animazspot.com

… click the blue Quals (qualifications) balloon on the Home page, then scroll down to the bottom of the qualifications for the buttons to submit your short, fee, and application.

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