News

The "Oscat" award recipients have been announced by PETA.

Annually, PETA honors "outstanding achievements in animal advocacy" through what is known as the Oscat Awards. These are awarded to various movies, TV shows, filmmakers, and actors who've promoted kindness to animals through their work. PETA had previously celebrated Ryan Gosling's Ken for wearing faux fur in Barbie, so it's no surprise that one of the Oscats goes to the hit film. Barbie has been given the Best Fauxjo Mojo Fashion Moments award, with PETA praising costume designer Jacqueline Durran for her work on Margot Robbie's vegan pink Birkenstocks and faux fur boots and with Gosling's vegan leather cowboy boots and "Fauxjo Mojo Mink" fur-free coat.

Related Slotherhouse Celebrated by PETA for Anti-Poaching Message Slotherhouse, a new horror film about a killer sloth, has earned PETA's stamp of approval. Close

The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey has also been...

Save Ralph, the star-studded stop-motion animated short film by Humane Society International, has been awarded the Grand Prix for Good, prestigious recognition as the top non-profit film entered into this year’s Cannes Lions Festival.

Save Ralph, which Hsi created to build support to ban cosmetics testing on animals worldwide, also was awarded Gold in the non-profit film category. The Cannes Lions Awards are recognized as one of the most prestigious global awards in creative excellence and the Grand Prix for Good recognizes and celebrates the use of creativity to positively impact brands and the world at large.

Save Ralph features a star-studded cast including Oscar-winner Taika Waititi as Ralph, along with Ricky Gervais, Zac Efron, Olivia Munn, Pom Klementieff and Tricia Helfer. The film was also produced or subtitled in multiple languages to support Hsi’s efforts to influence lawmakers in Canada, Brazil, Chile, Europe, Mexico, Southeast Asia, South Korea and beyond.

When director Ari Folman (“Waltz with Bashir”) was first approached about tackling an Anne Frank movie nearly a decade ago, he immediately refused. He thought everything had been done before, there was nothing left to explore. But the Anne Frank Fonds Basel, the Swiss non-profit that holds the copyright to her diary, wore down his resistance. And so did Folman’s mother, who was an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor.

“I realized that if something will not change in the way we teach young children about the past, it will fade. It will look to them like ancient history,” said Folman. “Eventually, I read the diary again. I was intrigued about the possibilities of using animation to tell this story. My demands were to animate it, to make it for children, and to portray the last seven months of Anne Frank’s life in the camps [Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen], which is a story that has never been told artistically.

Paws for applause: dogs featured in the documentaries The Truffle Hunters and Stray have shared the top prize at the annual Fido Awards, presented today in London, which recognize the best canine appearances in cinema. The pair picked up the “Best in the World” collar and also shared the “Dog Dox” prize at the irreverent ceremony, presided over by journalist Toby Rose.

Actors Kerry Fox and Christopher Biggins were among the guests at the Fidos’ pop-up in London’s trendy Coal Drops Yard, and plenty of four-legged friends were also in attendance. Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland continued to bolster its awards haul, winning the “Mutt Moment” prize for the black retriever cross in the movie. Pearl, the beagle from Spenser Confidential, took “Blockbuster Bowser”; Theia, the Scottish Dearhound in One Way to Denmark won “Comedy Canine”; the dogs from 23 Walks scored “Rom-Com Rover”; and the canine cast of The United States vs.

The Humane Society International’s #SaveRalphCampaign tackles the disturbing issue of animal testing.

Directed by Spencer Susser, the short film “Save Ralph” features the voices of Taika Waititi, Ricky Gervais, Zac Efron and Olivia Munn. It shines a light on the plight of countless rabbits and other animals suffering at this very moment in laboratories around the world.

Since its launch in April, the “Save Ralph” campaign has captured the attention of animal lovers and policymakers alike as it works to engage viewers to help ban animal testing of cosmetics.

Set designer and puppet maker Andy Gent spent six to eight weeks building the sets. In all, the production took place over the course of 50 days with the team filming 4 seconds per day with 24 frames per second.

To create Ralph, the process took over four months, with five weeks dedicated just to covering him in fur.

“We’ve worked on...

Hollywood filmmakers and movie stars have joined forces with Humane Society International to produce a powerful stop-motion animated short film, Save Ralph, to end cosmetic testing on animals around the world.

The film can be watched here.

Although banned in 40 countries, the practice is still perfectly legal in most of the world, and even making a comeback in Europe, subjecting untold thousands of animals to needless suffering and death.

Taika Waititi, Ricky Gervais, Zac Efron, Olivia Munn, Pom Klementieff, Tricia Helfer and others have come together to help Hsi change that by providing the voices for the Save Ralph film, which aims to shine a light on the suffering animals endure and engage the public and policy makers in Hsi’s mission to ban it. Writer and director Spencer Susser and producer Jeff Vespa (Voices of Parkland) teamed up with the Arch Model studio of puppet maker supreme Andy Gent...

The fifth edition of the world's only industry event dedicated to stop-motion animation will feature an impressive list of experts and decision makers, and the pitching of 15 projects. The world's only industry event dedicated to stop-motion animation, the Animarkt Stop Motion Forum, organised by Polish animation production, distribution and promotion company Momakin every year in Łódź, is taking place fully online for the fifth time from 6-10 October. The Animarkt programme consists of three main sections: Masters, Business and Pitching. Masters brings real animation masters to run workshops for puppet makers, operators and animators. This year, the guests will be Andy Gent, a puppet creator who is also known as Wes Anderson’s right-hand man; Kim Keukeleire, who served as animation director on My Life as a Courgette and who also worked on Chicken Run; Tobias Fouracre, animation supervisor on Isle of Dogs and key animator on Fantastic Mr. Fox...

Andy Gent says it was clear as soon as he read Wes Anderson’s script for “Isle of Dogs” that the project was very ambitious. It just took a while to understand exactly how ambitious.

For example, it was originally estimated the animated movie would require between 300 and 400 puppets, the same number needed for Anderson’s previous stop-motion feature, “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” But giving the movie the scale and look Anderson wanted quickly inflated that number to more than 1,100.

”He pushes you to levels that are amazing levels,” says Gent, who was head of the puppet department on both “Isle of Dogs” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” “Out of that push to do something new, new things would eventually pop out and they could be very happy accidents.”

Anderson wanted his canines to have a bit of humanity in their faces, but aside from more expressive eyes and the ability to talk,...

This article about “Isle of Dogs” first appeared in the TheWrap Magazine’s Oscar Nominations Preview issue.

For his second stop-motion film, “Isle of Dogs,” Wes Anderson reunited with many of the designers and animators he partnered with nearly a decade ago to make 2009’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” But this time they weren’t doing a story about anthropomorphic animals. They were making four-legged dogs, and that allowed them to do things a little differently.

“For past films I’ve done involving four-legged critters, their shape meant we had to create multiple versions of the same character because the normal versions had movement limitations,” head puppet designer Andy Gent said.

“But the dogs that we made for Isle of Dogs had a design that was very tall and long-limbed,” he said. “They could do everything, so all we had to do was create puppets that could lie down, sit still,...

The earworm song “It’s a Small World” may be a Disneyland staple, but stop motion moviemaking gives other meanings to the phrase. That’s not just a description of the doll-sized cavemen that stomp through “Early Man” by Aardman Animation’s Nick Park, or the miniature canines populating Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” — when you look at the select cadre of people who make stop-motion puppets seem alive, you realize that yes, it’s a small world indeed.

“There are very few people who do this,” says Tristan Oliver, who photographed Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” as well as Laika’s “ParaNorman” and Aardman’s “Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” “Our paths cross a lot. So we can bypass lots of explanation, which is a great advantage. When someone comes in who doesn’t quite understand the technique there’s a...

A stop-motion animation movie about Japanese dogs banished into exile and the court of an eccentric 18th century British queen don’t seem like immediate bedfellows, but today’s Fox Searchlight panel suggested that both films have a certain resonance with today’s political landscape. Speaking of Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs, producer Jeremy Dawson revealed that the film’s topicality, regarding the scapegoating of minorities, only grew as filming progressed.

“That kind of political aspect of it [initially] started as a plot device,” Dawson told Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione. “But as we were making the movie – and this movie took like half of my lifetime to make – it started to get more relevant, as things politically, all over the world, were starting to pop up. So, to start with, it was maybe accidental. But then, as we started making the movie, some of those ideas started strengthening within the movie,...

The prize was presented at an exhibition of the film’s craft in London.

Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle Of Dogs has been awarded the first ever Fi-Dogmanitarian award at the Fido Awards (For Incredible Dogs On Screen).

The film, which depicts a group of dogs fighting extermination on an island of trash in Japan, was recognised for its ‘celebration of the human bond with canines in the Year of the Dog’.

The award is modelled on the Palm DogManitarian Award at sister ceremony the Palm Dog awards, which take place during Cannes Film Festival.

Andy Gent, head of...

Ari Folman continues to follow his own strange star. The Israeli filmmaker will follow his spellbinding animation hybrids "Waltz with Bashir" (Oscar-nominated) and "The Congress" (a high-iq cult oddity that will someday get its due) with an animated retelling of the life and diary of Anne Frank. A blend of stop-motion and traditional animation—with 2D characters cut into stop-motion backgrounds — his Anne Frank Film is the first of its kind. That's because Folman, with Diana Elbaum of Belgian-based production company Entre Chien et Loup, negotiated to obtain world rights in all languages and media and complete access to the Anne Frank archives. Read More: Ari Folman Takes on Animated Anne Frank Feature Production began in winter 2014. Folman has finally shared concept art from the studio at Passion Films in London. Folman is collaborating with "Fantastic Mr. Fox" Dp Tristan Oliver and designer Andy Gent to hew the film's stop motion look,...

Film sets are chaotic places. Even on the best run, even during a take, there’s a sense that all hell could break loose any second.

Indeed, if it weren’t for the ever-vigilant Ad department, on most sets it probably would. Which is why the sense of quiet calm that hangs over this corner of 3 Mills Studios in East London is so odd. Even eerie. Because while everyone clearly has purpose, and no one seems to be slacking, that ever-present sense of panic isn’t… present.

“One of the things that he always said was that he really wanted to realise this fully, and animated. So this is kind of a little bit like his dream come true, and you will see his imprint over every frame” The ‘he’ being described by producer Allison Abbate, is of course, the film’s director, Tim Burton. She’s giving HeyUGuys a...

“A character has to last for a year or more of shooting, and as you’ll see, some of these things are very delicate, so we do quite a lot of hospital work, repairing things, and putting limbs back on where they’ve fallen off, or broken ears or fingers, remaking parts; just keeping them up to speed.”

Andy Gent’s job as head of puppet fabrication keeps him busy. The cast of Frankenweenie comprises around 250-300 puppets, each of which needs to be built, costumed and maintained. What’s more, as Gent puts it, “Ultimately, everything comes through here”.

The “here” Gent is referring to is the Puppet Fabrication Workshop – better known to the crew of Frankenweenie as the ‘Puppet Hospital’. It’s a fairly small space, hidden away up a flight of stairs at the back of one of the storage warehouses; a hard place to find, even...

Measurement firm Sentia Media has acquired BuzzNumbers, a social media measurement firm.

The announcement:

Asia-Pacific’s leading media intelligence company, Sentia Media, today announced

the acquisition of BuzzNumbers, leading Australian social media monitoring platform. The acquisition further strengthens Sentia Media’s ability to provide the highest quality and most comprehensive suite of media intelligence services across Australia and beyond.

Sentia Media CEO John Croll said, “BuzzNumbers social media monitoring solution complements our focus on timeliness, coverage, accuracy and insight for communications specialists. We look forward to working closely with Nick Holmes a’ Court (founder), Andy Gent (CEO) and their team to leverage their knowledge of the Australian social media landscape and their proven product, which has been specifically designed for this market.

“This is Sentia Media’s first acquisition since rebranding from Media Monitors Group in February,” Croll added, “and it reaffirms our growth strategy and commitment to providing our...