Just a quick heads up for anyone who is into animation and owns an HDTV here in the U.S. Last night during ABC's HD broadcast of Disney's Pocahontas here in L.A., they were promoting the rerun of the original Toy Story in to be broadcast in HD on this Thursday, June 30th at 8:00pm PDT. I saw this film the last time they broadcast it in HD, and let me just say, as good as your DVD copy is, it doesn't even compare! So set your HD TiVos or be at home if you can. Check it out!

-steve

P.S. - Pocahontas looked great in HD as well!

Do we really need them? Sure, big stars have a lot of draw in the live-action realm. Do they have the same clout in animation?

I want to see great characters when I go see a film. Many times, if I see a big name attached to an animated film, it actually makes me want to see the film less. That's not to say there aren't some great actors out there that can do great voices. PIXAR seems to have a knack for casting. But more often than not, celebrities are getting these roles based on their name and not their voice acting skills. Check out this really great interview with Billy West by Kyle Ryan about voice acting. I'd have to say that I agree with Billy on many of his points. What do you think?

-steve

Two new "non-Disney" animated features from the 80's are coming to DVD. 1983's Rock & Rule (which is available now) and 1985's Starchaser: The Legend of Orin which will be available on June 21. In today's 3D world where most kids may not have ever even seen a 2D feature, they are refreshing to watch (even if they may seem a little dated). Both are worth checking out.

-steve

Over the last week we have experienced some server problems. Hopefully that is all past us now. Look for more good stuff to come soon!

-steve and hoops

We were looking around the net for some cool animation tools to feature on Animation Meat the other day and we found a couple of neat little pieces of freeware and shareware. Of course, since we at the Meat are big Mac fans the tools we found are for OSX on Macintosh. Every animator should have a metronome to help with timing walks etc. So, with that in mind, we found two good freeware metronomes for OSX: MetronomeX and TapTempo. I like the simplicity of MetronomeX but TapTempo is cool as well in that you can tap in a beat and it will figure out the tempo for you.

Another good tool for your arsenal is a timecode frame calculator. This will allow you to add up your footage and frames, very handy if you want to calculate all the footage you've done on a job before going in to ask for a raise. We found a very cool little timecode calculator for OSX called surprisingly enough: Timecode Calculator. There is a limited free version (v1.0) and a $7 version (v2.0) with a ton of different formats from film to video. It comes in the slick OSX brush metal look and will be a handsome addition to any desktop.

-hoops

Today is Animation Meat's birthday! Back in 1999 we had an idea of trying to preserve and distribute all of the animation notes we had collected over the years from various studios and artists across the internet so that none of the information would ever be lost. We plan to continue doing just that in the years to come. Enjoy!

-steve and hoops