Gold Statues and Poison Apples

This year's Academy Awards were a golden event for Disney. In case you missed them, the Oscars were packed full of fun and entertaining song and dance numbers, jokes from first time host Seth McFarlane, and even some acceptance speeches cut off by the classic "Jaws" theme. This year, Disney won the Best Animated Feature Film award with Pixar's "Brave," and Best Animated Short Film with "Paperman."

Now let's rewind a couple decades...

In 1932, Walt Disney won his first Oscar for the Silly Symphonies cartoon, "Flowers and Trees." Throughout Walt's career as an animator and director, he won 21 more competitive Oscars. Currently, Walt holds the record for receiving the most amount of Academy Awards competitively (22) and non-competitively (26). In 1938, Walt Disney was awarded a special Academy Award for his achievement of his first animated feature film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." This statue was presented to Walt by Shirley Temple and had seven smaller "dwarf" statues attached to the regular Oscar statue, shown below.

Disney's legacy and quality film making continues today with Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar has won 11 Academy Awards, including the very first Best Animated Feature Film category's award for "Monster's Inc." in 2001. Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced Oscar nominated films, "Sleeping Beauty," "The Lion King," The Princess and the Frog," and "Wreck-it-Ralph." In 1992, Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, making it the first ever animated film to be nominated in this category. "Beauty and the Beast" held that honor until 2009 when Pixar's "Up" was nominated for Best Picture as well.

Walt Disney's 26 Academy Award statues are on display at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, California. There, you can see a special exhibit called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic" and learn how Walt's first animated feature was made into the successful film remains to be today. {Just don't take any apples from strangers while your there}.

Check out the link.here to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum's page on their Snow White exhibit.

Thanks for reading and have a magical day!

Monsters University and Rainy City Tales

If you haven't heard already, Pixar Animation Studios is releasing their fourteenth feature film this summer..."Monster's University". As a prequel to the 'monstrously hilarious' "Monster's Inc.", I'm expecting to laugh enough times while watching "Monster's University" to fill at least fifty laugh canisters. (If you're unsure of what a laugh canister is, stop reading this right now and go watch "Monster's Inc." because your life is incomplete. Then come back and finish reading of course!)

Anywho...Pixar is famous for not only their feature films, but also their much-loved and adored short films. Some of my favorite Pixar shorts are "Geri's Game" (where the old man plays chess with himself...so funny!) and the quirky "For the Birds" (the one with the judgmental birds who face the unfortunate, but funny consequences of bullying a larger silly bird).

Pixar has been working on a new short film to place in front of "Monster's University" in theaters this summer. The creative people at Pixar created a viral marketing campaign to create hype for the upcoming short by creating an code-named tumblr page documenting the work being done on the film, giving away subtle pictures and hints to what the film will be about, without revealing that they were even Pixar. How dare those Pixarians be so sneaky! Even with the stealthiness, Pixar fanatics who had been keeping a close eye on this blog saw the picture below on the tumblr and made their assumptions about the man behind the curtain, if you will. Pixar followers found that the "MU" in the picture below stands for "Monster's University", giving away the identity of the masterminds behind the Rainy City Tales tumblr!

Here's the link to the Rainy City Tales tumblr page: http://rainycitytales332.tumblr.com/

 

Here's a close up of "MU"

Earlier this month, Pixar shared their first sneak peak at the film and gave its official title: "The Blue Umbrella." The short is going to center around a blue umbrella who fancies a red umbrella. In his attempts to get close to this red umbrella, the blue umbrella gets a little beaten up by the weather. I think that sounds adorable enough, so when Pixar released their first clip of the film, I fell in love with the cutest little umbrella you'll ever see. The animation looks great and very realistic which is a bit of a change for Pixar shorts. Will the blue and red umbrella fall in love and have a happy ever after? I can't wait to find out. Can you? : )

Watch the sneek peak clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wY7KQmPYlo

Have a magical day!