Rainbow Brite Launches

Rainbow Brite gets a fantastic new makeover from Hallmark. First introduced 25 years ago, Rainbow Brite and her friends are ready to meet and entertain a whole new generation of girls. A new site launched with games and a new animated video featuring her updated look. Animax Entertainment created the animated video, "Return to Rainbow Land," for Hallmark.

And stay tuned because a big, new game called "Rainbow Rescue" is set to launch this Fall. It will bundled with the upcoming Rainbow Brite doll! Rainbow Rescue is a fun meta-game with a bunch of colorful mini-games where you help Rainbow Brite and her friends solve puzzles to find all the colors of the rainbow.

Animation and Advertising

As part of Advertising Week in New York City, Animax Entertainment's Michael Bellavia will be participating on a panel entitled Animation and Advertising. The panel will explore the current and future state of animation, storytelling and visual effects on Madison Avenue. Ask a provocative question Wednesday, September 23 at the Paley Center for Media.

Jonas Brothers on Popzilla

The Jonas Brothers, darlings of Disney and icons of America's twittering tween-agers, get the royal treatment from Popzilla and Animax in the latest video released. Check out the new site also www.popzilla.tv where you can follow the Popzilla Twitter feed, become a Facebook friend and get the latest celebrity dirt.

Soul to Seoul

Animax Entertainment is participating in the upcoming Seoul Promotion Plan. SPP 2009 is a market dedicated to cartoons, animation and animated content that lives on multiple platforms. We're set to meet with a variety of potential partners and will also be looking to meet with some game studios as well.

Canada Writing Contest

On the heels of launching a new studio in Toronto with former Nelvana exec Patricia Burns installed as head of production, Animax Entertainment is casting its net wide for animation concepts via a Canadian script-writing contest. If you're Canadian, enter the contest here. (From Kidscreen Magazine)

Meet Animax at MIPCOM

Animax Entertainment is heading to MIPCOM this year and will soon be announcing the slate of projects we're taking with us. If you'd like to arrange a time to meet, let us know.

Animation Magazine Articles Us!

In Animation Magazine's SIGGRAPH issue there is a nice article about Animax Entertainment. You can get a sneak of it here. A few corrections:

• We won the Emmy last year. This year we were nominated again but we didn't win.
• We haven't opened up in Van Nuys yet - we are desperately seeking 10,000 sqft of space so if you have some in your backyard, let us know.
  
• Michael's last name is Bellavia not Begroskjlsi - the print edition supposedly butchers it.
  
• They left out that we are super duper people.
• There were other items that shouldn't have been in the article but we can't really talk about what those items are and why they shouldn't have been in there but trust us when we say they shouldn't have been.
  

And by the way if you're at SIGGRAPH - we'll be there too tomorrow so hunt us down.

Panda Cute

A few things in life are Cute.

Even fewer things are Super Cute.

And then there are those rare gems that are Panda Cute -- a level of uber-cuteness that is humanly unattainable. Animax animated a series of shorts that are definitely Panda Cute. lil' panda just launched - complete with videos, ecards, wallpapers, screensavers, and merchandise. Forget YouTube. Check out pandatube and get your panda on!

We Sniff Emmy

Monday is E-Day: we find out if we win our second Emmy Award. Keep your golden fingers crossed.

Sorry we've been remiss in posting - we have been super busy. 2005 was our best year. Then 2006 was our best year times two. Then the first four months of 2007 exploded like nuts times four to the third power.

We want to thank all our clients, partners, employees, friends, fans, and even the rest of the competitive landscape for making Animax Entertainment a juggernaut.

Slammo Dunk for AOL

Well, the word is out. Maybe a little early, but still it's spreading. Animax Entertainment produced the Flash animation for AOL's new series Slammo and Sloshie’s Super Sexy Interstellar TV Jamboree. The show is a mix of 2D and 3D and is probably one of the lushest looking broadband animation shows ever created. Yeah, we're a tad boastful, but deservedly so.

Happy Easter!

We animated a cute ecard for American Greetings that's perfect for the holiday season. Animax Entertainment wishes everyone a happy holiday.

You Can Call Me Boner

After a verrrrry long wait, it looks like Slammo & Sloshie, the series Animax Entertainment worked on for AOL may be nearing launch. It's a very lush production, a mix of 2D Flash animation and 3D environments. Really crazy looking and the subject matter is very different as well. If you're into vinyl toys, Nazis, vaudeville, aliens, bad 80s TV shows, robots, vixens, blood, violence, anime, manga, and cute little Mexican sea cows, then you will be a fan of this show.

Happy Belated Valentine's Day

We love you, even if we are a little late in letting you know! Here's a special valentine we made for you.

And because we love you, we want to make sure you don't waster your money on expensive printer ink http://www.inkisit.com.

Sundance, YouTube and Animax

The Meet the Banes animation we did for Sundance Channel is also on YouTube. You can watch it here but don't forget to vote.

Animax Spawns French Speaking Siamese Bat Child

Looks like Animax Entertainment got roped into a little bit of a controversy. The wrestling tabloids have gone into gossip mongering hyperdrive over the cartoon we produce for Vince McMahon and WWE called Mr. McMahon's Kiss My Ass Club.

Yes, there are tabloids that cover the world of pro wrestling and in particular WWE. The journalistic integrity of these rags is mostly on par with Weekly World News, but then again, they don't really need any. They traffic in the sensational world of wrestling, so of course their reporting will be sensationalist. We were even more surprised though to see the "controversy" covered on Frederator, so we decided to issue a statement (we too feel Britney Spears' and Lindsay Lohan's tabloid pain.)

Yes, WWE was sued by the creators of Assy McGee. That's about where the truth in these articles ends and the rest of the assertions are baseless.

• Mr. McMahon has been doing the ass bit in the ring for years now.
  
• The initial idea for the cartoon came from WWE, but we wrote all the scripts and we designed the characters. (Only 2 episodes have been released but others are in the can.) Everything is original - Mr. McMahon's ass is 100% genuine grade A beef.
  
• We knew about Assy McGee. We were already in development and production on Mr. McMahon's ass when we saw the trailer on YouTube. We thought it looked interesting, but that, basically, it was boring. (Watched an episode on Cartoon Network recently - like the intro and that's about it.) But the existence or discovery of Assy McGee had no influence over the stories, look or anything done for WWE.
  
• The base level conception of the shows are very different. While they are both asses, they are as different as Mickey Mouse and Mighty Mouse.
  
• The WWE show launched before Assy did.
  

So where does that leave us? We're still transmedia. We're still funny. And, to be clear to our fans, even though we're getting the celebrity tabloid treatment, we're just like you.

Head of the Class

Wow. Another great holiday gift. We just found out that Arnold Schwarzenegger's Hanukkah card over at ArnoldSpeaks.com was one of the top 5 holiday cards on Revver this month.

Thanks for submitting a video to the Revver Film School holiday greeting card project! Your video was one of the 5 most-watched videos, and will be featured on the Revver blog (http://blog.revver.com/?p=405), in a dashboard message to all Revver users, and in the featured Head of the Class collection (http://one.revver.com/collections/show/78137).

Good work!!! Keep watch on your dashboard for the next project theme. Happy Holidays from Revver!

Alex Black

Thanks everyone for voting for ArnoldSpeaks even if you might not for Arnold Schwarzenegger himself :)

Christmas Cheer

Wow. How very nice. Our animated Christmas cards went out yesterday and we've been getting great feedback. So we thank:

AdCritic who said:

• Tree-huggers (and Charles Schulz devotees) should get a kick out of this animated ditty from Animax Entertainment.

And Netscape users who even commented on the flying banana - the banana peel is our logo,

And a certain 8 year old who said: "hahahahaha lol thats freakin funny" - we totally agree!

Arnold on Christmas

More Sad News

While learning of the news of Joseph Barbera, we also learned that Chris Hayward, the creator of Dudley Do-Right and a writer of Rocky & Bullwinkle, recently died. We hope it's not true that these things usually come in threes...

R.I.P. Mr. Barbera

Sad news in the animation world today - Mr. Barbera died today. Along with Bill Hanna, Barbera invented some of the biggest cartoon classics: Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound,The Jetsons, The Smurfs, and Scooby-Doo. How can you top that? We at Animax were lucky enough to actually animate Tom & Jerry and Scooby-Doo for a series of DVDs we produced for Warner Bros. and National Geographic.

Animax Got Into MIT!!!

Congratulations Animax! We got into MIT! Actually we got into the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog because of one of our transmedia productions. Huh? Not even wikipedia has a listing for "transmedia." We're pretty sure after reading this, that transmedia means how a particular piece of content is handled across various storytelling media - broadcast, broadband, theatrical, retail entertainment, etc. and how each piece of content and it's treatment contributes to a meta-narrative spanning across all media in aggregate. We're not exactly sure that's what it means because our brain started to hurt trying to understand all the MIT-speak (although, reading Geoffrey Long's blog helped.)

Anyways, all the fuss is being made over the highbrow cartoon we produce for WWE called Mr. McMahon's Kiss My Ass. It turns out that KMA is one of the "stranger transmedia products" Sam Ford has ever heard of - now, that's a pull-quote! Ford is a 2007 Masters of Science Candidate in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and is entering his second year as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He's also a fan of wrestling -- he didn't go as far as to say he's a fan of Mr. McMahon's posterior. KMA qualifies as transmedia because McMahon exploits his rump live in the ring (theatrical entertainment), on TV (broadcast entertainment), in print, and now, with our help, online. By the way, the latest episode features Mel Gibson.

Upon further review it seems like we've been involved in a number of transmedia productions not the least of which is the one Animax won an Emmy for - ESPN's animated Off-Mikes which spans many of the same media as WWE including radio.

P.S. Hey MIT, we feel like we deserve an honorary doctorate after trying to figure this transmedia stuff out.

WWE - The Passion of the Ass Starring Mel Gibson

Tonight the latest cartoon that Animax Entertainment produced for WWE went live. It's called Mel Gibson's Passion of the Ass and it features Vince McMahon taking the Apocalypto director to task for being a drunk, a racist and an all around ass. Mel Gibson might have been #1 at the box office this past weekend but Mr. McMahon's ass is tops.