Disney Book News, In Brief

Didier Ghez has the covers to two of this year's most eagerly awaited Disney-related tomes: Walt Disney Animation Studios The Archive Series: Story and Alice in Wonderland by John Scieszka and Mary Blair. 'Story' is a collection of notes and sketches from the golden era of Disney animation; 'Alice' is the follow up to last year's gorgeous Cinderella children's book. To gaze upon the goodness, click here.

Cartoon Brew has a brief blurb about The Alchemy of Animation by Beauty & The Beast director Don Hahn. The book "details the process Disney uses to make animated films from traditional animation, to CG to stop-motion." The blurb also offers this enticing bit of news-to-me: Hahn is developing a stop-motion animated feature of Frankenweenie with Tim Burton! To read the Cartoon Brew piece, click here.

Crabapplecove.vom has posted a review of Character Animation Crash Course by animator Eric Goldberg (he did the Genie in Aladdin, among others). Crabapple gives the book a 50/50 rating, saying that "it has some genuinely terrific information in it, but like nearly every other book on animation to date, it’s not so much a systematic how-to as it is a collection of formulae." He then goes on to lament the fact that "animators don’t really have a 'Unified Field Theory' of animation." To find out just what the heck all of this means, click here.

InRich.com recently did a piece on Disney's current Tinkerbell merchandising bonanza. In it, they talk to award winning author Gail Carson Levine, whose book Fairy Dust and the Quest For the Egg was published by Disney Press as the cornerstone of the "Disney Fairies" franchise. Commenting on the character, Carson says, "The only thing (Tinkerbell) says in (the original Peter Pan) is, 'Silly ass!' And she tries to have Wendy killed a couple of times. She is not, in my mind, a warm, fuzzy character." WTF? That sounds way more interesting than a mute do-gooder. To read the article, click here.