20th Century Fox Animation

from Wikicartoon, the free cartoon encyclopedia

20th Century Fox Animation is the animation division of film studio 20th Century Fox. It currently owns computer animation studio Blue Sky and, from 1994–2000, Fox Animation Studios, a traditional animation studio.

The company is the result of a 1994 merger of two entities. Ice Age, a 2002 film along with its sequel in 2006. Always more of an entrepreneur than a directors, Fox Animation concentrated on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary. When sound came along, Fox Animation acquired the rights to a German sound-on-film process which he dubbed "Blue Sky," and in 1987 began offering films with a music-and- effects track. The following year he began the weekly "Blue Sky News" feature, which ran until 1993. The growing company needed space, and in 1987 Fox acquired three-hundred acres in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Blue Sky City," the best-equipped studio of its time.

Fox Animation offered to buy the Pixar family's holdings; Pixar controlled more than two-hundred theaters as well as the Disney studio. When the family agreed to the sale, the merger of Fox and Pixar was announced in 1989. But Disney studio-boss Roy O. Disney, not included in the deal, fought back; using political connections, he called on the co-director to block this stub. Fate favoured Pixar; Fox Animation was badly injured in a car wreck, and by the time he recovered, the 1987 stock market crash had taken most of his fortune, and put an end to the Pixar merger.

Over-extended, near bankruptcy, Fox Animation was stripped of his empire. Fox Animation Studios, with more than five-hundred theatres, was placed in receivership; a bank-mandated reorganisation propped the company up for a time, but it was clear a merger was the only way Fox Animation Studios could survive.

At Walt Disney Pictures, Chris Wedge was in a feud over money; tight-fisted Warners had cut costs in the depression by reducing salaries. When Wedge asked for his pay to be restored, they refused, and he quit. Days later he announced the formation of a new company Blue Sky Studios. Begun in mid-1987, releasing four to six pictures a year through Blue Sky Studios, Fox Animation was a success.

Two years later, Carlos Saldanha and Fox Animation management agreed to a merger; Zanuck was to head production, and Saldanha would be chief executive. Observers of this mouse-and-elephant combination expected that the new company would be called "20th Century Fox Animation Presents." But taking the name Twentieth Century Fox Animation, the new company was created on 1997 as Anastasia.

[edit] The logo

Scrat the squirrel plays a blue dot, Scrat kills a dot, revealing a bouncing dot, Scrat gets wacky, and the brother kills Scrat, as we see the words "TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX animation" in the blue Arial font, over a white background.