The Big B Animation

Animal Magic 1962 - 1984

Visual development art for Me and My Shadow (canceled), DreamWorks Animation Pieces by Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay and Jason Scheier

Hercules (1997) might have the greatest opening in Disney history. The entire sequence was styled like a gospel performance, with the Muses acting as the film’s narrators inspired by classic Greek pottery art and gospel singers at the same time.

This is what CGI looked like in 1963.

The Mandolorian and Grogu movie has opened to the lowest box office of any Star Wars movie ever. This is despite a seven year gap between the last Star Wars movie. Disney has done the truly incredible — destroyed the Star Wars franchise.

Bombs away... My first fighter plane experience not so good

Daffy Duck in “My Little Duckaroo” (1954)

Teenagers have started calling AI art "boomer art" and consider it cringe, and YouTubers have stopped using AI-generated thumbnails because teenagers find them cringe and won't click on them. I honestly couldn't be happier.

Microsoft just banned its own engineers from using AI. The tool was literally costing MORE than the humans it was supposed to replace. They lied to you about AI adoption and now the whole narrative is blowing up: Microsoft gave thousands of engineers access to Claude Code six months ago and encouraged them to use it. Engineers loved it and adoption exploded. But then the invoices arrived. Token-based pricing means every query, every code review, every debugging session costs money. At scale across 100,000 engineers, the numbers became so large that Microsoft issued an internal order to cancel nearly all Claude Code licenses by end of June and force everyone onto their own cheaper tool instead. The company that invested $5 billion in Anthropic just told its own people to stop using Anthropic's product because it costs too much. Uber's story is even worse... Their CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the budget he planned for the full year was "blown away already" by April. Uber had rolled out Claude Code in December 2025. By March, 84% of their 5,000 engineers were using it with 70% of all committed code coming from AI systems. Heavy users were burning $500 to $2,000 per month each. Naga himself spent $1,200 in a single two-hour demo session. The company had even built internal leaderboards ranking engineers by how much AI they used. They literally gamified the spending and then ran out of money. Now look at what Nvidia's own VP of applied deep learning Bryan Catanzaro said to Axios last month. Direct quote: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees." This is a VP at the company that SELLS the chips saying that using AI is more expensive than paying humans. Think about what this means for the entire AI narrative. Every CEO on every earnings call for the past two years has said the same thing: AI will make us more efficient, reduce headcount, and cut costs. The stock market rewarded every company that said it. Fired workers, stock goes up. Announced AI adoption, stock goes up. But the actual companies deploying AI at scale are discovering the math doesn't work. The MORE employees use AI, the HIGHER the bill. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24x increase in token consumption by 2030 as companies adopt AI agents. Gartner just published a report showing that even though individual token prices will drop 90% by 2030, total enterprise AI costs will go UP because agents consume exponentially more tokens per task than basic tools. Meta built an internal dashboard called "Claudeonomics" to track which employees use the most AI. Amazon started pushing engineers to "tokenmaxx," their internal term for consuming as many AI tokens as possible. Both companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure this year alone. And Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on AI, just told 100,000 engineers to stop using the tool they liked best because the per-token bills got out of control. The companies building AI are telling investors it saves money. The companies using AI are finding out it costs more than the humans it was supposed to replace. And even the company that makes the chips just admitted it through its own VP. This is the gap nobody on Wall Street is pricing in. $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year across Big Tech. And the first companies to actually deploy these tools at scale are already pulling back because the economics don't work. What do you think?

I had no idea Porky Pig was ever like this. I'm shocked.

The networks have been losing huge amounts of money keeping these late night variety shows running because no executive wants to be the bean counter who killed “The Tonight Show.” But it makes no sense for this to exist in the contemporary media landscape. This format was invented in an era when there were four over-the-air television channels and nothing else to watch. If you turned on the TV at 11:30, this was what you watched because it was all that was on. Now that you have everything streaming, why on earth would you watch this? In an era of YouTube, why would you sit through an entire hour of mostly filler when there will be a 90 second clip of anything interesting that might have happened on the show? 200 people worked on this. It occupied a giant theater on top of some of the world’s most expensive Manhattan real estate. Colbert was paid a $15 million salary. And the network was losing $40 million a year keeping this lumbering behemoth going. This should be a podcast with a staff of about 10. And I am sure that is what it is about to become.

JACK NICHOLSON 40yrs ago on the corporatisation and conglomeration of the Film industry & Hollywood.

In the 1980s, the Norwegian salmon farming industry ran into a colour problem. Wild salmon are pink because they eat krill and small crustaceans containing a pigment called astaxanthin. The pigment accumulates in the muscle tissue and gives the flesh its colour. That colour is one of the cues a diner uses, consciously or otherwise, to decide whether the fish on the plate is appetising. Farmed salmon, raised on soy protein, corn meal, fish meal from wild-caught smaller fish, and stabilisers, do not eat krill. They do not accumulate astaxanthin. Without intervention, their flesh is grey. Washed-out, unappealing grey. Nobody buys a grey salmon. So the industry adopted synthetic astaxanthin, manufactured by Hoffmann-La Roche, originally developed as a feed additive to brighten poultry yolks. It is added to salmon feed in measured doses. The doses are calibrated against a colour chart called the SalmoFan, produced by the same company, which the farmer holds against a slice of flesh from a slaughtered fish to confirm the pigmentation has reached the commercially desirable shade. The SalmoFan has fifteen shades. The farmer picks the target shade based on what the supermarket buyer in the destination country considers appealing. Norwegian salmon, sitting on the ice in a British supermarket, has been colour-graded to match the expectations of a marketing department in Hoddesdon. The fish you're looking at is the colour the company chose. The fish didn't pick it. The krill didn't provide it. The pigment came from a Swiss laboratory. You're eating a paint sample. The paint is fish-flavoured. The fish remembers krill. It has never tasted krill. The krill is in a different part of the supply chain.

Actually this is also why we're stuck in remake/reboot hell, young people with new ideas aren't allowed into the industry anymore. Japan constantly scouts new talent while in the US it's just nepotism now.

160 mins of these restored gems. easily one of the releases of the year/decade and a key look at an overlooked bridge from the silent to pre-code era.

How did the Looney Tunes writers assume their audience would get Of Mice and Men references? Was a movie adaptation really popular, or was Steinbeck a lot more widely read back then?

@EricRSammons I always like meeting adults who mispronounce words, as they never actually heard them being uttered, they read them only in books and invented their own sound- a sign of a well read and self driven individual..

I've found that some of the most intelligent young people I know often mispronounce words, because they grew up reading far, far more than watching TV, and so they know the meaning of more words than they know how to pronounce correctly.

Animation by Rohit Kelkar* | My Father's Dragon (2022) #penciltest #sakuga #genga #2danimation

@FountainCartoon Wrong. He is referring to the hair.

Yes… because robots are the same as people 🙄

"Why is every other cartoon on YouTube either depressed people in apartments or 90s-2000s nostalgia reheats?" Because your average artist/animator doesn't really read. No amount of rewatching SpongeBob or Ben 10 will compensate for not reading Tolkien, Milton, or Howard Pyle.