Storytelling Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorSpire Animation Studios, the newly formed feature animation studio co-founded by award-winning producer Brad Lewis (“Ratatouille”) and industry entrepreneur P.J.

Zoe Hewitt Title sequences are road maps to shows for viewers. In mere seconds, audiences decide if they’re going to keep watching or look for something better.

Clayton Davis One year after “Sound of Metal” made a significant impact at the Oscars, Sian Heder’s “CODA” shows itself as an outstanding example for representation in the disability community, and could be one of the heartwarming family films of the year that finds its way to Academy attention.Distributed by Apple TV Plus, which bought the film at the Sundance Film Festival for a record-breaking $25 million, “CODA” is bowing in theaters and on the streaming platform.

Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh is making her return to the small screen in the new Netflix series “The Chair”.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at LargeThe Peabody Awards is expanding its domain to include honors for storytelling in interactive, immersive and new media categories. As part of the expansion — which comes a week after Peabody announced its 30 winners for 2021 — an additional board of ten newly appointed jurors has been named.

early reviews, has been held up as far simpler, more modest and yet still full of charm, compared to the more ambitious existential themes of “Soul” or the grand set pieces of “Incredibles 2.” One critic compared it to Pixar doing its take on Studio Ghibli, “evoking the low-stakes seaside magic of ‘Ponyo’ in particular” — and sure enough, sitting on Casarosa’s bookshelf is a small Totoro figurine from one of Studio Ghibli’s classic animated fantasies.

Several Hollywood stars and top companies are joining forces with the mental health expert community and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative to hold virtual conversations with visionaries and thought leaders across TV, film and music as part of a three-day virtual summit tied to Mental Health Awareness Month.

Ethan Shanfeld Regina Hall, H.E.R., Trevor Noah, Michael Imperioli, Margaret Cho, Andy Cohen, Rachel Bloom and Tig Notaro are among the industry notables lined up to participate in a virtual summit on how mental health is portrayed in media.The event is being pulled together by MTV Entertainment Group, Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Amazon Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment and other media companies, as well as the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and a host of mental health experts.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla It’s always hard to recount and reveal truths about the life of a widely-recognized celebrity in a biopic format.

Cartoon Network Studios has drawn up a new shorts program, Cartoon Cartoons, focused on showcasing diverse stories, centering new voices and mentoring the next generation of animators.

Designing the costumes for Emma, the Autumn de Wilde-directed adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic period novel, was a balance between staying true to the era (the early 1800s) while leaving room for some creativity and artistic license, says Oscar-nominated costume designer Alexandra Byrne.

A group of leading media companies and medical experts have created the Mental Health Storytelling Coalition, a partnership to address the national rise in depression, anxiety and suicide — particularly in young people and exacerbated by Covid-19 — and how the entertainment industry can help.

Guy Lodge Film CriticA bright, watery cornflower blue may lead the palette of “The Spine of Night,” an adult animated fantasy indebted in equal part to Ralph Bakshi and Gerald Potterton, but that doesn’t mean a lot of crimson blood isn’t spilled for contrast. Extreme, skeleton-snapping ultraviolence is a key selling point of this first collaboration between animator Morgan Galen King and filmmaker-comics writer Philip Gelatt.

Asian representation in mainstream storytelling and what fans can expect when they tune in to the series in less than two weeks.

Priyanka Chopra has made headlines recently with her recent achievements. The diva made history by becoming the first-ever Indian to announce Oscar nominees along with her husband Nick Jonas.

Tim Dams Ireland has long been known as a nation of storytellers, home to giants of literature and theater such as Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.In recent years, Ireland’s storytelling tradition has started to thrive in the screen industries too.

The coronavirus pandemic has obviously changed how movies are being made, with the extra costs involved in testing and implementing strict hygienic regimes, and the constant threat hanging over every shoot that a local outbreak or lockdown could shut things down.

Queen & Slim director Melina Matsoukas is partnering with Howard University and Instagram to help amplify and support the stories of aspiring Black storytellers through the newly launched Instagram x Share Black Stories “Future First” Reels Challenge.

Since Sound of Metal was released, the film from writer-director Darius Marder has been getting tons of acclaim and awards season buzz — and it received even more shine on Wednesday morning when star Riz Ahmed earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama for his role as punk drummer Ruben who is slowly losing his ability to hear and is forced to adapt to a new life.

When South Korean tech giant Naver paid $600 million for storytelling app Wattpad on Jan. 19, the companies pointed to global expansion as a rationale for the deal.

Cookbook author and television writer Sri Rao debuted his first theater showBollywood Kitchenas part of the Geffen Playhouse’s virtual Geffen Stayhouse series on Saturday night.The production is part storytelling in which he shares tales of his parent’s journeys from India to the United States and part cooking class.

Though it tells a story set 150 years in the past, the Paul Greengrass-directed News of the World re-teams the filmmaker with his Captain Phillips star Tom Hanks in an Old West tale from Universal Pictures about a country trying to heal.

The Canadian storytelling app Wattpad has unveiled a deal to be acquired by Naver, the South Korean Internet conglomerate and home of Webtoon, the global digital comics platform as part of a cash and stock deal valued at $600 million. The acquisition, when completed, will combine Wattpad and Webtoon into a platform with a joint global monthly audience of 160 million users.

As a new political era dawns, Americans are reeling. Images of a violent insurrection incited by a sitting U.S.

There’s a new hero in town. Javicia Leslie is donning the cape and cowl for the second season of Batwoman on The CW and she is hitting the ground running.

Elizabeth Wagmeister Senior CorrespondentLate last year, Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle both shared their personal stories of miscarriage and child loss.On Friday, Netflix’s Oscar-contending film “Pieces of a Woman” is released, shining a light on the taboo topics, which are rarely discussed in society, but highly common for women and families around the world.The subject matter is what attracted star Vanessa Kirby to the project, along with Ellen Burstyn, who says the film is emblematic of

After the release of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” I think it’s fair to say that most fans of the franchise are ready for something new. Or at least, something that isn’t directly tied into the world of Skywalkers.

Kiko Martinez The amount of literary content German authors Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were able to publish during the early to mid-19th century has given Hollywood a seemingly bottomless trove of imaginative narratives to pull from.

Janet W.

Stephen King fans wait with bated breath this week in anticipation of the first episode of “The Stand” mini-series, and as it turns out, there’s nothing to worry about. This nine-episode CBS All-Access adaptation opens with just under an hour of character introductions for three of its leads, and enough world-building to give the audience their bearings without overwhelming them.