DreamWorks Bits: New Turbo Poster and Trolls Director Announced

DreamWorks have had quite the success with their first feature film of 2013; The Croods has currently raked in upwards of $563 million. They'll be hoping for a repeat of that with their summer release, the Ryan Reynolds-starring escargot-adventure, Turbo. Today the studio rolled out another new poster for the film.

Beautiful Concept Art and Pre-Production Material from Scrapped The Legend of Tembo

It's a rough time for the animation and VFX industry as of late: DreamWorks are having to make massive cut backs; Rhythm & Hues, on the back of countless awards for their work on Life of Pi, including a BAFTA, have filed for bankruptcy. An earlier woe, though, came in September of last year, when Digital Domain ran into a whole host of financial problems, culminating in the shuttering of their animation division, Tradition Studios, and thus the unscrupulous demise of their first in-production animated feature, The Legend of Tembo.

Toy Story of Terror! TV Special Coming Next Year!

We heard a few months ago that - as well as working on new Toy Story Toons, one of which was just recently released - "two new 22-minute TV specials are in the works for October 2013 and Spring 2014." And now we know what the first of those will be about.

Animation World Network announced that next Halloween, Pixar will release a Toy Story holiday special: Toy Story of Terror! The synopsis AWN provides is:

What starts out as a fun road trip for the Toy Story gang takes an unexpected turn for the worse when the trip detours to a roadside motel. After one of the toys goes missing, the others find themselves caught up in a mysterious sequence of events that must be solved before they all suffer the same fate in this Toy Story of Terror.

Sounds great! After Partysaurus Rex, it's great to see Pixar going a slightly different route with the Toy Story gang going forwards. Bryko from Upcoming Pixar raises a good point too; given Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich's famous love of The Shining, and Toy Story of Terror!'s very Shining-esque sounding story, it seems very likely we'll see him involved with the project in some way.

It's only fitting, given that Toy Story started life itself as a holiday TV special (A Tin Toy Christmas), that things are coming full circle with these Toy Story specials. And I, for one, can't wait!