After Birthday Glow

Thanks to all for the sweet birthday messages in my email, answering machine, text mesages, IM's and so forth. As a person who spends ALL DAY in the house with only a cat, bird, and rabbit to talk to it sure makes a person feel loved.

In other news, I just purchased "The Incredible Book Eating Boy" as a birthday present to myself and it's a BEAUTIFUL book which was referred to me by the many folks in the blogosphere.


It's the kind of book you wish you could design if you had a level of design sophistication such as Oliver Jeffers. It's full of old paper collages combined with painting that make for real pleasing designs. It's not typically the style you would find in an american picture book illustrator and I think it's because we here in the states adhere to a particular aesthetic. It's something I tried in my early work but was often told by art directors that it was a little too complex and not too kid friendly and so, for fear of never working in the business I adapted my style. Then again, imagine how laborious it must be to go shucking about swap meets and trying to find such interesting paper? Call me lazy but I think I'm just gonna paint stuff.

I was gonna go to the bike store to see about purchasing a bike for myself so I can be a little more "GREEN" to the environment and hustle around town without having to deal with so much traffic but the local bike store had moved to another part of town and I was left emty handed. I thought it would've been cool to tell you all that I got a shiny new bike for my birthday after yesterdays rant about missing my youth but alas.... Maybe tomorrow I'll have something to share? :)

Lastly, when Disney Channel manages to break out of their 12 hour blocks of "Hannah Montana" and "Suite Life of Zack and Cody" they'll show a new episode of The Replacements and there will be a new one this Saturday at 9PM. I also changed my profile icon to something more suitable for my accomplishments. I mean, heck, why not wear my accomplishments with some pride right?

Disney orders 13 more episodes of "The Replacements"

I've been away from the show for quite a while with all the children's book work on my plate but it's always nice to be back to stop by and say HI.

I was suprised to discover that our show was picked up for an extra 13 episodes on top of the other 18 which brings us up to a total of 58 episodes! Woo Hoo!
We're switching up the show a bit and we 'guarantee' it's going to be even better than the first season. We have a slightly larger budget, with a larger staff (first season was seriously understaffed and fell behind schedule) The look has been tweaked slightly and each episode is now one whole 22 min episode instead of two 11s. Everyone is packing up to move to the third floor because Touchstone Pictures is kicking us out to occupy the second and fourth floors.
Afterwards I was walking past the Disney Archives and I saw these!

When you're a kid growing up I'm sure most of you can recall that you had a favortie book or VHS movie that you watched to DEATH and never got bored of. For me, Disney's THE BLACK HOLE was it. Here's a trailer....

Sadly, I still know a lot of the dialogue by heart.... Don't judge me.
In retrospect it's kind of an odd movie to consider as a favorite as a child. It did poorly in the theaters, and you would probably consider something like 'Sleeping Beauty' or 'Shrek' to be a kid's favorite movie. Nope, little Dan Santat liked the psychotropic sci fi flick with Ernest Borgnine and a scary scene depicting hell. Wait...We're talking about a DISNEY MOVIE here!?!?!? Needless to say I was so obsessed with V.I.N.C.E.N.T. and I probably drew him a thousand times, so to see the actual movie props really brought back memories and is probably the reason why I'm so obsessed with robots.
Ugh...Did you watch the trailer? In retrospect, this is really awful....
I also saw the ROCKETEER shelving books.

Apparently his movie did so poorly that he needs a second job.

"The Replacements" on Access Hollywood

My show was featured on Access Hollywood where we animated Billy Bush and Nancy O Dell (Grrr!) Thought you'd all get a kick out of it.