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The little animation studio that could, can’t any more, as Imagi Animation Studios has laid off 300 of its employees and closed shop due to financial woes.  If you’ve never heard of Imagi, you may have seen their work, with may being the operative word:

The studio launched in 2000 and after doing animation work for TV and in a supporting capacity with DreamWorks Animation’s Father of the Pride (2004), the studio had a moderate success in 2007 with TMNT. Unfortunately, their next film, last year’s Astro Boy opened to disappointing numbers, raking in only $23 million worldwide, which was less than a third of its budget.

Unfortunately, they did have another project in the works, Gatchaman, which is probably now dead.

via Imagi Animation Studios Shut Down; Is the Adaptation of GATCHAMAN Dead? – Collider.com.

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Imagi Studios invested $65 Million to create the CG Hit “Astro Boy”, and used Autodesk’s Maya along with a lot of proprietary software to bring it to the big screen.

Francis Kao, founder and creative director of Imagi Studios, said, “We chose Autodesk Maya as our animation platform for ‘Astro Boy’ because of its openness, creative tools, and large pool of trained artists. We relied on the software’s powerful feature set, and our programmers also developed custom plug-ins for Maya, enabling us to efficiently create high-quality animation.”

Specifically:

“For ‘Astro Boy’ foliage simulation we used the Maya software’s paint effects together with our in-house plug-in,” said Johnny Mak, head of technical operations at Imagi Studios. “Having relied on Maya for many years, we’ve seen great advancements in the software’s capabilities. It continually helps us deliver world-class animation.”

via Imagi’s Astro Boy Leaps With Autodesk Maya | CGnews.

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