SCAD's Animation Panel Returns With Directors From Netflix, Pixar and DreamWorks

Variety's “Pixels and Pencils” panel returns to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival for a fifth year, gathering directors behind the year's standout animated features into one conversation. Six filmmakers are on this year's list, among them Brad Bird for Netflix's “Ray Gunn,” Daniel Chong for Pixar's “Hoppers,” and DreamWorks Animation's Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado for “Forgotten Island.” The studio mix is the small interesting thing here: a streaming feature, a Pixar original and a DreamWorks production sharing a stage, which is roughly how the animation business now looks from the outside. Festivals are also where the craft conversation happens in public, which matters in a format where audiences mostly see the finished frames and rarely the arguments behind them.