Word: prided
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...ripe for recycling on the big screen. The Japanese love of cartoon heroes started with the birth in 1952 of Astro Boy and has continued unabated?the average citizen can rattle off superhero names and special powers like a bona fide comic-store geek. "It's a matter of pride for Japan to keep up with the U.S.," says Atsushi Ohara, a manga and anim? critic for the daily Asahi Shimbun. "When it comes to superheroes, we don't like to be in second place...
...Siegfried & Roy statue on the city's Strip. Sixteen time zones away, in a drab industrial building at the far end of a Hong Kong subway line, the shock was felt just as much. Imagi, a fledgling animation company, was in the running to make Father of the Pride, a prime-time comedy cartoon about the private lives of Siegfried & Roy's feline co-stars. "I opened the newspaper and it said Roy was bitten by a tiger," says Francis Kao, founder of the company. Then calls started coming in from DreamWorks SKG, the Hollywood studio that dreamt...
...Miraculously, Horn survived, and Father of the Pride debuts in the U.S. in August on NBC, which is awarding it the choice time slot vacated by Frasier. That makes Imagi, with its 300 employees, a small example of the kind of business high-cost Hong Kong needs in a big way: knowledge-based companies that don't require cheap inputs or production costs to compete. (Although the city has a world-famous film industry, Japan and South Korea have long been Asia's animation centers; mainland China and India are also on the rise in this field, capitalizing on their...
...time, not much. But last year, the renamed Imagi International Holdings landed a contract to animate 13 episodes of Father of the Pride. The company doubled its staff to 300, and Raman Hui, the Hong Kong-born supervising animator of DreamWorks' Shrek and Shrek 2, flew in to oversee the work. According to Hui, DreamWorks considered more experienced companies in France, South Korea and the U.S. but picked Imagi because its employees were plucky and determined to learn. "It's really refreshing," says Hui, one of six DreamWorks employees supervising work in Hong Kong. "They say, 'Tell...
...well as a great time slot, Father of the Pride has top-name talent-voice-overs will be done by John Goodman, Carl Reiner, and Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it may yet be undermined by Horn's condition. Last month, NBC previewed the show in New York City for advertising executives, playing a video greeting from Horn, his first public appearance since the mauling. The effects of his attack, and a stroke he suffered after it, were apparent, says Kristi Argyilan, media director of the advertising firm Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos. "They were trying to say, 'Look...