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To: Don Green who wrote (10169)	5/28/2002 6:40:15 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 14451

Sony to Announce New Unit To Focus on Digital Animation By ANNA WILDE MATHEWS and BRUCE ORWALL Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Hoping to cash in on the recent success of computer-animated films like "Shrek," Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment plans to announce the launch of a new digital-animation unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Sony plans to hire two executives from DreamWorks SKG, Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins, to head the operation. Both were executive producers on DreamWorks' big 2001 hit "Shrek," which was computer-animated, and they were producers on the studio's 1998 film "The Prince of Egypt," which was made in so-called traditional animation. Their task now is to develop new computer-animated feature films for Sony. Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment already has a unit called Imageworks, which creates digital effects and character animation. It has worked on such films as "Stuart Little" and the current "Spider-Man." But Imageworks doesn't develop its own films, but rather supplies digital services to the studio's other projects. The field of Hollywood studios interested in the animation business has fluctuated significantly in recent years. After Walt Disney Co. hit it big with "The Lion King" in the mid-1990s, several rivals launched ambitious animation efforts, including DreamWorks, AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox. Most of the efforts were targeted at making films in the traditional format. Intense competition for animators developed, driving the cost of making such films up significantly. But around the same, computer-animated films like Pixar Animation Studio's "Toy Story" started to catch on, capturing the public's imagination and shifting the marketplace again. Most of the studios that plunged into the business ultimately pulled back, with the exception of DreamWorks. But the continuing success of computer-animated Pixar films like "Monsters Inc.," coupled with DreamWorks' "Shrek," has begun to tempt other studios back into the business. Fox unexpectedly had a significant box-office hit earlier this year with "Ice Age," which has sold about $170 million in tickets domestically. Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Pictures, meanwhile, is planning a computer-animated "Curious George" movie.