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INDUSTRY NEWS FOR VISUAL STORYTELLERS

Jun 19, 2026

The Final Cut · June 19, 2026

Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline

Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.

Two very different kinds of milestones landed this week. Toy Story 5 opens tomorrow tracking for a franchise-best $140 million domestic opening — the kind of number that puts Pixar back at the center of the conversation after a few bumpy years. And across the Atlantic, Aardman’s co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton became Sir Peter and Sir David in King Charles III’s Birthday Honours, as the studio marks its 50th anniversary. One is a box office event. The other is half a century of work recognized. Both feel significant in different ways.

Also a bit of sad news this week: we lost Daveigh Chase — voice of Lilo in Lilo & Stitch and Chihiro in the English dub of Spirited Away — at just 35. Skibidi Toilet somehow secured $25 million in VC. Fox bought Roku for $22 billion. And two shorts you’ve probably never heard of just earned their Oscar qualifying runs. Let’s get into it.

Animation — Feature Film

‘Toy Story 5’ Is Tracking for a Franchise-Best $140 Million Opening

Thirty-one years after the original Toy Story, the fifth installment is tracking for a $140 million domestic opening weekend — which would make it the biggest debut in the franchise’s history, topping Toy Story 4‘s $120.9 million in 2019. Global projections sit around $275 million. Directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) and co-directed by Kenna Harris, the film centers on children’s growing attachment to technology and what that means for the toys who live on the other side of that relationship.

The timing matters. Pixar has been rebuilding confidence since the streaming-first years, and the success of Hoppers ($372M worldwide earlier in 2026) gave them a running start. A franchise-best opening for Toy Story 5 would be a convincing argument that the studio still knows how to make movies audiences will show up for — and that theatrical animation isn’t going anywhere.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Animation — Industry

Aardman’s Peter Lord and David Sproxton Are Now Sir Peter and Sir David

King Charles III’s Birthday Honours included two names that should mean something to anyone who grew up with clay: Peter Lord and David Sproxton, co-founders of Aardman Animations, have both been knighted for services to animation and the creative industries. The honor arrives as Aardman marks its 50th anniversary — the studio was founded in Bristol in 1976 and grew into the home of Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Morph, Creature Comforts, and Chicken Run.

In their joint statement, Lord and Sproxton said they accepted the recognition “not just for ourselves, but on behalf of all the wonderfully talented people who have helped shape Aardman into what it is today.” That framing matters. Aardman has always been a studio defined more by its people and its craft than by its IP — studios like this one are rare, and the fact that it’s still independent and still making things at 50 is worth pausing on. Also honored: Georgina Hurcombe, creator of the preschool series Pop Paper City, who was awarded an MBE for services to television and the creative sector.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Animation — In Memoriam

Daveigh Chase, Voice of Lilo and Spirited Away’s Chihiro, Dies at 35

Daveigh Chase died Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 35. Chase voiced Lilo Pelekai in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002) — winning an Annie Award for the performance — and also voiced the lead character Chihiro in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, released in the same year. Two of the most beloved animated characters of the 2000s, voiced by the same person, in the same summer.

According to Variety, Chase had been struggling with addiction since her teens and had been homeless in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, who confirmed her death. Her father said she died of meningitis and a blood infection after being hospitalized for malnutrition. She was 13 when she got her first major role. Both Lilo & Stitch and Spirited Away are films about children navigating strange and difficult worlds — finding their footing in places that weren’t built for them. The voice behind both of them deserved better than the world she got. She was remarkable in both.

Source: Variety

Creator Economy — Business

Skibidi Toilet’s Hollywood Ambitions Just Scored $25 Million in Venture Capital

The media company behind the Hollywood expansion of Skibidi Toilet — Invisible Narratives, founded by former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman — has secured $25 million in new venture capital financing. The money is earmarked for production, licensing, and franchise-building around several internet-native properties, with Skibidi Toilet as the flagship. Michael Bay remains attached to what Invisible Narratives has described as a cinematic adaptation of the property.

If you’re not familiar: Skibidi Toilet was created by animator Alexey Gerasimov using Valve’s Source Filmmaker — the same free toolkit that’s been generating fan films and machinima for decades. It launched on YouTube in 2023 and accumulated billions of views through sheer surreal energy. The path from “free software + one person + YouTube” to “$25 million in VC + Michael Bay” is genuinely strange, and it says something real about how animation’s entry points have shifted. Whether the film is good is a separate question. That it’s happening at all is the story.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Distribution — Industry

Fox’s $22 Billion Roku Deal Is the Latest Power Grab in a Shrinking Ecosystem

Fox Corporation is acquiring Roku for $22 billion, giving Rupert Murdoch’s media empire control over a platform that reaches more than 100 million households worldwide. Roku’s operating system, advertising technology, and content discovery tools will now sit inside a portfolio that already includes Fox News, Tubi, broadcast networks, and cable channels. As Cartoon Brew’s editor Jamie Lang put it plainly: “Fox isn’t buying Roku because it wants to sell streaming devices. It’s buying one of the most influential distribution platforms in television.”

For independent studios, animators, and small distributors, the significance is structural. Roku was valuable precisely because it functioned as a neutral gateway — it didn’t produce content and had no stake in which shows audiences chose. That neutrality is now gone. The same consolidation pressure squeezing the Paramount–WBD deal is eating another piece of the landscape. When fewer companies control both what gets made and how it gets found, the space for work that falls outside the mainstream gets smaller.

Source: Cartoon Brew

Short Film — Awards

‘18 Months’ and ‘Porque Hoy Es Sábado’ Earn Oscar Qualification at Animayo Gran Canaria

Two animated short films earned Academy Award qualifying runs through their wins at the Animayo Gran Canaria festival: 18 Months and Porque Hoy Es Sábado (Because Today Is Saturday). Both films now have a path into the Oscar short film conversation — and both would likely be unknown to most readers if not for the festival circuit doing what it exists to do.

Animayo Gran Canaria is one of a handful of international festivals whose top animation prize carries Oscar qualifying status, alongside events like Annecy, Zagreb, and Stuttgart. Winning one of these opens the road to the Academy — and in the short film category, that qualifying win can be the difference between a film that travels internationally and one that lives on a hard drive. Worth keeping an eye on both titles as the eligibility window opens.

Source: Cartoon Brew

From the Community — Worth a Restack

Two posts from this week’s visual storytelling Substackers worth your time.

Animation Obsessive · 72,000 subscribers

Congolese Animation That Needs to Be Seen

Animation Obsessive spent most of 2026 negotiating an exclusive two-week online release of Machini (2019), a short animated film by Frank Mukunday and Tétshim — two artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who specialize in animating with stones, chalk, and found materials. The result is unlike anything else: characters made of actual rocks from the Lubumbashi streets, chalk-drawn landscapes, and a film that’s literally built from the exploited land it’s about. The piece traces the directors’ decade-long path from candlelit test shoots with borrowed cameras to Belgian production residencies and international festival wins — and makes the case that Machini is one of the most visually inventive shorts of recent years. If you have twelve minutes in the next two weeks, watch the embed. It earns it.

Published June 14, 2026 · 175 likes, 36 restacks

Creating Comics · K. Woodman-Maynard

A Drawing Game for Your Next Artist Meetup

Woodman-Maynard shares the drawing game she developed for artist meetups — an exercise that started as a way to fill Zoom time and evolved into a structure she now uses at in-person retreats in Maine. The piece is practical (there’s a game you can actually run) and thoughtful about why shared creative constraints work differently in a room than they do solo. If you lead workshops, run a study group, or just get together with other artists and find yourself wondering how to make the time generative rather than social-but-idle, this is worth reading.

Published June 14, 2026 · 44 likes, 4 restacks

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