It is summer holidays, i.e. school holidays, and understandably the box office results for animated films have shot through the roof. 　　

 

Mr Wing Ng, General Manager of Intercontinental Film Distributors (H.K.) Ltd, said "school holidays are almost the basic requirement for an animation release, plus summer school vacation is the best among all types of school holidays. On normal school days, kids are either schooling or joining different regular school programs, plus parents are not free to bring them to movies." 　　

 

In the week 7th-13th August Monster House ranked 5th at the domestic box office with a total gross of 7,787,391 HKD after 18 days in release. Nobita in the Wan-Nyan Space - Time Odyssey ranked 7th with a total gross of 2,508,957 HKD after 11 days in release. Keroro at 8th has grossed a whopping 7,426,324 HKD in only 18 days of release. And the Pixar-Disney animation Cars ranked as 9th after 32 days in release with a cumulative box office of 14,833,207 HKD. 　　

 

Intercontinental has two animations amongst this week's top ten, Cars and Keroro, (as well as 1st box office hit Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest which after four days of release grossed almost 14 million HKD). 　　

 

Speaking of the success of Cars, which has been playing much longer than the other animations in the top ten, Mr Ng said, "We are proud to say that Cars is doing very well in such a big and competitive environment: facing the box-office-guaranteed competitor Superman Returns, plus the big hits like X-Men, Poseidon, Da Vinci Code, MI:3, plus two animations (Garfield from Fox and Over the Hedge from UIP) ahead of it during summer, not mentioning the frustrating time during the world cup. 　　

 

"Apart from local produced animations, we can usually find animations from Japan like Digimon, Pokemon, and those from US like Finding Nemo, Polar Express, Cinderella etc. When comparing these two, we found those from big studios from US like Pixar, Disney etc. are doing better in turns of box office." 　　

 

Animation has also found another mainstream outlet in HK, with HKCTV announcing that it is moving the Sony-owned Animax channel to its basic package, thereby increasing its presence to around 540,000 homes in the region. 　　

 

And more animation is set to be released. Intercontinental have in the pipeline Tales from Earth Sea, an anime directed by Goro Miyazaki and coming from the legendary Studio Ghibli.

 

(hkfilmart August 15, 2006)