20th Century Animation Century City

20th Century Animation Century City (formerly Fox Animation Century City and Fox Feature Animation) is an American animated feature production company that is the primary unit of 20th Century Animation, a division of Walt Disney Studios. Based in Century City, Los Angeles, the company was created in November 1998 as the successor to the now-dissolved 2D traditional hand-drawn animation studio Fox Animation Studios, which shut down in June 2000. It is responsible for 20th Century's feature-length animated films and associated short films, most notably the Puppet Pals, Cool Spot, Alaina Gleen, The Pixelators, and Crystal franchises.

History
Following the success of Anastasia (1997), Stuart Snyder and Roy Kobayashi met with News Corp. president Rupert Murdoch to discuss the creation of a secondary in-house feature animation division for 20th Century Fox in Century City, California, an offer that Snyder and Kobayashi immediately accepted. Fox Feature Animation was officially established on November 7, 1998 to produce theatrical animated films alongside its main animation division, Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona. John Cohen was brought in to head the new division as president, which was set up in a building on the Fox lot. To build the talent base, Kobayashi brought over a few artists from Fox Animation Studios, while Cohen recruited some of the staff from Walt Disney Feature Animation. A month later in December 1998, Fox Feature Animation announced a full slate of animated projects in development: Mice Tales, Pazo the Spaceboy, History Island, and Oceanic. In July 2000, most of the Fox Animation Studios staff were immediately hired to work at the Century City animation division, following the closure of the studio after the box office failure of Titan A.E. (2000).

Just after Mice Tales' November 2001 release, it was announced that Roy Kobayashi had been named Co-Head of Production at Feature Animation. In November 2002, Fox Feature Animation announced their first CGI animated feature film in development to be produced at the Century City division, Puppet Pals, which would be later released on June 30, 2006. After the box office failure of History Island, Fox laid off most of the employees at the Feature Animation studio, downsizing it to one unit and beginning plans to move into fully computer-animated features. A handful of employees were offered positions for computer animation. Subsequently, on June 4, 2004, Fox Feature Animation officially announced they were becoming a fully CGI studio, now with a staff of 460 people, and began selling off all of its traditional animation equipment. In February 2005, Fox renamed its Feature Animation unit as Fox Animation Century City and announced a slate of CGI animated feature films in development; these films included an film adaptation of Eric Stern's series of children's books Kate & Chris (whom they acquired the film from DreamWorks Animation), The Legend of Crystal, Greenwoods, and a feature-length film version of The Mushies!. Animators at Blue Sky Studios worked on projects based at the Blue Sky studio, but also assisted in Fox Animation projects based in the Century City Fox Animation studio.

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Related productions


Television programming
20th Century Animation announced its expansion into television programming in early 2021, and is currently producing 3 original shows for Disney+ and Fox Family.

Trivia

 * 20th Century Animation Century City was often described by fans as the Fox counterpart of Walt Disney Animation Studios while Blue Sky Studios was described as the Fox counterpart of Pixar.