Burbank Films Australia was an Australian animation-production company that in a span of eight years produced over thirty different animated films. These films were presented to the public through television or direct-to-video debuts.
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The company's first animated productions in 1982 were a series of adaptations of books from Charles Dickens; these first few films characterized themselves by their grim appeal. The sketch-styled backgrounds and the simplicity of the original score, such as in Oliver Twist (1982), added to the dramatic tone of those first stories. The eight total Dickens adaptations were produced during two years. At the same time, in 1983, the company produced a short series of adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories, adapted from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the years that followed, until 1988, Burbank Films Australia adapted the works of many other well known authors and legends, including Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers among many others. [1]
In 1991, the company was resurrected under the name of Burbank Animation Studios, from them until the present time, the new studio has continued the production of "animated classics". [2]
There has been confusion as to whether ownership of these films has fallen into the public domain. Despite the number of releases of these films, every Burbank Film has a valid US copyright and cannot be considered an Orphaned Work or Public Domain. The Burbank Films Australia catalogue is an example of the type of budget copyright content regularly parallel licenced to multiple DVD distributors.
When the Burbank Films Australia parent company Film Funding and Management Pty Ltd went into liquidation the distribution rights to the "Animated Classics Series" were transferred to ABR Entertainment Co[3] and the copyright was later fully assigned to Omnivision Ltd[4]. These are now owned by Pulse Distribution and Entertainment[5] and administered by digital rights management firm NuTech Digital[6]. These titles are currently available in the US on Nutech's Digital Versatile Disc Ltd and DVD Ltd labels. They have also been licensed to Genius Entertainment. (Low Budget releases from Digiview Entertainment have also been sighted, but their legality is unknown.)
The distribution rights to "The Dickens Collection" (A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop and Nicholas Nickleby), "The Sherlock Holmes Collection" (The Sign of Four, The Baskerville Curse, The Valley of Fear and A Study in Scarlet), The Black Tulip and The Corsican Brothers were transferred to Rikini Inc [7], which later became International Family Classics or IFC Inc, who onsold the films to HS Holding Corporation[8] who currently own the titles [9]. Alice Through the Looking Glass is now also owned by HS Holding Corporation[10] who purchased the rights from INI Entertainment Group, the distributor of Burbank Animation Studios' post 1991 films. These titles are currently distributed by Liberty International in the US, through Liberation Entertainment and Genius Entertainment. (As with the "Animated Classics Series," budget-priced releases from Digiview have been sighted, but again, their legality is unknown.)
Payless Entertainment Australia began reissuing the Burbank Films catalogue in June 2008. [11]
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