Burbank Animation Studios

Burbank Animation Studios was an Australian film animation production company, formerly named Burbank Films Australia.

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 adapted the works of many other well-known authors and legends, including Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers among many others.

By 1987, the animation was entirely made in Philippines (Burbank Animation Incorporated based in Manila).

In 1991, the company was resurrected under the name of Burbank Animation Studios. The new studio continued the production of "animated classics" in association with Anchor Bay Entertainment and Bridgestar Entertainment. David Field as managing director and executive producer and Roz Phillips as producer.

From 1991 to 1994, Burbank Animation Studios utilized the newly formed Sydney studio's Unlimited Energee as its production facility. The shows were traditionally drawn but then digitally inked, painted, and composited to first Betamax and then Ampex cartridge recording systems, which allowed for some unusually detailed backgrounds, various digital FX, and infrequent 3D (sparingly used due to low budgets). In 1994, Burbank Animation Studios chose to switch production facilities to Colorland Studios of China.

There has been much 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 United States copyright and cannot be considered an orphaned work or public domain. Burbank's catalogue is an example of the type of budget copyright content regularly parallel licensed to multiple home video distributors.

When Burbank's parent company Film Funding & Management went into liquidation, the distribution rights to the "Animated Classics" were transferred to ABR Entertainment and the copyright was later fully assigned to Omnivision. These are now owned by Pulse Distribution and Entertainment and administered by digital rights management firm NuTech Digital. These titles are currently available in the US on NuTech's Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), Ltd. label. They have also been licensed to Genius Entertainment.