On February 1st, indie animation rockstar Don Hertzfeldt kicks off a coast-to-coast 13-state US tour. The main event is the debut of It’s Such A Beautiful Day, which completes his ambitious trilogy about a mysterious man named Bill. Head to BitterFilms.com for ticket info, and go there quick because tickets have already sold out for a number of the cities.

Canadian cartoonists Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman recently finished raising over $10,000 to complete their animated feature Asphalt Watches. They describe their collaborative two-man animated epic in the following way:

Asphalt Watches is a true adventure story: in 2000, we hitchhiked across Canada together. The animation captures our crazy journey, full of hilarious and amazing encounters. Using music and songs we make ourselves, alongside hand-drawn Flash animation, we tell the tale of making our way from a 7-11 near Chilliwack, BC where a guy was hanging out with a knife in his belly… to meeting one of only “two real Santas” in the world outside Calgary… to barely escaping death near Regina, SK. Our style is to turn real-life characters and settings into funny and poetic abstractions that depict the feeling and essence of what happened.

The film should be finished this year. There’s an official film blog and the trailer below:

(via Meathaus)

Actor/comedian Patton Oswalt (Ratatouille) will host the 39th Annual Annie Awards on Saturday, February 4th at UCLA’s Royce Hall. The annual event will begin with a pre-reception at 5 p.m. followed by the Annie Awards ceremony at 7 p.m. and an after-party celebration immediately following the ceremony. All events will be held at Royce Hall. And for the first time ever, Cartoon Brew will live stream the event!

This year’s Winsor McCay recipients are Walt Peregoy, Borge Ring and Ronald Searle. Searle’s award will be posthumous, as he passed late last year at the age of 91. Other animation luminaries and voice actors scheduled to present awards include Ty Burrell, JK Simmons, James Hong, Jib Jab founders Greg and Evan Spiridellis, Tara Strong, Daran Norris, Dee Bradley Baker and animation legend June Foray – among others to be announced.

For complete ticket information and up-to-the minute details on the 39th Annual Annie Awards, please visit www.annieawards.org. And remember, if you can’t be there in person, Cartoon Brew will live-stream the ceremony from 7pm PST (10pm EST). Now you have no excuse to miss this event!

Stephen Colbert’s two-part interview with Where the Wild Things Are author/illustrator Maurice Sendak easily ranks as the most entertaining interview I’ve ever seen with a children’s book author. I’m sure it’ll be much discussed at the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators winter conference, which starts tomorrow in Manhattan.

With no clear frontrunners in either the Best Animated Feature or Short categories, it’s time to call upon the wisdom of the animation masses. Tell us what films you think SHOULD win the animation Oscars this year. We’ll keep the survey open for a week until everyone has had a chance to make their voice heard.

GO TO THE SURVEY PAGE >>>
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Over the last seven years, with quiet persistence and unwavering dedication, French animation historian Didier Ghez has been publishing one of the most important animation history documents of our time. His book series, Walt’s People: Talking Disney With The Artists Who Knew Him, is an incredible accomplishment that casts new light onto the operation of the Walt-era Disney Studios. Each edition of this ever-growing interview anthology series reprints rarely seen and unpublished interviews with Disney artists, both famous and unknown.

Didier’s newest volume, the eleventh in the series, is also the largest to date, weighing in at over 600 pages. The historians who have contributed interviews are a who’s who of Disney research royalty. The volume is expansive and extends to a handful of contemporary figures who didn’t personally know Walt (Ed Catmull, Brad Bird, Glen Keane), but who have absorbed the Disney tradition into their work.

In fact, the sheer scale and scope of this volume guarantees something for everybody. The interview subjects are Ray Aragon, Frank Armitage, Brad Bird, Carl Bongirno, Roger Broggie, George Bruns, Ed Catmull, Don R. Christensen, Andreas Deja, Jules Engel, Joe Hale, John Hench, Mark Henn, John Hubley, Glen Keane, Ted Kierscey, Ward Kimball, I. Klein, Mike Lah, Eric Larson, Ed Love, Daniel MacManus, Tom Nabbe, Carl Nater, Dale Oliver, Walt Pfeiffer, Jacques Rupp, David Snyder, Iwao Takamoto, Shirley Temple, Frank Thomas, Ruthie Tompson, and Richard Williams.

Walt’s People #11 is available for $25 on Amazon and you’d be wise to add the rest of the series to your library as well. Didier has provided us some excerpts from the new book, offering a glimpse of the hundreds of stories that can be found in the book. Read them after the jump.
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Okay, here’s another post for the animation historians.

Animation pioneer Max Fleischer was an inventor and he was passionate about science and modern technology. When his cartoon studio became established in the 1920s he created several educational films for various clients – not to mention extra-length films devoted to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (both in 1923). Many of these industrial films are lost.

AT&T has dug into its archives an unearthed a pair of sponsored films Bell Telephone commissioned from the Fleischer studio. Fleischer actually produced four nontheatrical titles for the phone company (How the Telephone Talks, 1924; That Little Big Fellow, 1927; Now You’re Talking, 1927 and Finding His Voice in 1929), but AT&T has posted two. Both are pretty rare – I’d never seen That Little Big Fellow myself. They are meant to educate and inform, and are not as inventive (or comedic) as the Koko the Clown theatrical shorts, but are fascinating nonetheless.

So, if you want to learn a little about the science of telecommunications in the 1920s, here are two of Fleischer’s finest. Thank you AT&T.

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King Features has collaborated with rock band Wilco on a comic strip/music video tie-in with Popeye. The sailorman and his crew crossed over in last Sunday’s comic strip (1/22/12 by Frank Caruso and Ned Sonntag) and joined the group in this animated music video (embed below), directed by urban fashion designer Darren Romanelli and animated in Singapore by Peach Blossom Media.