Don’t “Skip” this nice little student film, with a nod to Buster Keaton, from Sarah Jolley at Vancouver Film School.

Stereo Skifcha by Denis Borisovich (Russia): Borisovich’s earlier piece Jumpman was featured in Animated Fragments #12.

Bacon Clock by Greg Lytle (US)

Jammin’ by Hobo Divine (Canada)

Faces by Alexander Gellner (Germany): “This is an abandoned project and study, pretty much in preparation for my One Minute Puberty piece…I want to develop this approach further at some point. For now, it’s a nice study and tribute to a certain michael jackson video. The “John Jay Marathon” tune was made by beatbox legend Mando.”

Bonheur Partagé by Joshua Catalano (France)

I was digging around for some UPA photos the other day when I stumbled onto this photo that I’d labeled “Tee Hee and visitors.” Tee Hee is, of course, the gentleman on the right—a sequence director on Pinocchio and the “Dance of the Hours” segment in Fantasia, before moving over to UPA where he worked with director Bobe Cannon on shorts like Gerald McBoing Boing, Fudget’s Budget and The Jaywalker. When I looked at this photo again though, I thought, “Wait a second…these aren’t any ordinary visitors…they’re the legendary husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames!” At least I’m fairly certain they are. If anybody can confirm this, please do.

The cross-pollination between creative disciplines was an essential ingredient of the “cartoon modern” era. I wrote a little bit about Charles and Ray Eames and their relationship to animation on the Cartoon Modern blog. The story goes that Charles Eames was so impressed after he visited the UPA studio that he bought stock in the company. The Eames later created some animated projects and hired animation artists like John Whitney, Dolores Cannata, Ed Levitt and Chris Jenkyns. Here’s a film they produced in 1958 called The Expanding Airport:

The animated alphabet in film. Atlanta based Evan Seitz presents his love “letter” to cinema. How many film titles can you name?

BREWMASTERS NOTE: This week Cartoon Brew takes a closer look at the five Academy Award nominated animated shorts. Each day at 10am EST/7am PST we will post an exclusive interview with the director(s) of one of the films. Today, we discuss Studio AKA’s A Morning Stroll with its writer/director Grant Orchard:

Amid Amidi: At Pixar, when artists pitch their short film ideas to John Lasseter, if Lasseter really likes the idea, he hugs you at the end of the presentation. Did you get any hugs at Studio AKA when you pitched A Morning Stroll, and if so, who hugged you?

Grant Orchard: Not really, some curious questions and then an – ‘OK, we trust you, give it a go’. I bet you think we’re all very Downtown Abbey over here. All arch and stiff, but no, it’s all free hugs and love man. In fact it sounds like Mr. Lasseter is holding back a little, he should share it around a bit more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Studio Ghibli’s The Secret World of Arrietty opens today and Disney is quite excited about it. It’s the biggest US release of a Ghibli film (1200 screens), and the feature will be shown in selected theatres in Japanese with subtitles, as well as the more common English dub. The press reviews are looking good – The LA Times says the film is “imeccable and pure”; The Village Voice calls it “pure magic”.

As longtime fan, follower and one-time distributor of Ghibli films allow me to add my two-cents and say that Arrietty is one my personal favorites from the Ghibli factory. It’s a gentle film, a beautiful film and, yes, it may have the most accessible story for Western audiences to grasp. It should be, as it is a relatively faifthful adaptation of Mary Norton’s 1952 book, The Borrowers. Who knew this would fit so perfect into the Miyazaki canon?

The comments on this post are open only to those who have seen the film and wish to share their opinion of it. If you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to go see it this weekend – and tell us what you think.

The commercial directing team of Dan & Jason has been developing Office Buddies over the past few years at the New York commercial house Hornet. The earlier episodes, including the funny “Stapler Face Off”, have screened at festivals like SXSW and Platform.

Three new 3-minute shorts were produced recently. Hornet’s website currently features two of the shorts—“Happy Hour” is the latest—and the third will be posted soon. The animation team on these new shorts was comprised of Lizzi Akana, Jake Armstrong, Efrain Cintron, Alan Foreman, and Connie Li Chan.

Three cheers to everyone involved with The Simpsons for achieving the unheard of goal of producing 500 episodes! There has been a lot of deserved hype this week in honor of this milestone – I especially love the $500,000 contribution by Matt Groening to UCLA’s Animation program, an endowment which will “allow visiting master artists to teach classes” and “bring working professionals with wide-ranging expertise” to work with students. Groening also got a star this week on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. All well and good.

But someone explain to me these looney “Simpson’s fashions” (below) which made their debut this week in New York. Designer Jeremy Scott, whose previous designs were inspired by The Flinstones and Mickey Mouse, unveiled an entire line devoted to The Simpsons which – as much as I love Bart – are embarassingly bad.

Regardless, I’ll be tuning in this Sunday for the 500th time and, like these fashions above, I’m sure the show will get many laughs. Congratulations Matt, and to the crew at Film Roman.