Glen Keane lectured at CalArts a couple weeks ago. Below is a short video of Keane drawing the Beast and explaining some of the design ideas involved in the character’s construction. If you’ve got a lot of free time, you can watch an older Glen Keane lecture on YouTube; beware though, it’s broken down into 18 parts.

The official competition selections have been announced for the world’s longest-running animation festival, the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, which takes place this year from June 11-16.

224 films were selected from 1826 entries. The breakdown is:
* 51 short films in competition,
* 51 short films in panorama,
* 51 graduation films,
* 71 TV and commissioned films (34 TV series, 9 TV specials, 20 commercials, 6 music videos and 2 educational films)

If you have the opportunity to attend this festival, don’t miss the chance. It’s an experience you won’t forget.

Buck is an incredible design studio that uses animation, anime, and visual effects to create commercials, I.D.’s, and short films for a variety of clients.

They’ve recently completed two jobs for Toyota’s viral Scion ad campaign, Want2BSquare, that are well worth watching: the CG/traditional Tower of Grantville and the stop motion Three Years. Advertising money well spent.

Explore Buck’s website to see their absolutely amazing sample reels.

Animator Marv Newland dropped us a note about his new art project/website, Marvcards, which he says is part of “a little film in the works.” That’s what I like about Marv, he’s always pushing the envelope—or in this case, postcards.

We are happy and excited to announce the launch of CartoonBrewFilms.com, a new site that makes the world’s finest animated shorts available for convenient download to your iPod and personal computer. Our three launch films are Teddy Newton and Bert Klein’s Boys Night Out, Frank Tashlin’s The Lady Said No and Grantray-Lawrence’s The Hope That Jack Built. Films, both classic and contemporary, will be added to the library every week.

Here’s a few brief thoughts from BrewFilms founders—Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi—which should offer a bit more insight into why we’re starting this company, and also explain what sets us apart from all the other animation download sites popping up nowadays.

Jerry Beck

I remember the first time I wanted to collect animated films, back in the 1970s, while I was still in high school. There was no Internet, no home video, no 24-hour cartoon cable channels. I had to find 16mm film prints, which cost a fortune and were technically illegal to own. Because I had such a hard time doing my cartoon research back then, I made it one of my goals in life to find ways to spread information about cartoons and to make available the hard-to-find films themselves.

To that end I created books like Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide and The Fifty Greatest Cartoons. I worked in film distribution, releasing independent and international shorts through the Tournee of Animation, and putting anime, like Akira, into movie theaters and onto home video. Websites like Cartoon Research and Cartoon Brew have been another avenue in my continuing mission to connect animated content with like-minded individuals. Today, we are starting a new venture, but the objective remains the same.

This blog is read by a diverse collection of individuals, from students to cartoon aficionados, from directors and animators at the largest animation studios to commercial directors and independent filmmakers. What binds us all is our passion for the art form, and our desire to discover new animated films of all stripes and colors. CartoonBrewFilms aims to make available the most interesting, highest quality and rarest pieces of animated filmmaking, to offer hand-picked animation not found anywhere else. These are films that are not readily available; they are films that deserve to be seen, enjoyed, studied, discussed.

Not everybody can attend animation festivals like Ottawa, Annecy, Zagreb or Hiroshima, but with BrewFilms, your personal and portable animation festival is just one mouse click away. More importantly, we’re determined to do this in a way that is fair and financially equitable to the animators who are producing these shorts. Filmmakers contributing to our site will be compensated for their films; older films are being licensed from their respective owners. Every purchase you make sends a clear and direct message to filmmakers that you appreciate their hard work and want to see more animated shorts.

We’ve come a long way since I first collecting animated shorts in the 1970s, but I can say with confidence that the best is yet to come.

Amid Amidi

If I had to single out one moment during the development of CartoonBrewFilms where I became confident that we were on the right track, it would be an evening in May about ten months ago. Jerry and I were meeting with our distinguished attorney Ken. The purpose of the meeting was to hammer out the terms of the contract which filmmakers would have to sign so we could sell their work. Seemingly, every time Ken would make a suggestion (the type of suggestions that all good lawyers are supposed to make), Jerry or I would object saying that that wouldn’t be the fairest deal for the filmmaker. In the cutthroat world of business, some might say our desire to create a fair deal for all parties is naive, that it dooms us to failure. That’s not how we look at it though.

We think it’s smart business to create relationships with filmmakers that benefit them financially as much as they do us. There’s enough exploitation of animation artists as it already is; we’re setting out to create something wholly different, a company that supports, promotes and respects filmmakers. Video has barely arrived on the Internet, and like clockwork, the opportunists have already begun exploiting artists through myriad ways: paying filmmakers pennies through ad-based revenue sharing schemes, running “contests” to cheaply acquire new content, and asking you to submit your work for free because it’s “user-generated content.” CartoonBrewFilms doesn’t play those type of games. We aim to become the alternative that everybody has always wanted and nobody has had the guts to create.

This blog, Cartoon Brew, has been a consistent voice in the animation community since 2004; Jerry and I have been in the industry far longer than that. We’re in this for the long haul and we’re committed to making CartoonBrewFilms work. The idea for CartoonBrewFilms will surely continue to evolve over the coming months and years, but what will not change is our commitment to treating filmmakers fairly and with respect. Together—filmmakers, animation lovers and BrewFilms—let’s build a new type of animation company that we can all be proud of.

The journalism trade magazine, Editor and Publisher is reporting that the three cartoonists reported to be Pulitzer Award finalists all do animation:

What do Nick Anderson, Walt Handelsman, and Mike Thompson (his latest cartoon above) have in common?

They are the three names leaked to E&P’s Joe Strupp as likely finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. And, as E&P has reported on several occasions, all three are part of a growing group of print cartoonists who also do online political animations.

“The profession is abuzz with this,” one cartoonist told E&P today. This cartoonist (not Anderson, Handelsman, or Thompson) added that he heard all three possible finalists submitted animations with their print Pulitzer portfolios.

This is the first year that video, audio, and other new online entries havebeen accepted by the Pulitzers. (Online text and online still images were previously accepted.)

Anderson, a 2005 Pulitzer winner, is with the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Post Writers Group. Handelsman, a 1997 Pulitzer winner, is with Newsday of Melville, N.Y., and Tribune Media Services. And Thompson, a 2006 Pulitzer finalist, is with the Detroit Free Press and Copley News Service.

(Thanks, Lou Spirito)

Cartoonist extraordinaire Jim Smith (Ren & Stimpy, Samurai Jack, The Ripping Friends) will be performing a “farewell concert” with the band Freehead on Saturday, March 31, from 4pm until whenever at Safari Sam’s (5214 W. Sunset Blvd, Hollywood, CA). The concert is for a good cause: to raise money for Freehead band member Richie Hass who is currently fighting multiple myeloma, a type of cancer that affects plasma cells. Lots of other bands are also performing that evening, and Jim Smith notes on his blog that he will “draw and sign anything that holds still long enough.”

There is an important Disney history triple-play going on at three of our favorite blogs.

Michael Sporn got the ball rolling last year by posting the first 23 pages of the animator drafts for Pinocchio (1940). These are the sequence by sequence breakdowns of who animated each shot, scene by scene. Start here to read the earliest scenes.

Hans Perk at A Film L.A. picked up the ball and continued this project by posting the rest of the draft, (backtrack from here), posting several new pages each day.

Mark Mayerson is taking this information and visualizing it into “mosaics”: illustrating each shot with a frame grab, identifying the animators, and offering insightful commentary for each sequence. (Mayerson has previously done this, based on Perk’s collection of drafts, for several shorts including Mother Goose Goes Hollywood, Symphony Hour and Plutopia).

Now, Michael Sporn has now begun posting the original storyboards for the film.

This is a treasure trove of information for one of the undeniable classics of animation. It’s also a great example of what the Internet can do—bringing together information from three sources, in different parts of the world, that now allow us to study the individual work of the artists who brought this masterpiece to life.