Cartoonists going to the Platform International Animation Festival in Portland next week will be invited to be part of an experimental collaborative animated film. Dan Meth will round up 100 artists and have each draw 7 frames of a new unscripted short cartoon — on location at a bar full of cartoon fanatics. Sounds like fun. You can sign up in advance by contacting Dan at dammeth-at-danmeth.com.

Montreal folks have been getting some awesome animation exhibits lately. Philip Street writes about one that he saw recently:

Brew readers might want to know that even though the Disney exhibit at the Montreal Musée des Beaux Arts closes this weekend, there is another exhibit just down the street in the Loto Quebec building (500 Sherbrooke St West) featuring the work of Frédéric Back. Sketches and gouache paintings from the ’40s and ’50s, as well as storyboards and production art from several films, are on show on the main floor until August 5. Amazing and inspirational stuff.

Frédéric Back also has an impressive new website at FredericBack.com.

The GL. Holtegaard museum near Copenhagen has a Kay Nielsen exhibit on display until August 19. The show features over 120 drawings and illustrations, including some of Nielsen’s work from Fantasia on loan from Disney. If you can’t make the show, there’s plenty of Nielsen’s illustrations online at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive and ArtPassions.net.

(Thanks, Alex Rannie)

Here’s a sneak peek at some finished footage from the new Flash animated George Of the Jungle, in production by Studio B in Vancouver for Cartoon Network (U.S.) and for various other toon channels around the world. This clip is from cable’s G4 Tech TV network in Canada. Producer Kevin Gamble and director Jayson Thiessen do a good job of explaining the basics of producing animation in Flash for TV. The actual GTJ footage starts around 1:16 and was animated by artist Emmett Hall.

Congrats to Lou Romano who painted the cover for this week’s New Yorker. Various illustrators who work in animation, like Peter de Sève, have done New Yorker covers before, but could this be the first time a trained animation artist has done a cover in the mag’s eighty-plus year history? The New Yorker is also selling prints of Lou’s cover here.

(Thanks to Nate Pacheco for letting me know)

The latest batch of six student shorts from the French animation school Gobelins have been posted online HERE. All these films debuted on the big screen in front of the film programs at Annecy last week. As always, there’s some really slick animation work along with solid graphic sensibilities throughout. I’m not sure if anything really popped out at me this year like Burning Safari or Le Building from years past, though it’s hard to complain when the work is this technically proficient. And can you tell which student crew has been watching lots and lots of Mind Game?

Animator and director Will Finn has posted a letter that he received from Ward Kimball in 1973 packed with sage words about becoming an animation artist. His advice about learning to become a well-rounded human being and having a flexible open-minded attitude towards art is not just empty verbiage but very much how Ward lived his own life and one of the keys to understanding why he was such an amazing artist. Similarly, it’s hard to think that any of the other Nine Old Men would ever encourage a budding animation artist to go and watch The Yellow Submarine or Fritz the Cat. The letter may be over thirty years old but the advice within it is still relevant and well worth listening to.

Disney’s ad this year in the Annecy animation festival program book announced a new name for their feature animation division. They’ve actually been using the new name for a few months now but this is the first time I’ve run across an announcement about the name change.