Yes, it’s me with my June Foray Award.

I just got in from a wonderful night at the Annie Award ceremony, and yeah, it’s my birthday today. What a wonderful present and what a fantastic party.

Ratatouille was the big winner last night, winning several Annie Awards including Best Animated Feature, Best Director and Best Writing (Animated Feature). I’m a bit too tired to recall all the winners, but Pixar’s Your Friend The Rat won for best short, El Tigre for Best Children’s TV Animation, Creature Comforts America for Best Animated Program, Power Shares Escape Average (Acme Filmworks) won for Best Commercial, and Surf’s Up, The Simpsons and Robot Chicken took home other prizes.

It was a blast to be surrounded by some of the greatest names in animation (Groening, Bird, Kricfalusi, Canemaker, Keane, etc.). Tom Kenny did an amazing job as the master of ceremonies (more about this in a future post). The new venue, at UCLA’s Royce Hall, was terrific. If you were there please share your memories of the evening in our comments bellow.

Harry Knowles (of Ain’t It Cool News) has posted a top ten list (with YouTube links) of his some of his all-time favorite animated films. These include Disney’s Music Land, MGM’s Peace On Earth and Little Buck Cheeser, UPA’s The Tell-Tale Heart, George Pal’s Tulips Shall Grow, Ub Iwerks’ Balloon Land and Skeleton Frolic, Will Vinton’s Closed Mondays and Max Fleischer’s Great Vegatable Mystery and Ants In the Plants.

A fine list with a lot of great films.

With all the debate over scripts versus storyboards, animation writer Steve Marmel (Fairly Oddparents, Danny Phantom, et al) has jumped into the fray, and put his money where his mouth is.

Marmel, on his Animation Writers blog, has started a contest challenging writers to craft a script from a classic Bob Clampett cartoon. The film chosen, Falling Hare, was selected by scripter Marmel with the help of Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, one of the most outspoken on the subject of storyboard-driven cartoons.

Once he receives qualified entries, Marmel plans on reaching out to other board artists, directors and story people to help judge and give opinions, but would like the final arbiter of this to be Stephen Worth himself. Marmel asks Worth:

Pick the best of the bunch. Show script writers what’s right. And in return, you can take the worst of the bunch, and gut it.

Here’s what happens when a winner is picked. I will see that the winner is paid a “teleplay fee” for a short-subject script - as determined by the IATSE/TAG 839 rules. I think it’s a little less than $2000. This may be out of my own pocket… (and) I will personally make an in-kind donation to the ASIFA-Archive.

The contest will begin when Worth accepts the terms Marmel proposes. For more information, go to Marmel’s blog.

New stills have appeared online from the forthcoming direct-to-video Rob Zombie feature The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. Chris Battle, who did some work on the film, posted a few of the images on his blog with this accompanying thought:

“Above are some of the better pics that actually retain the brilliance of Carey Yost and Mark Colangelo’s original art, but judging from some of the other pics, the final product is falling a bit short of what it was supposed to be. I guess that’s what happens when the studio shuts things down way too early and sends everything overseas before it’s ready in order to concentrate on sure-fire winners like ‘Everybody’s Hero’…”

That’s disappointing news to hear. Back in August 2006, Jerry had written on the Brew about the promise of this project.

UPDATE: Multiple well-placed sources inform us that El Superbeasto is still being prepped for a theatrical release and not direct-to-video.

Brad Bird has done a couple radio interviews in the past week which are worth a listen. The first interview refers to him as “Big Bird” and “one of Pixar’s chief polishers,” but beyond that unnecessary cuteness, it’s a decent chat in which Bird discusses what’s wrong with Hollywood filmmaking and expresses reservations about how animation is treated at the Oscars. The second interview gets off an to equally bad start when the host refers to animation as a “genre” and Bird has to correct him. It eventually picks up, especially when he discusses how he came onto Ratatouille midway through the film’s development. The latter interview also features unintentional moments of comic relief by historian Charles Solomon who makes heroic efforts to correctly pronounce the name Ratatouille.

(Thanks, Jakob Schuh, for the first interview link)

Trembled Blossoms, a short film advertising the new Prada line, is worth pointing out not for its animation, which is a blend of awfully inept mo-cap and awkward CG effects, but for the simple fact that Prada is using animation to promote its clothes. Illustrator James Jean has posted some of the concept artwork that he created for the film, and for the record, it’s far more pleasing to the eye than the finished product.

(via NotCot.org)

Here’s a rare treat—thanks to YouTube. Milton Knight discovered this upload of a rare 9.5mm silent home movie film featuring Mimiche (a character previously known as Mish-Mish). About the animators, Milton says:

The Frenkel Brothers (Hershel, Salomon and David Frenkel) were pioneer animators in Egypt. Moving to France after WWII, one brother continued the series for home movie consumption. Here it is, proving himself still under the spell of John Foster and George Rufle’s TOM AND JERRY cartoons!

While we are on the subject, here’s another animated rarity on YouTube, from France — a cartoon by Andre Rigal about the prevention of accidents at work, Monstres Museles .

ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Archive has post a complete Quicktime movie of John Sutherland’s industrial film Rhapsody of Steel (1959) on their site. At the time it was released, it was the most expensive animated industrial film ever made.

It’s a pretty spectacular film, with incredible design by Eyvind Earle, Maurice Noble and Victor Haboush, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, and animation by Irv Spence and Emery Hawkins. It was directed by Carl Urbano.