Bio-Hazard is a thesis film produced at SVA by Andrew Falicon. It’s a funny short with plenty of send-ups of anime conventions and absurdist non-sequiturs sprinkled throughout. Part of its humor derives from the production problems that Falicon experienced during the making of the film. He explains in the YouTube description:

“[The film was] due near the end of April, and in mid-February in a freak slip of the finger on my keyboard I deleted a folder containing all the scanned animation for about 40% of the original work. BUT ITS COOL BECAUSE IT WAS BACKED UP ON DVD, RIGHT? WRONG, my DVD drive then stopped working, and then the two DVDs were corrupt when I tried them on another PC. So I had to cut out 30 % of the film, rearrange it and GET THAT SHIT DONE. In 2 and 1/2 months…”

Here’s something to note. Inspired by the NPR radio show Car Talk, PBS has created its first prime time animated series, Click and Clack’s As The Wrench Turns.

The animation is by CTTV, a new independent studio. Bill Kroyer and Howard Grossman are the producers, Stephen Silver (Kim Possible) designed it and Tom Sito directed the entire season. Ten episodes were produced and they begin airing on July 9th at 8pm. The program’s website contains only a brief promo clip, but I’ve been told it will be updated with more stuff very soon.

Tony White has just posted onto YouTube his classic animated short Hokusai: An Animated Sketchbook. He offers some background about the film:

“This was my first ever… and still my favorite… short animated film! I created it in my spare time while I was still a director/animator at the Richard Williams Studio in London during the late 1970’s. I actually started the film after we had completed ‘A Christmas Carol’, when I was Richard Williams’ own personal assistant at the time. ‘Carol’ went on to win the first of Dick’s three Oscars. When my own ‘Hokusai’ film won a British Academy Award I moved on to set-up the ‘Animus Productions’ animation studio… a creative entity I led for a further 20 award-winning years. The film itself was inspired by the wonderful sketchbooks of Hokusai. When I saw them I realized that this artist was indeed a true animator at heart… he just didn’t have the knowledge or the technology to be one in his lifetime. I therefore sought to bring his drawings to life for him, as homage to his genius.”

Check it out:

In recent years, many artists at feature animation studios like Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky have become involved in self-publishing art books and graphic novels. The Disney artists have remained noticeably absent from the scene…until now. A whole slew of Disney Feature story artists and directors are getting ready to release a fun-looking 72-page graphic novel anthology entitled Who is Rocket Johnson?, in which they answer the question posed by the book’s title. The book, limited to 1,000 copies, will debut in July at the San Diego Comic-Con and will sell exclusively at booth 2302.

Contributing artists are:
Steve Anderson
John Musker
Dean Wellins
Mike Gabriel
Kevin Deters
Paul Briggs
Tom Ellery
Sam Levine
Nathan Greno
Don Hall
Mark Kennedy
Aurian Redson
Daniel Chong
Tron Mai
Lawrence Gong
Joe Mateo
Michael LaBash
Chris Ure
Bruce Morris
Mark Walton

The book also features a painted cover by Paul Felix and pin-ups by Glen Keane, ChenYi Chang, Byron Howard and Arthur Adams. There’s a book blog at WhoIsRocketJohnson.com and an official announcement at the blog of Paul Briggs.

(via Blackwing Diaries)

Folks in the Bay Area have a chance to see Brad Bird's The Iron Giant on the bigscreen for two days next month—June 7 and 8. The screenings will take place at the Cerrito Speakeasy Theater. Be forewarned though: the screening is a part of the San Francisco Chronicle’s “The Poop Presents” children’s film series so there’ll likely be a lot of noisy and sticky children in the theater. More details at the Chronicle website.

This one is worth pointing out not because it's a great piece of work but because it's an interesting experiment and also serves as a reminder that animation as an art form is now well over one hundred years old. In honor of the 100th anniversary of one of the earliest examples of a fully-animated film, Fantasmagorie, a new CG remake has been produced called Fantasmagorie 2008. The film is the brainchild of Rastko Ciric, a professor at the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. The film also incorporates the footage from Émile Cohl’s original 1908 film. The film can be viewed in its entirety at Fantasmagorie2008.com

The film had its premiere in Paris last month during a retrospective of the films of Emile Cohl. Upcoming screenings include the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade and the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. A stereoscopic 3D version also exists.

(Thanks, Karl Cohen)

Better late than never: this weekend’s NY Times offers a profile of Shigeru Miyamoto, the prolific Nintendo game designer responsible for Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda. The article’s belabored point—that Nintendo is like Disney—is driven home by no less than eight mentions of the Disney name. There is perhaps a prophetic idea buried in that comparison though. If Mario serves as any example, it would be safe to predict that in the coming decades, the next batch of classic cartoon characters will emerge not out of traditional film or TV, but rather out of video games and other forms of interactive media.

Speaking of Miyamoto, here’s a recent short featuring him—A Really Really Brief History Of Donkey Kong directed by Gabe Swarr.

I’m a longtime fan of the incredible (and overlooked) stop motion paper cut-out animation sequences created by Bill Justice and Xavier Atencio for the Disney Studios in the late 1950s and early 60s. These remarkable little films have escaped wide attention by appearing in some of the least of Disney’s efforts during this period (their titles for The Parent Trap (1961) being an exception). The design and direction are top notch - and remember, these were created completely by hand, and animated frame by frame under a camera. None of the computer shortcuts employed by South Park here.

It’s hard to get the Sherman Brothers tune out of your head from the opening titles to The Mis-Adventures of Merlin Jones (1964):

This one is a little un-P.C., from the featurette A Symposium Of Popular Songs (1962):

Disney designer Kevin Kidney has posted his own tribute to these works on his blog, showcasing his own intricate recreations of these paper puppets (created with partner Jody Daily). Check it out here.

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