Joel Sundberg of the Stockholm animation studio Mad Crew sent me a link to Mad Santa, a nice-looking CG holiday greeting produced at their studio.

Manchester-based vfx house AHD Imaging created this timely and clever Internet viral for the holidays:

“AHD168 is a computer generated robot who was written out of a TV advert due to credit crunched budgetary constraints. AHD168 now spends his days wandering the streets looking for a meaningful role in an animated TV project.”

(Thanks, Aaron Bynum)

I can’t help it, I’m in the holiday spirit, so here’s another one for today: the Firehouse Five Plus Two, led by Disney director and animator Ward Kimball, perform holiday music with Dixie flair.

Well, imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch Saturday’s installment of Random Cartoons (10:30am/1:30pm on Nicktoons Network) and up popped my own cartoon Hornswiggle. Had I known it was going to run this weekend, I would have let you all know.

I was very disappointed I couldn’t give Brew readers advance notice. The good news is that someone posted the broadcast on YouTube - not quite the way I wanted you to see it, but it’ll have to do. Enjoy!

Rooftop Films, the yearly film festival that takes place across the rooftops of New York City, is currently accepting submissions for its 2009 summer series. Next year’s festival, the 13th anniversary of Rooftop, runs from May through September. The early submission deadline is January 5, 2009. Submission fees are a reasonable $9, and everybody who submits receives two free passes to any Rooftop Films show. They’re a solid filmmaker-friendly organization that I hear only good things about and should be commended for supporting both animation and live-action filmmakers. Complete submission info can be found on the Rootop Films website.

Joe Dante’s Trailers From Hell is down for Christmas week, so instead of trailer commentaries he’s running The Hangman, a rarely-seen 1964 short subject designed by Paul Julian and co-directed by Julian and Les Goldman, based on Maurice Ogden’s classic poem. If you are only familiar with Julian’s work through his years of background design for Warner cartoons or UPA’s version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1953), you know you are in for a treat. Haunting and moody - believe it or not, they used to show this to us in public school in the 1960s!

Thanks, Joe!

Today’s entry from the UK is more curio than classic: the 1959 Halas and Batchelor cartoon The Christmas Visitor, directed by John Halas, designed by Ted Pettengell, and animated by Harold Whitaker and Tony Guy. The cartoon, like a lot of Fifties work by Halas and Batchelor, is an uncomfortable mix of ‘cartoon modern’ styling and traditional animation movement. Its rarity makes it worth a view.

(via the excellent Saturday Morning Blog)

Chris Hardwick is our guest comedian for Tuesday night’s live Cartoon Dump show in Los Angeles. If you don’t know him, he’s a very funny writer/actor/comic who is currently a regular on G4’s Attack Of The Show, blogs on Nerdist.com and provided the voice for the hero Green Arrow on the The Batman (2004), the villain Glowface on Nickelodeon’s The X’s, and stars as Otis the Cow on Back To The Barnyard.

It’s our Christmas Special - and Mighty Mr. Titan will be one of the chestnuts we’ll be roasting in a open fire. Join us on December 23rd at 8pm at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood.

P.S. Good news for our friends and fans in the Bay area - we are coming to the Eureka Theatre on January 31st. Cartoon Dump will be part of the San Francisco Sketchfest - with guest comedians Andy Kindler and Mary Lynn Rajskub (”24″). Join us there at 8pm. Tickets available now!