Animator Elliot Cowan recently posted the following animation on YouTube featuring his characters Boxhead and Roundhead. The short uses an unlicensed piece of music by They Might Be Giants:

So how did the band respond to this? They called up Elliot, while he was taking a dump no less, to tell him they liked the animation and that he should change the credit at the end of the video from “Used Without Permission” to “Used With Permission.”

There are so many video sharing website contests and the like which encourage you to submit your work because you’ll get some “exposure.” If Elliot’s story proves anything, exposure is available to everybody, it’s free, and it doesn’t require silly contests. The key is to simply get your work out there. If it’s good, people will discover it and who knows what can come out of that.

ASIFA-Hollywood will be presenting the 36th Annual Annie Awards on Friday, January 30, 2009, at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Westwood, California. The evening begins with a pre-reception at 6 p.m. and event will be hosted by Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants).

Cartoon Brew has four sets of tickets (four pairs) which we’d like to share with our readers. These are the $250. VIP tickets and we are giving them away to the winners of our latest trivia contest. At 11am Pacific Time we will post a simple question relating to the Annie Awards in the space below. The first four correct respondents in the Comments section below will win the tickets.

The Contest is Now Closed! We have our winners!

THE QUESTION WAS: WHAT YEAR WAS THE FIRST ANNIE AWARDS CEREMONY? (The answer was 1972).

Entrants must live in the Southern California area (or are willing to transport themselves there by their own means). Please do not enter the contest if you cannot accept the prize.

For info on buying tickets to the event, go to the Annie Awards website.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! This be the official plug for the Jan 27th Cartoon Dump show at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood. In addition to hosts Compost Brite and Moodsey, the Clinically Depressed Owl, the show will also feature the return of Buff Badger — and guest comedians Laura Kightlinger and Jay London! Reserve tickets here. Join us next Tuesday at 8pm.

Extra! Cartoon Dump is also coming to San Francisco on Saturday January 31st. Our acclaimed cartoon/live-comedy show will be part of the San Francisco Sketchfest - with guest comedians Andy Kindler and Mary Lynn Rajskub (”24″) - at the Eureka Theatre, 8pm. Tickets available now!

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning. Nominated for BEST ANIMATED FEATURE were:

Bolt - Walt Disney
Kung Fu Panda - Dreamworks
Wall•E - Pixar

WALL•E was nominated for six Academy Awards. The Pixar hit was also nominated for Best Screenplay (congrats to Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and Jim Reardon), sound mixing (Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt), sound editing (Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood), music (Thomas Newman) and Original Song.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR was nominated for Best Foreign Film.

Nominated for BEST ANIMATED SHORT are:

La Maison en Petits Cubes - Kunio Kato
Lavatory - A Love Story - Konstantin Bronzit
Oktapodi - A Gobelins, L’école de l’image Production
Presto - Pixar, Doug Sweetland
This Way Up - Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

The winners will be announced Feb. 22 at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.

Here we go again! Variety is reporting today that Warner Bros. is planning to turn Tom and Jerry into its own Alvin and the Chipmunks-like family franchise.

Plans are to bring the constantly warring cat and mouse to life as CG characters that run around in live-action settings.

Studio-based Dan Lin will adapt the classic Hanna-Barbera property as an origin story that reveals how Tom and Jerry first meet and form their rivalry before getting lost in Chicago and reluctantly working together during an arduous journey home. Eric Gravning is penning the script.

Warners owns the rights to Hanna-Barbera’s slate of popular animated properties and has several of them in development for bigscreen adaptation. Those include Robert Rodriguez’s version of The Jetsons and producer Donald De Line’s Yogi Bear.

It worked for Warners before (i.e. Scooby Doo), so adapting Hanna Barbera’s Tom & Jerry sounds logical, but its something that has to be very carefully approached.

The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, will be presenting the 36th Annual Annie Awards a week from Friday, January 30, 2009, at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Westwood, California. The evening begins with a pre-reception at 6 p.m. followed by the Annie Awards ceremony at 8 p.m. and post award party at 10 p.m. Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants) will once again be hosting. Presenters include voice actress June Foray, director Henry Selick (Coraline), actors Brad Garrett (Ratatouille), Seth Green (Robot Chicken), Michael Clarke Duncan (Kung Fu Panda), James Hong (Kung Fu Panda), Donald Faison (The Boondocks), and Ben Burtt (Wall-E). Presenting the Winsor McCay award to Pixar’s John Lasseter will be Roy Disney.

General Admission Tickets are $25. VIP tickets, which include the pre-reception and post awards party are $250. Discount VIP Tickets for ASIFA-Hollywood, The Animation Guild, Visual Effects Society and Women in Animation Members are $150. To order tickets or for further information, visit www.annieawards.org

Cartoon Brew will give away a pair of VIP tickets to four lucky winners in a contest on Friday. Check back here tomorrow (1/23) at 9am (Pacific Time) for details.

Eddie Mort and Lili Chin (Mucha Lucha!) have returned to the cartoon wrestling arena to create a full length flash feature, Los Campeones. The movie opened theatrically in Mexico back in October. It has no U.S. distributor yet, but will be screening in Los Angeles at the Egyptian Theatre on Thursday February 5th. Eddie and Lili will be there to introduce the film and show off original art at the 7:30pm show. For more details check the Campeones MySpace or the Fwak blog.

Also check the Fwak! website to see some juicy images from other projects they’ve developed, like the retro-flash animated Hanna Barbera promos for Boomerang…

…and check this line-up (below) for La Familia Gonzales an aborted attempt by Warners and Cartoon Network to revive and update Speedy Gonzales:

We’re pleased to report that last weekend the Cartoon Brew community on Facebook surpassed 1500 members. Thanks to everybody who has joined. It’s big fun being able to finally put faces to our readers. We’ll try to use our Facebook group more in 2009. We tried a ticket giveaway on there last year which worked out well so expect more giveaways and contests this year. It’s also a fine place to share your animated projects with the Cartoon Brew community. In fact, we’ve picked up at least a couple news items for the Brew from tidbits that people have posted on the Facebook group. Or use it as a forum to start discussions about animation topics that aren’t covered on this site.