Cartoonist M. Wartella (Wonder Showzen, Superjail!) created a stylish Aztec-art inspired two-minute segment for tonight’s episode of Xavier: Renegade Angel on Adult Swim. The segment is previewed below. Wartella discusses his creative process and offers a short ‘how-to animate’ video in this interview on Cold Hard Flash (if only creating animation was as easy for the rest of us).

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has apparently become enough of a celebrity to appear as himself in a commercial for Hulu:

Sony Pictures Animation released the trailer today for their next feature, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Watch it here. The eyes on the characters are bigger than in most Pixar/Dreamworks-style CG features so I suppose they’re going for a “cartoony” aesthetic.

The official selections have been announced for the 2009 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Of particular interest is to see how many films in the shorts category have already been hits on-line. There’s Muto’s wall-painted animation Blu, PES’s Western Spaghetti, David O’Reilly’s Please Say Something, and Takena Nagao’s Chainsaw Maid, which is probably not even eligible since it’s from 2007. The music video category also includes the Rex the Dog music video “Bubblicious.”

Can anybody point to a short film from, let’s say Annecy in 1985, that was seen by millions of people at the time of its release. This year’s competition program offers numerous shorts that fall into that category and it’s exciting as hell. Even a decade ago, animated shorts remained a fringe-culture oddity seen by a relative handful in festivals and touring-compilations. Thanks to the Internet though, independent animation has been lifted out of the cultural ghetto and is quick becoming as visible and mainstream as it was during the Golden Age of theatrical animation when shorts preceded feature films.

What we are seeing are the beginnings of a new age of animated shorts, an age where short-form animation is an integral part of the cultural mainstream. As shorts increase their visibility, more and more people will see them and be inspired to create their own, which is great news for everybody, except for animation festivals like Annecy which must begin to rethink their roles or face the risk of irrelevancy. Festivals are no longer in a position to introduce these films to the audience because there’s a good chance the audience has already seen them. Therefore, festivals must find new ways to add value to their programming, whether through creating connections between the rich history of the art form and the contemporary shorts movement, or looking to the future and bringing understanding to where all of this is headed. Most importantly, they could begin to serve as a focal gathering point for artists and businesspeople who want to help one another make money from the animation that is being produced.

Going on sale sometime within the next month is the fifth volume (our last, for now) of my and Leslie Cabarga’s Harvey Comics Classics from Dark Horse Books. Previous volumes were devoted to Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, Hot Stuff and Baby Huey. The latest one is entitled The Harvey Girls and features the exploits of Harvey’s famous female trio: Little Audrey, Little Dot and Little Lotta.

The book contains more great artwork from animator Steve Muffatti and cartoonist Warren Kremer. Personally, I think it’s some of the best comic art ever produced. Speaking of which, I’m coming to New York on Friday April 17th to give a lecture on the history of Harvey Comics and it’s connection to Paramount’s Famous Studios. It’ll be at MoCCA, on the final weekend of the Harvey Comics exhibit there. Mark the date, though I’ll do another post when we get closer to remind you. In the meantime, check out our great new book, The Harvey Girls.

New Yorkers, here’s a heads-up on a free program this week at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Forever Young: Dance Stars of American Animation will be discussed this Thursday night, March 19, at 6 p.m. at the Bruno Walter Auditorium, 111 Amsterdam Avenue (south of 65th Street).

Mindy Aloff, author of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation, will discuss the subject of dancing in historic American animation with dance legend Marge Champion and animation historian (and Oscar-winning director-animator) John Canemaker. Among their topics will be Ms. Champion’s early work as a live-action reference dancer and choreographer for Walt Disney’s animated features Snow White and Fantasia, Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse’s duet in Anchors Aweigh, and Betty Boop’s Poor Cinderella for Max Fleischer. Film excerpts will be shown. Admission is free and on a first come, first served basis. For additional information and program updates, telephone 212.642.0142 or visit the New York Public Library website.

Post Script: I’ve neglected to mention Aloff’s book, Hippo in a Tutu, before now - and that’s been my mistake. It’s an entertaining, excellent read and I recommend it highly. Lavishly illustrated and well-researched, Aloff focuses in on an important, but critically neglected, part of the classic Disney features and shorts. Deserves a prime spot on your bookshelf.

Toronto live-action screenwriter Denis McGrath imagines what kind of notes today’s industry executives might give to Chuck Jones’ classic Warner Bros. cartoon One Froggy Evening. They are all too real. Samples from his blog:

re: the frog. Have you done research on Frog’s lifespans? Does it track that this frog could survive from 1892 to 2056? Is his long lifespan tied into his ability to sing?

Do they allow mental patients to keep pet frogs? Is it a companion animal thing? Will have to explain this, I think. The audience will want to know.

Read the whole piece on McGrath’s Dead Things On Sticks blog.

(Thanks, Warren Leonhardt)

It’s exciting when you’re introduced to the work of a filmmaker that you’ve never heard about, such as last weekend when I stumbled upon Millie Goldsholl’s powerful and beautiful 1969 short Up is Down. Now the question I find myself asking is why hadn’t I heard of her before.

She wrote, designed and directed the film by herself. Millie, with her husband Morton, ran Goldsholl Associates, a commercial/graphic design and animation studio in Chicago. Her husband’s name is actually quite familiar to me as he was a well-known mid-century graphic designer, but I had no idea that both he and his wife were also filmmakers.

The only information I could dig up online about their animation practice was in a couple of blog posts that Michael Sporn had on his blog recently—a 1975 article from Millimeter Magazine and a few more details from a 1976 article from the same magazine.

Morton and Millie made numerous short films during the Sixties. One of Mort’s live-action efforts, about the history of paper, is also available for viewing online. From the info on this website, we can deduce that Morton and Millie most likely attended the School of Design in Chicago, which was run by Hungarian-born Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy. Together, the Goldsholls were making film experiments as early as 1942. They appear to have been a fascinating couple and I hope to learn more about them in the future.