Oh Willy… is a short film about a porky guy who goes to care for his sick mother who lives in a nudist colony. It’s directed by Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels, and debuts later this month at the prestigious Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. I enjoyed the cozy-looking knitted animation of Emma’s earlier film, Soft Plants, and I’m really looking forward to checking this one out, too.

An elegant sense of symmetry and order forms the world of Boris Labbé’s Kyrielle. The repeating rhythms and cycles have a hypnotic quality, and encourage the viewer’s eye to wander playfully and explore different figures. Labbé accomplished all this with just 285 watercolor drawings which he later composited digitally and projected as a video installation. Kyrielle was made at the French animation school EMCA (Ecole des Métiers du Cinéma d’Animation).

Unexpectedly thought-provoking and beautiful in its own way, In the Pig, Everything is Good (Dans le cochon, tout est bon) takes advantage of the unconventional narrative possibilities available to the animated filmmaker. Made by Iris Alexandre as a graduation film at the Belgian school La Cambre: Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts visuels.

I think we have a winner — “Makin’ with the Magilla”:

No song could possibly live up to the cover, but if you must:

If you have a more perfect cartoon-themed album cover, share it in the comments.

(via John K Stuff)

The Chuck Jones Experience opens Thursday at Circus Circus in Las Vegas. Just in time, too, considering that one out of three Americans don’t know who Bugs Bunny is, and nearly half (44%) don’t recognize Daffy Duck. If you’ve ever watched this or this or this, you’d understand why the American public is trying to forget these once-great characters.

Last week at an animation screening in New York, the MC of the event, Bill Plympton, invited a member of the audience to take the stage and introduced him as a New York animation legend. The suspender-wearing pot-bellied gentleman looked about the farthest thing from a legend. I’d seen him at screenings before and never knew who he was, but I was certainly familiar with his famous work-in-progress animated film. It was none other than Michael Sullivan, who’s been working for over a decade on a stop-motion robot porno epic The Sex Life of Robots.

Michael has had a long career in animation, working on sets and puppets for projects like Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Joe’s Apartment, and Bear in the Big Blue House,, but it’s the exquisitely crafted robot porn that he’s been making in his apartment that has captured the most attention. Now he’s about to become a lot more famous thanks to a short documentary—Meaning of Robots—that will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week. The trailer is above, and it’s directed by Matt Lenski who describes it as such:

In the Spring of 2011, after years of hiring him to build miniature sets for my films I asked Mike Sullivan for his help on an art project – A doll-sized protest kit. During the process I got a peek into his world and discovered that it was anything but miniature.

What I found was a man dedicated, overwhelmed, slightly lost and happy to share it with honesty and a little humor. I also found thousands of Robots with wieners. This is a character exploration, a documentary, a Henry Darger-esque allegory set in one studio apartment on 27th street in New York City.

Sullivan has been profiled on multiple occasions in the past. Click after the jump for more videos about his animation work, with plenty of NSFW clips from his work-in-progress film.
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