It’s rare to browse through someone’s on-line animation videos and enjoy everything they’ve produced. That’s the happy feeling I experienced watching the work of French animator Paul Cabon. In fact, it was too difficult to choose a single piece of his to share so I’ve included three more of his films after the jump. His work is packed with fresh visual concepts coupled with strong control of color and shape and a keen sense of humor. His animation of human figures moves in an almost experimental fashion, which is to say it doesn’t follow the rules of conventional character animation but fits perfectly with the rest of his style. Cabon graduated from the French animation school La Poudrière a couple years back.

See more of his work after the jump:
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Welcome to the first 2012 installment of Cartoon Brew’s “Animated Fragments.” Covering the animation world used to be a lot easier five or ten years ago. Today there is a greater amount of animation being produced than ever before and more of that animation is being posted on-line. Likewise, our thinking is constantly evolving about how to cover this ever-expanding world of animation. We introduced Animated Fragments last year after realizing that a lot of the animation being posted on-line didn’t fit into the traditional categories that everybody uses (TV, feature, music video, short, etc.). On-line culture is built on openness and sharing, and emerging artists (as well as an increasing number of established animators) share just about everything they produce on-line: animation tests, experiments, small-scale commercial gigs, pilot projects, you name it. The Animated Fragments is our attempt to catalog and share these pieces with a wider audience, and to hopefully introduce you to more talented artists who choose animation as their medium of visual expression.

Opening credits: Motel Monstre animated by Nick Cross and designed by Dave Cooper (Canada)

“Wolf-cub” by Loup Druelle (Norway)

“ThingSync Test—Seashells” by Javan Ivey (US): Toying with the idea of lipsyncing with objects and actions that are related to the dialogue.

“Random Animation about Anything” by Sophie de Jong (The Netherlands)

Morphology by Peter Sluszka (US)

I do believe there is such a thing as over-art directing a piece of animation to the point where the message becomes buried within the polish of the artwork. Whether that’s the case with “A Year of Sun with Mr. Persol,” a glossy piece of advertising for Persol Eyewear directed by Kevin Dart and Stéphane Coëdel, is open to debate. What’s inarguable is that it’s an extremely competent piece brimming with sophisticated design and visual concepts throughout.

Credits after the jump
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This 1961 episode of Tales of the Wizard of Oz harkens back to a time when animation writers didn’t speak down to kids. It’s a perfect example of children’s TV animation that works on multiple levels, encouraging kids to question their surroundings and understand the realities of the world while entertaining them at the same time.

Lipsmackers by Beercan Rd. is a 2011 thesis film produced at the School of Visual Arts by Sachio Cook. The film has a quirky tone, stylishly mixing the mundane real world with fantastical elements. Some of the storytelling lacks clarity, but the overall effect (as well as the artwork) is charming. According to her LinkedIn page, Sachio works at Titmouse as an assistant animator. I hope she continues making independent films, too.

Fifteen years in the making.
35,000 hand drawn, hand-painted cels.
Shot onto 35mm movie film on a rostrum camera.

This is Neil Boyle’s The Last Belle, a recently completed short that will be playing on the festival circuit in 2012. If the mind-bending subway shot in the trailer reminds you of Richard Williams’s The Thief and the Cobbler, that’s no accident. Boyle worked as an assistant animator to Williams and the layout artist on Boyle’s short, Roy Naisbitt, also laid out the wild perspective scenes in The Thief and the Cobbler. Boyle discussed the path he’s taken to making this short on his website:

“I came into the animation industry on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and at 20 years old I was one of the youngest there. I was lucky enough to learn from the Disney veteran Stan Green (who had been assistant to the legendary Milt Kahl on many classic Disney films) and I became assistant animator to Richard Williams who was (and remains) amazingly generous with his vast knowledge of animation lore and technique. I was in the middle of all this, the archetypal kid-sponge, sucking up all the information I could. And then one day I went to bed and woke up 40 years old. Or so it seems. Then I was surrounded by a new wave of 20 year olds who – unlike me at that age – were already masters of their craft: the digital age of animation. So I had (and have) a lot more learning to do. The Last Belle is the project I’ve used to bridge the gap between old and new. A chance not just to read about the ‘old ways’, but to try them all out for real, guided by veterans of the craft.The interesting next step is to combine the old with the new and see where it takes us…”

More info and a blog with fascinating making-of details can be found on TheLastBelle.com. Enjoy it while you can because this will surely be among the last hand-drawn, cel-painted films shot on 35mm.