After the stress of judging the Ottawa International Animation Festival (more about that soon), I decided to unwind for a few days in the much more lively Canadian city of Montreal. Even there, I couldn’t escape cartoons. I stumbled upon this large and unconventional graffiti mural that incorporates vintage cartoon characters like Bosko, Honey, Betty Boop, Buddy, and Krazy Kat.The mural, which is a good eighty feet long, gives more visibility to these characters than anything their parent studios have done with them in a long time.

If you want to see the piece in person, it’s off of rue St. Catherine, a few blocks east of rue St. Denis. Otherwise, click on the image below to see my quick-and-dirty stitch job of the mural.

Worth checking out: a hi-res version of the Cartoonstitute short 3 Dog Band directed by Paul Rudish (Dexter’s Lab, Star Wars: Clone Wars). I wanted to like this short because there’s a lot to appreciate about it, including funny character movement, moments of visual inventiveness (the dj who flips his turntables into a bike), and a solid track at the end that is probably the best piece of music to ever accompany a Cartoon Network product.

At the same time, the characters have vague unappealing personalities, there’s little chemistry between the leads, and the attempts at humor fall flat (was the ending even supposed to be a joke?). It’s also a shame they couldn’t figure out what to do with the music. The last couple minutes come across as a fetishistic exercise in design and art direction that offers little in the way of entertainment value. By comparison, this is an example of how to properly end a cartoon with a musical sequence that rewards its audience.

In a shorts program, not every cartoon is going to be a homerun, especially when they’re produced in the completely nonsensical manner of allowing each director to only make one short. But when all is said and done, even the weaker shorts that I’ve seen so far from the Cartoonstitute program have their moments, and few appear to be offensively bad as so many TV animation pilots tend to be nowadays.

Filmmaker Michael Sporn interviews Jennifer and Bert Klein about their ambitious new animated short Pups of Liberty and the lengths they to to finish it:

Jennifer: It is hard to sit down and work after you have worked a full day, but I always remembered something Bert would say, “Even if you just get one drawing done you are one drawing ahead.” So I’d try and get one scene’s worth of layouts done a night, or read a track, or just something, and we’d inch forward until we were done.

The Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick and voice actor James Urbaniak recently appeared on “The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling.” The interview lasts a couple hours and there’s a lot of goofiness, but there’s also a lot of good discussion because the host, Scharpling, is a TV writer and producer (Monk, Tom Goes to the Mayor). The interview begins a little after an hour into the September 29 program, which can be listened to at the WFMU website.

Prepare yourself! That’s all I can say about David Sheahan’s Together! (2009). The first time I saw this film was like a punch in the face. It’s bizarre, unsettling, endlessly inventive, and wicked fun. In a nutshell, it’s a completely original take on traditional cartoon animation. The character animation of Candice is inspired, and the use of space and camera is dazzling. The multi-talented Sheahan also composed the music, and voiced the Spider and Candice (the words “I’m wearing a dress” have never sounded so disturbing). Sheahan made this as a graduation film at Pratt Institute, but his fully-realized vision of Together! pushes far beyond student film territory and into a realm of its own. Discover how a moth and roach come Together! exclusively on Cartoon Brew TV.

Twenty-one-year old Leo Campasso, an animator at Buenos Aires studio HookUp Animation, created Wild Wind in his spare time. The short is an experiment that combines pixel-style characters with traditional cartoon animation principles. The results are a lot of fun and prove that one need not associate pixel animation with stilted, boring movement . Interesting sidenote: Leo said in his email to me that he’s been animating since he was twelve when he got his hands on a copy of Flash 4.

A high-res version of the film can be downloaded here.

If I were in LA next Monday, I’d go to see this multimedia music/animation performance by The Decemberists at UCLA’s Royce Hall. With seemingly every other band using animation for their videos nowadays, the format is in need of some fresh takes like this:

On October 19, The Decemberists will unveil Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized, a special project that takes their ambitious and acclaimed song cycle to new heights for its final American performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles. This unique live experience will feature The Decemberists in collaboration with four filmmakers—Guilherme Marcondes, Julia Pott, Peter Sluszka and Santa Maria—each of whom have created animation to accompany a section of the music. Flux commissioned the films and worked with Hornet Inc. who produced them. This is a one time only - not to be missed - live experience. The film will later be released on iTunes.

Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. This is the trailer for Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized.

This morning, an example of animation from South Africa. Animator Mike Scott created this video for the band Goldfish. Software and tools used were Photoshop CS4, Anime Studio Pro 6, Final Cut Express 4 HD, Macbook, Macbook Pro, Wacom Intuos 3 and Wacom Cintiq 12 WX .

There’s a lot of good stuff happening at the Ottawa International Animation Festival this week. Eric Goldberg, Henry Selick, David Silverman and Ronnie del Carmen will be speaking up there, Don Hertzfeldt, Suzan Pitt and Jim Blashfield are having retrospectives, and there’s the to-be-expected impeccable selection of shorts as well as features like Mary and Max , $9.99 and My Dog Tulip. Inbetween this animation frenzy, I hope you’ll take the time to check out the retrospective of filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. His films screen Friday, October 16, and Saturday, October 17, at the Arts Court Theatre, both nights at 7pm.

It’s a disservice to label VanDerBeek (1927-1984) merely a filmmaker because he was so much more than that. He was a multimedia artist years before the term even existed. He was constantly getting his hands dirty with new technologies and trying to figure out artistic and educational applications for them. This included creating huge murals via fax machine, projecting film onto steam, and designing interactive multi-screen TV shows. No surprise that VanDerBeek was also a computer animation pioneer who starting experimenting with CGI in 1965.

His short films—often surreal, often funny, and always a visual free-for-all—combine animation, collage, cut-out, photography and video, with manic cutting that looks more contemporary than ever. Terry Gilliam has said in interviews that it was VanDerBeek’s cut-out films, and specifically Breathdeath (which will be shown in Ottawa), that inspired his animation style for Monty Python. I’ve personally been influenced by VanDerBeek’s work since I first saw it last year, and I recommend you check him out in Ottawa later this week. The screening will include examples of his analog and CG films, as well as rare film clips of VanDerBeek at work and at play.