Buck is an incredible design studio that uses animation, anime, and visual effects to create commercials, I.D.’s, and short films for a variety of clients.

They’ve recently completed two jobs for Toyota’s viral Scion ad campaign, Want2BSquare, that are well worth watching: the CG/traditional Tower of Grantville and the stop motion Three Years. Advertising money well spent.

Explore Buck’s website to see their absolutely amazing sample reels.

“Homage or Rip-off” should be a new category on Cartoon Brew. Certainly we have enough material. In the comments of the Lee Lennox’s “Girl and the Sea” music video, which was a homage/ripoff of Yuri Norstein’s work, Brew reader Doug posted a link to this new commercial for GE. The commercial is more than a little inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s short film Jumping (1984), and unlike Lennox’s video, it doesn’t build on the original concept or offer any new perspective on the material. The commercial is part of GE’s fittingly ironic campaign called “Imagination at Work.”

Below is Tezuka’s original (and much more creatively executed) short Jumping.

A few weeks ago I posted about Chuck McCann and mentioned his memorable voice work as Sonny and Gramps in the original 1960s Cocoa Puffs cereal commercials. At the time, I couldn’t find any on the internet to link to, but thanks to our pal J.J. Sedelmaier we were able to place several on You Tube ourselves. These spots were animated by the great Jan Svochak (1926-2006), who was best known for some of the early Hawaiian Punch commercials.

It looks like he had a lot of fun animating these.

It’s all about marketing, I guess.

Bad enough that Cinderella III was hyped on those dividers at the checkout aisle, now we can take the Peter Pan hype home with us—on our produce! The Consumerist spotted this latest excercise in Disney corporate mind control.

(Thanks, Hiland Hall)

Nike Love is a new ad campaign that encourages fat kids to exercise. The website has three animated spots; they’re not particularly noteworthy pieces but a pleasant enough diversion.

John Kricfalusi has done four mini animated pieces for Raketu, a new internet/cell phone entertainment/communication service. John has been blogging about the creation of these spots (one of which includes George Liquor). I love how John solved a problem by recalling a Roger Ramjet cartoon technique for inspiration. I can’t vouch for the service, but these little cartoons are fun.

Animation producer Lydia Holness has teamed with directors Jonathan Garin and Naomi Nishimura to launch a new design/animation studio, PandaPanther, based in New York. This G4 ID spot is representative of their work - but check out their website for pure psychedelic eye candy.

After Robert “Bobe” Cannon (the genius director of Gerald McBoing Boing) left UPA around 1958, he began to do a lot of commercial freelance. Among the places he worked was Playhouse Pictures, where he directed and animated this :20 second spot for the US Navy featuring a somewhat Thurber-esque cat and dog talking about their owner’s decision to join the Navy.

Despite the bare-bones simplicity of the piece (or perhaps because of it), it’s highly effective and does a great job of communicating the message. The commercial didn’t have much ad agency involvement as far as I can tell. The circular script where the characters repeat one another’s words was written in-house by Chris Jenkyns, who was the primary writer/storyboard artist at Playhouse.