First, London based Matt Clark and Matt Everitt created this short, using dialogue from a Ricky Gervais Xfm radio show. This is one of a series of web shorts, which you can view here.

A short time later, a series of Irish Lotto ads began appearing on television. Brown Bag Animation in Dublin produced these.

Clark and Everitt believe they were ripped off. They’ve confronted Brown Bag about it. Everitt comments about it here and other blogs have written about it as well.

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.