A funny thing has happened: as hand-drawn studio-produced animated features have all but disappeared from the American animation scene, European and Asian studios are enjoying a mini-renaissance of drawn feature films. The latest example is Ernest et Célestine, adapted from a French children’s book series about the unlikely friendship between a gruff bear with artistic ambitions and an intelligent mouse who doesn’t want to become a dentist. The clip above gives a taste of the film’s breezy visual style that mixes broken-line characters with watercolor-style backgrounds—animated in Flash no less.

Directors are Benjamin Renner, Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, the latter two of whom directed the recent stop-motion feature A Town Called Panic. The 80-minute feature is a co-production between France (Les Armateurs, Maybe Movies, Studiocanal France), Belgium (La Parti) and Luxembourg (Mélusine Productions). Ernest et Célestine will have its world premiere this week at the Directors’ Fortnight, which takes place alongside the Cannes Film Festival.

Another extended film clip as well as a video showing the paperless production pipeline can be viewed after the jump. It’s all in French, but don’t let that stop you from taking a peek.
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British animation artist Edd Gould passed away on Sunday, March 25 from leukemia. He was the creator of the popular online animation series Eddsworld, which achieved a devoted following on numerous video platforms including Newgrounds and YouTube. On YouTube alone, his shorts have been viewed over 80 million times. The Eddsworld universe also included comics and Flash games. Gould animated all the shorts, co-wrote them, and provided some of the voices. It is not clear at this point whether the series will continue without his participation, but the rest of the Eddsworld crew has promised fans that they will finish the two-part episode that Gould was working on at the time of his death.

(Thanks, David OReilly)

SVA grad Ross Bollinger has been steadily building his Pencilmation cartoon brand over the past few years, and his YouTube channel now counts over 4,000 subscribers and 2.6 million views. He recently started a new series of Pencilmation shorts that offer a tongue-in-cheek history of the world. It begins with cavemen:

A second episode about ancient Egypt is already online, and he’s also doing commentaries for each episode. Watch all of Ross’s Pencilmation shorts on YouTube.

Be sure and visit Google’s front page today for an animated Valentine’s Day short with music by Tony Bennett. For a Google Doodle, it’s an impressively long piece. I hope they’ll be doing more of these long-form animated pieces in the future. The designer and writer of the piece was Willie Real and the animator was Michael Lipman (aka Lippy). Also, kudos to Google for not being afraid to slip in a nod to gay marriage.

Canadian cartoonists Seth Scriver and Shayne Ehman recently finished raising over $10,000 to complete their animated feature Asphalt Watches. They describe their collaborative two-man animated epic in the following way:

Asphalt Watches is a true adventure story: in 2000, we hitchhiked across Canada together. The animation captures our crazy journey, full of hilarious and amazing encounters. Using music and songs we make ourselves, alongside hand-drawn Flash animation, we tell the tale of making our way from a 7-11 near Chilliwack, BC where a guy was hanging out with a knife in his belly… to meeting one of only “two real Santas” in the world outside Calgary… to barely escaping death near Regina, SK. Our style is to turn real-life characters and settings into funny and poetic abstractions that depict the feeling and essence of what happened.

The film should be finished this year. There’s an official film blog and the trailer below:

(via Meathaus)

Courtesy of Benny & Rafi Fine and the animators at TwoAnimators we finally get a glimpse of what will happen to Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang when they begin to grow up.

To be sure, there’s a cute voice track in this interstitial for British children’s channel CBeebies, but the piece as a whole is charming and delivers on all fronts, with sharp direction, design and animation (I love the run cycles of the brothers at the beginning). The piece, called “Sam,” was directed by Matthias Hoegg of Beakus, who also made a couple other shorts in the series earlier this year.

CREDITS
Directed, Designed by Matthias Hoegg
Animated by Amaël Isnard and Matthias Hoegg
3D Animation by Amaël Isnard
Additional Compositing by Leo Bridle
Produced by Beakus

We’re back from our Comic-Con hiatus with the fifth film in Cartoon Brew’s Student Animation Festival: The Impossible Moon by Meinardas Valkevičius. The film was made at the Vilniaus Academy of Arts in Lithuania. To comment on the film or read extensive behind-the-scenes notes from the filmaker, click HERE.

This just might be my personal favorite film of the festival. There are countless student films that tell stories set in space (with a large percentage of them revolving around the Russian dog Laika for some inexplicable reason), but this one stands out, mainly because it dares to challenge our perception of a famous historical event. The Impossible Moon convincingly presents an alternate history of an iconic moment through superb command of the animation medium, especially camera, staging and sound. Regardless of your feelings about the story (and for the record, I’m a space buff who doesn’t buy into any conspiracy theories), the film immediately grabs the viewer with its audacious, thought-provoking concept. My favorite part of the film is the relationship between astronaut Michael Collins and his two inflatable travel companions, which affirms that an emotional bond can exist even in a conspiratorial setting.

Cartoon Brew’s second annual Student Animation Festival is made possible through the generous support of Titmouse and JibJab.