Your favorite animated music video for the next five minutes: Birdy Nam Nam’s “The Parachute Ending” directed by Steve Scott and illustrated by Will Sweeney. There’s a healthy dose of René Laloux and Moebius mixed in there, but the overall results are fresh and fun. According to Scott, it was influenced by Laloux’s Planet Sauvage, bad 80s kids cartoons, Metal Hurlant, Nausicaa and Prog Rock album covers. It was created over four weeks in Flash and AfterEffects.

Crew credits are:
James Littlemore - Editor / Compositor
Geoff McDowall - Animator
Ed Willmore - Animator
Roland Edwards - Animator
Dele Nuga - Digital Painter

(Thanks, Christy Karacas and Chris McD)

Following this recent post, many readers demanded better animated and funnier fruit people. So I present to you Joel Trussell’s new Kid 606 video “Mr. Wobble’s Nightmare.” Watch it here. Credits for the video are as follows:

Director: Joel Trussell
Animators: Anna & Mike Hollingsworth, Joel Trussell
DP & Editor: Michael Samstag
Camera: Matthew Rogers
Lighting: Jeff Reed

Adventure Time creator Pen Ward recently turned me on to the work of Glasgow-based animator David Ferguson, who posts his work at SwatPaz.net. “I don’t know why this guy’s youtube videos aren’t more popular,” says Pen. “I love ‘em.” Personally, I think they’re amusing too. There’s lots of good ideas in Ferguson’s work, and the naive animation and borderline incomprehensible Scottish accent only add to the fun. David has a whole slew of short absurdist pieces on his YouTube page, as well as more random jollities on his website including this page of “cool characters.”

Yoni Goodman, the director of animation for Waltz with Bashir, created this public service announcement for the human rights organization Gisha—Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. It’s a good example of how to use animation to communicate an important political issue with clarity and precision. There’s also a short making-of video in which Goodman talks about the piece, as well as a website for the film at ClosedZone.com.

(Thanks, Mats Grorud)

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The Upstate Four (viewable in two parts above) is an eleven-minute Cartoon Network pilot created by brothers Fran Krause and Will Krause. When I first saw it last year, I was immediately taken by the quality of the production. Funny and fresh, energetic and entertaining, it looks and feels like nothing else currently out there. On top of that, the character animation is handled beautifully with none of the corner-cutting that has become an unfortunate hallmark of contemporary Flash TV animation.

The pilot wasn’t picked up for series production and languished at Cartoon Network, but the brothers Krause received recognition for their efforts in the form of a top prize for Children’s Television Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival as well as an Excellence in Animation prize from the 2008 ASIFA-East Animation Festival.

The Krause’s pilot for The Upstate Four raises the bar for TV animation everywhere, and proves that, with thoughtful planning and execution, top-grade TV animation is within reach. I wanted to learn how such an inspired and quality piece of work made it through the moribund development pipeline at Cartoon Network. The interview below was conducted via email, and in our far-ranging conversation, Fran and Will guide us through the tangled development process, their feelings about pitching, whether the type of quality they achieved in this pilot could be maintained in regular series production, and some of the lessons they learned from creating this pilot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Something funny for Friday. Australian animator David Blumenstein made this spot for a local Melbourne comic event called Comic Book Funny. David tells me, “I animated it in a day (Wednesday, to be exact).”

The Orange is a droll and effective piece of storytelling directed by Nick Fox-Gieg and based on a story by Benjamin Rosenbaum. It was created in Flash and AfterEffects. Gieg’s earlier short A Good Joke is another fun diversion.

Cartoonist M. Wartella (Wonder Showzen, Superjail!) created a stylish Aztec-art inspired two-minute segment for tonight’s episode of Xavier: Renegade Angel on Adult Swim. The segment is previewed below. Wartella discusses his creative process and offers a short ‘how-to animate’ video in this interview on Cold Hard Flash (if only creating animation was as easy for the rest of us).