For more about Animated Fragments, see this earlier post. If you want to see all the fragments collected in one place,subscribe to this channel on Vimeo.

Cuckoo by Paulo Mosca (Spain)

Work time by Stuart Bury (US): “A quick animation test in Flash. I wanted to use both symbols and frame by frame together in the same sequence.”

Guardian Pets commercial by Celyn Brazier (UK)

Pole Dance interstitial for E4 by Treat (UK)

Subway Test by BJ Crawford (US)

The Mushroom by Julio del Rio (UK). “The Mushroom” was done while sitting down in a pub on a Sunday afternoon…All frames were drawn directly in a single sheet of paper, and later scanned, cut, repositioned and timed in PAP, inspired by Fran Krause’s great sketchbook animation technique.”

I love the illustrative-collage animation style of Brooklyn-based painter Jonathan Campo and hope he continues to explore this quirky approach to filmmaking. Especially if he applies it to something more substantial than tired “Adult Swim”-esque non sequiturs and awkward pauses.

(via Meathaus)

Hadn’t checked in a while and was curious to see what the most viewed pieces of animation on YouTube and Vimeo currently are. The results are, erm, fascinating and quite reflective of the audiences who use each site. It should be pointed out that Muto, the most viewed piece of animation on Vimeo (3.5 million views) has significantly more views (8.8 million) on YouTube. In other words, good animation does get recognized on YouTube as well, but you have to wade through a lot of trash to get to it.

From a user standpoint, I no longer find it possible to discover new animators or films on YouTube unless someone sends a direct link. Vimeo’s community features are easier to use, and the number of users is still small enough to encourage browsing and discovery. I hope they find ways to maintain the sense of intimacy and community as they scale upward.

Top Animation on YouTube
1. Tootin’ Bathtub Baby Cousins – 151.1 million views

2. Intro La casa de Mickey Mouse – 123 million views

3. The Gummy Bear Song – 115.2 million views

Top Animation on Vimeo

1. Muto – 3.5 million views

2. The Third & The Seventh – 3.2 million views

3. The Crisis of Credit Visualized – 2.5 million

After two-years on the festival circuit, animator Chris Perry is releasing his short, The Incident at Tower 37, online today in honor of World Water Day. It’s a sci-fi allegory with a message, well worth ten minutes of your time.

Memorably surreal images—alternately beautiful and disturbing—populate the world of FIVE (FÜNF), a pixilation short by Moritz Reichartz and Andrea Éva Györi.

The Light At The End is by Chris Burton, a 26 year-old self-taught animator (“…and still learning”) based in London.

Burton writes:

“I’m actually a web developer my profession – I make films in my free time, and this – like my previous work – took six months from conception to final cut.

“Icebox Studios is just the moniker under which I show my work – the “studio” itself is little more than my desk and computer.I made the film using Blender and Gimp, both open source software, so apart from living costs the film didn’t cost anything. A friend of mine composed the music, and the sound was sampled from a creative-commons licensed website.

“I struggled quite a lot with the story details beyond the initial idea, and I actually started over and re-animated the whole thing after the first cut wasn’t entertaining enough. There are a lot of “pearly gate” comedy shorts out there, and I really wanted the divine aspect to take a back seat to the film’s underlying theme of learning to look out for yourself rather than being dependent on others.”

Viliam is Veronika Obertová’s graduation short from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. The handmade papercraft technique fits nicely with the theme of obsessive artistic creation at all costs. I was also impressed by Obertová’s satiric styling and how she subverted the crisp and safe paper sculpture shapes with quasi-grotesque character designs comprised of dangling noses, freakish mouth shapes, spoked-wheel eyes and heavy black outlines.

For more about Animated Fragments, see this earlier post.

Promo for Canal Brasil by Sergio Yamasaki (Brazil): “The idea was to tell the audience that the twitter of the channel had changed due to a virus.”

Lip sync exercise from Roman Holiday by Deanna Trudeau (School of Visual Arts, USA)

“Leo Fisher” lip sync exercise by Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits (Royal College of Art, UK)

Timbre Z by Mirai Mizue (Japan). One of 26 abstract pieces made in 26 consecutive days. View all of them here.

Anagrams by Phoebe Halstead (Kingston University, UK)

File No.4 by Patrick Doyon (Canada)

Eric Dyer’s The Bellows March is a sublime way to end our unintentional zoetrope week on Cartoon Brew. I first saw Dyer’s film when I was jurying the Ottawa animation festival a couple years back. The complex visual patterns and rhythms in his short have the dual qualities of mathematical precision and natural organic beauty. Even after watching the film multiple times, it still boggles my mind how Dyer, who is a professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County, planned and choreographed the production. Below is a video with a behind-the-scenes look at the circular sculptures, dubbed cinetropes, that were made with 3-D printed parts:

Max Hathaway, who sent me the link to the film and who assisted Dyer on this short, is working on his own zoetrope-esque animation with stop-motion armatures mounted on an animation rig. He’s documenting the production of the short on his blog.

I was surprised to run across The Indescribable Nth, an odd curio from 1999 directed by Steve “Oscar” Moore and produced at Character Builders in Ohio. Moore, who lives in New Jersey nowadays, is also the director of Disney TV Animation’s Redux Riding Hood, a 1997 Oscar-nominated short that, as he notes on his site, “has since never aired on television, never been released on video or DVD, and has not been shown publicly since 1998.” One would assume there’s something seriously wrong with the film for it to be buried so unceremoniously, but its only crime is that it’s fairly funny and well made. Below is a clip from Redux Riding Hood.

For more about our new section Animated Fragments, see this earlier post.

I Always Look Angry: 1000 Self Portraits by Tom Law

Slowjam by Beeple

Hooded Test by Leeanne Williams

Sketchy Friends Dance by Neil Sanders

Interlude for channel Music-24 (unused) by Ori Toor

Matt M, one of the artists who worked on Disney’s The Ballad of Nessie, commented with some helpful details about the production of the short:

This short film is based off of Stevie’s (one of the directors) ideas she had come up with while back at CalArts I believe. The style is meant to be flat. The character animation was traditionally done on paper as well as the cleanup. The effects were done using Toon Boom and were drawn on Cintiq’s the same way we did all of the effects on PATF. All ink and paint and comp was done in Toon Boom as well. I even used maya (3d) on a couple of shots but you would never know it by the way it was treated in Toon Boom. I believe Joe Mildenberger (2d efx) used After Effects with Toon Boom for one of the sequences with art direction based of Lorelay Bove’s work. Dan Lund set up the look of the effects with some scenes he did. It is a simple story and the style is simply done. Not everything needs all the bells and whistles. Enjoy the animation and enjoy the story from this film. Both go hand in hand and neither one of them tries to overshadow the other. This film was completed at the end of PATF and was a nice way to roll of a very busy film. Andy Harkness was the art director and was so great to work with as was everyone at Disney. People who dont work there or never have need to find out facts before they bash on a place. Does Disney have its problems, yes but at the same time it employs some of the most amazing people and I believe in time things will get to where they should be at Disney.