Half-cat and half-octopus, Octocat is searching for his parents. And he manages to drink a relaxing cup of tea during the search. I hope we see a lot more cartoons from 13-year-old Randy Peters.

(Thanks, David O’Reilly)

British commercial director Simon Tofield, who is repped by Tandem Films is the creator behind Simon’s Cat, an absolutely delightful series of Flash-animated shorts. While the cartoons are minimalist to the core—simple line designs, no color and basic backgrounds—the animation has two key ingredients that make them a success: personality and charm. The latest short posted below, “Let Me In,” has racked up over 1 million YouTube views since its debut last week. The earlier one, “Cat Man Do,” is also a gem.

Please Say Something is a visually and narratively intriguing series of CG micro-shorts by David O’Reilly, creator of RGBXYZ. O’Reilly tells me that the series of five dramatic pieces is designed to be seen on the Web and is influenced by the “amazing comics” of Jason. The shorts speak for themselves but should you require additional explanation, there’s always this blog entry.

(click on the image above to see more of this model sheet)

With so much attention being paid nowadays to film gimmickry like stereoscopic 3D, it may be only a matter of time before Hollywood begins resurrecting other outlandish ideas from the past, like Smell-O-Vision. As far as I’m aware, there’s only one piece of animation ever produced using the Smell-O-Vision process, in which audiences were exposed to aromas that accompanied the visuals onscreen. The cartoon is called A Tale of Old Whiff. I’ve never seen the short, but I can offer the model sheet above which allows us to see what the characters looked like.

A reviewer named F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre has written extensive commentary about the short on IMDB that includes the following synopsis:

Bert Lahr does hilarious work as the voice of Old Whiff, a cartoon bloodhound searching for a museum’s lost dinosaur bone worth $100,000 … but whose search is hampered by the fact that he has lost his sense of smell. While the bloodhound meanders through this cartoon, muttering to himself in Bert Lahr’s distinctive voice, we see various items which Old Whiff encounters … including a hot dog, mustard, soap, soup, chocolate, violets, pine trees, a field of clover and a horse. We also SMELL those objects; at least we smell them if the Smell-O-Vision process is working properly. But poor Old Whiff can’t smell anything.

I found the faded and many-times photocopied model sheet in the collection of Alan Zaslove, who is credited with directing the film. The film was originally being directed by John Hubley in New York but, for reasons that are unclear, he abandoned the project midway. The most likely scenario is that he had a financial or creative conflict with the bankroller of the Smell-O-Vision process, the notorious Hollywood producer Mike Todd.

Zaslove remembers that all of the artwork, including much of the completed animation, was shipped by Hubley to to Format Films in LA, where it was photographed and completed. Story artist Leo Salkin, who was working at Format at the time, is credited with storywork on the film, which perhaps implies that the story of the film wasn’t completely figured out when Hubley stopped working on the film. I’m not sure if the model sheet above was drawn entirely by Hubley, but the designs are certainly his, and a lot of the drawings look like they could be from his hand.

Throughout the history of the animation art form, there have been a select group of innovators who have pushed the medium to its limits and explored the potential of animation to its fullest. These artists include Winsor McCay, Walt Disney, Max Flesicher, Tex Avery, John Hubley…and now, I’m pleased to announce, Fred and Sharon.

Fred and Sharon, hailing from Kelowna, Canada are redefining the possibilities of filmmaking and animation by producing movies for any type of occasion. You can learn about their skills by watching this introductory piece below, entitled “Who Needs a Movie.”

Of course, Cartoon Brew is an animation website and thankfully for us, Fred and Sharon are specialists in the art of animation. They work in a dizzying array of styles, including hi-end computer animation that is seamlessly integrated into live-action settings…

to a traditional hand-drawn look…

to more painterly and experimental styles of animation…

For more of their filmmaking magic, visit FredandSharonsMovies.com or their YouTube page. And when you see them accepting an Oscar, just remember that you read about them on Cartoon Brew first.

Richard Williams’s epic first animated short The Little Island (1958) has been posted online. Highly stylized, dialogueless, serious themes, and over half an hour long, the film definitely takes some effort to sit through. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating—and surprisingly offbeat—early work by a contemporary animation legend, and well worth a view.

(Thanks, Patrick McCart)

Brew reader Michael Losure is a graduate student at the Texas A&M Viz lab who recently finished work on a couple of projects worth a look.

The first is a 3 minute CG short, just finished, named Goobees. It’s a darkly comic film about the inner workings of a vending machine, with a senario that’s a cross between Braveheart and Candyland. Losure and his partners — Seth Freeman, Tony Piedra, Patrick O’Brien — spent 18 months making the CG short inbetween taking classes and dealing with other college obligations.

The second is a stop-motion music video for the band Motion City Soundtrack. A fellow A&M lab student, Lauren Simpson, won an mtvU contest to direct a music video. Losure became the lead animator and editor. The resulting video, It Had To Be You, is a lot of fun - and a pretty good song. Losure adds:

I’m sending the films to you because I’m proud of them as films, not because I think the actual character animation itself necessarily meets Cartoon Brew standards. I have a strong interest in animation, but my schooling and job (I’ll start an FX position at Dreamworks this summer) are more technical. The viz lab specializes in the technical side of computer graphics - and on merging artistic skills with the technical - but there is no specific coursework in animation. I don’t think we’re very well known in the animation industry as a whole (probably because we don’t usually produce animators or shorts), but a lot of our graduates end up in various TD positions at the big animation companies (Seth and Tony are now at Pixar doing rigging and matte painting, and Patrick, Lauren and I are signed with Dreamworks for lighting and FX).

Pretty good for student work at a school that doesn’t teach animation per se. Pixar and Dreamworks are lucky to get you.

John Kricfalusi’s visual analysis of Bob Clampett’s The Hep Cat offers interesting ideas about why this particular cartoon works so well:

“It’s not Clampett’s funniest cartoon, although it is pretty funny. It doesn’t have any star characters in it. What makes it stand out, then? This cartoon is a mood piece. It’s an experiment in atmosphere and emotion…I think the best cartoons revel in goofiness and achieve a kind of gorgeous beauty not attainable in any other medium. Clampett takes the wacky surrealism natural to cartoons and places it in a lush atmosphere.”

Get ready for the Oscars tonight by watching Oscar-winning animated shorts from past years. A handy list of all the Oscar-winning shorts on YouTube can be found on this blog. Many of the years are obviously missing but it’s still a lot more shorts than I expected to be online.

(via The Animation Show)

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