Congratulations to our friends Joost van der Bosch and Erik Verkerk of Ka-Ching Cartoons, who just finished a new 3D cartoon short which will premiere tomorrow at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The 3D Machine, an homage to classic horror movies, about a professor who invents a machine that can bring everything he draws to life, was produced using the old anaglyph (red and blue) 3-D process. Bosch and Verkerk’s previous film, The Shoebox will soon be featured on Cartoon Brew Films. The 3D Machine premieres at the International Film Festival, Rotterdam on January 29th at 5pm at the Stadsschouwburg of Rotterdam.

Minotauromaquia is an intriguing stop motion short I saw a few years back in Annecy. It’s directed by Spaniard Juan Pablo Etcheverry. The short will appeal most to those who are familiar with Picasso’s work, though the message should be clear to all. Jeff Hasulo’s blog Hydrocephalic Bunny also offers some nice thoughts about the film.

According to the website of Koji Yamamura, he has completed a new short entitled A Child’s Metaphysics. The film, which premiered last October, is just beginning to hit the festival circuit. The synopsis of the film is intriguing if slightly confusing:

A child whose head is numerals, a child who winds his own face and has it under his arm. What was left is his identity, a child whose eyes are provided by fishes, a child who lies down on the floor and head-butts his identity, a child who cannot say anything because of a zipper across his mouth. He undo the zipper but under it is another zipper…

Ecology and philosophy of children with sadness and humour.

Yamamura has emerged as perhaps the finest independent Japanese animation director of his generation. Though he’s been creating animated films since the late-’80s, he didn’t begin attracting worldwide attention until 2002 when his short Atama yama (Mt. Head) became a huge hit on the festival circuit and garnered an Oscar nomination. Since then, he’s turned out a couple of other winners—The Old Crocodile (2005) and last year’s Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor, which I’ve heard is nothing short of incredible. You can familiarize yourself with a couple of his best known works below.

The Old Crocodile

Atama yama

The nominees for the 80th annual Academy Awards were announced this morning:

Best Animated Feature
• Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud)
• Ratatouille (Brad Bird)
• Surf’s Up (Ash Brannon and Chris Buck)

Note: The Surf’s Up nomination surprised even Sony. Yair Landau, president of Sony Pictures Digital, told Animation Magazine this morning, “We really didn’t run any campaign here whatsoever.” Considering that both Persepolis and Surf’s Up are released by Sony, it’ll be interesting to see whether they choose to promote one film over the other in the run-up to the Oscars.

Best Animated Short Film
• I Met The Walrus (Josh Raskin) Link
• Madame Tutli-Putli (NFB, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski) Link
• (Meme Les Pigeons Vont Au Paradis)Even Pigeons Go To Heaven (Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse) Link
• My Love (Moya Lyubov) (Alexander Petrov) Trailer
• Peter And The Wolf (Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman) Link

Note: This is the first time since 1999 that US filmmakers have been shut out of the animated short category. This year’s nominees are by Canadian, British, French and Russian filmmakers.

Ratatouille also received nominations for Best Original Screenplay (Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco, Brad Bird), Best Original Score (Michael Giacchino), Best Sound Editing (Randy Thom and Michael Silvers) and Best Sound Mixing (Randy Thom, Michael Semanick and Doc Kane).

UPDATE: Four of the five animated short nominees can be viewed online in their entirety. Ticklebooth has the links.

Last August Jerry wrote about one of the newest animation fads sweeping through Japan: a crude, borderline inept, series of animated pieces about the Bottom-Biting Bug. This article in Pingmag reveals that the creators are the husband-and-wife team UrumaDelvi. They are also responsible for the animated short A Long Day of Mr. Calpaccio, an entertaining little film that made the festival rounds a couple years back. In the Pingmag piece, the husband half of the team, Uruma, discusses the genesis of the Bottom-Biting Bug and speculates about why it has caught on with the Japanese public. A short clip of the animation is below, but if you really want to torture yourself, try watching this ten-minute spectacle.

Suzie Templeton’s contemporary stop motion retelling of Peter and the Wolf can be seen below in three parts. As we reported last week, the film is on the shortlist for possible nominees in this year’s Oscar race. Last year the film was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Short Animation Film and also won both the Annecy Cristal and Audience Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

(Thanks, Karl Cohen)

The Chicago Spire, a building designed by superstar architect Santiago Calatrava, is poised to become North America’s tallest free-standing structure and the world’s tallest all-residential building when it is completed in 2011. When the developers officially unveiled the project last September, their presentation included a slick five-minute animated promo. Pushing far beyond typical animated architectural renderings, the developers enlisted vfx houses Lightstream Pictures and Sony Imageworks to create a feature film-style piece complete with dramatic staging and lighting. A portion of the film can be seen on the building’s website, TheChicagoSpire.com, and a video about the building with a few more animation clips can be seen on YouTube. It just goes to show that there’s no product or idea that can’t benefit from some well conceived animation.

Earlier this month, I linked to illustrator Steve Brodner’s podcast series “The Naked Campaign” which offers his views on various Presidential candidates. This got me to thinking about whether there are other people who are creating animated pieces in hopes of influencing the outcome of this year’s Presidential elections.

A bit of searching on YouTube uncovered a number of independently produced animated pieces, though none of them appear to be making a huge splash at the moment. But it’s only January and with ten months still to go, I expect we’ll be seeing an unprecedented use of animation during the 2008 elections. The most viewed animated piece supporting an individual candidate that I found on YouTube is the following Ron Paul Brickfilm short, which has garnered over 60k views since debuting ten days ago.

Andrew Arnold has created an impressive CG political animated series called Heada’State which features strong condemnations of candidates Rudy Giuliani and Thompson (below).

Ray Noland (director) and Rebecca Berdel (animator) have posted a piece called Revolt in support of Barack Obama.

Democratic longshot Mike Gravel is promoted in this puppet and stop-motion piece titled The Word: Mike Gravel.

And this live-action spot by candidate Mike Huckabee has inspired two different animated parodies, both of which are posted below:

If you know of other pieces, please post links to them in the comments. This is not an attempt to catalog animated pieces that express a political viewpoint because there are plenty of those. Rather I’m curious to find out how animation is specifically being used to effect this year’s Presidential elections through pieces that are either for or against individual candidates.

(PS: A friendly reminder to keep any discussion in the comments focused on the use of animation in the campaign, and not to express any personal political views.)