A heads-up for animation fans stuck in L.A. over Labor Day weekend. Bill Plympton will present The Best of The Best: An Animated Evening of Oscar Qualifying Shorts for three days only in Los Angeles. This special 35mm presentation of outstanding new shorts will screen from August 30th through September 1st at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood.

The program includes Doxology by Michael Langan, Veterinarian by Signe Baumane, Chainsaw by Dennis Tupicoff (above left), Hot Dog by Bill Plympton, A Letter to Colleen by Carolyn and Andy London (above right) and Berni’s Doll by Yann Jouette. Each film has been recognized as a standout in storytelling and technical expertise, entertaining audiences all over the world and receiving awards. Plympton himself booked the program into the Laemmle theatre to help qualify these films for Oscar consideration. The shorts in this lineup have, up till now, only been seen at festivals such as Slamdance, Annecy and the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, among many others.

Co-director Fernando Sarmiento descibes ELA in Love at First Byte to me as, “A weird mix between She Ra, Tron and Flash Gordon.” It also happens to be a fun and graphically appealing piece of computer animation combined with live actors. It was produced by the Argentinian motion graphic studio PepperMelon. Check it out:

The French CG student film Oktapodi has been winning all sorts of awards this year including the “Best Animation” prize at the Imagina Awards 2008. It was mentioned on Cartoon Brew a few months back and now the entire short can now be viewed online at the Autodesk website (link to 60mb file) . It’s directed by Julien Bocabeille, FX Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier and Emud Mokhberi.

(Thanks, Matt Morris)

One of the newest, and most unexpected, outlets for original animation nowadays appears be newspaper websites. For the past year or so, the NY Times has been commissioning beautiful animated pieces by animators like Jeff Scher and Gary Leib, and now the Chicago Tribune is getting into the act with a new politically-oriented series Animated Chicago by illustrator and animator Joe Fournier. I’m not sure if they’re planning to do more of these, but the first episode can be viewed on the Tribune’s website.

Ideation is a well drawn and very short short by East Coast animator Jeremiah Dickey.

Studio AKA has released the trailer to Varmints, a followup to the 2004 BAFTA-winning short JoJo in the Stars. I’ve always loved the way that Marc Craste, the director of this short, uses CG to create worlds that are poetic and impressionistic.

Here’s a bit more about the film:

Adapted and directed by Marc Craste, Varmints is a 24-minute film based on the award-winning book of the same name by Helen Ward and illustrated by Craste, that tells the story of one small creature’s struggle to preserve a world in danger of being lost forever through recklessness and indifference. A crew of 35 people worked in three countries over a two year period to make the film, and an original score by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson and sound design by Adrian Rhodes complete the picture.

Varmints will have its London premiere in September this year. It has also been accepted into the Rhode Island International Film Festival (August 5-10) and the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival (August 15-21).

Philip Hunt of Studio AKA also informs me that they’ve launched a new easier-to-navigate website. There’s beautiful commercial work throughout.

What does the little man on the emergency exit sign do when he’s not helping humans? “Signs of Life” is a witty animation installation created by Freddie Yauner that answers the question. Here is the explanation of how the interactive aspect of the project works.

(via We Make Money Not Art)

Jerry has posted a super-rare gem on YouTube: the 1965 short The Shooting of Dan McGrew directed by Ed Graham, Jr. I was so excited about seeing the film online that I asked him to let me post about it. When I first encountered this short about five years ago, the thing that popped out to me was the striking background color design of Walt Peregoy, who is most famously the color stylist of 101 Dalmatians. Unfortunately, this copy on YouTube doesn’t do justice to his color work and gives only a vague taste of what an actual print looks like.

The film was created in the spirit of earlier UPA shorts like The Unicorn in the Garden and The Tell-Tale Heart which adapted classic pieces of literature to the animation medium. In this case, the inspiration came from Robert Service’s poem of the same name.

In addition to Peregoy’s contributions, the film also has character designs by George Cannata, Jr. and background layout by UPA veteran Bob Dranko. The animation was directed by another younger design-oriented animator, George Singer, and the primary animators were Golden Age veterans Manny Gould and Amby Paliwoda. Also worth noting: the music is credited to jazz great George Shearing. This is his only animation score as far as I’m aware.

The Sixties was an interesting time for theatrical shorts in the US. As studio animation was dying out, many of the major studios offered independently-produced one-shots like this one, which was released by Universal. There are plenty of other Sixties one-shots that are currently owned by major studios and deserve to be made available to animation fans. These include two films by John and Faith Hubley that are owned by Paramount—A Windy Day and Oscar-winning Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature—as well as Ernie Pintoff’s Oscar-winning The Critic, Ken Mundie’s The Door, Format Films’ Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and Chuck Menville and Len Janson’s Stop Look and Listen and Blaze Glory.