This one’s for you. It’s in Klingon!

This piece of Klingon Propaganda is brought to you by Mark Farinas San Francisco based Bad Monkey Studios.

(Thanks, Patrick Lake)

Jérémy Clapin’s Skhizein, a poignant short that grows on me every time I see it, is now available for online viewing. It’s also available for purchase in a limited edition of 500 dvds.

Worth checking out: a hi-res version of the Cartoonstitute short 3 Dog Band directed by Paul Rudish (Dexter’s Lab, Star Wars: Clone Wars). I wanted to like this short because there’s a lot to appreciate about it, including funny character movement, moments of visual inventiveness (the dj who flips his turntables into a bike), and a solid track at the end that is probably the best piece of music to ever accompany a Cartoon Network product.

At the same time, the characters have vague unappealing personalities, there’s little chemistry between the leads, and the attempts at humor fall flat (was the ending even supposed to be a joke?). It’s also a shame they couldn’t figure out what to do with the music. The last couple minutes come across as a fetishistic exercise in design and art direction that offers little in the way of entertainment value. By comparison, this is an example of how to properly end a cartoon with a musical sequence that rewards its audience.

In a shorts program, not every cartoon is going to be a homerun, especially when they’re produced in the completely nonsensical manner of allowing each director to only make one short. But when all is said and done, even the weaker shorts that I’ve seen so far from the Cartoonstitute program have their moments, and few appear to be offensively bad as so many TV animation pilots tend to be nowadays.

Filmmaker Michael Sporn interviews Jennifer and Bert Klein about their ambitious new animated short Pups of Liberty and the lengths they to to finish it:

Jennifer: It is hard to sit down and work after you have worked a full day, but I always remembered something Bert would say, “Even if you just get one drawing done you are one drawing ahead.” So I’d try and get one scene’s worth of layouts done a night, or read a track, or just something, and we’d inch forward until we were done.

The Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick and voice actor James Urbaniak recently appeared on “The Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling.” The interview lasts a couple hours and there’s a lot of goofiness, but there’s also a lot of good discussion because the host, Scharpling, is a TV writer and producer (Monk, Tom Goes to the Mayor). The interview begins a little after an hour into the September 29 program, which can be listened to at the WFMU website.

From Bert and Jennifer Klein (The Chestnut Tree) a handsome new short, Pups of Liberty. Here’s the trailer:

For more details on this short, visit the Pups of Liberty website.

Twenty-one-year old Leo Campasso, an animator at Buenos Aires studio HookUp Animation, created Wild Wind in his spare time. The short is an experiment that combines pixel-style characters with traditional cartoon animation principles. The results are a lot of fun and prove that one need not associate pixel animation with stilted, boring movement . Interesting sidenote: Leo said in his email to me that he’s been animating since he was twelve when he got his hands on a copy of Flash 4.

A high-res version of the film can be downloaded here.

A nice little Halloween short about a Corn Kernel who has a crush on a cute piece of Candy Corn. This nicely done G-rated cartoon is from L.A. based boutique studio Oddbot Inc., who specializes in doing pre-school animation series. Crystal Stromer directed.

Drips of humanoid wax worship the fire that gave them life, and then risk everything to investigate a mysterious object that lands beyond the next horizon. This is a 40 second trailer for Mike Dacko’s 5-minute short, Lightheaded, currently playing festivals around the country (though sadly not in Ottawa this week). Dacko is an animator at Disney’s ImageMovers Digital Studio (A Christmas Carol).