Hayley Morris is a director and animator at Curious Pictures in NYC. Her short stop-motion animation Undone won best animated short at Slamdance 2009. Hayley joined Curious in June 2008 after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Undone, her senior film project, is a tribute to her grandfather who suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Ambitious new spot for Washington State Lottery. A fine example of PES doing what he does best. This is the one-minute director’s cut; a thirty-second version is airing on TV right now.

This one is quite delightful. It’s a new stop-motion music video for Latin American Grammy winners, Jesse & Joy. The video was conceived and directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada (currently a student at Chapman University’s Dodge College) and was shot over a month in a house-turned studio in L.A. by a dedicated (”and painfully underpaid”) group of young artists for Warner Music Mexico. It’s made up of almost 3,000 still photographs with no post effects, featuring characters actually made of edible custom-made cookies. Cameron Clark, the director of animation, explains the process:

“I pre-animated the motion for every shot with After Effects and then used a combination of Dragon Stop Motion, a projector, and a small team of animators to basically trace the motion that I had created digitally. That way we got the smooth motion of digital animation with the charm of physical stop motion.”

A very cool making-of piece is posted here. But watch the video first:

Long before Hanna Barbera’s Oscar-winning cat and mouse, a decade before Van Beuren’s rubber-hose human pair, a comical duo named Tom and Jerry created mischef on movie screens in animated theatrical short subjects that have long been forgotten - and are perhaps lost for all time.

In the image above, Tom is the man and Jerry is the mule. This was a stop-motion Tom and Jerry series, filmed in Los Angeles in the 1920’s, modeled and animated by Joseph Leeland Roop, a stop-motion pioneer who today is just as forgotten as the films themselves. Lee Roop, his grandson, is presently preparing a book about the animator and provided Cartoon Brew with tantalizing information about the original Tom & Jerry films.

Lee says J.L. Roop worked on twelve shorts for producer Lloyd C. Haynes, released between 1923-1924. All are (as of this writing) lost films. If anyone has any clues to their whereabouts, please contact us. The titles are:

The Incomparable Aerial Comedians in Fly-Time by H. C. Matthews
The Amiable Comedians in Throbs and Thrills (”A Snappy Railroad Comedy Drama”) by H. C. Matthews
Gasoline Trail by Bumps Adams
Tom’s First Fliver by Bumps Adams
Tom Turns Sleuth by Doris E. Kemper
Tom Turns Farmer by Doris E. Kemper
Tom’s Charm by Marshall Roop
Moonshine Frolic by Glen Lambert
Tom Turns Hero by Doris E. Kemper
The Jungle of Prehistoric Animals by G. E. Baily Ph. D.
The Hypnotist
Tom Goes on Vacation

Lee Roop provided this biographical information:

Joseph Leeland Roop was born in Kentucky on December 22, 1869 and died on December 22, 1932 in Glendale California. He was a sculptor most of his life and his work can be found in Indiana, Kentucky, and California.

When he died he was working for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and made most of the Early California History miniature dioramas which most are still on display. He also started and almost finished some of the statues at the Page Museum in Los Angeles (The La Brea Tar Pits) but died before he finished them and Herman Beck finished them and got the credit. You can find the picture of the saber tooth tiger on the internet.

He worked on the 1925 version of The Lost World making and animating some of the dinosaur scenes. His picture is on the Ray Harryhausen website as a early pioneer. He worked on the 1926 version The Gorilla Hunt, making the gorilla model and animating the scenes. He carved a fourteen foot wooden indian which is still in San Bernardino.

Lee sent three images (thumbnails below - click to see larger image). 1. a trade advertisement for the Tom & Jerry series, 2. An article from the May 1924 Popular Mechanics magazine, 3. Second page of P.M. article:

This is the kind of stuff I crave, new information on the unsung pioneers of animation history. Mr. Roop will keep me informed on the progress of his book - and I thank him for sending us this little preview.

Tobias Gundorff Boesen’s Out of a Forest is a stop-motion effort out of Denmark’s The Animation Workshop, the same school responsible for Vegeterrible, which was featured on the site a few days ago. A lot of Out of the Forest was shot on location in forests around Viborg, Denmark, and the presence of prim and proper bunnies in this natural setting lends the film a magical flavor. The film was animated by Katrine Kiilerich, Frederik Villumsen, Christophe Peladan, and Tobias Gundorff Boesen, and the song,” Slow Show,” is by The National.

The Animation Workshop’s students first caught my attention a few years back with John K. Mortensen’s short Fishing with Spinoza (2007). If Out of a Forest and Vegeterrible are an indication, the school’s Bachelor program, which only began seven years ago, is worth watching closely.

Animator Nick Childs just finished this dream-like, semi-abstract, stop-mo music video he’d been working on during the past year.

“It’s a stop mo piece that the folks at LAIKA/house in Portland Oregon were kind enough to give me some space on the stage to shoot. It’s for the band Eulogies, off their 2009 album Here Anonyomous. The song is called Goodbye. As I recall from back in my school days it may considered kinesthetic animation. I see it as a stop motion piece with a minimal style that fits with the song, hopefully.”

I figure a blog named Cartoon Brew should report on anyone who combines animation and beer. Thus, Magic Hat Brewing Company in South Burlington, Vermont, just released a new beer this week, named Vinyl. The intro to the beer on their website is done in stop-motion, old school style. Not sure who did it, maybe in-house, but thought it was cute and kitsch - and worth 45 seconds of your time.

(Thanks, Cousy Kane)

“It’s not even a contest,” was the response an unnamed Disney exec gave the NY Times when asked to comment on Fantastic Mr. Fox’s Oscar chances against Up. Despite the swagger that some Disney folks apparently have, the Times warns that Disney and Pixar shouldn’t break out the bubbly just yet:

In a mid-December surprise, both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named “Fantastic Mr. Fox” the best animated movie of 2009. Similar awards from five other critics’ groups followed.

Fantastic Mr. Fox and Up are both nominated for this weekend’s Golden Globe Award, along with Coraline, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Princess and the Frog. Since initiating a Best Animated Feature Film category in 2007, the Golden Globes have given the award to Pixar every year (Cars, Ratatouille, WALL•E). We’ll find out in a few days whether Pixar can make it four-in-a-row at the Globes.