I haven’t seen a new piece of animation by stop-motion animator Corky Quackenbush in what seems like forever, so I was pleasantly surprised to run across his latest: Harry Potter and the Office of Unemployment.

I also found this “sex and violence” reel with clips from Quakenbush’s familiar classics along with newer works that I hadn’t seen. Family Guy could stand to take a lesson from Corky about what it means to be edgy and outrageous.

For more about Corky, visit his charmingly outdated website SpaceBassFilms.com.

Awesome news from The Hollywood Reporter: Monster Safari, a project created by the boys at LA-based Screen Novelties—Mark Caballero, Chris Finnegan and Seamus Walsh—is being turned into a stop-motion feature by the Jim Henson Co. Craig Zobel and Matt Chapman, creators of Homestarrunner.com, are scripting the feature. According to THR, the story “revolves around what happens when the Earth’s monsters come out of hiding and a pair of bumbling crypto-zoologists spring into action to save them from a ruthless big-game hunter.”

I’m really excited about this! It’s rare to see stop-motion animation that is as cartoony, energetic, and fun as what they do at Screen Noveltiess, and their cartoons are never anything less than super appealing and entertaining. I can’t wait to see them show off their stuff in a full-length film.

Check out some images posted on their blog from the original Monster Safari short. Below is one of the studio’s earliest shorts, Mysterious Mose, made in 1999:

Cassidy Curtis, an animator at PDI/DreamWorks, and his wife, Raquel Coelho, created this charming pixilated short that also serves as a document of a pregnancy. The extensive notes on how they made it are worth reading:

Animating over such a long period of time, using an increasingly pregnant woman as one of your puppets, means basically throwing out everything you might normally do in an animated film. For example, early on, we had this idea that we should wear the same clothes every time, for continuity’s sake. But as Raquel’s pregnancy developed, we soon discovered that the extra effort required to change in and out of our uniforms was going to interfere with the goal of shooting as many frames as possible, and might even prevent us from finishing the project at all. We dialed down the perfectionism, and in the process ended up having a lot more fun with it.

(via A Cup of Jo)

Videokrauting, created by Italians Nicola Ferrarese, Corrado Agnese, Valentina Mantello and Marzia Pellegatta, is a tribute to videogames animated entirely with sauerkraut. References are made to Tetris, Pac-Man and Prince of Persia.

They’ve also made Super Mario with beans and Asteroids with tomatoes. My favorite work by these filmmakers is an original creation however—D’Altra Parte è Così by Nicola Ferrarese. This two-minute film (posted below) uses simple stop-motion tricks to transform the ordinary and mundane—a spoon and other everyday objects—into a nail-biting action-packed episode.

(via Kotaku)

George Pal came to America in 1940 with a contract to make animated shorts for Paramount. His Madcap Models (later Puppetoons) were a instant success, and Paramount played up, for publicity purposes, the unique methods Pal used: stop motion and replacement animation.

Mike Van Eaton recently shared this rare publicity photo with me (click picture above to see larger, fuller image). That’s actreses Martha O’Driscoll with Pal in the Paramount commisary, with “Sarong-Sarong” the star of the third puppetoon, Hoola Boola (1941). The caption on the back says “More than 7000 miniature, stringless manikins were used for the eight minute film”.

Here’s a short scene from Hoola Boola, featuring Jim Dandy and Sarong-Sarong:

Classic cartoon chase meets David Hockney in A Wolf Loves Pork by Japanese artist Takeuchi Taijin. Technique and technical showmanship are front and center as the actions within the photo frame interact with the real-world space in clever and unexpected ways. I’ve got just one word for this short: Brilliant!

Can’t wait to check this one out! Tatia Rosenthal’s stop-motion drama $9.99 has its New York premiere this weekend. It’s playing at 7pm on Sunday, March 29, at the MoMA, followed by a screening next Wednesday, April 1, at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center. For additional info, including online ticket purchases for either screening, visit the Film Society of Lincoln Center website. The Film Society also has an article about the film on their blog.

This is a smokin’ piece of stop-motion animation…

(Thanks, David O’Reilly)