An excellent piece of motion picture promotion, created by animator Noah Fisher and artist Zachary Johnson, for the upcoming Bruce Willis/Joseph Gordon-Levitt sci-fi action adventurer Looper:
I’m never going to let you forget that I’ll be co-hosting an evening (6 hours!) of Classic Animation on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday October 21st. To that end, I just started a dedicated Facebook page with daily updates and related eye-candy for this Earth-shattering animated event. And TCM has created a beautiful piece of Gulliver’s Travel’s wallpaper art, which you can use as desktop background on your various computer screens – and they’ve produced a video podcast featuring me to promote the evening. So spread the word, buy a lot of popcorn and gather your friends – classic cartoons are returning to television, in prime time, and I wouldn’t want you to miss a minute!
The Butterfly Effect is a short CG/mo-cap animated film created by Dan Sumich at UK-based Passion Pictures. It was made in partnership with games engine developer Unity, to show-off their new Unity 4.0 3D software. Hang on, it’s a pretty wild ride.
The winners of the 2012 Ottawa International Animation Festival were announced earlier tonight at the National Arts Center in Ottawa. The top prize for short film went to Dutch filmmaker Hisko Hulsing for his short Junkyard. The animated feature prize went to the Spanish feature Arrugas (Wrinkles) directed by Ignacio Ferreras. It’s Such a Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt picked up the audience prize.
I Am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson picked up two awards, including the grand prize for best student animation. Two films in this year’s Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival were also recognized: Kyle Mowat’s Ballpit won best graduate animation and Noam Sussman’s Gum won the Canadian student animation award.
The complete list of winners is below:
Nelvana GRAND PRIZE for Best Independent Short Animation
Junkyard directed by Hisko Hulsing, Netherlands
GRAND PRIZE for Best Animated Feature
Arrugas (Wrinkles) directed by Ignacio Ferreras, Spain
Walt Disney GRAND PRIZE for Best Student Animation
I Am Tom Moody directed by Ainslie Henderson, Edinburgh College of Art, UK
GRAND PRIZE for Best Commissioned Animation
Primus “Lee Van Cleef” by Chris Smith, USA
Best Animation School Showreel
Supinfocom (France)
BEST Narrative Short
A Morning Stroll by Grant Orchard, STUDIO AKA, USA
BEST Experimental/Abstract Animation
Rivière au Tonnerre directed by Pierre Hébert, Canada
Adobe Prize for BEST High School Animation
The Bean by Hae Jin Jung, Gyeonggi Art High School, South Korea
Honourable Mention:
La Soif Du Monde (Thirsty Frog) by a Collective: 12 Children, Camera-etc, Belgium
BEST Undergraduate Animation
Reizw“sche by Jelena Walf & Viktor Stickel, Germany
BEST Graduate Animation
Ballpit directed by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
BEST Promotional Animation
Red Bull ‘Music Academy World Tour’ by Pete Candeland, Passion Pictures, UK
BEST Music Video
The First Time I Ran Away by Joel Trussell, USA
BEST Television Animation for Adults
Portlandia: “Zero Rats” by Rob Shaw, USA
BEST Short Animation Made for Children
Beethoven’s Wig directed by Alex Hawley & Denny Silverthorne, Canada
Honourable Mentions:
Au Coeur de L’Hiver directed by Isabelle Favez, Switzerland
Why do we Put up with Them? directed by David Chai, USA
BEST Television Animation Made for Children
Regular Show: “Eggscellent” by JC Quintel, Cartoon Network
Honourable Mention:
Adventure Time: “Jake vs. Me-Mow” by Pendleton Ward, Cartoon Network, USA
The National Film Board of Canada PUBLIC PRIZE
It’s Such a Beautiful Day directed by Don Hertzfeldt, USA
Canadian Film Institute Award for BEST Canadian Animation
Nightingales in December directed by Theodore Ushev, Canada
Honourable Mentions
Ballpit directed by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
MacPherson directed by Martine Chartrand, National Film Board of Canada, Canada
BEST Canadian Student Animation Award
Gum by Noam Sussman, Sheridan College, Canadaa
Honourable Mentions
Ballpit by Kyle Mowat, Sheridan College, Canada
Tengri by Alisi Telengut, Concordia University, Canada
The Ottawa Media Jury Award
For the best short competition film, as deemed by the local Ottawa Media, consisting of:
-Peter Simpson (Ottawa Citizen)
-Sandra Abma (CBC)
-Fateema Sayani (Ottawa Magazine)
-Denis Armstrong (Ottawa Sun)
I Am Tom Moody by Ainslie Henderson, Edinburgh College of Art, UK
I absolutely love this little promo for the forthcoming children’s book Let’s Make Some Great Fingerprint Art. It was animated by the cool London-based Animade studio; based on the book’s artwork by author Marion Deuchars.
A mother has to deal with her video-game addicted son. Created by four 3rd year students (Guy Elnathan, Alon Tako, Daniel Lichter and Sivan Kotek) from Bezalel Academy of the Arts, Israel.
Will Compost Brite reject Moodsy The Clinically Depressed Owl for her new love, Mighty Mister Titan? This coming Monday, Cartoon Dump is back with a “very special” season-finale cliffhanger episode!
Joining us in this month are guest comedians Susan Burke, Emily Maya Mills and Lizzy Cooperman; plus the ukulele stylings of Thessaly Lerner, The Ukalady! And of course, the crappiest cartoons in the history of crappy cartoons!
Showtime is 8pm Monday night, September 24th, at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood California (4773 Hollywood Blvd; two blocks west of Vermont), and tickets can be purchased at the door or online here. Join our FaceBook Event page for more information and updates. Be there!
(Artwork at top of this post by Thom Foolery)
Aren’t these attractive? Almost everyday some rare oddball piece of vintage cartoon memorabilia or ephemera shows up on Facebook or in my email box. It never seems to end… and each piece raises more questions than answers. Case in point: this pair of Daffy Duck slippers (above) and the super-cool off-model shoe box (below).
Warners art mega collector Eric Calande sent me these images – the latest additions to his superb Looney Tunes collection. I’m guessing it’s from the late 1940′s or early 1950′s – as Charlie Dog is featured as one of the characters and he didn’t appear until 1947. Man, Bugs Bunny looks like he’s eaten too many carrots. And the Daffy slippers – they’re despicable (but I want ‘em)!
Heads up! Animator Don Hertzfedlt (Rejected) is publicly screening his first feature this week at The Cinefamily (at the Silent Movie Theatre) in Hollywood.
This special engagement of It’s Such A Beautiful Day – a feature-length combination of his magnificent “Bill” trilogy of short films – will qualify the 70 minute film for Academy Award consideration. Screenings begin tonight at 10:30pm – and will play through Monday (each subsequent night at 10pm, except Sunday at 9:30pm). Tickets and info here.
Hertzfedlt has already begun self-distribution of the film and will be bringing it to Portland, Dallas, New York City (Oct. 5th at the IFC CEnter), Tucson and Chicago, among other cities, in the next few months. Complete list of theatres and dates is posted on Don’s Bitter Films website. Here’s a glimpse of what to expect:
I know nothing of games, but this debut project from Australian development collective, League of Geeks, looks pretty neat. Or at least the trailer is cool. Armello is a digital card & board game “of swashbuckling, character-based high adventure, set in a fairy-tale animal kingdom” and should be released in 2013.
League of Geeks collaborated with Melbourne-based 12 Field to bring this beautiful trailer to life.
The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed a new Looney Tunes movie is in development at Warner Bros., and it will be written by Jenny Slate, a one-season Saturday Night Live performer who most recently appeared on screen in Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked (see clip embed below). Slate has voiced characaters on Bob’s Burgers and was Ted’s mom in The Lorax. She also co-wrote and voiced the viral stop-motion short Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.
Like Alvin, the Looney Tunes feature is being planned as a mix of live-action and CGI. Harry Potter producer David Heyman, as well as Jeffery’s son David Katzenberg (MTV’s The Hard Times of RJ Berger) and his creative partner Seth Grahame-Smith (Dark Shadows, Beetlejuice 2) are set to produce.
Image at top from recent CG Looney Tunes shorts – which you can now see online.
(Thanks, Liam Scanlan)
Today is bittersweet because we are presenting the final film in our 2012 Cartoon Brew Student Animation Festival. But we are delighted that this film is an extraordinarily unique achievement in computer animation.
Snail Trail comes to us from Germany, where it was made by Philipp Artus at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. The film draws an ingenious link between two disparate things: the spiral of a snail shell and the concept of exponential acceleration (don’t worry, we had to look up the latter one too).
Mere description fails to do this film justice though. Snail Trail is an intensely visceral experience. Excitement and surprise abound in every frame, even as the film celebrates the mathematical order of the universe. The snail’s dynamic evolution in mobililty is eloquently expressed through a luminescent line that curls and stretches across the screen. Artus achieved the fading trail of images by projecting his computer animation with lasers onto a phosphorescent material.
The totality of Artus’s vision is startlingly beautiful. Snail Trail, quite simply, uses computer animation in ways that we have not seen before, and the results are astounding.
Click HERE to read an interview with the filmmaker Philipp Artus.
I’ve been a fan of Jason Carpenter’s haunting student film, The Renter, since I first saw it – when it was nominated for an Annie Award in 2010. Amid interviewed Carpenter about the film back then and it has since gone on to great acclaim at festivals around the world, winning prizes at Ottawa and Anima Mundi. Finally, it’s online and we are especially proud that Jason allowed Cartoon Brew to be the first to post it.
Here’s a rarity: an industrial film from 1943 with animation by Paramount’s Famous Studios. We’ve long known of several non-theatrical industrial and educational films from Fleischer Studios – and it is known that its later incarnation, Famous Studios, did television commercials in addition to its annual output of Paramount’s theatrical entertainment cartoons. But examples of the studios supplemental commercial work have been incredibly difficult to locate.
To be sure, the animation here isn’t particularly exciting. In fact, it will probably bore most of our readers – but fascinate a fanatic few (like me). It’s essentially a live action film, extolling the virtues of vacuum tubes during wartime, containing several animated inserts that demonstrate electronic current flow. Dull? Yes, but it’s another piece of the puzzle – and I’m damn glad its been uncovered. Produced by Westinghouse, here’s Electronics At Work(1943):
(Thanks, Ken Layton)
If you like to watch cartoon characters bash each other over the noggin and hand each other sticks of dynamite, this is probably not the conference for you. This Friday and Saturday (Sept. 21-22), the University of Pennsylvania will host an animation conference called Enchanted Drawings II: Animation Across the Disciplines. The two-day conference will take place in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art (118 S. 36th Street). The event is FREE and open to the public.
The conference, organized by Karen Beckman, Erna Fiorentini and Oliver Gaycken, will explore the convergence of animation with other disciplines. Some of our smart Brew readers will surely enjoy this, but frankly, I’m intimidated just reading the titles of the lectures: “Rough and Smooth: Toward a Rhetoric of Animated Scientific Images,” “The Animation of Evanescence: Camouflage in Motion,” “Algorithmic Aesthetics vs. Punk De’collage: From Animation to Live Performance,” “Graphic Engines: Videogame Animation as Transmedia Bridge,” and “Inside and Outside the Toon Body: Challenging Somatic Integrity through Animation History.”
