The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, will be presenting the 36th Annual Annie Awards a week from Friday, January 30, 2009, at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Westwood, California. The evening begins with a pre-reception at 6 p.m. followed by the Annie Awards ceremony at 8 p.m. and post award party at 10 p.m. Tom Kenny (SpongeBob SquarePants) will once again be hosting. Presenters include voice actress June Foray, director Henry Selick (Coraline), actors Brad Garrett (Ratatouille), Seth Green (Robot Chicken), Michael Clarke Duncan (Kung Fu Panda), James Hong (Kung Fu Panda), Donald Faison (The Boondocks), and Ben Burtt (Wall-E). Presenting the Winsor McCay award to Pixar’s John Lasseter will be Roy Disney.

General Admission Tickets are $25. VIP tickets, which include the pre-reception and post awards party are $250. Discount VIP Tickets for ASIFA-Hollywood, The Animation Guild, Visual Effects Society and Women in Animation Members are $150. To order tickets or for further information, visit www.annieawards.org

Cartoon Brew will give away a pair of VIP tickets to four lucky winners in a contest on Friday. Check back here tomorrow (1/23) at 9am (Pacific Time) for details.

Gallery Nucleus is having an artist panel with some the artists who worked on Coraline. The recent Art-Of book on the film mainly highlights Tadahiro Uesugi for characters and background designs. This panel will represent several of the other key artists who worked on the film. They’ll be bringing samples of their work to show and will talk about their involvement on the new Henry Selick film.

The artists are as follows: Shannon Tindle, Shane Prigmore, Dan Krall, Chris Appelhans and Jon Klassen. Gallery Nucleus is in Alhambra, California. The event is at 2pm on Saturday February 7th – Admission: FREE! Check the gallery website for more information.

Sound cartoons… Disturbing sound cartoons. Cartoons too violent, too scary, too depressing and, though made decades ago for all ages, are considered no longer suitable for todays kids! Tonight, Tuesday January 13th, at 8pm I’m returning to the Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood with a full program of classic cartoons no longer shown on television and not on DVD.

If your childhood wasn’t already perverted by hours upon hours of unhinged animation, this show will make it up to you. I promise to fry your brain with ultra-rare 16mm and 35mm prints. Bring kids at your own risk. For more details, check the Silent Movie website.

UPDATE 3:00pm: The 8pm show is almost sold out! A second screening at 10:15pm has been added. The show also got a nice plug on LAist.

Wanna meet three comic art legends? The YIVO Institute in New York will be presenting one-on-one interviews with three comic book innovators.

Al Jaffee, Jules Feffier and Harvey Pekar will be interviewed by comics writer and critic Danny Fingeroth. YIVO’s Comics and the American Jewish Dream series kicks off Wenesday January 21st at 7:00 pm with The MAD, MAD, MAD (Jewish) World of AL JAFFEE. The series continues with Jules Feffier on Tuesday, February 3, at 7:00 P.M. and Harvey Pekar on Tuesday, February 17, 7:00 P.M. The YIVO Institute For Jewish Research is at 15 West 16th Street, in Manhattan. Admission $25 / YIVO members: $18 / students: $12. For tickets call 212-868-4444 or visit smarttix.com.

We’ve plugged the forthcoming It All Started Here! several times already, but once more couldn’t hurt. I also couldn’t resist posting this photo of J. J. Sedelmaier and Howard Beckerman which appeared in the Westchester section of the local NY Times on Thursday. The Times article gives a good overview of the events planned starting next Saturday around the New York area. Don’t miss this series if you live in the Northeast. You’ll hate yourself if you do. For even more details, click here.

“Edward Gorey at the Bowery” by Morgan Kelly

Need something to do tomorrow evening? Then head on over to Atwater Village for the opening of “Y’aint Gonna Get There Free: Screams in Hollywoodland,” a new show of paintings by JJ Villard, Morgan Kelly, and Jeremy Bernstein. It opens 7pm at the Little Bird Gallery (3195 Glendale Blvd. LA, CA). Since emerging out of CalArts, all three of these guys have been working in the bowels of the animation industry, at studios like DreamWorks and Sony, but they’ve managed to retain strong artistic identities by self-publishing books and painting. It bears mentioning that Villard, who currently isn’t working at a studio, is also the director of some amazing animated shorts like Son of Satan and Chestnuts Icelolly. A preview of the work can be seen on the gallery’s website. They also put together a bizarre series of show invites, a few of which can be viewed on Jeremy’s blog.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Center for Visual Music (CVM) are presenting a program of rarely screened 16mm and 35mm films from the CVM collection, at The Billy Wilder Theatre at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles on January 21, 2009. The program features a range of works, from experiments by German film pioneers to light show psychedelia, and highlights of new visual music and experimental animation. It includes little-seen films by Oskar Fischinger (pictured above), Jules Engel, Charles Dockum, and Mary Ellen Bute, among many others. From the website:

Several of the works in the show were designed to be used in performance contexts, light shows and other expanded forms of cinema, often with independent musical accompaniment, such as the 35mm ‘recreation’ film of Oskar Fischinger’s multiple-projector film performances from the mid-1920s. A number of the films were made in Southern California, including early experiments in computer graphics from UCLA in the 1960s and Cal Arts in the 1970s. Many of the prints in this show represent recent preservation work by CVM.

Admission to this event is FREE. The Billy Wilder Theatre is in the Hammer Museum, at 10899 Wilshire Blvd. in Westwood. Title list and film notes are at CVM’s website.

Here’s a restored 1936 Fleischer Studios drawing wedge (click photo above to see larger image). It’s made of wood and fitted with ball-bearing’d wheels to ease the rotation of the heavy disc. It also has two inventions of the Fleischer’s employed on it:

1. a lever which when pushed down, will slide the drawings off the pegs in an uniform fashion so as to not rip the peg holes in the paper

2. an inkwell tray with a sliding latch which locks the bottles in place. (This was added later on and wouldn’t have been on an animator’s/asst’s disc)

This contraption began its life in the NY studios at 1600 Broadway, then traveled to their new Miami complex for several years, only to return to Manhattan as the property of Famous Studios. It also comes with Marty Taras’ fieldguide. . .

…and it will be part of It All Started Here, the East Coast animation exhibition curated by Howard Beckerman and J. J. Sedelmaier. Presented by ArtsWestchester in partnership with J. J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc. and Blue Sky Studios, this citywide celebration of New York’s 103 year relationship with the animation industry will have its opening reception on Saturday, Jan 17th, from 5-8pm at The Arts Exchange, 31 Mamaroneck Ave. in White Plains, New York. This is the kick-off for a month of screenings, parties and displays.

For more info regarding all the It All Started Here festivities check the Facebook page. And, to whet your appetite, JJ sent us a very vintage 70s era Wyler’s Lemonade spot by Jan Svochak that will be in the Commercials section of the film program. . .