One of the most exciting evolutions within the animation art form in recent years has been its development beyond the traditional screen. Environmental animation and site-specific installations have the potential to occur throughout our natural surroundings and be woven directly into our day-to-day lives. In other words, animation no longer need be restricted to a passive viewing experience or limited to a rectangular screen.

The most restrictive factors at this moment in time are the significant financial outlay and tech-savvy required to set up these kind of spaces, especially permanent ones. Additionally, each space must be designed individually to respond to a specific location. One such new space is the lobby inside of the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. The Rockwell Group installed over 400 displays in the lobby, and the effect looks impressive. Since each set of 3 monitors is an “addressable 1920 x 1080 output” and there are 64 addressable faces, there is a lot of flexibility for artists to create distinctive works, and I hope the hotel commissions animators and filmmakers to experiment with its great setup.

More details from the Rockwell Group:

A kinetic space, centered around 8 giant central columns wrapped with mirrors and LCD screens. Rockwell Group’s LAB installed 384 displays on the columns and 26 behind the registration desk to create a platform for a variety of customized immersive digital experiences in the space.

Watch it in action:

We posted the centerpiece of this animation back in 2006, but here is an expanded version featuring the pre-show with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Boy is this script corny, but the animation is fantastic, full (maybe too full) and at this point, quite nostalgic. The character animation for The Funtastic World of Hanna Barbera ride at Universal Studios Florida was produced at Sullivan Bluth Studios in 1990, and was directed by David Steinberg. The ride ended its run at the Orlando theme park in 2002. Thankfully someone had the foresight to photograph this bootleg video:

(Thanks, Matthew Gaastra)

Dani from the Spanish animation blog Protoones turned me on to Puck Cinema Caravana, a cool little project from Spain conceived by Carles Porta and Toni Tomàs. In short, Carles and Toni got their hands on a trailer home, decorated it beautifully on the outside, outfitted the inside with a cinema, and are roaming the Spanish countryside screening rare animated shorts for young and old alike. There is a more in-depth description on the Puck Cinema Caravana blog:

“Puck is a caravan fitted out as a cinema. Its inside is a tiny cinema, maybe the smallest in the world. There is room for seven people. Puck shows animation films which are not usually broadcast on TV. There is a wide selection of international films from all around the world that have been made throughout time. The menu is varied but selected. It aims mostly to the spirit.

The objective is to capture a brand new lover of animated cinema or simply be able to recover the experience of cinema in a particular way in order to enjoy in a short time a little big piece of work of audiovisual creation.”

They’ve put a lot of care and detail into the presentation and branding of their cinema, from the beautiful paint job on the exterior of their cinema-on-wheels to this cute animated trailer:

Kenny Scharf, one of the first “lowbrow” artists to popularize cartoon culture in ‘fine art’, is back with a new exhibit of Flintstone and Jetsons mash-ups. His new show, Barberadise, opened tonight at the Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles.

The show features several “re-appropriations” of cartoon characters created by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, including “the contrasting stone-age family, The Flinstones and the futuristic Jetsons amidst world annihilation”. The exhibition will run through on October 31st. Can’t make it? You can scan 20 pieces in the exhibit online if you click here.

There has been a lot of growth in site-specific animation over the past few years, and artists like Blu and Pablo Valbuena are finding different ways to incorporate the built environment into animation. The video installation “Tetragram for Enlargement,” created by the Italian visual artist collective Apparati Effimeri, is set against a medieval castle, and it’s one of the trippiest marriages of architecture and animation I’ve seen to date.