Wow, how quickly times change. A few years ago, while I was researching my book Cartoon Modern, I traveled all the way to Montreal to see the NFB short The Romance of Transportation. Today, it’s available instantaneously and free-of-charge on my iPhone.

If you have an iPhone, be sure to check out the newly released NFB iPhone app. Dozens of great and classic NFB animated shorts are available on it including Richard Condie’s The Big Snit, Norman McLaren’s Begone Dull Care, Caroline Leaf’s The Street, Ryan Larkin’s Street Musique, Gerald Potterton’s My Financial Career, Peter Foldes’s Hunger, and, of course, Colin Low’s The Romance of Transportation. More recent films like Chris Landreth’s Ryan and Theo Ushev’s Tower Bawher are also on there.

The app is a bit rough around the edges, but it is well-intentioned, offers terrific content, and did I mention, FREE! One of its nicest features is a “Watch Later” option that allows you to pre-download films and watch them off-line for up to 24 hours, which is perfect for subway and plane trips.

Lots of interesting new animation-related iPhone apps are being released, and I’m going try and write about as many as I can on the Brew. Mouthoff is an iPhone app that applies a crude animated lip-sync to voice inputs into the phone. It’s kind of like Clutch Cargo in reverse—instead of cartoons with human mouths, it’s real people with cartoon mouths. It can be downloaded for $1 from the iTunes store. Here’s an example of how it works:

(Thanks, Rob)