After old comic books and classic animated cartoons, the number #3 most influential art to aspiring animators has to be on cereal boxes. Especially old cereal boxes from the 1960s. The whole design of the packaging itself was/is inspirational. Just ask Thorsten Hasenkamm or Dan Goodsell or Ridd Sorenson. Their blogs are filled with modern interpretations of old packages (or the actual old boxes themselves).Bob Staake is an incredible commercial artist and children’s book illustrator with an obsession: breakfast cereal. To him, it’s not what the flakes taste like, it’s the box design and the groovy prizes inside. Bob is proposing his own line of cereal, centering his efforts around his iconic product characters. Check out his website for Freebies Cereal.

And what ever happened to the project Von Kreep (of Kreepsville.com) was doing called Cereal Killers. He had asked illustrators and animation artists to do box covers of “scary” cereals. It was supposed to be out this past summer and I don’t know what happened to it, but a lot of the art is online on various artist blogs, like: Rob Lilly, Johnny Yanok, Ben Balistreri, Kevin Schmid, Gabe Swarr, Brandon Scott, Saxton Moore. This stuff is mighty tasty.UPDATE: Bob MacNeil sent me a link to a list of all the Cereal Killer artists and their contributions to the project.

If you watch just one animated short this week, make it POTAPYCH: THE BEAR WHO LOVED VODKA by Darren Price.

Produced as part of Channel 4’s Mesh program, POTAPYCH is a wonderful little short that works on every level. The film’s style is a delight – a combination of cel-shaded CG characters with painted backgrounds – though what impressed me most was the elegant storytelling, which is fast-paced but never rushed. Price manages to tell a great story with heart in under three minutes – something much harder to do than it looks. (Sidenote: After watching the film, be sure to click on the “Learn More About The Bear” link.)

I believe this is Darren Price’s first personal short, but he’s also the head of 3D at London’s Nexus Productions, where he’s worked with Smith & Foulkes on numerous spots including Coke’s “Video Game”, Honda’s “Grrr”, and Motorola’s “Grand Classics.”

“A girl finds some soap in the woods that turns her into a slut.”

That’s the description I found for this risque Lux Provocateur soap commercial on No Fat Clips and it does a pretty good job of summing things up. The stop-motion spot, which definitely wasn’t commissioned for American TV, is directed by Chel White at Bent Image Labs. Designer Jim Clark recently posted some of the spot’s conceptual work on his blog.

Does that creepy guy on the far right look familiar?Yeah, it’s me. You never know where you’ll end up if you let Evan and Gregg Spiridellis take your picture. But I couldn’t be more honored. Al Yankovic is an old friend and the folks at JibJab are my heroes. So when they asked if they could use my mug in the latest Weird Al music video, “Do I Creep You Out”, how did I know they’d actually use it as a mug shot?The video is hilarious – and I’m a star (for about six seconds). Check it out for laughs!

Who needs DANCING WITH THE STARS? EN TUS BRAZOS is a new French student film from Supinfocom created by Edouard Jouret, FX Goby and Matthieu Landour. I had some issues with the design and animation, but the stylish dreamlike atmosphere makes this film worth checking out.

(via Fous d’Anim)

What’s the most popular piece of animation on the Internet right now? How about KIWI!, a Master’s thesis film by Dony Permedi of School of Visual Arts. The 3-minute, dialogue-less short became a “Featured Video” on YouTube’s front page a few days ago and it connected with audiences in a way that nobody could have expected. It is currently the most linked-to video on the blogosphere according to Technorati.com, it’s in the top 15 all-time favorited videos on YouTube, and it’s racked up nearly two million views in the past week.

That last number is particularly impressive. It’s one thing to talk in the abstract about the Internet and the potential it offers for animated shorts, but KIWI! offers clear proof that an online audience exists for animated shorts. When was the last time anybody heard of a piece of student animation being viewed two million times in a week? Even if the film had screened at dozens of film festivals or been released onto a compilation dvd of shorts, it’s unlikely to have ever achieved such a sizable viewership through traditional short film distribution channels.

KIWI!’s success is part of a much bigger story, which is how the Internet is making animated shorts accessible to mainstream audiences, something that hasn’t happened in the last thirty or forty years. It’s going to take some time until filmmakers figure out models for generating revenue from their shorts online, but with a worldwide audience thirsty for fresh animated content, making money from animated shorts has finally become a matter of when and not if.

Watch KIWI below:

Long before Paramount Pictures was affiliated with Nickelodeon Movies… a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away… they had an animation studio. And before that, they contracted animated shorts and features from the Max Fleischer studio.Mr. Bug Goes To Town (1941) was the second feature film from Fleischer Studios, produced at their state-of-the-art animation facility in Miami Florida. It had the misfortune of not only being produced during a tumultuous rift between brothers Max (the producer) and Dave (the director), but during a period of heated battle between Max and Paramount Pictures. Paramount released the film during the first week of December 1941 and audiences stayed home in droves due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and our imminent entry into World War II.The film has been unjustly neglected for 65 years (so much so its latter day owners forgot to renew the copyright; the film is now in public domain and is widely available with inferior image quality). It was reissued as Hoppity Goes To Town and has become a cult favorite to a younger generation of animators and animation buffs. On New Year’s Day 2007, Mr. Bug Goes to Town will be presented at The Museum of Modern Art. If you live in, or are visiting New York City during the holidays, I urge you to GO!Here’s one reason why: The Museum has one of the only existing original Technicolor prints (with its Paramount logos and original titles intact). Most of the bad dubs on video (and the Internet) are so far from its original intended presentation, it’s pathetic. This print was shown at LACMA (L.A.’s equivalent of MoMA) several years ago and it absolutely blew my mind. The film was meant to be seen in a theater, and the vibrant colors of this print show it to be on par with anything Disney did during the same period. You’ve got two chances, Monday, January 1st at 11:00am and 2:00pm.The film also has a clever story, wonderful songs (by Frank Loesser, Hoagy Carmichael and Sammy Timberg) and great animation – and it’s a great way to start the new year.

One of the unlikeliest sources for quality animation writing nowadays is PRINT MAGAZINE. Their September/October issue had two smart pieces worth mentioning. The first was an article by John Canemaker about the OpenEnded Group, a NY-based trio of artists who are combining CGI, artificial intelligence, real-time graphics and installation art. It’s the type of experimental work one imagines Fischinger, Lye and McLaren would have been doing if they’d lived in the 21st century. The second piece is an informative profile of New York stop-motion director PES, whose latest spot I mentioned in yesterday’s TV commercial roundup. The PES article is posted on the PRINT website and it’s worth a read.