Alexandre Siqueira’s Voyage au Champ de Tournesols (Journey to the Field of Sunflowers) is a unique, delicate film about life and death. It was Siqueira’s graduation film from the French animation school La Poudrière and has since been screened at Annecy and Anima Mundi, as well as broadcast on the French/German ARTE channel and Switzerland’s RTS. Here’s its internet debut:

I would not skip this film by San Francisco based animator Dan McHale.

Brad Bird will host a special screening and on-stage discussion with the filmmakers of the 2011 animated and live-action shorts on Tuesday night February 21st at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills. The program, called Shorts!, will include all five animated short nominees and their respective directors: Patrick Doyon (Dimanche/Sunday), William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg (The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore), Enrico Casarosa (La Luna), Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe (A Morning Stroll) and Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby (Wild Life). The program will begin at 7:30pm. For ticket information click here.

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The now traditional Academy Animated Feature Symposium will be held on Thursday February 23rd at 7:30pm. Actor/comedian Patton Oswalt will host a panel featuring the 2011 Oscar nominees in the Animated Feature Film category. The nominees (schedules permitting) include Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli (A Cat in Paris), Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (Chico & Rita), Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda 2), Chris Miller (Puss in Boots) and Gore Verbinski (Rango). The panelists will discuss their films’ development and their creative processes as well as present clips illustrating their techniques.

Both events will take place at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, CA, and will begin at 7:30pm. $5 general admission/$3 for Academy members and students with a valid ID (limit 2 at the discounted price). Tickets will be available online and by mail on a first-come, first-served basis beginning Friday, February 3 at 9:01 a.m. To order tickets click here.

What’s the best way to promote a romantic comedy about prostitution? The producers of the 1963 Billy Wilder film Irma la Douce decided to advertise it with an animated trailer. They commissioned John Wilson and his studio Fine Arts Films to create the piece. Animation director Michael Sporn has scanned the trailer’s artfully designed, never-before-seen storyboards and posted them onto his blog. They can be viewed HERE and HERE.

I’m new to the work of Michel Klöfkorn, but he’s been creating music videos, commercials and experimental films in Germany since the 1990s. He’s a relentless experimenter whose animation techniques look familiar but foreign at the same time. Take, for example the first short after the jump, Fluid Paper. We’ve seen books used as the raw material for animation before, but Klöfkorn charts exciting new territory with the concept.
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Mathematician and video-maker Vi Hart exposes the mathematical impossibility of SpongeBob Squarepants pineapple:

The results are in from Cartoon Brew’s Oscar survey and the winners are Pixar’s La Luna in the Animated Short Category and ILM’s Rango for Animated Feature. The full results are below:

As an unfortunate sidenote, we had to end the survey a few days earlier than we’d anticipated because someone attempted to hack the survey over the weekend. Despite the system’s restrictions for allowing one vote per IP, a user with the IP 75.128.42.114 who lives in a residential neighborhood of Glendale, circumvented these safeguards. This person voted a total of 224 times, 221 of those votes for Kung Fu Panda 2. In a show of generosity, the other three votes were awarded to Puss in Boots. We eliminated all of those results and ended up with 618 legitimate ballots.

Watch the trailer for The Pub, the latest short by British animator Joseph Pierce. His rotoscope-based technique, which he’s used to powerful effect in shorts like Stand-Up and A Family Portrait, explores the expressive potential of live-action reference in ways that few have ever done.