Good news: Ninety-one-year-old animation legend Borge Ring is receiving a Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award this weekend at the Annie Awards.

Bad news: His house burned down yesterday. According to animation director Hans Perk, “A fire in the chimney ignited the thatched roof of their old farm in the south-east of Holland.” Thankfully, Borge and his wife Joanika weren’t hurt, but they lost everything including the Oscar that he won for his short Anna and Bella. Borge and his wife ran a bed and breakfast from their home, so in addition to losing all their possessions, the fire also eliminated their primary source of income.

Borge’s daughter Anne-Mieke Bovelett will be in LA to accept the Annie Award on behalf of her father. She has set up a Paypal donation button on her father’s official website BorgeRing.com and writes on the website that an official fundraising effort will be launched soon. This would be an ideal moment for the global animation community to lend a hand to a legend who’s suffered a devastating loss.

UPDATE: A fundraising website has been launched to help Borge and Joanika Ring. Go HERE to help out!

Here’s Borge’s Oscar-winning short Anna and Bella:

And here’s an earlier short he made Oh My Darling, which was also nominated for an Oscar:

(Thanks, Pieter van Cleef)

I’ve nearly wrapped up my Ward Kimball biography, but to get it just right, I need a handful of images related to his key characters. Please get in touch, if you can provide a hi-res scan of photostat models or animation drawings related to the following characters:

* Matador from Ferdinand the Bull
* Mad Hatter, March Hare, Cheshire Cat
* Jiminy, particularly the two images below
* Lucifer, particularly the one below

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: