(Thanks Andres Silva)

It’s rare to find a studio whose work truly excites like that of Amautalab, a young outfit based out of LA, Buenos Aires and Lima, and headed by Carlos Battilana, Martin Jalfen and Julian Montesano. They’re employing a wide range of animation techniques, and across the board their work has an incredibly fresh and funky aesthetic. A few of my favorite pieces: this stop-motion spot for Tokyo.Now about how Japan remade its image following WWII, super-lo-fi music vid for Anne Laplantine and a tripped-out CG/live combo for Resfest: Buenos Aires. Their stop-mo website Amautalab.com is a good bit of fun as well.

(via Motion Design blog)

If you haven’t picked up your copy of the new Woody Woodpecker Classic Cartoon Collection, shame on you! Everyone reading Cartoon Brew should have this. This morning we had a contest and gave away three copies.

Answer the question below in our comments section and the first three correct answers will win the DVD collection.

Who was the original voice of Woody Woodpecker? (HINT: he was also Bugs Bunny, Barney Rubble and Pepe LePew)

CONTEST NOW CLOSED! We have our winners. Congratulations to Craig Davison, Kelly Kilmer and William Russo (MGH) for being the first to submit the correct answer (answer: Mel Blanc)!

Special Thanks to Universal Studios Home Entertainment for providing us with the prizes.

Here’s a short and amusingly awkward interview with animation artist and voice actor Lou Romano (Ratatouille’s Linguini). It’s funny how the interviewer tells Lou that he’s “obviously not an actor” even though Lou has done plenty of voice acting before and has even been the lead in a live-action feature.

Simple concept, executed with style and humor—that’s “Promesas,” a music video for the Chilean band Los Mono, produced by Santiago, Chile-based motion graphics house Smog. Animators on the piece were Moises Arancibia, Pablo Gonzalez, Andres Rodriguez and Luis Suarez.

(via Feed by way of Thinking Animation Blog)

After Annecy and Platform, I figured I’d had my fill of animation festivals for the year, but I’m rethinking that stance after hearing about Aurora. Aurora, you ask? This is the new name of the UK’s Norwich International Animation Festival, and it’s happening this year from November 7-10. While the festival has dropped ‘animation’ from its name, it has done so in an effort to redefine the notion of what an animation festival can be. A bit of explanation about the name change can be found on the Aurora site:

The change of the name is the annual festival’s latest move towards a truly multidisciplinary programme, and represents the opinion that ‘animation’ itself has become a restrictive tag which rarely does justice to the myriad artistic activity that it encompasses. It follows, then, that an ‘animation festival’ is no longer capable of staying abreast of this enormous artistic diversity – so in order to more freely reflect the way we think animation is heading, we’re dropping the label.

However, the festival is emphatically not abandoning animation – quite the opposite. The move away from an ‘animation festival’ will allow it to concentrate on what animation really is, on what it’s truly capable of, without being constrained by arguments about definition or limited to presenting film work alone.

Aurora has five featured artists this year—Robert Breer, Takashi Ishida, Jeff Scher, Naoyuki Tsuji and Jim Trainor—all of whom will be there in person to present programs of their work. These are complemented by an intriguing array of curated short programs, discussions and debates, and live performances combined with real-time animation. We’ve already seen some of this boundary-busting attitude at Platform earlier this year with its installation and cell phone animation competitions. Aurora is pushing it one step further, ushering in a new breed of animation festival that extends beyond films and embraces the entire cross-disciplinary potential of the medium. To read more from another blogger excited about this festival, check out Ben Ettinger’s AniPages Daily.

IGN has an interview with director Andrew Stanton about Pixar’s next feature Wall-E. The following comment from Stanton perfectly encapsulates what sets Pixar apart from almost every other major feature animation studio:

One of the keys to us is we’ve never thought about our audience, or never thought about who our audience might be. We honestly are just making the movies that we want to make, that if we didn’t show it to anybody else but ourselves we’d be fine…[I]t’s all artistic; there’s not a single sort of corporate kind of audience point of view looking at any of the stuff we do — at least within the walls of Pixar.

Incidentally, one can find similar sounding quotes from any number of Golden Age animation directors like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Allowing a filmmaker to make the film that they want seems like the most obvious concept, the only requirement being that the filmmaker’s vision has to be trusted. Sadly, with the exception of Pixar, most contemporary animation studios don’t extend that type of trust to their directors.

(Click on images above for larger version) The painting above left is original art from Fleischer Studios Technicolor two-reel special The Raven and how it may have looked on screen in 1942. The image at right is a blurry 16mm frame grab of the same shot – the way it looks today as it sits unrestored and essentially unavailable to view. ASIFA-Hollywood is working with the UCLA Archive to help preserve neglected films like this (and in fact, The Raven may be ready later this year). It’s a real crime that these animation classics are allowed to rot in the vaults of the mega corporations who own them. The Raven is one of the Fleischer’s lesser efforts, but can we really judge it in the horrifying condition as it now exists?

If you’d like to see a larger, more complete version of the gorgeous background painting above, click here. And for those of you who might like to own it, the piece is being sold at auction by S/R Labs sometime during October 22-23, 2007, along with more than 250 fine pieces of animation art like it. S/R is an animation art conservation center that specializes in restoring vintage cels and paper (as well as doing ceramic, porcelain and oil conservation). They do good work.