The Ottawa International Animation Festival concluded last night with its award ceremony honoring some of best animation of the year.

Stephen Irwin’s Moxie (trailer above) won the Grand Prize for Independent Short. Phil Mulloy’s controversial Buried But Not Dead won the big prize for Best Animated Feature (see my opinion of it below).

Other awards of note include: Best Student Grand Prize to Jason Carpenter’s The Renter; Best Commissioned Film to Intel The Chase; Best Animation School Showreel to Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design; and Best Graduate Animation to Eamonn O’Neill’s I’m Fine Thanks (see trailer below). Click here for the full list of winners.

Festival highlights for me were the tributes to Aaron Augenblick, Pen Ward and Thurop Van Orman, which were both highly entertaining and somewhat educational (hat tip to Pen for showing Rebecca Sugar’s Singles off of Cartoon Brew TV); John Canemaker’s incredible heart-felt tribute/talk for Joe Grant and Joe Ranft; Pixar’s Enrico Casarosa screening and discussing (in wonderful detail) his new short La Luna (which will be released with Brave next year); Disney’s screening of both The Ballad of Nessie and Winnie The Pooh with animator Mark Henn and Pooh directors Steve Anderson and Don Hall on hand to answer all questions; and Brandon Oldenburg’s whimsical presentation on the making of The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lesmore.

I watched all four feature films in competition: Chico and Rita is a beautiful film, grown up film based around the world of jazz of the 40s and 50s. Not exactly sure what technique is used here, but if its rotoscope, its one of the best uses of the form I’ve ever seen.

Mati Kutt’s Taevalaul (Sky Song) is an amazing non-narrative sci-fi/fantasy stop motion film (45 minutes) in the Brothers Quay tradition. Hilarious in parts, thought provoking throughout. Might be my favorite film of the week.

Colorful by Keiichi Hara presents important themes – like suicide, teen prostitution, reincarnation, bullying and dysfunctional families – in his compelling anime feature. I liked the film and its story, but it is told at a snail’s pace (126 mins!), and despite a fantasy premise concerning an angel there is nothing in this film that couldn’t have been said perhaps better in live action.

Dead But Not Buried I hated. I actually admire the shorts of Phil Mulloy, but this feature is a continuation of his previous Mr. Christie film. Talking heads in silhouette may be fine for 12 minutes on Adult Swim, but 80 minutes (twice) is too much to take.

As for the rest of the fest, I had a blast. Met many Brew readers, saw many old friends. I screened a bunch of violent cartoons at several venues and did a CBC radio show on Saturday morning to promote the screenings. You can listen to it here:

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At the picnic Friday afternoon (above), left to right: Yvette Kaplan, me, Tom Knott, Steve Stanchfield, Mark Mayerson.

And finally, a strange taste of Chris Robinson’s late-night festival programming: a mock panel discussing the history of animation held on Thursday night, featured this piece (below) written and animated by Morgan Miller (“Teela“) and Josh Kleefeld. Here, they discuss the history of animated short films and the Ottawa Animation Festival’s role in fostering the medium.

French animator Caroline Attia lends her incredible style and color design to American songwriter Jim Bianco’s song about a bored secretary with a wild imagination.

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack creator Thurop van Orman has taken fan interaction to a whole new level. This video (reposted HERE) recorded during the Ottawa International Animation Festival, which is happening right now, shows Thurop wrestling one of his fans to the ground. Here’s the setup, according to Andrew Stewart, who filmed the action:

A few of us were talking with Thurop (guy who created the show Flapjack.) and Steve Smith faked wrestled with him, but then Thurop took him out into the bushes. Steve then challenged Thurop to a 2nd match 10min later and this is that match!

Rest assured that this kind of wrestling is considered perfectly normal by Thurop, and according to Stewart’s followup tweet, might even be a kind of kinky foreplay in the van Orman household: “Thurop said he loves to wrestle and he does that with his wife too. He said she cheats by pulling his beard.”

Add this as one more reason why LA artists should consider attending Ottawa: if you’re looking for a good place to bodyslam your fans into the ground, Canada and its universal health care system beckons!

Moodsy the Clinically Depressed Owl cannot be in Carton Dump this month because he’s in rehab for his auto-erotic-asfyxiation addiction. (In a very emotional group therapy session this morning he got all choked up.) So this Monday’s show will be guest-hosted by Andy Kindler and Dumpster Diver Dan with a sensational line-up of stand-up comedy guests mixed with the usual assortment of unbelievably awful cartoons.

Monday, September 26 at 8:00pm – Special guest host Andy Kindler, plus Melissa Viallasenor, Hugh Moore, an incredibly jet-lagged Jerry Beck, and special guest star Greg Proops!

Where? The Steve Allen Theater, 4773 Hollywood Blvd. • Free Parking! • Advanced Tickets here • Phone: (323) 666-9797 • Map & Directions

As the second season of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic commences, it’s worth another look at the post that started the phenomenon known as The Bronies.

Amid’s commentary on the state of TV animation, which was directed towards a professional audience, was interpreted differently by younger animation fans who aren’t as familiar with industry lingo like creator-driven animation. The unexpected reaction to the article spread on 4chan’s /b/ and sparked a world-wide fandom for this innocuous children’s show, leading to obsessive sites like this and this.

Now the folks at Know Your Meme have created the video history of this show’s popularity (and done a pretty good job of mangling the pronunciation of Amid’s name in the process):

(Thanks, Kelly Toon)

We’ve been posting about Foodfight! since 2004 (the year Cartoon Brew began!) and every year we wonder if it will ever be released. (Click the Foodfight! tag to see all of our coverage.) It’s becoming The Day The Clown Cried of animated features. How bad can it be?

This bad: I spotted this classified ad (below) printed the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter (9/23/11):

So, next Monday you can purchase the film, lock, stock and barrel from Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, who obtained the rights when C47 Productions and Threshold Animation Studios defaulted on their loan. That is, of course, if you have at least $2.5 million dollars to throw at a film that looks like this: Click here to see Foodfight! trailer.

The inevitable has happened: CG provocateur David OReilly has partnered with Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, whose mocap news reports are at least as truthful as anything you’ll see in the mainstream media. The resulting short, Children’s Medium Used for Dissemination of Truth, is exactly what you’d expect of a collaboration between these two non sequitur aficionados in that it’s totally unexpected.

“Animated GIFs are the web’s vinyl records,” wrote Jamie Zawinski on Twitter a few months ago. It’s a sly but accurate observation. In the face of Flash and streaming video, the animated GIF, which has been around since the 1990s, has refused to fade away. It remains a ubiquitous part of Web culture and inspires countless memes amongst a new generation of Web users. While the underlying technology of the animated GIF hasn’t changed, artists continue to explore new approaches to the form, such as cinemagraphs and the recent animated GIF comics trend.

There are many reasons for the extended reign of the animated GIF, prime among them the form’s emphasis on cycles (or loops). Rhythmic repetition was a staple graphic technique of theatrical animation during the 1920s and 1930s before being cast aside in favor of more realistic approaches to movement. The inherent beauty of cycled movement, which was cheapened by limited TV animation in the 1960s, has enjoyed a creative rebirth with the advent of the animated GIF. The animated GIF is also a remarkably potent form, and combined with good timing, it can deliver a surprising punchline as funny as any comedian’s joke. The British animator Cyriak has perfected this type of animated GIF. Perhaps the underpinning reason for the endurance of the animated GIF is its utter simplicity: it has no sound, generally last less than 10 seconds, and require no technical knowledge to create, thanks to the abundance of gif-making websites.

This brings us around to the latest development in animated GIFs: a new iPhone app (also iPad/iPhone Touch compatible) called Gif Shop. Created by Daniel Savage and Matthew Archer, the app, which costs $1.99, streamlines the GIF making process on the iPhone, and makes it easier than ever for anybody to create their own animation. While it’s possible to make any kind of animation using Gif Shop, because of the app’s integration with the iPhone camera, it lends itself particularly to the pixilation stop-motion technique.

Here’s a quick demo of how it works:

Daniel Savage, the app’s co-creator, foresees a social media component to Gif Shop as well, and believes it can become to animation what Instagram is to photos. “The concept of simply creating animated GIFs,” he writes, “evolved into a service that enables our users to share animated GIFs across their networks with no concern for hosting and file size limitations other services may impose. Since the initial concept, Gif Shop is no longer the first of its kind, but we think there is one key factor the others have missed: simplicity. It is extremely important to us that we take the tedious act of making a GIF and make it as fun and intuitive as possible.”

It’s exciting to see the emergence of easy-to-use animation software for smartphones. These apps have the potential to make the act of animating as second-nature to the general public as taking a photograph. That’s a revolutionary concept, especially when one considers that fifty years ago, there were at best a few thousand people in the entire world who could animate. Most of the people using the Gif Shop app aren’t professional animators, but then again, most people who take photographs aren’t Cartier-Bresson. It hardly matters that every animated GIF be a masterpiece. The real victory is that as more and more people animate, appreciation and understanding for the art form will inevitably grow. That may end up yet being the greatest legacy of the animated GIF.