Lots of buzz yesterday over the announcement of Wacom’s new Inkling device. It allows users to sketch directly onto paper using a real pen, and records the strokes, which can then be exported to the computer as a vector file. The consensus amongst various professional artists posting on Twitter appears to be, “Wow, this is a cool gadget, but I’m not sure how it fits into my workflow.” On the plus side, it’s priced at $200 which is a relatively affordable cost of entry for a new technology. Are you excited about the Inkling? Can you envision using it in your film production workflow?

Watch this intro to the Inkling:

Eighty-one-year old Fred Cohen, owner of Poughkeepsie’s Overlook Drive-In movie theater, is either clairvoyant or a crotchety old man. He offered his assessment of 3-D movies in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal and it ain’t pretty:

“I’ve been in this business long enough to see it fail once. And I’ll be in it long enough to see it fail again.”

The jury is still out on how much longer Fred will have to wait.

Produced by Luc Besson, Bibo Bergeron’s A Monster In Paris looks gorgeous… but the story, about a giant singing flea, seems a bit slight. Hope I’m wrong. It opens in France in October. No U.S. distributor or release date yet, but here’s the English language trailer:

Despite getting food poisoning the last time I ate at Chipotle, they remain among my favorite fast food joints (along with my other fave, In-N-Out). One of the reasons I like Chipotle is their emphasis on humanely raised animals. Whether raising meat can ever be as idyllic or beautiful as depicted in this new stop motion short called Back to the Start is open to debate, but it’s an undeniably attractive piece of advertising. It was directed by designed by London-based Johnny Kelly whose hand-made approach to the art form is a perfect match for Chipotle’s message. Like George Pal’s Puppetoons, Kelly knows how to animate stylized geometric forms with organic appeal.

Behind-the-scenes production photos on Johnny Kelly’s Flickr account.

Making of video and credits after the jump:
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Don’t let your rat touch your stash. Seth Brady made Ratticus at NYC’s School of Visual Arts.

Passenger is a hand-drawn film that abstracts the nighttime driving experience into a playful, kinetic performance of color and shape. It’s a junior year film by the piquantly named Africanus Okokon. He attends Rhode Island School of Design, which was also the point of origin for Playing for Keeeps, the short that we debuted yesterday as part of our Student Animation Festival.

John K. has several new pieces of animation coming up – bumpers for Adult Swim – that explore a more abstract style. I have no idea if these have aired yet, but John is posting clips and discussing them on his John K. Stuff blog.

Eddie Fitzgerald thinks this (below) is “one of the funniest walks in the history of TV animation“. He might be right.

UPDATE – Here’s one that did air:

Playing For Keeeps comes to us from Dylan Hayes who graduated last spring from the Rhode Island School of Design. The film is both witty and violent, primitive and sophisticated, and through all its strangeness, surprisingly poignant. Hayes uses hand-drawn animation to startling effect, creating a stark, ominous environment with a minimalist drawing style. The motivations of each of the film’s characters is crystal clear, yet the message one takes away is open to viewer interpretation. Perhaps a clue lies in Hayes’s film synopsis, in which he outlines the rules of his world:

Lesson 1. Everyone gambles, not everyone loses.
Lesson 2. The world is full of traps.
Lesson 3. You cannot win if you don’t take risks

Comment on the film or read production notes from the filmmaker on Cartoon Brew TV.

Cartoon Brew’s second annual Student Animation Festival is made possible through the generous support of Titmouse and JibJab.