Here are two non-narrative pieces that are quite pleasing to the eye. Adam Avilla and Tony Benna have joined forces to “try our might at becoming an artistic superpower.”

“Our most recent project spawned a notion to animate one of the most unruly mediums known to man: Yarn. After two cold months in a dark warehouse bedroom (which we transformed into a shooting stage) the spot was complete. The result of the exploration left us conjoined at the temple and deprived of precious vitamin D.”

Lucky is the collaboration between Melbourne based All India Radio and Darcy Prendergast’s animation company Dee Pee Studios

“It involves a painstaking animation technique, whereby the team paints in the air with glow sticks, frame after to frame to create entire sequences of animation, sometimes taking a whole night to shoot.”

In case you were wondering what happened to a U.S. release of Adam Elliot’s clay animated feature Mary And Max… The film was finally picked up for US distribution by Sundance Selects, a video-on-demand service that’s an adjunct to the Sundance Channel and the Sundance Film Festival. The film will be available to purchase and view on cable and satellite systems beginning October 14th.

If you have a hankering to see the film on the big screen, the way it was designed to be seen, it starts tomorrow at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino for an Oscar qualifying one week run. It will screen everyday at 10am Friday and Saturday at 10pm, Sunday through Thursday at 1pm. Asifa-Hollywood members have been invited to a private screening in Glendale next Wednesday, which will feature a Q&A with director Eliiot.

Mary and Max will also screen Wednesday October 14th, 7pm, as the opening selection at the Ottawa ‘09 International Film Festival.

(Thanks, Eric Graf)

Among the many fine people I met at the Fredrikstad Animation Festival in Norway last year was stop motion artist Jan Rune Blom. He promised to send me a link to this music video for singer Helene Bøksle when he was done with it. He didn’t let me down.

After the singer was filmed, the stills were transferred onto paper, cut out, and shot as stop motion. He tells me:

There are no digital effects or digital post production on the piece. Everything was shot on a Canon 300D SLR camera, and all pictures were imported into Final Cut for editing.I really like working with a lot of analog details and solutions. And I like the “analog feeling” of the end product. My brother Tor Harald Blom made the original 2D illustrations of trees and animals. Everything else I did myself. I spent like seven to eight months working on this.

These behind-the-scene pics on Jan’s blog give a hint of the painstaking work that went into making this piece. The results are lovely.

Chainsaw Maid has gotten a fair share of play this year, but I thought it deserved a bigger shout out here on Cartoon Brew. The idea to match up colorful plasticine with the zombie genre was a revelation for me—a perfect match. Show me a better use, or at least one that’s more fun, for plasticine.

The film is very well edited and shows a lot of directorial promise. The director, Takena Nagao, takes the zombie genre and replicates its idiosyncrasies flawlessly. The music is delightfully creepy, and works like a charm.  The candy-colored world is almost edible and had me wondering what purple brain blood tastes like. From a storytelling perspective, Chainsaw Maid mixes reaction shots, wide angles and close-ups better than some of the feature films I’ve seen recently.

Perhaps most impressive of all is Takena’s use of the moving camera: the quick zooms, the subtle pans and tilts, the lens recalibrating during a shot to find the action (e.g. 2:53-3:02). It takes confidence to move a camera like this, and even more confidence when you’re doing it in-camera without the aid of rigs/motion control. Takena uses it to add tension, believability, and dynamism to the film at just the right points—in other words, not just for the sake of moving a camera, as so many directors (amateur and professional alike) tend to do.

All in all, I find it super-refreshing to see a talented young filmmaker having so much fun and I can’t wait to see his future work.

PS. This is a link to Takena Nagao’s YouTube channel. And if you like Chainsaw Maid, check out Takena’s latest film, Pussycat.

Portland’s Laika studio (Coraline) has scrapped all its plans for creating CG features and will instead focus on making stop-motion films exclusively. The studio laid off 63 computer graphics employees today, according the website SlashFilm. UPDATE: Studio publicist Maggie Begley wrote in to clarify: “It’s not accurate to say that the studio is abandoning CG altogether. They will continue to use CG opportunistically in stop motion films and will continue to develop CG projects in house for further down the road.”

I personally think the decision to specialize with stop-motion is great move - not only for the health of the studio, but for the art of stop-motion animation itself. And this is shaping up to be a helluva year for stop-motion. I just attended an advance screening of Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox today. It’s not from Laika, but it’s an outstanding film - which, compared with 2009’s other stop-mo releases (Coraline, Mary And Max), shows the wide range of this technique. I’m delighted to know this ancient hand made animation process has a somewhat healthy future.

Today also marks the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which upwards of 100,000 Japanese people were killed instantly by an atom bomb dropped by the US military. In commemoration, here is Dan Blank’s Shadowplay, a moving stop-motion film about the “permanent shadows imprinted on the city’s walls and streets by the intense flash, creating indelible images from the exact moment the bomb hit.” Made at NYU, it won a gold Student Emmy as well as a bronze Student Academy Award.

Trailer is out today for Wes Anderson’s first animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox. Maybe it’s just me, but the dialogue delivery sounds stilted and leadfooted throughout the trailer. On the other hand, the production design looks fantastic indeed. Like Coraline, we’re seeing another stop-motion feature that is pushing the boundaries of mainstream feature animation design and searching for an original look. That’s never a bad thing.

I haven’t seen a new piece of animation by stop-motion animator Corky Quackenbush in what seems like forever, so I was pleasantly surprised to run across his latest: Harry Potter and the Office of Unemployment.

I also found this “sex and violence” reel with clips from Quakenbush’s familiar classics along with newer works that I hadn’t seen. Family Guy could stand to take a lesson from Corky about what it means to be edgy and outrageous.

For more about Corky, visit his charmingly outdated website SpaceBassFilms.com.