Atomic animation

IBM made their logo out of atoms when they first invented the scanning probe microscope. Now they've made a movie with atoms as pixels. That's some cool progress.

Paper Animation

This is frickin' amazing. I want to watch this 3 more times to see all the beauty that flies by in an instant.

Motorcycle assembly stop motion

This makes me tempted to try to show a sweater knitting itself.

Maybe I should start by trying just a scarf. For a mouse.

Her Morning Elegance

This is an awesome stop-motion animation music video.

This is cool

I love stop motion animation. This is a great piece of reinterpreted household objects.


Stop Motion Spaghetti Cooking

Cartoon Censorship

I read an interesting article today on censorship in cartoons.

For me, the most shocking examples are the "curse" words of "heck", "darn" and "furnace".

Painstaking music video animation

The people who made this stop-motion music video worked very, very, very hard.

Signs of the Times

This is weird.

I like Lore Sjoberg's sense of humor. But I struggled to get this one. Which is, of course, why I posted it on my blog.

Head Mountain

This is an excellently drawn work of Japanese animation. With dreamlike symbolism, it explores a variation of the classic Japanese theme of civilization versus nature.

Monster House

I just saw the movie Monster House.

It's pretty good. The characters are just a little close to stock characters rather than genuine personalities. But the visuals are shiny, and the story's ok.

Although I bet I would have totally gotten the movie with the sound off. Which I was surprised worked during my trip East 2 weeks ago - with a Woody Allen movie!

Anyway, I'm still not sure how I feel about the motion capture technology used to make Monster House. Same as used to portray Gollum in Lord of the Rings. On the one hand, pretty impressive way to amp up your effects budget. On the other, the animators who shaped human bodies in The Incredibles are true artists who created original body language.

I've read somewhere speculation that Andy Serkis and other motion capture performers might get their own category of award some day. Who knows? My question is, if that happens, are we honoring a new art form, or making actors sit at the little kids' table?

"Animation"

What does Animation mean, anyway?

If I use computers to make a bunch of pretty things, that are completely impossible, but have people dance in front of a camera and make the computer reproduce it, am I an animator?

Happy Feet got a nomination for Best Animated Feature.

As this blogger points out, it's not really animated. It's computer assisted puppetry.

Savion Glover did all the dancing, and deserves credit for it.

But should the actual animators who created the motion in Cars be compared to the technicians who computerized Savion Glover's dancing? (Assuming you think comparing artists and giving them awards is a relevant task to begin with.) Happy Feet is a better movie, with better writing and characterizations. But is it animation?

Star Wars fan movie

This is excellent. You have to watch this one to the end. This is an honored classic style of Japanese hand puppetry, put to amazing post-modern use.

Best. Cartoons. Ever.

The industry voted on what the 50 best cartoons of all time were.

And then that link above went and found online video of them all. Awesome.