For the past week or so, Stephen Worth, Director of the always amazing ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive (which I have mentioned on several occasions) has been guest blogger on Boing Boing.

During that stint he has given us a series of treats including the Boing Boing Cartoon Circus, a list of some wonderful classic cartoons.

These are almost forgotten gems from an age when cartoon characters, and the imaginations of the artists, were wildly flexible.

The list includes such bizarre and delightful wonders as Grim Natwick’s Swing You Sinners (which Worth bills as “The Weirdest Cartoon Ever”); Terry-Toons’ The Last Roundup, in which Gandy Goose faces Adolf Hitler in the form of a pig; the Fleischer brother’s Popeye in Goonland, a delightfully looney excursion into weirdness (see my previous posts on Max Fleischer and the studio’s amazing Superman and Betty Boop cartoons); Bob Clampett’s Tin Pan Alley Cats, with a parody of Fats Waller; and the beautifully realized Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, a masterpiece by Grim Natwick under the direction of Ub Iwerks, which has some of the character of a Winsor McCay comic strip brought to life.

All in all a treat for fans of cartoon animation, swing jazz and/or overall weirdness.

For more, see the links on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive under item #7 on The Top Ten Reasons to Contribute to A-HAA, for links to even more classic cartoons.

(Images at left: Swing You Sinners, The Last Roundup, Popeye in Goonland, Tin Pan Alley Cats, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp)

This Is Where We Live is a short stop-motion animation by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

It is a promo for 4th Estate Publishers, and the “where” it refers to is the world of books. The designers and animators have taken a literal take on the phrase and created a world made, literally, from books.

You can see a time-lapse video of the animators preparing materials and another of them arranging a shot for the film here.

The animation was produced over a three week period in 2008, and was produced to mark the publisher’s 25th anniversary.

It starts, aptly enough, with a bit of flip book style animation in the pages of a book, and transitions nicely into a walk through the the book world; including nicely atmospheric “night” scenes, in which the darker side of things is displayed.

Charming, imaginative and beautifully done.

[Via Metafilter]

This is an amusing little animation that was made as a course assignment by a design degree student in Singapore, who goes by the handle “saggyarmpit” on Vimeo.

She points out that it was done fairly quickly, the drawings illustrated with technical pen and rough around the edges, and expresses surprise at the degree of attention the piece is getting.

What’s amusing and appealing about the piece is her clever use of folded paper, flip book techniques and stop motion animation to move the character through his parkour motions.

(Parkour, or “the art of moving”, is a practice originating in France of traversing an environment, usually urban, by physically adapting to it using climbing, jumping and running skills that are honed in a way comparable to martial arts training. You may have seen it displayed in the opening of the Casino Royale James Bond film from 2006.)

Here the artist, with post production help from Noel Lee, moves the figure through the illustrated environment, her hands acting as part of the stop motion action.

“Saggyarmpit” does not have a web site yet, but promises one soon.

In the 1990’s, Richard Williams, the Canadian animator responsible for the brilliant animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, began teaching an Animation Masterclass in various locations around the world. It was attended by members of major studios like Disney, Pixar, ILM, Dreamworks/PDI and Warner Brothers; who knew a Good Thing when they saw it.

Williams’ Masterclasses became somewhat legendary, with participants often claiming that the course changed their lives, or at least the way in which they saw, understood and created animation. The courses, and Williams’ approach, are founded on an understanding and keen observation of motion, particularly human motion.

His influential lectures were later codified in a book called The Animator’s Survival Kit, considered a must-have standard by knowledgeable animators and animation students.

Williams also created a series of videos for which he gave his Masterclass lectures in front of the camera; and additionally created over 400 special animations illustrating various points and techniques.

A newly revised version of the series has been released as a 16-DVD boxed set, The Animator’s Survival Kit – Animated.

At over $1,000.00 USD, the set is not inexpensive; but neither would be a classroom course of this quality and depth, if you could find one.

Even the short clips on the web site, meant give you a taste of the video set’s major sections, are instructive and fascinating in themselves (4 bottom images above); though many aspiring animators may not like the first one (grin).

Just look at his brilliant description of how to make a character correctly mouth the word “Hello” (#13 Dialog 1, top left of this page). All of the others are worth watching as well.

I absolutely love the group walk cycle animation on the home page (still image at top), and the animated intro from which it is taken.

This review from Daniel Briney may give you some additional perspective on the course.

[Via Articles & Texticles, which has a 10 minute audio interview with Williams on the post]

I’m fond of retro-futurism, the appreciation of past visions of the future; often the “future” in which we are currently living.

I’m particularly delighted with future visions rendered out in that wonderful ’50s & ’60s modern cartoon style that seems to be having a bit of a revival these days.

Disney’s Magic Highway, USA is a classic in the genre. Originally part of a TV program aired in 1958, it took off from visionary speculation about the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the construction of which had just been authorized two years prior.

The animation presaged some of the realistic aspects of that system, which had been championed by then-President Eisenhower as a national defense initiative. The animators then carried on into flights of imaginative fantasy about the future of automobile transportation.

It is at once naive, silly, fanciful, astute, ridiculous, clever and, at times, surprisingly predictive of things like rear-view cameras, digital dashboard read-outs (”onboard teletypes”) and the equivalent of GPS map displays.

Remember this is pre-Interstate Highway, pre-Jetsons, pre-space travel, pre-widespread commercial jet travel and produced at a time when computers as powerful as an iPhone took a up an entire room.

It is also remarkably insightful in the prediction of the de-centralization of urban areas into an idyllic version of contemporary suburban sprawl.

The animation and design work are a delight. Disney, both in animation and in their theme parks, often indulges in futurism, and this is one of the best examples from their animation studios.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of a source for the animation credits.

[Via Daring Fireball]

NuFormer is a design firm based in the Netherlands. They have developed a computer-based projection system for creating the illusion of moving, 3-dimensional alterations to the surfaces of buildings.

The results are striking, as you can see in this video on Vimeo. Bear in mind that these are not CGI in the usual sense, the computer imagery is in the projections on the buildings, not in the manipulation of the video images themselves. This is essentially what you would see if you were standing on the street in front of the buildings.

Take note of what each of the two buildings actually looks like early in the video, as their actual appearance will be delightfully called into question in the course of the display.

[Via Metafilter]

Like its predecessor, The Zoomquilt I, which I wrote about in 2006, The Zoomquilt II is a collaborative art project by 34 different artists.

Basically an amusement, this is an animated sequence of scenes, each one of which is related to the others by a transitional area within the image that allows for a continuous zoom, one scene leading into the next, leading into the next and so on.

The effect is nicely hypnotic, and the images are fun pseudo-Surrealism, full of monsters and trippy landscapes. You can control the speed and direction of the zoom with a slider on a pop-out panel at the left, that also contains the credits.

The Flash based animation is set to render to the size of the browser window, so maximize your browser for best effect.

In what may turn out to be an unfortunate choice, one of the participants used Disney characters in one of the scenes, so if the web site is hosted anywhere that has a copyright treaty with the U.S. this version may not be available for long. Enjoy it while you can.

[Via BoingBoing]

A is for Atom is a 1952 (released in 1953) educational cartoon explaining the wonders and mysteries of atomic power, sponsored by General Electric and directed by Carl Urbano (who later went on to work for Hanna & Barbara).

Like the more well known and widely distributed Our Friend the Atom, a longer, part live action, part animated, 1957 film from Disney, this was basically an indoctrination for school children as to why atomic power was a Good Idea. As part of an overall campaign to promote acceptance of that idea, they were quite successful.

Both films, Disney’s explicitly, this film implicitly, treat atomic power as an obedient genie, ready to grant our wishes for nuclear powered cruise ships and airplanes, saving lives with isotope based medicine, and, of course, providing the clean, efficient and oh-so-advanced Energy of the Future to power our cities.

In the course of their ad for atomic power, the two films actually manage to teach some basic principles of atomic physics.

A is for Atom in particular is charming and efficient in this. I especially like portrayal of “Element Town” (about 5 minutes in) and the wonderful building representing “Science”.

Though A is for Atom opens with a (somewhat mild) representation of a mushroom cloud; as you might expect, it conveniently dismisses with a few nods to “shadow of the atom bomb” and “men of good will” the fact that hundreds of thousands had died in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only 7 years earlier. (For a sobering counterpoint, see my post on Barefoot Gen.)

This was the dawn of the “Atomic Age”, a time of postwar prosperity with the promise of atomic power balanced against the cold war insanity in which school children were drilled to cower under their desks or line up in the halls with their hands over their heads, and enterprising, forward-thinking families were building backyard bomb shelters. (Ah! The shining promise of the future!)

Films like A is for Atom illustrate again the power that cartoons and animation have to explain and educate (and influence), with the strong appeal of moving drawings.

I’m convinced there was more before the beginning scene, which seems abrupt and more like the end of a sentence than an opening statement, but I haven’t found anything to indicate that is the case.

[Link via BoingBoing]

“Greatest” and “best” lists always elicit responses of varying degrees of disagreement, as they are meant to do, from “Well, maybe…” to “You’ve got to be kidding!”, and this list, Time Out’s 50 greatest animated films, with added commentary by Terry Gilliam, is no exception.

That’s the fun of it, of course, you’re prompted to fire up your own list, and run through your favorites with a mind to comparison and debate.

This one certainly gave me plenty of occasions to say “You’ve got to be kidding!”, but on the whole it was enjoyably thought provoking; and I have to say I was actually surprised at how often I agreed, even in the selection of the #1 animated film.

The interesting angle here, of course, is the added commentary by ex-Python and celebrated director of cinematic weirdness, Terry Gilliam, himself no stranger to animation, which livens up the proceedings (and produces it’s share of “Huh?” moments as well).

There aren’t a lot of images, but each film is illustrated with at least one image, and if your curiosity if piqued, you gan crank up Google Image Search to look for more.

At the very least, it’s a list to investigate for interesting and often terrific animated films you may not have seen.

(Images above: My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki; Walt Disney’s Fantasia, (multiple directors); Akira, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo; and The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird.)

Televolution is an animated short by Malcolm McNeil, who I have written about previously here and here.

Originally shown in Japan in 1990, when some of the the tech he suggests was almost prophetic, the animation is meant to salute the birthday of Charles Darwin (an event that just passed again recently).

McNeill traces the course of evolution in a few whimsical steps, and suggests how things might go from here.