I’ve written before about The Tale of How, a short, wonderfully original animation by The Blackheart Gang, featuring the artwork of Ree Treweek.

I’ve also talked about Shy the Sun, a commercial production company featuring members of the Blackheart Gang, including Treweek and Jannes Hendrikz, which has been producing marvelously eccentric ads for companies like United Airlines and Bakers Precious Biscuits.

Art from The Tale of How, which is planned as part of a larger ongoing project called The Household, has now been published as a coffee table art book, in a deluxe slipcase version that includes a DVD with the animation and reproductions of a print series.

The book is available directly from the Blackheart Gang web site, I don’t know if it will be available in other distribution channels. There are additional images from the book here.

The print series will also be made available for purchase on their site (”soon”).

The original Tale of How animation is visible here, and there is now a short Making of the Tale of How video on the site.

For more on Ree Treweek and The Blackheart Gang, see my previous posts listed below.

Working with lead artists David Whittle and Sainty (Henry St. Leger), who are known as street artists, directors Ben Foley and Chris Hopewell created a 30 second television commercial for Acura called Wall Art in which the car is shown in an animated environment.

What you might assume at first to be CGI, compositing the car image into cartoon drawings done on paper or in a computer graphics program and composited together in the usual computer special effects suites, is instead a completely different approach, in which the images themselves are drawn, life size, on huge 60′ x 40′ (18m x 12m) canvases.

The canvases were drawn, painted over and redrawn, as if they were enormous animation cell backgrounds, and other elements were drawn on the floor and even on the car itself, animating a life-size driver and the images of birds as seen from above against the car.

Even the apparent turn of a corner that goes by at one point is hand drawn animation. All of the apparent motion is in the drawn animations and the position of the camera. The car never moves.

(It brings to mind the remarkable MUTO wall animation I wrote about in March.)

The Acura Wall Art shoot took 17 painters and 240 hours of shooting over ten days. There is a “making of” video on the t5m.com site, that includes the final 30 second spot at the end.

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny is an animation by Tomas Nilsson, in which the classic fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is reinterpreted as a series of animated infographics.

The video traces, in that wonderful isometric projection style of vector art common to modern infographics, not only Little Red Riding Hood’s route to Grandma’s house and the events that transpire there, but lots of “info” about stuff on the way, from wild animal density of the forest to the specs for a classic VW microbus as it passes by.

The info also includes such tidbits as the nutritional content of one Grandma, presumably for the wolf’s benefit.

[Via Daring Fireball]

I first wrote about illustrator, animation art director and painter Eyvind Earle back in 2006.

Since 2007, I’ve been waiting for a new site promised to be “Coming soon April 2008″ at eyvindearle.com to materialize; but as the promise is unchanged as we approach April of 2009, that looks unlikely.

Fortunately, in the meantime, some additional Eyvind Earle art resources have appeared on the web.

The best is still Gallery 21, who I believe are the official representatives of his work. There are galleries of Originals and Serigraphs, as well as Books, Videos and a Chronology of Earle’s career.

There are now other galleries and unofficial sites, and I’ve listed some resources below.

Earle was noted in particular for his stunning design work on Disney’s 1959 feature, Sleeping Beauty, as well as major contributions to Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and a number of shorts. (See this 2006 article about Eyvind Earle and Sleeping Beauty on Cartoon Modern.)

He was awarded the Winsor McCay Award (named after pioneering animator, illustrator and cartoonist Winsor McCay) for lifetime achievement in animation at the 1998 Annie Awards.

Some of Earle’s artworks were among the 250 pieces of original animation art recently returned to Disney after being misplaced in storage following an exhibit in Japan five years ago.

There are books of his work, as well as an autobiography, Horizon Bound on a Bicycle.

Earle was a dazing designer and painter. In addition to his beautiful work for Disney, he painted strikingly graphic and graceful landscape paintings, with compositions that blend the lively draftsmanship of mid-20th Century animation design and the elegant compositional influence of Japanese woodblock prints (images above, and middle, with detail at bottom).

His handling of color is just as amazing as his compositions, taking chances on color combinations and juxtapositions that would simply not work in lesser hands.

I’m usually not a fan of the destructive ego stoking defacement of buildings that is grafitti, at least not until it gets sophisticated to the point of impromptu wall murals (and I’ll point out that the illusionistic sidewalk art I like is done in chalk and washes away); but defacement aside, I’ll make an exception for this.

MUTO is a frame by frame animation in which the “cells” are grafitti drawings on building walls, and the canvas is sections of the cities of Buenos Aires and Baden.

The artist, known only as BLU, has painted and repainted sections of wall with drawings that, photographed in sequence, make an animation.

If you can put up with the shakiness inherent in making a stop-motion animation with a hand-help camera, and the occasionally creepy tone of the story (such as it is, actually more of a stream-of-consciousness narrative), the interaction of the animations and the environments in, through, around and on which they play out, is fascinating and genuinely different.

[Via Digg, via SoulPancake]

I will sometimes gripe about manufactured culture to the point where it may seem I don’t like certain genres at all, when in fact I do (e.g. CGI animated movies and superhero comic books).

After griping about Hollywood CGI animated features in the course of raving about Sita Sings the Blues recently, I’ll point out that I really do like Computer Generated Imaging when it’s used with intelligence, wit and imagination (The Incredibles is one of my favorite movies); as opposed to being put into service for super-slick formulaic features in which name voice talent is seen as a prerequisite but actual stories are in short supply.

As a case in point, I’ll recommend a wonderful short film by Bruce Branit called World Builder, in which a man builds a holographic 3-D environment for the woman he loves. The live action part of the film was shot in a single day, the CGI post production was done over the course of two years.

The film makes good use of CGI, which, in a way, is part of the subject, and anyone who has worked in CGI applications, even consumer level “world builders” like Bryce or Vue d’Esprit, and users of Google Sketchup in particular, will find entertaining nods to the way these things work.

The real point, though, is that the film is a story, and a touching one at that; and the effects are in the end only tools to enable the telling of the story; something that Big Entertainment tends to forget in the midst of their calculations about box office receipts and visions of sugarplum merchandising returns.

Branit directs Branit/VFX in Kansas City. You can find other films by Branit there and on Vimeo.

[Via Kottke]

Sita Sings the Blues is an award winning independent feature length animation by Nina Paley.

The film combines an adaptation of the epic Indian story of Ramayana with a personal story from Paley herself. The film won the Best Feature award at the 32nd Annecy Animated Film Festival (see my post on student films at Annecy 2008, and Cartoon Brew on Annecy 2008), and has been receiving rave word of mouth around the net.

Sita Sings the Blues gets its TV debut tonight on WNET (Channel 13, New York), and may be on other PBS stations as well (though not here in Philadelphia).

After struggling with copyright issues which prohibited release of the film for a time, in which there was an unexpected claim to copyright on 1920’s jazz vocals by Annete Hanshaw, Paley has generously released the film through a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license; so for those of us who can’t catch it on TV or in a theater, it is available in its entirety online.

You can view it on the WNET site, or on the Internet Archive, where you can also download it in a variety of formats and sizes ( and where I watched it and will eventually download a high resolution copy), or through other mirrors or BitTorrent Downloads (see the SitaSites page on the Sita Sings the Blues site).

If you like it, and want to show your support, you can donate to the artist in the kind of voluntary purchase that the internet makes possible.

The film, which Paley made primarily in Flash, with help for a specialized fight scene from Jake Friedman, is a triumph of imagination and writing over fancy technology.

It is a visual delight, with a variety of animation and drawing approaches, from direct sketchy drawing to vector patterns to shadow puppets to scanned and composited photographs, like a combination of Yellow Submarine, Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python “cartoons” and the kind of wiggly line sketchiness (”Squigglevision”) often associated with hand drawn independent animated films.

Sita Sings the Blues is awash with colors, both visual and emotional, and bursting with clever ideas and entertaining notions about how to present various subjects, but always in the service of the story, not for the gratuitous display of technique.

Unlike so many of the formulaic, manufactured CGI films that the big studios crank out to meet their accounting schedules, Paley actually has a story to tell, two of them in fact.

Anyone who is familiar with Watchmen, the darkly dystopian and very adult graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, or the much anticipated feature film adaptation that is being released today; and/or those familiar with 1980’s style Saturday morning superhero cartoons; will get a kick out of this perfect and spot on send-up by Harry Partridge.

He’s got it all down perfect, Ozymandias and his mutant pet recast as Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, the light and happy take on Rorschach (”I’m nutty!”), the Josie and the Pussycats girl band version of Silk Spectre, and the gang sitting around eating pizza, encouraging you to say no to drugs and be in bed by 10; plus lots of “in” jokes for those familiar with the graphic novel… absolutely hilarious.

The funniest thing is that you know for certain that it could have happened. The people who made these cartoons were so monumentally clueless about their formulas that they would have cheerfully taken on the material and “cleaned it up” for the little Saturday morning cereal consumers.

Who watches the Watchmen, indeed.

[Via Geekdad/Wired]

In the 1950’s 60’s and 70’s, a number of non-animated television shows had animated titles, something that was also common in movies of the time.

Undoubtedly influenced by the film title mini-masterpieces of Saul Bass, the TV titles were usually much cruder and less imaginative, but still amusing nonetheless.

Some of them were in fact pretty good, notably:

the clever opening titles for The Wild Wild West (image at left, second down), a terrific 60’s television show (not to be confused with the tragic mess that was the 90’s remake movie with Will Smith), I love the way in this title the seemingly separate scenes in the panels progressively interact with the main character in the center panel;

Bewitched, the titles for which were more fully animated than most (third down);

and, of course, Terry Gilliam’s wonderfully loony animated collage titles for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of which there were several versions (bottom).

Fanboy.com has posted a nice article with some examples of these and others, titled The Golden Age of Animated TV Opening Titles.

Some of them are a little over-compressed and you may be able to find better copies by cruising YouTube and the other video aggregation sites, I don’t know.

While you’re thinking about animated titles, it’s always worth a stop by the Submarine Channel’s Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, to see what delights have been added to their selection of movie titles (see my posts on Forget the Film, Watch the Titles).

[Via Digg]

Reza Dolatabadi studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Dundee, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, from which he is graduating with a Bachelor in Animation and Media Art.

As a student project, Dolatabadi spent two years creating over 6000 individual paintings as frames for a five minute hand-painted animation called Khoda.

The film is a wordless story that is described as a psychological thriller, directed and art directed by Dolatabadi, written by Dolatabadi and Mark Szalos Farkas, with animation by Adam Thompson and music by Hamed Mafakheri.

Dolatabadi also has a web site on which you can see that film, and others, as well as his concept art and sketches.

He also maintains a blog, largely focused at the moment on the reception and accolades that Khoda is receiving, including Winner of the Best Animation Canary Wharf Film Festival (London) Aug, 2008, Award Nominee, Bacup Film Festival (Rossendale) Oct, 2008, Official selection for the “Best Short Film Program” at Waterford Film Festival (Ireland) November 2008 and selections for several other film and animation festivals.

[Via Digg]