Ji Lee is a designer and illustrator, born in Korea, raised in Brazil and currently living and working in New York.

Inspired by an art school typography class assignment almost twenty years ago, Lee has been since then working with the concept of creating images out of the letterforms of words that depict something of the meaning or character of that word.

The result is a long-term project Lee calls Word as Image.

(You will sometimes see logo designers trying to work with a similar concept, but in a more limited way.)

In 2011 Lee published a book, Word as Image, that collects 100 words.

A number of the word/images have been animated in a short film with animation by Bran Dougherty-Johnson that can be viewed on Lee’s site or on Vimeo.

On Lee’s website you will also find examples of his personal, professional and editorial work. I find the editorial selection exhibits much of the same kind of “turn things on their head” imagination as the Word as Image project.

[Via MetaFilter]

I’ve written before about the superb series of Superman cartoons done in the 1940′s by the studios of Max and Dave Fleischer.

These are beautiful examples of hand drawn animation, essentially film noir adventure stories with great design, rendering and animation; and, as far as I’m concerned, the best film adaptation of the character ever.

The cartoons are in the public domain and have been available on the Internet Archive and YouTube for some time in various versions, but they have been remastered from the original negatives by Warner Brothers and recently released on their YouTube channel for all to enjoy.

All nine of the original series are linked below.

Super!

[Links and announcement via Cartoon Brew]

[Please note: the images above are just screen captures, not embedded videos. Use the links below.]

Cartoon Brew is a widely known and respected web portal devoted to animation.

Founded and edited by animation authorities Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi, the site has been a go-to source for all things animation for a large and growing audience, including your correspondent, since 2004.

Cartoon Brew has just released a newly redesigned website. Crisp and clean, the new site is well organized, with easy to access sections for news from the film and television industries about upcoming projects and ongoing films and series, as well as industry awards, festivals, books, interviews and more.

It also provides an easy to browse interface for my favorite section, “Shorts“, which highlights a variety of animated shorts from across the industry.

You can additionally browse by clicking on one of the red topic headings that accompany the post listings, like “Animators”, “Feature Film”, “Educational”, “Experimental” and so on.

You can also search, of course, or simply browse the archives.

If by some odd chance you love animation and you’re not already aware of Cartoon Brew, I’ll give you my Time Sink Warning as you dive in to their deep, rubber-bottomed pool of animation related goodies.

Based on current evidence, the development of writing, and with it, “recorded history” goes back at least 5,000 or 6,000 years, perhaps further.

The development of agriculture, which we use to mark the beginnings of “civilization” can be set at roughly 10,000 years. (Those who choose to believe that the earth is 4,000 to 7,000 years old can put their fingers in their ears and chant “La la la la la…” until we’re done discussing science and history.)

In contrast, radiocarbon dating has established that art, in the form of sophisticated cave paintings discovered in France and Spain, is at least 35,000 years old.

Animation, the use of multiple images to give the illusion of motion, has generally been assumed to have been an invention, in various forms, of the early 19th century. (It’s interesting to note that animation, even if you assume it to have started in the 19th century, predates and is the parent of movies, not the other way around.)

A new paper by French archaeologist Marc Azéma and his collaborator, artist Florent Rivére, suggests that animation may in fact be almost as old as our oldest sophisticated examples of art, going back some 30,000 years.

Based on 20 years of research, a recently published a paper that summarizes their findings outlines how paintings on cave walls in Chauvet and La Baume Latrone, that show animals with multiple superimposed representations of legs, tails, heads or even body positions, may have been more than suggestions of motion, and may, in fact have been designed to be animated by the action of flickering firelight.

There is a video accompanying some of the articles listed below in which simplified examples of the cave paintings have been extracted and arranged in sequence to show how that effect may have worked.

Prehistoric Europeans may also have invented the “thaumotope”, an animation toy assumed to have been invented in the 19th century — essentially a disk with images painted on both sides that, when suspended on two strings (or strands of animal tendon), could be spun to make the images appear in rapid sequence, producing the illusion of motion or superimposition.

Perhaps this helps explain why France, out of proportion to its size and population, is such a strong center for animation today — they’ve been at it for 30,000 years.

[Via Jeremy Lipking, on Twitter as @lipking]

Ever get tired of having the same view outside your door every morning?

One Day (YouTube link) is a beautifully realized animated short (4 minutes) about a young man whose house apparently moves to a new location every night, leaving him with a different view outside his door every morning.

It suggests that this is eventually less charming than it may seem.

The film was created by Joel Corcia, Bung, Nguyen, Thomas Reteuna, Laurent Rossi and Bernard Som, with input from others, and released through Gobelins — the amazing art and animation school in Paris that either finds remarkable students, or trains their students remarkable well, or both.

This version of the film is dubbed in English, with French subtitles. It may help to know that “rien á faire” translates as “nothing to do”.

See my previous post on the Gobelins students’ animations for the Annecy Animation Festivals.

[Via io9]

As much as I love art, I’m also fond of words; and I find the the origin of particular words fascinating because it shows, as in art, how we develop things and put them into use over time. I also like animation.

Mysteries of Vernacular is a series of short, artfully crafted stop-motion animations explaining the origin of individual English language words.

Set in a bookcase website interface, the animations themselves largely take place in and on the pages of books. You can view them small in the context of the interface, or, once they are started, click again to view them larger (usually on Vimeo).

The project is young and the bookshelves are still thin, and some of the volumes are blank (“coming soon”). As of this writing there are videos for the words Assassin, Clue, Hearse and Pants, accessed by clicking on the book spines showing the letter with which they begin.

In addition to being amused, you may actually learn something about the origin of words, or at least get a Clue.

[Via hurdy gurdy girl on MetaFilter]

Directed and animated by D.C. Turner and narrated by comedian Tim Minchin, The Story of You: ENCODE and the human genome is a short (4, 1/2 minute) animated video about the history of our attempt to understand our own genetic structure, the latest stage of which is the ENCODE project.

On YouTube.

[Via BoingBoing]

Jacob (Jake) Wyatt is a comics artist and animator who came to my attention by way of his beautiful short animation, Metro, which was done while he was a student (top three images above, plus promo, 4th down). Metro is about a young girl, a subway, a fox and… other things. It’s simply but very effectively done and makes great use of setting off areas of the screen into smaller shapes. (Link is to Vimeo, best viewed fullscreen.)

I then found his blog, life on paper, a page on deviantART and a Tumblog, but none offer much in the way of a bio or list of credits. ( I sometimes think artists simply don’t realize they are doing this, rather than making a deliberate choice to ignore an important part of their online presence.)

From what I’ve been able to glean by skimming the blog, he has done a story for the Image Comics title Hawaiian Dick, but I don’t know in what issue, or if it’s even been released. There is also a comics story that is apparently an adaptation of the story of Theseus that was part of the Anthology Project (Volume 2).

I also stumbled across the information that he draws his comics in black Prismacolor pencil rather than ink. His comics have a nice, rough edged, textural quality, probably partially due to that approach and partially in his application of textured areas of color. I’m assuming his color is applied digitally, but again there is no link to direct information about process, though you may be able to find more by searching through his blog posts.

(Via io9)