Category: Animation

Pandore (Pandora) is a superb animated short by Marion Stinghe, Meryl Franck, Benoît Guillaumot, Nicolas Caffarel and Elen Le Tannou, students in their third year as Animation majors at Gobelins, l’école de l’image, a visual communications school in Paris. Unlike the introductory shorts done by Gobelins students for the Annecy Film Festival each year, this…

Now that the U.S. animation studios have largely abandoned cell animation in favor of the hyper-kinetic slickness of computer graphics, we must look elsewhere for the joys to be found in hand-drawn animation. The most prominent of those delights is the obvious and simple visual charm of drawings that move; a charm that is most…

One of animated films that I discovered through Irene Gallo’s Saturday Morning Cartoons listing (see my previous post) delighted me in particular, Kunstbar, by Steve Whitehouse and a group of associates that call themselves The Petrie Lounge. The group includes Denis Gonzalez, John Halfpenny, Chris Labonte and Paul Teglas. “Kunst” is the word for “art”…

In addition to her own terrific blog, The Art Department (required reading for anyone interested in science fiction and fantasy illustration), her contributions to the Tor.com blog, and of course her ongoing work in bringing the best and brightest lights in the field to print in her role as art director at Tor Books, Irene…

A friend of mine recently reminded me of the amazing Fleischer Studios Betty Boop cartoons from the 1930’s (see my posts on Max Fleisher and the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons). Betty Boop, in her original incarnation, was sexy, surreal (in the accurate sense of that word), imaginative, beautifully done and entertaining on several levels. These…

Over a period of four months, teams of students in the animation division of the extraordinary Gobelins, l’école de l’image (Goeblins School of Communications) in Paris develop short (60-90 second) animated films that serve as introductions to the events of each day of that years Festival International du Film d’Animation d’Annecy (Annecy Animation Festival). As…