Tag: animation

I’d go tonight, but I promised Tony I’d go with him

Threadless is having a one-day “all shirts are $9” sale to commemorate 9/9/09.

And you know what that means! Today 9 comes out, the full length stitchpunk feature produced by Tim Burton and Timur “freaking” Bekmambetov, the guy responsible for Nightwatch and Daywatch, (and distributed by my favourite company, Focus Features), based off Shane Acker‘s amazing Oscar nominated 2005 short film of the same name:

Also, whimsical trend blog Urlesque have christened 09/09/09 as The Day Without Cats on the Internet. Please abide.

tossing it out to the animators

via Sean:

Illustration by Roy Husada

Vancouver Opera announces OPERABOT, an animation contest for our Golden Anniversary Season. Animators are challenged to create animated shorts of one of the four productions of the Golden Anniversary Season.

The contest is found here: http://www.youtube.com/group/vancouveropera

Anyone 18+ can enter and submit a 4 min or less short that tells the story of one of the four operas of the Golden Anniversary Season. Upload them to our YouTube contest group. Everyone is encouraged to vote for their favorites!

“With the long-running success of our manga series by Roy Husada, we thought this was the logical next step,” said General Director Jim Wright. “We can’t wait to see what people come up with!”

Four winners — chosen by the public and a panel of judges from Vancouver-area animation studios Pixar, EA, Rainmaker, Bardel, and Rival Schools – will win a host of prizes including animation hardware, gaming packages, and digital cameras.

The contest runs June 1, 2009 to Nov 1, 2009 and is open to all residents of the US and Canada. Official rules can be found at www.vancouveropera.ca Everyone who enters will receive tickets to the opera so everyone is a winner!

The contest was inspired by the active animation industry in Vancouver and a similar contest run by Chicago Opera Theater in 2008.

Vancouver Opera is a leader in social media initiative, including the Operalive.ca multimedia site, “Blogger Night At the Opera”, “Operaninja” a live backstage Twitterer, and “Operagator” an opera news aggregator. A leader in Web 2.0 initiatives including an active blog, facebook, flickr, Twitter and YouTube channel, Vancouver Opera is committed to reaching the next generation of opera lovers using the media of the times. Vancouver Opera is also a leader in using pop visual arts as a medium for opera, including a long running Opera Manga series by Roy Husada and Fiona Meng, and commissioning of award-winning visual artists like Edel Rodriguez and Michael Abraham to create original artwork for VO season productions.

Vancouver Opera’s extensive network of Web 2.0 and social media sites as well as official contest rules can be found on our homepage at http://www.vancouveropera.ca.

what I do when I can’t sleep

On the heels of the discovery that both Aardman Studio’s The Pearce Sisters and the National Film Board’s Madame Tutli-Putli have both been put on-line in their entirety, I started sporadically collecting together a selection of Oscar-winning animated shorts that have been put up on YouTube, beginning with Balance, a fantastic film I saw at a festival in the early nineties and have never been able to shake off.

A week later, this is what you get:
1931-1932: Flowers and Trees
1932-1933: Three Little Pigs
1934: The Tortoise and the Hare
1935: Three Orphan Kittens
1936: The Country Cousin
1937: The Old Mill
1938: Ferdinand the Bull
1939: The Ugly Duckling
1940: The Milky Way
1941: Lend a Paw
1942: Der Fuehrer’s Face
1943: The Yankee Doodle Mouse
1944: Mouse Trouble
1945: Quiet Please!
1946: The Cat Concerto
1949: For Scent-imental Reasons
1950: Gerald McBoing-Boing
1951: The Two Mouseketeers
1952: Johann Mouse
1953: Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom
1954: When Magoo Flew
1955: Speedy Gonzales
1956: Mister Magoo’s Puddle Jumper
1957: Birds Anonymous
1958: Knighty Knight Bugs
1959: Moonbird
1960: Munro
1963: The Critic
1964: The Pink Phink
1965: The Dot and the Line
1974: Closed Mondays
1978: Special Delivery
1980: The Fly
1983: Sundae in New York
1986: A Greek Tragedy
1989: Balance
1990: Creature Comforts
1991: Manipulation
1992: Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase
1994: Bob’s Birthday – Part 1, Part 2.
1996: Quest
1998: Bunny
1999: The Old Man and the Sea – Part 1, Part 2.
2000: Father and Daughter
2003: Harvie Krumpet
2006: The Danish Poet – Part 1, Part 2.

Nominated this year: Moya Lyubov (My Love), (sans subtitles, sorry), and Peter & the Wolf.

As a bonus, here’s Atom Films Academy Award Hall of Fame, which spans from stunning achievements such at The Cathedral to downright clever fun like Aardman’s Adam.

edit: someone’s pointed me to this torrent link, Top 100 Animated Shorts 1906 – 2006.