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A surprising short tops Ottawa 2016.

The post ‘I Like Girls,’ ‘Louise en Hiver’ Wins Top Prizes at Ottawa appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The new "Powerpuff Girls" revival gets its first Emmy nod, and so does the last episode of "Phineas and Ferb."

The post 2016 Emmy Nominations: Just the Animation Categories, Please appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The festival's theme, "Rock, Paper, Scissors," focuses on materiality, D.I.Y. culture, and the beauty of imperfection.

The papercraft spot represents a new style for the Oscar-nominated director of "Fresh Guacamole."

PES makes a submarine sandwich.

Stop motion animation just got a little easier with the introduction of Nikon Animator's Kit.

Leave it to PES, the whiz of the very-short short, to use the visual of a decomposing woman being colonized by insects as a way to sell earrings and brooches.

Filmmaker PES, currently nominated for an Oscar for his short Fresh Guacamole, directed this striking title sequence for the Dutch TV series Het Klokhuis (Apple Core). The long-running show, which first aired in 1988, is the Netherlands’ oldest youth television show.

Credits
Directed by PES
Production Company: PES Productions
Het Klokhuis (NL) Editors-in-Chief: Loes Wormmeester & Jan Pieter Schaap
Fabrication/Production Studio: SCPS Unlimited
Animation: Dillon Markey
Editor: Joshua Balster
Sound Design: PES

Indie animator PES (pictured above) moved from New York to Los Angeles a couple years back to fulfill his ambition to become a feature film director. It didn’t take long. Deadline Hollywood broke the story this afternoon that PES has been tapped to direct a feature film based on the Eighties fad Garbage Pail Kids.

The news is significant, representing not only a career shift for PES—best known for animated shorts like Roof Sex and Western Spaghetti as well as a slew of award-winning TV commercials—but also because it heralds the return of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner to feature filmmaking (at least on the financing side). Deadline reported that “Michael Eisner’s The Tornante Company will finance and produce the development of a feature film. . .Eisner bought the card company in 2007 and this is his first feature spinoff project.” Michael Vukadinovich will write the script and Toby Ascher will produce.

While neither the name Eisner nor “Garbage Pail Kids” instill much confidence, the real story here is PES’s involvement. He has proven himself time and time again as a force for innovative graphic ideas. A quick browse of Cartoon Brew’s archives will reveal some of his creative storytelling abilities (as well as some of his contributions as a guest blogger). I’ll certainly be looking forward to see what PES does with his first feature film.

PES’s latest short Fresh Guacamole debuted on YouTube last week:

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Garbage Pail Kids, Michael Eisner, PES, Tornante Company

Less than a year after its launch, Kaboing TV has come to a virtual standstill. Billed as “an alternative channel for quality animation that serves both the cartoon fan and the animation community of artists and writers,” the idea was conceived by Joe Murray, the veteran creator of old-media shows like Rocko’s Modern Life and Camp Lazlo. Murray raised over $20,000 from a Kickstarter campaign in June, 2010 to launch the concept.

Kaboing failed to gain traction with viewers. In the past year, Murray unveiled three original animated shorts based on his Frog in a Suit concept, and also presented six indie animated shorts. The combined viewership of those nine films was just 57,000 views.

In an essay posted on his blog last week he described Kaboing as being “at a crossroads.” In an earlier blog post last month, he alluded to Kaboing as if it had already died, writing that it was like “watching the fuse to what promises to be a wonderful firework display, fizzle out at the moment of truth.” The Kaboing website, which hosted its videos on YouTube, hasn’t unveilved a new cartoon since September, 2011, and the last original Frog in a Suit short premiered last March.

Murray blames virtually everything as a factor in the site’s lack of success, from a failed mainstream project that he had undertaken to no marketing budget to advertisers who wanted ownership of the shorts to the Internet’s desire for crude material.

The simplest solution though is often the right one, and in this case, it would appear that Murray didn’t offer a compelling product that audiences wanted to see. The Internet is very good at identifying what it likes, and it doesn’t like the kind of traditional material produced by mainstream TV studios. Frog in a Suit felt too much like a standard-issue TV cartoon with all the timeworn elements that Internet audiences are trying to escape.

It’s commendable that Murray is being upfront about the struggles of his start-up Kaboing TV, but his assignment of blame for the site’s failure seems misplaced to me. Reading between the lines of his January 18 post, he appears to believe that his work was of a higher quality than the kind of animation that becomes successful on-line. He expresses frustration that a “unicorn shitting rainbows” is more popular than his own work. But while some material is certainly more crude and raw, there are also breakout Internet hits like Simon Tofield’s Simon’s Cat which feature more elegant animation than anything you’ll find produced by a TV animation studio. The nineteen Simon’s Cat shorts, all animated by Tofield, have garnered over 215 million views on YouTube and spawned book and merchandising deals.

In the past artists created properties to pitch and sell to TV networks or newspaper syndicates in the hope of making their characters famous. Tofield has succeeded where Murray couldn’t by showing its possible to create characters on one’s own terms, turn them into a success online without giving up ownership rights, and then wait for companies to approach you with licensing deals.

YouTube, in fact, has spawned a new generation of animation creators who have become successful individual brands without the help of any middleman. An even more successful example is Dane Boedigheimer, whose Annoying Orange videos have accumulated nearly 600 million views on YouTube. His work has become so popular that Cartoon Network