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The "Iron Giant" director has revealed that he's not done yet with hand-drawn animation.

The Hungarian animation director opens up on his more than 50 years in animation.

The creator of "Aladdin'"s Genie turns sixty today!

A new online project is bringing women out of the shadows of animation history.

"Book of Life" director Jorge Gutierrez has some inspiring advice for young filmmakers.

If there had been an art book for Henry Selick's "Coraline," this is some of the art that would have been in it.

Happy centennial birthday to Bill Peet (1915-2002) who was born in Grandview, Indiana exactly one hundred years ago today.

A pretty much perfect response from "The LEGO Movie" co-director Phil Lord on being overlooked by the Oscars.

Japan's Animation Artist in Residence Tokyo has announced the three animation filmmakers selected for its 2015 residency program: Alex Grigg from Australia, and Anna Budanova and Natalia Chernysheva, both from Russia.

This quintet of posters came out today for "Pixels," the big-budget Hollywood feature based on a two-and-a-half-minute French animated short.

What can we learn about the animation industry from this photo of the animation crew from "Lord of the Rings"?

Though the work that animators create is often exhilarating, the actual process of animating, which involves sitting at a desk for hours at a time, is not particularly interesting to the general public. In the past, when studio publicity departments were tasked with creating publicity stills of animators, they often posed animators making an expression in front of their mirror while drawing a character with a similar expression. The mirror, it turns out, was not just useful to the animator’s own process but also to the photographer who wanted to compose a dynamic image of the animator at work. It never occurred to me what a common motif this was until I collected a few of them on Instagram a few days ago. Looking at more recent publicity shots of 2D animators, especially from the 1980s and ’90s, the animator-making-an-expression-in-a-mirror publicity shot was largely phased out in favor of a more generic pose of an animator drawing at a desk, looking at the camera while drawing and flipping, or the unnatural pose of holding a maquette while drawing. Enjoy this collection of legendary animators hard at work creating some classic characters:

A collection of animation work by Terry Gilliam on the occasion of his 74th birthday.

An appreciation of the work of Kyu-Tae Lee, a South Korean filmmaker, illustrator, and comic artist.

Designer Todd Oldham, who has compiled impressive monographs on mid-century illustrators and designers like Charley Harper and Alexander Girard, looks to have made something special again with his book on Ed Emberley.

Saschka Unseld, who conceived and directed the Pixar short "The Blue Umbrella," has moved to the East Coast to become the creative director of Passion New York,

The setting for Laika’s upcoming stop motion film The Boxtrolls takes place in in Cheesebridge, a fictional faux-18th century city that houses the underground dwelling Boxtrolls and everyone else, who live above ground under the political lead of the Lord Portley-Rind and his upper crust council The White Hats. To help visualize the world of The Boxtrolls, which is a mélange of German Expressionism, steampunk and tktktkt, they enlisted the aid of concept illustrator Michel Breton. Breton’s work possesses a nervous line quality that was kept in the final designs for not only the props and sets but also the costumes. “A lot of the linework in these costumes is slightly crooked which fits in perfectly with the sets,” said Deborah Cook, who designed the costumes for the film. “It comes from the original concept illustrations for the film, the line work is kind of wiggly and we just brought that through to combine everything into our own unique look for Cheesebridge. The Cheesebridge look.” Cook, who also designed the costumes for ParaNorman, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Corpse Bride, does technical fabric testing and character studies as well as working with the project designer, directors and character designer to help develop the film’s visual language and the color script. Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People”, 1830 To get a vibe for the colors used in an era, Cook begins by looking at art from the time period. The color palette for the costumes came from Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People”. “It’s just got little bits of turquoise and ochre and different shades of yellow and the browns and the touches of token red is where the Red Hats came in.” “We wanted some authenticity to the era so we’ve used some velvets and chiffons and things, but we back them in something [else]. We use the properties of two fabrics, for example, Eggs’ pants has got a non-stretch suiting on the top, but it’s backed with lycra.” In terms of construction, some of the sewing on the surface is done with machines, but the costumes are always fitted onto the puppets by hand. “All of the puppets are hand made so they’ve got a certain difference in them, so even though there might be duplicate [puppets] of Eggs, each one has got it’s own little idiosyncratic shape. It might only be a few millimeters out here or there but it’s a big difference [in stop motion]. If you did that all by machine and tried to fit it, each puppet would look so different, so you really have to line it up by eye and fit it by hand. (Costume Image #2) When with such small subjects, scale is always a concern. If a character is supposed to be wearing denim, you cannot use the actual fabric, because once it’s blown up to full size on the screen, it will no longer look like denim. Laika uses laser etching to create everything from pressed velvets, to lace, to cutting elaborate patterns into materials. Cook also did intensive research on military and gang clothing. This was particularly a great deal of inspiration for Cheesebridge’s high society TKTKT, The White Hats and Snatcher’s exterminator crew The Red Hats. “For the white hats, it’s kind of a distilled [military] presence; lot of medals and sashes. Lord Portley-Rind looks militaristic, he’s got his plate on the front, he’s got his tails and his top hat and his feather plume. As far as gangs, [it was] to try and get a feel for how people customized their own clothing and how much of it came from or are influenced by more sort of upper class clothing. [So] when it comes to the Red Hats, [the mark making is] done in a very different way, it still denotes them as a kind of gang or a team or as a recruited party of some kind but they’ve sort of customized their own jackets.” To compliment the contorted lines of the sets, crooked line work was implemented into the designs of the costumes. TKTKTKT still functional… “We put [the lines] in places where the pants needed to stretch so that when he’s not moving those lines are closer together and when he moves it gives him the stretch that he needs. It really helps the animators if he needs to kneel down so he’s got a lot of lines around his knees and up around his butt. Another thing we do in the costume [is] we line the seams up so everything’s got several purposes, they also need to pass over the puppet’s access points so they’re not twisting the costumes around or impairing movement.”

Jorgen Klubien lives a double life: he's an animation artist in the United States and a pop singer in Denmark.

Sony Animation has posted this nicely produced nine-minute profile of Lauren Faust, who is developing their "Medusa" feature.

It's perhaps a mixed blessing that the only public personality who talks frequently about Walt Disney nowadays is the right-wing political commentator/conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.

A collection of rarely seen drawings by former Disney artist Jesse Marsh, who drew the "Tarzan" comic books for nearly twenty years.

Disney veteran Lino DiSalvo, the head of animation on "Frozen" who gained notoriety for comments about animating women, has left Disney to join Paramount Animation as its creative director. He is also slated to direct an upcoming animated feature at the studio.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the stodgy group of film industry workers who hand out the Oscars, has revealed a list of the 271 people it has invited to become members of its organization this year.

John Lasseter, who became a doctor for the second time last week, delivered the commencement speech to this year's graduating CalArts class. Lasseter's speech is a cross between a revival meeting and a rock concert, complete with rowdy audience members chiming in, like in this exchange.