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Chris Robinson looks at a few different ways to read the Ottawa grand prize-winning film "The Night of the Carrots."

The post Ottawa Animation Festival 40th Anniversary Look-Back: ‘The Night of the Carrots’ appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

After being booted by the school last month, the legendary filmmaker has reached an agreement to continue teaching at the school.

The post Victory for Priit Pärn Who Will Continue Teaching At Estonian Academy of Arts appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

How does one of the most famous animators in the world get booted from his country’s only animation school?

The post Why Was Estonian Animation Legend Priit Pärn Booted From His Country’s Only Animation School? appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Hundreds of other animated shorts were released last year; which ones were the best?

Laura Heit’s Animation Sketchbooks (published this month by Chronicle Books in the US, and earlier by Thames & Hudson in the UK) offers a peek inside the private sketchbooks of 51 (mostly independent) animation filmmakers. The 320-page hardcover has a straightforward format: each artist is allotted 4-8 pages that includes a career overview, brief statements about the process of sketching and keeping a sketchbook, and a gallery of sketchbook pages and stills from short films.

The artists in the book include many of the biggest names in indie animation (Koji Yamamura, Michaela Pavlatova Georges Schwizgebel, Regina Pessoa, Priit Parn, Paul Driessen) as well as some artists who are better known for their commercial work (Stephen Hillenburg, Luis Cook, David Polonsky, Fran Krause). It’s safe to say that unless you’re a regular festival attendee—or a reader of Cartoon Brew—many of the names will be unfamiliar. That’s not a criticism though. These are all artists who deserve greater exposure and this book does a fine job of giving it to them.

There’s a remarkable range of techniques, approaches and visual styles represented in the volume, as the author Heit explains in the intro:

You will discover many types of sketchbook keepers within these pages. You will find early ideas plotted out, sometimes repeatedly until their purpose becomes clear, thumbnail sketches of developing characters, mini storyboards scratched out in a hurry. There are those who try out new mark-making techniques, searching for the next film’s look. Others use the pages to doodle mindlessly as a kind of artistic respite, their work here unrelated to their film projects. Some keep a book like a travelogue, carrying it with them on all of their adventures…Others, such as Luis Cook, treat their sketchbook like a reliquary, part scrapbook, part personal project.

My only gripe about this otherwise commendable project is that the film stills took up an excessive amount of space in the book. When an artist like Koji Yamamura only has six pages, it’d have been preferable to not see a third of that space devoted to film stills. The reason for their inclusion—to connect the sketches to filmmaking practice—is perfectly valid, but the stills could have been presented in a way that didn’t consume large chunks of space that would have been better devoted to the book’s main selling point: the hard-to-see sketchbooks.

Not only will this book introduce the reader to names worth knowing in independent animation, it will inspire and challenge any artist with a non-commercial streak to push their own craft further. That, in itself, makes it a recommended purchase.

Order Animation Sketchbooks for $36.07 on Amazon

Not About Us is a sensitively composed student film effort by Swiss artist Michael Frei:

The short is a symbolic staging of the complex dance of rapprochement between a man and a woman. A mechanical ballet flitting between black and white, light and dark and countless mirroring motions—until at last contact is made and a relationship develops.

Frei recently wrapped up the film’s festival run, which included screnings at Annecy, Hiroshima, Fantoche, DOK-Leipzig and the Krakow Film Festival. He is a graduate of HSLU (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts), but produced Not About Us mostly during an exchange year at the Estonian Academy of Art under the mentorship of filmmakers Priit and Olga Parn. Frei kept this blog during the production of the short.

If you can’t make it to Annecy this week – you can always stay home with a case of wine, with labels drawn by an international collection of animators. Our friend Dave Filipi recently spotted this bottle of wine (above left) with a label drawn, storyboard style, by Bill Plympton. Further investigation found that several years ago, Portuguese winemaker Niepoort recruited a group of renown cartoonists to illustrate their various international labels (Plympton told me “It’s something to look at while you get drunk. I did mine five years ago.”).

Apparently each label uses an artist from the area the wine will be marketed in: Phil Mulloy created a label (above right) for the British market; Priit Pärn drew the Estonian label; Fintan Taite, an award-winning Dublin-based cartoonist created the bottle for Ireland; cartoonist Martin Kellerman provided art for the Swedish label.

For a closer look at Bill Plympton’s label, click here. A full rundown of the winemakers complete line: here.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Bill Plympton, Phil Mulloy, Priit Pärn