Some animated shorts for your soul…

Just a few animated shorts I thought were great:

Margarita – This short looks like it came from a full-length feature and the music and art are just fantastic and match each other perfectly. And there’s no dialog, which you hardly notice. The story might seem a bit odd until you understand that the “star” is like a achieving a dream… well, you’ll have to figure it out for yourself. I love the flight in the boat and the whales in the clouds. Very awesome and fantastical.

MARGARITA from HAMPA STUDIO on Vimeo.

——————–

The Third and the Seventh – This really isn’t a story-oriented short, it’s more of a… non-story short. I don’t know what you would call it. It’s more atmospheric I guess. It’s all computer rendered (as far as I can tell), but some of the rendering is so awesome that it looks completely real. (Well, I’m not sure mapping textures from photos really counts as “rendering” if one wants to get technical about it.) It explores some very welcoming architecture and features music from the wonderful sci-fi film Gattaca. (At least, I think that’s where the music is from…)

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

——————–

Alarm – A fun short. Love the Pixar references in the background, and the character and world design are wonderful. Nice clean animation as well. And it’s the first ever time a CGI character brushed his teeth and went to the bathroom at the same time, so it makes animation history!

Enjoy!

Disney making some more shorts

And I don’t mean pants.

I hate posting a link like this, since they go out of date so quickly, but it looks Disney is bringing back the shorts.

Perhaps they are following the tradition of Pixar, or perhaps John Lasseter made them, but I’m hoping there’ll be one of these shorts before Tangled and one before… er… is anything else coming out from Disney Feature Animation anytime soon?

Right now, they’ve got clips of a computer animated short called Tick Tock Tale, which looks great, and How to Hook Up Your Home Theater, bringing some nicely animated Goofy to the modern world.

I also noticed on their feature projects page, King of the Elves is no longer listed. Too bad, since that looked like the most interesting one, but then again, they might’ve completely messed up the story. I don’t think they’re cancelling the project, just putting it on hold for now.

(Speaking of shorts, it was also nice to see that Looney Tunes short before Legend of the Guardians. Hopefully the habit will continue! Now they just need to put shorts in front of live action movies as well, bwa ha ha ha! Create more animation jobs so I can have one!)

A few animation blogs…

There are, of course, a ton of animation blogs out there, but here are a few random ones I’ve been visiting recently:

Pencil Test Depot – This has a lot of great pencil tests, as the name might suggest. 2D animation, yes, but the principles of animation don’t change. Lots of great stuff there. I came across this blog some months ago before getting into Animation Mentor, but it came up again last night during my Animation Mentor Q&A and I was reminded of its goodness.

Blue Sky Disney – More of an entertainment business blog, but still lots of interesting animation news there.

The Pixar Blog – What Pixar fan hasn’t come across this blog? Dedicated to Pixar news, with a dash of its parent, Disney.

Good stuff.