Excellent Tron-style glowing vector 3D in the Iron Man end credits, courtesy of Danny Yount et al of Prologue in Venice, CA.

High-rez Quicktime:

(via Motionographer.)

Ben Meinhardt has been busy: his new four-part series “Perfectland” is airing on MTV, and is full of more of the same cuddly goodness seen in his 2004 short “Dancing Animals in Love.”

PerfectLand Part 4, “Progress: As Promised”:

Following on from the Clone Wars preview, here’s “The Cultural Adventures of Mister Otter” by Cappuccino Studio, featuring subtle gradient shading broken up by white rim light outlines, which flattens everything out and resembles watercolors on paper.

Perhaps not coincentally, loutre, the French for otter, is an apostrophe away from l’outre — French for “further” and commonly seen in the phrase l’outre-mer, “overseas” — as well as an additional accent ague away from outré: “outrageous.”

And this certainly is all of that. Everyone knows otters don’t use forks.

(Via Feed.)

So far, the new 3D Clone Wars tv series looks to be just as engaging and well-acted as the prequels. Too bad.

At least the character design is interesting…

Continued »

In 2005, Disney announced a sequel to Jim Henson’s 1982 creepy bizarro muppet fantasy The Dark Crystal, with no less than Genndy Tartakovsky directing, called Power of the Dark Crystal.

There’s a marketing press release repository disguised as a “production blog”; there’s not much there there, but it does mention that the Henson crew is working on it, so of course it’s animatronics again, but this time enhanced with CG.

Here’s an interview with Jim Henson just after the completion of the Dark Crystal, speaking of the processes and challenges involved in the making of the film.

He makes a number of points about the characters that sound like he’s describing a 3D project. To paraphrase: “Though the characters became quite technically complex, we tried to keep the interface simple enough that a single person could use it to deliver a performance, because that’s how you get acting.”

He ends by saying that though he’s primarily a visual thinker, he sometimes throws out “wonderful shots, because they no longer serve the story, which is what you have to do.”

…I never get used to Kermit’s voice coming out of his mouth.

“Ode to Summer” creator Ron Hui worked on Thru the Moebius Strip, an animated feature film based on a story by Jean “Möbius” Giraud, who also did production design.

Too bad it came out looking like a really long NVidia demo.

The film premiered at Cannes in 2005 as the first full-length 3D CGI movie made in China; this AWN article has pre-production details from the beginnings of the project, back in 2000.

“Sigg Jones” isn’t a commercial, French art students just like sneakers.

Yes, it’s another French student piece, credited to Matthieu Bessudo, Douglas Lassance, and Jonathan Vuillemin of Supinfocom, and made in 3DS Max.

This is the trailer for a documentary on the life of Jean “Möbius” Giraud, with commentary by Mike “Hellboy” Mignola and Enki “Nikopol” Bilal.

“Ode to Summer,” Ron Hui’s demo for his Chinese ink watercolor shader for Maya, from SIGGRAPH 2003.

(Via Drawn.)

French studio H5 directed this infographics-style video in 2002 for “Remind Me,” from Norwegian wistful-disco electro-pop duo Röyksopp’s first album.

This appears to be two trailers — one short and one long — for a Toei Company animated feature from 1963 called Wanpaku Ouji no Orochi Taiji (literally “The Naughty Prince Slays the Giant Serpent”) — released in English as The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon.

The movie is available undubbed in eleven pieces on YouTube, and though the story is legible even to the non-Japanese speaker, I believe I’ll need to find and procure this film legitimately for myself, if possible.

The animation and design are astonishing, particularly for Japan in 1963. Simple, clean lines lend economy of form to appealing and believable characters; the motion, though simple, is subtle and nuanced. The absolute believability of masses during rotations and deformities is as sure and solid as rotoscoped shapes. The color design and backgrounds are generally gorgeous, and the layouts and staging are all very clear and forthright.

The director of animation, Yasuji Mori, was also an illustrator of children’s books; three years later he was working as an animator on another Toei feature, Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon. The film didn’t have a satisfactory ending, but a 25-year-old inbetweener named Hayao Miyazaki suggested a better one, which was used. This brought Miyazaki notice within Toei, and started him on the path to directing.

Miyazaki’s work clearly exhibits much of the directorial philosophy of these early Toei pictures, including a clear-eyed and ingenuous sentimentality and the inclusion of actual peril for contrast.

This lovely spot for Bombay Sapphire was made by Psyop in 2003.

I always liked this blatantly honest promotional video from Psyop in 2004.

The use of ambient occlusion to represent airbrush-style design, composited no doubt with some flat gradients, is a nice touch, and an excellent way to add another literal dimension to a classically flat design style.

I also appreciate an agency’s acknowledgment of the debt owed to Psychological Operations in general.

It’s Blow-Your-Mind Friday! Belgian Mathieu Labaye directed and animated this short film. The animation reminds me quite strongly of Peter Chung, flavored with some Presstube- and Plympton-esque morphing action.

The narration is in French, but given the philosophical nature of the piece, I suspect it’s one of those things that’s better if you don’t speak the language, like foreign films, or anime. If you don’t get the nuances, you can’t tell if they’re awful. I know Waking Life would have been better in French.

Update: My thanks to the commenter who notified me that a subtitled version is now on YouTube, and shown below.

And I take all the cynical comments back — the nuances are better than I could have imagined if I were being optimistic. It’s a tribute to his late father, who had MS.

It’s Blow-Your-Mind Thursday! How did I just find out about this guy? “Kings of Power 4 Billion %” is Paul Robertson’s amazing ultra-violent sprite-tastic seizure-riffic heavy-metal cosmic anime-pocalypse opus, shown below in two parts:

Aarg! It cuts off! Amateurs! What kind of Internet is this, anyway? You can see the last few seconds starting at 5:12 of this lower-quality version, or you could download the entire high-quality 321MB version from BitTorrent.

(via Transbuddha.)