Thursday is Matthias Hoegg‘s graduation film from the Royal College of Art in London.

Wonderful color! And the limited palette allows some really excellent cel-shading. Heavily comics-influenced — the humans have Bá faces and Eisner poses; the sets are made of lots of flat landscape pieces and orthogonal pans past flat backgrounds; and the color, with broad swaths and subtle gradients, looks like Cam Kennedy‘s old Star Wars work.

It’s a bit long, and the voice work undercuts the already stiff acting and weakish plot, but the visuals carry the piece. The cel shading is used to make space for the stellar texture work, with fantastic layout and color design supporting the kind of balance of form and texture that you normally only see in expensive anime.

There’s also something interesting about the models — it appears that there’s a randomized jitter applied to all the vertices, which loosens up the silhouettes and contours, and makes it look even more like hand-painted work.

It’s all very well-considered and deliberate-feeling, and makes much of the rest of modern CG seem even more about spazzy reactionary trendiness. Fish barrel bang, I know, but there are waaaay too many fish in there, and they’re evil.

Credit goes to Clément Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sébastien Eballard, and Quentin Chaillet, all 2008 graduates of Supinfocom.

Watch Gary in HD on Vimeo.

[Via Motionographer.]

Goebelins encore, naturellement. Blending 2D and 3D, they’re getting better every year. So much has to do with restraint: which things you emphasize, and at which times. Matching 3D camera speed and pacing to the 2D character’s speed and pacing is a lot of it. The camera is a spoiler, and can hide a world of errors. Shading is only a tiny piece of the puzzle.

Gorgeous painting helps too. Very anime, especially in the wide shots, with the curving cirrus clouds. That fake wide-angle lens, though an anime cliche*, still works to stretch out the horizon and emphasize the timelessness of a moment.

Credits: Charles-André LEFEBVRE, Manuel TANON-TCHI, Louis TARDIVIER, Sébastien VOVAU, Emmanuelle WALKER. Apparently they are all from FRANCE.

[via Motionographer.]

*I’m looking at you, Voices of a Distant Star**.

**I couldn’t remember the name of this Non-Ironic Anime Tropes Clearinghouse but it was tracked down by googling “anime emo”.

(Via Drawn.)

High quality at Stage 6.

It’s a curious artifact — the short is steeped in a typical anime combination of childlike innocence and an oddly naïve eroticism, complete with creepy Lolita angle.

The fact that it’s played so straight — with sensitive attention paid to movement and a nostalgic design worthy of Miyazaki — just makes it more unnerving, as it appears that we’re intended to take it all at face value. Far be it from me to moralize, but I get nervous around depictions of the fetishisation of the disenfranchised.

There’s some subtle 3D in there too, which probably explains this short’s inclusion in a collection called “Digital Juice.”

The music is the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning.”

The official site has Hi-res Quicktimes.

From the AnimWatch mini-interview with Price:

Putting cel shading together with hand painted backgrounds was the general idea. Each frame had to look like an illustration.

Great success! The look of gouache on rough paper works like it worked for studios in the 50′s: it’s economical and evocative without being distracting, an excellent foil for the simple, cel-shaded characters. However, unlike many of those studios (I’m looking at you, Hanna-Barbera), rather than throwing backdrops up slapdash, Price uses the simplicity and versatility of the style to take the design further: he can afford to give nearly every shot in “Potapych” its own background, with colors and design carefully tuned to match the mood of the story at that moment.

The hereby-mononymous Amid elaborated on the vicissitudes of this style in one of his notorious cage-fight death-match posts on Cartoon Modern: “Hanna Barbera vs. Walt Peregoy/Eyvind Earle.”

Go bears!

And here’s Quicktime with stereo.

The song on the record is the song sung by the man in the shower in “Le Building,” thanks no doubt to the sound designer for both pieces, Olivier Crouet.

I believe “Gnap Gnap” translates roughly to “Nom Nom Nom.”

“Le Building” in high-res on Stage6.

Excellent in every respect. They pulled off an extra-nifty trick here you don’t see done well very often.