The Curative Power of Storytelling

A wonderful story about books brought to us by author, illustrator and animator William Joyce and the team at Moonbot. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is full of detail and theater with many book-related themes going on in some of the backgrounds of the story. Check out a previous short about the iPad version of this story I posted here earlier.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore available in the iTunes App Store for $4.99. You can even get a Moonbot case for your iPad that looks like the cover of the book.

An Animated Sentence

Another stunning illustrated short from local Seattle artist, Drew Christie for electric literature, promoters of writers and the short story. Inspired by one selected sentence, Drew animated a short for Nathan Englander's story, The Reader, about a discouraged author haunted by his one remaining reader. Combined with the moody music of Michael Guggino, his short animation sets the tone of a haunting landscape and I wonder if Englander's story can measure up to this dreamy sneak preview. Drew is an amazing talent of many skills and comes by his first name quite honestly. He is a prolific artist and would often turn out drawings on every page of old discarded books for his animated shorts. He tells stories by drawing on historical events such as the assassination of Lincoln which took 12 entire paperback books to complete. His lovely music video for the Moondoggies song, Empress of the North, is a must see. I posted it here a little over a year ago. So is History is Us, his short animation for the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle. To see far more of Drew's drawings, check out Democracy for the Cartoons. Some mighty fine work there!

The Fantastic Flying Books Bedtime Story

From the hand of legendary author / illustrator William Joyce of Toy Story and A Bug's Life comes the iPad app for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Joyce teamed up with his friends at Moonbot Studios to create this interactive iPad book-app around the story and animated film that accompanies it. There are many twists and turns you can take in this narrative bedtime story that blurs the line between books and animation. Every page is supposed to have some delightful animated cue built in to navigate. This is what eBooks are designed to do best. Of course it doesn't hurt to have the Emmy award-winning animation of William Joyce to produce it all. John Pavlus over at Co. Design has a wonderful write-up on this iPad app by Joyce and company today. The app is available in the iTunes App store for $4.99.

Kung Fu Panda 2 Top's International Box Office Charts

After 3 weeks in release, Kung Fu Panda 2 has finally top the international box office charts with a weekend total of $56.5 million in 45 territories. The kid friendly animated film has benefited from the booming 3D overseas marketplace and its global appeal is evident, having earned over $330 million worldwide.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated Poetry from smjwt on Vimeo.

You can view a better quality version of Forgetfulness and watch many more shorts of Billy Collins animated poetry here—each animated by a different artist. Collins poetry together with the animation of Julian Grey of Head Gear is enough to brighten any day! Thanks Sam!

The Red Nose Studio

Peek behind the curtain and watch how Chris Sickels of Red Nose Studio creates his charming figures and dioramas for his newly released book, Here Comes the Garbage Barge written by Jonah Winter. The book is based on a true story of the barge loaded with Long Island garbage which was rejected from every port along the Atlantic coast in 1987. Sickels has a wonderful blog link on his website which is chock full of more behind-the-scenes-sausage-making of his work. If that isn't enough, watch this one below which Terry Border of the wonderful Bent Objects blog recently created. Sickels is a magician when it comes to giving each of his characters a personality.

The Lost Thing

Tonight is the Academy Awards and my pick is for Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing nominated for best animated short. I was unfamiliar with Tan's illustration work until I saw a screening of the Oscar nominated shorts last weekend. There were no designer gowns, no red carpet laid out for us—only an amazingly long trail of spilled popcorn up three flights of stairs, down a long hallway and into the dismal theater—which actually made for a perfectly good intro to this odd little story.

The Lost Thing is based upon Tan's charming children's book by the same name, about a young boy who discovers a giant red creature while he is out searching for bottlecaps on the beach. When he tries to find where the thing belongs in this peculiar little world of industrial drabness, he is met with indifference from everyone he encounters. Work on this 15 minute film took 8 years to complete by a 4-person team in Melbourne Australia, using CGI (computer generated imagery) along with 2D handpainted elements. (That amounts to less than 2 minutes of film per year if you can imagine.) Tan was the writer, director, designer and illustrator on the project. Even with the aid of CGI, almost every surface is essentially handpainted using non-digital materials including acrylic paint, pencil, oil and collage, according to Tan's website. This risk undoubtedly prolonged the entire process, but helped to avoid the artificiality of so many computer animated films. His imaginative characters are delightful and endearing, but it is the scenery and incidental things ongoing at the edges of the frame which give this entire film so much texture. If you look quickly, you will catch glimpses of some nice handlettered typography—graffiti, random numbers, nonsensical industrial signage—oh, and bottlecaps. You just can't go wrong with any story that includes a collection of bottlecaps. 

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PostOscarScript:

Yeahhhh, The Lost Thing just won!!!

Oh, and by the way, the 2004 first edition of The Lost Thing is available on Amazon for $263 now.

Typogami

Typogami from Jeroen Krielaars on Vimeo.

For more info or purchase visit Calango.
:: Via This Isn't Happiness.

Say it Like You Mean it

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
Poem by Taylor Mali.

First Anime to Win an Oscar

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, aka Spirited away, is the first anime to win an Oscar, for Best Animated Feature, in 2003. At 124 minutes Hayao Miyazaki's film is also the longest movie to win this category.

Flakiness

Create a typographic snowflake from any word or your name with David Hunter's interactive flake generator, NameFlake. Enter another word in the Winter Wonderland, and you get an instant snowstorm on your desktop. Almost as much fun as the real thing. From David Hunter, a designer and developer based in London. Beware of avalanche danger.

Letter A

Bianca Chang is a paper artist, illustrator and creative problem solver based in Sydney, Australia. All her paper sculptures are made from photocopy paper and cut entirely by hand using only pencil, ruler, compass point, and sharp blades.

One More Reason to Get an iPad

The Heart of the Bottle, by the wonderful author and illustrator, Oliver Jeffers, of The Incredible Book Eating Boy. Read by Helena Bonham Carter. Available on the iPad in December.

Dingbats

Dingbats are shirt sleeve relatives to printers ornaments, type ornaments, decorative rules, printers flowers and fleurons. The word dingbat is said to have been coined in 1904 according to the editors at Visual Editions, and just like their counterparts, they are used for spacers in typesetting. They were originally adapted as ornamentation to enliven the layouts and to break up large blocks of text so it might appear less solid. Actual dingbat designs can vary tremendously but they are usually decorative in nature, unlike ornaments which can be pictorial as well. Lucy Brown Studios has made their own interpretation of dingbats in this sweet little film.

Dingbat from Lucy Brown Studio on Vimeo.

Moondoggies Animation

I just love this new music video sent to me by my former student, Amanda Moore. She and her good friend, Drew Christie who did all of the beautiful illustration work in this animation, have been extremely busy. In addition to being a terrific graphic designer, Amanda also has a film school background and has produced a number of very nice animated shorts. Her partner, Drew is a brilliant and prolific illustrator working in a variety of media. Produced as a music video for the band Moondoggies, their video Empress of the North tells the story of love lost in a charming and very heartfelt style. Some of Drew's original hand-painted animation cells and prints will be for sale at the Moondoggies new release party at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle this coming Saturday night, October 9th. More of Drew's lovely work is featured on his blogsite, Democracy for the Cartoon. Look for the song, Empress of the North on the Moondoggies forthcoming album, Tidelands, due out on October 13th on Hardly Art. Great stuff!

TOY STORY 3

If you like the first two movies of Toy Story, then my friends, don't hesitate to watch this one. Toy Story 3 was just brilliant, Pixar really did a great job on this one.

The main characters are back, Woody and Buzz together with Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Rex, Jessie and more. This time Andy is all grown up, and is going to college, which leaves an uncertain future for Woody and his company. Trouble and adventures started when Woody's friend thought they where all going to be junked. Well I'm not gonna tell you all the details of the movie since it will be much better if you watch it yourself.

Another interesting part for you to watch in the movie is near the end, which for me was really touching and that's coming from a 30 plus year old guy. I never taught that animation can get this emotional, and believe me, some of my friends who have watched the movie even cried, yup and those where adults hahahaha. You better prepare something to wipe those tears off.

This was just a perfect movie and although I felt sad since this is the finale of the Toy Story trilogy. My hats off to the Director and Writers of the movie, and to Pixar I repeat BRILLIANT. And to you guys and gals, children and adults, you better watch this movie or buy a copy of Toy Story 3 DVD because this would be a keeper.

TV SERIES THAT HAVE CAUGHT MY ATTENTION

There are plenty of shows on cable to choose from. My wife wont watch the cable when I had the remote since I jump from one channel to another. But there are some series that I do stick around and finished before jumping to another one. One of it is Wipeout, they say that laughter is the best medicine, then watch this one. It always makes me laugh. Especially when the contestant try to hurdle those balls hahahaha. Although male contestant usually wins in the end, I do wish some female contestant would dominate too.

And also there is the anime series which is for me is the best, that is why I get cable, for the sole reason of having to watch anime. When it comes to anime Bleach is the one for me. Kurosaki Ichigo is really a cool character, having to wield that massive sword of his and fighting of hollows, arrancars, espadas and of course the very powerful Aizen. I hope Ichigo defeats Aizen, although I think it will be a fierce one because Aizen is one tough dude, powerful, cunning and very unforgiving and another thing that is a mystery to me about Aizen is his sword, I haven't seen it's Shikai or its Bankai. So, how about you? whats your favorite series in cable TV.

NINJA ASSASSIN

Now this is the type of ninja movie i want to see. Cool fighting scenes was great, and add to it the gore and violence and blood splashing all around. The story is nice and you wont feel bored. Of course there are no twist to the plot in this movie, cause who needs one, in this action pack film.

The cast is good especially the lead man, Raizo (Rain), i just wish they would had pick a much hotter female to pair up with Raizo although Naomie Harris did a decent job.

The only part i don't like about the movie is the chase scene where the ninja are trying to catch Raizo on a highway. What??? aren't ninja's supposed to be stealthy and rather hide on the dark to kill its victims. Not run around jumping on cars and all.

But if you like ninja movies like i do, you cant miss this one. Top notch action from beginning till end. But let me remind you there is lots of gore, blood and violence in this movie.

MOST COMPLEX CG HUMAN

The character of Aki Ross in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (USA, 2001) is composed of over 100,000 subdivided polygons; she has 60,000 hairs, each individually modelled and animated, taking up a quarter of the computer processing power, and 16 motion capture cameras were used to create and animate her body.

ASTRO BOY

Wow i really like this movie, although the story is far far away from the story of Astro that i have seen on anime series. But for the kids today who is not familiar with Astro Boy they're going to have a blast with this one. The movie brings values such as friendship, responsibility which can be nice for kids. The animation was great, the fighting scene was nice too. But for those die hard Astro Boy fans who have followed this character from the start would be really mad since the origin of Astro is way of from the original one. But still for me, i still like it.

Astro Boy movie photo: