Here’s the teaser for a godawful looking low-budget European co-production … waitasec…my bad…this is DreamWorks’s Megamind. By now, I’ve come to expect very little from DreamWorks product, but this one strikes me as being even blander and clumsier than their usual bland and clumsy style. It looks like a slapped together patchwork of CG cliches, so much so that in these clips the characters appear uncomfortably detached from their background environments. The strain of a three-films-a-year schedule is becoming painfully evident.

Let’s Pollute by Geefwee Boedoe Yesterday, the Annecy International Animation Festival announced the selections for its 34th edition, which takes place June 7 through 12. This is a milestone year for the world’s oldest continuously running animation festival as it marks its fiftieth year of existence. The Annecy site has the complete list of selections for shorts, TV series, music videos and commercials. Feature film selections will be announced next month. Their site states that 48 animated features were submitted. Wow! Of note: one of only two American films in the short film category is Let’s …

The Realist is a graphic story by illustrator and comics artist Asaf Hanuka about one family’s search for a new home after their current living arrangements are upset. The strip was originally serialized in a Hebrew language version in the Israeli Newspaper Calcalist . Hanuka has re-lettered it in English and is publishing it on the web, one page a week. English speakers may find it interesting to compare some of…

The Realist is a graphic story by illustrator and comics artist Asef Hanuka about one family’s search for a new home after their current living arrangements are upset. The strip was originally serialized in a Hebrew language version in the Israeli Newspaper Calcalist . Hanuka has re-lettered it in English and is publishing it on the web, one page a week. English speakers may find it interesting to compare some of the English language pages with their Hebrew counterparts in that the Hebrew pages read right-to-left, creating some challenges for the conventions used by comics artists to guide your eye through dialog balloons in the proper order…

Are you a fan of Avatar The Last Airbender? Then you need to put up some sweet Avatar The Last Airbender Wallpapers up on your desktop PC.

Another Justin just showed me this site FontDiner.com Great fonts in the style of Yester-year. Not free, but pretty cheap  ( $29 is cheap for 12 fonts) Also I got an email yesterday about this site, FantasyFonts.com which does have free fonts. And yeah, I know there are like a million font websites (more or less free) but what the heck, I’ll throw some traffic to these two today.

If you’re an artist or a multi-media marketing professional looking to direct today’s modern fat-free budget or Internet-placed movies or videos, you know you can benefit from knowing the best ways to generate an action-packed movie storyboard. Now this has been a hard task, often enough, in times gone by. You’ve needed to rely upon the temperamental sketch artist and photographer, and they don’t work cheap even as they are giving you a hard time!

Pretty sure the piece is called Worth Enough 2500, but I can’t find the arteest. I’d love to buy a decent print. UPDATE! He’s been found … Radoslav Zilinsky   http://www.radoxist.com/ , the big version actually had his URL in the bottom right. Kripes, he even sells relatively cheap prints too! Click to Super size it (3MB detailed version)

A sketchbook-style piece (with many funny moments) from Malcolm Sutherland whose consistently original works are positioning him as one of Canada’s top indie animators. Description from his Vimeo page: [The film] takes a look at people at a “La Fete Nationale” celebration in Montreal. The film was an independent production, directed and animated by Malcolm Sutherland with music by Kevin Kardasz, and was produced with financial assistance from The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Tonight Comedy Central debuts a new animated series Ugly Americans . The show was created by New York animator Devin Clark . Here’s a short interview with him about how the show made the leap from a webseries into a TV show. The Flash-animated series was made at Augenblick Studios in Brooklyn and Cuppa Coffee in Toronto. If you’ve watched the show, please

I woke up this morning (this afternoon, to be honest) hating animation. Blame it on last night’s interminable ASIFA-East screening of uninspiring and insipid indie shorts. Only something truly beautiful could uplift my spirit and make me appreciate this art form again. Thankfully, I stumbled across Volgens de vogels ( According to Birds ), a 2008 graduation film by Linde Faas (b. 1985). Touches of Norstein throughout, and that’s not a bad thing.

I have been into anime since 1984 when I was a 4 year old little boy. It has been a genre of exciting and intriguing events for me. It is a great way to really start to acknowledge a lot around you from political views to just plain entertainment of the world.

One more plug for Craig Yoe’s Milt Gross book (it deserves it) now that you can order it on Amazon (for $29.19). Craig searched high and low for unseen Gross art to illustrate his 40-page introduction. I told him I had an unpublished Gross sketch given to me by Bob Clampett, but unfortunately I could not find it in time for inclusion in the book. I just found it yesterday. So here it is – Gross caricatures Clampett (and himself?), with Clampett as a director yelling “Cut!”. Gross asks “With what?” What is Gross about to eat?

Florian Afflerbach is an architect and architectural artist, and one of the founders of the Urban Sketchers group blog, which I wrote about previously (also here and here ). While many artists who sketch architectural scenes rely on a suggestion or informal feeling for perspective, Afflerbach has a masterful command of its nuances, at times tackling drawings in three point or even curved perspective. His sketches of buildings, streets and interiors have a wonderful feeling of place, as well as a tactile sense of weight, solidity and, in the case of larger structures, monumentality. He often lays out perspective construction lines under his drawings, and …

How many of us know the definition of graphics, animation and multimedia? It is very much possible that an outsider has a common definition for all the three terms. Before a person enters this industry it is important to understand the primary difference between graphics, animation and multimedia.