New Year Animation From Russia’s Toonbox Animation Studio

When Russians make animations they do it better than anyone else. Toonbox is an animation studio in Russia and they’ve made this little New Year greeting that illustrates the Chinese year of the ox giving way to the new year of the tiger. It’s beautiful. I like Russian animation above all others. They seem to maintain a lovely, rough, hand-drawn, physical connection to what they are doing. They are an antidote to the completely lifeless injection-molded work of Disney and Pixar.

I found this via Cold Hard Flash

Animation: Muzorama (An Illustrated Surrealist CG Film)

Muzorama is a short surrealist animation made by students at Supinfocom Arles. Elsa Brehin, Raphaël Calamote, Mauro Carraro, Maxime Cazaux, Emilien Davaud, Laurent Monneron and Axel Tillement directed the film which took only six weeks to complete.  It reminds me of surrealist painting and film work being done in Europe during the twenties and thirties.  I will not link to the Supinfocom web site because it is the most inexcusable mess I have ever seen on the web.  Their animations are wonderful, but they need to immediately terminate whoever builds their web sites.  Seriously.

Blurry Animation: The Passenger

Chris Jones made this CG animation about a terrifying bus ride and an old-fashioned tape player. I’m on the fish’s side.  Totally.  I will criticize and say that the YouTube video is of inexcusably poor quality considering it’s a recent upload.  I’m over animators uploading trailers or compressed versions of their films as lures to purchase their DVDs.  You’re going to sell exactly enough DVDs to buy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.  Show us your film properly or don’t.  It’s very nice work, but really I’m just posting this to make my nasty YouTube point.