John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

1066 and all that moves

The Bayeaux Tapestry is a famous bit of fabric. It's not really a tapestry, but it's history, on cloth, and elements of it have been used to tell the story of early Britain.

Here's a video that uses animation to make (a good bit of) it come to life.

World history, as told through a three-minute flipbook

Wonderfully fun bit of animation here.

The Sims do the Royal Wedding

It's, uh, probably not going to roll out just like this. (From ITN.)

Simon's Cat and a bunny, for Easter

A new Simon's Cat, with a timely theme for this weekend.

Vanishing Point

A very imaginative bit of animation. Created by  Takuya Hosogane.

 

Vanishing Point from Takuya Hosogane on Vimeo.

Happiness is a warm blanket

Peanuts specials are plentiful - almost four dozen of them, in fact. Happiness Is A Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown is notable in that it's the first production to be made     since Bill Melendez died in 2008. Melendez was the guiding light of Peanuts specials since A Charlie Brown Christmas (if you listen carefully to Charlie Brown's dialogue, you can hear how his line readings echo Melendez's Mexican accent). Amazon will have it for sale next week.

The script, as always, is based on Charles M. Shulz's original strips, particularly the storyline of Linus losing his beloved blanket, which appeared in the 1960s. (Colour me biased, but prime time for Peanuts.)

Here's a preview:

The Incredibles gets the Blu-Ray treatment

Brad Bird's The Incredibles is not only one of my favourite animated movies, it's among my favourite, period. I love the characters, the story, the breezy recreation of silver-age comicdom, the in-jokes, the performances (Sarah Vowell's Violet, Holly Hunter's Elastigirl/Helen and particularly Brad Bird's Edna Mode) and especially the fantastic score by Michael Giacchino. It's a film we watch together at least once a year.

The DVD set itself was good, with extras that included Easter eggs galore, including a hilarious recreation of the plot done with sock puppets. Now there's news of a new edition for Blu-Ray, with new features, set to come out in April.

The catch: we don't yet have a Blu-Ray machine. I've put off the decision for, well, ages. We have, after all, managed. This might be the tipping point.

 

Simon's Cat discovers sticky tape

Brand new from Simon's Cat and Simon Tofield. Hilarious, as expected.

 

Simon's Cat discovers snow

This was posted a year ago this week; with all of the snow we've had in St. John's (and I'm sure elsewhere) lately, maybe you'll get a kick out of it again, or for the first time if you haven't seen it. Click here to see the whole Simon's Cat series.

 

French Roast

I've been there. I've ordered a coffee and found myself without the money I thought was in my pocket to pay for it.

French Roast is the first film by Fabrice Joubert, and was nominated last year for an Oscar for best animated short. (Logorama won.)

Have a look. It's brilliant.

Marcel the Shell

... with shoes on.

This has been such a hit on the web for the last few months, and is a great example of how a career disaster doesn't mean the death of a career. Jenny Slate got hired by Saturday Night Live, and then got dropped by Saturday Night Live after one season that was notably largely for her accidentally dropping an F-bomb on her debut episode.

Now she has a whole new following because of the Marcel videos she makes with her partner. A book deal is the works. Probably more.

Good on her.

Now, have a laugh!

Papercuts and animation: The Thomas Beale Cipher

You don't have to have stacks of servers to make great animation, or clay, or an exquisite way with a pen. The Thomas Beale Cipher is a short film made with a low-tech approach: papercuts. It's brilliant. Read more about it here.

Thanks to Andres for pointing me to it.

 

Simon's Cat does Christmas

Simon's Cat is a favourite feature for my sister, my wife, me, and countless thousands of others who flock to the YouTube page of a different kind animated puddy-tat. Here's this year's Christmas offering.

Disney hiring logic on women, 1938

As spotted here.

Great logic in that paragraph: "... that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school."

Bender bench

As seen on Buzzfeed. Futurama's Bender finally gets a park-based tribute. 

The Pink Panther squeezes in a little advertising

I caught the pinkness in this ad for LG's very, very thin TVs, before I caught the Pink Panther itself. Clever. It's part of a series that also had nods to Michael Jackson (the other thin white - sort of - duke) and Avatar; you can see the lot here.

The Princess Bride, as retold by funny bunnies and in Lego

The latest entry from Starz (which has bunnies tell the plots of famous movies, in just 30 seconds) is about one of our family's favourites, The Princess Bride:

There's more to be seen, too, and it's not at all inconceivable. Here's the Lego version:

You can see more Lego parodies, from Jaws to Napoleon Dynamite to Blade Runner, right here.

Hey! Let’s watch some cartoons

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, March 11, 2010. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

When I was a kid, cartoons were best watched on Saturday mornings. That is, that’s when you could most easily find them in abundance. Nowadays, there are whole networks devoted to ‘toons, and the web is rife with animation. In other words, you could easily spend every waking minute watching one kind of animation or another.

 The range of quality for online animation is startling. This week’s column is devoted to some of the best … and to some other stuff, too.

Logorama
Logorama won the Oscar on Sunday night for best animated short. It runs just 16 minutes long, and many of its stars – hundreds of them, actually – are world-famous. They’re not people, though; they’re logos. Nonetheless, they’re characters in this remarkable film, with attributes that are, well, like people. I wonder how many media literacy courses will take advantage of this clever film.

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
While Logorama got the big prize in L.A., I actually liked this Irish short even more. Granny O’Grimm looks just like your stereotypical sweet-hearted granny … until she starts talking, that is, and you realize her bedtime story is infected with a lifetime of repressed anger. Don’t get the wrong idea: this is hilarious, and (to use a local frame of reference) like something Codco might have cooked up. It looks great, too. The best news on the site: the makers are planning a series.

How They Donut
One of the other nominees in the best animated short category featured a cheese-loving Englishman and his silent, remarkably efficient dog. Wallace & Gromit have had Oscar love before – three times, in fact – so perhaps it was someone else’s turn. I haven’t seen the new short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, yet, but I had a good laugh watching this, a making-of special … with a joke of a title to match. [Note: Since this column was published, the video for this item has been removed.]

Runaway
More and more, I love the NFB site, which offers crisp, high-quality uploads of shorts and full-length films. Runaway is the third film by animator Cordell Barker, and it’s a hoot, what with a cast of characters about a train gone wild, accompanied by a pulsing, rhythmic score … but oblivious to the dangers that are literally around the bend. Barker made The Cat Came Back, a Canadian favourite, in 1988; you can watch that online, too, if you poke around for it. 

Hungry!!
Don’t have the time today to commit to most animated shorts, even those running just seven or eight minutes? Hungry!! will do the trick, since you can see the whole thing (girl meets muffin, muffin gets revenge) while you’re dialing a number and waiting for someone to pick up.

RenderMan
RenderMan is a propriety system that Pixar uses to make movies like Up, Wall*E and more; you can actually buy a copy for yourself, if you’ve got the cash. Movie fans, though, will dive right into the rich material on this site, which explains fully how those amazing details in Pixar movies come to be. Remember the realistic food in Ratatouille’s kitchen sequences, for instance? You’ll learn how the artists made the grapes and steaks look good enough to eat, and then some.

Elsewhere this week
 
Whiteout
George Murray is a St. John’s writer, and the author of Bookninja, a book-focused blog that has a worldwide following. He’s also a renowned poet. You can read one of his poems, Whiteout, here in the prestigious literary journal Granta, and listen to Murray read it, too.

BoardTracker
Google may be the default choice for looking stuff up on the internet, but always remember that even Google has its limits, and that other tools can be very useful for finding particular things. BoardTracker specializes in following that old-fashioned corner of the web, the message boards. They may have flourished even before the boy-band era, but they’re still vital.

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and works with CBC News. John is on Twitter right here.

Homer Simpson sure has some stones

It sat on the PVR for a while before I got to see it (the boy's enthusiasm prodded me on), but last month's Simpsons episode on curling, Boy Meets Curl, was not only funny, but had some decent curling jokes in it, too. (That said, I don't curl. The curlers may feel differently.) The setup was that Homer and Marge make it to Vancouver for the Olympics, in a supposedly mixed-curling category.

It looks like Americans, though, weren't much in on the joke. The episode ranks among the least-watched Simpsons episodes ever ... largely because it aired as counterprogramming to the real Olympics itself.

Wallace and Gromit: How They Donut

I mentioned this in my Telegram column today, and thought you might like to see it: a comprehensive making-of, behind-the-scenes peek at the latest Wallace and Gromit short. Have fun.

Watch Logorama, the Oscar-winning short

Logorama, which won the Academy Award for best animated short on Sunday night, involves about 2,500 different corporate logos in about 16 minutes. Enjoy it.

Ricky Gervais Show, revisited a la Flintstones

 

Last Friday, I recorded the debut episode of HBO's Ricky Gervais Show, and we caught it later on. It's fun, and it's strange; if you haven't heard, they've taken old podcasts that Gervais made over the years with his long-time collaborator Stephen Merchant and their comic foil, Karl Pilkington. The two-dimensional, jaunty animation style is like something right out of the Sixties (think the Jetsons or Flintstones), except that what you see is most definitely not for the kids.

I've heard many of the original podcast episodes (the in-the-flesh chaps are above), and remembered some of the inane exchange between Pilkington and the others over everything from technology to human reproduction. Seeing the banter, including Pilkington's utterly daft ideas, come to life is something else.

Hit the beach

Looked out the window; still February. This helps:

TV1: Beach from sixty40 on Vimeo.

T-shirt war!

Quite the hoot, and a fun bit of stop-motion animation. As seen here. Curiously, you can buy pretty much any of the specific shirt designs you see in the video, although the real fun lies in the sequence. 

Amazing: See sand animation tell a story of Ukrainian history

This video is astonishing. It's of a woman named Kseniya Simonova, who won the Ukraine's Got Talent competition, using what's called sand animation. Incredible, and small wonder 12 million people have watched this video so far (I learned about it from Roger Ebert's blog).