The Progressive Animation Review

FPC10

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:21:28 GMT

hi animation community!
I think you might like a visit to the animation site
Fantasy Pleasure Complex #10

just launched, with the web premiere of 4 new animated films
also, if your'e new to the site, there's archives

Genius Party - Winners of Competition up online!

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:19:02 GMT

Back again after the usual long hiatus to present a link showcasing the shorts in the next part of Genius Party, a two part anthology coming out by Studio 4C. The first one was just reciently released in theatres and has a review by Mark Schiling:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20070628r1.html

He also did an overview of the studio here:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20070628r2.html

And finally a link showcasing the winners of the competition!

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=1000494556&blogID=284560944&Mytoken=198CAA1B-2659-484C-8E9DEE0ED93D447440602623

Enjoy!

Film of interest

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:49:10 GMT

Not necessarily animation, but at least drawn - for the Nara Yoshimoto savvy, looks like a documentary's coming out:

http://www.apple.com/jp/quicktime/trailers/tfc/nara/

Amazing Nuts, Studio 4c

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 22:59:02 GMT

Trailer to Amazing Nuts

Glass Eyes

Director: Takashi Yamashita
Character designer: Koji Morimoto
Music: RAM RIDER (Smile Again)
Site: Amazing Nuts!

(Review, Screencaps, and Video Itself)

Sita Sings the Blues

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:21:18 GMT

Nina Paley released a trailer to her 72-minute movie "Sita Sings the Blues".

I've been following Paley a bit before she started this project, so I'm incredibly excited to see the end product.

Check the trailer here

Site's here

bueno

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 04:29:37 GMT

I Pen Ward's short animation section, especially Barrista
and his Television debut is so charming, called Adventure Time.

hot spotwinds gamdrops goalo

Lasky on Prescott

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:51:22 GMT

Seattle Cartoonist David Lasky wrote a wonderful post about Prescott Wright, who just passed away.
right here.

The Mouse and his Child

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 06:59:41 GMT

Check this one out -- it's like Toy Story only abysmally bleak!

actually, if you can get your hands on the book, do so. the movie rushes the story along a little too much, but still, the animation is pretty darn cool.

Les Proverbes

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 04:07:43 GMT

Flash animated piece by an animation group called Cellofan.

The Animation Show

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 00:41:19 GMT

It's that time of year again. Time to go down to the theater and catch one of the screenings of Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge's The Animation Show. For those of you who have never experienced it, The Animation Show is a traveling compilation of some of today's most illustrious and interesting independent short animations. It's a great chance to see some great animation as it's meant to be seen, on beautiful 35mm film.

The films included in this year's program (thus far) are listed here at the official website, and the schedule is here.

Persepolis

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 11:54:20 GMT

Persepolis is an upcoming 2D animated movie based on the comic series by Marjane Satrapi, an autobiography about her experience during the Islamic Revolution of Iran and her experiences in the Western world afterwards.

If anybody has read the comic, they’d know about its excellent mixture of history, drama, humor and a touch of surrealism topped by its cute and simple style. As a big fan of the comic, I’m honestly very excited to see this movie.

Tachigui - The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 03:55:54 GMT

Mamoru Oshii's (Ghost in a Shell) upcoming animated film, Tachigui, is a delicious entrance into the world (or at least the Japanese perception of the world) of fast food and the people who love/hate/create it.

Sources say, and when I say sources I'm saying "every other work Oshii's previously done", that this would be yet another philosophical, political and historic outlook on a part of Japanese life through something that would usually seem insignificant.

The film is done in an animated cutout fashion that will definately rock the "anime aesthetics" some. Just the look by itself is enough to get me excited.

Trailer can be found here

Overview here

More Chad VanGaalen

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 00:32:11 GMT

This man is my hero!

From his song Clinically Dead:

And a video he did for another band named "Love as Laughter":

1K Project II

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 06:38:31 GMT

Pretty much the first Machinima animated short I’m posting, which is primarily working with some racing game engine. I’m not sure about the method, but there is about 1000 cars here driving at the same time. It’s pretty cool.

Machinima is a form of 3D animation that uses real time rendering software to finalize. Normal Rendering software is not used for these, which allows production to be quicker. Most Machinima works are done in existing game engines that allows such quick real time rendering.

Some 3D animators expect Machinima to be the future of 3D animation as a whole, though presently, real time rendering engines can’t handle the power that is offered to rendering software that is made for films from Pixar or Dreamworks… but maybe in the future the rendering phase of animation will no longer be a time consuming process, and all things will be done in real time.

Click here to check out the 1K Project II

Chad VanGaalen

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 18:31:11 GMT

In the same vein as Hobo Divine and Jim Ether, Chad VanGaalen is a one man band and a one man animation house all at the same time. And like Hobo and Jim, Chad animates his own awesome music videos.

Anybody that was into the Yellow Submarine may have fun with these.

Flower Gardens

Red Hot Drops

Fallen Art

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 05:58:10 GMT

Polish CG short done in 2004 by Tomasz Baginski, the man who directed “The Cathedral”, a more experimental CG animated short. For anyone who was into the Animation Show, Fallen Art was featured on it in 2005 (I believe).

Watch it here (Warning, Graphic)

Check out the official site here.

The Bead Game

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 08:14:11 GMT

An animated short featuring none other than beads.

Check it out

Summary of Kazuto Nakazawa Q&A session - and Misc Otakon stuff

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 03:20:19 GMT

Neil here again, back from Otakon where I got to meet a very cool anime director Kazuto Nakazawa. For those of you who don't know Nakazawa was the guy who directed shorts like "Comedy" (link here), the music video to the Linkin Park song, "Breaking the Habit" (link here), and finally the Kill Bill anime sequence (link here). Finally he's working on a short for the upcoming Studio 4C anthology, Genius Party, which is due sometime later this year (official site).

He's an underrated talent in the world of anime, and sadly many of the people at otakon didn't even know of his work besides being a character designer/animation director/intro director for Samurai Champloo. As a result the room I was in was sparsely attended, probably a fraction of the crowd that would attend a well-known English voice actor's panel.

Nakazawa was a quiet guy dressed mostly in black, but with a bit of an "artsy flair" to him, dressed in varying shades of grey with thick black glasses. Even though he was quiet, he had a wonderfully dry sense of humor that I could probably never capture in words, it was subtle and timed just perfectly with just the right amount of irony to bring a smile to everyone's face. The panel began with his film reel, including a short I haven't seen before with very muscular characters colored in many different brillant colors to Japanese rock music, followed by clips from Samurai Champloo and a few of his other works.

I'm not good at doing transcripts (if I had my laptop there I would have transcribed the session) so this will be a summary of what I saw from the notes that I culled together, on a small steno-pad. So here it is, enjoy! :-)

Nakazawa on his Origins
Kazuto Nakazawa said that he started drawing ever since he was a kid, and that he always really liked drawing. He was inspired by Gundam (which he guessed made him "normal"), and really wanted to work for the animation studio Madhouse since he was young. He went to an animation school where the school closed down due to lack of attendance right after he graduated, and then applied and succeeded at joining the wrong studio. After figuring out the studio was not the right one he joined Madhouse.

Nakazawa on the Kill Bill Anime Sequence:
For Kill Bill, Nakazawa talked about how demanding Tarantino was to him and his team. He would constantly tell him to do impossible scenes, then see the scene, and tell him to make it even more impossible. Nakazawa continued to say that Tarantino would then take difficult scenes and have the production team completely rework them just because he didn't like one little detail in them. He ended it by saying that while he respected Tarantino, he was quite challenging to work with.

Nakazawa on the Linkin Park Music Video:
He said that the video didn't come out the way he would have liked it to. He didn't like how the final video came out, and preferred the version that he did originally, implying that he didn't have a say on the final cut. He ended his discussion of this video by saying that he was proud to have received an MTV music video award for it, if it was for his original version.

Nakazawa on Shinichiro Watanabe and Samurai Champloo:
Nakazawa said that while he loved Watanabe's work, he was originally uninspired by the choice of music for this anime. He was not a big fan of hip hop, and had a hard time channeling his interest in that music into his work for the series. Other than that problem, he enjoyed working with Watanabe and enjoyed the show.

---
After his introduction he opened it up for a Q&A session. The Q&A session covered misc works from him, here are some highlights:

Nakazawa on Genius Party:
His short in Genius Party would be mainly a series of things that one usually finds on the cutting room floor in most films. He went on to describe it as a series of scribbles, crinckled paper, and other things that would give the film a chaotic feel.

Nakazawa on "Comedy":
Comedy was a short that he had put together pretty much by himself. He called up a few friends to help him on it, but the bulk of the work was his own. For this short, he was inspired by Franz Schubert's music(1) and the manga of Moto Hagio(2). He went on to say that he loved music, and he was always thinking of graphics to put to music, which is how he came up with the idea for Comedy. Also, the reason why the black swordsman was black, was that he was going for a gray-scale feeling, and wanted there to be a contrast between him and the female character who was mostly white. He closed this segment by thanking all of us for seeking out this work, and urged those of us who haven't to check it out. (He seemed to be really appreciative that fans had gone out of their way to check out one of his own works).

Nakazawa on "Black Heaven":
Nakazawa also had a little bit to say about his work as character designer and on the intro to the hair metal inspired anime (created by Hiroki Hayashi, who did Tenchi Muyo), Black Heaven. He said he had loved music from the 1980s and he transplanted the feeling of that music in his characters. He also talked about how he and the creator would trade music during production.

Nakazawa on the "Sketchy Style" found in some of his work
The Sketchy style of the Kill Bill anime and the music video for Likin Park (the guy who asked this question incorrectly credited him for doing Kid's Story in the animatrix) was not his invention, but instead the invention of another animator, Shinji Hashimoto(3), who first used the style in Isao Takahata's film My Neighbors the Yamadas.

After that Nakazawa left, telling us once again to check out "Comedy", and thanking us for spending time with him. Later at the con me along my buddies at Neo Battle Peasant hosted a Studio 4C panel, at which I showed a clip from Comedy, thanked the Otakon staff for inviting such a talented director, and urged people who saw him walking around at the convention to thank him for his wonderful work.
----

Finally to end this post a bit off topic, there was a trailer for a new film from Katsuhito Ishii and Takashi Koike (Trava Fist Planet) called Redline, about a group of futuristic race car drivers which will be eventually (late 2006?-sometime in 2007). I urge all of you to keep an eye out for this one, the design looks fresh and innovative, and the story seems like it will be a lot of fun. On the downside I inquired about the "Hiatus Status" of Trava and even though Madhouse had produced it, the president Masao Maruyama, didn't know it even had existed, thus it seems the project might be dead.

----
Notes:
1. Schubert is an early 19th century composer, who is credited with the piece "Ave Maria", which served as inspiration for and as the background music of Comedy. He's considered a leading figure of the Romantic period in classical music.

2. Moto Hagio is the mother of modern female authored shoujo manga. Part of a group of women called the 49ers, she along with her contemporaries created many of the conventions that shoujo manga use today. Prior to theses women shoujo was authored primarly by men. Very few of her works are published in the states, and the few that are, are out of print (like "They were 11"). A bit of trivia about her is that director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue) also cites her as a major influence.

3. Anipages information on Hashimoto, who is one of the most influential Japanese animators: here

Updated with more information and edits Aug 16 9:30 am

The End of All Things

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:20:31 GMT

Since I was given the go-ahead, I'm posting a link to the animation I made for my undergrad senior thesis. It's minorly convoluted.

First, go to http://digart.stetson.edu/

In the right side, go to the box where the Art and Student Galleries columns intersect.

Then, go to the Senior Thesis section. My movie is the icon on the bottom. Be puzzled and enjoy.

Vectorpark

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 06:18:52 GMT

Vectorpark is one of those sites that feels complete, and feels like it will still feel that way 10 years from now even if no updates ever happen.

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:47:56 GMT

Are we discouraged against posting links to personal animations on here? No one seems to do it, but I'm interested in seeing if anyone else on here has any work to show.

Help?

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 19:10:22 GMT

I want to go into animation. I don't know how to do it though, other than making an incredibly fast slide show on my computer or a flip book, or that old circular mirror trick. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a program I could download that will help me. I can't find one anywhere. I would appreciate it so much!

Allegro Non Troppo Excerpt – Feline Fantasies

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 04:26:20 GMT

An animated sequence from a 1977 Italian film by Bruno Bozzetto called “Allegro Non Troppo”, it's a beautifully animated part of the film featuring an expressive cat with no dialogue or written words.

Check it out on YouTube

Bruno Bozzetto's Site (Thanks Chuckola!)

Architecture in Helsinki – Do the Whirlwind music video

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 10:19:45 GMT

Simply the quirkiest masterpiece I’ve seen in a while. Paul Robertson, known for his incredible videogame-inspired pixel animated characters made this amazing music video for band, Architecture in Helsinki. Honestly, “Do the Whirlwind” is one of my favorite songs from AIH, and this just made it even better.

Architecture in Helsinki – Do the Whirlwind Music Video
Paul Robertson’s Livejournal page

Stefan Gruber

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:46:35 GMT

It’s apparently animation day! Woo hoo!

Just found another animator’s site by the name of Stefan Gruber of CalArts fame who created this really fun flash animation short called Big Gulp. There’s other quirky things at his site at fantasy pleasure 9, including some other experimental animation shorts done by him and others.

Also check out Nova Animation, a high school program that Stefan is leading, assisting high school students in learning animation as well in doing some.

Fantasy Pleasure 9

Big Gulp

Nova Animation