In this day and age, just about anyone can self publish a book. Many artists have taken up the title of authorship and have released their own books featuring sketchbooks, instructional guides, and an array of comic books. One of my favorite character designers, Ben Balistreri, recently finished up work on his comic book, “Seaweed”. According to Ben, it took him nearly six years to accomplish the task as he single handedly produced all the artwork found in this over-sized book. It measures a good 12×15 and all 64 pages are in glorious color.

The story is about a pirate, Seaweed, and his first mate, Poisson, who have a chance meeting with a bat named Mildew who is looking for The Devil’s Cookbook which can grant anyone who has it practically enternal life. As you can see, everyone here is an animal or fish of some sort. It reminds me a lot of the early Disney shorts where everyone is an animal, or like how in the Goofy shorts there’s an entire hockey rink of Goofies. There’s not a human in sight in Seaweed’s world and I think its all for the better.

We’re really sorry that we made you guys wait over three months for the latest installment into the GFG series. Guess the idea of having a cartoon a month was just a bit more than we were able to chew. You’ve heard us talking about it everywhere, and today we’re finally able to show off our new short “The Last Copy.”

This was a bit of a hard episode to pull off, and Frank worked over time on the thing. There’s much more going on in it than previous episodes of GFG thus far. On top of that, we also brought back three old characters, all of whom have received a face lift since the last time you’ve seen them. Everyone did a great job on this I think, from Steve’s script, Frank’s animation to Joe’s sound (I won’t be patting myself on the back, ha). Anyway I won’t bore you, go and enjoy it.

Who would have guessed that the best love story of the year would feature robots instead of humans? I sure wouldn’t have, yet it’s not that I doubted Pixar could pull it off, I just wasn’t really sure what WallE was about. It wasn’t until recently that we found out WallE was about a robot trying to find his companion, but I never expected it to be a full blown love story.

WallE starts out simple enough, with the robot going about his normal routine of cleaning up what is essentially a post apocalyptic earth. The first 20 or so minutes doesn’t feature a lick of dialogue, yet the audience can’t help but fall in love with WallE almost immediately. I could easily have watched an entire movie of WallE just going about his normal day because Pixar has made it that interesting. WallE’s opening moments captivate the audience in much the same way that Tom Hanks does during Cast Away. You simply can’t take your eyes off of him.

Many people probably remember the old Bonkers series that used to come on the Disney Afternoon, but I imagine many people forgot about the show Bonkers originated from called Raw Toonage. In a confusing series of events, somehow Disney developed these two shows at the same time, with the idea that Raw Toonage would show that Bonkers did have a career as a cartoon character before losing work and joining the police force in the real world.

Anyway, Raw Toonage was sort of Disney’s stab at what Warner Brothers had seemingly mastered with Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, in that they wanted to create a variety show of sorts. Each episode would have a bunch of different shorts with different main characters, and the episode would be hosted by another well known Disney character like Goofy, or even Tale Spin’s Don Karnage. The show wasn’t particularly memorable, or good even, but it had a few bright spots. I recalled this old short called “Badly Animated Man” and decided to look it up on Youtube, and sure enough, it was there. It’s a pretty good stab at the sorts of cartoons that were out around then.

“Good Breeding” is a senior thesis film by Smorgas Board regular, Alex Berry AKA “josephmcklay”. He shared the early pencil test version of it with us back in January, and has since gone on to finish it up. I think he did a bang up job on it, and thought I’d post it up here for everyone else to get a kick out of it. Congrats on a job well done, Alex!

A buddy of mine sent this clip over to me the other day, and I really dug it. Its rendered to look like an Atari 2600 game with square-ish, simplistic characters running around playing paintball, but they are animated well and the short moves along at an entertaining pace. I followed Lovesport’s link to the rest of his (or their’s?) shorts. They’re all done in a similar manner, but I was surprised to see that these are done in 3D as in one short, “The Dogs”, the camera zooms in tight to reveal space and vollume on the characters. Enjoy!

I’m a heterosexual male and I like boobs. Theres been a lot of politically-correct propaganda getting tossed around out there that might make you feel guilty or ashamed for making a statement like that. However, I feel totally justified in this feeling… its a part of who I am. Thinking back to my childhood, I remember some of my first exposure to ‘mammarous gigantus’ being in the form of cartoon breasts on various afternoon television shows. The time from 3-5 PM was a magical time. It was time to turn the lights down low, light a candle, lock the door and tune in to some hot cartoon boob action.

After a quick stroll through memory lane and a few strategically placed google image searches I have compiled some of the cartoon chesticles that hold a special place in my mind. Journey with me back through the 1980’s as we take a look at some of the cartoon T (and a little bit of A) that I hold near and dear…

During the latest Shamoozal Radio Podcast, The General Johnny Manf asked what an animatic was. I know I often use that term a lot when I make an update, and even though Phil answered Manf’s question during the Podcast, I’ll go into it a bit more here just to help educate our readers about the animation process.

Above is the animatic we used from GFG#1, “Rated ‘M’ For Molestor”. Read more after the jump about how and why we even bother with this step in the first place.

Clay’s got another great interview up over at Animationpodcast.com. This time its with Ken Duncan whi Clay has worked under while he was an inbetweener at Disney’s in the early 90’s. Ken was the lead animator on one of my favorite Disney heroines, Meg, from Hercules. Ken’s a bit more more reserved than say, Nik Ranieri, but has has a ton of professional experience to draw from, and he has some interesting things to say about how he animates. Its good stuff, so go check it out.

I came home from work today and after eating dinner ran a few races in Mario Kart Wii. I’m finally on the 150cc circuit, and it’s proving to be worthy of the Mario Kart title as it seems every time I play it now I become enraged by an onslaught of Red and Blue Shells at the finish line. I found little solace online either as for some reason or other every one there was destroying me, too.

In an effort to keep myself from throwing my Wii Remote out of the window, I popped Chicken Little into the ol’ PS3 for some Blu-Ray goodness. It’s been sitting on my shelf at least since last September, but I always forget I have it there. It had a decent idea at its core, but it somehow got off track in multiple parts throughout the movie. I feel like the committee that was running Disney Feature Animation at the time was too busy trying to cram in as many pop-culture references as possible, and I’m sorry but the pig character has to go. I don’t even remember his name, but I do know that he was Chicken Little’s equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks. Every word out of his mouth made me cringe.