Results tagged “animation”

Check out this cool collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis.

Our friends over at WBEZ got creative and had a little fun. For a recent review from Sound Opinions - the new Fiery Furnaces album - the crew got Arthur Jones of Post-it Note Stories to animate Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis. Check out the WBEZ Blog for more information. It's a pretty entertaining twist for a program we quite enjoy. But animating music critics? It's been done!

A cool steampunk, stop-motion animated short worth checking out.

Every man, woman and child in the Chicago-area will probably either go see Public Enemies (and watch for our review tomorrow) or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at the movies this weekend, but there are a ton of cinematic alternatives available. Because, you know, there's more to America than murderous gangsters and robots. Such as:

Created for the recent This American Life - Live! event, this short cartoon of Chris Ware's Quimby the Mouse (animation by John Kuramoto) is not only awesome, but features music by Chicago's own Andrew Bird. [Drawn! via The Daily What]

Friday, we love you. But why do you have to drag like a cat's ass in the afternoon? zzzzzzzzz...

Acclaimed animator and Animation Show co-creator Don Hertzfeldt is hitting Chicago's Music Box this Friday on a current tour billed as An Evening With Don Hertzfeldt. The event will showcase some of Don's classic animations, such as Billy's Balloon and Lily and Jim, and culminate in a screening of his newest animation, I Am So Proud Of You, the follow-up to his highly-praised Everything Will Be Ok. Hertzfeldt will then be on-hand for a post-screening interview. As we await Don's arrival, we'd like to look back at his hilarious short film Rejected, which happened to garner an Academy Award nomination (2001, Best Animated Short Film). It's nothing short of brilliant and is a perfect reflection of Hertzfeldt's bizarre genius.

We love us some Xmas movies; but frankly there are plenty of swell, non-Holiday movie events coming up as well:

Waaaay back when we were still aspiring animators, just getting over our Disney / WB phase and into our Fleischer Studios / Ralph Bakshi / Nelvana phase, Bill Plympton's early MTV cartoon shorts made a really big impact on us. We specifically remember "How to Kiss" and "25 Ways to Quit Smoking," two cartoons filled with dark whimsy and a loose line style allowing a freedom of movement, and a realistic mimicry of the absurd...

Though it makes the rest of the Chicago International Film Festival seem sort of anti-climactic, awards were handed out last week to some of the festival films. The big winner of the Gold Hugo for best film? My Nikifor/Moj Nikifor from Poland. Paczkis for everybody! The film won the award, in part, because of a “cinematographic form that creates a dialogue between art and compassion.” We bet that dialogue contains a lot of words like...

Chicagoist and its fellow cinemaphiles have it rough this weekend. With the college crowd on Spring Break, most of our favorite off-the-beaten-path movie houses (Block Cinema, Doc Films) are dark. Don’t even get us started on the mainstream box office this weekend. We know The Ring was a big hit, but we saw the sequel the first time, you know? As for the new Woody Allen film, we’re skipping that one too. Unlike the family dog, we only have to be hit on the nose with a newspaper twice before we learn our lesson. And as much as we love Joan Cusack and Buffy’s little sister, we’re not sure we can bring ourselves to see The Ice Princess especially when our local video store has The Cutting Edge on DVD. Now THAT'S an ice skating movie.

Man, five o'clock cannot come fast enough. We love when the weekend is brimming with autumnal goodness, and we can't help but celebrate by using overly cheesy and obvious icons. Here are three of our picks for the oh-so-enjoyable last weekend in September: