Talk to the Snail

So earlier tonight I was making my weekly check-in to one of my more favorites blogs, Weekend Stubble, a quirky literature-related blog run by a man named Paul Collins (who has just re-published a book by one of my favorite authors, woefully long out of print).

Anyhoo, about five entries down I caught a glimpse of art unmistakenly by Seonna Hong. What’s this? Paul Collins was actually posting about Seonna’s new book, Animus, before I did here! Shame on me. Seonna’s one of the most talented artists in animation (or anywhere else, for that matter) today. We at Frederator should know: Seonna’s work for My Life as a Teenage Robot has been uniformly fantastic - so fantastic, in fact, that it earned her an Emmy for Individual Achievement in Animation last year.

If you’re a fan of beautiful art in children’s books, buy your Animus today.

Someone asked me this past week what was the biggest problem that, in my opinion, I saw in the tons of Oh Yeah! pitches we’ve seen this year. Easy: they’re often too complicated. It seems we’re always suggesting to creators that there’s way too much going on in their pitches, and that the best course is almost always to be as simple as possible (while true for seven-minute cartoons, this really goes for just about any art form, I think). Then I generally use as example one of my favorite shorts of all time: “Bully for Bugs”, directed by Chuck Jones in 1953. Bugs meets bull, bull ticks off Bugs, Bugs belittles bull. Simple. Pretty much just two characters, one of whom doesn’t speak. No B (or C!) story. Of course we wouldn’t want every short to be just like “Bully for Bugs”, and while this cartoon has tons of great stuff going for [Read more…]

I think these were designed by Kyle, and I think they were colored by Mr Chris Hacker, a color stylist over on My Life as a Teenage Robot. I’m sure Kyle will let us know.

While trolling around in the handy-dandy OY! shared folder (an internal repository of tons of production art), I came across this nifty background from “Ivan the Unbearable”, created by Mr Andrew Dickman. This wonderful piece of art was designed by Antonio Cannobio and painted by Chris Duncan. All the pre-production materials for “Ivan” were shipped overseas for animating a few months ago. Andrew is currently on needles and pins, waiting to see how the animation all comes together. He’ll get his first peek in early 2006.