Indie animator and composer Cyriak has finally made something I can show my five-year-old without supplying her with a decade's worth of nightmare material. The video about teddy bears is engaging, richly patterned, and laugh-out-loud funny. Enjoy it with a child!
For an example of a Cyriak piece with dozens of ingenious jokes (and plenty of mildly amusing ones), try his entertaining "Animation Mix." If you start watching it and think it would be ok for your young child to enjoy with you, don't be fooled. Things get ugly and, for young viewers, very creepy.
Here's an interview with Cyriak that gives a few hints of his creative process. It contains a bit of the artist's gore but nothing likely to really scare a kid. But that's just my assessment.
I'd have to know you a little better personally to have any idea whether you would find the following videos extremely annoying or endearing and funny. I do know, however, that any child in the vicinity who is between the ages of four and eighteen is going to love Alexei Alexeev's KJFG series, which I discovered yesterday on Drawn.
Interestingly, the YouTube tributes to KJFG #5, while undeniably annoying, may actually improve the flavor of the original, if you liked these cartoons already. Note that these tributes are coming out of Japan, Russia, and Brazil, respectively.
Annoying, right? But now that you've sat through one or two, watch the originals at the top. They're even better. - Jeremiah
The American director's adaptation of Roald Dahl's excellent Fantastic Mr. Fox, opened over the weekend at the London Film Festival. The film opens in the U.S. on November 25. It's rated PG for "action, smoking, and slang humor," so I'll be voting to take Z straight to the theater. We'll read the book either before or after.
Nice to see new, playful work in stop-motion by a major director that has a different perspective than Henry Selick's trademark style. Stop-motion can look many different ways, and it's easy to forget that if there aren't enough active practitioners. - Jeremiah
Google's Japanese arm made a cute ad a while back for the Google Chrome browser. In case you missed it, it's done in real or fake stop-motion with blocks.
They have another ad now, this one for Google Street View. This one is hyper-cute, clearly done with virtual blocks, and is very concrete, although it showcases some of the map-making process. If you ever wanted to show your young child the power of Google's street by street mapping project, this is the intro to your explorations of Street View itself.
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