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Star Wars: Clone Wars

Last night, I watched the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon in pretty much it's entirety. It had been shown continuously for four hours on TeleToon on New Year's Eve - and lucky for me, a friend of mine taped it.

Clone Wars marks the first time in over 15 years that the Star Wars franchise has come to television - not since the likes of Droids has George Lucas's fantasy world have we had the pleasure of indulging in cartoons of the story I love to hate.

Yeah, I said it, I hate Star Wars. I find the movies boring, pretentious, poorly acted, and over the top. I am by no means a fan of George Lucus, and I find his willingness to consumerise his so called "masterpiece" to be a bit disturbing. I always have had a bit of a soft spot for Droids though, and previously attributed that to 'growing up with 80s cartoons' nostalgia. When I saw the previews for the Clone Wars cartoons though, my interest was piqued.

Developed as 20 chapters of 2-3 minute shorts for The Cartoon Network, the show chornicals the epic Clone Wars, which as I understand it, takes place somewhere between episodes 2-3. [Don't quote me on that one though]. The first 20 chapters were apparently so successful, that an additional five 12 minute long chapers were released as a follow up.

Sylistically, the show is simply stunning - as it should be, considering the cartoon is written, directed, and produced by none other than Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Dexter's Labratory and Samarai Jack. The result is a 50s art nouveau meets 80s comic book style of animation - using solid matte colours as a background for the bright neon light sabers and laser beams.

Animation techniques aside - this cartoon makes good on nearly every aspect of where the live action Star Wars movies fail - the dialogue is kept to an extreme minimum, letting the imagry of the story simply tell it's self, and, also, leaving very little room for the bad acting Star Wars is notorious for. As well, the animation style leaves little room for detail - letting our imaginations choose to fill in or bypass certain character design, landscape, and mechanical details that serve only to distract from the story in the original movies.

The friend I watched this with last night is a bit of a Star Wars buff - and said that the Clone Wars cartoon is what Episode 3 should have been. I'd take that a step further and say this clever animation is what all of the Star Wars Episodes should have been. Creative, fantastical, entertaining, lacking all pretensions - so much so that this self proclaimed Star Wars hater may just be tempted to go out and by Clone Wars on DVD.

Love or hater - I suggest you go and do the same.

Super Mario Strikers

For the past few days, I have become addicted to Super Mario Strikers. It's an awesome Game Cube Game that features all the usual loveable MarioWorld Characters, in the most violent and silly soccer game I have ever seen.

The game play is pretty awesome, and everytime someone scores a goal, there is a quick little cut animation unique for each character celebrating their goal, followed by a quick instant replay. Having been a Nintendo gal all my life, having grown up with the world of Mario and it's sickening cuteness, imagine my surprise when I saw the cut animation for the character Waluigi (Don't ask me where he came from, I'm behind in my gaming, no longer l33t, and have no idea when he was introduced).

His goal celebration dance primarily features him performing the international action for "Suck It", in all it's classic hip gyrating, crotch glorifying, well, glory. My jaw seriously dropped and I was rendered speechless for a good 30 seconds before I was able to even giggle over it. Even still, now that I've seen it 10 times over and find it halarious, something about it seems not quite right - out of place perhaps.

Regardless though - best cut scene animation sequence I've ever seen in a video game, for the shocking LOL factor alone. I wish I could find a video of it online to link to, so that all of you Game Cubeless kids out there could enjoy it, but finding this screen shot was unfortunately, difficult enough.

Skyland

Earlier today, while mostly channel surfing and watching tv in passing, I came across a few minutes of an entirely new and simply stunning cartoon on TeleToon. It looked like a modern, pretty anime, with Ghost In The Shell-ish CGI against lusicious Howl's Moving Castle-esque landscapes. Add in characters and a story line that seemed to suspiciously give an air of space piratetry, and I was immediately sold.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to watch the show for long, or even catch it's name, so I took note of the time slot with a promise to investigate further, later. So, here I am, finding scant information about this new show called Skyland. The show is a joint production between Canada and France, using what appears to be top of the line tricks of the trade, while paying careful tribute to the genres it steals from.

The official site is most definately worth a visit, and the trailer is especially worth viewing. The show is premiering this month in Canada on TeleToon, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be reaching American television until April 2006. I've had a difficult time finding any information on the animators, the voice actors, the soundtrack, etc, in fact, at this point, TeleToon doesn't even have the show's time slot posted on their website.

I'm going to keep my eye out for it, and will hopefully have positive things to say about it in the near future. I don't want to go too far out on a limb with my praise so far - lord knows that even the most beautiful of animations can easily be destroyed by horrible plot lines, character development, or voice acting.

Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Clik Clak

While on the subject of cute animations, check out this awesome french 3D animation, Clik Clak.

The animation is about 2 robots who communicate using the clik, clak, and tinking noises of two objects hitting each other. They meet a human child (who the are unable to communicate with) and attempt to teach him their language.

The story line is cute and original, and the animation is simply stunning. Given the lack of quality 3D animation outside of Pixar, I was really eager to find out more about the animators who made this film. The website is mostly 'en francais' but there is a CV section - which is remarkably void of any work, let alone work of note. Could this possibly be a student film? No amount of googling has managed to provide any further info.

*Sigh* Yet another reason why the more I explore animation produced outside of North America, the more dissatisfied I am with the animation North America produces.

Eat Dog Cat Mouse

Created by Kwok Fung Lam for UK's Channel 4, this 3 minute CG short is charming, if not a bit twisted.

One site I've found has described it as a folk tale about the food chain, using what appears to essentially be Russian Nesting dolls.

This is a hard one to describe, other than to say to prepare yourself for some dark humor. One of my favorite finds of the past year.

Fuggy Fuggy

He Who Struggles,

But Endures,
Will Be Ninja.

This is an adorable flash animation about the adventures and mishaps of the life of a ninja. It doesn't score as high on the lol scale as some other flash animations on the net, but the design is cool and cute, and really, who doesn't love ninjas?

PS. While you're there, be sure to check out the Christmas Special.

Sons Of Butcher

If you're in Canada and you haven't tuned into to TeleToon on a Friday night at 9:30pm recently, I strongly suggest you do as soon as possible. The treasure you'll find in this odd, if not slightly inconvenient timeslot (during prime party hour, wtf?) is Sons Of Butcher a flash animated TV show that follows around 2 teenage brothers and their friend, who are butchers by day, and aspiring metal gods by night... and well, day.

The result is a halarious and well animated (well, except for each of the three main character's heads - each are true to life and acted in front of a green screen). Take the episode I caught tonight - the hijinks included one member being ostracized from the band as his sobriety came between them, and the front man in his never ending quest to get "labelled" (aka signed), finds himself ditching his bandmates in favor of fronting the newly signed "Fatbags". How far will he sell out in order to achieve fame? Will there be a Wayne's World-ish "I love you man..!" scene when he reuintes with his fellow bandmates? Will Ricky overcome his love of sobriety?

The voice acting is top notch and the clever writing is able to both poke fun at and pay tribute to Metal music. At times, the jokes and overall concept sounded like something my buddy Brynne would have come up with while back in his red mullet sporting, cheap beer drinking, shitty drum kit smashing punk house days.

Keeping in line of course, with bands like The Gorillaz and Prozzak, Sons of Butcher are also a band IRL, although with a much lower profile. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for their style, or whether or not the cartoon's popularity will increase their on stage profile, but to their credit, they were able to sucessfully pitch their concept for the cartoon to TeleToon and sell 13 episodes. Pretty impressive for industry noobs who met at broadcasting school and on the set of The Red Green show.

If you're interested, there's a trailer available at www.sonsofbutcher.com.

Coca-Cola M5

"For 05, Coca-Cola asked 5 design groups from 5 contintents to create and share visions of optimism.."

The result is www.them5.com, a website that despite it's corporate backing harps back to the early days of the internet and everything I oh so loved about it. The site features 5 different music videos, each highlighting the music of a different artist (The Flaming Lips, Guided By Voices, Towa Tei, Citizen Bird, Fischerspooner), and the talents of a different design company, each of which just happens to be from a different continent.

The result is a varied, electic, and excellent mix of music, vidoes, and design/animation techniques. The site design is lovely and user friendly, with some gorgeous flash that makes the visit worth it, alone. To top it off, each video is accompanied by a making of, information about both the artist and the design team, and is available for free download. Even better, Coca-Cola is kind enough to keep it's branding to a minimum, so much that one can easily forget that the evil corporate empire is the real backer of such a beautiful, wonderful, artist supporting site.

I wonder if they'll do something similar for '06?

The Faint: Agenda Sucide

Bored and lonely on my couch at 3AM, I found myself channel surfing to good old Much Music. I'd spent most of my night until this point watching cartoons - and watching Madonna gyrate a ghetto blaster in her "Hung Up" video just wasn't doing it for me.

I found myself ditching the tv in favor of the computer, and I googled "Animated Music Video". I haven't even really begun to to sift my way through the plethora of links the internet gods provided, but already, I've found something I love.

There is a great video out by The Faint, for a song called Agenda Suicide. The music is along the lines of that whole 80s electro dance revival thing going on right now, which I can personally take or leave, but the animation in the video is top notch.

The video was created by MK12 Stuidios, which I have to admit I'd never heard of until tonight (but will definately be bookmarking for reference later). The style is at once both distinct and recognizable, with the use of motion graphics as the main technique.

The video tells the story of a businessman tired of the same ol same ol sameness of everyday life, and does a pretty amazing job of it. Apparently, due to the references to taking pills and committing sucide, the video never made it to MTV. It appears to be old meme - I guess this made it's way round the internet a while ago, but somehow, I've only managed to stumble upon it now. If you're like me - slighly out of the loop, you too can watch it - here.