Winter Linkage ...

Three Dee!

... of the extra frosty kind.

Fred Seibert explains Frederator's long cavalcade of teevee shorts:

Random! Cartoons was a series unique to its moment in time. Like with all the others, we relied primarily on artists and animators who wrote their own films. Common to all of the shorts series was my production companion, veteran Larry Huber.

What a Cartoon! was nurtured inside of an existing studio, Hanna-Barbera, and depended on the support of the great staff that had built the company. We made 48 shorts with 40 different creators across the world. Veterans like Bruno Bozzetto and Ralph Bakshi, newcomers, including Genndy Tartakovsky, Craig McCraken and Butch Hartman ...

Disney's other c.g. animated doggie picture is up for ... an award!

Indian film industry has just bagged its first nomination at the prestigious Visual Effects Society (VES) awards, known as the Oscars of the animation and visual effects industry.

India’s first full length animation 3D film, Roadside Romeo, co-produced by Yash Raj Films and Disney, has been nominated in the ‘Outstanding Animation in an Animated Motion Picture’ category alongside big Hollywood animation films such as Dreamworks’ Kung-fu Panda and Disney’s Wall-E ...

Probably not the front runner, but if an award helps boost Romeo's grosses, that's a good thing, right?

Connecticut welcomes Blue Sky Animation Studios to the Land of tax breaks.

More than 300 creative Blue Sky staff are beginning to fill 105,000 square feet of leased space of the 605,000-square-foot Greenwich American Center office facility west of Westchester Airport, and the group's innovative and productive capacity, coupled with the state's alluring tax credit for movie makers, could turn this corner of Greenwich into a veritable "Disneyland." ...

Problem is, the good times might be short-lived.

... Whether the state's film industry tax credits will continue remains to be seen. The state faces a budget shortfall of $343 million, and the $6 billion estimated deficit over the next two years has some state senators reassessing the TV/film tax credits to determine their value to the state's unsettled economy.

It's bum how financial disasters wreck beautiful parties.

In the meantime, 3-D marches on ... and on (and it's not just the DreamWorks ad today on Super bowl Sunday.):

DURING the title sequence of “Coraline,” Henry Selick’s latest stop-action animated movie, two hands disembowel a doll and then reassemble it with needle and thread. While not the most warm and fuzzy scene in any cinematic form, what makes it particularly ghoulish is the feeling that you could run your fingers through the doll’s sawdust innards and touch its button eyes.

As the 3-D experience becomes an increasingly regular part of moviegoing, scenes like this one will be impossible to resist for directors eager to play with the technology ...

Time to book a flight to Stuttgart, where a smorgasbord of German animation is getting served up.

As part of this year's Stuttgart Festival, the retrospective with the title "Cheers! 100 Years of German Animation Film" documents the versatility of Animated Film in Germany. The topical range stretches from the first German animated film PROSIT NEUJAHR of 1909 to the works of early avant-gardists of the 1920s and 1930s such as Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter, featuring current productions like Oscar-winning short films BALANCE (1989) by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein and QUEST (1996) by Tyron Montgomery and Thomas Stellmach.

Have a restful sabbath.