Animated short film: Sucker Punch – Distant Planet

The third, animated commercial for the action movie Sucker Punch.

Lovers of explosions, action and babes come the end of this month to their draw with Sucker Punch, the new film of Zack Snyder (Director of Watchmen, 300, Legend of the Guardians). In addition to the usual teasers and trailers brings the studio now also promotional spots in the form of short animated films. That serve as a complement to the feature film.

In Distant Planet it becomes clear that in an advanced, futuristic world not everything is rosy. Also there are the rich over the poor. The oppressed robots pick up the no longer and are planning a bomb attack on the rich capital …

The movie was directed by Ben Hibon, you might also know as the creator of the piece of animation from the recent feature film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. After The Trenches and Dragon is the third animated film for Sucker Punch.

Animated short film: Sucker Punch – Distant Planet

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Mars Needs Moms appears instantly on dvd

Mars Needs Moms, the recent animated film in which a boy his mother out of the hands of the Martians want to save, no longer appears in the cinema.

A week ago we reported how the rather catastrophic proceeds of Mars Needs Moms ensured that Walt Disney was no longer interested in the Yellow Submarine-remake of Robert Zemeckis.

In addition to the input of this Director both animated films have in common is that they're using motion capture (would) be created. That is a technique in which movements of actors will be converted to digital characters.

Let Disney today know that the space adventure no longer in the cinema appears in Netherlands and Belgium. A date for the DVD release to be announced. The print is a financial not apportion direct responsibility for the studio (the production budget was $ 150 million), but really surprising is not the flop. It was only a matter of time before the public the often scary results that the technique, the spine would turn.

I've never understood why the studio the fun story of Berkeley Breathed with motion capture wanted to make. The studio proves that she's at this time both handsome films in 2D (Winnie the Pooh) as well as in 3D (Rapunzel). Why choose a technique that – what mimicking human characters – still not on point of law? If you're in a film, which focuses on children, more sympathy cherishes for the monstrous alien kidnappers, than for the (hideous) human main characters, something not. The mocaptechniek is, in my view, an ideal means to strange creatures human traits (see the Na'vi in Avatar), but not to human characters as an odd version of himself.

Pictures, trailers and more information about the animated film you find in these messages.

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More unseen artwork for Pixar's Newt

View more Pixar's artwork for cancelled animated film Newt.

It's been almost a year ago that Pixar plans for Newt opborg, but it is still a bit bales when ' new ' pieces of artwork for the animated film pop up. The story – about two blue-footed newts that the last of their kind – was apparently not original and strong enough to compete with other studios that similar animation films release (Alpha and Omega, Rio).

In addition to an extensive collection of artwork that appeared in september at the bottom, you'll find also a handful of illustrations that were made by Jason Deamer. Draws the character art director for more than ten years Pixar for and worked includes characters from Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and Wall-E.

Artwork for Newt (click for high resolution)

(Via Pixarblog)

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Teenagers translate Pokemon For the Facebook Generation

You start with a sample that is small and weak. Your job: Raise and train the monster to battle and best your friends ' samples.

For those coming of age in the late ' 90s, this role-playing game sequence brings to mind the Pok?mon franchise; the Facebook generation may instead come to associate the monster RPG with MinoMonsters.

MinoMonsters is a Y Combinator social game upstart founded by teenagers Josh Buckley and Tyler Diaz, 19 and 17 respectively. The duo view their monster machination as a modern-day version of Pok?mon, Zynga's primed to eat lunch with the emotional engagement of an RPG and the casual appeal of a social game.

"Zynga, I think we can all agree, is fairly good at social games," Buckley said to a packed house at Y Combinat's Demo Day in Mountain View, California. "But, what they don't focus on is emotional engagement. You're not going to find kids this Christmas begging their parents for a CityVille plush toy. Pok?mon, on the other hand, could sell anything with their name on it at the start of the decade. "

Buckley and Diaz are Y Combinat's youngest founders ever. Buckley has an impressive pedigree for a teen, having sold his first virtual world company when he was just 15. Together, the pair appear to have a solid grasp on the gaming space and hope to have found a formula — social gaming + emotional engagement = MinoMonsters — that will make Pok?mon's $ 24 billion franchise seem miniscule.

As for the MinoMonsters game itself, it lives in Facebook and tasks players to choose a monster, teach it skills, take it on adventures, progress to higher levels and grow a clan by battling other monsters.

It could easily become addicting for social gamers — though this reporter in het bijzonder, who admittedly never glommed on to the Pok?mon movement, is not exactly hooked. Perhaps I'm in the minority — the four-week-old game now has more than 110,000 players and is experiencing 10% growth each day, says Buckley.

MinoMonsters gamers can expect Android and iPhone applications for mobile game play in the near future. Plus, the startup is talking to investors and hopes to secure $ 1 million in funding, a round that will likely fuel more rapid developments.

Image courtesy of joshbuckley.net

First trailer for The House

A Korean animated film about ghosts who live in your House.

The House was made by Park Mi-Sun, Park Eun-Young, Ban Joo-Young, Lee Hyun-Jin and Lee Jae-Ho, five fresh graduate students KAFA of the (Korean Academy of Film Art). There they get the chance to not only short films, but also feature-length animated films. The young animators in spe a lot of useful experience.

(Imagine if they thing in Netherlands and Belgium would do, I'm already excited.)

What is a House exactly? A place where you eat, drink and sleep? Something where you feel safe? Where you can always contact? Is that not a little family? The House describes a House as a place where people and spirits live together. The story is set in a poor neighborhood that must give way to new buildings. The people are being forced to move and minds remain orphaned behind. When a girl her in an old House, she a confused mind. He asks her for help and wants the demolition of the old neighborhood.

First trailer for The House (2011)

(Via CTK, HC, AI and GB)

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Junot Diaz Reflects on Tokyo

Reuters/Issei Kato-Corbis Smitten with Tokyo's streets. Here: the hip or Shibuya ward.

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the ' 80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst its economy crippled for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai movies. Tokyo for all sorts of reasons spoke to me. By the time I was ready to start having fantasies about any city other than New York, Tokyo was already "the default setting of the future" — Blade Runner city! — and whether because of my childhood poverty or personal inclination, the future was where I longed to be.

It took a while — I wasn't the kind of kid who could afford to just up and go wherever he liked — but I did finally make it to Tokyo. My best friend, a Japanese-American who'd relocated back to the home country after college, was hosting me. It was a strange time, really. My friend was scheduled to have open heart surgery the following month, which was part of the reason I had flown about when I did. You know: just in case. He had pretty much decided that no matter what the doctors said about the risks, he was going to be fine, and all that really mattered at the time was showing me as much of Tokyo as possible. His way of dealing with it. So that's basically what we did for the next three weeks. Saw Tokyo. Lived it. And predictably I fell in love.

With what? The typical stuff. All the bells and whistles of its modernity. The strangeness of it, the impossible overwhelming scale. With the ramen shop behind my friend's apartment that served the greatest gyoza I'd ever eaten. With his hip neighborhood, Shimo-Kitazawa. With the last trains back from Shibuya, everybody smashed. With the curry shops that were a revelation to me. With the ginkgo trees and the parks that, despite Tokyo's insane urbanism, were everywhere. With the castles and the temples and the costume tribes that gathered in Ueno Park on the weekends. With the fact that you couldn't walk five feet in Tokyo without being tempted by some new deliciousness. With the eyeglass-washing stations. With the crows and the wooden crutches propping up ailing trees. With the glimpse of Mount Fuji from the top of the Metropolitan Government building. With the salsa clubs in Roppongi. With my little train book that I carried with me everywhere.

I could go on. We all can when we talk about the cities we love. Tokyo just did it for me the way London or Rome or Paris or Barcelona does it for other people. My childhood self with all his longings resonated with Tokyo's futurism. My immigrant self grooved on the familiarity of being an utter stranger, or being gaijin No.1; it was not so long before that America had been as incomprehensible to me as Japan. My apocalyptic self (highly developed after an ' 80s childhood) froze at the scars of Tokyo's many traumas.

It is a strange thing to love a city. In the end because no city is entirely knowable. What you love really are pieces of it. You are like Dr. Aadam Aziz forever peering at sections of his beloved through the perforated sheet. In Midnight's Children the sheet was finally dropped and the beloved revealed, but with cities that never happens. That is perhaps part of the allure, what brings us back to the cities we love: our desire to accumulate enough pieces so we can finally have it whole within us. But to love a city is also to love who we were at that time we fell in love. For me, my love for Tokyo is intertwined with my love for my best friend, who did, in the end, survive his surgery.

Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable. No city in the world makes that vulnerability more explicit than Tokyo. In the last century alone Tokyo was destroyed two times. Once by the Great Kanto Earthquake and again by the bombings of World War II.

Each time Tokyo has risen anew.

Today, as radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station drifts toward Tokyo, I am again thinking about the vulnerability of cities and of our love for them. Perhaps cities provoke so much love because they know that in that love lies their own endurance. After all, isn't it true that for all their vulnerability, as long as a city is loved by someone it will never truly disappear? Isn't that what it really means to love a city the way I love Tokyo: to carry within yourself the possibility, however faintly, or its rebirth?

D?az is the author, most recently, or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

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Animated short film: The Incident at Tower 37

Find out what was happening in water tower number 37.

After The Incident at Tower 37 more than two years, afgeschuimd has all kinds of festivals, the movie since yesterday (on the occasion of world day for water) now also on the internet. The story revolves around two mysterious men who plans an attack on a giant water tank.

The animated short film was created and directed by Chris Perry of Bit Movies (in collaboration with a lot of animation students from the Hampshire College). The story takes some surprising twists and that ensures that The Incident at Tower 37 the ten minutes of your time is worth.

Animated short film The Incident at Tower 37 (2009)

(Via Cartoon Brew)

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