Blizzard

Here are some more Skwigly advent calendar contributions to help you get your holly and jolly on:

Claude Cloutier

Sean Cox

Stephen McNally

Ross Phillips

Blue Zoo

We've passed the halfway point but fret not, there's still plenty more goodness to come. In the meantime you may wish to peruse some other Skwigly offerings such as Lucinda Parry's recent interview with Peter Sohn (director) and Denise Ream (producer) of Pixar's new feature The Good Dinosaur:

Also Laura-Beth has some holiday gift suggestions for the animator in your life, as well as interviews with Pa director Lawrence Rowell, Snowfall director Conor Whelan and Cooped director Mike A. Smith, all fantastic films from this year (and the latter we had the pleasure of screening at MAF last month). Meanwhile Steve Henderson has interviewed Fresh Cut Grass director Rob Cullen, Stephen Cavalier has added some more entries to his ongoing 100 Greatest Animated Shorts series, Johannes Wolters brings us a chat with Pete Doctor (director) and Jonas Rivera (producer) of Pixar's other 2015 film Inside Out (now out to buy) and new contributor Heather Wiggins gives an overview of MAF's inaugural edition as well as the feature film highlights of 2015. Meanwhile I recently caught up with Canadian director Howie Shia of PPF House about his latest NFB film BAM (a fabulous piece of work indeed) along with a Q&A with Tom Gran of Spin Kick Bros about their new webseries Lone Wolves.

I was also kindly invited by Marco de Blois to contribute again to Revue24's end-of-year animated short film critics' lists, my personal top ten being: 

1. World of Tomorrow, Don Hertzfeldt (États-Unis / USA) 
2. Teeth, Tom Brown, Daniel Gray, Hungary (Hongrie-États-Unis-Angleterre / Hungary-USA-England) 
3. Splintertime, Rosto (France-Pays-Bas-Belgique / France-Netherlands-Belgium) 
4. We can't Live Without Cosmos, Constantin Bronzit (Russie / Russia) 
5. Ernie Biscuit, Adam Elliot (Australie / Australia) 
6. If I Was God..., Cordell Barker (Canada) 
7. Stems, Ainslie Henderson (Royaume-Uni / UK) 
8. Sonámbulo, Theodore Ushev (Canada) 
9. Very Lonely Cock, Leonid Shmelkov (Russie / Russia) 
10. The Story of Percival Pilts, Janette Goodey, John Lewis (Australie / Australia) 

Interesting to note that there isn't quite as notable a disparity between my picks and the other critics as last year. Have a read of the full article and see what you think. I'm looking forward to checking out the films others have picked that I've not yet come across so far.

News for a dreary Sunday afternoon

I'm just coming off a very nice holiday break and the inevitable catch-up-with-life stuff that follows, so here's a roundup post of some coverage that went up while I've been away as well as some general updates.
There are two new Lightbox videos, beginning with an exclusive interview with Canadian animation legend Cordell Barker (The Cat Came Back, Strange Invaders) on his new NFB film If I Was God, which boasts some gorgeous stop-motion; more recently one of our newer contributors Beverly chats with Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda, directors of Minions.

Thanks to mass merchandising and over-saturation I'm sure the world at large has a daily fill of Minion excess whenever they step out of their homes, but her interview does go into some interesting places as regards the range of animation techniques on offer, so I'd recommend taking a look.

Laura-Beth and I pester the brilliant Adam Elliot at BAF 2013

Elsewhere on Skwigly, Laura-Beth has a fantastic interview with Australian animator Adam Elliot, a mutual hero of ours. Even if I were 100% impartial I'm confident I'd say it's the best and most thorough piece on his latest project Ernie Biscuit, so treat yourself and give it a read.

Speaking of treating yourselves, Alan Holly's amazing short Coda is now online in full. This was one of my absolute favourites of last year's shorts crop and I'm very happy to say there's an in-depth interview with Alan up now also.

Visiting Claude Cloutier at the NFB during production of Carface

As well as some memories of the underappreciated 90s animated sitcom The Critic, I have another NFB interview up with Claude Cloutier, whose new film Carface was part of Annecy 2015's official selection (along with Ernie Biscuit; If I Was God, bafflingly, played out of competition).

In non-Skwigly news, I now know the screening times for my latest film when it premieres at OFF in August, the first of seven showings being Monday 24th at 9am. The two programmes it plays in are Main Competition 4 and Animation 3, both of which have full time/venue information listed (if you're a master detective you might even be able to keenly scrutinise both and work out which one's mine).

Also the proposed release date for Throat: Book 3 - Nobody's Waiting of August 3rd is now confirmed, with a cover mockup I'm not 100% wild about. But all being well a book that sort of looks like the one above will be out that week. The end is in sight, folks.