Remember how I made that post ages ago harping on about how Flapjack is probably the funniest and best cartoon committed to film in the last couple of years?
Well, Flapjack is mostly just animated by J. G. Quintel and crew (and a marvellously well animated show it is), but there is a stop-motion opening at the beginning of each show, as well as little bits here and there throughout. This stop-motion isn't, in fact, produced by Quintel and Co. at all, but is sourced out to a studio called Screen Novelties, a company which seems to work exclusively (and most professionally) with stop-motion animation.
You can watch their showreel here.
The work they produce is astounding: they've done work for a whole host of shows, including Robot Chicken (a show famous for the uncanny quality of its animation), Moral Orel (a surprisingly likeable show if you can get past the first season) and Chowder.
The showreel is amazing to watch: I find it incredibly heartening that a studio is attempting to do something stop-motion related that doesn't look like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline, which are deliberately designed to look creepy. Screen Novelties are particularly commendable precisely because they manage to make their animations not look creepy - something which in stop-motion is very hard to do. Also, this is the first stop-motion animation I've seen that utilises smearing and other traditional "cartoon" techniques to such a great extent. I really hope we get to see more of Screen Novelties' work in the next few years.
1 comment:
Robot Chicken! I've watched it about a million times but never knew who did the stop motion. The animation always had a certain 'snap' to it, the gestures and stuff, that made it really funny.
This internet's really good for keeping in touch isn't it? Silly silly me.
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