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Best animated film lists are always floating around. MSN have just released one, you'd expect pure american froth, Disney and Pixar all the way. But it's pretty good. Their site is here and it's their list that follows.

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20. ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995)
How much soul remains when most of the human body has been replaced by machine? That’s the philosophical question at the cyborg-y center of director Mamoru Oshii’s anime classic — and it’s surrounded by some blistering action.
19. ‘Waltz With Bashir’ (2008)
Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman’s extraordinary and painfully timely autobiographical documentary of remembered life during wartime ... uses animation as a way to face memories that might otherwise be unbearable, or even unretrievable. In its own distinct way, the movie makes serious, political use of the freeing possibilities of animation ... To tell Folman’s story ‘straight’ would be to miss the waking-nightmare sensations of war.”
18. ‘Pinocchio’ (1940)
This isn’t the first Disney animated feature — that’d be 1939’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — but the story of a puppeteer who creates his own son with his bare hands was the first to truly find what we’d come to call the Disney Touch.

Finally someone has dug up the original King Kong armature. It's a lovely thing, even if you'd have to be a diabolical villain to drop 150k on it. I'll let the nice lady from Chisties explain,

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Christie’s South Kensington invites you to journey back and share in the spectacle that was King Kong as it presents the giant ape himself as the highlight of the November Popular Culture sale. This unique relic, the 22-inch armature (metal skeleton), was used to allow the animated ape to scale the dizzying heights of the Empire State Building in the films poignant and climactic final scenes.

The King Kong storyline was the vision of adventurer and documentary maker Merian C. Cooper who worked alongside cinema legends including RKO chief technician Willis O’Brien to breathe life into this risky and expensive production. O’Brien, a pioneer in stop-motion animation, took on the challenge of creating the life-like illusion of a 50 foot ape...

Back in Feburary we mentioned a logo comp the good sorts at the And/or Book Awards were running. It was won by Imagine regular Brian Anderson, who wrote to tell us about his day with David Hockney.

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Dear Frank

I have now had my visit to David Hockney's studio, and very enjoyable it was too.
He is really intelligent, intense. It's good to see that he is working quite prolifically. He drove us (the runner-up Richard Dixon came too) around in his Lexus, which he needs because it is quiet and he is hard of hearing, showing us the trees and landscapes that inspire him in the countryside around Bridlington. And his studios and current work. Such energy and enthusiasm - I was very impressed with him. You can see from the photo that he is very pro-smoking, and I must say it didn't bother me, he makes a very persuasive argument for its benefits!
He is busy completing work for a new exhibition in New York this autumn. I was very lucky to get a preview of his new work, and be given a day of his time. It is an experience I will treaure the memory of. I'm glad I spotted the logo competition on the Imagine Animation newsletter and went ahead and had a go. It came at just the right time as I was learning After Effects and Flash at Gloucester College. My 30 second animation was shown at the BFI, I was invited to Aardman Animations studio, and now this!

Many thanks

Brian Anderson
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Motion comics is an emerging trend as the big comic publishers make a play for digitization while retaining their USP. I reckon it’s largely successful. A few pans and bumps here and there to provide a crude kind of animation. They’ve got a voice overs so the dialogue boxes aren’t needed, which gives a very clean look. Check out this Spiderwoman example, available from iTunes. for more details check out http://marvel.com/motion_comics

Just back from The International Scientific Animation Conference in China. Full report in the next issue of Imagine magazine. Suffice to say is was amazing and eye-opening.
The scientific animation on display wasn't quite the best I've ever seen, although I'm certain it'll get better.
This on the other hand is very amazing.

There have been a lot of rumours and dirty talk going around about Fantastic Mr Fox, the latest uber budget stop-frame feature. The facts as we see them are that the production team are the best in the business, the story is one of the greatest kids' books ever written and the director is a proven maker of beautiful, albeit live-action, films. Wes Anderson declared after the film was made that he'd "finally found his medium." We've been interviewing a few of the key production people for a big feature in the next issue of Imagine and of course we haven't seen it yet so we reserve judgement. Here's the trailer that's floating around.

This is a really nice featurette with Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze talking about the movie. They got a really nice relationship and the film's gonna be great.

This is some pretty incredible photographic print based stop-mo. 60,000 shots of over 9500 photos. A staggering achievement really, some great little flourishes make it a beautiful thing.

Leisure wear-rocking, old millionaire perv Hugh Hefner apparently likes cartoons a lot. So he set up the Playboy animation comp, which has just been won by Basement Gary, which is great. The film's creators won $10k and Hugh immediately announced another comp. Check out the film here and don't forget to check out the advice column while you're there.

Certain forums are fizzing about the so-called news concerning Futurama, which is that Fox are recasting the major voice roles because they all can't agree on new terms. Forum feeling seems mostly with the old voice lot, "better to scrap the series," they say, "than get new voices" and "take it out the fat-cat exec wage". Dissenters point out that The Simpsons voice characters love nothing better than a good strike/negotiate over pay and that the voice guys are probably trying this trick. I'm inclined to agree and never thought the voice work was that great in Futurama anyway. Get some new people in. There's a lot of good voice actors around, find some without the prima donna vibe. So what if the Fox execs got all diamond teeth an that, it's not a co-operative, go be an exec if you can stomach it.