The Transformers may be raking in the box office gold and G.I. Joe battled COBRA in the multiplexes, but while those once-upon-the-eighties Hasbro cartoon shows made the leap from TV cartoon to big screen live action, the diminutive equines collectively known as My Little Pony have returned in a new animated series that has surprised a lot of people. To put it simply, The Hub Channel’s My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is one hip show.

For the past 2 years, Bill Plympton has had a team of interns busy restoring Winsor McCay’s last short film, The Flying House. As work has progressed, Matthew Modine came onto the project as a producer and with assistance from business partner Adam Rakoff, has launched an online fundraising effort through Kickstarter.com.

Fox has released a teaser trailer for their midseason 2012 animated series Napoleon Dynamite. The series, based on the 2004 cult classic film of the same name, teams the original cast behind the lineup of odd-duck characters.

CTP is software specifically designed for broadcast and film quality animated series production. To run the CTP just a standard Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer, a simple scanner and a graphics tablet are needed to produce animated series in broadcast-, high-definition- or film resolutions.

How one artist/activist pioneered animation education.

Tsvika Oren has been deeply involved in animation for the better part of 30 years - creating, teaching, writing, judging, jurying…

Here's a short previs round up of tools and technologies found at NAB 2011. Take a look around the show floor and see if any of these toys strikes your fancy.

Gnomon's art gallery shows off Transformers: War for Cybertron. Great looking art featuring Optimus Prime, Megatron and... Zoidberg?

Okay, so maybe it isn't really a full-blown sport, but if the proliferation of these videos of digital artwork screen-captured during the creation process is any indication, it's fast becoming a popular spectator event in any case.

While Goro Miyazak’s animated feature, Tales from Earthsea, stands on its own as an entertaining film that did well in its Japanese theatrical run, there’s no doubt that the inevitable comparisons to his father and scrutiny from the book’s fans would overshadow the film’s merits to some degree.

The arrival on Blu-ray of Miyazaki’s timeless feature, Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind reminds me why I mortgaged the farm to buy a top-of-the-line HD-TV and dvd player last year. The true beauty of the director’s visual style, his painterly landscapes and explosions of color have never been more apparent than with this new Blu-ray release.

Nancy Denney-Phelps travels to Norway to take part in the Fredrikstad Animation Festival. The event has an emphasis on screening Nordic animation but offers so much more. Along with Nordic short film and student competitions and screenings of animation aimed at the family audience, two days were devoted to seminars with international guest speakers from all branches of the animation world.

Bastien Dubois tells us about his personal journey making Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage.

Do you believe in magic? Do you remember how you felt when you saw a magic trick for the first time? Have you ever wondered what a magician’s life is really like? That is the story behind The Illusionist, a rapturously animated feature film by French animation director Sylvain Chomet about the languishing art of amusement, recently nominated for an Oscar.

Joe Strike sits in on Stephen DeStefano's storyboarding class at MoCCA, part of the museum's ongoing educational program.

The directors and producer of Day & Night and Tick Tock Tale discuss how small films really are big at their studios.

Without good direction, you end up with drek. Problems with sequence timing or the render pipeline can be solved with relative ease – problems of mismanagement are difficult to overcome and usually spell doom. Animation directors aren’t directing animation, they’re directing a group of people who are working in arguably the most time consuming and exacting of creative mediums. David Levy's new book Directing Animation at its heart strives to teach the reader how to keep an animation production crew happy, productive and on task.

The director of China's biggest animated feature discusses its hand-drawn importance.

Ryan Woodward's film "Thought of you" offers a great look at what hand animation has to offer, and what an animator and his audience can expect from the medium.

A close encounter with the five more YouTube Play award winners, L through N.