Paperman

“Have you seen Paperman yet?”, Jim Treacher asks. And if you click on the gorgeous piece of animation above, you can answer in the affirmative:

I’ve been hearing about this short film for a while, how it’s like nothing anybody’s seen before, it’s signaling the future of animation, etc. Apparently it’s been playing before Wreck-It Ralph, and Disney just put it on YouTube a few days ago. Even at YouTube quality, it’s fantastic.

It looks a lot like traditional hand-drawn animation, but it’s actually CGI. Graeme McMillan at Wired explains how they did it:

Follow the link, or click over to Jim’s post for the technical details, but watching this, I had one thought: Warner Brothers needs to phone up Kevin Conroy, the voice of the Caped Crusader in their cartoon-noir series from the early 1990s and do a Batman TV series or movie set in the 1940s in this style of animation; it would look fantastic.