The gang at Toonbox recently produced this mixed-media spot for the travel website anywayanyday.com. If you don’t speak Russian, you can just stare at the beautiful merger of miniature sets and Flash animation. The spot was produced by Pavel Muntyan and directed by Arthur Merkulov.

Yoni Goodman, the animation director of Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, is reportedly already working awaiting the start of production on The Congress, Folman’s follow-up to Waltz. Goodman, who we interviewed here back in 2009, hasn’t been idle since his work on Waltz. He was hard at work on this 3-minute segment for Ari Mark’s short film The Gift, using Toon Boom.

… and here’s a video that includes some scenes from The Congress, that’s due out in 2013.

The latest Flash-animated madness to emerge from Weebls-stuff.com is a diddy about Stephen Fry, the British actor, author, host and twitter fiend. Peabo is behind the animation knobs and levers.

Nina Paley’s critically-aclaimed feature Sita Sings the Blues (100% on RottenTomatoes.com) will be screened at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco on July 20th to benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In related news, the EFF is celebrating their 20th anniversary, and Paley was called upon to get the party started. She animated this short below that illustrates one of the issues the EFF fights for.

Developers at Ubisoft in France have hatched a new animation tool called UBIart, that focuses on “interactive creation.” It’s a proprietary tool, and the fact that they’re promoting its existence makes me think they’ll offer it to the public at some point. With user-generated content invading the video gaming world (like LittleBigPlanet), it would make sense, especially in light of Ubisoft’s announcement of ManiaPlanet, a “user-powered” game coming later this year. UBIart appears to work like Flash – or probably more like Toon Boom – allowing the user to import any medium and then animate using rigs.

The artist working the tablet here is Christophe Villez, a graduate of Gobelins, and his work is then animated by Anthony Le Du.

… and this piece discusses the UBIart framework, and then leads into a trailer for Rayman Origins.