Russian-born animator Alex Budovsky delighted us with the Bathtime in Clerkenwell music video back in 2002 for the band Tuesday Weld, and he’s got another one cued for us. It’s Budovsky’s second collaboration with the German pop artist Jim Avignon. Back in 2007, they partnered on Jukebox, which utilized drawings by Avignon. Here’s Middle Class Hell, off Avignon’s Say Hi To Your Neighbor.

While the majority of Oscar-nominated feature The Secret of Kells was traditionally animated, there were a number of Flash-animated sequences in the film, as we reported here back in 2009. If you watched last weekend’s Oscar telecast, you may have spotted the segment featuring animated characters from all of the nominated productions, and I just discovered that the :18 second clip of Aisling, the woodland fairy from The Secret of Kells, was animated in Flash, frame-by-frame with the brush tool. Alessandra Sorrentino and Alfredo Cassano, two talented freelance crew members at Cartoon Saloon (who are also a couple), brought it to life. Huge congrats to the whole team at Cartoon Saloon!

Ian Worrel is the mastermind behind Second Wind, his brilliant senior thesis from CalArts, which emerged on the web last August. It got another release on Vimeo this week to rave reviews. Since school, he’s been hard at work at JibJab, where he makes fun projects like this Flash animated wedding greeting below:

The Cyanide & Happiness team teach us a valuable lesson in their new short Speed Racist: Don’t Drive Fast.

Here’s the latest short from the Russian studio Toonbox. It’s based on a poem by Sasha Svirsky, an artist working at the studio. It’s in Russian, and the story deals with an abstract word, Khabrahol, imagined by Svirsky and the word’s untimely fate.