Remember when the Cartoon Network team produced new Powerpuff Girls animation in Flash? Inevitably, the discussion veered towards whether the software ruined the project. (the blogger calmly unclenches fist) If CHF has a mission, it’s to dispell this kind of talk, and illustrate that it’s not the software, it’s the artist. If the artist sucks, ergo the animation will likely suck, and vice versa. Flash is meerly a brush and a canvas.

So…. we move on to The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!, which will release direct-to-DVD in April 2010. Six Point Harness recently put the finishing touches on the project, which was animated in Flash right here in Hollywood. The TV episodes were never about the animation, so we’re not talking about recreating The Lion King here, but nevertheless there will likely be discussion about how the move to Flash has somehow soured the visuals. I personally think it looks great, and I’d argue that the production values have gone up a notch. More importantly, what do you think?

The Flash-animated series Pale Force is now available on DVD, featuring 85 minutes of video, including plenty of behind-the-scenes material. The NBC series is drawn by New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth, and features one of my favorite comedians Jim Gaffigan along with Conan O’Brien.

A couple of “celebrity” directors have turned to Flash animation over the years, and perhaps the two most notable were David Lynch and Tim Burton. In 2002, Lynch, who received instruction from Tony Candelaria at one point, produced Dumbland – an 8-episode Flash-animated series. Two years prior to that, Burton teamed up with Shockwave.com and Flinch Studio to create Stainboy, a character who first appeared in one of Burton’s books. Tony Grillo at Flinch recently unearthed the original source files from that production and began remastering. The new HD videos will be screened at an upcoming MoMA exhibit on Burton that opens on November 22nd. Grillo has detailed both this recent process and the original production over on his blog, and below is one of the newly restored episodes:

Another valuable lesson can be learned from Amy Winfrey’s latest episode of Squid and Frog. In Canyons, we also meet a new character – Squirrel. Pick up some Squid and Frog stickers at squidandfrog.com, and check out the Season 1 DVD for Winfrey’s Making Fiends series – a 2-disc set that hit the shelves this week.

Ward Jenkins, a director at commercial animation studio LAIKA/house, created the character animation for Primal Screen’s show reel back in 2006. Jenkins, who runs a popular animation blog, animated the characters traditionally and then scanned the drawings into Flash. Joe Kubesheski then cleaned up his work in the software and created the final sequences below.