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.

If you missed King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters last year in theaters, you should seek out the DVD, which is being released on January 29th. This documentary about a pair of Donkey Kong experts fighting for the all-time high score is both inspiring, hysterical and heartbreaking.

The DVD is shipping with a handful of featurettes and a bonus short titled A Really, Really Brief History of Donkey Kong, which you can see below. It was written by I Am 8-bit’s Jon Gibson and directed by Flash-pioneer Gabe Swarr, a Spumco vet with heaps of TV animation experience at Warner Bros. Animation, Disney and Nickelodeon.

The VO was provided by El Tigre voice actor Eric Bauza and the character design was led by Swarr and Steve Lambe. Tony Mora (another Spumco vet) provided the animation and the After Effects artistry was handled by Matt Gadbois.

Dave Redl’s Flash-animated series Family Pants is a perfect example of how the web is changing the face of entertainment. Not only is Dave producing, directing and distributing his own series on the web, but he’s also selling his own DVDs. Family Pants’ Hole in ‘Da Roof! is available through customflix.com for $13.95.

All of Dave’s work is produced with Flash 4 (he prefers the smoothness of the old brush tool), and he’s gone into extreme detail on his production process over on his blog, and he’s released an excellent Behind the Scenes short. Below is a 4-minute episode in which Frank Mueller accidentally locks his boss in a port-a-john.

Family Pants: Toilet Turmoil!

Family Pants has been written up in great detail over on Thinking Animation and Cartoon Brew.

Free Range Studios, the team behind The Meatrix and 2 sequels, recently teamed up with Richard Linklater and his film Fast Food Nation.

The Fast Food Nation DVD was released last week, and included on the disc are several shorts created by Free Range Studios, including The Backwards Hamburger Flash Animation Short (see below), The Meatrix and two follow-ups.

Nick Cross’ The Waif of Persephone, a 12-minute Flash-animated short, is now available on DVD. You can purchase the disc off Cross’ website, where he’s set up a Paypal account. The price is $13.99 and this includes shipping to Canada, the US and international addresses. Let’s all pull out our wallets and support the independent animator community. I just threw down my $13.99, and I already had a review copy. In the meantime, enjoy this teaser clip from the film.

Back in August, the fine folks over at Cartoon Brew posted about Nick Cross’ and Helder Mendonca’s exceptional work on the Flash-animated short ‘It’s All Around You.’ That month, the Cold Hard Flash team was asleep at the wheel.

The 7-minute short is a bonus feature on the ‘Final Destination 3: Thrill Ride Edition‘ DVD which released last month. Helder and Nick both posted stills on their respective blogs, and YouTube will help you view the fruits of their labor.

Michael Levine’s Pileated Pictures delivered a huge volume of animation for Hasbro’s new board game - Trivial Pursuit Dvd For Kids. It released this summer, and the game, which is aimed at kids 8 and up, is currently going for $29.99 over at Amazon.com.

I got my hands on a copy, and briefly played around with the DVD. It’s set up like a TV show - with episodes, and the game is sold as ‘Season 1.’ I recorded some footage from the game and cut together a short assembly.