With The Princess and the Frog DVD arriving in stores today, it’s high time we mention that Toon Boom was the technology of choice behind the Oscar-nominated feature. Much of the animation process was traditional (flipping paper and such), but the crew at Walt Disney Animation Studios used the enterprise-grade Toon Boom package Harmony to bring it to the screen. In fact, many of the Annie-Award-winning effects were “paperless” – drawn with a Cintiq right into Harmony.

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!

Listen up, suckas! We finally got our hands on the Flash-animated Black Dynamite end credits. The live-action film, which opened in mid-October on 70 screens, is director Scott Sanders’ faithful send-up of 1970s Blaxploitation films (Dolemite, Super Fly), and the 90-minute project has received a strong critical reception. The producers turned to Six Point Harness to bring the action-packed end credits to life, but that’s not the end of the animated story. According to a recent interview with Sanders, the project is in the pilot phase for a series on Cartoon Network. We’ll keep you posted, ya dig?

James Farr’s Flash-animated series Xombie is reportedly nearing a feature deal at DreamWorks. Yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter leaked that the writing/producing duo of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are currently negotiating with Farr for the rights to the property, which has also been spun off as a graphic novel and a comic book. We’ll cross our fingers.

Sure! If you’ve got the skills and the time, a Sita Sings the Blues video game is yours for the making. Or a sequel or whatever else you can dream up. That’s because Nina Paley, the writer and director of the award-winning, feature-length animated film, has pushed the FLA source files into the in your hands with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This move follows suit with Paley’s distribution method in which she offered a free download earlier this year, hoping it will promote the sales of the limited edition DVD and accompanying merch.