For his final film at Shenkar College, Israeli artist Yonny Zafrani animated a slice of his life - his answering machine. Cobbling together snippets from his answering machine messages, Yonny crafted this 3-minute, Flash-animated film that lets us peer into his seemingly complicated life. The film is aptly titled Answering Machine.

Highlander Productions, who created the Shlomo music video we watched back in March, are back with a new animated web series. Bana Panic pits citizens against beasts of unimaginable size, inducing panic of unimaginable volume.

To promote his Top Shelf comic book The Incredible Change-Bots, Ignatz award-recipient Jeffrey Brown turned to animators Mysh and Oren Mashkovski. The two created this trailer below, which features characters from Brown’s riff on the Transformers universe. Brown is no stranger to animation, having directed the music video for Death Cab For Cutie’s Your Heart is an Empty Rooom, which was animated by Eliza Kinkz.

Preview the comic here.

Before Waltz With Bashir made its big splash at Cannes, Ari Folman experimented with animation in a 2004 series. The Material That Love is Made Of, a documentary series, was animated in Flash at PIL animation in Israel, serving as the testing ground for the process Folman and his team would employ on Waltz With Bashir. The project was design by Mysh and David Polonsky and animation by Yoni Goodman, Ella Marshak and Oryan Ventura.

We’ll decide for ourselves if these are “the best animations on Earth,” but Hiyo.com has to be commended for putting the extra effort into their Flash-animated emoticons. I personally despise instant messaging, but this makes me want to download MSN and clog up other people’s work days. Have a look at some examples in this promotional video:

Hiyo.com is a subset of Incredimail, the email software that comes with a vast array of animated emoticons. Incredimail is based in Tel Aviv.

A big thanks to Pierre for spotting this site and posting it to the message boards.

Alex Orrelle, the owner of Tel Aviv-based animation studio Crew 972, conceived this short film below, titled Irma’s Car, which is a clever comment on the recent invasion of sub-compact cars. JP Vine, an in-house director, handled the art direction, and the short was brought to life in a combination of Flash and 3D.

Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir premiered yesterday in France and is generating a good deal of positive buzz at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The story deals with the Israeli Army’s mission in the 1982 Lebanon War, intercut with animated interviews with those who took part. The UK Guardian called the film, which cost approximately 2 million to produce, “extraordinary” and the film’s website reveals that it took about 4 years to produce. The film’s art director, David Polonsky, completed 80% of the movie’s 2,000 illustrations, which were based on video footage shot prior to production. These illustrations were then brought to life in a combination of Flash animation, traditional animation and CGI. The director of animation, Yoni Goodman, created the animation process that was instituted on the film, and he eventually revved up his team to where they were outputting an average of 1.5 seconds of footage a day. Goodman was supported by lead animators Tal Gadon and Gali Edelbaum. Waltz With Bashir is one of 22 films in contention for the Palm d’Or, or “Best Picture” at Canne. Here is the trailer, subtitled in English.