Dan Kanemoto and Dan Blank

I really appreciated the personal style and feeling put into every drawing of Dan Kanemoto's Letter From the Western Front short animated film. In a modern technological era when whole movies are done using entirely computer effects at massive budgets, it was refreshing to see hand painted and drawn images, augmented and set to motion using a computer. With this method, Kanemoto managed to merge traditional animation with computer effects and motion, to bring out the best aspects of each method.
Dan Blank's Shadowplay achieves a similar success, albeit with a different kind of animation. Everything three dimensional in the piece was created with clay and animated in traditional stop-motion. The two dimensional figures of the shadows and posters were then animated via computer. This particular style really succeeded in separating and contrasting the three dimensional, tactile world of the living, with the flat world of shadows.