Here is a very cool animation reference straight from the World Cup semi-finals:

Check out the commentator (the guy near the camera): his initial facial expression denotes a bit of disbelief (is Spain scoring a goal after a corner kick against the taller players of Germany?); then it goes to a apprehension one, where his torso and head remain completely still for a moment (it seems that Spain can actually score this goal); and ends with the celebration with the beautiful goal from Puyol. Very cool!

And congratulations for the teams of Spain and the Netherlands for advancing to the finals! :)

The World Cup is finished for us Brazilians (and Argentinian). My bet was a Brazil vs Argentina in the finals... Anyway, I had to talk about something related to animation and the World Cup here, right? :D

I just saw this, thanks to Suryara's tip: a recreation of the German goals in stop motion, using Lego and over the original narration, made by the German newspaper Bild.

I think its an amazing approach. Here in Brazil there are a couple of websites which don't have the rights for reproducing the World Cup images and decided to recreate them in 3D, but the lack of enough production time made them look less than interesting. This one by the German website is at least as interesting as the original goals. I had to watch them over and over to pay attention to all the funny details. Congrats to the people at Bild, who managed to turn an unfavorable condition into something memorable.

You probably remember the awesome wall-painted animation MUTO, by the italian artist BLU.

Now he managed to make something even bigger in a short of amost 10 minutes and an outstanding mix of creativity and hard work: Big Bang Big Boom.

The first teaser of Rango was one of the weirdest things in a while, but this trailer got me very interested in watching the movie. Looks very good and funny:

I'll avoid spoilers, but I'm writing this post to say:

If you didn't watch it yet, turn off your computer and go to the next session of Toy Story 3. The movie is fabulous, and the preceding short, Day & Night, simply amazing.

As always, Pixar manages to raise the bar in every production. To the international public, like here in Brazil, they usually make translated renders of some shots that contain text. This time their level of adaptation was something unimaginable.

Well, I'd better stop writing because I'm about to release a spoiler. ;)