GKIDS and Fathom Events have announced the lineup for Studio Ghibli Fest 2024, and it’s absolutely stacked with gems. This year’s run includes 14 films and isn’t limited only to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, also featuring movies directed by Isao Takahata, Yoshifumi Kondo, Hiroyuki Morita and Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Studio Ghibli Fest 2024 will start with Spirited Away on April 27 and continue through December, when it ends with My Neighbor Totoro. The movies are playing in select AMC and Regal theaters across the US, with a few dates for each title in both Japanese and English dubbed.

The full list is: Spirited Away (April 27-May 1), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (May 19 and 21), Castle in the Sky (May 20 and 22), The Secret World of Arrietty (June 9 and 11), When Marnie Was There (June 10 and 12), Princess Mononoke (July 13-17), Ponyo (August 3-7), Whisper of the Heart (August 25 and 27), The Cat Returns (August 26 and 28), Howl’s Moving Castle (September 26-October 3), Kiki’s Delivery Service (October 26-30), Pom Poko (November 24 and 26), The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (November 25 and 27), and My Neighbor Totoro (December 7-11).

I’m already crying thinking about watching Nausicaä and Princess Kaguya on the big screen. Actually, you can apply that sentiment to pretty much all of these titles. It’s going to be great. According to the announcement, there will also be “surprise special extra content.”

Sony's Funimation purchased Crunchyroll from WarnerMedia for $1.175 billion in 2020, and they kicked off their transformation into a unified anime subscription service under the latter's name a year after the deal was announced. By 2022, Crunchyroll has already added more than 50 shows that were either exclusive to Funimation and weren't available with dubs to its library. Now, it sounds like they're almost done unifying their services: Funimation has revealed that it's going to shut down its old app and website on April 2. 

In Funimation's End of Services' page, it said most of its content has already been migrated to Crunchyroll. Those who've yet to leave Funimation, will automatically be transferred — all they need to do is use their existing credentials to log into Crunchyroll's website. After they do log in, they'll get a prompt telling them that their Watch and History lists are being migrated, as well. 

Viewers who have a Funimation and a Crunchyroll account will be prompted to merge their data from both services or to choose to use their data from one of them. And after April 2, their billing will go through Crunchyroll's and will follow its pricing, which starts at $8 a month. Unfortunately, Funimation customers who own digital copies complementing the DVDs or Blu-rays they purchased will lose access to them because Crunchyroll does not support them. "[W]e are continuously working to enhance our content offerings and provide you with an exceptional anime streaming experience," Funimation said. "We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to explore the extensive anime library available on Crunchyroll."

Animation is big business for Hulu, as the streamer’s roster of cartoons regularly rank in the top ten for hours watched on the platform, thanks to shows like Bob’s Burgers, Futurama, King of the Hill and many more. Seeking to capitalize on the popularity of adult animation, Hulu’s launching a sub-brand to house all of its animated and anime-based content, as originally reported by Variety. Animayhem is now the home for legacy content like the above titles and original content like Solar Opposites and Koala Man.

All told, the hub/sub-brand allows access to 2,600 episodes of traditional animated programming, spread across 46 series, and a whopping 18,400 episodes of anime, spread across 435 series. That’s over 20,000 episodes of cartoon goodness, for those keeping count. As such, Hulu is advertising the platform as the streamer’s “Animation Destination.”

The surprise-launch of Animayhem comes just two weeks before the latest Futurama reboot, and that’s just the start of the streamer’s plans for animation domination. Hulu’s ordered new episodes of Mike Judge’s King of the Hill and it plans on having a heavy presence at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, promising an immersive experience called “Hulu Animayhem: Into the Second Dimension.”

In the meantime, the hub’s already available as part of the standard Hulu subscription, so go ahead and binge Archer, Family Guy and all the hundreds upon hundreds of available anime series like One Piece and Naruto.

Sometimes, finding new ways to use old hardware requires awesome feats of reverse engineering, software sleight of hand, and a healthy dose of good fortune. Other times, though, it’s just as simple as reading the data sheet and paying attention to details.

Not that we’re knocking [upir]’s accomplishment with these tricked-out 16×2 OLED displays. Far from it, in fact — the smoothly animated bar graph displays alphanumerics look fantastic. What’s cool about this is that he accomplished all this without resorting to custom characters. We’ve seen him use this approach before; this time around, the hack involves carefully shopping for a 16×2 OLED display with the right driver chip — a US2066 chip. You’ll still need a few tricks to get things working, like extra pull-up resistors to get the I2C display talking to an Arduino, plus a little luck that you got a display with the right character ROM.

Once all that is taken care of, getting the display to do what you want is mainly a matter of coding. In the video below, [upir] does a great job of walking through the finer points, and the results look great. The bar graphs in particular look fantastic, with silky-smooth animations.

Light painting: there’s something that never gets old about waving lights around in a long exposure photo. Whilst most light paintings are single shots, some artists painstakingly create frame-by-frame animations. This is pretty hard to do when moving a light around by hand: it’s mostly guesswork, as it’s difficult to see the results of your efforts until after the photo has been taken. But what if you could make the patterns really precise? What if you could model them in 3D?

[Josh Sheldon] has done just that, by creating a process which allows animations formed in Blender to be traced out in 3D as light paintings. An animation is created in Blender then each frame is automatically exported and traced out by an RGB LED on a 3D gantry. This project is the culmination of a lot of software, electronic and mechanical work, all coming together under tight tolerances, and [Josh]’s skill really shines.

The first step was to export the animations out of Blender. Thanks to its open source nature, Python Blender add-ons were written to create light paths and convert them into an efficient sequence that could be executed by the hardware. To accommodate smooth sliding camera movements during the animation, a motion controller add-on was also written.

The gantry which carried the main LED was hand-made. We’d have been tempted to buy a 3D printer and hack it for this purpose, but [Josh] did a fantastic job on the mechanical build, gaining a solidly constructed gantry with a large range. The driver electronics were also slickly executed, with custom rack-mount units created to integrate with the DragonFrame controller used for the animation.

The video ends on a call to action: due to moving out, [Josh] was unable to continue the project but has done much of the necessary legwork. We’d love to see this project continued, and it has been documented for anyone who wishes to do so. If you want to check out more of [Josh]’s work, we’ve previously written about that time he made an automatic hole puncher for music box spools.

Thanks for the tip, [Nick].

One can imagine that making a stop motion animation film is a lot of work, but if you’ve ever wondered what one involves, James Wilkinson decided to document the process of making Billy Whiskers: The Mystery of the Misplaced Trowel. 

The main character of this film is a mystery-solving feline, who is animated with the help of five servos that control mouth movements under Arduino control.

In order to get shots that move properly, Wilkinson also came up with his own motion capture rig, moved by a number of stepper motors via an Arduino Mega. His documentation is certainly worth checking out if you’re interested in animatronics or advanced filming techniques, and you can see a trailer for the film below.

Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?

Stop motion animator and maker/hacker [James Wilkinson] is working on a project involving a real-world furry cat character called Billy Whiskers and decided that Billy’s lips would be moved one frame at a time using servo motors under computer control while [James] moves the rest of the body manually.

He toyed around with a number of approaches for making the lip mechanism before coming up with one that worked the way he wanted. The lips are shaped using guitar wire soldered to other wires going to servos further back in the head. Altogether there are four servos for the lips and one more for the jaw. There isn’t much sideways movement but it does enough and lets the brain fill in the rest.

On the software side, he borrows heavily from the tools used for lip syncing computer-drawn characters. He created virtual versions of the five servo motors in Adobe Animate and manipulates them to define the different lip shapes. Animate then does the interpolation between the different shapes, producing the servo positions needed for each frame. He uses an AS3 script to send those positions off to an Arduino. An Arduino sketch then uses the Firmata library to receive the positions and move the servos. The result is entirely convincing as you can see in the trailer below. We’ve also included a video which summarizes the iterations he went through to get to the finished Billy Whiskers or just check out his detailed website.

[Jame’s] work shows that there many ways to do stop motion animation, perhaps a part of what makes it so much fun. One of those ways is to 3D print a separate object for each character shape. Another is to make paper cutouts and move them around, which is what [Terry Gilliam] did for the Monty Python movies. And then there’s what many of us did when we first got our hands on a camera, move random objects around on our parent’s kitchen table and shoot them one frame at a time.

This tutorial will show you how to build your own Stroboscopic Animator using Magzor's Mechanotronic Design Portal as a starting point. Magzor Corporation is a business in California that is trying really hard to simplify robotic design. They want to enable users with little to no engineering experience to design and manufacture a custom robot by themselves in a matter of hours.

What is a stroboscope? A stroboscope is an instrument that uses a strobe light to make a moving object look stationary… We will use this feature to create an interesting 4 picture animation on a rotating disk.

 

 
Have a look at the video below to see the project in action, and the MDP process walk-through:

 

Video

 
 

Parts Required:

• Arduino MEGA (or compatible board)
• Magzor I2C Arduino Shield
• Magzor MIC: Power and I2C board
• Magzor MIC: 10x GPIO
• Magzor MIC: 2x DC Motor Driver
• Magzor Hall Effect Breakout
• Neodymium Magnet
• Magzor LED board
• 6V 2.5A DC Planetary Geared Motor
• 5V DC 4A Power supply
• RJ45 cable
• Female to Female Jumper wire
• Misc items: scrap paper, wood, brackets, screws, single and double-sided tape, cardboard.

 

Magzor Schematic Diagram

Click to zoom ...

 

Further build instructions can be obtained by selecting the components in the Mechanotronics Design Portal within the Magzor website. Generating the build, and then selecting "Setup Instructions" tab at the top of the page. See video above to see this process in action.
 
 

Arduino Sketch

Make sure to copy and paste the following code into your Arduino IDE. It doesn't seem to work directly from the browser. You also need to install the Arduino Magzor I2C library ( http://magzor.com/downloads/ )

 

Putting it together

 

Arduino MEGA

 

Magzor I2C board

 

MIC Boards

 

MIC Boards Assembled

 

Sensors, Modules and Shields - all put together

 

Motor with Bracket and Wire

 

Picture lined up with magnet on disk

 

Stroboscopic Animation

 

             

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