UPDATE: You can keep up to date on this project from Alex Zemke's new Twitter.

The geekier side of the Internet has been fair abuzz since test shots of Alex Zemke's upcoming animated short Companionship, based on the award-winning and impossibly excellent video game series Portal from Valve, were revealed. The shots bring the protagonist Chell to life, infusing the mute, determined queen of the portal gun with warmth and humanity.

"Well, of course, the game is phenomenal, and I was obsessed with the sequel the instant it was announced," said Zemke via e-mail.

Zemke, who's had a hand in projects like the latest Smurfs film and the Uncharted games, had been looking for ideas for test animation to add to his portfolio. At the time all he was working on was facial animation and cleanup duty on motion capture. Then he ran across this graphic. The initial idea was to do a simple animation of Chell tripping into a portal and ending up caught in a constant loop of movement between them.

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Disney is famous for bringing fairy tales to life on the big screen, and most fairy tales are by nature made up of stock characters and archetypes. That's one of the ways they remain timeless as well as accessible to many different cultures.

Still, most Disney characters have names. It's awkward to call someone constantly by his or her title, so the nameless sea witch in Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid becomes Ursula, just as the Little Mermaid becomes Ariel. A few of the characters have held onto their honorifics, though, but you might be surprised to learn that they too have real names.

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Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss! On March 2, everyone's favorite master of rhyme would have been 108 years old. Dr. Seuss passed away in 1991, but his legacy will forever live on. In fact, right now his legacy is as strong as ever with the March 2 release of The Lorax on the big screen.

Not too many people know that Dr. Seuss, a.k.a. Theodor Geisel, has had a checkered past. Surprisingly for someone known to entertain children, Seuss has had his hand in some very grown-up activities. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904 and found his way to the prestigious Dartmouth College. For a while he was editor of the university's humor paper, but was forced to resign because he and his pals threw an alcohol-fueled rager. He went off to Oxford, on his father's wishes, but dropped out soon after.

He pursued a career in advertising, most notably at the New Jersey company Standard Oil, where he would design the company's ad campaigns for 15 years. The work he did there would set the stage for the rest of his career.

Theodor Geisel's print ad for Standard Oil

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Like most adult people, we didn't really pay attention to the world of Disney. Whenever a new film came out, we briefly acknowledged whatever story they'd chosen to animate and then moved on with our day. Now we have a daughter, and like most parents you start getting into Disney culture...a culture that has some serious problems, in our opinion.

The Disney princess movement is really beginning to annoy us. We understand that the point of the whole thing, aside from making huge amounts of money, of course, is to give little girls a bevy of female protagonists to identify with. The problem is, we feel that they've become so dedicated to this narrative that they have actively begun sacrificing any male roles in the stories. That's too bad because there have been some truly badass boys in the films, and each one is dying the sad death of undermarketing. Such as..

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You know Don Hertzfeldt. He's the genius animator behind Billy's Balloon, where the world's children are suddenly attacked by their helium-filled companions. More likely you've seen his Academy Award-nominated film Rejected, where his trademark stick figures act out a series of fictional advertisements for the Family Channel and birth the phrase "My spoon is too big."

Tonight, Hertzfeldt will be showing his most epic work, the Bill trilogy, in its entirety at the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park, including the not yet released finale It's a Beautiful Day. The three films, each running around 20 minutes, chronicle the life and breakdown of a man named Bill as he ponders the meaning of his existence through the filter of an unnamed illness in a series of short vignettes that incorporate Hertzfeldt's stick figures with brilliant, innovative multimedia footage. The first film, Everything Will be OK, was the second Oscar nomination for Hertzfeldt, and though we've seen only pieces of the middle film, I Am So Proud of You, what we've seen continues Hertzfeldt's unbroken streak of surreal excellence.

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Photo by Robert Easley

In costume at Oni-Con.

Check out our slideshow of the sexiest costumes at Oni-Con.

Oni-Con, Houston's annual appreciation of all things Japanese pop culture and anime, moved to the beach this year with a stunning setting at the Galveston Island Convention Center, giving costume-clad superheroes and manga fans the perfect backdrop for their photos.

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What she does: Wendy Wagner is a Hunting Prize-winning painter, animator and mixed-media artist who has been making art most of her life. "My father was a professor at UT and would bring home stacks of paper from work that I would draw on. I would go through these stacks furiously with tons of drawings," she tells Art Attack.

Her work has a magical, whimsical quality, fashioned halfway out of comic books and halfway out of classic portraiture. Still, she's always looking for ways to change up her format and try new things: Her fabric figurines, for example, were a way for her to bring the two-dimensional characters she draws for her animation into the third dimension.

"My mother always sewed growing up, so I had been exposed to laying out patterns and basic sewing," she says. "I inherited a 1954 Singer Featherweight sewing machine from my grandmother and started using this to sew in my artwork."

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Karolina Sobecka

Who's playing whom? "Sniff," by Karolina Sobecka.

Each year, the Aurora Picture Show and the Mitchell Center for the Arts present a festival of "live cinema performance" that they call "Media Archeology." This year they present three artists in three nights that will put the audience in three distinct positions with respect to the work, and will make the performance component of the festival its most salient feature. The festival's title, "Rewind - Play - Fast Forward," refers to an overall theme of games and game-playing, so it's only fitting that these presentations rely on the audience's interaction.

"This year I wanted to think about how games have influenced media and how they have influenced the art world," says festival curator Mary Magsamen.

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Art Attack's resident geek Jef With One F's list of ring powers that should be considered by the makers of the upcoming Captain Planet movie (yes, there is one) landed on our blog today and had us rolling in the aisles ("METAL!"). We imagine we'll be saying something similar once the actual movie comes out, which isn't even supposed to be a comedy (we think).

For those of us watching cartoons in the late '80s and early '90s, the post brought back memories of killing time and what channel surfing was like when we only had three channels.

For 8th Dimension Comics, it provided a forum to rant about what was a very disappointing, sometimes even frustrating, show:

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Abby Koenig's list about cartoon reboots we'd like to see made us a little teary as we recalled the many happy hours we wasted as kids watching Gummi Bears and The Snorks. We were glad to see we weren't the only ones getting nostalgic for '80s animation outside the current popularity of The Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks (shudder). Several readers left comments with their suggestions for inclusion on the list.

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