In this day in age, ’tis the season where more and more “holiday cards” have become digital, leaving mantle places and refrigerators bare of holiday greetings with the exception of ‘once a year’ correspondence from Aunt Millie and her 9 cats, out in Sheboygan, Idaho. I just spotted this one on Glossy, from JWT which I thought was a nice mix animation by Blacklist, with a glimmer of hope for 2010. Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

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And if this puts you in the mood for more reasons to procrastinate at work, you can check out these sites which have put together a list of other holiday cards:

Motionographer.com
Adfreak.com
AgencySpy

While is might not be the norm to direct you to some of our “competitor’s” sites, I figure it’s the holiday season, so why not let them do all the work while I sip on egg nog and stuff myself with Christmas cookies. Kidding…at least about letting them do all the work.

We took a week off yesterday and whilst we were gone, a new DVD came out. Parodying Star Wars for a second time, Family Guy: Something Something Something Dark Side hit the shelves on December 22nd, and here’s the trailer:

Buzz, Woody and the rest of the Toy Story 3 gang have passed on a few words of advice to help you get through the holiday break:

JibJab is famous for using cutout digital photos of famous people and (in particular) politicians to make us all laugh. This year, they pushed aside the digital tools, and sharpened their scissors. Here’s their 2009 wrap-up animation – Never a Year Like ’09. Congrats to the Spiridellis brothers, and to the many artists who pulled this together like Devin Bell, Ian Worrel, Jeff Gill, Kevin Elam and Alan Cook.

Australian musician Nick Bertke (aka Pogo) produces music entirely from film audio, creating entirely new works. You may remember his take on Alice in Wonderland – simply hypnotic. Upular is his latest, which borrows samples from Disney/Pixar’s Up.

Adeline Grange, Violaine Briat, Rachid Guendouze and Benoit Tranchet produced this special effects shot this year as part of their studies at Gobelins L’Ecole de L’Image. It’s titled Golem.

This third trailer for Despicable Me, which is brought to you by Universal’s Illumination Entertainment, takes a far different approach from the first two. It’s a character highlight of the Minions that apparently uses animation produced just for this promotion. I like physical humor, and I think this might actually standout in theaters simply because of the spartan approach. The CG feature is due in theaters on July 3rd, 2010.