From the bristling fur of Fantastic Mr Fox to the rag dolls of the forthcoming Tim Burton-produced animation 9 and the low-fi puppets of Where The Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze, it seems you can't move at the moment for animation with a homespun attitude.
More often than not, these mainstream films have their blockbuster roots in personal projects and traditional techniques.
The apocalyptic adventure story 9 is a case in point. The original concept for this film, released in the UK last week, came when its director, Shane Acker, holed up in his bedroom and, using easily available modelling software, created a short film about a sentient rag doll warring against a band of psychopathic machines. Burton saw the film and helped turn the project into a feature-length story.
Continues Below↓"I heard about him working in his spare room and I had to get on to it for that reason - to see his creativity and passion," Burton told US Wired magazine earlier this month.
Burton felt it was his role to nurture such talent, which is looking more professional more quickly than ever.
"The technology has got down to the consumer level and the level of the artist," adds Acker. "People can manufacture these things in their spare bedroom or wherever else."
The story of the would-be creative genius toiling away in his bedroom before winning widespread success has always walked hand-in-hand with animation, though it was never as easy to do it as now.
Twenty years ago this year, Aardman Animations, the world's most successful stop-motion animation house, released its first film, the 23-minute classic A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit.
That was the result of six years of hard graft by the company's founder, Nick Park, who began his endeavour when still a student at the National Film and Television School.
Then, it took a ton of Plasticine and the contacts and facilities of one of the world's best film schools. Now, the same effect can be achieved by one man working alone with a computer. What the Internet has done for democratising the distribution and creation of music and film, it has also done for animation.
One animator who has used it to its full potential is the London-based cartoonist Simon Tofield. He dreamt up the character of a naughty moggy named Simon's Cat one day while experimenting with a new software package on his computer.
He created a one-and-a-half minute film based on the attempts by his own cat, Hugo, to wake him up one morning.
The results found their way on to YouTube and an animation series was born. It spread through word of mouth and, by the end of last year, Tofield had scooped several prizes, including Best Comedy at the British Animation Awards.
He says his technique is fully dependent on modern technologies.
"I do my films on Flash (a programme which gained prominence as a means for web designers to add little animations to websites) and it would take me much longer if I were drawing them all by hand," Tofield explains.
"If I were doing what I do traditionally, I would need to draw every frame by hand, then I would need to take them to a professional - a line tester - to photograph all of the images.
"Then I would need to take notes on them, make corrections over a light box and then shoot them again."
It is a tribute to the accessibility of the software that Tofield is a self-confessed technophobe - he says he knew nothing about computers before he started using Flash.
Eighteen months later, Simon's Cat has been turned into a book and Tofield's cartoons have been seen by an estimated 30 million people.
In the last five years a plethora of websites has sprung up designed to capitalise on the public's penchant for do-it-yourself work.
Many of them use Flash animation to allow you to create animations in your browser.
This Internet-fuelled animation boom is feeding back into the film industry - with some interesting results.
Bill Edwards, a 38-year-old graphic designer from Leicestershire, gave up on animating when he was growing up and went to work in a warehouse instead.
It wasn't until software made the process easier that he found success. He entered a number of online competitions. One of the websites to which he submitted his film 2009: A Space OAP was created by the director Shane Meadows.
Meadows was so impressed that he asked Edwards to direct the 97-second title sequence to his rockumentary Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee.
Not everyone is convinced that creating animation in your bedroom is a new trend, no matter how much easier it is to pull off these days.
"I'd say animation in the UK has always been a cottage industry," says Frank Grimshaw, editor of Imagine magazine.
"It's always existed for bedroom noodlers; it's such a labour-intensive thing that previously only a very specific kind of person would devote two years of their life to making a two-minute film."
He says the kind of person who is drawn to the painstaking animation process has a specific psychological profile: perhaps with these new technologies, the pursuit can at last escape from the asylum. - The Independent
