French animator Arthur De Pins first gained notice with his animated short L’Eau de Rose (Bed of Roses, image above — bottom, left), for which he created the characters and animated them in Flash, with some additional compositing in After Effects.

Macromedia (Adobe) Flash, a computer animation application which was originally aimed at the creation of animated banner ads for the web, has been coming into its own as an animation tool for both television cartoons and animated shorts aimed at the animation circuit. The Kalamazoo Animation Festival Internationalactually has a special category for Flash animation and awarded that category to L’Eau de Rose in 2005.

De Pins worked with producer Jeremy Rochigneux on Rose, and teamed up with him again for La Révolution des Crabes, which took home home top honors, and the prize money, from the 2005 session of Nextoons, The Nicktoons Film Festival.

Books by Arthur de Pins

Zombillenium, Vol. 2: Human Resources

by Arthur de Pins - Graphic Novel

Tempers are flaring around Zombillenium, the amusement park run by monsters. When one hires only the witches, vampires, werewolves, and other undead in a region where unemployment is in the double digits, one must expect some friction. But things get particularly ugly when the park’s security is breached from two sides: activists and a very strange visitor, the mother of two peculiar sons that the head of the park seems to remember from somewhere. Presented in Arthur de Pins’s trademark, tongue-in-cheek black humor, this is a stunning beautiful, fully painted graphic novel that plays on that traditional horror genre.