China has been in London for a long time, and it's not just been in the series of streets, shops and restaurants that constitute Chinatown. As well as a marvellous amount of fun things to see and do around Chinatown this weekend for Chinese New Year, it seems the whole of London wants to get involved. The Victoria & Albert museum, National Film Theatre, City Hall and the Trocadero are all hosting events and......

Grown-ups have known for years, since parents found themselves begging their kids to take them to see Toy Story again, that animation is not just for drooling infants who don't know how to read or pronounce Jan Svankmeyer correctly. Claymation, anime, CGI, stop-motion, traditional pen, paper and clever uses of transparencies... it's a big area and with the recent release of animation-a-like films such as A Scanner Darkly challenging the now extremely common CGI......

The Portobello Film Festival started in 1996 and it has grown and expanded to become the UK's biggest independent film festival, going from 1,000 visitors back then to over 15,000 last year. Every film submitted is screened, entry is free to all events and there has never been a fixed venue: each year, the organisers book themselves into places ranging from church halls to night clubs to parks, tents, cafes and bars. Starting from......

There can't, nor shouldn't be many of us who have never come into contact with the Mr. Men, today celebrating their 35th birthday. Since advertising copywriter Roger Hargreaves's son once asked him what a tickle looked like, there have been over 80 Mr Men and Little Miss books translated into 15 languages worldwide, selling over 100 million copies and making Hargreaves the third best selling author of all time in Britain in 2005. Hargreaves......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com. This week's summary was brought to you with the help of Inky Circus ....thanks Inky! Event of the week Pixar: 20 Years of Animation opens at the Science Museum this Saturday. Prebooking is strongly recommended cause, us inkettes dunno, it’s Pixar and they are easily the coolest geekiest most-badass......

Last year's inaugural London International Animation Festival was such a success that it's no surprise that they've come back even bigger and better this year. For starters they've moved in to the Curzon Cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue (one of Londinist's favourites), and they've also managed to accumulate 210 films from 30 countries to assault the capital's eyeballs with. They've got short films, kids animation, a special British series, student animation, and computer animation; and......

We can't seem to turn round without bumping into a film festival at the moment, so we thought it might be useful to go through a quick rundown of what's on offer out there. The Italian Film Festival at the Riverside Studios started on the 8th and runs until the end of this week. Highlights include After Midnight and On Any Street, along with a couple of extensive shorts programmes. The Johnny Depp season......

Last weekend Channel 4 screened the results of its online poll to find the top 100 cartoons, and while it threw up the odd oversight (Fantasia at 53 while Shrek and Shrek 2 come in at 6???), it was pretty much the usual suspects in the top 10 with the Simpsons inevitably at number one. One of the artists that featured regularly throughout in one capacity or another was animation legend Chuck Jones, whose......

If you are down at the snow slide today or over the weekend and you fancy warming your bum in a nice, cosy cinema afterwards then Londonist reccomends a walk down to City Hall where the International Manga & Anime Festival is taking place. The festival has been organised by the County Hall Animation Studio Enterprise (CHASE), and as a result entry is abasolutely free. For the next three days there will be four......