Nicktoons Network : Animation Festival

To get aspiring cartoonists and animation fans to toon into the third annual Nicktoons Network Animation Festival, an online and on-air showcase for the world's best animated shorts, the Nickelodeon sister network tapped interactive studio Exopolis to create a promotional website for the event. The resulting web experience blends standard features (including the call for entries and downloadable entry forms) with bonus content like videos of past winners, profiles of the judges and festival blogs, all mashed into a multi-level universe designed to invoke Dante's Inferno. Each of the site's eight surreal levels represents different content areasafter starting off in Burbank, the home of Nicktoons Studios, visitors can fly up to heaven to read the latest news, inspect the ozone layer for rules and FAQs, watch videos in the sewers, descend to hell to read about the judges, or travel to China on the other side of the world to check out prizes for festival winners. And each level is populated by an army of animated characters that more than match the quirkiness of their environments.