AN animated website featuring the collected stories and "rants" of the people of Leigh has been drawn up by a renowned New York animation team.

Cartoonists Grennan and Sperandio have collected the words of the people of Leigh about the idiosyncrasies of living in a small town.

They have chosen 10 stories of obsession, pet-hates and bugbears and turned them into their trademark cartoon stories to be placed on the web-site.

Entitled, Don't Get Me Started, it will be based in the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh as part of the Year of the Artist events.

The web-site is launched in May and can be seen at www.dont-get-me-started.com until April 2002.

Christopher Sperandio explained: "This will be our first art website. We've had a really great response to our call for both public and private rants from local people. We want to make the website as revealing about life in Leigh as it can be." Sperandio, 37, and Simon Grennan, 36, have worked together since 1989 when they met as lecturers at the University of Illinois. Their work has featured throughout Europe and America. In the last two years they have turned their attention to animated cartoon movies. They are currently working on films for MTV and Tyne Tees Television, and have recently completed a film for Channel Four.

Year of the Artist is aimed at raising the status and profile of living artists across all art forms.

The web-site project runs alongside an exhibition by Masakatsu Kondo, whose landscape paintings, 1997 to 2001, feature from May 5 to June 30.

The exhibition presents hyper-real landscape paintings by the Japanese artist.