Fard is a 2009 French animated short by Luis Briceno and David Alapont. The story is quite visual, but my limited French tells me that the main character is part of a colorless corporate world and he’s just done a good presentation at work. However, he gets a package that contains something which allows him for a brief time to see what really lies underneath the surface of things.
Via SF Signal
A machine tells the tale of another machine and its hunger for control. A beautiful and frightening fairytale about the machinery of power. Rob Shaw and Sarah Hulin animated it.
Jérémy Clapin made Skhizein, a CG animation in which a man finds himself standing about a foot to the side of his actual position in the world. My question is: if he’s standing off to the side of himself, wouldn’t he be seeing everything from the point of view of his actual self since he touches things from that point of view?
Papiroflexia is a short film by Joaquin Baldwin about an origami artist who can make a world for himself.
Theodore Ushev, the animator who made the ‘Help Haiti’s Children’ poster that we use on this blog, has a new short film coming. It’s called Lipsett Diaries and is about a Canadian experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett who struggled with mental problems and died very young. I think Ushev takes animation very seriously as art and film. I always want to draw something right after watching anything he’s made.
From Russian animation studio Toonbox comes this marvelous animation based on a poem by Sasha Svirsky. I don’t understand a word of it but I love the sound of it. I really must find the woman who does the voice-over. She is just magnificent and totally fearless. The drawings are fascinating. The rhythm is catchy. Toonbox does so many of the best animations that I see. They seem to balance their commercial projects with artistic ones very well.
Via Cold Hard Flash
Head is an Argentinian animation by Matias Vigliano and Dante Zaballa. Lots of things going on at the same time.
South African artist William Kentridge made this film in 1996. It concerns the recognition of white guilt expressed through the medical investigation of a real estate magnate as he lies in a hospital bed. Kentridge makes his films by drawing and erasing in charcoal. He photographs each alteration to create movement.
From Super Electric Video comes a music video for a new single, Machine Gun, by Noisia. Hands rule the world and get nasty and destroy everything.
Via Dangerous Minds
Did you know this was going on inside your fridge? I think not. These terrible rotten avocados should be dealt with harshly. Henrik Sønniksen made this short and sweet animation that’s full of action and humor.
Simon Ampel made this animation to support the student protest movement against the barbaric and brutal religious government of Iran. It’s very well done and it drives its message home.
Chinese animator Te Wei made this film, The Cowherd’s Flute, in 1963. The boy plays a magnificent flute, then he falls asleep in a tree and dreams about losing his water buffalo. How does he find his friend again?
I found this via Cartoon Brew.
Someone named Brian Duffy at Massachusetts College of Art and Design made this peculiar animation featuring the voice of William S. Burroughs. He gets that face animation of Burroughs just absolutely perfect. And that copy of Naked Lunch is the exact copy I’m reading this very evening. Who is this animator? He’s very good.
You know, this is what’s so great about reading today, so far and beyond what any other time has allowed people to enjoy. It’s that you can read something like Naked Lunch and think ‘Whew! What a weird creature that Burroughs must have been! What a lunatic! Very sharp and very crazy.’ And then you can go out across the Web and find all sorts of fantastic films that have him walking around in them. You can find some kid up in Massachusetts who reads this lunatic and gets so inspired that he makes an incredible film about some one little thing Burroughs said at some point in his long life. Amazing. It’s never been better to read than now.
E.T.A. was directed by Henrik Bjerregaard Clausen, with character modeling and animation by Søren Andersen and Michael la-Cour. The production company is called Junk. The film gets the whole thing with the orbiting spaceship and the cockpit just perfectly. It’s short and sweet and funny. I love sci-fi with grungy control rooms and crap lying around. And of course I bet GM built the poor guy’s ship. Definitely. It’s a junker.