Film: Sweetheart

Here’s a music video made entirely out of illustrations, photos, and text from second-hand books! I never watch music videos all the way through. But I watched this one and admired its clever associations of images to lyrics. It’s all spelled out for you in the most charming and humorous way.  Good song too!  Ben Reed made this for a band called The Wave Pictures.

1000 Years of Polish History Turned Into 8 Minutes of Xbox Hell

Here’s how you obfuscate 1000 years of history. You animate it into an unintelligible eight minutes for an expo in Shanghai because certainly those Chinese are interested in how the Poles won their freedom. But the real problem with this animation that seems to place Poland’s entire history squarely into an Xbox game is the ending. All that history brings us up to the overbearing and rather creepy final images of the great corporate towers ascending into the heavens, completely taking over and creating the corporate citadel of wonder that houses only cubicle workers and offers relaxing courtyards where business people can take a mandatory lunch.  It’s as if the only thing the western world can figure out to do with cities anymore is to turn them into gargantuan corporate business parks unfit for any human habitation.

Animation: Sensology

Animator, Michel Gagné, has just premiered his latest film.  Sensology is a visualization of music played by Paul Plimley (piano) and Barry Guy (bass).  The images actually look like the sounds they accompany.  I couldn’t help thinking all the way through the film that the pictures were exactly how the notes sounded.  I’m normally very hard to amuse with shapes that illustrate music, but this piece is short and good.  My favorite part is the machine-like animation near the end.

Via Cartoon Brew

Animation: Dante’s Inferno In Under 2 Minutes

Filmmaker Declan Moran made this under 2-minute version of Dante’s Inferno which is based on a book called Dante’s Inferno: A Comedy’ by the Brothers Grim & Grimy (undead). I like it.  Dante’s actual book is so full of colorful Italian whining that I find it almost unreadable.  I mean really, the nasty old fellow used his trip through the underworld to take out his revenge for every little insult he ever suffered at the hands of almost anyone he ever met.  Insufferable.  Well, suffer no more, the Inferno is here in short form!