Jamie Stone and Anders Jendenfors made this brilliant ‘washing powder’ animation about a kid named John who has lots of thoughts about Mars and man’s destiny in space. Beautiful and just hilarious.
Jamie Stone and Anders Jendenfors made this brilliant ‘washing powder’ animation about a kid named John who has lots of thoughts about Mars and man’s destiny in space. Beautiful and just hilarious.
One of the submitters to my Vimeo short films group, Robert Lyons, sent this short French stop-motion film in. He worked as the directory of photography on it. The director was Delphine Burros. It’s about a librarian who opens a magical and evil book.
Gulp is a stop-motion film created by animators at Aardman. It was shot entirely on a Nokia N8 camera and has the distinction of having used the largest set for a stop-motion film in the world. A beach!
This looks pretty good. There’s a new free browser game called ‘Star Trek – Infinite Space‘ coming this summer. You of course get to command either a Star Fleet or a Klingon ship. The explosions look impressive, as do the starships in this little preview.
A 1932 cartoon advertisement for Oldsmobile by the Fleischer studio. Via Hidden Los Angeles.
Here’s a wonderful animation that takes us inside a newspaper’s world of print and ink. Chaos ensues as the world waits on the edge of disaster. Words become danger and begin to fail as the stories get worse. The film was directed by Bastian Böhm and Nico Uthe from their own story.
This a 2004 animation directed by Tomek Baginski. Soldiers are pushed to their deaths and photographed. You know, kind of like the way it all works in the real world.
In 1955 The American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods produced this animation to encourage people to get together and work hard to rebuild and clean up impoverished neighborhoods and slums. Its focus on individual effort, painting old garage doors, and forming groups seems hopelessly naive, but it does at least make an effort to encourage people. The production actually has quite an impressive audio track and I think that’s Ray Walston voicing the Devil. The film calls itself: ‘a film dedicated to the purpose of better living in homes and neighborhoods for… All Americans.’
Bastiaan Schravendeel, who is part of Polder Animation, directed this touching film about a boy who falls in love with and older girl who is a neighbor. The faceless characters do it all with body language.
Via Short of the Week.
In 1956 Peter and Joan Foldes made this animation about nuclear doomsday that caused quite an outcry after Ed Sullivan presented it to unsuspecting viewers and their children on his evening show. Io9 has more about the broadcast.
Henry Zhang, who is studying at the UCLA Animation Workshop, made this perfectly charming animation about a little bird that just wants some damn peace and quiet so it can sing. For goodness sake, how hard can it be? Well, I guess it’s just a noisy world.
This short film by Duncan Elms explores the danger of an Internet that can be shut down quite easily by governments that want to suppress free expression or crack down on popular movements toward freedom. The recent experience of Egyptians trying to stage a revolution and spread information about it amongst themselves and to the world should be very informative. The Mubarak government was able to turn off Internet access throughout the nation. Even in the U.S., President Obama has sought the power to switch off the Internet if he declares an emergency. That effort has since been watered down, but it is clear that the U.S. government does in fact seek a method for shutting down the Internet. The continued treatment of China, a nation that monitors every single word typed into a web site, as even remotely civilized is an embarrassment to the entire world. Those people won’t even allow a person to think freely, much less post freely on the web. There must be a way to maintain worldwide access to the Internet that is beyond the control of any national government, including the United States government.
Emlyn Boyle of Ireland made this beautiful Gothic horror animation about a girl who has a late night encounter with a young vampire.
Artist, photographer, filmmaker Cindy Sherman made this short stop-motion film, Doll Clothes, in 1975. I only just realized during my most recent viewing that she was actually continuing the conversation with Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.’
There’s a glitch in the YouTube video, so you’ll need to drag the slider a bit to get the movie started.
Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2’ (1912):
I found this via the Echo Park Film Center.
Igor Kovalyov, who has had an extraordinary animation career as both an independent producer of bizarre shorts and as a Klasky Csupo producer of things like ‘Rugrats’ made this very strange depiction of domestic life without any dialog. Enjoy the weirdness.