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Short stop motion animation Directed by Paul Bush

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'Orgiastic Hyper-Plastic' trailer (Paul Bush, Denmark/UK)

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DOVETE APRIRE NUOVA SCHEDA SUL PLAYER UFFICIALE...YOUTUBE O VIMEO..

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CI SONO BELLE COSE ANCHE DI QUI ---------->

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CI SONO BELLE COSE ANCHE DI QUI ---------->

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NO

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"Le città invisibili" un film di Manfredo Manfredi

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the journey - a short charcoal stop motion animation

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Notare come il timelapse diventa un documento del passare del tempo, le tracce che si creano e si cancellano donano al lavoro una poesia potente, anche con poco.

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1991 Mine (HIGH RES) by artist William Kentridge

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William Kentridge group presentation (part 2 of 2)

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William Kentridge group presentation (1 of 2)

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Fernet Branca - Digestimola: Fantasia in libertà

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Fernet Branca alla menta  - Digestimola  - il gioco dei rumori

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Carosello Fernet | Branca e Branca Menta - RAI (anni 70°)

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PRODIGI - Opening trailer for Ribalta Experimental Film Festival 2023

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A plant monster grows a human houseplant in a torturous room of gore and existential dread.

Written, Directed, Edited, Starring: Benjamin Roberds      
Produced, Animated, Art, SFX: Katie Gregg

Director’s Website: https://www.benjaminroberds.com/
Production Co Website: https://www.dominarfilms.com/

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E. A. Albedo (N+2) is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Goga Mason creates an unconventional, fantastic world of animations, illustrations, embroidery, and performances. She was born near the springs of a magical river...

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mon film de fin d'étude 2014
Realisé à l'école de réalisation en animation La Poudrière 

synopsis : Sohrab, un jeune soldat enrôlé dans l'armé, se retrouve face à ses congénères lors d'une manifestation .

Réalisation : Reza Riahi
Musique et création sonore : Christophe Héral
Avec la participation d'Arte France
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my graduation film 2014
directed in Animation school of La Poudrière 

Synopsis : 
Sohrab, a young soldier, finds himself face-to-face with his fellow citizens during a demonstration.

Director: Reza Riahi 
Music and sound design: Christophe Heral 
With the participation of Arte France

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Where to start: (co-directed with Niles Atallah, 2007) Young Lucía remembers a summer of love with Luis that was mysterious and filled with dark secrets. It's an eerie work of creepy beauty. Set in, it seems, Lucía's bedroom, the ghosts and voices of the house's past seem to come alive and unveil the troubling history of the building. Is Lucía dead? Was she murdered? Assaulted? Using stop motion with charcoal, dirt, flowers, and assorted objects, Lucía is a haunting ghost story and a reminder that the past is never truly dead.

What to watch next: Luis (2008) was made as part of a series of films along with Lucía. Equally chilling, this time the story is told from Luis' possibly psychotic perspective. In a different room, perhaps a basement, Luis recalls his life in the forest and his love for Lucía. You want to look away, but you can't because it's too damn beautiful and hypnotic.

Other key works: The Smile's Thin Thing (2022), La Bruja y el Amante (2012), La Casa Lobo (The Wolf House, 2018), Los Huesos (2021)

Influences: David Lynch, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Jan Švankmajer

Says: "Almost all of our works begin with jokes. The truth is, I mean this honestly, we always want to do funny things, but the results are always terrifying. We seem to be bad comedians. But we will work on it. We try to have fun working. I am fascinated by artists who manage to combine comedy and horror, like Jordan Peele. I think art is very much about connecting emotions that seem separate."

Currently working on: "We are now working on Los Hiperbóreos, our first live-action feature. We will shoot it in December and January in a museum in Santiago. It will be an exhibition/shoot, open to the audience. We will work with one actress, Antonia Giesen, and many puppets of different kinds. Everything will be shot in life-size sets built within the museum."

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Know Your Indie Filmmaker: Cristóbal León And Joaquín Cociña

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Where to start: (co-directed with Niles Atallah, 2007) Young Lucía remembers a summer of love with Luis that was mysterious and filled with dark secrets. It's an eerie work of creepy beauty. Set in, it seems, Lucía's bedroom, the ghosts and voices of the house's past seem to come alive and unveil the troubling history of the building.

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REALITY SHOW / Les Vibrants Défricheurs / 2022 / NikodiO et Lison De Ridder

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A discussion with main title director DAVID DANIELS.

How did you first become involved with developing stratacut?

DD: I had this thing called Clay Town... I grew up in a family of four and I'm the youngest. We had a Sir Walter Raleigh coffee can left over from ancestors, perhaps grandparents, and it had clay in it. Mom set us up at the kitchen table and we started play-sculpting. I was five years old when we started this and we never put it away. For many hours each day, Clay Town consumed the kitchen table. We did this from the age of five all the way through high school.

My older sister would enact marriages and soap operas - someone cheating on someone else with little blobs of plasticine - while my other sister, Shelly, would sculpt and she was very good. Incidentally, she later sculpted Jack Skellington for the film The Nightmare Before Christmas and some of the early work at Pixar, like Toy Story.

Anyway, what led to stratacut took place around the age of seven. It was a birthday party and we made a cake out of yellow and blue clay. We cut the cake and I looked at the pieces and thought, "Okay, it's all there. It's quite beautiful and quite clean and I'm going to do something with that one day.

Were you animating anything at this age?
It was all sculpture at this point. That is part of the reason I got into filmmaking. Clay absorbs any kind of dirt or lint or punctures or any kind of rough treatment. The plasticine gets very dirty and doesn't last. So I have all these really neat clay sculptures but cannot show it to anybody because by the time it has been put into a presentation it has gotten dusty and limp and a little funky.

Stratacut is a sort of reinvention of that sculpture because when you slice it open you get a clean slice so you are always revealing something fresh and, in a sense, undamaged. I began to animate and that led me to filmmaking and filmmaking led to storytelling and storytelling has led me to shooting live-action and mixed media.

I did my first animation at the age of 13 and won an award called Cine Media Five which was put out by Kodak and the Broadway department stores. They brought me to New York and put me in the Plaza Hotel and gave me a thousand bucks - that was the beginning of the addiction! I thought, "Hey! This is the lifestyle I'm going to want to live someday, so I'm going to keep making these movies."
The how-to stratacut animation video is fascinating. Do you have a series of these videos for your work?
There is no creative behind-the-scenes for each one. The video you have was done in either 1992 or '93. I do have ten hours of extensive how-to footage I did in 2000 from a stratacut class I held at my studio for people who were interested. I went over every trick or technique or approach and tried to show whatever I had learned and developed and was worth passing on. It's all digitized now and I keep swearing I'll edit it down to 90 minutes.

I left the stratacut story at age eight and picked it up at age twenty-two. And I did nothing with it between that time. I worked in traditional animation and stop motion and filmmaking at San Francisco State. After I graduated, I had a summer off and it was an unusual summer in that I didn't have any real obligations. I met a girl who had an apartment and was away most of the time and I was able to try to figure out how stratacut works. I sat and cut everything I could think of in every direction in a very reverse-engineering kind of way and calculated the ways the image would animate. It was a lot of, "If you put a series of sliced frames together and twisted it in this direction then this is the result." After a while you realize it is basically motion sculpture. Stratacut is the technique but what you are really doing is sculpting time. You are creating these blobby, spaghetti extrusions with a lot of distortions in them. You are calculating how they will be revealed in time. The potential energy that has been sculpted into them is revealed as kinetic energy once it is cut apart. So I tried to figure out all the possible geometric principles on which the twisting of the shapes would yield the ideal result - the blinking eyes, rotating faces, walking, etc.

Buzz Box thesis project

I then went to California Institute of the Arts for my masters. My thesis project was the visual onslaught of Buzz Box, where I sort of took television through the sieve of stratacut and tried to regurgitate it so that hopefully people could see their own over-consumption anew as if you were viewing alien broadcasts through stratacut and it showed you 100 hours of TV jammed into fifteen minutes. That was Buzz Box. It was trying to force an audience to face overload in a structuralist film as a way to come to grips with it. I was trying to seduce and abuse them at the same time. It was very hypnotic and very sensual but also aggressive and angry because it is trying to keep your attention at all costs. To me, television and cinema do that - they give you a little bit of story and then jam advertising or the excitement of bullets and guns at you - anything that can grab your attention in a visceral way.

I ended up in New York on Pee Wee's Playhouse. The director, Stephen R. Johnson, also did a Peter Gabriel rock video, "Big Time." He had seen Buzz Box, my student film. It got passed around a lot. I was told it was circulated around the UCLA dorms on a VHS dub from ¾ inch tape as some underground let's-smoke-pot kind of evening of entertainment.
And how did you become involved with Freaked?
Alex Winter was an associate of Tom Stern who also had a show on MTV at the time, named Idiot Box. John Payson at MTV was in charge of a lot of interstitial material and had hired me for a number of projects including Idiot Box.

The crew from Freaked had $18,000 in the budget for the title sequence and about three weeks. The primary animators were Michael O'Donnell, Galen Beals, and myself. Michael and Galen sous chef for me - sous chefing is when you are prepping the 'strips of bacon' or the 'sandwiches' or the layered-up clay - doing the parts that allow me to throw everything together in a more organized way. And a number of those shots were done by them as animators. They gave me a series of faces that were in the film so I worked on variations of them. I put a self-portrait in there. That was my one request (laughs).
How did you start breaking the sequence down? Were you given an idea by the directors or were you given free reign?
It was free reign. There was Blind Idiot God, which was a great soundtrack. And part of that was my manic-obsessive style, trying to attack. And the style is very Buzz Box. I'm slicing the clay but I am also strobing the lights. Often I am putting the light on a rotating rig, which is something I started doing in 1982 with Buzz Box. I would throw a light and put it in four different positions on four different frames continually to get the sense of something rotating around your sculpture while it is being cut away. This assaults your eye on every sixth frame. It does not attack the front surface - that has been lit well enough so you can get a cleaner image. This technique gives the sides energy and relief.

I would often place various background stratacut as 'bacon strips' on a piece of 4×4 plywood and I would shift that around randomly underneath so the background would have its own static energy. Everything was an in-camera matte. There were no special effects, there was no time to do any optical printing. The sculpture is put on glass and sometimes there are two or three layers of glass underneath that - it's a crude version of an old Disney multi-plane camera.

At Cal Arts, for Buzz Box, I had to use the 16mm Oxberry which was based on a down-shooter camera. That allows support to the clay which is heavy and has a tendency to sag. Think of a Mayan temple rising upward with a shallow slope. Imagine the camera above the temple looking down on it. This allows you to keep the aspect ratio of what the limbs would be doing and I am trying to ensure the clay can support its own weight. Having one or two levels of glass to have things going on underneath creates a kinetic graphic overload. We did use 3D elements as well, like razor blades and knives because that makes it more exciting for lighting and you don't know what textural intensity to expect.
At one point you used celluloid for hair.
Exactly, celluloid for hair! Some of that was me and some of that Michael O'Donnell and some was Galen Beals. I was directing it stylistically but it was a group effort.
Did you have the Blind Idiot God/Henry Rollins track beforehand?
It came first and I edited the piece to that song. The song itself is so crazy that it wasn't any trouble for the intensity and the images to go together. I was trying for larger edit arcs in the music, so I never micromanaged it down to the infinitesimal beats. I knew it would work well with my material.
In terms of mapping out the action, did you work from boards?
No, the great thing about the Freaked sculptures is that they were more like progression/explosion sculptures. I would begin at the bottom with a face I was aiming toward and then I would build free-form as I went higher. I already had the Worm-Man and the other characters from the film so I built from those [end frames].

Those kinds of stratacut are easier to do. I did a Sesame Street piece that had rotating numbers going on. Doing pieces that rotate in space and change their two-dimensional position from one side of the camera to the other are much more difficult to do and have to be thought out very clearly. But I didn't storyboard much of anything. Sometimes I'll draw a paint-by-numbers look of something. As I'm sous-chefing the materials I'm going to work with, essentially I make my palette like a painter does his colors - I need to fill a table of twisted log "colors" that are gradients: one part brown, two parts red, three parts white, and so forth. I stagger the gradients so that they all live in a different textual twist or a different kind of Seurat or Van Gogh pixelation - they all have to live at a particle level but they can also go from pure white to pure black.

After I've sous-chefed, I paint by numbers, creating the shadow for the cheek and the highlights for the brows. So I would sketch if I had a character I was trying to work toward. I would spend 15 minutes working on a thumbnail to make sure the gradients came out right. There is an Impressionist-inspired result.

The process is like juggling fireworks. You want to have everything as loud as possible in all different ways while maintaining a coherent strategy. I mean, clay comes in about twenty colors. It is possible to mix colors using a double boiler, which is a pot of water with another pot inside. You put the clay in and mix a pure color from that. It's a lot of time and effort, which is one of the reasons I've developed a kind of Oaxacan-influenced primary color clash.
Right. In Freaked, there is a lot of smearing going on.
Yeah. Imagine the lens is about three feet above the animated action. I have the sheet of glass that is going to smash the image already in front of the lens for the entire process. It has to be there in a one-quarter or one-half f/stop optical density to the glass. Only at the moment where I've animated all the way down do I place a light bulb under the last frame of stratacut. I let it heat up and watch it carefully and when it is ready, I lower the glass and smash it really slowly. I am animating, it isn't really live-action... it's a kind of tai chi live-action where you take the shot and you let it melt a little more, and you smash it just a little bit harder, and it's slowly oozing out and you are slowly twisting the glass and you are trying to raise the heat underneath. I'm glad you noticed that - it's fun to smear!

Here is one way to think of the reverse engineering aspect of the work; if you were to take classic animation where you take key frames and, say, a Disney animator would take four frames to define key action, the in-betweener will come in for the in-betweens, but the key animator will only draw the significant action over time. So the key animator is gapping four or five frames out of the whole thing. It's a four dimensional space seen in three dimensions. Time is simultaneous unto itself. The beginning, middle, and end all coexist at once and what we are seeing is human beings normally cannot: ourselves in extruded time. Time is this slice that we tick by but truthfully we are extruded pieces of spaghetti - much like stratacut - where we blob and shift and move and run. All our timepieces are connected but we can't see them and don't know it. In a sense, I'm putting those pieces together and giving you a sculpture of that time.
In the video you said you wanted to start animating with a pasta extruder and you gave an example for the stretch and smear effect. How did that develop for you and do you have any new techniques to share?
Wow, that's a great point. You know, life is full of many dreams and in some ways dreaming them are more fun than doing them (laughs). Sometimes I will put a score along the extruded edge and have registration marks and you don't see them. They're tiny little dots and I can line things up after the fact because there are tiny pieces of clay that run the whole length. They're not visually significant, you can't tell they're there and I can use them as registration marks to kinda line them up but it doesn't always work because there is internal distortions inside of each slice depending on how the knife cuts it and the kind of surface tension of the knife as it goes through it that doesn't allow it to be repeatable internally.

So I would use that and the pasta extruder to try to lay them out and re-align. I think with modern software, like After Effects and other digital tools, it gives you a cheap way to correct things. In 1992, when I did that video, it would have been very expensive to sit and reposition every single frame properly.

The reason that I feel Blind Idiot God and Freaked looked good is because it was happening under the camera as a performance piece and there is a dimensionality aspect to some degree that's actually part of what makes it interesting.

The front surface is only half of what's interesting about it - it's the contours in the sides and all the other stuff that's actually sculptural that gives you the feeling of the entire event as it's happening. The downside of doing a series of extruded pieces and then doing them after the fact is that if you do it really well people will say it's a video effect. They'll say the computer did that (laughs).
How controlled is it? Do accidents happen when you're animating?
Nothing ever comes out where I think that shouldn't have come out, but I do think it's like jazz improvisation. You're working with a series of core structures and you know you're going to go through a series of emotional parts in the piece but you don't know every note. I intentionally leave crudeness in the mix. I could control it more, but I choose not to because it is less interesting to look at. It becomes too controlled and too tame. The muscular, electrical effect of the natural, random stuff happening is a little bit large, a little bit crude, but it's more interesting. It's a wrestling match of trying to bottle lightning.
There's a real fury to a lot of what you're doing. Where does that come from?
People meet me and they think I should be more ragged and crazy than I look. I'm pretty low-key and normal on first handshake. But I had a lot of anger about life on the cosmic level, on the practical level, on the human level. There are a lot of philosophical things that eat me. I grew up during Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war and then just as things started to look like they weren't as bad as I thought they were, we got Ronald Reagan and the machinery of deceit that his minions perfected. That's just a small issue though, the real problem is that I'm alive and I'm going to die in a short time like everyone before me. I knew that from the age of four. You could see that everybody was an adult, struggling with details that don't really matter, and I'm an adult now and it's really tragic. I grew up to be that. So what you're seeing is a lot of inner anger from not wanting to sell out and not wanting to become what I knew was ahead of me. And from the frustration of trying to shout at the top of my lungs in an artistic way to say, "There's something on the other side here!" It's all I can do to sort of explain that through time/space extrusion experiments, if you will. It dooms us to be a piece of spaghetti at the beginning of our lives and a piece of boiled pasta at the end.
Would you care to list any influences in animation and otherwise?
That's tough. You know, after the fact, people told me about Oskar Fischinger but I was never really into him. I did like his puppettoons, but he did some wax cut stuff that I never really knew about until long after my work began to be seen. I really had no clues from any predecessor, so it's hard to give Oskar credit 'cause it had absolutely nothing to do with what I was doing. His stuff is pattern-based and primitive.

Anyway, some people who inspired me! Einstein, Hegel, Herman Hess, Krishnamurti, Carlos Castaneda even though I think he's full of shit but I read the books when I was young and they were fun (laughs). Artistically: Kandinsky, Munch, and first round of expressionist anger and the neo-expressionist painting in the '80s and graphics, like RAW magazine. Chihuly is very pleasant and I think Gehry is very good. Van Gogh and the impressionists obviously made a big early impact when I was young. The Beatles, Menomena, Viva Voce, Peter Gabriel.

The mind of David Daniels by means of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Earlier you mentioned that you moved away from stratacut - what are you working on now? What gets you up in the morning?

I have a family and I run a business. Family brings serious adult responsibility and so I sort of took the easy way out. I would love to do actual sculptures that use pottery clay or a form of plastic and create things that would sit on your coffee table or could be very large that are the motion sculptures themselves. I would never cut them up but would put some kind of magnetic filament into them and MRI the things and sell them as gallery pieces. You're looking at time from the outside. That's my gift - I see time from the outside and I see motion sculpture and see how the pieces all flow together and we're a part of all that. So when you see these things as sculpted pieces from the side, that's when they're the most beautiful. Showing something that nobody sees is a revelation and an artistic triumph. My medium is a transitory puddle of goo (laughs), so you just can't sell it.

I also consider CG. It is the ultimate chameleon. It can be anything - including what I do - but there are so many things to communicate and I cannot even begin that process. I would have to make or work with programmers to make my own tools since these are mediums and techniques I don't understand enough to actually do.

Also, agencies and creatives have become scared, to some degree, of the possibilities. When I was doing this in what I would call the heyday of the '80s and '90s, there was actually more openness to unusual things and to the possibility of a random outcome. They're very scared of random outcomes now - they want control because everybody's afraid - so I'm not getting as many pieces of commissioned work. These are all reasons why I've been away from stratacut but it is my natural talent and I should go back to it. Many people can run a company and lots of people can make good or even great commercials, so a great pool of talent already does the things I do all day long. Going back to stratacut would require economic and personal sacrifice, but I may be lucky in the next year or two and have enough of a cushion to go back to being a less angry, less crazy person and more of an artist who's trying to find something in the work.

A Stratacut Demo by David Daniels, Part 1 of 5 - Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

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The psychobilly opening to Tom Stern & Alex Winter’s Freaked is strung on the brute wattage of the Henry Rollins/Blind Idiot God track and the unfettered fury of one Mr. David Daniels. The creator of modern stratacut animation, Daniels has essentially refined a process where the image - and the movement of the image - is molded into clay.

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Bent Image Lab co-founder, David Daniels (Pee Wee's Playhouse, Peter Gabriel: Big Time) talks about the aches pains and joys of making his ground breaking Cal Arts student film, Buzz Box (1985) So, how'd you make this?
I went to sleep at Dawn, then got up at Noon. This went on for the better part of three years. After food / classes and a random shower it was -- think, build, chop, slice, click. Stay fascinated, stay focused. Slice open the next motion-block experiment. Reveal the embedded time-programming hidden inside. Send to Lab. Consider results. Repeat.

My 'living space' was an Orange 68 Chevy Van in the parking lot. That's where I slept, unconscious until the sun would 'bake me awake.' The tin box oven went to full broil with the desert sun. No alarm clock was needed as profuse sweat would force my eyes open.

Roll awake. Then drop onto the hot pavement, and stumble into Cal Arts. This is a "hospital-spaceship" looking campus, where I would search to scarf down leftovers from cafeteria plates. My art studio came equipped with a massive heat-waste exhaust vent. The phone bank and server room next door would melt without dumping that noise and heat into my room. With a balmy throbbing distress, the super-sized leaf-blower cranked away 24/7, pushing sweaty anxiety into every corner of my work space.

That would sauna my ass right up. Shirtless, I would struggle to think straight. It's hard to make time-space-art-sculpts inside a turbine jet revving Max-RPM's at the equator.

This is a picture: of me swimming in molten stress. I would pour all that strange energy back out. It was channelled into strokes of clay and knife animation. The process and environment became fuel to propel this movie. Everyday, the joy and anger felt both raw and desperate. Yet also large and epic, even romantic. My childish psychomorphic punk neo-expressionism comes from my love / hate relationship with the gods, fate and eternity. I see absurdity joined at the hip with beauty, shuffling in the dance of temporary existence. Most 7 Billion humans zig and zag with their mortal coil, going from birth to death without rest. Time to shake a fist at the sky!

I have found my life strategies are a little crazy. But how is one to react to this planet of humans? "First world of problems" become all the worlds problems. We dump our externalities into the wider terrestrial aquarium. This creates my cliché of angst. I would stop-mo all this 'crazy' back into the blinking gaze of an audience. My own demons were up on screen, but reflected back on all of us.

Buzz Box was a large physic load shoved back at the audience. Drew Neumann crafted the best and only soundtrack it could possibly have. He brought six months of polish and sonic clarity to help organize and amplify all this strange and jumpy visual material Hey world! Here is our fun house mirror of psycho-morphic clay, imitating pscyho-spastic TV, folks! It's a Samuel L. Jackson thing -- "Wake the Fuck Up!'
Let me pause this Epic Rant. Now indulge me the rest ... Brain washing is a ritual of 'think this way' repetition designed to exclude other thoughts. Fox and Rush have put modern lipstick upon Goebbels corpse. A growth industry of bombast and stupidity is funded by billionaires. This insincere and intentional deceit machine has now manufactured full blown victim hood for white people. It's the browns who are the problem, not the multi-millionaires funded by billionaires at all levels of national government. The Onion is no longer parody or ironic. Realty has crossed the rubicon beyond anything sincere or rational, and the much larger pubic is just exhausted. Many have lost all curiosity to care. A third have checked out from thinking clearly about any of it. Who cares? Trust nothing and understand little. This effect is both pernicious and powerful as apathy leads us into a dizzy anaemic form of disassociated madness. Buzz Box mimics how this works. Billions of people watch serious things interrupted by frivolous things, on a minute to minute and now second to second basis. Disrupted patterns of logic are like disrupted sleep. People don't function well mentally. Advertising (and now Twitter or Social attack and response) injects rapid hyper-doses of aggressively amplified pre-digested thought-chunks into the larger narrative of otherwise difficult and serious things. This micro-distraction process chops all meaning into mostly useless pieces of dripping mental shit. Facts, Science, History and Cultural truth is mostly learned as cliff notes from the snark-trolls who battle it out in one liners, or flame wars. What puzzle of conclusions could we make about where this long tail is now taking us? Looking up from your cell phone, you barely even think "No thanks. Next? TL;DR." Buzz box was a giant 'Wargazzm' scream against institutionalized and systematic incoherence. A cry for mercy against mental abuse on an entire society drifting into mass attention deficit disorder. A gadget filled population well trained (for seven decades now) to follow the next 'shiny-shiny' with a lot of 'clicky-clicky.' This addiction to stimulation (over clear thinking) is now the nature of most visual and electronic media. Amassive seduction and abuse of minds is going on at a truly unrelenting scale. It's purpose is to create emotional numbness, division, distraction and doubt. It achieves acceptance and conformity to what the powerful, rich and focused want us to accept, believe and think. Rinse, repeat. Eyeballs nailed with click-bait. Minds hypnotized with slow tease. Thoughts tossed into shards are put on pulse-parse. A void of blender whip deletes all real meaning. Throw this against digital walls - all over the world. Splatter. Drip. It's like a manic drum machine doing EDM inside a blistering tornado. A bursting AR-15 of phosphorous toilet paper fireworks. Pointless, but glowing red hot and deeply visceral. Super-charged day-glo feces goes flying at you! Duck! Then more sweet talk from that next soft voice. Screech! Face pummelled again with an audio/visual fist bringing shock and intensity. Explicit sex pretending to be character development. Graphic shoot outs to rivet your flagging attention. Blood in slow-mo. Glints of sweat on skin. Bang. Crash. chaotic edits of tight lipped heroes making strong physical decisions. Shock and Awe is really a meth-amphetamine blitzkrieg of smart bombs blowing up the mind. Like the salt and sugar in everything we eat, the system pumps up the noise floor, and pushes the volume down. Since ordinary life is mostly low key, repetitive and banal, people cannot help but come back for more. It's easy to crave the maximum simulated drama. Drama against the mass-similarity of houses, jobs, golf courses, liquor stores and daily commutes. Voyeuristic ultra-significance is attractive. It thrives to stand out against the bland repetition of vague problems This 'pain and pleasure' spin cycle -- this 'Twilight Circus' -- is a weaponized adrenaline fix of repeated happy/horror drug injections. How does a current fairy tale like mass 'white oppression' even get going? It's a drama of self-significance. When your mind just repeats top level slogans, myths and inside-out answers you can free-associate your brain into fears. These fears are backed up by all the alt-right websites funded by the rich who need an army of angry stupid whites. Open and clear contradictions to facts in all directions no longer even begin to matter. Strata Cut can capture this boiling cauldron of opposites, and yet not be anything you can put your finger on. Seductive and hypnotic, as well as raw, jagged and abusive. I took this weird new medium, and twisted it into the shape of my film. Why not start out fast, and just go faster with these opposing contrasts? That would be an audience bet I most would likely lose! A gauntlet: thrown down hard. It's on! So sure, I started fast and yes, went faster. It begins right in the hot water, and then keeps 'boiling that frog.' Turn the dial way past 11. Drew Neumann and I had a 'craftsman's objective in Buzz Box: It was to find out "how much hypnotic beauty and jarring abuse" can we both throw at an audience? How can we make them squirm hard in their seat, but STILL NOT WALK OUT? Where exactly is that tipping point? Maximalism. In the mid 80's, some thought this final edit was too choppy and way too fast. The speed, angst and 'feeling of violence' was planned to get people antsy, yet almost no one left in the middle. When a few did, we found that gleeful and fun. This happens when you are young, and 'doing a dare 'on an elaborate gamble. We braced for a defection of maybe even half the audience to leave. Yet only maybe 1 out of 20 would peel off before the end credits. Today, 35 years later (to my eye) this film looks normal. Sometimes slow. The times have so sped up to meet me. The punch line of dark comedy comes with the first day of the week: TUESDAY. That one joke, sets the bar. "I just watched four minutes of madness, and I have ... what? Six more days? Holy Shit!" Stunned after the acceleration of Monday, people move and shift around, restless. But they don't leave because its a seductive and abusive bizzaro world you have never yet quite seen. Familiar, but childishly and perversely distorted. The second day of the week turns out shorter than the first. You stay seated a bit longer from sheer relief. Then everything just get's shorter, more violent, faster paced, even darker, and much more frantic. And it's finally over, only to re-run again. A burning-fuse accelerating metronome gives the audience a bare bones a structure. It's both Neo-Punk and Neon-Bolero. Buzz Box was edited on hand cranked rewinds. It evolved this way, because I felt 36 frames a second was 'right.' It made the footage more liquid and flow better. No editing devices would run this speed. So I got good at doing micro edits with tape on the re-wind bench. Then I would hand-wind it at about 36 clicks a second for 15 straight minutes ... to 'see the flow' of what the strata cut was telling me. During the edit, I let the new animation medium reveal its own pace. Let it say to me what it wants. Message in a bottle: Real information is irreversibly polluted and debased. The signal to noise ratio of most modern communication is just a media sewer firehose. Noise destroys signal. This is true almost everywhere in the first world, and even more so in the US. (The most over entertained and under informed population on earth.) It's designed this way. Public decisions are shouting matches between political pro wrestlers in red-tie suits. They aim staccato catch-phrase megaphone bile at billions of smart phone surfers with Swiss-cheese brain disease. Many folks marinate day to night in a relentless cesspool of 4K Technicolor overload. Now draw a straight line from Ronnie Ray-gun in the early 80's -- to the current "Orange Gasbag Anus Mouth Spew Huckster Drama Boy Queen Whiner-in-Chief" OGAMSHDBQWIC -- !!! So question -- Who keeps putting so many wretched years of this incoherent narcissistic blow hard loser baby-man onto the world stage? The Cheeto-Mussolini, who sucks all logic and decency out of every room? Answer -- We do! The Public. The Mass. But we had to be fully meat-tenderized in the brain to allow this. Seduction and abuse conditioning is designed. It is essential to this massively dysfunctional and totally broken condition. Our system lurches toward epic levels of deceit and corruption, driven by a Mercer-backed Russian Cyber-Ops campaign to use a money-laundering reality TV star to destroy public trust in anything and everything civil, democratic, decent, humane, empathetic, or scientific. Are we tired of 'winning' yet? Information as a random shit-show of adrenaline hits, has created this problem. I have no practical remedy or answer. Just one guy trying to understand the disease.
It unfolds, no stopping. Relentless. Buzz Box. Rant over.
Why this technique?
For much of my childhood, I used oil based plasticine (Van Aken) to sculpt with clay. This was onward from the age of 5. My Sister Shelley and I, would create amazing things that would then fall quickly into ugliness. Our creations would wither from dings, nicks, dust, heat, yellowing, and ordinary life abuse. Oil-Clay is pathetic looking much like fresh bloom flowers sitting way too long in a vase. Over many years, it is impossible to keep anything pristine in clay that is worth looking at later. My childhood love of clay creation, would never hold up to time. There had to be a different approach. I sought a way to 're-invent' this medium that would avoid these drawbacks.

So ... STRATA CUT.

The act of slicing itself is not new. Many kids with clay have seen this 'magic.' They slice a wad of junk clay, which gives them an abstract primary-color thunder-egg. At age 8, I was cutting cakes and hardboiled eggs, but only representations of such made in miniature and with clay. At age 21, I finally sat down to reverse-engineer what the layers and geometry behaved like when in motion; when under the knife. I wrote a rule book (in my head) for each action. While hard at first, there was a clear predictable result. An occasional cannabis with a whole lot of coffee was involved. A syntax and language was developed.

It was 1981. Once I got the rules all figured out, then it was: 'what film should I make?'

As for slicing clay patterns, well Miafore is a 4000 year old pottery technique. 'Caning' in glass or fimo is a popular art form. The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger showed the work of Walter Ruttmann, a kind of strata-cut horse shape. Fischenger did some wax cutting and Closed Mondays had a haywire computer sliced apart with abstractions inside.
Strata Cut to me means at least four things --

1) There is true narrative control over the shapes. It is like an analog computer program with tubes, ribbons, and sculpture instead of code. What you put in -- is pretty much what you expect to get out. There is no real mystery about what is going to happen inside, if you can mentally pre-program Strata Cut behavior.

2) When done right -- it is really a "designed motion-sculpture" as art form, with flow and world lines happening over time. A time sculpture. There is a movement now for 'chrono-morphology' that is born from the Makerbot 3D printing ability. A whole generation of '3D Muybridge Artists' are pushing motion over time as an art form.

3) It is simultaneously a 2D and a 3D animation medium, with a built-in 4D metaphor. Seeing the emergent distorting edge of the block shape is critical to 'getting it.' The fourth dimension of time, comes from the change emerging out of the sculputed 3D edge, where the strata block surface sand reveals itself in stop motion. It is the spaghetti noodle edge; the burning fuse shape moving along the tube. Inside is a 2D art medium with fake 3D images, giving birth to questions of actions=over-time. Like a moving flat painting with 3D perspective added. Contradictions are the beauty of it.

4) It is best when combined with physical things around it, or inside it. Context is all-important, like graffiti-art. Like Banksy at his best. Putting a tin can inside a strata cut brain, and cutting around it, is essential to the whole 2D/3D/4D contradiction.

How long did it take?
Buzz Box took 3 years to build and animate. Then about a year to edit and do the soundtrack from 1981 to 1985. Drew Neumann, a great musician and technical artist, was working with the most primitive stone age samplers and created the most perfect manic audio match to the visuals. He hand crafted a 'maximalist' soundtrack that linked all the purpose and drive from the images, and brought sonic identity to chaos. It added clarity and structure and a through-line to the onslaught! Amazing.
What was the most challenging part of the process?
Sheer tenacity and endurance. Being relentless. Going in Debt. It's all consuming. Keeping at it when I felt really ill, tired, worn out, etc. It's the price. Most people have to pay something deep.
Was it worth it?
Absa-fuckin-lootly. How many people say no to that question? "My artistic effort is recognized, but I feel lousy about that."

I get a lot of satisfaction from those who discover Strata Cut, and Buzz Box particularly. When eyes light up and jaws drop, I smile a little inside. Being able to cross my own boundary and share with another soul -- is amazing. People often say the film is unlike anything they have ever seen. Some tell me the moment they first watched it, like a virginity situation in college. That's all very fun to hear. To reach out with something so strange, and have others reach back.

Art is necessary and wonderful, but also impractical and useless. This is precisely its magic. Human survival was partially made possible because art helped us all pass along meaning. Art is very useful in a non material way. A brain that practices creativity, can figure out even more complex things. It is all weird and wonderful.

I do sometimes regret not having made a more conventional narrative and gotten a larger more popular audience. It was a choice at the time. But those who love it, are hardcore for the same reasons I am, and for that I am very grateful.

A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

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What are all those paint men digging? - 'Buzz Box'

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Bent Image Lab co-founder, David Daniels (Pee Wee's Playhouse, Peter Gabriel: Big Time) talks about the aches pains and joys of making his ground breaking Cal Arts student film, Buzz Box (1985) So, how'd you make this? I went to sleep at Dawn, then got up at Noon.

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Today, we’re hoping to inspire a little animated fun! We’re using a neat animation method called ‘pixilation’, in which humans are used as stop-motion puppets, to get from Point A to Point B. So grab...

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Anima, the Brussels international festival of animation film, was established in 1982 as a showcase of the world's finest animation films. With more than 300 films, the festival includes national and international competitions of short and feature-length films, retrospectives, tributes and special programmes as well as exhibitions, workshops and a sidebar programme for professionals: Futuranima.

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Whiteboard Workout: Stop Motion Animation

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Přes hranici / La Traversée / The Crossing | Trailer  (French)

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A LOVE LETTER TO THE ONE I MADE UP / מכתב אהבה לבחור שהמצאתי

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A lonely walk home is intertwined with an underwater fantasy world. The combination between reality and fantasy is portrayed in a love letter addressed to an imaginary "perfect" man. 

Winner of the Vimeo Staff Pick Award at Animafest Zagreb, 2018

My graduation film at the animation department, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, 2017.

experimental animation, silk screen print.
directed / animated / printed by: Rachel Gutgarts
original score: Aviv Stern
Text: Dana Decktor,  Einat Gaulan, Anat Bosak. 
Voice: Tomer Damsky 
Additional music: Dana Decktor
6:05

Contact: 

Rachel Gutgarts- rgutgarts@gmail.com (director/animator)

Aviv Stern- monkeystern@gmail.com (music/ sound design)

סרט גמר במחלקה לאומנויות המסך - אנימציה, בצלאל 2017.
"מכתב אהבה לבחור שהמצאתי"
בדרך חזרה הביתה מבילויי מאכזב, נשזרת המציאות ברגעי הזיה וחלום - לכדי מכתב אהבה לבחור שאינו קיים. 
אנימציה ניסיונית, הדפס רשת משי.
בימויי / אנימציה / הדפס : רחל גוטגרץ
פסקול מקורי : אביב שטרן
6:05

Vimeo Staff Pick Award, Animafest Zagreb 2018
Best animation Tel-Aviv student film festival 2018
MQ artist in residence award, Tricky women 2018
Award in the Borderlands Competition, StopTrick 2018
Originality PIAFF, 2018
Special Golden Jabberwocky, Etiuda & Anima 2017
First place student film, ASIF 2017

Official selection:


ASIF (Tel-Aviv) 2017
Haifa international film festival 2017
Etiuda & Anima 2017
PiterKit 2017
PSIAF 2017
Miami Jewish Film festival 2018
Anima Brussels 2018
Watersprite 2018
Tricky Women 2018
EPOS 2018
DCIFF 2018
International Short Film Week Regensburg 2018
Athens ANIMFEST 2018
ANIFILM 2018
Dresden film festival 2018
Cologne international women’s film festival 2018
INDIE LISBOE 2018
LISFE 2018
North West animation festival 2018
SIFF 2018
ANIMFEST ZAGREB 2018
Tel-Aviv international student film festival 2018
ANNECY 2018
La Guarimba International Film Festival 2018
INSOMNIA 2018
Message to men 2018
Turku animated film festival 2018
PIAFF 2018
Indie-AniFest 2018
ICAF 2018
OTTAWA animation festival 2018
StopTrick 2018
KLIK 2018
Leeds International Film Festival 2018
Heart of Gold 2018
Durham Film Festival 2018
LUFF 2018
Denver Film Festival 2018
Milano Film Festival 2018
International Weekend of Animation Wiesbaden 2018
Eindhoven Film Festival 2018
London International Animation Festival 2018
PRIMANIMA 2018
CutOut 2018
GIRAF 2018
Sommets du cinéma d'animation 2018

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Yonder Mountain String Band - "Suburban Girl" [Official Music Video]

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Ongoing international directory of historical and contemporary female* animators

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by donato sansone 
sound by enrico ascoli

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Idea:
3 second animation of a ball.
Pass it to someone in another country  
They pick up where you left off.

40 animators
40 months in the making...


Concept: Nathan Boey

Animators (in order):
Nathan Boey
Podenco
Leo Franchi
Vincenzo Lodigiani
Mario Forero
Kaho
Dina Amin
Vickie J Boschiero
Vincent Raineri
Caroline Kjellberg
John Kim
Mert Kizilay
Ilgi Candar Dyer
David Rowley
Wendy Eduarte
Morgan O'Brien
Marcus Bakke
Steve Savalle
Allen Laseter
Andy Gregg
Jaren Tigani
Alex Delker
Tushar Pandey
Ameen
Vishal Varghese
Gaurav Chandrakar
Yat Fung Leung
Lego Lam
Knifeson Yu
Sabine Volkert
Ivyy Chen
Tung Wu
Jin Shen Wong
Brandon Kisereu
Salman Hashmi
Ryan Kane
H. Kristen Campbell
Joe Bichard
Nicholas Luchak
Serkan Goncagul


Sound design and Mix by Jose Correa @fellowwave
Music courtesy of Sanctus Audio

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You can find here the best animation shorts from our catalog after their runs in festivals. Mostly arty & all audience animation. Miyu Distribution is an international sales and festival distribution company of animation short films born from the partnership between Sève Films and Miyu Productions.…

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Wednesday 12th and Thursday 13th June, Derek Jarman Lab

The 2019 Essay Film Form and Animation: Intersectionality in Motion conference held in London last June was well attended. The conference was supported by the Arts University Bournemouth, the Society for Animation Studies, The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, CAPA Global Education Network, and the Derek Jarman Lab. Professor Paul Ward, Dr. Romana Turina, and Dr. Bartek Dziadosz gathered a broad range of participants, who came together to talk about various subjects that arose from the ideas of intersectionality, animation documentary, and the essay film. Delegates came from across the world to present and discuss the work at the center of their research and practice.

Figure 1. Paul Ward addressing the conference attendees.

The papers presented span a broad range of subjects and included some particularly thought-provoking and insightful ways of working and developing research when using a biographical and ethnographic stance. Some of the highlights included a presentation by Susan Young from the Royal College of Art, London. Her paper, titled 'Using Animated Autoethnography to Resist and Reframe Psychiatric Othering and Iatrogenic Harm,' was a thoroughly enthralling personal account into her relationship with mental health and the health care providers that were put in place to help. Her work, that is highly autoethnographic, had a great visual and ethical depth that brought together aspects of both the essay film concept and social research. Another particularly interesting paper was Sally Pearce (Wolverhampton University)'s 'Subversively Claustrophobic Spaces in Woman's Animated Autobiography,' that discussed the spaces in which women in animated films live and fill with their bodies. This paper densely described the subject within the parameters of the documentary film genre. Pearce used a broad range of examples to emphasize the autobiographical, often claustrophobic and intersectional aspects that are prominently visualized within the physical and imagined spaces of female lead films.

Faiyaz Jafri (Parsons School of Design and Queens College) began by presenting his film This Ain't Disneyland (2015) which documents his firsthand account of the 9/11 terrorist attack. His paper 'The Illusion of Destruction' discussed the event, his approach to the film and the end of Postmodernism. This paper gave another dynamic to the discussion of essay films by presenting the film alongside the analysis and theoretical framework of its creation, it enacted the idea that an essay is in itself a discussion on a topic - in this case, destruction and postmodernism, with a very specific meaning to its creator but a certain amount of critical evaluation and open-endedness for the audience.

Samantha Langsdale (University of North Texas)'s paper, 'You are like me: Intersectionality Strengths and Weaknesses in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018),' applied the writing and discussion of intersectionality to the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in which the main character is a young Afro-Latino male. This led to an open-ended discussion about whether intersectionality and commercial film production can work together, or by definition are unable to be perceived as genuine or sincere attempts to better understand and represent marginalized people.

Figure 2. Sam Moore, Abigail Addison and Lizzie Hobbs.

There were also more unique events that included a talk from filmmakers Lizzie Hobbs and Samantha Moore, as well as producer Abigail Addison, whose new project The Happiness Machine was commissioned to illustrate, elucidate and highlight 'The Common Good' economic model. The films were unique and offered very different takes on the subject matter, potentially showing the use of essay films and animated documentaries.

Figure 3. Bella Honess Roe delivering her keynote.

The keynote was provided by a highly respected authority on animated documentary, Annabelle Honess Roe. Her talk drew links between animation and the essay film as well as the difficulty of defining and separating the two fields of essay and documentary filmmaking. Andy Holden presented his new essay film Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (2018), which was discussed during a roundtable chaired by Bartek Dziadosz from Derek Jarman Lab.

Offering a varied range of takes on what an essay film actually is, should and could be, the conference brought to the light how the essay film raises much debate when presented alongside animation and animated documentary as it seems hard to decipher the differences, since much of what would make a film an essay film is intrinsically linked to animated documentary. This, in turn, prompted a lively debate about whether or not essay films work within the context of animation documentary or if, by definition, the animated documentary is (and surpasses, to a certain degree) an essay film. The clear overlap of all these subjects made for a rich source of discussion, with two days proving not to be enough. While more discussion would be valuable in the future, the keynotes and talks opened yet more definitions, consideration and potential avenues for exploration. The conference showed that this form has great potential for rafting the difficult interplay between both practice and academia, between makers and thinkers. The essay structure, much like a documentary (if indeed they are separate things), is a great companion to the animation academic's arsenal, providing a clear union even if its definition is not yet clear in itself.

What I found particularly interesting was this link between practice and the written or theoretical framework around the films. This struck me as the defining nature of what would or could be defined as an essay film, an open, multiple positioned film about a subject. However, this theoretical framework and the idea of both being passionate in our exploration of a subject whilst not fully stating our position seems to be the potential difference between essay and documentary. It would seem that a documentary film may at least be partly essay and an essay film is often similar to documentary, but perhaps it is the idea of 'may,' 'can,' 'often,' and 'potentially' that allows the essay film to straddle a position between fiction and nonfiction, biographic and ethnographic, taking the definition back to the word 'essay' itself, which is a piece of writing. The essay film can be musing on a subject and does not require the defining features a documentary may need. Yet, similarly to documentaries, which seems to deal with certainty and facts, essay films can reveal unexplored information but can also be less-defined and more fluid. These elements can be found in the films Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016) by Turina, who has been the driving force behind the organization of this conference.

The papers presented have had the merit of reframing and opening up the categorization of films while giving new scope to both the fields of animation and essay film. Also, there were films presented during the conference that offered unique approaches to engaging with methodology in a creative or practice-led research process.
Laura-Beth Cowley is a practice-based Ph.D. researcher in the Centre for Fine Art Print at the University of West England, Bristol. Her research is looking into the use of 3D printing in stop-motion animation. As a freelance animator, model maker and independent filmmaker, she created short films that have been screened globally and has worked on commercial projects for various studios. Laura has also been the featured writer for Skwigly online animation magazine for the last five years and has written for various online and printed magazines and journals.

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The Essay Film Form and Animation: Intersectionality in Motion Conference

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Wednesday 12th and Thursday 13th June, Derek Jarman Lab The 2019 Essay Film Form and Animation: Intersectionality in Motion conference held in London last June was well attended. The conference was supported by the Arts University Bournemouth, the Society for Animation Studies, The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, CAPA Global Education Network, and the Derek Jarman Lab.

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While studying graphic design at Liverpool Polytechnic Young became interested in animation as a fine art form and as a vehicle for the expression of subjective...

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Goga Mason creates an unconventional, fantastic world of animations, illustrations, embroidery, and performances. She was born near the springs of a magical river...

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Short Cuts - Une minute d'animation pour résumer un grand classique

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Short Cuts - Une minute d'animation pour résumer un grand classique

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Short Cuts - "Le cercle rouge" de Jean-Pierre Melville

Animé par Iulia Voitova

Short Cuts - "Le cercle rouge" de Jean-Pierre Melville

Animé par Iulia Voitova

Short cuts - "Les Liaisons dangereuses " de Stephen Frears

Animé par Leon Moh-Cah

"Le cercle rouge", chef d'œuvre du cinéma noir de Jean-Pierre Melville, est résumé en une minute par Iulia Voitova, réalisatrice de films d'animation

Lire plus

Durée :

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Du 18/09/2021 au 19/09/2025

Genre :
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Short Cuts - "Le cercle rouge" de Jean-Pierre Melville - Animé par Iulia Voitova - Regarder l'émission complète | ARTE

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Short Cuts - "Le cercle rouge" de Jean-Pierre Melville Animé par Iulia Voitova Animé par Leon Moh-Cah "Le cercle rouge", chef d'œuvre du cinéma noir de Jean-Pierre Melville, est résumé en une minute par Iulia Voitova, réalisatrice de films d'animation Lire plus Durée : 2 min Disponible : Du 18/09/2021 au 19/09/2025 Genre : Émissions Vous pourriez aimer aussi Les vidéos les plus vues sur ARTE Édition du soir (05/12/2021) Tous droits de reproduction et de diffusion réservés © 2021 ARTE G.E.I.E.

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Barry Purves - Barry Purves - Made In Manchester

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This is “Barry Purves - Made In Manchester” by Loose Moose on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Even though COVID-19 vaccines have finally begun to ship and reach their first recipients, people shouldn't let down their guard when it comes to wearing masks. Given that most people will not receive their shots until late spring / summer 2021, we must continue our vigilance.

London-based advertising creative and founder Yannis Konstantinidis has just released one of his latest projects, The World's First Animated COVID Face Mask, delivering a dash of color and an extra dose of hope to the idea of a face mask this holiday season. The "animated" mask takes the form of a beautiful stop-motion short, made from 400 unique cloth masks, animated together to create a parade of colorful moving images.

Watch how Konstantinidis put his creativity to work producing the animated short.

According to the director, his film is just what Santa ordered to get viewers fired up about wearing a mask! The masks will be sold to benefit the world-renowned London-based Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity. Masks can be purchased and additional donations to the charity can be made on the project's Indiegogo campaign.
Source: NOMINT

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great ormond street hospital children’s charity

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WATCH: 'World's First Animated COVID Face Mask' Short

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Even though COVID-19 vaccines have finally begun to ship and reach their first recipients, people shouldn't let down their guard when it comes to wearing masks. Given that most people will not receive their shots until late spring / summer 2021, we must continue our vigilance.

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Using a combination of 3D printing, mold-making, and 1,000 liters of ice, NOMINT directors Yannis Konstantinidis and Marcos Savignanoto transform 500 polar bear ice sculptures into a powerful stop-motion story of the disappearing Arctic.

Yannis Konstantinidis: "[In production for a year], this was by far the most taxing project we have ever worked on, both emotionally and technically.

"Part of the appeal of the concept was that we were going to use the natural melting properties of ice to create a direct metaphor to the Arctic problem.

"We completely underestimated the fact that once ice starts melting you have no control over it, making it almost impossible to create a stop-motion film of this scale, which famously requires time between each shot.

"It was especially hard emotionally, as with every melted sculpture and ruined shot, we were being reminded of the devastating issue at hand and how easy it is to underestimate it."

For another example of stop-motion ice animation, have a look at Soetkin Verstegen's short film "Freeze Frame".

Watch the stop-motion ice bear test:

Client: WWF Arctic Programme

Production: NOMINT
Director: Yannis Konstantinidis, Marcos Savignano
Creative Director: Yannis Konstantinidis
3D Animator: Jua Braga, Marcos Savignano
Producer: Yannis Konstantinidis, Marilena Vatseri

Music/sound design: Ted Regklis

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WWF "You can't Negotiate with Ice" by NOMINT (with BTS)

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Using a combination of 3D printing, mold-making, and 1,000 liters of ice, NOMINT directors Yannis Konstantinidis and Marcos Savignanoto transform 500 polar bear ice sculptures into a powerful stop-motion story of the disappearing Arctic. Yannis Konstantinidis: "[In production for a year], this was by far the most taxing project we have ever worked on, both emotionally and technically.

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L.A. based indie animation artist Sandro Del Rosario talks to Zippy Frames on his Italian travelogue hand-painted animation film, The Italian Gaze.

Τhe animation short 'The Italian Gaze' was a 11-year effort for Sandro Del Rosario, starting since summer 1999, and his summer Florence days (after the first year of his CalArts studies) -filled with Italian beauty, but also with a lot of uncertainty regarding his own financial future. But still Florence and its city Duomo did the trick: "Its magnificent dome by Brunelleschi was standing out against the roofs, and this view raised a powerful emotion in my heart, combining personal frustration and the impossibility to imagine a future there with the ecstatic contemplation of the city unique beauty, of the pulse of its history which was still so present. In those days, I began to think about a new project, initially dedicated to Florence, and sketched the first images"

Another and longer sojourn in Italy that lasted four years after his graduation had an indelible mark on the author, combining personal feelings and artistic translation ("A myriad of emotions, good and bad, would gather inside me pushing to be transformed into something that I could share with others"). Finally, a 2005 residency at the Bogliasco Foundation greenlit the project Lo Sguardo Italiano ('The Italian Gaze')

"The concept for this film, the coexistence of a sense of awe and belonging with disappointment and sadness, didn't changed through the 11-year effort to make the film. It sustained it" Sandro Del Rosario tells Zippy Frames. "But the material did evolve inevitably". The material (taking photos in 35mm camera and videos in analog hi8) was amassed as early as 1999 Florence, and obviously -and massively-edited; the rest was obtained during the 2005 residency (' I was so moved by the view of the Mediterranean Sea and by the city of Genova, that I elected that landscape to represent symbolically the entire country. Many of the photos and videos that became part of my film come from that area').

Watch The Italian Gaze:

The director wrote himself the text, characterising himself as 'fed with books, poetry and fiction writing' during his formatting years; in his previous film, 'L.City', words pre-existed the film. In 'The Italian Gaze' the text later complemented the visuals.

The visuals themselves are a different story. ' I wanted to isolate, magnify, and make those moments more abstract at first, so I began to print both photos and video frames out on paper, in black and white and with high contrast. After being printed out, those images were photocopied over and over, until they would lose their details, down to only a grayish ghost of the original frame. Each image measured about 10 x 13.5 cm'. These images now became the source material.

Color was the next step, and oil pastels were used ('for their brilliance, their saturation and their ability to stick on the photocopy paper'). Sandro Del Rosario fell in love with all those different kinds and varieties and pastel tones, which was a second kickoff to what he describes as 'his labyrinth of my memory, on the pages of my photocopied stripes'.

Color was Del Rosario's shorthand for emotions ('Painting the material was a conscious act of creation'), but movement became another shorthand for renewed image life. ' I shot the images one by one, compositing them as sequences, and testing their smoothness. Sometimes I had to eliminate some images; other times I had to change the animation pace. I settled on shooting "on threes", with an average of eight-ten images per second. At the end, eleven years after beginning to work on this film I had colored thousands of images, almost six thousand. With all these images, I was able to create fourteen minutes of film'.

Computers were used at the first stage, of photo selection and video editing as still frames (and Photoshop to transform all photos in black and white, adjust and alter their contrast). After the bulk of the coloring process was done entirely by hand, computer use returned for the film shoot (after abandoning the decision to shoot in 16mm). 'I used a digital still camera and shot RAW format high-res images. Then I used Camera RAW (professional photo retouching) to eliminate all the tiny spectacles of dust that had stuck on the pastels. Unfortunately, I had discovered soon that those tiny dots, when blown up on the screen, would flicker a lot, creating a stroboscope effect that could disturb the flow of the animation. This painstaking task took a long time'.

Digital color balancing followed, and most accurately captured in the DCP of the film, the director's preferred means of viewing the film. The film format in 4:3 has its own story as well. 'When I began my journey as a filmmaker,16mm film was still the preferred widespread format for independent and experimental films. The aspect ratio of 16mm is 4:3. I never thought I could afford to shoot in 35mm, so I stuck to that format. And I was interested in making a film to be seen in the dark of a movie theater, not on the monitor of a computer.

When the shift to digital became more apparent, Del Rosario experimented with the 16:9 format, yet in the end 4:3 won -and it is the one to be used in film's theatrical screenings as well ('I honestly never imagined or desired to show my film on phones...but that's a different story').

Finding the budget proved to be a source of constant concern; grant applications were made. Art residencies proved instrumental (besides Bogliasco, MacDowell and Yaddo up in the Northeast of the US as well as Ucross, in Wyoming, among the others). After many years of alternating full-time work with full-time film production, a 2014 Kickstarter campaign followed ('found some incredibly generous donors'). Del Rosario also cites renowned Italian animation scholar Giannalberto Bendazzi as a source of support and inspiration. 'Each challenge renewed my commitment towards this film. The theme was so important for me, and the investment so extensive that I couldn't let it go', he states.

The sea and the stones alternate in the film as two major themes, water and solidity. "Returning to the sea is always a special experience to those who were born on the coast' Del Rosario states. ' Nature has an ancient pull on all of us. And it is even stronger when it comes from our hometowns. But in this film the sea has a symbolic value, it represents the cycle of life, defines Italy's geography and identity, it is key to the history of my country. One of the first challenges I had in making this film was understanding how to communicate the disappointment and the sorrow for the issues that are affecting contemporary Italy, while also expressing the love for the art, the architecture, and the landscape. The metaphor of the stones came out as the solution only after a second fellowship and residence at the Bogliasco Foundation, in Liguria'.

Here Del Rosario found out the bad side of Italian political life: corruption, economic crisis, environmental disasters ('I was never happy about Italy's political situation, and things never improved. This is still a big issue for me, one I feel unable to change'). The Pescara-born artist (now living in the L.A.) has learnt to constantly shift his horizons, from the minute to the big . 'In the past, I confronted myself with Italy's regional dimension, with its deep differences and divisions. After visiting other European countries, I appreciated macro-diversities'.

But, back in Italy for the film, he spent hours looking out of the sea, from those small coast inlets full of stones. 'The submerged stones carried to the shore by water were a metaphor that fit perfectly the situation described in the newspapers: words (like water) went away, while their weight (the stones) remained'.

Music (by Michele Di Toro) is also distinctive in the film, and unlike earlier films, improvisation was not needed. 'I knew exactly what I wanted in terms of music. I had been working on the sound on my own, while listening to music composed by various musicians. When I discovered the work of Michele Di Toro, a jazz and classically trained pianist who coincidentally was from my same Italian region, I thought I found my composer'. One of Di Toro's compositions was specifically adapted for the film, a lyrical piano tune, and the end credits theme. An impromptu variation on it was created for the stone sequence.

'The Italian Gaze' (in both its English and Italian version) is a prime example of independent animation and its hurdles, and especially the variety of experimental animation. 'It's almost funny (except that is not) that twenty-three years after emigrating to the United States for it, I see experimental animation in the US like an orphan child, endlessly looking for parental support' Sandro Del Rosario will attest. Even though he won't diminish the importance of his CalArts alma mater, he still notes the complete absence of funds for anything apart from the big US animation industry. Yet for him animation and experimentation (not a single way to do it) are always sources of inspiration, despite his meagre commercial returns, and amount of dedication required. Call it the experimental gaze.
Film Review (Vassilis Kroustallis):
A three-act structure of initial awe, subsequent doubt and final reconciliation is evident in the sensitive travelogue of 'The Italian Gaze'. Sandro Del Rosario makes his entrance with his camera as a tourist struck by the Italian natural and cultural beauty; then he steps back by reading the latest political news, before he is able to remove himself from the temporal to the universal. This journey in impressionistic images, carefully painted to give an overriding inescapable effect of a rich but also moving locale, is also poignantly sustained with the piano theme and the narration -acting like your local travel guide in an esoteric mood. 'The Italian Gaze' reveals its painstaking procedure in the making, but also leads you beyond its imagery to an inner life reflected upon the imagery itself. It is empathetic, past-and-present-time conscious and a labour of love.
About Sandro Del Rosario:
Sandro Del Rosario's films and installations are inspired by places, feelings and memories of feelings, distilled through a labor-intensive animation process that transforms still images, photos, paintings, and collage in moving imaginary spaces.

Born inItaly, with a background as a multimedia designer, Del Rosario came to the U.S. with a Fulbright Scholarship in 1998, received an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, and currently lives in Los Angeles. His work has been awarded and exhibited in many festivals and venues worldwide, and he traveled extensively as a Visiting Artist and Visiting Assistant Professor at non-profit foundations and universities across the United States.
Sandro Del Rosario on the web, and vimeo

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L.A. based indie animation artist Sandro Del Rosario talks to Zippy Frames on his Italian travelogue hand-painted animation film, The Italian Gaze. Τhe animation short 'The Italian Gaze' was a 11-year effort for Sandro Del Rosario, starting since summer 1999, and his summer Florence days (after the first year of his CalArts studies) -filled with Italian beauty, but also with a lot of uncertainty regarding his own financial future.

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Jodie Mack is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It's right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern. If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you'll convey the illusion of a clench. "What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame," the prominent experimental animator Norman McLaren (who makes the list with his short Neighbours, below) once explained. "Therefore, animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames."

That has largely remained true throughout the medium's history, both frame by frame and over the course of a two-hour children's movie. Animated cartoons fool the brain into believing that static images can move; characters are "brought to life" by putting pen to paper or finger to a computer's trackpad. The medium that began to crawl thanks to the live performances of inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud and illusionist Georges Méliès has now matured into a complex and diverse art form - one that has seen new processes and cultural innovations in every decade since its inception. The characters and intellectual properties it has drawn into existence are as relatable as Daffy Duck and as lucrative as Mickey Mouse. Today, vast audiences understand what artists like McLaren were observing: that the invisible holds a marvelous power over us.

To capture an idea of that power and to narrate its history, we have charted the evolution of animation by considering 100 sequences throughout the medium's history. We chose the deliberately flexible element of a "sequence" because it felt the most focused: It is often in one inspired moment, more so than a single frame or entire work, that we are able to see the form progress.Focusing on full cartoons would create a bias in the favor of studios with the resources to produce theatrical features - but history has shown that many landmark achievements in animation have been produced with a variety of budgets, formats, and lengths. By focusing on sequences, we can let creators and their individual decisions shine in a way full-length works may not.

The arc of this history begins in 1892, the year Charles-Émile Reynaud first used his Théâtre Optique system to screen his moving pictures - to our mind, the first animated cartoons ever produced - for the public (and long after the invention of the magic lantern). From there, we address sequences in every decade well into our own era, touching on a range of formats, innovations, and historical moments, from the patenting of rotoscoping to the invention of the multiplane camera to the rise of anime and everything in between and after.

This list is not intended to be comprehensive. One hundred is a crushingly compact number of slots with which to encapsulate the totality of a medium. That isn't to say we didn't try. We arrived at our list after months of discussions and arguments among a brain trust of animation professionals, historians, and other experts. More than 600 nominations were considered based on the criteria we established: Since this list is for an American audience, entries skew toward what influenced American animation; to be eligible, sequences had to have been made available, at some point, to audiences in the U.S., whether in limited screenings, wide release, or bootleg importation. You'll notice Japan's output is better represented than that of French or Czech animators, which we felt reflected American audiences' evolving, decades-long relationship with Japanese animation. We excluded porn, video games, and advertising, reasoning that they didn't jibe with a list of art intended to be consumed, rather than interacted with. We were especially choosy about which examples of combined live action and animation to use - a gimmick that had been deployed long before Mary Poppins - and how to handle the question of special effects, which we tried to limit to moments when we felt the tools and forms used by animators crossed over most dramatically with those of live-action filmmakers.

Inevitably, a list like this can only scratch the surface of an art form unparalleled in its elasticity and capacity for wonder. And yet the sequences included here, listed chronologically, speak as much for the evolution of animation as a medium as they do for themselves. The creators of the early, tastelessly minstrelsy-laden shorts on this list could not have imagined how our entries would make vast audiences vibrate with joy - and the basic compact of the craft still holds, firm as ever: Animators continue to fool us into believing still images can move and breathe, and we in turn remain delighted to live between the frames.

Before the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, one of the earliest movie cameras, there was a filmic evolutionary link that now feels all but forgotten. Starting in 1892, three years before the Lumières first exhibited their motion pictures, French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud presented his animations for audiences at the Musée Grévin in Paris. HisThéâtre Optique (or "optical theater") system was a rough precursor of the technology that would come to define both animation and film projection. The films were made of hundreds of individually illustrated cells connected via strips that were perforated with sprocket holes - a first in film history - and wound around spools, which could be run rapidly before a magic lantern, projecting a moving image for an audience.

Reynaud's show, Pantomimes Lumineuses, consisted of sets of shorts that he had drawn. The premiere lineup featured "Un Bon Bock"(A Good Beer), about a tavern boy swiping beers from unsuspecting patrons of a country bar,"Le Clown et Ses Chiens"(The Clown and His Dogs), about a clown directing his three dogs through their tricks, and "Pauvre Pierrot" (Poor Pierrot), a riff on the familiar Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine characters from the commedia dell'arte. These animated performances were not fully premade stories that Reynaud simply played for his audiences; manually operating the Théâtre Optique,he could play each short at variable speeds and repeat certain moments. He could react to how patrons responded to the shows, having a character perform an encore of a winning gag or trick.

The turn of the 20th century saw a much needed injection of modern filmmaking thanks to the work of experimental French filmmaker, set designer, and magician George Méliès, widely regarded as the innovator of special effects in movies. Méliès's penchant for illusion and stage magic played a vital role in the way he approached his early movies, with a desire to transfer the whimsy witnessed in theaters to film. Méliès is credited with innovating the first split screen, the first double exposure and the first dissolve effect.

The seamless jump cut editing of the vanishing act and additional use of double exposure to illustrate the giant heads separating and merging were proto-techniques that would go on to be utilized in animation, and are still employed today. While many of Méliès's films have been lost over time, his impact remains keenly felt. In the Oscar award-winning 2011 film, Hugo - which fittingly won Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects - Martin Scorsese made Méliès a character whimsically played by Ben Kingsley, showcasing how creative magic can elevate any motion picture.

The elaborate scene reveals a chaotic world with toy cars driving recklessly through a busy town, dolls falling off wooden horses, and other playthings (such as a toy bear and policeman) brawling in the streets before piling aboard a double-decker bus and ultimately facing a shocking explosion. The motion is remarkably fluid considering the equipment available at the time, and movement is seen not just among the toys in the foreground but with every item viewable onscreen. There's little in the way of plot, but the movement itself shows the level of care and dedication taken by Cooper in his experimenting with this new form of art. Based on the movement of shadows from the toys, this scene seems to have been shot on an outdoor stage, further heightening the impressiveness of this piece. With through-lines to Gumby, Wallace and Gromit, Laika's modern stop-motion offerings, and of course, various "living toy" stories, animation enthusiasts everywhere owe a debt to Cooper's wild dreams.

A French caricaturist, cartoonist, and one of the first great animation innovators, Émile Cohl became aware of motion pictures in 1907 and wanted to see if this art of movement and the illusions of light could be adapted to include his own interests of cartooning. The next year, Cohl made Fantasmagorie, whose title is a reference to the "fantasmograph," a mid-19th-century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images onto surrounding walls. And it forever changed animation.

The introduction of the clown as a central character has its roots in the carnival stylings of the traveling circus, where movies got their start as an extension of the works of illusion and prestidigitation performed by magicians. The little clown was the first character in animation history and began a trend of character-driven work that we still witness today. Fantasmagorie is also one of the great works of the avant-garde, with its morphing abstract images and Cohl's emphasis on innovating new techniques and scenarios.

Winsor McCay did not create the animated cartoon as he always claimed, but he was responsible for one of its great "big bang" moments.Composed of 10,000 drawings made by the newspaper cartoonist (with the help of his assistant, John A. Fitzsimmons, who traced the backgrounds) and mounted on cardboard, McCay's third short laid the groundwork for the next century of animation.

The short marked the first use of key animation, registration marks, animation loops, in-betweening, and, most important, character animation. McCay not only gave Gertie life; he gifted her with a personality. Before Gertie the Dinosaur, characters were blank slates. Now they could cry, which Gertie does when McCay scolds her for disobeying, or eat, drink, or breathe, all of which she does with a playful, elegant charm that many later artists would try to emulate and build empires on.

While Lady Gaga used "rite of passage" to describe getting a song parodied by "Weird" Al Yankovic, it's a phrase that can apply to a celebrity being caricatured in animation, too, from BoJack Horseman's cheeky use of Character Actress Margo Martindale to pretty much any episode of or South Park. Even the British royal family is getting the animated satire treatment (blimey) in HBO Max's upcoming The Prince. But really, it all started with one anthropomorphic black cat hungry for the spotlight.

Consider the seven-minute-long silent-era short film Felix in Hollywood. Created by Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, we can credit this little gem, made nearly a century ago, for what's now a staple of modern-day animated television. In the short, Felix the Cat uses his ample wits to travel to Hollywood, where he shares the silver screen and rubs elbows with real-life industry pioneers and tastemakers like Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, Will Hays, Snub Pollard, and Ben Turpin. It was the first animated cartoon to caricature celebrities and along with them the contemporary studio system. Felix even earns his "long-term contract" - bestowed by one of the founding fathers of American cinema, Cecil B. DeMille - after a camera crew catches him rescuing an unconscious, tied-up Douglas Fairbanks from a swarm of angry mosquitoes.

The value of Felix's contract may be nebulous, but the film's impact is undeniable. Just a decade later, Looney Tunes celebrity caricatures began to emerge as well. In one of the company's early shorts, Bosko in Person (1933), the titular character created by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising finds himself interacting with imitations of Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, and Greta Garbo.
Directed by Lotte Reiniger
Though Disney would later debut Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which was the first animated feature in the U.S., The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film, period. Directed by the great Lotte Reiniger, the earliest woman animator whose work is still extant and the first to helm an animated feature, it premiered in Germany over a decade before Disney's first masterpiece. At that time, Reiniger pioneered silhouette animation as a self-taught artist particularly skilled in shadow play. To create the film, she manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera, similar to Wayang shadow puppetry. Perhaps even more impressively, the piece was animated frame by frame, which took three years. In the scene for the Caliph's birthday, Reiniger animated the sorcerer's magical horse, a miraculous steed flying through the air, proving both her fantastic imagination and ability to bring it to life through silhouettes.

It's also an early use of fairy-tale storytelling, another area Disney's films would become known for. Prince Achmed specifically tells stories based on One Thousand and One Nights, including the story of Aladdin, which Disney's studio would return to decades later. Moreover, Reiniger's style went on to influence even more modern works, including an episode of Steven Universe, " The Answer."

Steamboat Willie, the short that introduced the world to Mickey Mouse, served as a watershed technological breakthrough thanks to its use of fully synchronized sound and a fully post-produced soundtrack. It was also born out of heartache. Starting a little more than a year before the short's release, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks began producing short films for Universal and producer Charles Mintz featuring a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When Walt traveled to New York to renegotiate the terms of the deal, he was blindsided. Not only did Mintz offer him less money, but he had slyly started to steal Disney's employees for his own animation operation. Walt quit, and Ub stood by his longtime partner. But Walt didn't own the character. Universal did.

As the undoubtedly apocryphal story goes, Walt began brainstorming the idea for Mickey Mouse on the train ride back from his failed meeting in New York. Disney had a dynamite new character, an intellectual property he could own. Walt could just as easily have given up, but instead the recent experience strengthened his resolve.

Iwerks and Disney got to work. Steamboat Willie wasn't the first Mickey Mouse short they made (that honor goes to Plane Crazy), but it was the first distributed, and its gags incorporated consistent sound and music throughout, a first in the business. When Steamboat Willie hit theaters in November 1928, this labor of love became a sensation, applauded for its technical artistry and entertainment value. And rightfully so - it is still a hoot, and one you can watch on Disney+ right now. And while many of the cultural references have faded from memory (its title is a play on a Buster Keaton movie called Steamboat Bill, Jr.), Steamboat Willie remains a towering achievement of early animation and a testament to Mickey Mouse's singular, elemental power - a character whose emergence wound up altering the shape of U.S. copyright law.

Mickey is no bland corporate figurehead. Rather, he's downright rascally - at one point, he cranks the tail of a goat who has eaten sheet music for "Turkey in the Straw" and the tune spills from the goat's mouth. Only a few seconds of Steamboat Willie have truly been immortalized in the popular consciousness - the opening moments, in which Mickey whistles and steers the boat, have become a signature of the Walt Disney Company. But the entire short is of staggering importance - for its technological advancement, sure, but more so for the introduction of an American icon.

Disney magic wasn't made by Walt Disney alone. Many of Disney's early successes, before movies, were done in collaboration with Ub Iwerks, who helped to create Mickey Mouse. Then Iwerks and Disney had a falling out in 1930, and Iwerks opened his own animation studio.

But it is still an achievement. Fiddlesticks came two years before Disney's own Flowers and Trees, which was the first full-color Technicolor cartoon and won an Academy Award. But it was Iwerks who showed that the burgeoning Technicolor process could be applied to the medium. Technicolor was faster and easier than previous coloring techniques for animation, and the finished product was easy for theaters to screen.

Iwerks and Disney eventually settled their differences, and he went back to work at Disney's studio in the 1940s. Today, Disney recognizes him as a "master of animation and technology," a title he richly deserves.

Of course Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was always going to make this list, but let's start with the other technically innovative 1930s animated musical adaptation of the fairy tale. This one stars two of the Fleischer brothers' greatest creations: Betty Boop and Koko the Clown. Koko was developed in 1918 concurrently with Max Fleischer's invention of the rotoscope technique, which allowed animators to trace over filmed reference footage to achieve fluid, uncannily lifelike motion in their characters. Betty Boop, on the other hand, was created as a send-up of Jazz Age flappers, with a character design naughty enough to match the times.

In the original Out of the Inkwell series, Koko's filmed movements were acted out by Dave Fleischer while he was dressed as a clown. But in 1933, Fleischer Studios put Betty Boop and Koko the Clown in the seven-minute Betty Boop in Snow-White short animated by Roland C. Crandall, with a rotoscoped set piece in the middle, set to "St. James Infirmary Blues," performed by jazz artist Cab Calloway. Watching this scene, in contrast with the Disney version of the folktale that would set the template for mainstream animated storytelling, the sheer experimentalism looks like an eerie dispatch from a different, much cooler timeline.

The film was a follow-up to Calloway's popular Minnie the Moocher Fleischer short from the year prior, which opened with live footage of Calloway dancing before rendering him into a walrus. Here, Calloway seems to moonwalk along the animated landscape as Koko, arms out, singing a blues song about death and decay. When the witch casts her mirror over him, he becomes a ghost, at which point the rotoscoping gives seamlessly to impossible contortions. The ghost's limbs pretzel in on themselves, turning at one point into a gold chain, echoing the lyrics. At the time, character animation - think the Fleischers' Bimbo, Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan's Felix the Cat, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse - was often rooted in the racist visual language of blackface and minstrelsy. Cab Calloway's Fleischer shorts, and their use of rotoscope, saw an African American musician able to voice and perform his own art. Playful and surreal, it remains artistically daring nearly 90 years later.

During the early stages of what would become King Kong, Merlan C. Cooper planned to film wild gorillas, intercutting it with footage of Komodo dragons so that it would appear as if the animals were engaged in a life-or-death battle. Thankfully, he figured out that it would be more economically feasible to go with animation, coming to that conclusion after viewing Creation, an overbudget and eventually canceled action-fantasy film helmed by stop-motion animator Willis H. O'Brien.

To achieve Cooper's dream of a giant gorilla, O'Brien and his assistant animator Buzz Gibson combined stop-motion animation with other special effects including miniatures, matte paintings, and rear projection. The result seen in Kong's introduction to the movie that carries his name makes it appear as if the giant ape, an 18-inch model made out of rubber, latex, and rabbit fur - designed by Marcel Delgado - is towering over Ann Darrow, the helpless blonde the beast falls for. This moment in the 1933 classic would set up the next 90 years of blockbuster movies, everything from the work of Ray Harryhausen, to the animatronics of Stan Winston, to the inclusion of CGI.

There's a moment, about three and a half minutes into the Silly Symphony short Three Little Pigs, when the Big Bad Wolf is about to blow down one of the pigs' houses. He gets himself in the headspace to get a-blowin' and then prepares physically by breathing in more and more air, his chest heaving and expanding with each gasp. Finally, when his chest is about to burst, he lets out a gust of wind powerful enough to knock down the poor piggy's home. As drawn by Norm Ferguson, perhaps best known as the creator of Mickey's dog Pluto, the Big Bad Wolf was a benchmark in terms of character animation. Chuck Jones commented that the film made him realize "something was happening there that hadn't happened before." Jones said that it showcased a major principle in character animation, that "it wasn't how a character looked but how he moved that determined his personality." He even argued that character animation truly began with the film.

Disney himself agreed. Notorious for finding fault in just about anything he produced, upon finishing the short, Disney exclaimed, "At last we have achieved true personality in a whole picture!" And as a result, Three Little Pigs was hugely influential both inside and outside the studio.

Internally, the short featured an original song by Frank Churchill, Ted Sears, and Pinto Colvig, and the use of original music would become a convention of many Disney shorts that followed. Also, thanks largely to the work done by Freddie Moore, a hugely talented and influential artist at the studio, the storytelling and animation style at Disney began to shift. The "rubber hose" style of animation was out; the more naturalistic and complicated "squash and stretch" style was here to stay. It was a huge success for the studio, too, winning an Academy Award and making a truly unbelievable amount of money; the following year, the studio's net profit was estimated at more than $600,000 and led to Disney's expansion. One theater played the short for so long that it started adding whiskers to a poster for the short outside the auditorium; as the run went on, the whiskers would get longer and longer.

Most crucially, Three Little Pigs was one of the first of Disney's films to feature a story department, which included Ferguson, Art Babbitt, and Dick Lundy. (It was also, not coincidentally, one of the first animated films to be fully storyboarded.) While Disney had established a story department before 1932, the success of Three Little Pigs, the creation of which Disney himself was heavily involved in, made him double down on his desire to create specialized roles for talented people that ran in direct opposition to the studio's earlier, looser, everybody-chip-in ethos. And that story department would prove crucial in the years ahead as he marched toward a feature-length animated film.

Culturally, though, Three Little Pigs had an even larger impact. It proved that Walt's work, far from being trifles for kiddies, could be considered high art, and the short, along with Disney himself, was fêted widely by the Hollywood elite and embraced by critics. As a metaphor for the Great Depression, then in its fourth year, it also spoke volumes, with the wolf representing the country's economic hardship and the industrious, hardworking pig serving as a metaphor for Roosevelt's New Deal. It became something of an anthem for a beleaguered country; its audio was played over the radio and its plot satirized in the newspaper. When fascism began bubbling up in Europe, the pigs with houses of straw and sticks were repurposed as a desperate warning call to Western nations not taking the Nazi threat seriously. (It should be noted that the original version of the short featured the Wolf dressing up as a "Jewish peddler," a distressing moment that has been edited out of subsequent versions beginning in 1948; the choice didn't help Disney's case when he was accused of anti-Semitism.) And the song, "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?," was influential too, inspiring Edward Albee to title his hit play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Mickey Mouse in color! The Band Concert, a ten-minute tour de force, is mostly notable as Mickey's first appearance, after 72 cartoons, in color - technically three-strip Technicolor - alongside stalwarts Donald Duck and Goofy and lesser-known characters like Clarabelle Cow, Peter Pig, and Horace Horsecollar.

In the short, Mickey is a conductor trying, desperately, to get through the "William Tell Overture." Goofy is a clarinetist in the band and Donald is an obnoxious ice-cream salesman who takes out a flute and starts jamming along uninvited. There are a number of notable character moments: Mickey's reaction when a melting scoop of ice cream slides down his back is still a supremely impressive bit of character animation, and when a rampaging tornado threatens the band and its audience, the benches become anthropomorphic and run away from the disaster.

While it's largely considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Mickey Mouse cartoons ever, Donald is clearly the star of the show. The only character with speaking lines, he is hilarious throughout, something that was commented upon at the time of the movie's release - "The duck takes over," a critic for the New York Journal wrote.

Iconic and recognizable, The Band Concert inspired a 1942 short called Symphony Hour, has been referenced in a number of video games over the years, and is the basis for a pair of Disney Parks attractions: Mickey's PhilharMagic and Silly Symphony Swings, a classic wave-swinger attraction at Disney California Adventure that features characters from the short (including the bee!) painted on the side and whose structure is adorned with a statue of Mickey in his oversize conductor's coat, stick in hand. (You can even hear the overture as you swing.) Truly a tremendous performance.

Popeye the Sailor Man made his animated debut in a 1933 Betty Boop short named after him and quickly became Fleischer Studios' star attraction. The naval pugilist with forearms the size of watermelon had originated from E.C Segar's daily comic strip Thimble Theatre, where he was only supposed to make a one-off appearance. By the mid-1930s Popeye was the most popular character in America, so it only made sense that Paramount Pictures would push Max Fleischer to produce a more ambitious short starring the spinach chomping strong man.

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor was the first Popeye cartoon made in Technicolor as well as the first American animated film to be billed as a feature (running over 16 minutes, it took up two reels), and it is where the Fleischer brothers' "setback process" was showcased to its full potential.

The Fleischers' studio had been behind a number of inventions that helped innovate animation during the mediums early years, but arguably none were more remarkable than the process invented by John Burks. First used in the 1936 Popeye short, For Better or Worser, the process gave off the illusion that two-dimensional characters were able to maneuver in a three-dimensional space. Over 80 years after its premiere, the process is still effective, the illusion not aging a day.

A vital influence on Ray Harryhausen, who made a Sinbad film of his own, the process would be used for a handful of other shorts and one feature, its heights remaining with Sindbad and its follow up Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves. The pair would be the grandest cartoons Fleischer ever produced - until they began work on the adventures of a mild-mannered reporter from Metropolis.

This led to the invention of the multiplane camera, in which different scenes and characters would be painted on separate panes of glass; the camera would then move "through" the panes at different speeds and at various distances from one another, creating the illusion of dimensionality and depth - a concept Ub Iwerks, by this point long gone from Disney, had been tinkering with for years. Walt Disney biographer Neal Gabler hypothesized that Disney "was anticipating the deep-focus photography that director Orson Welles would use so famously in Citizen Kane." Whether or not that's true, the technology was used fabulously in The Old Mill.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this movie to animation. The first full-length Disney animated film and the first full-length cel animated feature, period, the hardest thing about including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on this list was trying to decide which sequence to highlight.

Disney's heralded Nine Old Men worked on the film and famously pulled inspiration from many sources, including European fairy-tale illustrations, German expressionism, and silent films. Snow White also turned the tables of influence a bit. Where early animation incorporated the rhythms of jazz music, both metaphorically and literally, Snow White gave the world a song, "Someday My Prince Will Come," that would become a jazz standard covered by the likes of Dave Brubeck and Herbie Hancock, even inspiring a Miles Davis album more than two decades after the film's 1937 premiere.

But what's most notable about the "Someday My Prince Will Come" sequence is the way it establishes, in a very short scene, the core elements for so much of Disney animation going forward. It centers on a princess and her desire for a happy ending. The details in the characterizations of the dwarfs, from the big, moony eyes so many of them share to the individual distinctions, like Grumpy's snakelike eyebrows and Sleepy's flabby cheeks, are engaging and precise. The adorability quotient, courtesy of the woodland animals who gather to listen to Snow White, is extremely high. What one gets from watching all these bits of artistry working in tandem is a warmed heart and a lifted spirit. It's a feeling best described as pure Disney.

As the first full-length animated feature in the U.S., Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs gets the credit for changing the course of animation history, and rightfully so. But Walt Disney's wildly ambitious follow-up, Pinocchio, ultimately had much bigger effects on the medium itself. From its ample and ambitious use of the multiplane camera to its reliance on an anthropomorphized animal sidekick to its use of live-action models and celebrity voice-acting, the film planted many of the seeds that would be sown over the next half-century of animation.

But of all Pinocchio's achievements, it is the film's special-effects animation, in particular its approach to water, that is most remembered and celebrated. Splitting the difference between stylization and realism, Pinocchio set the standard for water effects in hand-drawn animation and became the model most mainstream animation aspired to up until CG animation made photorealism the new benchmark. The film is lousy with subtly impressive aquatic flourishes, from Jiminy Cricket popping and nearly drowning inside an underwater bubble to Figaro diving into Cleo's fishbowl, but nothing captures Pinocchio 's marriage of ambition and achievement better than the climactic chase scene, in which Pinocchio and Geppetto escape via sneeze from the gullet of the gargantuan whale Monstro.

Every single frame of the three-and-a-half-minute sequence shows water in motion, a crescendoing symphony of foaming ripples, whirling eddies, and crashing waves achieved through a combination of inked cels photographed over specially toned blue paper and white paint overlays. Walt Disney himself called Pinocchio "the toughest job the animators have ever had" (adding, "I hope I never have to live through another one like it"), and you can see every ounce of that effort paying off in the Monstro chase. A box-office bomb in its day, Pinocchio might have seemed like a stumble for Disney in terms of financial success, but it beat live-action films that year for two competitive Academy Awards: Original Score and Original Song ("When You Wish Upon a Star").

Fantasia was, undoubtedly, Walt Disney's biggest gambit - a largely wordless, classical-music-based anthology film that would require theaters to install new equipment in order to accommodate its breakthrough "Fantasound" technology, with individual speakers playing separate musical instruments. In fact, Disney himself saw the film as an ever-evolving, never-complete passion project. (He wanted the film to have its segments switched in and out every few years.) It was Walt at his artsiest and most ambitious. And for the movie's grand finale, "Night on Bald Mountain," based on a piece of music by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, Walt would plunge the audience straight into hell.

Well, not hell exactly, but close. "Bald Mountain, according to tradition, is the gathering place of Satan and his followers," the introduction goes. "Here, on Walpurgisnacht, which is the equivalent of our own Halloween, the creatures of evil gather to worship their master." What is incredible isn't just that this vision of darkness somehow made it into a Disney animated film aimed at a mass audience - it's that an animated version of the material had already been made just a few years before by Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker, a Russian American husband-and-wife animation team based in France, using their own, incredibly complicated technique called pinscreen animation. This "Night on Bald Mountain," incredibly, is just as creepy. And Disney still managed to one-up it.

Fantasia was meant to show how limitless animation was and how willing Disney, who had made his fortune with cuddly animated characters, was to experiment. You can feel all of that coursing through "Night on Bald Mountain." Its iconic devil character, the Chernabog, was animated by the deeply talented Billy Tytla, who found inspiration for the character in everything from doodles by Swiss artist Albert Hurter to the face of Bela Lugosi, who came to the studio and posed for animators. (Tytla would leave the studio after the animators' strike that rocked Disney in 1941.) Rewatching the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment, it's downright shocking. Not only is the tone midnight black, but the ghouls and goblins summoned by this unspeakable evil are truly grotesque; there are even topless female witches, their bare breasts exposed. Its bleakness is enough to make you wonder how, when the movie was rereleased in 1969 and aimed explicitly at the period's head culture (just look at the poster), all those stoned audience members felt about that finale.

It is worth noting that at the time of the film's release, this segment of Fantasia fell under particular scrutiny. Overall, the film was not well regarded, but critics complained specifically about "Night on Bald Mountain" and how Disney chose to showcase evil in abstract terms (a winged demon lording over an army of the undead) while the real thing was making itself very apparent in Europe.

Shortly after Action Comics No. 1 introduced the era of comic-book superheroes, Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights to Superman and wanted its animation studio, Fleischer Studios, to bring the character to series. This was a substantially different task than Max and Dave Fleischer were used to, forcing them to trade caricatured humans and animals for realistic-looking characters.

And yet the Fleischer Superman serial ended up as a definitive take on the Man of Steel. We get the origin, a bit of Clark Kent's daily life as a journalist having to hide his identity, and Superman heroically saving innocents and doing great feats of strength with a smile on his face, all in the ten minutes of "The Mad Scientist," the first of 17 shorts. The Fleischers' patented rotoscoping technique seldom looked as smooth as it does here - the brief moment when Superman lands on the ground after saving a building from collapsing and stands tall to stop a laser beam with his bare hands still looks better than most live-action acts of superheroism.

"The Mad Scientist" was a huge success. Not only was it nominated for an Academy Award, but its influence on both Superman comics and action animation is undeniable. As the legend goes, the studio got permission from the comic's publisher to make the Man of Steel fly because they were unconvinced with how giant leaps looked. Likewise, Superman's iconic pose - fists on the hips, with the cape waving in the wind - first appeared in this short. And the shorts' Art Deco architecture and noirlike aesthetic influenced animator Bruce Timm's now-classic Batman: The Animated Series and, later, his own Superman: The Animated Series.

Ultimately, though, it was also the series that ended the Fleischer brothers' working relationship. Amid financing troubles with Paramount Pictures, the Fleischers resigned from their own company having produced nine Superman shorts credited to Fleischer Studios, which was later renamed Famous Studios.

The Wan brothers - Chaochen, Dihuan, Guchan, and Laiming - are the founders of Chinese animation (it's written right there on Wan Laiming's tombstone), and their first feature-length film began as an artistic act of resistance. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War when, in 1939, the siblings decided to make Princess Iron Fan. They wanted to make something that could match Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had been released two years earlier, as well as represent their distressed nation.

There's a slapstick logic to the animation that recalls the earlier Disney shorts, but the drawing style and the opera-tinged soundtrack are distinctively Chinese. Princess Iron Fan would, with a touch of irony, be exported to Japan, where it would inspire a then-teenage Osamu Tezuka to pursue animation as well as the commissioning of the country's own first full-length animated film.

Though not the first time Disney anthropomorphized animals and far from its last time taking the life of an animal parent, the 1942 feature Bambi stands apart. The death of the young Bambi's mother is perhaps the most brutal and sudden instance of loss in the studio's filmography, the mother and child's hope of escape from a human hunter referred to only as "Man" swiftly and mercilessly cut short with the sound of a single gunshot.

That starkness is only amplified upon realizing that the company still dialed back the bleakness of the scene in the novel the film adapted, Felix Salten's Bambi: A Life in the Woods. The book was originally considered too grim for the company to adapt, but after the film was put on hold following the release of Fantasia, it was, of course, taken into production. The death sequence in Bambi is emblematic of a recurring trope in Disney films: the death of a parent as a formative part of the film's narrative. Disney producer Don Hahn attributes this trope to Walt Disney's personal life. He believes the impulse to include such sequences stemmed from residual guilt surrounding the tragic death of his mother, for which he possibly blamed himself. Whether that real-life tragedy influenced Bambi is unknown, even though the famously autocratic Disney held an almost dictatorial control over all the studio's early works and was directly involved in the process of adapting Bambi. After all, the mother's death was already written, and the death of a parent in films starring children - as it is in fairy tales - is a trope in part because of its narrative convenience, however emotionally difficult that convenience may prove. (Even Disney's own daughter wasn't thrilled at its inclusion.)

Despite its bleakness, the source novel was well received by critics and is considered both one of the first environmentalist novels and an anti-fascist allegory. As for the film, its most tangible effect, besides influencing similar death sequences in films including The Land Before Timeand The Lion King, was on animal rights. The film led Sir Paul McCartney to vegetarianism, at least indirectly, and the origins of the term "Bambi effect" as a stand-in for the prioritization of the safety of "adorable" animals over others are obvious.

Those impacts aside, it's simply a marvelous sequence. Realistic movement of the deer was a particular goal for the studio; animator Eric Larson referred to its previous animated animals as looking "like big flour sacks." The film is one of the most striking of Disney's Golden Age, even without the gothic spires and epic scope of Sleeping Beauty or Fantasia - those deceptively simple forest backgrounds enveloped by snow and punctuated by small streams go a long way. Though the studio is now working to "update" the film by remaking it in CGI, as it has done with so many of its works, the effort will surely be for naught. It won't ever look as good as this.

Animated shorts based on fairy tales were a staple of animation in the first part of the 20th century. The Walt Disney Company made more than ten short films based on fairy tales during the 1930s alone, and both Disney's own feature films and his competitors followed suit. Yet it's easy to imagine the audiences of the 1940s getting a bit bored with the same handful of stories animated over and over by different studios.

Enter Tex Avery, animation's master of screwball comedy, capable of pushing every comedic button in every short to produce maximum laughter. For his 1943 MGM short Red Hot Riding Hood, he changed the script with one of his signature fourth-wall breaks: Instead of a straight adaptation of the story, the characters directly talk to the narrator and ask for a new take. Then the second title card appears and we get an urban, catcalling wolf that pursues Red, now a sexy nightclub performer à la pinup girls Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. The short is the perfect amalgam of Averyisms, from meta-humor to pop-culture references, to gags with characters pulling objects out of thin air, to incredibly stretchy and contorting bodies. On top of it all, Avery's signature risqué comedy was practically guaranteed to give the era's censors panic attacks within a short's first few seconds.

And while cartoon content would be tamed over the coming decades, Avery's innovations stuck.me His catcalling Wolf, for instance, has received homages and parodies from generations of animators after him. And the sequence in which Red's grandma, now portrayed as a hip and wealthy woman living in a penthouse, begins chasing the Wolf around her apartment, all the while opening doors that lead outside the building or reveal cement walls, inspired a similar chase sequence in 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The Merrie Melodies short "Falling Hare" stands out from this crowd, being non-racist, non-educational, and non-jingoistic, and as such it has endured in reruns over the years without being censored. (To be fair, it probably threatened fewer censorship minefields than the notorious Censored Eleven shorts because it features just two characters at odds with each other.) Mainly, it uses an Army Air Force base as an excuse for airplane shenanigans.

Notably, it also bucks the trend as a Bugs Bunny short in which his adversary consistently gets the better of the wascally wabbit, and the role reversal can be surreal to watch at times. A "gremlin" seeking to sabotage planes puts Bugs through some fantastic physical comedy. In the final sequence, this paradoxically hits new heights as the plane plummets toward the ground. Bugs is made of putty, contorting in mortal agony. The depiction of the falling plane itself is a masterful combination of skillful animation and cost-saving shortcuts on the part of director Bob Clampett; it's incredible how visceral simply spinning a static shot of the ground is. And it all caps off with one of the greatest punch lines in WB history.

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were, like their most famous creation, a match made in animation heaven. In Leonard Maltin's book Of Mice and Magic, the film historian described how the two complemented each other: "Barbera's forte was gag comedy. Hanna aspired to be a director and possessed a keen sense of timing." Hanna was the musical one (and would later write The Flintstones theme), and Barbera's talent was drawing " like hell" (his words).With their Tom and Jerry shorts, their strengths always rose to the occasion, and the collaborators worked almost exclusively on the two natural enemies for 15 years after their debut short, Puss Gets the Boot.

The Cat Concerto is one of both duos' zeniths of situation, timing, and gag-based comedy. Tom is a concert pianist animated with a pompous affectation (modeled on the short's music supervisor, Scott Bradley), and Jerry is a rascal inside the piano looking to ruin Tom's big performance of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. What unfolds is a battle of wits built around Bradley's dynamite explosion of a score. The Tom and Jerry cartoons were created with the highest craft at MGM, racking up numerous Academy Award nominations and wins in the process, and the escalating violence of the premise was lightning in a bottle for the studio.

In the wake of the Disney animators' strike of 1941, several staff members left the company. Among them was John Hubley, who believed that the medium of animation was constrained by Disney's painstaking approach to realism. Hubley joined the emerging United Productions of America studio, where he would go on to create the iconic Mr. Magoo. He, together with other animators, would also break the mold in American animation and prove that animation could have as much variety as the imagination allows.

UPA introduced the concept of "limited animation," which brought a modernist design to the medium. The studio used single blocks of solid color and a few lines to indicate a location, influenced by the flattened perspectives and bright colors of Picasso, Matisse, and other modern painters. This style would later be associated with Hanna-Barbera, which used the technique to save time and money, but it was UPA that made the choices that changed how animation was perceived. The creativity that was possible using limited animation was evident in Gerald McBoing-Boing, a short about a boy cursed to speak only in sound effects.

Produced by Hubley, directed by Bobe Cannon, and based on a story by Dr. Seuss, this short is the perfect showcase for the UPA style, masterfully using limited animation to deliver a modernist film that captures mood through a limited color palette and seamless editing between scenes. The short's best transition comes after the titular Gerald gets home after being bullied at school. The color palette shifts to reflect his dejection, and when he runs away from home, he finds himself surrounded by black, a backdrop that evokes the woodcut backgrounds of the illustrator Lynd Ward.
Directed by Noburo Ofuji
First made in 1927 as a silent black and white film, Noburo Ofuji's Kujira, or Whale, maintained its priority of visual storytelling in its final version while taking on some fascinating changes thanks to the possibilities of color film. Ofuji's film was the first piece of Asian animation ever shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and it garnered praise from festival attendee Pablo Picasso (yes, really) as well as the poet Jean Cocteau, who was a member of the jury the year that it was screened.

In remaking the film, Ofuji deployed the unique method of using cutouts of transparent, colored cellophane and silhouetted shadow puppets, assembled on a multiplane animation table used to backlight the frames. This resulted in intentionally flat but fantastically layered frames, each swirling layer of water or sky remaining distinct even as the film quickly moves into visual chaos. Instead of storytelling through dialogue or conventional animated character acting - expression through both body language and facial expression - Ofuji's obfuscation of the characters, which only exist here as shadows, forces the film to convey its meaning through just body language and movement, composer Setsuo Tsukahara'stense classical score, and sound effects: crashing waves and thunder; the strained groans of a sailing ship under duress; and occasionally the laughter, screams, and incidental chatter of the ship's inhabitants.

The film follows a ship as it's attacked by the eponymous whale and, subsequently, one of the survivors as she staves off assaults by her crew mates and evokes the work of Herman Melville, with its collisions of man's vices and folly with titanic marine life, as well as the biblical tale of Jonah, as the survivors of the shipwreck are swallowed by the whale. But Ofuji's own fable is wholly idiosyncratic in its presentation. Its fairly common themes of humankind's propensity for violence and the conflict between humans and the natural world become extraordinary in the hands of Ofuji - and its creative ambitions, as that Cannes jury confirmed, were a signal to the world that Japan, sooner rather than later, would become an animation superpower to be reckoned with.

Neighbours is one of the most important works by animator Norman McLaren and the first short to use live-action actors to make a stop-motion film, a technique called pixilation. The story, which is an antiwar parable, and which was greatly scrutinized when it came out in 1952 (McLaren said he was inspired by witnessing "the beginnings of Mao's revolution" in the People's Republic of China), plays out over just eight minutes and shows two men fighting over a flower.

Over the years, McLaren made many more contributions to the medium, mostly in his experiments combining animation with music. He also founded the National Film Board of Canada's animation department, which cultivated the artistry of several notable independent animators, and taught animation in China and India. Eventually, he retired to a suburb of Montreal with the love of his life, Guy Glover, a man he met in 1937 and who supported him during bouts of depression. They lived there together until McLaren's death in 1987.

Duck Amuck is a classic Merrie Melodies short in that, like so many others, it's about Daffy Duck being driven absolutely bonkers by the situations in which he finds himself. But as a meta-commentary on how Daffy Duck's entire existence is beholden to those who created him, it's infused with the sense of mischief that is so very Chuck Jones, who directed it. And, as written by Michael Maltese, it also serves as a lesson in how animation works and why each element of it matters.

"Whoever's in charge here: Where's the scenery?" Daffy asks through a ruptured fourth wall after his background has turned into a blank white space. From there, the backdrops keep changing and Daffy keeps trying to adjust. But eventually everything goes haywire: The sound goes out, the frame collapses and nearly crushes Daffy, and even Daffy himself gets erased more than once by the butt end of a pencil that enters the frame, presumably via some God-like figure.

Every person who worked on Duck Amuck matters, this short tells us, because every piece of a story, if altered or absent, transforms the narrative. That said, special shout-outs go to Mel Blanc for his signature, hilarious escalation of Daffy's exasperation and to legendary composer Carl Stalling for changing up the music with impeccable timing. The big twist is, once again, very Chuck Jones: Turns out it's Bugs Bunny, ever the stinker, who's been sitting at the drafting table and messing with Daffy the whole time. A lot of the works on this list are perfect cartoons, but seriously: This is a perfect cartoon.

More than almost any other short film in this list, this one needs no introduction. Animation legend Chuck Jones at the height of his creative powers? The final appearance of Elmer Fudd in a Jones-directed cartoon? Bugs Bunny in his best drag performance? A pitch-perfect parody of Richard Wagner's operas and ballets, the Bugs-and-Elmer formula that had grown kind of stale, and even a send-up of Disney's Fantasia? There's no wonder this became the first cartoon selected for the National Film Registry.

The short continued in the vein of Jones's earlier opera parody, Rabbit of Seville, itself a nod to an earlier Woody Woodpecker short loosely adapting the same opera by Gioachino Rossini. What's Opera, Doc? was an especially labor-intensive cartoon to make, requiring Jones and his animators to fudge the numbers on their time cards to get it done, claiming the additional weeks were instead allocated toward the easier-to-produce Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts. The added time and effort show onscreen. Maurice Noble's art direction evokes the limited animation style of rival studio UPA to create a world influenced by the horrors of German silent-film expressionism, featuring jagged towers and buildings and sets that simply couldn't be replicated in live-action even with the highest of budgets. Meanwhile, Dutch angles are used to give the story of Bugs and Elmer's last stand a scope worthy of Wagner's grandiose epic.

Then there's the real star of the show, Bugs's lapine femme fatale, the pigtailed Brunhilde. For many people, including RuPaul, Bugs Bunny provided a first introduction to drag queens, and the wascally wabbit never did it better than here, riding atop a morbidly obese yet graceful steed as Brunhilde. It is a definitive entry for the character, whose creative life is a subject of a chapter in Jones's own illustrated autobiography. "Bugs went through a period of wild awkwardness before settling into the self-contained studied attitudes peculiar to him, so that his every movement is Bugs and Bugs only," Jones wrote. He described What's Opera, Doc? as one of the final corners turned in that evolutionary process: "Probably our most elaborate and satisfying production."

World War II lasted 15 years for Japan, a period during which few foreign cartoons were accessible. After the war, game-changers like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia flooded Japanese cinemas, overshadowing the domestic industry's grayscale shorts. Until Toei released Japan's first full-color animated feature, proving Japan could play the game too.

The head of Toei, the former accountant Hiroshi Okawa, bought respected animation studio Nichido Eiga and rebranded it Toei Animation. He intended to replicate Disney's business model (and financial success) by churning out features for export beyond both the language barrier and anti-Japanese sentiment. But Japan didn't have enough animators for that yet, so Toei had to cultivate them to make Panda and the Magic Serpent, which required a staff of more than 13,500 to complete (including a young in-betweener who would later become famous as anime director Rintaro).

The effect was monumental. "I first fell in love with animation when I saw Panda and the Magic Serpent," said Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki, who worked at Toei early in his career with Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata. "I can still remember the pangs of emotion I felt at the sight of the incredibly beautiful young, female character, Bai-Niang, and how I went to see the film over and over as a result." Her transformations between her human and serpent form are the emotional cruxes of the film, and Miyazaki's reaction was far from an isolated experience. Toei had made the biggest anime landmark since Japan's first feature-length animation 13 years earlier, wartime propaganda Momotaro: Sacred Sailors (1945). Recruiting aspiring animators was easy.

Retention was harder. The so-called Toei University turned young hopefuls into accomplished professionals, creating a massive pool of talent dissatisfied with their wages. Many left, including Miyazaki and Takahata, who became Toei's competitors. Toei built an animation workforce ripe for poaching, just in time for the anime TV boom of the 1960s.

"We took the approach that we were going to kill that damned prince," Wolfgang Reitherman once said of the dynamic sequence he directed in Sleeping Beauty. Overseen by Reitherman in a film co-directed by several of his fellow Nine Old Men, the fight between Prince Phillip and Maleficent in her dragon form feels like a moment Disney had been building to throughout its history as a studio. This sequence requisitions the best elements of Snow White's retreat into the forest after she learns of the wicked queen's plans to kill her and the arrival of the demon in Fantasia's "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence, combining them into one climactic expression of storytelling bliss. Like many of the studio's earliest efforts, Sleeping Beauty 'sanimation techniques owe a lot to the expressionistic quality of silent film. Phillip's galloping horse and Maleficent's transformation are clear images of good and evil that are immediately understood and brought to a thrilling conclusion of explosive greens, twisting brambles, and the deadly fires of Hell.

But Sleeping Beauty 'stranscendence is not confined to just one scene, and Walt Disney's decision to film with Super Technirama 70-mm. - the first wide release to utilize the prestige format - only emphasized the film's glittering assemblage of artistic achievements. There is the expansive, richly painted background work of artist Eyvind Earle. There is also the beautiful color work depicting the three fairy godmothers and their planning of Aurora's birthday, which Floyd Norman, Disney's first Black animator, helped create. And there is the arrival of Maleficent, overseen by Marc Davis, whose villainy debuts with a clap of thunder and green fire, dominating the tone and texture of the film's imagery. That's not to mention the other remarkable animators who worked on the production in varying capacities, including Chuck Jones and Don Bluth.

Despite all this spectacle, Sleeping Beauty did not find its audience upon release, and it would signal the end of an era for Disney. In the future, the studio would adopt animation shortcuts and digital techniques, and Sleeping Beauty would stand as the last film the studio allowed to be built entirely by the hands of its creators.
Directed by Jiří Trnka
Though not well known in the U.S., Czech animation has a long, rich history. Two of its animators in particular contributed enormously to the medium: Karel Zeman and Jiří Trnka. Zeman was often referred to as the "Czech Méliès" for his use of special effects and animation, and his short Inspirace bears the distinction of being the first film animated using blown-glass figurines, reportedly because of a bet Zeman accepted. His work influenced directors as wide-ranging as Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson, to say nothing of his contemporary Trnka.

Trnka, a master of puppetry and stop-motion, was called "the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe" in his day owing to his influence on the medium and his fantastical adaptations of literary works. His masterpiece, A Midsummer Night's Dream, uses framing and posing alone in order to convey the emotions of Shakespeare's characters, as Trnka refused to alter the hand-carved puppets in any way. The film is set to the balletic music of frequent collaborator Václav Trojan in order to highlight the fluidity and rhythm of the action.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a highly unusual film in technical terms. Trnka, who found letterbox presentation of films to be abhorrent, chose to shoot every single frame with two cameras, one in Academy ratio and the other in CinemaScope, essentially recording an in-camera pan-and-scan of the film simultaneously with the theatrical version. The result is a film that feels epic in ways few other animated films of the time did - and many took notice. Stephen Bosustow, one of the founders of United Productions of America, said Trnka was a great influence on UPA's visual approach, praising the director as "the first rebel against Disney's omnipotence."

Influenced by Dragnet spoof "St. George and the Dragonet," by Butler and Stan Freberg, Fractured Fairy Tales started with twists on real fairy tales not only by the Brothers Grimm but by Hans Christian Andersen as well; after a while, the creative brains behind it started composing fairy tales of their own. Fractured Fairy Tales "were so distinctive an element of Rocky and His Friends," wrote animation historian Keith Scott in The Moose That Roared, his book about Rocky and Bullwinkle, "that they remain the strongest memory of the series for many viewers."

Compared to the Hanna-Barbera re-creations of the family-sitcom format like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, the Rocky and Bullwinkle humor in general and Fractured Fairy Tales in particular felt jaggedly satirical and occasionally dark. Fractured Fairy Tales paved the way for a film like Disney's Tangled and especially the Shrek franchise. We can ultimately thank Ward for everyone's favorite Scottish ogre as well as for a host of later fairy-tale twists, such as Jon Scieszka's award-winning postmodern children's book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.

Te Wei is unlike anyone else featured on this list. The cartoonist and animator did not come to the medium out of passion for the art or a desire to further innovate it; rather, Wei entered the world of animation because a government official ordered him to.

A year after being hired by his China's Ministry of Culture to run the animation division of Changchun Film Studio, he, along with a number of artists, moved to Shanghai to form the Shanghai Animation Studio, where together they would pioneer three new animation techniques: paper cutting, paper folding, and Wei's speciality, ink-wash animation.

Chinese animation has such a rich history but has had to overcome many hurdles thanks to government interference or indifference. There has not been a true ink-wash animated film since Wei's final film, 1988's Feeling From Mountain and Water, and with older animators not passing their techniques to younger generations, because of a lack of financial support from the government and the most talented animators being acquired by American and Japanese animation studios, there are real fears that the technique Wei help pioneer will soon fade into history.

Though cartoons were considered children's entertainment in the '50s, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera's The Huckleberry Hound Show, featuring characters like the titular pooch and Yogi Bear,became a surprise hit with adult audiences, who would even go to bars to watch the show. This surprise success inspired the duo, who had already produced Academy Award-winning Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM, to create a groundbreaking adult-oriented cartoon series for prime-time TV.

The Flintstones, like most of Hanna-Barbera's productions, made use of looping "limited animation." The animators kept characters' hands at their sides. They looped animation of Fred's feet as he served as the motor of his own car. Characters passed across the same backgrounds over and over again. Limited animation was pioneered by the UPA studio as a stylistic alternative to the more detailed realism of Disney and Warner Bros., but it was Hanna-Barbera that saw the technique's potential to save serious time and money. The Simpsons memorably mocked this in later years, but in the '60s and '70s, this helped Hanna-Barbera become so efficient at churning out shows that 60 Minutes once referred to the studio as "the General Motors of animation."

Despite using fewer than 20 images, this sequence from the show's first episode, "The Birth of Astro Boy," covers more than 200 frames. It showcases the limited animation associated with Astro Boy 's creator, manga artist/anime boss/cultural giant Osamu Tezuka. Techniques like partial animation, abstract backgrounds, animation loops, and camera movement on still images all convey motion with as little animation as possible.

But while they developed into stylistic conventions now part of anime's visual language, these techniques weren't Tezuka's. Or new. Or unique to Japan. At the time, Astro Boy didn't look too out of place next to Hanna-Barbera productions like The Flintstones. Tezuka didn't pioneer limited animation so much as the commercial conditions that forced TV animators in Japan to rely on it.

Tezuka sold Astro Boy's pilot in the anime TV industry's formative years. Unfamiliar with the costs involved, buyers made low offers based on known quantities such as animation imports. By accepting an amount he knew fell far short, Tezuka set a harmful precedent that became industry standard. The ripple effect of that decision continues today; where Tezuka switched suppliers to save five yen per cel, animators now receive starvation wages to work in crunch conditions without benefits. Astro Boy made today's anime industry possible. That's a complicated legacy.

Astro Boy was also the first anime series to be broadcast on U.S. TV, imported by Fred Ladd, whose work carries its own complicated legacy. It set the precedent for treating imported anime as raw materials. Renamed characters, liberal translation, heavy-handed editing, bowdlerization, and filled silences (as in this sequence, entirely without words in Japanese) were hallmarks of anime localization until the aughts.

Ray Harryhausen didn't invent the use of stop-motion as a means of creating big-screen special effects. But his contributions to the field were instrumental, and his influence remains immense, as the artist responsible for everything from the proto-kaiju that attacks New York in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms to Bubo the mechanical owl in Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen did no less than define a whole generation of moviegoing wonder, bringing to screen flying saucers and fighting centaurs and dinosaurs, all of it decades before the advent of computer-generated imagery.

His genius wasn't just seen in his skill when it came to designing and manipulating miniatures. He also developed a technique, dubbed "Dynamation," that combined live-action footage with stop-motion photography, using split screen and rear projection. The result is that his animated creations appeared to exist in the real world - and never more famously than in the climactic skeleton battle in 1963's Jason and the Argonauts, his masterpiece, in which the eponymous Greek hero (Todd Armstrong) faces down seven bony foes who emerge from the Earth at the behest of King Aeëtes (Jack Gwillim).

The intricate sequence, which took four months to film, looks so good because Harryhausen was able to sync the actions of his models up with the actions of the actors, making for an entirely convincing sword fight. First he shot the actors, who had rehearsed with stunt doubles and were then filmed performing their half of the fight, then he layered in his skeleton warriors, each of which had five appendages, into the film with their halves of the fight. "You have to make 35 moves when you have seven skeletons on the screen for one frame of film," he later recalled of the workload. In the end, the fight was a landmark special effect. Those stop-motion skeletons shared the screen with the stars, but more importantly, they interacted with them.

While in this animated wonderland, they dance, they sing catchy tunes by the Sherman Brothers, and they interact with a small platoon of animated penguin waiters, as charmingly animated by Disney legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. It feels like something of a throwback today, but for the time was incredibly cutting edge, mostly thanks to the interactivity between the humans and animated characters and the way the sequence was put together in an era long before blue-screen technology or the kind of compositing popularized by Star Wars.

This feat was accomplished using a combination of sodium vapor lights and a specially designed Technicolor camera responsible for only two strips of film, with a special prism that would capture the sodium vapor light on one strip and everything else on the other. The result was a perfect matte line that allowed for the background and characters to be fully animated and things like the piece of material holding Mary's hat to her head to be fully transparent. Incredibly, Technicolor was never able to replicate the prism again, leading to decades of cumbersome, overtly intricate solutions to the same problem. And looking at the sequence now, it really is as stunning as it ever was, thanks largely to the expressiveness of the animation (at a time when the attention of the head of the world's most renowned animation studio was drifting away from the medium) and just how good the compositing is. You can tell that Disney wanted to push things forward, and push things he did.

It's janky. It's junky. But it's also jingle-jangly: Rankin-Bass's 1964 holiday television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer established the mid-century template for American Christmas tradition in all its glorious kitsch. Something about the stop-motion makes it fascinating, year after year, to the very young: the characters are hypertactile, all hair and fur, the story simple but elemental. Where A Charlie Brown Christmas appeals to the bourgeoisie, with its anti-consumerist screed and middle-brow jazz, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas's Seussian wit positions it as the most effectively classic and timeless, Rudolph is chintzy and childlike and - between Hermie and the Misfit Toys and the disapproving jock dad - remarkably, charmingly queer. Its Abominable Snowman is like Baby's First Harryhausen, made all the scarier by its lo-fi movements and the compensating hyper-close-ups.
Directed by Marv Newland
When he was working on his student project at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in the late '60s, Marv Newland had no idea that he'd create one of the funniest and famed animated shorts of all time. When his first project - a live-action film - turned out to be too ambitious for the allotted time, Newland abandoned the project and changed course, spending two weeks and less than $300 on Bambi Meets Godzilla.

The minute-and-a-half-long film plays the picturesque, rural "Call to the Dairy Cows" from the 1829 opera William Tell as Bambi grazes in the pasture - that is, until the last haunting note from the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" (1967) reverberates as (spoiler!) Godzilla's scaled foot comes crashing down on our protagonist. Decades later, Newland joked that Bambi Meets Godzilla is the "film that ruined my career," though he went on to work on Gary Larson's Tales From the Far Side TV special.

Jokes aside, few students can say their school project played in theaters across the U.S. (in this case, before screenings of Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts). The short's magic is all in the timing. Of the total 90-second runtime, the film spends the first 48 listing the opening credits and the last 27 on the closing credits, leaving just about 12 seconds in the middle for the "action," which is just Godzilla's unmoving, monstrous foot, ensuring the life is truly squashed out of poor, poor Bambi. But the film lives on, getting a makeover in a frame-for-frame HD re-creation in 2013.

"Sugar Sugar," The Archie Show (1969) and "Title Sequence," Josie and the Pussycats (1970)

These two iconic sequences go hand-in-hand, so we're combining them as one - cheating, perhaps, but it's simply irresponsible to discuss the chart-topping megahit without highlighting the heavy hitter it hatched, both spinning out of the pages of Archie comics in the late '60s.

Written by musicians Jeff Barry and Andy Kim and originally recorded by The Archie Show's fictional bubblegum pop band the Archies (with Ron Dante, Andy Kim, and Toni White on vocals), "Sugar Sugar" skyrocketed to No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard "Hot 100" chart, where it stayed for four weeks. According to Dante, a promoter in San Francisco "took off the label before giving it to the top radio station there. He said, 'Just play it! It's a mystery group.' The guy played it, and the phones lit up."

The catchy tune (and the originality of the animated music-video concept) inspired a wave of Saturday-morning cartoons to follow suit by incorporating bands and music, like that time Scooby Doo met the Monkees. And while it was the first song by an animated band to reach the charts, it certainly wasn't the last.

Much as we'd prefer to leave Bill Cosby out of this - and we really, really would - we can't. That's because Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which Cosby co-created and starred in, marks an important milestone as the first animated TV series to focus on original Black characters. ( The Jackson 5ive and The Harlem Globetrotters, which preceded it, were based on existing people.) The initial special based on Cosby's stand-up comedy, Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert featured the designs of Leo Sullivan and the work of six other animators and aired on NBC in 1969, while the long-running series that debuted on CBS in 1972 was produced by Filmation - known for its use of limited animation and adaptations of Archie comics, Star Trek, and other properties.

Like so much of children's programming during the early '70s, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was built on educational underpinnings. In every episode, Fat Albert, Mushmouth, Rudy, and the rest of the Junkyard Gang learned some kind of lesson. That mission, and the show's spirit, are best captured in the show's theme song, which starts with a distinctive bass groove that quickly turns into a "na-na-na, gonna have a good time" party. In the song, Fat Albert declares that he and his friends will be "learning from each other while we do our thing," while the animation introduces its all Black cast of distinctive personalities. The nicknames of these characters weren't always positive - "Dumb" Donald, not the best! - but seeing all these Black kids on TV, depicted in a positive light, was significant. The fact that Fat Albert, the overweight center of the series, was the hero and that each of his friends had their own challenges to overcome only adds to the show's status as a true example of better representation in animation.

Schoolhouse Rock! was born on the first Saturday in 1973 with this short, which established the sensibility of one of the most significant works of educational animation in modern history. Co-created by a team from an ad agency, including Thomas Yohe, who provided the drawings that became the basis for the animation, "Three Is a Magic Number" was written and performed by jazz musician Bob Dorough, who would go on to contribute to 32 more memorable Schoolhouse Rock! efforts.

"Three Is a Magic Number" was a catchy song, effective at cementing multiplication tables in children's heads, and moving in its evocation of holy trinities, triangles, and single-child families. The animation was just as elegant in its simplicity. Combined, the music and those visuals created a distinctive aesthetic that would be expanded upon in "Conjunction Junction," "I'm Just a Bill," and many other shorts, which were shown regularly between commercials during ABC Saturday-morning cartoons. "Three Is a Magic Number" and its PSA-esque descendants like Muzzy or Téléfrançais! taught kids math, grammar, history, and science while also serving as an antidote to the increasing barrage of commercials being pitched directly to wide-eyed, sugared-cereal-hungry audiences.

Many generations have been exposed to Schoolhouse Rock! since its debut, thanks to the shorts themselves, viewable on Disney+, as well as the many homages and parodies that wound their way through pop culture. But
Gen-Xers were basically homeschooled on "Three Is a Magic Number" and the shorts that followed, to the point where it seems fair to argue that the children of the 1970s became MTV's earliest music-video-obsessive adopters, in part because Schoolhouse Rock! trained them for the moment.

There's nothing else out there quite like Fantastic Planet, that 1973 science-fiction freakout from French filmmakers René Laloux and Roland Topor and the Prague-based Jiří Trnka Studio. To see images from it are to have them forever seared on the brain. Who could forget the giant blue-skinned Draag, with their lidless red eyes and a tendency to keep humans (called Oms) as pets, sometimes indulging the much-smaller species and sometimes subjecting its members to random acts of capricious cruelty? Czech artist Trnka, who died in 1969, was best known for his reliance on puppets and paper in animation, and Laloux had a background in puppetry as well, and the result of the latter's five-year cross-European collaboration with the studio was a film that used paper cutouts and dreamlike backdrops to unique and unsettling ends.

Fantastic Planet is an all-purpose allegory about oppression that at varying times has been read as having a message about slavery, about animal rights, and about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The truth is that it's malleable enough to be repurposed for any conflict, as the oppressed Oms learn to use Draag knowledge and technology against their captors. The po-faced story is lightened up considerably by the heavy streak of psychedelia in the imagery, something that's made the film a treasured party backdrop, especially in the scene in which four adult Draags are shown meditating. As their bodies shift kaleidoscopically into strange, organic shapes as they travel with their minds, it's clear that what you're watching is sci-fi, sure, but with an unmissable whiff of substances to it.

Belladonna of Sadness was singular at the time of its release in 1973, addressing historical misogyny and the ways that it can compromise or, in some cases, annihilate the bodies of women. Rendered through beautiful watercolor paintings, much of Belladonna is brought to life in close-ups of its protagonist, Jeanne, whose tragic face often reflects the complicated emotions of Lillian Gish's work as D.W. Griffith's tragic martyr. This story of extreme misogyny and violence does not make the implication that Jeanne is a universal figure of woman, but it does present her anguish in a journey reminiscent of Eve's in the Bible. Jeanne has more in common with the tempting snake than the average woman, but the fatalism of her story, and the way it is rendered through oozing, wretched, red and black paint and a gaze of furious intent contains within it an elemental rage toward those who attempt to fracture the psyche of women everywhere.

Three years before the sci-fi boom led by Star Wars, Space Battleship Yamato sent a salvaged warship through space to save Earth from alien attack. Like Star Trek's USS Enterprise, the Yamato was named for a real ship. This flashback from the episode "The Opening Gun! Space Battleship Yamato Starts!" animates its very real demise in 1945: bombed and burning, sinking with 3,000 crew members while Japanese soldiers pay their respects. A voice-over says the Yamato 's origin as a warship, born to fight, is a tragedy.

So the director, the prominent manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, was horrified to learn this sequence had aired with a military march. He fought to change the music, insisting, "Young people will not go along with this!" and "If the broadcast station hears this, the program is over." War was still a delicate subject in Japan, where anti-military protests had filled the previous decade. Using real wartime iconography in a sci-fi setting to tell a very human story required a careful balance - easily tipped by a militaristic soundtrack. He won the fight, changed the cue, and Yamato went on to become one of the most influential anime of all time, both in Japan and in the U.S., where it was localized as Star Blazers.

However, this sequence didn't make it into the U.S. adaptation in any form. But neither did more overtly antiwar sequences. At one point, the protagonist weeps for his enemies while surrounded by dead allies, wondering if violence was necessary. Star Blazers created audio to keep the dead alive and the hero firm in his beliefs. The U.S. - subject of Japan's anti-military protests - had its own delicate balance to maintain.

Hayao Miyazaki (who danced around a car park with a colleague as a reference for Heidi and Peter's dance in this sequence) described working on Heidi as "a year-long state of emergency," which he realized was "the danger of television": maintain that unsustainable state of emergency or sacrifice production quality. He chose to make movies instead.

A little hedgehog is on his way to meet his friend the bear when he spots a white horse in the evening fog and decides to investigate. The horse disappears, and the hedgehog encounters all manner of frights in the fog before eventually finding his way to the bear. Even when the danger has passed, he cannot shake the image of the horse in the fog from his mind. Neither will anyone who watches this astonishing film.

Animation is breathing the illusion of life into two-dimensional objects, and few directors have made this magic as wondrously as Russia's Yuri Norstein. Despite working with paper cutouts - a form that has more in common with stop-motion than traditional 2-D animation - he brings incredible dimensionality to his films through a variety of tricks, such as his own unique version of the multiplane camera. With Hedgehog in the Fog, he stumped his colleagues around the world with extraordinary environmental effects. How do the animals actually fade into and out of the fog? How did he replicate the fuzziness of fog so effectively with glass and celluloid? (The answer is that he painstakingly manipulated an extremely thin layer of paper between the camera and the planes of the scenes.) The film is at turns beautiful and scary in its evocation of a child's imagination and the first encounter with the all-consuming strangeness of the world.
Directed by Caroline Leaf
The best-known practitioner of paint-on-glass animation is probably Russia's Aleksandr Petrov, who's gotten four Academy Award nominations for his shorts, winning for his 1999 The Old Man and the Sea, a gorgeous adaptation of the famous Ernest Hemingway novel. But the artist most often credited with inventing the technique is pioneering Canadian filmmaker Caroline Leaf, who first used it to make her wondrous 1976 short The Street, based on the story by Mordecai Richler. Leaf has made use of various innovative approaches to animation throughout her career, creating images with sand or by scratching directly on the emulsion of the film itself.

For her paint-on-glass work, she used pigments with retardants mixed in so they wouldn't dry. After drawing on a white glass background and photographing the result, she'd wipe away the old image with a cloth and redraw the next frame. The result, in The Street (which was also up for an Oscar), is a handcrafted look that conveys the subjectivity and, in the fluidity of how the figures and scenes shift from one moment to the next, the haziness of the recollected past. It's a style perfectly suited for a story shot through with love and loss - a Montreal man's memory of a summer when he was a boy and his grandmother was on her deathbed, the whole family keeping vigil nearby while he thinks mostly of the fact that when the woman passes, he'll finally have his own room.

In the mid-1970s, Hanna-Barbera was unstoppable. Midway through what would be a 30-year reign as one of the most prolific animation studios in television history, the studio made hay by embracing limited animation, a low-budget technique that only required animators to animate what they absolutely had to, and embraced recycled footage whenever possible. The studio's success was a victory of quantity over quality, one made easier by the massive portfolio of licensed characters available to it. DC's Justice League was enshrined by the studio on television for more than a decade as the Super Friends.

The longevity of Super Friends - like many Hanna-Barbera properties, the series would regularly be retooled and renamed - means that wider trends in the television landscape of the time can be seen in its segments. The introduction of Black Vulcan, the first Black superhero on television, is one of them.

A landmark for onscreen diversity is reduced to rote tokenization - Black Vulcan was created for the show when a rights dispute precluded the inclusion of Black Lightning, DC's first Black superhero. Black Vulcan was one of a rotating cast of ethnic superheroes used interchangeably to team up with one of the "main" Justice League members (in "The Whirlpool," his first appearance, it's Aquaman) to try and maximize the value of the superhero IP in animation, which for decades meant selling toys and appealing to audiences in the shallowest way possible.
Directed by Suzan Pitt
Pitt animates her film with a gliding, dreamy quality of shape-shifting and effervescent movement. She refuses to cut hard from one image to the next, instead opting for something more fluid with a seductive, liquid effect of disguised image wipes, which give the short a sinking, hallucinatory aura. In Asparagus, when doors and windows open, within those images there are only more images to slip into even further, as if Pitt envisioned her 20-minute short as Alice falling down the rabbit hole if the falling never stopped. The sloping, curving images of Pitt's animation also feel deliberately feminine in construction and are only amplified by the sensuality of hands cupping phallic imagery that morph and sway with the bobbing of a mouth. Pitt's work is surrealist but deliberate in its intent, and her straightforward approach to emotions and sensations made all of her work prick the skin of feeling - feeling totally inhabited by the soulfulness of her own human spirit as a result.

Pitt died in 2019, but the influence of her artistry and of Asparagus in particular are undeniable in the fields of experimental animation, visual art, and film to the extent that a community formed in her orbit over the years. In a remembrance, her friend and fellow animator Julie Zammarchi recalled asking her deep "questions about art and life" over the years, which Pitt never shied away from. "No subject was off limits or too personal," Zammarchi said. "She was always generous during these meandering interviews as long as we both kept drawing and painting."

A film roughly 30 years in the making, French animator Paul Grimault and poet Jacques Prévert's adaptation of a tale by Hans Christian Andersen probably felt like a bizarre piece of history even upon its release in 1979. What began in 1948 as The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, loosely based on Andersen's fairy tale of the same name, was released unfinished in 1952 (as The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird in English-language markets) without the approval of either Grimault or Prévert. Grimault eventually obtained the rights to the film and was finally able to complete the film as he originally intended. And boy, were those intentions bizarre.

In this story of an evil painting of a king coming to life so as to kidnap a shepherdess and force her into marriage, Grimault's work recalls the bouncy movements and ghoulish, wide-eyed characters of animation from decades prior, particularly that of Max Fleischer. It's all placed within a film that pushes that style to a surrealist extreme, each wild left turn set against backdrops of a kingdom that alternates between minimal brutalism and Escher-esque labyrinthine architecture. And then the giant robot appears.

Despite Mockingbird 's unpredictability up to this point, the first appearance of the king's giant robot, hidden beneath the city as a last resort weapon, is still a shock, its empty eyes and cold metal making for a stark visual contrast with the clean, white stone of the rest of the kingdom. More shocking still is the film's final sequence, when the robot is repossessed and transformed into a tool of the common people and used to raze the pristine, decadent structures of the castle to the ground as the king's tyranny is finally met with cathartic resistance. The surrealist film, particularly this sequence, is a noted influence on Ghibli co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, with Miyazaki explaining how the film made him more aware of how to use space in a vertical manner. The design of the robot itself seems to echo throughout that director's work, but even in isolation the film remains a powerful one, with its animated tale of totalitarianism rendered in beautiful detail.

When Ichiro Itano was 20 years old, he decided one night to strap 50 fireworks onto his motorbike, light them with a Zippo, and start speeding down his local beach at 80 miles an hour. Why? Because he was told it was dangerous. In the midst of all the smoke, light, and sound emanating from the fireworks, the young daredevil and animator gained the inspiration for what would become one of the most iconic sequences in animation.

The "Itano Circus," where a single character or object maneuvers through a torrent of missiles (or lasers, body parts, etc.), all in a single shot or within a single cut of the character, often shown from the perspective of the cockpit, is one of anime's most dynamic, stylish, and visually distinctive tropes. Itano first used the technique in the 1980 series Space Runaway Ideon, and gained even more attention for the technique when he pulled it out for 1982's Super Dimension Fortress Macross, hence the origin of its other name, "The Macross Missile Massacre."

Since the 1980s, it has been one of the most copied sequences in animation, many attempting to mimic or even outdo the innovator. Itano has said that only three animators have successfully pulled off the technique: Yasushi Muraki, Masami Goto, and Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideki Anno. The circus also helped lead to the rise of sakuga culture in anime, where fans become familiar with the work of individual animators, following them from series to series, elevating them to superstar status.
Directed by Jan Švankmajer
No one combines the whimsical and the grotesque quite like Jan Švankmajer. The great Czech stop-motion surrealist turned Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into a half live-action, half-animated child's-eye-view nightmare. He transformed a folktale into dark comedy about a tree stump baby with a taste for human flesh. He depicted two cutlets of meat having a grand and fully consummated romance before getting fried up for dinner. Švankmajer's sensibility and style have been hugely influential, particularly when it comes to fellow stop-motion lovers the Brothers Quay and Terry Gilliam, who wrote in the that his films "always leave me with mixed feelings, but they all have moments that really get to me; moments that evoke the nightmarish specter of seeing commonplace things coming unexpectedly to life."

Despite the number of artists he's inspired, Švankmajer's work remains singular and fantastically strange, which is never more evident than in his 1983 short Dimensions of Dialogue. The three-part film involves different variations on faces doing disturbing things to one another, but it's the opening sequence that's the most extensive and the most memorable. In it, tooth-clicking profiles formed out of produce, kitchen equipment, and office gear take turns devouring one another and then regurgitating the increasingly chewed-up bits. After several rounds of this, what's left are a set of identical and more realistic looking clay heads vomiting each other up ad infinitum - call it a metaphor for anything from the flattening of public discourse under authoritarianism to the tedium of making small-talk.

After working at Walt Disney Productions for nearly a decade, Don Bluth was fed up. Feeling the famed studio's decline in the '70s was due to cut corners in the animation process, he left - along with Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy, and a cadre of other Disney talent to form his own studio, Don Bluth Productions. A staunch advocate for the medium, Bluth wanted to make movies that refused to cut those corners and showed what animation could be at a time when the form was at a box-office low.

This iconic sequence proved you could sell action figures and pop songs at the same time and demonstrated two game-changing innovations: transforming mecha and virtual idols.

"Form Voltron," Voltron and Beast King GoLion (1984, 1981)

Alongside executive producer Peter Keefe, Koplar heavily edited the series, removing the more violent and gruesome aspects of GoLion and rewriting the script so that it could be appropriate for American children. He and his staff would also change the name of the robot from GoLion to Voltron, Defender of the Universe.

A legit pop-culture phenomenon, Voltron is an example where - in the U.S. and elsewhere - the adaptation almost fully eclipsed the source. It was the No. 1-rated syndicated children's program for three years, mainly remembered today for its formation sequence, where five pilots combine their robot lions to form the all-powerful Voltron - always accompanied by the triumphant score composed by John Petersen. While not the first super-robot series to feature a formation sequence (that honor goes to Toei Animation's Getter Robo), the trope became synonymous with Voltron, referenced in other animated programs ranging from Dexter's Laboratory to Robot Chicken, to say nothing of its nod on the Wu-Tang Clan's debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). More than anything, Voltron paved the way for other anime series to appear on American televisions like Dragon Ball Z, and tokusatsu shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

"Take on Me," A-Ha (1985)

When the Norwegian pop trio A-Ha released their now-iconic single "Take on Me" in 1984, the reception was a deadening thud. Despite the response, lead singer Morten Harket knew they had a hit on their hands; it just needed that extra something to push it over the top. Enter Jeff Ayeroff, then-creative director of Warner Bros. Records. Ayeroff put the band in touch with "Billie Jean" director Steve Barron, who from there enlisted the talents of animators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger to bring the song's music video to life.
Directed by The Brothers Quay
Siblings Stephen and Timothy Quay were born in Pennsylvania, but their aesthetic feels so innately European in its influences that they might as well be from across the Atlantic in spirit. The Brothers Quay are often held up as inheritors of the tradition of Jan Švankmajer, to whom they paid homage in a 1984 tribute short, though they've insisted themselves that their main inspiration is actually Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk. Regardless, their work, which combines stop-motion and live-action footage with a dark sensibility, feels both familiar in its touchpoints and fresh in how it builds on those references toward something new.

In their best-known work, the 1986 short Street of Crocodiles, a puppet inside a curio box is freed from his strings by a man looking down through a viewing window from the outside. What the puppet finds in its explorations is a decrepit landscape that's a masterpiece of mood and miniatures - all rusted hardware, clouded mirrors, hollow-headed dolls, a pile of dandelion fluff that reassembles itself into a ball, and a pocket watch that opens to reveal it is filled with meat. In the words of the Quays, the film is a depiction of "mechanical realities and manufactured pleasures," but it's also just an eerily beautiful experience that injected new life into the realm of experimental stop-motion. And the commercial, as well - it's no surprise that Mark Romanek cited it when directing the video for Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" eight years later.

Pixar may be one of the most recognized brands in animation today, but its icon status found its start in a little lamp that could. Luxo Jr. was the first short film ever produced by Pixar Animation Studios, shaping and showcasing the qualities that the studio has come to be known for since. At the time, Pixar was a new, small studio where John Lasseter and a team of part-time animators were working with very little funding and low expectations. Though Luxo Jr. was produced merely as a test to demonstrate the Pixar Image Computer's capabilities, it exceeded and transformed the traditional understanding of what computer graphics were for and what animation could be.

At the time of its release in 1986, the short was the first work of animation to use procedural animation and marked a breakthrough in CGI, using shadow mapping to show shifting light and shadow animated objects. Its emotional realism established inanimate objects as having lifelike qualities that could inspire both comedy and drama. After premiering it at the SIGGRAPH festival to laughter and applause, it was clear that Pixar had piqued the world's interest. Later that year, Luxo Jr. became the first computer-animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

" Luxo Jr. sent shock waves through the entire industry," Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull wrote in his 1998 book Computer Animation: A Whole New World. "At that time, most traditional artists were afraid of the computer. They did not realize that the computer was merely a different tool in the artist's kit." The storytelling in Luxo Jr. got Pixar more support and funding and made it possible for the team to turn to feature animation, and eventually , the first fully computer-animated feature film, also directed by Lasseter.
Studio Ghibli
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
While waiting for their father's bus, sisters Satsuki and Mei get caught in the rain. Soon they encounter another commuter, the local bear/cat/rabbit spirit Totoro, to whom Satsuki lends their spare umbrella. Totoro has some fun with making water fall on the umbrella before his ride comes: an enormous bus shaped like a cat. (Or rather, a cat shaped like a bus?) It is an extremely simple scene and also one of the most beat-by-beat delightful movie moments ever.

Hayao Miyazaki directs this sequence, which has been mimicked or parodied countless times and neatly encapsulates Miyazaki's style, with a mesmerizing rhythm of pauses and actions. Each mundane gesture - Mei stomping in a puddle while Satsuki makes string figures, a streetlight coming on as night falls, Satsuki hefting Mei onto her back when she wants to nap - gradually builds to the intrusion of the fantastic. Every action has an equal and opposite non-action, a moment of consideration and reflection. This is best exemplified when Totoro figures out that raindrops + umbrella = fun noises, with the buildup climaxing with him making a huge hop (an echo of Mei playing in the puddle) to cause a ton of water to shake off the trees. It's the simple feeling of passing the time, refracted through a lens that makes it indelible.

Nowhere else is a still drawing of a human so agonizing as in this scene. The conclusion is foregone; the movie starts with Seita dying in a train station and his ghost joining his sister's, before jumping back in time to show us how things came to this. Seita, having cashed in family savings to get food, thinks there's still time to save Setsuko from malnutrition. There isn't. Like Miyazaki's bus stop in Totoro, the sequence has its own rhythm. Seita is horrified by the mud "rice balls" Setsuko has made, then cuts her a slice of watermelon, then it lingers on the pause before she weakly reaches to take it. Each time it cuts to Setsuko lying on the floor of their makeshift shelter, you expect this to be it. When the moment finally comes, it isn't with a meticulously animated final breath, but instead just another still shot, with Seita's voice-over stating that she never woke up.

Grave of the Fireflies is indicative of two related historical impulses: the collective act of a population still processing grief decades after the end of World War II and the individual drive of an artist to depict it. Takahata's film followed Barefoot Gen, a movie that graphically depicted the bombing of Hiroshima, and though he has denied that Grave of the Fireflies was intended as an antiwar film, he took pains to reproduce the era faithfully, knowing that among his animators, he was the only one in fourth grade during the war who could remember what the landscape looked like. "I'm not out to make a movie that explains the times," he said, "but I think those aspects should get incorporated somehow."

Animation and live action had co-existed on the big screen well before Who Framed Roger Rabbit, dating all the way back to the silent era. But Robert Zemeckis's work of film cartoon noir married the two for the length of an entire feature with such precision and imagination that it felt like the genre had just rocketed into a new stratosphere.

That feeling sets in immediately during the film's brilliant opening sequence, which begins with "Somethin's Cookin'," a hand-drawn short in the Merrie Melodies vein starring Roger and Baby Herman, then pulls the camera back to reveal a live-action set where human director Raoul J. Raoul and his crew are shooting this "cartoon" on a movie set. Even now, it remains astonishing to see how seamlessly the real people interact with the animated characters, a testament to the work of the legendary Richard Williams, animation director on Roger Rabbit and director of the famously unfinished The Thief and the Cobbler, who sharpened every line of sight between toon and person to make sure that an animated rabbit yanking an actual coat looked completely real.

Arriving in 1988 at a time when animation was on a cultural downswing, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with moments like that initial sequence and its many homages to beloved cartoons of the past, reminded members of its audience of their deep affection for the medium. It also reminded critics just what animation could do. As a result, it paved the way for the next decade of cartoons, which would include The Simpsons, the Disney Renaissance, the revived popularity of Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes, and the return to the gleeful slapstick of yore on networks like Kids WB and Nickelodeon. Yes, this motion picture was half-live action. But it was 100 percent a love letter to the humor and magic of animation. (Click here to watch on Disney+.)

Where does one even begin to adapt, let alone reimagine, Katsuhiro Otomo's 2,000-plus-page cyberpunk epic Akira for the big screen? For the man himself, the answer was simple: with nothing short of a big bang followed by a scintillating high-speed battle through the streets of a futuristic metropolis teetering on the brink of destruction.

The opening 13 minutes of Akira are a master class in cinematic precision. Otomo grabs the audience and thrusts it full force into the film's world, weaving a motorcycle chase comprised of pulsating light trails, visceral action, and a thunderous Noh-inspired drum score performed by Geinoh Yamashirogumi between parallel sequences of civil unrest, police brutality, and a mysterious agent provocateur being mercilessly ventilated in a hail of gunfire. Everything you need to know is spelled out in those 13 minutes: the strained friendship and simmering rivalry between protagonist Kaneda and his antagonist/foil Tetsuo, a societal rage threatening self-immolation, and a clandestine military government desperately attempting to bury the past while straining to hold it all together.

The chase's midpoint climax, animated by veteran animation director Koji Morimoto and informally known as the "Akira Bike Slide," has been replicated nearly countless times on television, in the movies, and in games since the film's release in 1988 - and especially in animation. Akira is a monolith of contemporary Japanese cinema, a cinematic achievement as historically significant as it is eminently impressive, and Akira's opening motorcycle chase is nothing if not an enduring testament to the film's primacy in the history of animation. (Click here to watch on Hulu.)

In the last three decades, the couch gag has gone from very simple actions such as the Simpsons performing a dance routine to gloriously outlandish ones that sometimes stretched for more than two minutes. The gag also allowed the family to meet other classic cartoon characters, such as Gumby, Rick and Morty, the Flintstones, and even the version of themselves that appeared on Tracey Ullman.

It also offered an opportunity for outsiders to come in and present gags animated in their own personal style. World of Tomorrow's Don Hertzfeldt, the U.K. street artist Banksy, The Triplets of Belleville's Sylvain Chomet, Guard Dog's Bill Plympton, and even Blade II and Pan's Labyrinth directorGuillermo del Toro have all made versions of the gag. It is perhaps the most iconic aspect of one of the most iconic animated programs in history as well as its most adaptable. Click here to watch on Disney+

Very few artists had as widespread an influence on the history of animation as lyricist and playwright Howard Ashman, and he wasn't even an animator. When Ashman started working with Disney in 1986 after he was commissioned to pen the lyrics for a song in the creative failure that was Oliver and Company, it began a relationship that would help birth the so-called Disney Renaissance and chart a path for the animation giants that they are still following to this day.

With The Little Mermaid, Disney's output returned to the world of fairy tales and tapped into a feminine yearning for something more that resonated deeply with children everywhere. "Part of Your World" is an expertly crafted song of rising, bombastic vocals from Jodi Benson and firmly situated Disney in a new Broadway-influenced style of animated musicals. In the sequence, the mermaid Ariel retreats to her secret treasure trove, where she collects things from the human world, and like a teenage girl's bedroom, it is decorated with her hopes and dreams. Much of the animation in this sequence is catered to the way Ariel moves, with her gorgeous flowing hair seeming to have a life of its own and her skyward gaze to emphasize her longing for more. (It would be the last fully traditionally cel-animated Disney film, before the process was replaced by Disney's Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS.)

"Part of Your World" tapped into something fundamental about girlhood, and those sweeping, beautiful enchantments about being liberated and free from the restrictions of where you grew up, or who you are, or what your body looked like, still strike a chord to this day. Disney knows this too, as it has been tapping into the Ariel model ever since with the likes of Elsa from Frozen. "Part of Your World" is not only the start of Disney's resurrection, but gave them an emotion to inhabit for the next 30 years, and that all started with Howard Ashman. Click here to watch on Disney+

The show's unsettling essence is encapsulated by its most famous moment, "Happy Happy Joy Joy." It showcased one of the things that Kricfalusi did so well, which was to reintroduce physical humor and timing into cartoons, reminiscent of the work of Bill Hanna and Tex Avery, but with his subversive twist. The two leads perform a weird butt-slapping dance, followed by Ren bashing himself in the head with a hammer in time to the music while Stimpy bounces around, well, joyfully. It channels the weird antics, cringey behavior, and silliness the show was known for into a catchy tune whose popularity helped propel the show to new heights and does so with odd parodies of classic cartoon tropes.

But, like so many things, the show's inventiveness is now overshadowed by its creator's indefensible behavior. In 2018, two women came forward with accounts of how Kricfalusi sexually harassed them when they were teens, accusing him of grooming them and starting a sexual relationship with one when she was just 16. Kricfalusi admitted to the claims and said it was motivated by undiagnosed bipolar disorder and ADHD. Kricfalusi's sexual harassment of female artists and teenage girls was an open secret of the animation industry at the time.

Despite Kricfalusi's behavior, Ren & Stimpy's influence is undeniable. It inspired dozens of imitators and fellow envelope-pushers in American adult animation in the late '90s and early aughts. Mike Judge credits it with MTV picking up Beavis and Butt-head, and many of the conventions that it created or popularized still endure in today's cartoons. Click here to watch on CBS All Access

During this sequence, the camera spins around lead character Usagi as she becomes Sailor Moon, as if she were a ballerina mid-pirouette. No longer is she clumsy, but rather assured of her movement, and bit by bit she becomes glamorous and strong; tipped fingernails, mascara, a sailor suit, and a tiara - and with a determined look on her face, she was ready to not only save her friends but the entire world. Click here to watch on Hulu

How many animated television shows have managed to condense nearly an episode's worth of plot beats comfortably into the space of minute - let alone for that minute to convey one of the most archetypal stories of a character so iconic one could immediately recognize who, or what, they're watching without any dialogue, title card, or credits to speak of? The intro sequence of Batman: The Animated Series, aside from prefacing one of the greatest animated television series of all time, is itself irrefutably one of the greatest sequences in the history of animation.

"Everything you need to know about Batman is in [that opening]," DC Entertainment president and CCO Geoff Johns said back in 2004. Drawing inspiration from pulp-fiction staples such as the likes of the Avenger and the Shadow, Max Fleischer's Superman shorts of the 1940s, and the dark futuristic architecture designs of Hugh Ferris, co-creator Bruce Timm and art director Eric Radomski crafted a one-minute pilot short to pitch the series to Warner Bros., which would later be reanimated by Kazuhide Tomonaga of TMS Entertainment to serve as the series' intro sequence.

The result was an incarnation of the Caped Crusader unlike anything that had been brought to the screen before, drawing on the precedent of Tim Burton's own feature film (and including its theme), albeit now reimagined through a synthesis of the chiaroscuro stylings of film noir, the architectural audacity of Art Deco, and the angular menace of German Expressionism. Nearly three decades later, the image of a heroic silhouette illuminated by a bolt of lightning against a blood-red sky stands as one of the most iconic depictions of the Dark Knight ever conceived and serves as a benchmark for animated action television to come.

Animation is the only medium that could truly keep up with Robin Williams. The zealous, hilarious, endlessly talented actor and comedian first first lent his voice to animation in 1992's Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, where he played an unbalanced rapping fruit bat named Batty Koda. The animators at Kroyer Films did a decent job animating Williams's vocal skills, but they would truly shine when he joined Disney, as the company was redoubling its animated efforts, for the biggest film of 1992, Aladdin.

It takes almost 36 minutes for Genie to make his appearance and less than three to steal the entire picture (though Williams also voices the opening scene's merchant). His opening song, "Friend Like Me," written by the late Howard Ashman and composed by Alan Menken, is one of the highlights of the Disney Renaissance. From Williams rapid-fire delivery to the off-the-wall and elastic animation from Disney, and especially from the character's lead animator, Eric Goldberg, the entire sequence is flawless.

Williams's participation in Aladdin would lead to other studios hiring famous voices for animated characters - Eddie Murphy in Mulan and Shrek, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen in Toy Story, Chris Rock in Osmosis Jones. Williams would not return for the straight-to-video feature The Return of Jafar, as the actor felt betrayed by Disney when the company went back on their word and used his voice for promotional purposes, something Williams was strictly against; he did come back for 1996's Aladdin and the King of Thieves. Today, Genie is Williams's most famous and popular character, and it's unlikely to see a big-budget animated film without at least one or two marquee celebrities attached. Click here to watch on Disney+

Traditional children's animated entertainment forever got permission to be ghoulish thanks to the opening number of the Tim Burton-produced, Henry Selick-directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, the stop-motion film that brought Ray Harryhausen-style craft into the mainstream as a longform art.

In 1993, in the middle of the Disney Renaissance, The Nightmare Before Christmas showed up on screens and immediately thrust vampires, skeletons, and clowns with tearaway faces into the eyeballs of audiences much more used to Disney princesses and genies with the comedy gifts of Robin Williams. "This Is Halloween" was scary - "Everybody scream!" shouts a creepy talking tree in the Danny Elfman-penned song - and seductively dark. If animated movies of the time were generally for kids who yearned for tiaras and adventure, The Nightmare Before Christmas, released under Disney's Touchstone Pictures label, was aimed squarely at Wednesday Addams.

Across the pond, stop-motion animation director Nick Park and studio Aardman Animations achieved feats of their own the same year, with the The Wrong Trousers, a short Wallace and Gromit film with an iconic train chase that nods to Indiana Jones. The short is full of visual humor that builds layers of sight gags in every handcrafted, incredibly detailed scene. We would be remiss not to mention it, as it and Nightmare both kick-started an interest in stop-motion in the '90s. Aardman's 2000 film Chicken Run remains the top-grossing stop-motion film of all time. Click here to watch on Disney+

Dexter's Laboratory, created by Genndy Tartakovsky, was the second short to premiere on What a Cartoon! but the first to be greenlit for a full series. ( The Powerpuff Girls, created by Tartakovsky contemporary Craig McCracken, premiered a week earlierin February 1995.) Mike Lazzo, the Space Ghost Coast to Coast creator who would later launch Adult Swim, greenlit Dexter's Lab after a vote from viewers, who loved the weirdly accented little Dexter and how he contrasted with his destructively ignorant sister Dee Dee.

"Changes," originally titled simply "Dexter's Laboratory" in the What a Cartoon! anthology, is the short that started it all. Dee Dee sneaks into Dexter's lab and starts misusing his latest invention: a remote that inexplicably turns people into random animals. The two run amok, turning each other into various animals throughout the lab and then up into their house, as their oblivious mother calls them down for breakfast. The crisp animation and visual humor made the segment stand out, nowhere more so than in the ending - a battle between a tortoise and the snail racing for the remote.

Dexter's Laboratory received critical acclaim and won multiple Annie Awards, including the pilot episode, a testament to Tartakovsky's talent and commitment as a filmmaker and a proof of concept for the What a Cartoon! anthology format, from which more series were quickly greenlit. Once it launched Tartakovsky's career, he went on to create the Emmy-winning shows Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Primal, not to mention directing the Hotel Transylvania franchise.

Holiday specials have been around nearly as long as television, with virtually every popular serialized TV show, animated or otherwise, incorporating at least one Christmas-themed episode. But it took until 1995 and the arrival of Rugrats before we saw a Jewish-holiday special in an animated show.

In the episode, the babies attend a Seder with the maternal grandparents of protagonist Tommy Pickles, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who talk with heavy Yiddish accents and at times even in full Yiddish phrases. Because this is still a show about babies, the Ten Plagues are toned down a bit, and Moses tells Pharaoh: "Let my babies go!" But the episode still manages to capture the epic scope of the Passover story, with Tommy as Moses parting the Red Sea evoking the famous scene in The Ten Commandments. The episode was a big hit with critics and audiences alike, with theNew York Times even reviewing the episode, and it became the highest-rated episode in the history of Nickelodeon to date. It also proved influential within the network, with Hey Arnold! later including a Bar Mitzvah episode. The creators of Rugrats, Klasky and Csupo went on to define Nickelodeon during the '90s, producing other hit shows such as Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys, and As Told by Ginger. Click here to watch on Hulu

The seams never showed, though. In one of the most memorable sequences in animated film history, the climax of Toy Story has Buzz Li

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The 100 Most Influential Sequences in Animation History

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This article was featured in One Great Story , New York 's reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick.

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Fall Out Boy - Bob Dylan (Official Video)

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BTS | Shots in the Dark with David Godlis

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They say that the punk rock movement was born in Mid 70's New York City. If so, then David Godlis was in the delivery room. Godlis was NYC's latest resident when he found the now-famous venue, CBGB's. He was a 25 year old street photographer, dissatisfied with his studio assistant day job. To combat his frustration with his inability to shoot street pictures by day, he was determined to reinvent street photography to be just as beautiful by night. His setting would be his favorite bar: CBGB's. While he took some of the earliest photos of The Ramones, Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads, he also turned his camera away from the celebrities. He took photos of the regulars, the drunks, and loud mouths who loitered the club too. As a result, Godlis compiled a truly intimate portrait of his new home, CB's, all while empowering himself in the new punk movement fueled by a DIY attitude.

Lived by, narrated by, photographs by David Godlis | Directed, Produced, Animated by Lewie & Noah Kloster | Produced by Giovanni Fumu | Executive Produced by Maximilian Selim, Kimbo Kim | Sound Design by David Britton | Colorist Samuel Gursky (Irving Harvey) | Music Provided by Numero Group | Thank You Emily Kreusch, Tom Ishizuka, Aidan Stadler, Lissette Emma, Brad M. Bailey

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A 37TH DEGREE ORIGINAL FILM
Between 1976 and 1980, young Manhattan photographer David Godlis documented the nightly goings-on at the Bowery’s legendary CBGB, “the undisputed birthplace of punk rock,” with a vividly distinctive style of night photography. Lewie and Noah Kloster bring his photos to life with electrifying immediacy, bolstered by black-and-white watercolor animation, a rollicking soundtrack, and voiceover narration by Godlis himself.

“Shots In The Dark with David Godlis” is this week's Staff Pick Premiere. Read more about it here: https://vimeo.com/blog/post/shots-in-the-dark-with-david-godlis/

Trailer:
https://vimeo.com/451306168
Behind the Scenes:
https://vimeo.com/443080077

https://37thdegree.com/
http://tallglasswithiceproductions.com/

Lived by, narrated by, photographs by David Godlis | Directed & Animated by Lewie & Noah Kloster | Producer Giovanni Fumu | Executive Producers Maximilian Selim, Kimbo Kim | Sound Design by David Britton | Colorist Samuel Gursky (Irving Harvey) | Music Provided by Numero Group | Thank You Emily Kreusch, Tom Ishizuka, Aidan Stadler, Lissette Emma, Brad M. Bailey

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Il mondo dell'animazione italiana, così attiva nel periodo in cui il Carosello furoreggiava sugli schermi televisivi negli anni del boom economico del secondo dopoguerra, tutt'oggi non difetta di realtà interessanti e propositive (basti pensare al lavoro del napoletano Alessandro Rak che, con la MAD Entertainment, ha vinto l'European Film Award 2014 per il lungometraggio L'ARTE DELLA FELICITÀ), ma difetta di quella competitività praticata a suo tempo da professionisti come Bruno Bozzetto, Emanuele Luzzati e lo Studio Pagot in grado di riportarla definitivamente alla ribalta internazionale.
Accantonate le velleità commerciali dell'epoca d'oro, a cui, comunque, realtà isolate come la Rainbow delle WINX non sono affatto estranee, l'animazione italiana indipendente vive attualmente in una sorta di dimensione parallela e "clandestina" e si esprime principalmente in forma di cortometraggio: si tratta di una produzione incolpevolmente d' élite, rivolta ad un pubblico selezionato, quello delle rassegne e dei festival di genere (se non degli addetti ai lavori), che, come accade per le produzioni indipendenti nell'ambito del cinema "tradizionale", fatica a raggiungere le grandi platee.

"L'ANIMAZIONE DIPINTA": L'INDIVIDUAZIONE DELLA PRIMA CORRENTE NEL CARTOON ITALIANO

Se, da un lato, questa condizione di isolamento penalizza la distribuzione canonica di lavori artisticamente meritevoli, d'altra parte essa sembra aver favorito lo sviluppo di un sapere artigiano peculiare per l'uso dei mezzi e per l'originalità della messincena, dal quale emerge una indubbia propensione ad una rappresentazione visiva caratterizzata da un'evidente urgenza comunicativa, da un grande estro creativo e da notevoli sperimentazioni espressive e tecniche che, spesso, non contemplano l'uso del digitale.
Ravvisati questi ed altri tratti comuni nei lavori di un nutrito gruppo di autori che, oltre ad essere animatori sono spesso scrittori e illustratori, Priscilla Mancini ha raccolto le proprie analisi sull'argomento nel saggio L'animazione dipinta. La Corrente Neopittorica del cartoon italiano, recentemente edito da Tunué nella collana Lapilli.
Critica d'arte laureatasi in Lettere Moderne all'Università degli Studi di Milano con una tesi curata da Giannalberto Bendazzi, tra i maggiori esperti internazionali e docente di storia del cinema di animazione e autore di numerosi testi inerenti la materia (tra cui l'imprescindibile Cartoons - Cento anni di cinema di animazione), con L'animazione dipinta la Mancini enuclea una corrente precisa in seno alla produzione animata made in Italy: si tratta di un fatto assolutamente inedito.
Come sottolinea Bendazzi nell'introduzione al testo, infatti, una Corrente propriamente detta non era mai esistita in questo settore della cinematografia italiana: affondando le proprie radici nella tradizione pittorica, in particolare quella rinascimentale e delle avanguardie sviluppatesi tra l'Ottocento e il Novecento (in Italia, furono artisti futuristi come Arnaldo Ginna, Gianni Veronesi e Cioni Carpi a sperimentare per primi una sorta di pittura astratta animata, seguiti da nomi come Magdalo Mussio e Manfredo Manfredi, esponenti di quella che la Mancini definisce paleopittoricità), a cavallo tra il XX e il XXI secolo, la Corrente Neopittorica ha iniziato ad esprimersi concretamente, ma in maniera spontanea, senza un "manifesto" preciso, offrendo perfino uno spunto di analisi interessante sull'Italia e sulla sua cultura in un preciso momento storico, configurandosi come un crocevia fra pittura, cinema, video arte e poesia.

QUALI SONO LE CARATTERISTICHE PRINCIPALI DELLA CORRENTE NEOPITTORICA?

Oltre alla scelta di lavorare in maniera creativamente e produttivamente indipendente, rifuggendo la "serialità su commissione", uno degli elementi di raccordo tra gli albori dell'animazione italiana e la Corrente Neopittorica è la cosiddetta pittura verbale (termine coniato per descrivere i lavori del citato Mussio), ovvero la capacità di creare immagini legate alle regole della rappresentazione pittorica, ma declinate con toni eleganti e intimistici, "di tradizione vagamente e suggestivamente letteraria". In breve, la parola scritta entra nella sfera dell'immagine: la parola si scrive davanti agli occhi dello spettatore, grazie all'animazione. Sullo schermo, prende vita un "gioco di trasformazioni, di fusione, di metamorfosi incessante delle forme e dei soggetti che, incapaci di essere fissati in qualcosa di stabile e determinato, subito fuggono verso nuovi orizzonti, verso nuove mete da conquistare". Nelle rappresentazioni animate neopittoriche, la creazione artistica "sembra essere caratterizzata dall'impossibilità di staticità e da un profondo bisogno di movimento e di fuga verso forme differenti (...). Le forme vengono trascinate, dilatate (...). Ne nascono film che potrebbero esistere di per sé, al di là della presenza di una trama o di una storia riconoscibili", in una sorta di danza irrefrenabile che permette di saltabeccare nel tempo e nello spazio (fisico e mentale): non è un caso che la memoria (in particolare, il ricordo dell'infanzia) intesa anche come conservazione e rispetto della tradizione, l'uso della parola (detta e scritta), la fuga siano tra i temi prediletti e ricorrenti all'interno dei lavori di animazione che ricadono nell'alveo della Corrente Neopittorica.

LA CORRENTE NEOPITTORICA: GLI ARTISTI

Lo spoglio della Mancini ha fatto emergere un dato geografico importante: pur provenendo da luoghi diversi, una parte degli animatori neopittorici si è formata e lavora in una zona precisa dell'Italia centrale, tra la Romagna, la Toscana e le Marche, con l'Istituto Statale di Urbino che funziona come perno e che, con la sezione di Disegno Animato, "si caratterizza come una moderna 'bottega'".
L'animazione dipinta analizza nel dettaglio la biografia e l'opera di questo nutrito gruppo di artisti (da Simone Massi a Ursula Ferrara, da Elena Chiesa a Massimo Ottoni): per approfondire l'argomento, vi rimandiamo alla lettura del ricco, agile ed esaustivo testo della Mancini, mentre, qui, vi proponiamo una brevissima selezione di alcuni dei loro affascinanti lavori. Buona lettura e buona visione!
[Nella foto, un'immagine tratta dal promo della Mostra del Cinema di Venezia del 2012 firmato da Simone Massi]
Indice dei contenuti dell'articolo

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"L'animazione dipinta" e la Corrente Neopittorica italiana

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Il mondo dell'animazione italiana, così attiva nel periodo in cui il Carosello furoreggiava sugli schermi televisivi negli anni del boom economico del secondo dopoguerra, tutt'oggi non difetta di realtà interessanti e propositive (basti pensare al lavoro del napoletano Alessandro Rak che, con la MAD Entertainment, ha vinto l'European Film Award 2014 per il lungometraggio L'ARTE DELLA FELICITÀ), ma difetta di quella competitività praticata a suo tempo da professionisti come Bruno Bozzetto, Emanuele Luzzati e lo Studio Pagot in grado di riportarla definitivamente alla ribalta internazionale.

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About a woman who wanted to fly away / Про бабу, которая хотела улететь

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Film Director, Scriptwriter, Artist, Animator Sasha Svirsky
Composer, sound designer Alexey Zelensky
Master-Film Studio, 2018, Russia

A tale about the ideas of transhumanism that spring up out of the peculiar Russian soil.

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Режиссер, сценарист, художник-постановщик, аниматор Александр Свирский
Композитор, звукорежиссер Алексей Зеленский
Cтудия “Мастер-Фильм” 2018, Россия

История о том, как идеи трансгуманизма прорастают на специфических российских черноземах.

Prizes:
The SPECIAL JURY MENTION - International Kansk Video Festival, Russia, 2018
The Priestley Innovation Prize - Big Cartoon Festival, Moscow, Russia, 2018
The JURY MENTION - Animaevka, Mogilev, Belorussia, 2018 

Festivals:
23rd Open Russian Festival of Animated Film, Suzdal, Russia, March 2018
20th Future Film Festival, Bologna, Italy, competition program, 1 June 2018 
Insomnia International Animation Festival, Russia, July 2018
Window to Europe, Vyborg, Russia, August 2018
International Kansk Video Festival, Russia, August 2018
25th IIF Etiuda&Anima, Krakow, Poland, November 2018
PÖFF Shorts International Competition  / Animated Dreams International Animation Film Festival, Tallin, Estonia, November 2018
CutOut Fest, Querétaro, Mexico, November 2018
Animaevka, Mogilev, Belorussia, November 2018 
Big Cartoon Festival, Moscow, Russia, November 2018
Linea d'Ombra Festival, Salerno, Italy, December 2018
The Unforeseen International Experimental Film Festival, Belgrad, Serbia, November 2018
La Truca Festival Internacional de Animación, Cali, Colombia, April, 2019
KINOLIKBEZ, Saint-Peterburg, Russia, July 2019
Kinodot, Saint-Perersburg, Russia, June 2019
Melbourne International Animation Festival, Australia, 2019
MEDIAWAVE, Komárom, Hungary, April, 2019
ReAnima, Bergen, Norway, November 2019
Linz International Short Film Festival, Linz, Austria, November 2019
Turku Animated Film Festival, Turku, Finland, August 2019
LOBO FEST - Festival Internacional de Filmes, Brasília, Brazil, November 2019
VOID International Film Festival - Copenhagen, Denmark, January, 2020

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Seenfilm | Music Video Production | Commercials

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Music Video Production | Seenfilm | We make paper videos

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We have had the pleasure of working for Robbie Williams, Amy Lee, Alok, Mishaal & Powfu, Yatra & Monsta , The Game, Alter Bridge, Blueface, Louis The Child,

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Babfilm Ottó Foky 1976  Shortmovie No Language

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Acclaimed director and animation studies scholar Georges Sifianos signs his latest animation film, The Blind Writer. He talks to Zippy Frames.

Paris-based, Greek animation director, artist and University teacher Georges Sifianos a well-known name in the animation world. His activities in filmmaking start with his 1974 Smile film and proceed in animation with Scent of City - 1994, Tutu (co-directed with Pascal Dalet), Ego (2007). He has taught (since 1994) at ENSAD -École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and his very active scholarly career includes a Norman McLaren-Evelyn Lambart award for the Best Scholarly Book in animation (2014, with Esthétique du cinéma d'animation). His new film, The Blind Writer, was just being completed.

The drawings of this film were made blindfolded, that is, without looking at them while drawing but using only tactile cues. This challenge reflects the writer's dilemmas facing ideological certainties. In a world of communication, where custom images and opinions are constructed, how can one discern the essential? What is seeing anyway? Appearances, do they correspond to reality? - Film Synopsis

Sifianos is straightforward in his answers even when introducing the film itself. "The blindness of the writer is the metaphor of uncertainty on how our world evolves. Why do people decide against their own interest? Why this ecologic crisis which does so much damage and perhaps will destroy life on the earth?" This impending catastrophe brings forward epistemological questions, which work better than all certitudes of politics and religion. Sifianos' central questions are based on the famous Socratic ignorance ('I know one thing, that I know nothing'), and makes the creator the unknown but acting author.

The central character in The Blind Writer, according to Sifianos, is the opposite of the fanatic whose fixed ideas (dogmatism) lead to inadequate responses when seriously challenged; these inadequate responses in turn create more questions leading to a mise en abyme, tiredness and finally oblivion. Take for instance, the argument about our complex world, which is in need of a creator, which in turn necessarily (logicaly) requires another creator and so on. Or the fake logic argument that because an idea has many followers (as religious ideas usually do), then it has to be statistically right -simply because of its followers' size. In contrast, the blind writer is the spirit who seeks understanding beyond the fake reasoning and ready-made platitudes.

Watch Excerpts from The Blind Writer

The Blind Writer had the director himself being blindfolded using only tactile cues on paper to make his drawings, and then create the famous 'movement between the frames'. "I wanted to question our own method, our animation language. Industrialisation creates dogmas, a kind of violence; it tries to establish models". His first exposure to blindness came when he was studying at the Sorbonne University in France; one of his classmates was Evgen Bavčar, a Slovenian who lost his vision young, but studied and became a well-known blind photographer. Sifianos used the technique of blind acting to his subsequent ENSAD students, where he had the move around, walk, draw and animate with their eyes closed (results were subsequently collected and exhibited in various animation colloquia, including Animafest Scanner at Zagreb). "The drawing becomes more sensitive and less cerebral in that way".
This is the exact process of how The Blind Writer was made:
I use prepared papers and tools I conceived. I create a video-model on which a simple grid is drawn.

When animating, I look at this model but never on my drawing. Videos are also prepared. Apart from the grid and hybrid models I create digitally, I keep only 1 every 2, 3 or 4 images of videos. As vibrations are violent, it is more interesting to work with fewer frames/second. Perception needs a delay; otherwise, the screening becomes very tiring. I try to copy frame by frame the video, looking at the image but not looking at the drawing. A disc prevents me from looking at it.

The papers are small and prepared: I drill pin holes by the rear of the paper, giving a small relief, like in Braille. I also use a small support with other marks on the borders of the paper. The pinholes and border repairs correspond to the grid on the screen.

During drawing, I try to match forms following these landmarks. But this ...never happens! Every drawing is a surprise. Sometimes, the drawing is very far from the model. In the beginning I thought it would be a failure. But paradoxically, the movement organized disparate drawings. This experience helped me to understand better the way perception functions. In the beginning I was quite attentive and stressed while drawing, but with the experience I realized that mistakes on precision on single drawing, was not so important, and I started feeling freer. I tried to keep proportions, but concentrated more on modelling. Since that moment, drawing has become jubilant...

Another technical question concerns the use of color: Touching the point of a pencil is a relatively clean process. But what if you need to use a wet brush? For the next film, I created a small desk with a relief grid behind. That way you can touch the landmarks and keep your hands clean while painting.

As Sifianos used drawing with a small format drawing ('the size of my hand'), the process was relatively fast ('I spent much more time trying to finance the project' he admits). Post-production and voice acting was done remotely. The whole film process lasted 2 years, with the animation chunk being 4-6 months period.

"This kind of film is not scheduled rationally, but intuitively. I worked on a theme and tried variations, like in music." Research on the ideas and materials implied by the theme still took place beforehand. "Sometimes I did animations directly, at other times I was preparing videos". Watching the film you see at a point a hand rolling a pencil, denoting the presence of the creator. "This animation was not intentional. I copied several times the same photo of my hand and, assembling the drawings, I discovered that accidental movement gives the feeling of somebody who is embarrassed. This feeling matched with the scene and I used it".

A storyboard (a collection of sketches and photographs) only came later as a production bible and marketing tool to present and finance the project. "I always worked by association of ideas. They come spontaneously, often in the morning under the shower! I think it's useful to replace storyboards with showers!" The Blind Writer features the words written on the screen, which introduce both the questions and the answer. "It was there to remind me of the writing experience. Animated handwriting is something alive. I remember the films on Alexander Pushkin by Andrei Khrzhanovsky, where Pushkin's writings become waves of the sea... On the other hand, writing is also drawing: drawing letters".

His voice actors, a man and a woman, both utter the words in an musically accented tone. "Even though we recognize a male and a female voice, my voices are not gendered but human voices". Everything needs to participate in everything else. " Who is the blind writer? The old man we see? The man and woman we hear and see the faces? The hand who writes or the painter who sketches the hand who is writing? The director of this film, or the spectator? I am interested in our blindness, its reasons and consequences, not on the destiny of an individual. The blind creator is the human in general; everyone".

Jan Švankmajer (Possibilities of a Dialogue), Norman McLaren (Neighbours), and Charlie Chaplin, the eternal underdog and our conscious soul all parade in The Blind Writer. Is this a call to dialogue and to invite a look to the people mostly in need of it?

"They do give references; they express thoughts clearly and facilitate the process to understand the culture, the world where we are" Sifianos tells. "I think that some scenes, or some notes as Beethoven's four first notes of the fifth Symphony, (pa-pa-pa-pam) are so representative of a content that becomes universal references. In the same way that an ox head becomes Aleph, the letter A. And A, becomes a tool. Similarly, when Charlie Chaplin eats his shoes and shoelaces with "polite manners" this is an emblematic representation of a thought, a kind of cinematographic ideogram, which from now on belongs to humanity. Who was the painter who first drew the ox's head which became A?

Charlie Chaplin never eats peelings instead of orange, but he could do it. It is the thought behind who is interesting and I try to find a universal representation; the idea that we eat the peelings and throw the essential, the fruit, when we valorise appearance more than essence". This is an ancient question, up to the time when the Greek sophist Protagoras defended the thesis that "man is the measure of all things", going in contrast with previous cosmological solutions. "It is the skilful speaker now who dictates what must be considered as true in our society of communication" Sifianos mentions. He voices his deep concern about this regime of appearances ('slander, slander, there will always be something left'), and clings to a deepening of the essence in our human understanding, the blind writer being the first step.

The Blind Writer's aesthetics seem to encompass dance, music and singing as well. "I think all that fits together" Sifianos explains "The spontaneous, poetic way of thinking functioning by association of ideas and forms, more than cause and effect method, is something that I defend". If consequences are not linear but qualitative (as the philosopher George Politzer described) and the boiling water becomes vapor, perhaps our own stance towards things should differentiate accordingly. The classical Greek 'metron' (measure) which guards from hybris and excess should actually lead to a more harmonious co-existence. "Nature is structured on a predator-prey model", he says. "Human civilization has to go past this model; otherwise, the 'liberal' law of the stronger, the law of the jungle will continue in the same way. Humans are clever, and developed enough power to destroy - many times - the earth. Will they be clever enough to find again the need of measure (metron) and ecologic and social harmony? That is the question of the blind writer" Sifianos explains.

The director had something himself to learn during the making of this 2D animation film, starting from the way of animating characters and moving to the way the mind itself works. "During many years I was teaching the classical law, that when you have the weight on a foot which is on the ground, this foot must not move if you want to avoid a sliding of your character. This law won't function in the same way in "blind" animation. In fact, when you have a lot of vibrating lines, some of them are more precise and at better position than others. I realized that visual perception is like hearing: it chooses. When you are interested in hearing someone talking in a noisy place, your perception distinguishes what is interesting, isolates and ignores the rest. Visual perception does the same: when we distinguish a few lines in the right place corresponding to the gravity and elasticity of a movement following our experience, our perception chooses these lines as references, and considers what remains as noise. Without vibration, perception is more comfortable, yet in a vibrant context our perception actively chooses".

He calls this 'blind' animation a kind of impressionistic animation; the Impressionists' notion of complimentary colors in painting is here paralleled by the complementary lines, placed one beside the other and get connected in our mind (his thoughts to be further expanded in his presentation at "10èmes rencontres professionnelles de Fontevraud"). "Paradoxically, we like this process of participation. We feel creators; we like to understand by ourselves". The Blind Writer will travel the international festival circuit, and, hopefully, its pertinent questions as well on a film that is very particular, pressing yet still sensitive on issues too familiar to disregard.
About Georges Sifianos
Georges Sifianos, born in Greece, holds a PhD in animation aesthetics from the University of Sorbonne. He is a filmmaker and professor emeritus of animation at ENSAD in Paris, where he founded the Department of Animation Studies in 1995. He has lectured worldwide including universities in Europe, India, Korea, Japan and China.
As a member of PSL academic research group, SACRe (EA 7410), he is interested in the renewal of forms of animation cinema, particularly from the point of view of cognitive science. The blindfolded animation approach employed in "The blind writer" is part of this research. His other recent research interest concerns animation forms found on the Parthenon's Frieze. His book Aesthetics of Animated Cinema received the 2014 "McLaren - Lambart" award for the best academic book by the Society for Animation Studies and the "Hemingway Grant" in 2015.

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Acclaimed director and animation studies scholar Georges Sifianos signs his latest animation film, The Blind Writer. He talks to Zippy Frames. Paris-based, Greek animation director, artist and University teacher Georges Sifianos a well-known name in the animation world.

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The Blind Writer by Georges Sifianos (Excerpts)

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A short animation movie by Nicolas Mahler based on the Comic book with the same title.

Idea & drawings: Nicolas Mahler
Animation: Thomas Renoldner
Soundtrack: Ulrich Troyer
Mastering: Kassian Troyer

Duration: 5 min 28 sec

Vienna 2009

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PLANET ∞, by Momoko Seto | Institut français

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Planet ∞ (2017), by the Franco-Japanese director Momoko Seto, is the fourth film in the Planet series. In this virtual reality experience, the spectator finds themself plunged into a phantasmagoria filled with enormous mushrooms.

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12 Sketches on the Impossibility of Being Still

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A short film directed by Magali Charrier, featuring Selina Papoutseli and Tom Lyall. Cinematography by Fran Weston.
An series of animation experiments exploring the idea of stillness: what happens when nothing happens?

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Graduation film from the Royal College of Art, 2007.

An investigative and exploratory hands-on gloves-off study into the practice of putting things 'off''. Sometimes the only way to get something done is to do two dozen other things first.

Awards:

Jerwood Moving Image Award
Palm Springs International ShortFest - Best student animated short
European Film Academy Award - Nominated, European Film Award for Best Short Film
NYC Shorts - Best Animation
SF Shorts- Director's Special Recognition in Animation
Giraf Animation Festival - Audience Award
Befilm Underground Film Festival - Best Short - Animation
Langsett Independent Film Festival - Audience Award
Multivision International Festival - Best Experimental Film
Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife - Best Film
Animadrid - Best Short Film From Animation School
Narkolepsy International Short Film Festival - Grand Prix du Public
Royal Television Society Student Awards - Postgraduate Animation
Clermont Ferrand - Special mention, Prix de Médiathèques
Premier Plans Festival - Prix UIP
London Short Film Festival - Second Prize, VX Auteur Theory 3
Exground Film Festival - Best Film, International Competition
Shark Awards - Best New Irish Director
Royal College of Art - Conran Foundation Award

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Credits:

Story, Animation, Direction: Johnny Kelly
Voice Over: Bryan Quinn

Sound Supervision: Mike Wyeld
 Foley Artist: Sue Harding 
 Foley Engineer: John Mark
Foley recorded at Fonic Studios, London

Bryan Quinn - http://nolanmuldoonagency.com/actors-male/bryan-quinn/
www.johnnykel.ly

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My Mother talks to me about post-dictatorship Athens, her struggle to adapt to the greek mentality, her memories of motherhood, and her longing to go back to her small town in Italy. 

Produced, Directed & Designed by Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits
Royal College of Art 2010

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My Kingston University graduation film, completed in 2008. Based on real interviews and recordings, this short film is about girls talking about men, sex and relationships on a night out.

Produced, Directed & Designed by Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits
Produced at Kingston University 2008

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BAFTA Nominated Short Animation 2011

A serendipitous journey in which a lone fisher is united with a form of estranged matter.

Directed & Designed by David Prosser
Sound Design by Joe Tate 
Animation by David Prosser, Eamonn O Neill, Gergely Wootsch
Mixed by Nikola Zivojinovic
Mixed at National Film and Television School
Production at Royal College of Art 2010

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WATCH A sand animation short film inspired by Ovide's "Metamorphoses" | FULL MOVIE

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WATCH Oscar nominated and César winning animation short about child abuse | FULL MOVIE

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"Maneuvers (Manöver)" is an experimental animation combining skiing with stop-motion animation.

"Maneuvers" is this week's Staff Pick Premiere! Read more about it here: https://vimeo.com/blog/post/maneuvers-sami-ortlie/

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The misty and deep memories of a woman in exile.

A short animated film about exile, immigration, memory and identity.
Made with ink on paper.

Directed, animated, edited and produced by Éléonore Goldberg.
Music composition and sound design by Olivier Girouard.

This film received supports from the program L'Aide au cinéma indépendant (NFB) and from Montréal, Arts Interculturels.

2015   Special Jury Award for Wandering at the Cinema on the Bayou Festival
2014   Honorable Mention, for Wandering , given by the Breakthroughs Film Festival
2014   Nominated at Jutra, within the shorts animated film category

Festivals:
The Ottawa International Animation Festival – Canadian Showcase (2013, Ottawa, CA), 
The Interfilm 29th International Short Film Festival - International Competition (2013, Berlin, Germany), Les Sommets 	du cinéma d’animation à Montréal et Québec – Compétition Internationale 	(2013, Québec, Canada), 
Animated Dreams "Focus on Canadian Animation" (2013, Tallinn, Estonie), 
KloosterKino 9th Edition (2014, Nijmegen, Pays-	Bas), 
Animac (2014, Lleida, Espagne), 
Melbourne International Animation Festival – Compétition internationale (2014, Melbourne, Australie), 
Festival 	Fantasia (2014, Montréal, Québec, Canada), 
Breakthroughs Film Festival 	(2014, Toronto, Canada), 
International Animated Film Festival KROK - 	compétition programme (2014, Russie et Ukraine), 
London International Animation Festival (2014, Londres, Royaume-Uni), 
Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival – compétition internationale (2014, Sudbury, Canada), Cine Migrante (2014, Buenos Aires, Argentina), 
Animated Dreams 	– Panorama (2014, Tallinn, Estonie), 
Festival International du Cinéma Francophone en Acadie (2014, Moncton, Canada), 
Animated Dreams –	Panorama Programme (2014, Tallinn, Estonia), 
Rendez-vous du cinéma 	québécois (2015, Montréal, Ca), 
10th Cinema on the Bayou (2015, Lafayette, 	États-Unis), 
6th "Cine court anime" Festival de Roanne - compétition expérimentale (2015, Roanne, France), 
25th Mediawave International Film & Music GatheringFestival (2015, Komarum, Hongrie), 
Imaginaria – Animation Film Festival (2015, Conversano, Italie), 
Nouvelle cartographie de vidéographe: Humanités et réalités numériques - programme Art & guerre (2015, Montréal, Regina & Shanghaï), 
Women Make Waves Film Festival (2015, Tapei, Taïwan)

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Vive la Rose is a short film Bruce Alcock made for the NFB. It’s a rather tragic love story of a fisherman and his beloved, based on a traditional Newfoundland song performed by Emile Benoit.

To convey the history and character of this story of unrequited love, we rooted the film on location in Newfoundland, using a combination of live action and animation to tell the story. Bruce loves mixing up elements of things, so we combined digital and hand-made production – ink drawings with a variety of romantic and associative elements and objects – to create a stop motion film. Because it was all shot on location, we were able to make use of sunlight and the physical realities of the location. The film looks like it could have been made in the 1800’s: we used still cameras but the digital underpinning made it work.

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The shapes we make, an advertisement for planet earth.

Awards: 
Black Maria Film Festival Jury's Stellar Award 1st Prize
Sunderland Shorts Film Festival Best Art/Experimental

Official Selection:
Ottawa Internation Animation Festival
Slamdance Film Festival
GLAS Animation Festival
Black Maria Film Festival
Melbourne International Film Festival
Holland Animation Film Festival
Oxford International Film Festival
Anchorage International Film Festival
Atlanta Film Festival
Bahamas International Film Festival
Kurzfilmfestival Koeln
Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival
Flatpack Film Festival
Desert Dust Cinema
Sunderland Shorts Film Festival
Providence Children’s Film Festival
SENE Film Festival
St. Lawrence International Film Festival
Mac Creteil
New England Film Festival
IndieFEST Film Awards

Imagery:
 - Google Earth Pro
 - Wikimedia Commons
 - RISD Picture Collection
 - RISD Materials Collection
 - Personal Photography
Audio:
 - RISD 'Sound Ideas' Library
 - Freesound

RISD 2015
Please contact cgriffit@risd.edu for inquires concerning attribution.

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Synopsis: A rabbit couple tries to survive in a dying forest...

-Best Narrative Short Film, Ottawa International Animation Film Festival 2011.

-Grand Prize NFB, Les Sommets de l'Animation de Montréal 2011.

Frédérick Trembley, La Bande Vidéo, Le Conseil des Arts du Canada

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by Michèle Cournoyer — 1999

The Hat is a tough, visceral experience. The filmmaker, with naked honesty, invites the audience to share in the pain of a woman, an exotic dancer whose body is on display and whose soul is forever soiled.

The woman can never forget. The hat becomes for her an overwhelming, invasive obsession, constantly resurfacing in a rapid and implacable succession of metamorphoses. Animator Michèle Cournoyer uses black ink on white paper to illustrate this painful tale. With a quick stroke, she throws ink on paper, creating an occasional blotch.

Production : National Film Board of Canada (nfb.ca)

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by Patrick Bouchard — 2007

The selfishness of the bourgeoisie and the dull passivity of its servants are the theme of this puppet animation presenting the tragicomedy of a society in its death throes, taking refuge in absurd behaviour.

Production : National Film Board of Canada (nfb.ca)

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by Jean-Thomas Bédard — 1973

Made up of hundreds of cut-out color ads projected in fragmented, rapid succession, this animated film without words takes a critical look at the conditioning process that underlies consumerism in our world of materialism. Seductive advertising is seen as the main motivating force in shaping the desires, the needs and, to a large degree, the lives of modern men and women. A provocative film to stimulate reflection.

Production : National Film Board of Canada (nfb.ca)

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Short film dreamt by Aaron Paradox.

Upcoming projects: facebook.com/ParadoxAaron
To license animation for your project go to: pond5.com/collections/3257476-kensho

Narrated by British-born American philosopher Alan Watts.

Narrated by Alan Watts audio courtesy of alanwatts.org.
Music: “The Way” by Zack Hemsey. 
Sound design by Jacob Thomas Czech.
Additional 3D Animations by Mike Winkelmann. 
Dreamer’s voice by Paul "Bear" Vasquez.
Visuals and animation by Aaron Paradox.

"This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief." - Rumi

If you want to help with international translations of Kensho please contact me at paradoxaaron[at]gmail[dot]com. Thanks :)

Translations:
Portuguese by Lindenberg Munroe ( behance.net/lindenbergmunroe ).
Spanish by Data FilmZ X ( youtube.com/channel/UCThofJg-gXf6h_tZe7u7Ukg ).
Russian by Herman ( youtube.com/channel/UCLz6yBivbUVdHzJvFk3dd3w ).
Turkish by Fatih Aruk.
German by Paul Merkel.
Albanian by Taulant F. Devolli (taulant.devolli@gmail.com).
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) by Isabella and John Chan.

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A dive into sunny childhood memories, when a girl is singing and cooking with her father. An intimate moment, so simple. But they’re swept along by the wafting mass of dough into the emotional depths of loss and disappearance; Helpless, the child is trying to grasp what is not tangible.

An animated Shortfilm by Cécile Brun

CH / 2019
www.lahgah.ch

Contact
Director: info@cecilebrun.ch / www.cecilebrun.ch 
instagram.com/cecilebrun_animation
facebook.com/cecilebrunanimation
Producer: mail@viragefilm.ch / www.viragefilm.ch
Instagram.com/virage_film
facebook.com/viragefilms

Credits
Production:             Virage Film in co-production with SRF Swiss Radio and Television SRG SSR
Producer:               Saskia von Virág
Animation:              Charlotte Waltert, Cécile Brun
Compositing:          Rafael Sommerhalder
Sound Design:        Thomas Gassmann
Voice Dough:          Bruno Amstad
Voice Girl:               Maya Zurbuchen
Script Consulting:  Claudius Gentinetta, Michael Frei
Soundmix:              Jacques Kieffer
Colour Grading:      Roger Sommer, Patrischa Freuler, 8horses

Supported by: Federal Office of Culture (FOC), Zürcher Filmstiftung, SRF/SRG SSR, Migros-Kulturprozent, FOCAL/ Résidence d‘écriture en cinéma d‘animation - Abbaye de Fontevraud, Swissfilms


Awards
** 1st Place ** Florida Animation Festival, Mixed Media/Experimental Category, USA
** Special Mention ** Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Int. Animation Filmfestival, A
** Special Mention ** Primanima World Festival of First Animation, HU
** Special Mention ** Animateka, SI
** Special Mention ** TIFF - Tatsuno International Film Festival, JP
** Special Mention ** Prague Int. Indie Film Festival, CZ
** Special Mention ** Santiago del Estero Film Festival, AR

Festivals (selection)
- Fantoche Int. Animation Film Festival Baden, CH, Sept 2019
- Primanima World Festival of First Animations, HU, Nov 2019
- Kaboom Animation Festival, NL, Nov 2019
- Animateka Int. Animated Film Festival, SI, Dec 2019
- Tricky Women Tricky Realities, A, Mar 2020
- Monstra Int. Animation Festival, PT, Mar 2020
- Florida Animation Festival, USA, June 2020
- Imaginaria, I, Aug 2020
- La Guarimba Film Festival, I, Aug 2020
- World Festival of Animated Film in Varna, BU, Sept 2020
- FAB Festival of Animation Berlin, D, Oct. 2020
- Animafilm Int. Animation Festival, AZ, Oct 2020
- EIFF Edinburgh Int. Film Festival, UK, cancelled
- TIFF - Tatsuno Int. Film Festival, JP, Nov 2020
- Animasivo Festival Internacional De Animación, MX, Nov 2020
- PSIAF - Palm Springs Int. Animation Festival, USA, Dec 2020
- TIAF - Tbilisi International Animation Festival, GE, Dec 2020
- Animatricks, FI, May 2021
- Santiago del Estero Film Festival, AR, June 2021
- Insomnia Animation Festival, RU, July 2021
- ShorTS Int. Film Festival, I, July 2021
- Animist Tallinn, EST, Aug 2021
- The Animattikon Project, CY, Sept 2021
- ZOOM - ZBLIZENIA International Film Festival, PL, Oct 2021
- CRAFT Int. Animation Festival, ID, Oct 2021