Munro (Oscar 1961)

Tiny Munro, a four year old boy, is drafted into the army. Then his life profoundly changed.
Jules Feiffer's parable about the dangers of a mindless military mentality is accurately presented in this funny little film. Howard Morris narrates and voices the various grown-ups.



You can buy Rembrandt Films Greatest Hits.

You can visit Rembrandt Studio.

Don Carrascas

by Camilo Macheca.

Trevor (Oscar 1994)

This short is a tender and humorous tale of a gay teenager’s struggle with his sexual orientation and his attempted suicide.



Set as a sequence of diary entries, the film tells the story of bright, funny, and exuberant thirteen year old Trevor, who learns to deal with the fact that he is gay. He falls for another young boy, his friend, and his true feelings are revealed. He attempts suicide, but in the end his strong will and determination help him get through this tough time.



Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone created The Trevor Project, too.
You can buy Trevor.

Jane's World

In 2002 Paige Baddrock launched her own publishing company, Girl Twirl Comics, so that she could finally make her comic feature, Jane's World, available to comic shops and bookstores. Jane's World started as an online feature in the late 1990s, but was soon picked up for online distribution by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
In 2006 Jane's World received an Eisner Award nomination for best humor book. There are currently 8 Volumes of Jane's World in print.

You can buy Jane's World Volume 1, Jane's World Volume 2, Jane's World Volume 3, Jane's World Volume 4, Jane's World Volume 5, Jane's World Volume 6, Jane's World Volume 7 and Jane's World Volume 8.

Now Hear This (1962 Oscar nominee)

Now Hear This is without a doubt one of the weirder shorts that Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble ever made. This short is one of the Looney Tunes series produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc.
Looney Tunes is a variation on Silly Symphonies, the name of Walt Disney's concurrent series of music-based cartoon shorts. Looney Tunes originally showcased Warner-owned musical compositions through the adventures of cartoon characters.
This was the first Warner Bros cartoon to use the "modern" Looney Tunes opening and closing sequence featuring stylized animation.



An old man finds a red horn and uses it as a megaphone, unaware that it is really a lost horn from the Devil's forehead. The Britisher finds that the horn has the effect of amplifying every sound psychedelically and causing him serious bodily harm.
It's impressive how economically Chuck Jones packed in so much expression and character into so little. You'll enjoy his artistic style and abstract design!
You can buy Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection.

Arachne Elrafo

Raphael Lacoste did this painting for a project he has with Pascal Blanché: they are planning a remake of Time Masters, the 1979 French animation movie by René Laloux and Moebius. He has drawn the picture after the introduction shots of the movie where a rescue vehicle runs into the desert of Perdide, a lost planet colonized by the Time Masters...

Moving Still (2007)

This stereoscopic short film was made with an experimental tecnique: Santiago Caicedo de Roux created all the images in a single camera take and mixed them with CG images which build and destroy the city.



The routine of the daily train, with the same point of departure, same point of arrival, same route without surprise. You can feel feel the monotony of a recurring journey made too many times.
The images pass by outside and you follow the rhythm. Which rhythm do you choose? Are you free to change your life?

Not From Concetrate 5

Not From Concentrate runs daily in The Diamondback, the independent student newspaper of the University of Maryland, College Park.

It is created by Thomas Dobrosielski.

Precious Image (1986 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film)

Precious Images features approximately 470 half-second-long splices of classic movies and movie moments through the history of American film, chronologically arranged from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Rocky IV (1985).



The scenes are organized by genre, which is matched to appropriate music. Chuck Workman chooses only about a second from each movie to push the audience into a kind of trance and take them on a journey into their individual memories of great films of three quarters of a century.
Workman wanted to evoke hundreds of fleeting memories in the viewers to look back on all the great films they have seen.

Making A Map

Wakaba Noda issued Making A Map and was awarded with a honorable mention award at Canon New Cosmos of Photography.

The Meatrix (Annecy 2004 Netsurfers Award for Short Films)

With this short, Free Range Studios wants to criticize the methods of industrial agriculture and to encourage consumers to purchase organic food products and free-range meats.
In early 2003, Free Range Graphics invited nonprofit groups around the country to submit proposals for their first-ever Free Range Flash Activism Grant. After reviewing 50 proposals, Free Range awarded the grant to the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (GRACE), an organization committed to halting factory farms and promoting sustainable agriculture. Their decision to spoof The Matrix was based on the similarities between the film and today’s corporate system of agriculture.



Leo, a pig on a seemingly bucolic family farm, is approached by Moopheus, an anthropomorphic bull. Moopheus shows Leo that the farm he has known is an illusion, and that he is really trapped in a horrific factory farm. Leo and Moopheus then work to break out of the Meatrix and help others do the same, with some help from a third character, Chickity..
In 2006, Free Range studios also released two sequels: The Meatrix II: Revolting and The Meatrix: II and 1/2.
The Meatrix will be the best parody flash animation with a political message you've ever watched!

Not From Concentrate 4

Not From Concentrate runs daily in The Diamondback, the independent student newspaper of the University of Maryland, College Park.

It is created by Thomas Dobrosielski.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Meshes of the Afternoon is full of bizarre and creepy surrealist images. It's very poetic and disturbing. It reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid wanted to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.
This short is still one of the most popular of all American experimental films and is a landmark film that has provided an important model, setting the tone and style for other individual efforts over the next decade.
The entire film is seen through the eyes of a woman. You cannot tell when Maya's character is awake or dreaming. She carries a flower with her, which she holds upside down. She sees death, who wears a black hood and has a mirror for a face. She sees herself dreaming. In her dream she seems to foresee her own death. She seems to have a subconscious fear of knives, or being killed by a knife.



The film's narrative is circular and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper-like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean.
The film was produced in an environment of wartime volatility and this is reflected symbolically as throughout its mise-en-scène: the atmosphere is saturated in paranoia.
The beauty of this films is in its rhythmus: an innovative style of cutting on action, repetition and variation: a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.
You can buy Maya Deren: Experimental Films.

Cold Breath Finalsm

by Alec Senwald.

Sub (2000)

Sub is an exquisitely-timed, hysterically funny, stunningly expressive story of one sunny afternoon in a cool Italian plaza.
It's a strange short: a spare dialogue, a striking illustrative style and a decidedly red aesthetic. Someone will see in the short the decline of the Soviet Empire or a treatise on the vulgarization of mass culture and the decline of religiosity.



I'm not sure if it's simply a surreal short about the crew of a miniature submarine attempting to save their captain from being splattered about the ground of a European plaza but I'm sure this film will fascinate you for its inventiveness, its dynamic editing, its continual narrative surprises but most of all for its subversive humor.

Not From Concetrate 3

Not From Concentrate runs daily in The Diamondback, the independent student newspaper of the University of Maryland, College Park.

It is created by Thomas Dobrosielski.

Le Vieil Homme et la Mer (1999)

The old man and the sea, based on the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway, won many awards, including the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.



Aleksandr Petrov and his son Dmitri Petrov painted each of the 29,000+ frames. They took more than two years of painting on glass sheets. The project was initiated in 1995 after Petrov (who had made his first films in Russia) had his first meeting with Pascal Blais Studio, a Canadian animation studio. The film was partially funded by and was made at their studio. After photographing each frame painted on the glass sheets, which was four times larger than the usual A4-sized canvas, he had to slightly modify the painting for the next frame and so on.



The style is analogous to that used in Petrov's other films and can be characterized as a type of Romantic realism. People, animals and landscapes are painted and animated in a very realistic fashion but there are sections where Petrov attempts to visually show a character's inner thoughts and dreams.
You will be overwhelmed by its beauty and depth, and the admiration for what human imagination, creativity, and talent are capable of producing.
An astonishingly gorgeous example of a modern classic!

Garden

By Maki Fujimoto.

Kiwi (2006)

Kiwi was created by Dony Permedi, a student in the New York City School of Visual Arts, as his Master's Thesis Animation, with music composed and performed by Tim Cassell.
Originally the main character wad going to be a chicken but Permedi found it an obvious choice. So he created Kiwi.



The animator's story is that of a kiwi bird who has a dream (he aspires to fly) and is willing to do anything to see it become a reality.
This charming short is simple yet so powerful that it sticks in your subconscious.
A great example of a dialogue free narrative, which reminds me of the first shorts of Pixar!

Not From Concentrate 2

Not From Concentrate runs daily in The Diamondback, the independent student newspaper of the University of Maryland, College Park.

It is created by Thomas Dobrosielski.

Intolerance (1916)

This is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history.
The film consists of four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrate mankind's intolerance during four different ages in world history. It was made in response to critics who protested against Griffith's previous film, The Birth of a Nation, for its overt racist content, characterizing racism as people's "intolerance" of other people's views.
Films were poised between an emphasis upon visual pleasure, 'the cinema of attractions', and story-telling, 'the cinema of narrative integration' but conventions for constructing internally coherent narratives had not yet been established. In the transitional years, between 1907-8 and 1917, the formal elements of film-making all became subsidiary to the narrative, as lighting, composition, editing were all increasingly designed to help the audience follow a story. Integral to these stories are psychologically credible characters, created through performance style, editing, and dialogue intertitles, whose motivations and actions seem realistic and help to link together the film's disparate shots and scenes.



The increased use of editing and the decreased distance between camera and actors most obviously distinguish the films of the transitional period from their predecessors.
Intollerance displays a more consistent construction of internally coherent narratives and credible individualized characters through editing, acting, and intertitles than do any of the other genres.
However, the basic elements of the earlier films remained unchanged- credible individual characters still served to link together the disparate scenes and shots, the difference being that character motivation and plausibility became yet more important as the films grew longer and the number of important characters increased.
You can buy Intolerance.

Gently Elephant

Adrian Johnson issued Designed to Help, The Fundamentals of Illustration, 300% Cotton, Pictoplasma : The Character Encyclopaedia, If You Could Do Anything Tomorrow, What Would It Be?, Hand Job, Graphic 11 : Graphic Ha Ha, The Secrets of Digital Illustration : Rotovision.

Scurtă Istorie (Palme d'Or 1957)

Short History has a dual philosophical content. It's full of ideas and poetry, in a funny short story full of rhythm and imagination.
Ian Popescu-Gopo admitted that he tried to start an "anti-Disney rebellion" with his animated films. He knew he would be unable to surpass Disney's animation characters in color and beauty, so he tried to be more profound in message and substance: he simplified the form and techniques used. Gopo is, in fact, designed in simple lines.



The main character is Gopo, a Homo Sapiens, featured in most of his films, and he is a reflection of himself, almost a self-portrait. He appears to be a lost creature, an innocent party, not knowing how and why he came about. But as the plot develops he adjusts his outlook and attains the upperhand. He goes through all the evolutionary stages of history until he reaches space and discovers a new life.

Not From Concentrate

Not From Concentrate runs daily in The Diamondback, the independent student newspaper of the University of Maryland, College Park.

It is created by Thomas Dobrosielski.

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (1902)

This early silent film is repeatedly declared to be the first science fiction film and is revered as the greatest achievement of stage magician and film pioneer Georges Méliès. Lubin Manufacturing Company released another take on A Trip to the Moon in 1914, written e directed by Vincent Whitman, a work of silent animation which alas did not survive.
With a mix of stage tricks, camera tricks and several types of animation, Méliès crafts a surreal fantastic vision of the Moon with great artistic sensibility and the care of a painter. It's almost as though a painting comes to life.
Georges Méliès aimed in the film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque." (Alison McMahan).





"A Trip to the Moon" is loosely based on the books "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne and "The First Men in the Moon" by H. G. Wells, as if this whimsical fantasy really focuses on an astronomer' s dream. A group of men travel to the moon by being shot in a capsule from a giant cannon. They are captured by moon-men, escape and return to the earth.
The plot is very well-written and still captures the imagination with its wonderfully crafted visuals and its charming comedy, although it still displays a primitive understanding of narrative film technique. The editing is purely functional: the concept of showing an action twice in different ways was experimented again by Porter in his film, Life of an American Fireman, released roughly a year after A Trip to the Moon.
He used overlapping action, as a result of his desire to preserve the pro-filmic space and to emphasize important action by essentially showing it twice.
You can buy the dvds Georges Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) and Melies the Magician and the book Georges Melies.

Pink

By Naho Kubota.

Tie shan gong zhu (铁扇公主, 1941)

Princess Iron Fan is the first feature length animation made in China, just four years after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
It resembles the early 30s Fleischer cartoons because of its strange mix of primitive drawing and imaginative metamorphosis.
This film is freely adapted from a classic 16th-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West and it's set during the Tang Dynasty. Wan Brother chose to adapt a popular national legend to renew China’s rich heritage and traditions by extending them into the new world of animation.



The novel concerns the hardship and adventures of Buddhist monk Xuanzang and his four disciples. We follow the Monkey King and his friends on their journey to the west. The tale of Princess Iron Fan is one such episode.
As they reach Fire Mountain they are unable to pass because of the fire but learn that a special iron fan can quench the flames. However, the fan belongs to Princess Iron Fan and she will not willingly lend it to them...
Wan Brothers resorted to rotoscoping, a tecnique invented by Max Fleischer, to create certain human movements.
You can buy Princess Iron Fan.

Missile Mouse

Jake Parker is an employer at the Blu Sky Studios. He has published Missile Mouse Adventures, Agent 44 Art Digest amd in various anthologies.

L'Etoile de mer (1928)

This film is based on a script by Robert Desnos and depicts a couple (Alice Prin and André de la Rivière) acting through scenes that are shot out of focus.



Originally a silent film, recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray's personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot and it fitted this film perfectly - haunting and hypnotic.



With these loose images, sometimes seen distorted through a glass, Man Ray refuses the authority of the look. We can recognize this choicee also in the editing, which draw out the disjunction between shots, rather than their continuity.
You can buy You can buy Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934 and Man Ray (Artists of the 20th Century).

Sax

Simone Pieralli. He worked as an illustrator, graphic director and colorist. He was the editor of Funnies and Hangar.

Stanley (2000)

Suzie Templeton will intrigue audiences with her darkly comic film Stanley. While his wife wreaks violence and death in the kitchen, Stanley finds life and love in a cabbage he is growing in his barren back yard.
This short features just two human puppets and shows deep feeling and melancholy.



It's her first work and every element is already perfect. The background is delivered so well it's amazing. The final punch line is a bit subtle but up till then it's all sublime. Little details, little expressions, little movements tell so much about the inner feelings.

The Adventures of Ashley 2

You can read Faith Erin Hick 's other comics on his website.

The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903)

This film is significant as a precursor to Porter's groundbreaking classic The Great Train Robbery, which combined state of the art editing techniques to tell a 12 minute narrative story and is notable for its early use of matched shot editing, with a close-up of a female customer's ankle and a longer establishing shot used in combination with each other. This close-up insert is an example not only of the visual pleasure afforded by the 'cinema of attractions' but of the early cinema's voyeuristic treatment of the female body. Despite the fact that their primary purpose is not to emphasize narrative developments, these shots' attribution to a character in the film distinguishes them from the totally unmotivated close-up we viewed in The Great Train Robbery.



The pre- 1907 'cinema of attractions' were primarily designed to enhance visual pleasure rather than to tell a coherent, linear narrative. But many of these films did tell simple stories and audiences undoubtedly derived narrative, as well as visual, pleasure: a shoeshop assistant flirts with his female customer.
You can buy Treasures from American Film Archives.

Mushroom

By Jennifer Tong.

The Thief and the Cobbler (1993)

This film is based upon the ancient Arabian character of Nasruddin, a figure from the classic texts of '1001 Arabian Nights'. The Thief and the Cobbler is esotic and extravagant. The sheer beauty and subtlety of the simplest details are breathtaking. Generally, The Thief and the Cobbler remind me of the finest mimics of Buster Keaton.
The scenes are very intricate and it's all hand-drawn and painted cel animation. The Thief and the Cobbler is the best animated long film I've ever seen!
I hate Warner Bros for having stopped the work of Richard William.



Williams conceived the project (as a nearly silent movie) as early as 1964 but he started this ambitious animated film only in 1968 together with Art Babbit, Grim Natwick, Ken Harris, Emery Hawkins and other great animators. The film was originally self financed by Williams with money coming in from his animated commercials.
The film was gaining notoriety in the animation world as a masterpiece in the making, with over a decade of part-time attention devoted to it but it really did need some serious funding. In the late 70s, Saudi Prince Mohammed Faisil agreed to finance the film's most spectacular sequence 'The War Room'. After winning an academy award for Roger Rabbit, Williams got the film financed externally so it could be completed. I can imagine Williams' excitement: eventually each and every element which could be animated would be animated!
But he was a perfectionist and took time to work and work, often without sleep, more often without pay. Unfortunately, Williams took such a long time to make the film that Warner began to fear that their work would be stolen by Disney’s Aladdin (1992). This turned out to be a bad decision because after going over the budget the investors got nervous and pulled the film from him and had it completed by someone else. The film had about 10 to 15 min left to complete when it was taken out of Williams hands. Instead of just completing the film, the person in charge of the completion decided to re-work the film to make it more mainstream: Fred Calvert not only added dialogues and songs but replaced much of the original scenes and changed the editing.
You can buy The Thief And The Cobbler.

The Adventures of Ashley

You can read Faith Erin Hick 's other comics on his website.

Meow (1982)

Meow is a funny political tale which won the Jury's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.



Marcos Magalhãe show us the effects of american cultural invasion. The story is simple and essential, the animation too.
He also makes Animando , a documentary about various animation tecniques.

Dum Dum Girls

Andrea Campanella is the founder member of the magazine CUT UP. His works: IL GRANDE FLOYD, ''Storia di Ermanno'', "Dum Dum Girls" '. He has been a curator of various film conferences.

Black and White High School (2003)

Charles Chadwick explores the existential potentials of non-narrative cinema and experimental music. Despite its title, this short isn't about racism but is a loose footage exploration of sexuality and infantilization.



There are repetitive patterns and visual motifs (above all the recurrence of two colors: red and blue), which explore the relationship between teenagers and sex and drugs. These arguments are depicted in the clinical and biological sense.
There are seven intermittent animated sequences, dispersed throughout the film, which illustrate the human body.

Passage of the Olympic Flame to Paris

By Vincent Rif.

The Heart Collector (2006)

The Heart Collector is a Vancouver Film School 2D animation. Featuring various surreal and metaphorical scenes of a man searching for the confidence to interact with those around him, Michael Fallik explores the harsh realities of mood disorders through his sound design.



A man with no heart rips out the hearts of lovers in order to make himself one of his own.
This short has been screened in many international festivals and was elected Best of 2006 by Channel Frederator.

Untiled (Parking Lot)

by Philip Ullrich.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

The Great Train Robbery, often lauded as one of the first movies to include a linear narrative within its running time, came out of the Edison company over a hundred years ago, following their experiments in the previous decades with shorter topical pieces such as cockfighting, dancers and other limited scenarios.
This short is the most popular and commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era and established the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium.
In the film's fourteen scenes, a narrative story with multiple plot lines tells the story of a train holdup with six-shooters. The steam locomotive always provides a point of reference from different filming perspectives.
The precursor to the western film genre is based on an 1896 story by Scott Marble. The plot was inspired by a true event that occurred on August 29, 1900, when four members of George Leroy Parker's (Butch Cassidy) 'Hole in the Wall' gang halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks toward Table Rock, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.

The clerk at the train station is assaulted and left tied by four men, who then rob the train, threaten the operator, take all the money and shoot a passenger while trying to escape. A little girl discovers the clerk tied and gives notice to the sheriff, who at once goes along with his men hunting the bandits.
The action of each scene is told with only one shot. Almost every shot is a static, long shot, confining the action to the perspective of the camera at eye level. Edwin S. Porter used a number of innovative techniques, many of them for the first time, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places. Tension and excitement is achieved by moving the players, rather than moving the camera angles.
Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction and which are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, are there more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information.
You can read the script.
You can buy Great Train Robbery - 100th Anniversay.

Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles 2

Neil Swaab writes and draws Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles.

Kataku (1979)

Kihachiro Kawamoto is a pioneer in the neglected field of stop motion puppet animation. He takes inspiration from his fortuitous meeting with the Czech maestro Jiri Trinka and from the Russian Ladislaw Starewicz. He was impressed by how Trinka's and Strarewicz's puppets truly began to take on a life of their own. But today, Kawamoto's puppets are so beautiful and expressive he can't envy his masters.



Kawamoto turned to Japan's aesthetic traditions for his subject matter.
House of Flame is based on the Noh play ‘Motomezuka - the Seeker’s Mound’, which tells the story of a young woman named Unai-Otome who is loved by two men. Not knowing which to choose, in anguish, she chooses death. And although her intentions are pure, not even the grave brings the respite she longed for from her earthly dilemma.
The short is haunting and poetic, at the same time. It narrates of passion and loss.



House of Flame isn't a pure stop motion. It's melded with more conventional 2d techniques, such as the painted matte foregrounds of flames and water as the young maiden finds herself plunged into the very depths of hell itself, both masking out and balancing the colour composition across the frame.
You can buy The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto (1968-1979) and The Book of the Dead.

Bird's Mentor

Michael Knapp. He's working at Blue Sky Studios as the Art Director on the third Ice Age movie. He previously worked as a designer on the animated films Robots, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Horton Hears A Who and spent a few months art directing the Academy Award nominated short No Time For Nuts. His work can be found in Spectrum 12 and 13 as well as the Society of Illustrators Annuals 48 and 49.

Une Histoire Vertebrale (2006)

Blackbone Tale is realized by Jeremy Clapin in collaboration with Spirit Productions, with the support of Centre de la Premiere Oeuvre (GOBELINS). It's a high result of mixing 2d and 3d: the characters are made in 3d cellshading and the remains in 2d.
This silent mute is pure poetry.


A man alone, with his peculiar physique: he has his head held low, looking down at the ground.
Clapin needs only few minutes to show you the emotional state of this man: his loneliness and his quest for a human being like him. A profound analysis of alienation and frustation of people: man needs to live with other men.

Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles

Neil Swaab is a freelance illustrator and book designer whose clients include HarperCollins, The Utne Reader, The Village Voice, Storage Magazine, Plenty Magazine and a ton of alt-weekly papers and other trade publications. He is also the illustrator of Yet Another NASTYbook by Barry Yourgrau. In addition, Neil is an instructor at Parsons, the New School for Design, where he teaches in the Illustration department. He writes and draws Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles.

La Joconde: Histoire d'une obsession(1958)

How many films did you watch in your life? How many films narrate the obsession of a character? It's very simple, for a cinematographer, to leave all the intepretations open but sometimes the fact could be true.

A man is obsessed by the Mona Lisa after he has seen the famous painting at the museum of the Louvre. This anecdote is the inspiraton of Heri Gruel's short. Boris Vian give free course to his imagination and tries to solve the enigma of the smile of the Mona Lisa.

La Joconde won The Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

Untitled

By Patrick Schoenmaker.

Adjustment (2006)

Ian Mackinnon graduated in Animation at the Royal College of Art with his film Adjustment. The films is, in part, animation and ,in part, drama. The result is an original work, although the filmaking is conventional.

A diarist searches for flickers of hope in a drama of technical and emotional obsession. He can't forget his woman, he can't allow her to go away.
The silenct movements give emphasis to the entire story.
You can buy the DVD compilation of all Ian's 13 films.

Puah

By Simone Altimani.

The Bangville Police (1913)

The Keystone Cops was a series of silent film comedies very slapstick-like, relying on speed and numbers to achieve their comedy, rather than sophisticated wit.
They feature a totally incompetent group of policemen produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917. Mack Sennett continued to use the Cops intermittently through the 1920s. By the time sound movies arrived, the Keystone Cops were an anachronism; symbolic of dated, lowbrow humor.
The idea came from Hank Mann, who also played police chief Tehiezel in the first film before being replaced by Ford Sterling.


Their first film was Hoffmeyer's Legacy (1912) but their popularity stemmed from the 1913 short The Bangville Police starring Mabel Normand.
This short, directed by Henry Lehrman, is notable for being regarded as the seminal Keystone Cops short.
At a farm near Bangville, the farmer's young daughter sees a group of local individuals in their barn. Fearful, she quickly rushes to the house and calls the police. The keystone crew in a haphazard rush across the countryside to get there in time.
This short is a visual comedy, with notable elements of slapstick.

You can buy Bangville Police (1913).

Cul De Sac

by Richard Thompson. You can visit Cul De Sac' blog and read other strips.

A Letter From the Western (1999)

A Letter From the Western Front is a well-crafted piece by Daniel Kanemoto, a film graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
This film was produced using PhotoShop, AfterEftects and watercolor paints. Kanemoto scanned his original paintings into the computer and then used the software to composite and transform each element into the unique multiplane environment of the story.

A 25-piece orchestra performed the original score, composed by Ryan Shore.
This short is a romantic tale of a newly married soldier. It's a far cry from the sludge of South Park wannabes that normally flood these sites.
In Belleau Wood, France, during the Great War, a soldier named John writes a letter home to his wife Sara in Milwaukee. He tells her about sorties into No Man's Land and that they have orders tonight to charge. Then, his letter becomes a report of that charge: towards an armed German soldier who doesn't fire, even when John reaches him and jumps into the trench beside him. What happens next brings silence and an end to the letter.

Mini-monkey

Amy Crehore is the creator of pop surrealist oil paintings: "Little Pierrot", "Monkey Love" and "Blues Gals" series. Her works has been featured over the years in ROLLING STONE, ESQUIRE, PLAYBOY, BLAB! 17 and many other top magazines. She has exhibited her fine art in galleries and museums. You can view her portfolio at her website and you can visit her blog.

Three Blind Mice (1945)

George Dunning, like his contemporaries John Hubley and Norman McLaren, can best be described as an experimentalist, having used every medium to make animated films, including cut-outs, painting on glass, and direct painting onto film as well as more orthodox methods such as cel and paper. But he hahs been marked him as an individual talent for is use of articulated, painted, metal cut-outs.
The first films from the NFB animation unit were cut-outs, because of the equipment limitations they faced (all they had was a 35mm title stand with a vertically mounted camera). The first cut-outs were jointed or unjointed and made out of cardboard and soft metal sheets.

Dunning simplified the process and the method of making the joints. He used black thread between the shoulders and the bodies to provide greater flexibility.He needed two assistants, the animators Grant Munro and Robert Verrall, to complete this film.
Three Blind Mice tells of horrific factory accidents that befell three mice that work there. It's an educative and bizarre film because this short, using simple cut-out animation and the song "Three--- Blind--- Mice----", illustrates why industrial safety rules must be observed.
The nursery rhyme favorites prove no less foolish in the factory than when they provoked reprisal from the farmer's wife. They disobey all the safety rules with dire results.

Teeth Tunnel

You can read Tom Neely's comics on his blog.

Spook Sport (1940)

Spook Sport is an expressionistic interpretation of Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns.

In the 1940's, Mary Ellen Bute hired Norman McLaren, who didn't live in Canada yet, to draw directly on film strips the characters of ghosts, bats and other figures and to synchronize them with Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre. Some original paintings of McLaren would be reused in Bute's later films, including Tarantella (1941), Color Rhapsodie (1951) and Polka Graph (1952), where they seem less at home stylistically than in their original context. The final result is a mix of conventional cel animation and pen drawings, drawn directly on 35 mm film stock.

Although the animation moves in time to the music throughout the film, there are two particular moments that feature specific gestures synchronized to the music: when a xylophone plays a prominent theme in the music and when the timpani plays a motif later in the piece. In the first, the animation features the ghosts dancing over an xylophone made of bones; in the second, bone mallets play drums in time to the music.

This film is a splendid example of animation which responds to preexistent music both in terms of the narrative and in terms of actual sound.

The music is programmatic in nature. Although this is an abstract film, it tells a discernable story and the characters are always recognizable. Thus you feel more comfortable with the visual images.

You can buy Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition and The Film Work of Norman McLaren.

Cap'n Bush

by Miguel Valenzuela

Le Vampire (1945)

The Vampire is a pseudodocumentary, in fact, it's largely fantastical in elements. This film has stuff that speaks sub textually about Nazi Germany and the like. It certainly covers a lot of the different types of horrors in the world and it's quite original, too. The Vampire it is full of rhythm and precision.
The bats are being macro analyzed and they are personifying human emotion. After a brief overview of the general weirdness of the animal kingdom, Jean Painlevé talks as some sea creature creeps along the floor of the ocean like something out of a German expressionist film.



Then The Vampire gets a little into Murnau's classic Nosferatu, which eventually leads to a discussion about what vampire bats are like, illustrated with a live guinea pig. Duke Ellington's music scores it to bring us back to the sort of New Orleans voodoo tradition of vampires.
And thus what should be a documentary about parasites and bloodsuckers, becomes a subtle critique of the Nazi party.
Painlevé's exploration of a twilight realm of bats is very poetic. The approach is quite interesting along with being somewhat self-conscious aware. Painlevé preoccupies himself with juxtaposing things to create quite odd effects. The film is full of lush imagery and imagination.
Painlevé sees in the shapes and behaviour of the creatures he is observing, his own especial analogies and associations: the terrors of human fantasy are
set beside the terrors of creation.
You can buy Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s.

Profession Clone

Translation: I'm a doctor cloning little kids; good cloning is what everybody needs!

by Andrei Bakhurin.