Dimensions of Dialogue is a 1983 Czechoslovak animated short film directed by Jan Švankmajer. It is 14 minutes long and created with stop motion.
The animation is divided into three sections. “Eternal conversation” shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies; “Passionate discourse” shows a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp; and “Exhaustive discussion” consists of two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and intertwine them in various combinations.
Terry Gilliam selected the film as one of the ten best animated films of all time.
Paul Bunyan is a 1958 American animated musical short film produced by Walt Disney Productions. The short was based on the North American folk hero and lumberjack Paul Bunyan and was inspired after meeting with Les Kangas of Paul Bunyan Productions, who gave Disney the idea for the film.
Story by Lance Nolley & Ted Berman
Animation by John Sibley, George Nicholas, Bob Youngouist, George Goepper, Fred Kopietz, Ken Hultgren, Jerry Hathcock, Jack Parr, & Jack Boyd (effects animation)
The Last Belle is an award winning 2D animated short film featuring the voices of Sienna Guillory, Colin McFarlane, and Amanda Donohoe. It is produced and directed by Neil Boyle. The film was created using classic-cartoon technology: 35,000 hand-drawn and hand-painted pieces of artwork, shot directly onto 35mm film with a rostrum camera, to achieve a traditional cartoon feel. For much more behind-the-scenes info please visit http://www.thelastbelle.com/
Seven and a half years in the making, The Moon’s Milk is an entirely handmade stop-motion animated short about a time when the moon was close enough to be reached by ladder. Narrated by Tom Waits, the film chronicles the last expedition of Captain Millipede and his crew to harvest the milk seeping from the craters. The action takes place between the gravities of two heavenly bodies, which further complicates the attraction between the characters. Longing, missed signals, and mishaps lead to the enchantment of the heavens with music.
Credits
Directed by Ri Crawford
Produced by Kim Aubry & Ri Crawford Narrated by Tom Waits
“The whole point of our experiment was that I would say nothing about my intentions and Marek would interpret the visuals in his own way. So I say it was a great successful experiment, and I loved the composition Marek wrote for the Penderecki String Quartet.”
David Lynch
“I thought it was a very melancholic film in a certain sense and also very poetic. Without trying to be too explicit, I tried to illustrate further what David was doing. For example, there is something that looks like a hailstorm and I used a lot of pizzicato, but I also used a soaring melodic line to add a lyrical element to it.”
A tale of how two “disgrega workers” react to the presence of a wild animal in their workshop.
Barnaby Dixon is a puppeteer, animator, musician, singer, YouTube star, and social media personality from Britain. He has garnered fame through his self-titled YouTube channel, on which he posts his puppet performances. His ongoing comedy/vlog series with a bird puppet named Dabchick has brought him widespread recognition.
Barnaby Dixon is a producer and director, known for Once Upon a Time in a Shed (2013), Eskos (2009), and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019).
Stop-motion puppet animated short film written and directed by Michal Struss.
A character is inside a cubical room; there is a hole in the roof, which is too high to reach. But pushing on the walls distorts the room in various ways, always appearing to bring the hole closer while still leaving it tantalizingly inaccessible.
Michal Struss graduated from the Department of Film and Television at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, majoring in animation. His stop–motion animation picture In the Box was nominated for a Student Academy Award. He worked on animation, visual effects, and post– production of Blind Loves (Slepé lásky, 2008), Blue Tiger (Modrý tiger, 2011), and Deadly Stories (Smrteľné history, 2016). He was nominated for the Czech Lion for Blue Tiger in the category of best production design.
Balance is a German surrealist stop-motion animated film, released in 1989. It was directed and produced by twin brothers Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein.
A group of fishermen on a precariously balanced platform fight over a trunk.
The setting is on a floating platform where a group of evenly and carefully placed men live. Each man is aware that the platform is not stable and in order not to fall to their deaths, they maintain a careful balance of weight to prevent the platform from tipping too far and cause them all to fall. This reasonably harmonious understanding is lost when one man pulls up a heavy trunk. In the ensuing struggle, balance is lost in more than one sense.
In a strange, dark box lives a group of box-headed elderly humanoid creatures with roots instead of legs. Most of these creatures are sunken into a catatonic sleep, unaware of anything outside their hermetic, sealed-off world.
But one of them emerges from the crowd, stunned into consciousness. Young and growing, the creature starts to cause a joyful ruckus, but struggles against the disapproval and rancor of the rest of his box-dwellers. But then the youngster begins to fight back, looking for a way outside the box but coming against its most oppressive forces yet.
Writer/director/animator Dusan Kastelic’s short animation is a surreal yet exuberant allegory about the pleasures and perils of non-conformity, being an individual and pushing through obstacles to a new level of consciousness.
The narrative takes the phrase “outside the box” and spins it into a deeply imaginative, hypnotic narrative that resembles a fairy tale. Not a sanitized children’s version of a fairy tale, however: the film instead resembles the original European fairy stories, which were dark, psychologically complex and disquieting in their emotional violence.
The images are nightmarish, with their evocations of distorted flesh and murky colors. But the expressiveness of the creatures and attention to detail — created in open-source 3-D software Blender — are remarkable from a technical and emotional level, and draw in viewers with a powerful combination of gesture, sound and storytelling.
Despite the claustrophobic world portrayed in the film, there are splashes of zany humor and joy, particularly as the younger creature expresses its unbridled childlike self. The musical score and sound design by Mateja Staric go a long way to create contrast between stultifying conformity and youthful individualism, as well as keeping the narrative at a consistently engaging pace.
Despite its strange appearance, the uninhibited joyousness and high spirits of the newly emergent creature are so much like the energy of children, and viewers cannot help but relate. Yet “The Box” becomes genuinely sad and painful as the youngster is repeatedly brought down and cut down to size, and confronts the mechanisms of the box itself that keep its inhabitants docile and in the dark.
Watching that struggle becomes a powerful metaphor for the oppression and conformity that we all face, whether it’s the box that society puts us inside or the ones we put ourselves in. To watch the creature struggle against a dark, narrow world is hard, and yet, as the creature discovers, as long as you can feel a spark of an essential self, there is always a way towards the light.
For more information on this and other films by me, visit: My website: http://nick-cross.com
WTF did you just watch? Perihelion is a sort of animated tone poem. It is a short film that toes the line between narrative and non-narrative, essentially having no real beginning, middle, or end.
Visually, I was heavily inspired by the work of a number of German painters from the early 20th century. Notably: Otto Dix, Richard Oelze, Ingrid Griebel-Zietlow, Rudolf Schlichter, and Max Ernst, as well as Francisco Goya. This is sort of a tribute to the work of these artists living in a time of Fascism and impending war, which really informed their work in a distinct way.
Nick Cross
Story, art, and animation by Nick Cross (nickcrossanimation.com)
Audio samples courtesy of Freesound.org
Special thanks to alphadog, szuhogyisziszi, Sampleconstuct, Timbre, martian
Animated with a Cintiq 20 WSZ using Toonboom Animate
Backgrounds painted in Adobe Photoshop
Compositing and effects were done in Adobe After Effects
Betty in Blunderland is a 1934 Fleischer Studios animated short film starring Betty Boop. It is based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.
The Old Lady and the Pigeons is a 1997 animated short film written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. It tells the slightly surreal story of a starving policeman who dresses up as a pigeon and tricks an old lady into feeding him.
If you like this short film check out The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist.
