Great animated shorts

Looking through old posts on The Plastic Club's Philadelphia Independents animation festivals, I found these three gems:

• The Elephant's Song (Lynn Tomlinson, 2018)
This is the true story of Old Bet, the first circus elephant in America. Tomlinson animates with clay on glass.The Elephant's Song screened in over thirty festivals, receiving eighteen awards including Best Music from TOFUZI Festival.

• Everything Must Go! (Rusty Eveland, 2009)
Rusty Eveland animates grocery carts, sometimes in parking lots in the middle of the night. Lately, he's been customizing them for his next project, Cartwheels. More on his Instagram feed.

• An Animator's Guide to Weir Farm National Historic Site (Karl Staven, 2014)
Karl Staven's stop motion shorts take place in wooded areas and star rocks, plants, and mislaid toys. During a two-week residency at Weir Farm in Connecticut (named after impressionist painter J. Alden Weir), he made this.

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This morning I was wondering what local animator Paul Fierlinger has been up to and found this documentary on him that was made in 2019.

Fierlinger has attended and shown work at The Plastic Club animation festivals as well. It was great to see him there and talk with him. I attended one of his lectures once and his advice has been very helpful. I still have the notes I took.

Animation by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger can be viewed on their Vimeo page.

Also, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim site just unlocked the entire second season of animated comedy series Tuca & Bertie. It can now be watched online for free, but there's no telling for how long.

Great animated shorts

• Aug(de)mented Reality 7 (Hombre McSteez, 2021, 3 min)
Hombre McSteez is perpetually posting little animations of only a few seconds to Instagram. Then he accumulates them into larger posts like this one. Don't miss the complete dancing chickens short on his Instagram page.

Also, the first three installments of Don Hertzfeldt's sci-fi epic World of Tomorrow will soon be available on blu-ray via his website. Hertzfeldt talks about the series in this interview on Gizmodo.

And as a fan of sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein, I'm glad to see the animated adoption of Red Planet that aired on Saturday mornings in 1994 is on YouTube over here. Heinlein is best known for having written Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land.

And speaking of sci-fi, here's Instagram juggler extraordinaire Taylor Glenn juggling light sabers!

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Thanks to Bob Lee for recommending Taylor Glenn's juggling videos.

Great animated shorts

• Cooking with Wool (Andrea Love, 2020)
This series of shorts by Washington-based animator Andrea Love makes wool look appetizing. Love posts new shorts to her Instagram page, over here.

• The Lost Chord (Jamie Hewlett, 2020, 4 min)
The latest music video from virtual rock band Gorrilaz combines animated characters with live action and calls to mind Ray Harryhausen's epic, Clash of the Titans.

Also, The Animation World Network has posted this guide to the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short. Two of the shorts are included to watch in their entirety.

And a second season of Love, Death, and Robots, the animated sci-fi anthology series, will premiere on Netflix, May 14. The trailer is over here.

Great animated shorts

• The Places Where We Live (Bernardo Britto, 2020, 6 min)
A truly birds' eye view of our modern world. This short from Cake, a series on FX that showcases short films, has been nominated for an Annie Award for Best Short Subject.

Normally, at this time of year, I'd head over to The Ritz theater in Center City to check out the Oscar Nominated Short Films: Animation show. But I haven't had my shots yet (working on that).

Fortunately, Landmark Theaters has made it available to view online for twelve bucks. The trailer is on YouTube.

Also, Rick and Morty Season 5 is due to premiere on June 20. The new trailer is over here on the Adult Swim website.

Great animated shorts

Here comes February. Wanna watch some cartoons?

Three for Valentine's Day:

• Tale about the Cat and the Moon (Pedro Serrazina, 1995, 6 min)
A cat's love letter to the moon. This is the translated version. The original version, Estória do Gato e da Lua is narrated in Portuguese. Both are on the animator's Vimeo page.

• Bottle (Kirsten Lepore, 2010, 6 min)
A long distance love affair animated with snow and sand. This is a good one to take full screen. Afterwards, check out the one-minute Making of "Bottle".

• La Joie De Vivre (Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin, 1934, 11 min)
Two young women dance through various landscapes. British animator, Gross and American animator, Hoppin teamed up in Paris to make this innovative short. The result shares the carefree feel of French films of the pre-war era.

Also, I recently learned that Björk's music video, Human Behavior (1993), directed by Michel Gondry, was inspired by Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), the classic short by Yuri Norstein.

Great animated shorts

Hey, it's Sunday. Wanna watch some cartoons?

• Aug(De)Mented Reality 4 (Hombre McSteez, 2016, 3 min)
Hombre McSteez blends 2D animation with stop-motion to set his characters loose in the real world. Once you start watching his work, it's hard to stop. More on the artist in his video bio, Behind the Steez.

• The Child Strikes Back (Cory Strassburger, 2020, 8 min)
Baby Yoda meets with his agent to make some demands. This CGI short was completed in two weeks with minimal equipment to show just how easy making high-quality CGI has become. Read the making-of in this AWN article.

• Désolé (Jamie Hewlett, 2020, 6 min)
Over the past few months, virtual band, Gorillaz has been releasing music videos to promote their latest album, Song Machine. I like this one and Pac-Man.

And a couple of trailers for TV shows:
The Great North and Matt Groening's Disenchantment, Season 2.

Great animated shorts

• Engaging Conservation Leaders (Andrea Love, 2017, 5 min)
Andrea Love is a stop-motion fiber animator in Washington State. In her short documentary on conservation group, the Northwest Straits Initiative, she captures the beauty of Puget Sound, without actually showing it.

This is a good one to take full screen.

Great animated shorts

Hey, it's Friday. Wanna watch some cartoons?

• Animaniacs: Jurassic Park clip (2020, 2 min)
Steven Spielberg's Animaniacs will be returning soon. This preview suggests that the show will have the same look and feel, and be as funny as ever.

• All 1004 Classic Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies at the same time (multiple directors, 1929–1969, 10 min)
Here are all the classic WB shorts at once, stacked in chronological order. Take this noisy mess full screen and think of your favorite one. Can you find it?

• World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (Don Hertzfeldt, 2020, 35 min)
It's always a good day when Hertzfelt posts a new cartoon, but he doesn't do it for free. If you're a supporter of the arts, sending him six bucks to watch his latest masterpiece of sci-fi madness is a worthwhile investment. I used PayPal.

Also, Primal has two new episodes online, both are accessible to anyone right now. The latest is about a plague. Timely.

Great animated shorts

Hey, it's Friday. Wanna watch some cartoons?

• I Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Chris Casady and Carol Lay, 2020, 2 min)
In 2005, Rick Moranis recorded the perfect anthem for 2020. Now his song parody of I've Been Everywhere has a timely music video.

• The Fish (PES, 2019, 1 min)
Stop motion animator Adam Pesapane, known as PES, wrote and directed this statement on marine plastic pollution for environmental organization, Parley. Followed by a making-of video.

• Scrambled (Polder Animation, 2017, 7 min)
Rubix cube vs. video game. Note that there isn't any language in this short, even in the signage. Shorts that don't require translation are easier to enter in competitions around the world. This one picked up a few prizes in its travels.

Suddenly searchable

Friend and fellow artist Diane Podolsky writes, "How do I follow your blog?" That's a good question. I'm not entirely sure if this blog has ever had a follow function. I went looking for a solution today, found it, and now there are following buttons in the sidebar. Thanks Diane!

I'd been under the impression that Blogger charged extra for their "gadget" options, but apparently not. And one of them is a search function! Years of adding keywords to posts has finally paid off!

Naturally, the first thing I searched for was "skeleton". All the yard skeleton photos popped up, so that's classy. Then I searched for the "Great animated shorts" posts and holy gods, I've written more of those than I thought.

Great animated shorts

• Friend and fellow Plastic Clubber Anders Hansen has pointed out this article in the New York Times. Warner Brothers has been making new Looney Tunes shorts, attempting to match the style of the 1940s cartoons. Midway through the article is a video short in which Bugs, the WB's mascot, throws dynamite around.

• Bob Lee notes that more of the shorts are on YouTube, like this one with Daffy and Porky.

• If you happen to have Netflix streaming, every episode of Love, Death + Robots is an animated marvel. Episode 14: Zima Blue, by Robert Valley (interviewed here), who also directed 2016's Oscar Nominated Pear Cider and Cigarettes, knocked me sideways.

• New episodes of Rick and Morty have been turning up here, on the Adult Swim site.

• And just because it's Teen Girl Squad, here's a link to Teen Girl Squad.

Great animated shorts

The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show: "Piano"
Some Schroeder jokes from the Peanuts comic strip were strung together to make this short sketch. From the 80's Saturday morning cartoon show.

Great animated shorts

Jim Morrison on Why Fat is Beautiful
A radio interview with Jim Morrison from 1969, animated for the PBS series, Blank on Blank.

Great animated shorts

Jarrett Heather is the animator of Weird Al's music video Word Crimes. On this page of his website, he's posted Word Crimes as well as his previous font-centric animations that got him the gig.

He also restores arcade game consoles. Remember video arcades? There are a few of them around Philly, like Dave & Buster's and Barcade. One of these days, I'm going to trek out to the Morristown Game Vault. They have a Dragon's Lair.

Two strange shorts

All this talk of walls reminds me of Lazar (Gavrilo Gnatovich, 1987), an animated short about a mad escape from a walled-in city. I saw it in the theater in the 80's when it toured in an animation festival.

It took me a long time to find it on the internet. I couldn't remember the title. All I could remember was the ending; a great ending that stuck in my memory for years. Thankfully, Gnatovich posted it online or it would still be bugging me.

Another strange short with an odd title is Gisele Kerozene (Jan Kounen, 1990). The fun thing about this one is how it was done. These kids figured it out.

Clokey bio

Night Flight has posted a biography* of Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby. It explains a great deal, including Gumby's distinctive shape and the origin of his pony pal, Pokey.

It's great to see Night Flight still exists, albeit in Website form. I miss the late-night variety program from the 80s and 90s that showed music videos, short films, animation, and a lot of eclectic weirdness in the middle of the night. Night Flight helped popularize animated shorts like Bambi Meets Godzilla and Balance.

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*Feb 2021 update: Alas, Night Flight just removed all articles from their website.

Keane's Oscar win

Glen Keane won an Oscar on Sunday for Dear Basketball, which can be viewed here. The animated short was written and narrated by Kobe Briant with music by John Williams.

What's great about this is that of the five nominated shorts, Dear Basketball is the only one that was animated in a traditional hand-drawn style. Whenever I see Keane's animation, I'm reminded of Disney's Tarzan and this documentary in particular.

Having seen it makes his work easy to spot, particularly in his recent shorts, like 2014's Duet. Aside from Tarzan, he also animated the beast in Beauty and the Beast, Arial in The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin in Aladdin. He left Disney in 2012 to start his own company. In this video, he lectures for a half-hour on his animation career.

Keane grew up in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania. His dad, Bil Keane, created the long-running comic strip, The Family Circus. When Bil passed away in 2011, Glen's brother Jeff took over the strip and has been writing and drawing it since. Glen's son Max was the production designer for Dear Basketball.

Glen Keane's next project is the feature-length Over the Moon, which will appear exclusively on Netflix.

Dracula's Daughter

This is a photo I took at the gallery opening at The Plastic Club on Sunday. That's friend and fellow animator Bob Moore's video entry in the Movement, Motion and Sequential Art Show — his movie review of Dracula's Daughter (1936).

Bob has been using my portrait of him as a backdrop for the movie reviews he posts on his Website. His terrific designs and recent animated works are there as well. It's always great to see where my paintings end up and this is a good one. Thanks Bob!

Bob and I are each working on animated shorts for the Philadelphia Independent Animators Festival, happening at the club on February 24. Thursday is the due date for submissions. Details on how to attend the festival or submit animation are posted at The Plastic Club Website.

Great animated shorts

Merry Christmas!
Wanna watch some cartoons?

• I Am Here (Eoin Duffy, 2016, 4 min)
A cosmic traveler's quest for meaning. This is the latest short from the animator of The Missing Scarf.

• 8 Ball Bunny (Chuck Jones, 1950, 7 min)
Bugs Bunny returns a misplaced penguin to the South Pole. Humphrey Bogart was voiced by impressionist Dave Barry in the recurring reference to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Barry was Beinstock in Some Like It Hot.

• Happiness (Steve Cutts, 2017, 5 min)
A social commentary on the rat race. Thanks to Charlie Lenzi for recommending it.

[missing links: videos taken down since this posting]

Great animated shorts

Happy Thanksgiving!
Wanna watch some cartoons?

• Holiday for Drumsticks (Arthur Davis, 1949, 7 min)
Daffy Duck vs. the Thanksgiving turkey.

• Thumb Fun (Robert McKinson, 1952, 7 min)
One of my favorites. Daffy and Porky go on the road when Daffy hitchhikes south for the winter.

• I Was a Thanksgiving Turkey (John Schnall, 1986, 3 min)
Thanksgiving from the turkey's point of view.

[missing links: videos taken down since this posting]