A collection of mind-expanding films, inspiring artists, and insights into the animation process to fuel your creative practice.
Make your Mondays a little more pleasant with a newly curated short film each week, plus our insights into why we love them.
The Calgary-shot Fraggle Rock reboot is out! Plus trailers for Inu-Oh, Shenmue the Animation, and The Cuphead Show, animated GLAAD Media Award nominees, and other news from the world of animation
Plenty of interesting opportunities this week, including calls for Calgary festivals, mentorship and scholarships for Alberta media artists, an international residency at Hiroshima, and a chance to help steer the Alberta animation and VFX industry
An animation legend transforms a Renaissance painting into a densely woven dance of shapes and colour.
A hodgepodge of CG experiments and challenging classics make up our first Mixtape roundup of 2022
Trailers for Netflix's The House and Cuphead's latest DLC, plus Slovenian stop-motion, awards announcements, Makato Shinkai's new feature, and Bugs Bunny vs. The Walrus
A look back on a year full of preparation and anticipation—with more than its share of bright spots along the way
The opening image of Panta Rhei is a long shot of a beach. On the left, a humpback whale lies on the sand belly up. In the centre, the film's protagonist, a marine biologist named Stefaan, stands motionless. The camera is far back, the two figures dwarfed by the barren beach and the drab grey sky.
New trailers from Studio Ponoc and Sony animation, deleted scenes from Bojack Horseman, and new uploads of classic Sally Cruickshank round out this week's quick links
Our programming director shares his thoughts on some new, classic, and obscure Christmas animations
We'll have limited availability from Dec. 19 through January 17—thanks for your patience, and happy holidays!
Freeze Frame is a stop-motion film made from ice, and there is an inherent tension between that technique and that material. Stop motion is a slow, tedious practice that creates the appearance of motion from static materials. But ice is never really static. As soon as it's out of the freezer, it is already in the process of disappearing.
All-star tutorials, stop-motion interviews, industry news, and other items that caught our eye this week.
This week's volunteer opportunities and job postings in the local arts community
Collecting the kind words that were said about our online animation festival
The numbers have been crunched, and we can say with mathematical certainty that these were your favourite films
After hours of viewing and careful deliberation, it's time to announce the winners of this year’s jury prizes at GIRAF17
A Spirit made of pure white light roams the earth at a time-scale we can barely comprehend. What would humanity look like to a being that moves in geological time?
This officially makes it a tradition: We're once again writing about the signal film for our GIRAF animation festival. But can we help it when the films are this good?
We’ve been focusing so much on the films and artists in this year’s festival that we might’ve missed mentioning a few details, so here are five things you might not know about GIRAF17
The simplicity of Salise Hughes' How to Draw Clouds makes it a really difficult film to write about. As the synopsis says, it's a "meditation on the desire to hold on to the ephemeral," and at only two minutes long, it makes its point concisely and poetically. Honestly, what else is there to say?
Cage Match is essentially a stress dream, drawn from the same subconscious source that brought you the test you forgot study for and the job you forgot you still had—just ramped up to 11. What starts off looking like just a moment of claustrophobia quickly becomes a battle royale between beefy super-wrestlers.
In honour of International Animation Day and the Halloween weekend, enjoy 13 spooky selections from Quickdraw's ongoing Vimeo channel.
From its opening shot—a car interior bathed in red light, the protagonist small and blurry outside the windshield, hints of tree branches and utter darkness behind her—100,000 Acres of Pine sets a sinister mood that it never lets fade.
Trailers for two new Netflix features, and news from the world of independent animation.
Cholo is an independent Calgary-based artist, working primarily in digital illustration. Born in the Philippines and raised in Canada, they are a self-taught visual artist who’s worked in various mediums including digital illustration, graphic design, painting, printmaking, and very recently, animation.
Cholo is an independent Calgary-based artist, working primarily in digital illustration. Born in the Philippines and raised in Canada, they are a self-taught visual artist who’s worked in various mediums including digital illustration, graphic design, painting, printmaking, and very recently, animation.
Diana Reichenbach's short is about "the relationship of light, sound, and space" — the feeling you get from how those elements interact, and the blurring between the senses when the synchronized sound and image hit just right.
Animation and dance share an obsession with understanding movement, breaking down complex acts into their component parts, and understanding the expressive potential of even the subtlest gestures.
A/R gets a boost, Dozens of North gets a release date, and EMMEDIA is hiring a new Artistic Director
Opening with an overhead shot of a grandmother's hands inspecting a tea set, the film is as patient and unhurried as its subject, and as comfortable as the most pleasant family gathering.
It's strange to say that a story about a one-eyed being who accidentally destroys a planet full of life feels deeply personal, but in this case, it's the truth.
Laika's next project, film restoration, and an interview with King Gizzard
Set in small-town Saskatchewan in the year 2037, it's the story of a trendy noodle shop exploring the newest frontier in hipster cuisine: psychedelic, polydimensional comfort food.
Four news stories that caught our eye this week
Frankly, some things are more fun when you choose not to overthink them.
A brief glimpse at what's happening in the world of animation
A pair student films using fuzzy, felted puppets to explore the darker side of human nature, Mantzaris' films play like two sides of the same psychological coin.
Interesting tidbits from the world of animation
Yearbook is a bittersweet film, but it’s a deeply affecting one, a reminder that life is more important than legacy, and how easy it is to get lost dwelling on the wrong things. That it can do all that while still being this briskly paced, this concise, and this funny is truly impressive.
A kinetic film scratcher, visual music maker, animated traveler of time and space, light sensitive, looper of loops and collector of motion picture projection bulbs to bring total enlightenment.
A leafy creature roams the wasteland, a lone figure of life and warmth gathering its energy and releasing it in flame-like bursts, which eventually spread through the land, urging new growth from old roots.
Four quick links on animation developments that caught our eye
The film's climax is a psychedelic trip, a glorious, glitchy vision of aquatic life and ego death that couldn't be further removed from the 2D scrolling of its opening.
We know you've been waiting patiently, and we are happy to say registrations are open now
Parks' ability to bring fresh eyes to her materials makes Foreign Exchange stand out. Zoomed in, cropped, collaged and recombined, her compositions force new perspectives as the most familiar elements become, well, foreign.
A feminine, feminist reframing of the act of creation, Ross’ film revels openly in its sexuality. Adam depicts the process as tender and tactile, not cold and clinical. It’s a creation fueled by desire, one just as linked to the needs of the body as any of the acts that would follow from it.
The human form becomes plastic beyond belief, faces stretching and distorting, bodies opening up, skin peeling off and re-applied as clothing. It's a nightmare realm, as surreal and disturbing as Bosch's most vivid fantasies.
The second half of our recent additions to the ongoing Indie Animation Mixtape Vimeo channel
"Lighthearted" might not be the first word that comes to mind in a film that features auto-cannibalism, grubby parasites, and landscapes overstuffed with fleshy mounds, laughing cysts, and far too many teeth, but it fits.
The first half of our recent additions to the ongoing Indie Animation Mixtape Vimeo channel
You're bound to imagine faces and figures if you stare deeply enough, angelic or insect-like faces created by the brain's love of bilateral symmetry. It's a meditative experience, or maybe a transcendent one—the brightest moments certainly feel downright heavenly.
Flood is driven by a haunting, yet progressive sound design with two main characters Spider Woman and Thunderbird. They act as vessels, composing and carrying the story of an Indigenous youth named Thunder, navigating her way through a colonial flood.
Does the introduction of a fictional narrative in the film's visuals separate it from the truth of the situation? Or is it a way to strive for another kind of truth?
Nina Patafi is a 4th year AUArts student whose focus is illustration and animation. Her current project is a stop-motion animation using cut-outs and pieces of garbage to simulate a garbage-filled world.
An award-winning Canadian singer, producer, video director and songwriter, Troy Kokol is also a talented animator.
A look at the illustrations and animation of Ana Piñero.
MLE is a cartoonist and art instructor with an ambition for comic writing.
Samantha Lucy (@sadnesscoach) is an illustrator, animator and graphic designer based in Calgary, AB.
Greg Doble is a Montreal-based animator and illustrator who specializes in 2D animation. His work is easily recognizable by its playful absurdity and whimsical nature.
A fun, creative person who loves to draw and create fun and entertaining scenarios to make people laugh, they enrolled in VCAD and began studying 3D modelling to help with that mission.
Axis-Z Media Arts (AZMA) is a Calgary-based artistic collective interested in creating genre-blurring digital art experiences that step outside the confines of the rectangular screen and into the real world.
Kayla Twaddle is an upcoming graduate of the Alberta University of the Arts majoring in Character Design. She has a passion for all things silly and cute, and brings a child-like playfulness to her work using colour and style.
Like a fairy tale, it makes its point through simple storytelling and exaggerated elements. And like a thought experiment, it puts a friendly face to a thorny problem.
"When you’re out in the bush, especially at night with no light pollution, something shiny and bright tends to stick out."
Whether it's a good place to live, to die, or to end up in eternity, one thing that's unambiguous is the beauty of Onohana's creation.
Like its predecessor, How to Be At Home is a work of radical empathy. It doesn't sugar-coat the hardship of loneliness or the mental toll of living in a situation of extreme, almost unprecedented ambiguity.
The harmony between the creative visions of de Boer and Ill Considered is hard to deny, and the resulting film is striking enough that it doesn't really matter whether you see it as a reverse music video, an abstract animation, or something else altogether.
The harmony between the creative visions of de Boer and Ill Considered is hard to deny, and the resulting film is striking enough that it doesn't really matter whether you see it as a reverse music video, an abstract animation, or something else altogether.
By taking their path to self-understanding and depicting it with warmth, care, and directness, Charpentier-Basille has made an entertaining short that doubles as a gateway to understanding.
Like a feudal Japanese take on The Wind in the Willows, Yon Hui Lee's CalArts graduate film tells a tale of fantasy and mob justice in a world of frogs and toads.
Equal parts folklore and The Cat Came Back, Killing Time finds the amiable personification of time unknowingly tormenting its hero by just being itself.
Narrated with alternating cynicism and intensity by the gravel-voiced Vincent Macaigne, Devaux's film is a masterpiece of forced sincerity and simmering resentments, exploring the angst, regret and Freudian undercurrents that give this family's weekly gatherings their unique dynamic.
The story in L'homme aux oiseaux is storybook simple, but it isn't really about the plot. The heart of the film lies in the joy of watching colour and life spring from the soil.
The title refers to the two characters who open and end the film, but combined with the symmetrical structure and the mid-film inversion, it also points to 2's many dualities.
One of the wonderful things about a film like River Lethe is that no description can actually do it justice, and no interpretation is definitive.
Instead of trying to recreate events, Chandoutis uses animation to create his unsettling atmosphere, building a backdrop of video game-style wireframes and letting them stack up in innumerable layers until the tangle of lines is almost completely indecipherable.
Where most of Nkondo's previous shorts have played with the abstraction of 2D art's simplified perspectives, The New Exhibition opens up a new dimension—or at least half of one.
Âme noire isn't so much about the past in and of itself as it is about the way that past lives on in the present, how it shapes cultures and, as the title says, soul.
The loss of cultural knowledge is always a tragedy, but it seems doubly so when it comes to oral cultures where, once a story is gone, it is truly gone. That makes the very existence of Kapaemahu a bit of a miracle.
The film is a testament to her love for this eccentric, who was an artistic inspiration and played a key role in her becoming a filmmaker. A moving tribute to a poet of the everyday.
(caution: NSFW). Tides is a film about the relationship between light and dark within us all. It is about the person behind the smile, the exhaustion of pretending, and how it is sometimes needed to give in to our darker tendencies in order to survive
It's been a treat watching Hodkin's style evolve from short to short, and her first post-student animation, a music video for The Magic Gang, shows she can do unbridled joy just as well as she does offbeat dialogue and surreal humour. Whatever comes next, we already know it'll be worth watching.
The first half of Make It Soul constrains the marker to the background, lending an impressionist touch to the Chicago neighbourhood that sets the stage for the short — but once characters come into focus, they're rendered in crisp, digital lines. It's a smart way of introducing the aesthetic, but it still hardly prepares you for the moment Brown's performance starts.
The film feels like it's being viewed through a veil, or refracted through a pool of water—which is perfectly appropriate for such a drifting, dreamlike story.
The film examines humanity's view of the universe through the sweep of human history, depicting scenes from myths and legends along with our evolving scientific understanding, all in just under seven minutes, plus credits.
Structured around a mother telling her daughter about their struggles in post-dictatorship Athens, My Mother's Coat is a film full of regrets, but it isn't sour and it isn't even exactly sad, although it isn't happy either.
Play it on the biggest screen you can find. Don't analyze it. Don't ask yourself what it means. Just let it happen.
A story that's both lighthearted (sports fandom!) and serious (government repression!), exposing one more way that extreme religious conservatism restricts freedom.
Agnew said that she "wanted to create a story that was lighthearted but also very strange," and that definitely comes through in the short story of a long-necked creature (most definitely not a giraffe) slowly starving in a sun-scorched desert.
If it's fair to classify Ooze as a psychological horror film (it's certainly unsettling, in spite of its cartoonish character design), it's a much more internal one than the genre usually allows for—and a more efficient one, too. In only five minutes, you're drawn into the elevator operator's plight, pulled through the depths of his unconscious, and emerge, well, somewhere else, although it's hard to say where, exactly.
In the most straightforward telling, the Mothman was a creature that appeared in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the 1960s, whose presence coincided with a bridge collapse that killed 46 people, leaving locals wondering about its role in the disaster. If you want to follow that rabbit hole, things get much stranger from there.
Julian Glander's films are child-like, not childish. They're full of wonder, imagination and playfulness, and they tend to unfold with the "and then this happened" logic that makes kids' stories so strangely charming.
Things that are mundane in the microcosmos are so utterly removed from our own experience that the processes themselves are already almost poetry.
In the most straightforward telling, the Mothman was a creature that appeared in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the 1960s, whose presence coincided with a bridge collapse that killed 46 people, leaving locals wondering about its role in the disaster. If you want to follow that rabbit hole, things get much stranger from there.
Animation is great at conjuring worlds that never existed, but that's not all it's good for. It's also a perfect medium for showing true stories that are too good to be true.
If anything, the most remarkable thing about Ohayo is that it tells a complete story in its one-minute, and one that even feels refreshing to watch. It's not the final film he would have intended, but it's a lovely note to go out on.
A crisp, cool film for a sweltering day, a bit of fresh air and respite in tumultuous times. Take a deep breath, and watch the seasons unfold.
Instead of focusing on one film, this week's Monday Short post is looking at a trio of recent music videos from a set of vastly different musicians and animators.
Released as part of the FXX series Cake, Joe Bennett's short Birds is maybe the sweetest memento mori you'll ever stumble across.
