Discover

In his words, it's "a lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth," but the mirth is mostly in the contrast between Cross' golden age animation style and his willingness to follow through on a premise to its bitterest conclusion.

Join us at the Calgary Central Library for the youth screening!

the reason I keep coming back to it is less for the story, striking as it is, and more just to linger in its world a little longer.

Les Autres is a sci-fi collage in every sense of the word.

It's a character study of sorts, breaking down the concept of "bird" until it should be basically unrecognizable.

We're all going to be out of office to join the end of the BUMP festival, come on by!

You Could Sunbathe is wonderfully organic even in its most sculpted moments.

All you need is the film’s title and first few seconds, and you can see exactly where it’s going—sort of.

Everything you need to know about Saki Iyori’s 2013 student film is right there in the title.

We'll be back on August 8th!

It's a film about anxiety and fear, about the things that force us out of our comfort zones, and how good intentions don't always lead to good results. It just happens to convey all that that through fuzzy, lumpy monsters.

Whether there's a moral to it is up for you to decide—director Arthur de Pince flirts with some ideas around conformity, individuality and revolution, but none of them are particularly fleshed out

it's such a burst of cheer and refreshment that it seems perfectly suited to a late July afternoon.

Animation isn't about the quality of the drawing as much as the quality of the ideas, and Snake nails it on that front.

Animators Erik Alunurm, Mihkel Reha, Mari-Liis Rebane and Mari Pakkas' film is four minutes of perfect prat-falls and nauseous wobbles, set to the soaring strains of Bolero.

A look at the films that made us do double (sometimes triple) takes at our WHIPLASH Lockdown Screening event on June 17th!

Here's one from the QAS vaults, and you really couldn't ask for a better time capsule of Calgary in the 1990s.

As the object falls apart and reassembles, the memories fragment, too, giving an odd mixture of brightness and melancholy that never quite resolves itself.

I hope that my work connects to those still figuring themselves out, especially fellow young people of colour, and inspires them to freely create and live authentically.

Sijia Ke's film Pear is based on a true story. Maybe. It's based on a story, in any case — one that Ke was listening to on the radio, despite not speaking the language it was broadcast in.

Join us on Zoom to talk about Quickdraw's past year and future plans!

A tiny film of cosmic significance.

Due to our Animation Lockdown, we'll be taking a quick break afterwards to recharge!

A tiny film of cosmic significance.

For an entire year, the McLeod's drew one second of animation each day, basing it on something they had seen, heard or read over the course of the day, with a little creative license for good measure.

Loosely based on weird fiction legend HP Lovecraft's poem Night Gaunts and influenced by the visual style of early Polish animator Wladislas Starewicz, The Old Man and the Goblins is an impressive homage to both of its inspirations

Ugly but Good feels hand-made and grounded, and impressively tangible.

Free Swim will be back again on May 13th!

hi!

We will be back in the office again on Tuesday, April 11th!

Anne Breymann's 2017 film Nachtstück is, in a word, weird. Not in the hand-wavy, dismissive way that word is often used, as in "that was weird, I don't get it." Nachtstück is weird in a deeper, more unsettling way, the way that horror writer H.P. Lovecraft articulated almost a century ago in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature

Remembering Will Walton, and his over 2 decades of filmmaking at the Quickdraw Animation Society.

The range of moods it runs through in just over two-and-a-half minutes is astounding. The fact she can do it in such an intuitively appealing way is why she's an artist you absolutely should be following.

The first half of the film shows the unease that accompanies those restless nights where sleep never seems to come. The second shows that falling asleep isn't always so great, either.

Dylon Klemen-Hurrell is a recent graduate from AUArts who specializes in animating to music, which he also composes.

The story of a Nishnaabeg youth and elder rescuing a canoe from a museum's collection, it's a direct challenge to the western claim that other culture's artifacts are educational items or historical curiousities.

Heads up - QAS will be hiring! We’ll be looking for up to 4 folks to fill positions in April-August 2023. More details and an official call for applications will be coming soon!

It's strange, because the mix of digital animation and real footage, and especially the nature of the projection, should emphasize how artificial the images are, but they don't.

Taking a look back at 2021 and 2022 Quickdraw Life.

There's a reason it walked away from our 2017 GIRAF festival with the Audience Favourite award and some of the highest ratings we've ever seen for a short at the fest.

Split into four parts, the film is somewhere between a visual poem and an expression of philosophy, cycling through acts of creation and destruction, evolution and remembrance. Volcanoes erupt, creatures evolve as sort of whimsical exquisite corpses, the pins that make up the animation dance around the screen in a strangely minimal ballet.

Have a great long Family Day Weekend!

The frog is wearing boots. What more do you need?

It would be a striking film no matter where it came from, but even with the diversity of Gobelins' current output, it stands out all the more for the expectations it defies.

We are excited to announce the recipient of our 2023 Procedural Electrifying Projection (PEP) Residency!

Time to take a look back at the amazing Animation Lockdown 2022: IMPOSSIBLE SHAPES edition and see which film came out on top of the Penrose Triangle!

It would be a striking film no matter where it came from, but even with the diversity of Gobelins' current output, it stands out all the more for the expectations it defies.

Silly and slightly surreal, it's also a perfect reminder of the virtue of simplicity

Where most video yule logs are almost static, 2.0 is perfect for parties with much shorter attention spans.

The loose line work and muddled audio add to the intimacy, as the film fixates on quiet moments and small gestures

We're getting close to the Quickdraw staff hibernation season! Closed Dec 18 - Jan 14

Kade’s take on describing that mystery, excitement, and bizarre undertones are just so fitting for our beloved festival of independent animation.

Kade’s take on describing that mystery, excitement, and bizarre undertones are just so fitting for our beloved festival of independent animation.

Its post-life coda can't come close to capturing everything beautiful about life, but that failure is its own argument for life's beauty.

It’d be grisly if it wasn’t so delightfully well drawn, and its blend of cutesy rubber-hose animation with macabre madness has been inspiring animators for nearly a century

From the opening shot of a crudely rendered surfer to the final mishmash of birthday cakes, cocktail glasses, dancing bears and fidget spinners, it's a burst of absolute glee.

The QAS Board is thrilled to announce that Val Duncan has been hired as our new Executive Director!

Fur, grass and leaves share space with fabric, felt and construction paper, creating a world that you just want to reach out and touch.

It's a unique form of collaboration, with each artist building on, altering or subverting the last.

Just enjoy the tripping cadences of Worth's words, the craft of Allinson's ever-shifting clay, and let the meaning live in the experience of it.

A visual improvisation on the music of a group of sidewalk musicians, the film passes through multiple movements and varying levels of abstraction.

Various elements of my art include curls and curves contrasting with straight lines, cartoon-like figures, and vibrant colours. I like to manipulate my use of colours in a polychromatic style. Sometimes I try to replicate realism. Other times I take realism and twist it in a chaotic way, so it also produces something beautiful

Even at its most intense, Lovrity's film remains gorgeous to look at. But its picture of paradise trampled by toxic masculinity is a haunting one, despite the beauty.

Even at its most intense, Lovrity's film remains gorgeous to look at. But its picture of paradise trampled by toxic masculinity is a haunting one, despite the beauty.

Prologue is meant to be the beginning of an adaptation of Lysistrata, the Greek play where women withhold sex from their spouses to stop a war. It would be interesting to see where Williams aimed to take the production; how faithful he would be to its story, how much humour and horror he planned to bring to the piece.

Complex and intricate as it is, though, appreciating Divisional Articulations is all about the simple satisfaction of watching video and audio in perfect sync, and letting the boundary between your senses blur.

There are films like Honami YANO's Tokyo School of the Arts graduate film, Chromosome Sweetheart—films that live in complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Based on the works of Canadian artist Dave Cooper, The Absence of Eddy Table is billed as a romantic horror film, but there's no conventional relationship to be found here.

Before it was fleshed out into a 10-film miniseries (which constitutes one of the best American animated features of the 21st century, for what it's worth), Patrick McHale's Over the Garden Wall started its life as a more humble short film, Tome of the Unknown.

Connection is at the heart of the film. Its plot is fairly standard for a children's film, a quick and cute tale of a search for belonging. But it's packed with warmth and humour, and enough silliness to win over even the sourest audience.

Robbie Ward's video for "Annihilation" by Dedsa is a stunner, a one-of-a-kind creation that's equally suited to a serious watching or the epic backdrop to your Halloween party.

Everything in an animated world can grow, shrink or transform in the blink of an eye, and the simple cube in which Egg's narrator resides does all that, constantly—and so does the character.

It’s been a busy time at Quickdraw over the last few months, and we wanted to give an update for what to expect for our summer hours: we are hoping to open our doors and return to Saturday Free Swim! Read on for details --

The Woman Who Turned Into a Castle is a story from noted neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose work often focused on describing unusual mental states in order to illuminate the workings of the brain.

Filmed with a multiplane camera setup with five layers, the film only gives viewers glimpses of the whole, with constant motion on the other, blurred-out layers adding to the film's inner anxiety.

an animated short as part of the National Film Board's Five @ 50 Series: An Intimate Look at Contemporary LGBTQ2+ Lives and Iden­ti­ties. A neon-coloured tribute (conflicted as it may be) to a long-shuttered Edmonton gay bar, it is every bit as thoughtful, personal and provocative as you'd expect, and a worthy addition to Vivek's ever-growing artistic catalogue.

Despite being overshadowed by the two very different masterpieces he released on either side of it, Don Hertzfeldt's The Meaning of Life is still the kind of film most animators go their whole career hoping to create—funny, thoughtful, cynical and gorgeous in its own odd way.

If you're in need of a wholesome escape, Jacob Kafka's student short is a great place to get it. Silly, calm, and life-affirming, it's six well-spent minutes for the terminally overwhelmed.

Set in a version of Kolkata that has been made uninhabitable by rising water levels in a post-global warming future, Ghost studio's 2020 short is a tense 10 minutes of climate horror

Four new animated beauties for your perusal, including a video for Fleet Foxes, a colourfully choreographed self-portrait, a dark-comic twist on pixilation, and the tale of a studly wolf discovering the world of sex work.

The daughter of one of the engineers who worked on the creation and launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, Tracy K. Smith's poem is a touching tribute to her father's work—but it's the analog artwork by Brazilian animation director Daniel Bruson that truly elevates this short film

Two vastly different music videos, one using machine learning to create hyper-detailed close-ups of currency, the other painted in broad, blocky and vibrant strokes; plus two films from artists we've spotlighted in our Monday Shorts series, returning with even more impressive iterations of styles we already loved.

A clever spin on abstract animation, Sweater gives its director an excuse to indulge in the medium's affinity for swirling patterns, vivid colours, and kaleidoscopic arrangements, with some relateable slapstick added as a framing device

3D scanning on your phone, a new "Innovation Centre" in Calgary, and an adorable trailer, plus other news from the world of animation

Steeped in art deco elegance and ornate designs, Avarya is a visually rich addition to one of science fiction's longest ongoing converstions—one that has only gotten more urgent since it began nearly a century ago.

With its unique visual metaphors, subtle comic timing, and the sandpaper grit of cognitive dissonance, Lepage's darkly funny short captures a contemporary version of an age-old feeling.

Jobs at cSPACE, SAAG and the NMC, screening opportunities with the Calgary Black Film Festival, a Downtown Activation Grant, and national and municipal funding opportunities

An encounter with a street vendor prompts a young boy to confront his own mortality in this multilayered memento mori from the Tokyo University of the Arts

Animation Lockdown winners compete for The 48 Film Festival's inaugural prize

GIF contest, grant deadlines and free artistic "utensils" — here are the arts opportunities in Calgary this week.

Buoyed by a joyful score and Mirai Mizue's intricate draftsmanship, Dreamland is a narrative film in abstract clothing, a memorable blurring of the boundaries between animated genres.

GLAS and Annecy announce 2022 selections, Kate Beaton gets an AppleTV+ series, Animation Magazine chronicles Cartoon Movie, and AWN dives into the history of one of Canadian animation's most prominent studios

GLAS and Annecy announce 2022 selections, Kate Beaton gets an AppleTV+ series, Animation Magazine chronicles Cartoon Movie, and AWN dives into the history of one of Canadian animation's most prominent studios

Calls for artworks and residencies, job postings, and educational workshops are all part of this week's roundup of professional opportunities for Calgary animators

Quickdraw artists selected for HBOMax and WarnerMedia Access' new animated shorts program cohort

The return of CUFF's 48-hour filmmaking challenge, opportunities for queer and Indigenous creators, and a job posting from our neighbours at EMMEDIA round out this week's offerings

A sci-fi fable in the vein of Italo Calvini's Cosmicomics, Matisse Gonzalez' film is a brief, breezy story built around an immediately intuitive metaphor