Monday Shorts

This is animation at its most exuberant, a whirlwind of camera movements, neon colours and non-stop energy.

Animation festivals sometimes get flack for leaning towards hand-drawn films over digital ones, and there’s definitely some truth to that. But if more of those CG films were easy on the eyes as Saito’s work, I think you’d see that balance shift pretty quickly.

It’s utterly absorbing, but also soothing (probably because of the mostly ambient score) and almost hypnotic.

It’s a rare combination of profound and entertaining, and is as distinctive visually as it is in its ideas.

Let’s go full-out manic with this week’s pick.

It’s a tough film to interpret, with its mix of the domestic and the global, and its blend of cynicism and hopefulness.

In watching Hunger, it doesn’t take long to see that the software’s decisions on how to ‘tween aren’t exactly the same as what your average human animator would choose.

As much as he’s paying tribute to the ’90s animation underground, Bailey is also letting his own personality come through loud and clear, and the result is wonderfully odd.

Wind takes a straightforward concept and spins it into something special.

It’s a difficult film, but one that feels particularly relevant right now

Portingale’s film is all about the emergence of complex matter, the birth of the universe as we know it.

It’s spooky and soothing all at once, a unique mood from a unique artist.

it conveys energy and exertion and outright exhaustion with a practiced efficiency that’s nowhere near as simple as it seems.

Get a sneak-peak at what we're planning for our 40th year of QAS!

Maybe the most impressive thing about Skhizein is how Clapin mines empathy and humour from the same images.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Skhizein is how Clapin mines empathy and humour from the same images.

It’s not a film to be scrutinized, but there’s something in watching its graceless critters lumber towards their destiny that can’t help but feel uplifting.

A ton of whimsy and a dash of Renaissance to create a three act visual spectacle from fruit decorating Paradise to Kimchi being the background of Hell

So maybe it isn’t utopian, but it isn’t nihilistic either, and when you’re looking at the span of human history, that’s its own sort of optimism.

Rendered on a portable typewriter, you can see the film as Johnson’s daydreams manifesting through a dreary day job, the excitement of early aviation rendered in a few pieces of punctuation and some dabs of colour.

It’s hypnotic in a way that’s hard to describe, like staring at a fire—there’s something in the pattern of movement that’s just inherently compelling.

unlike most cut-out animation, which tends to treat its canvas like a two-dimensional platform, Voltova is more than willing to push her camera angles and distort her perspectives; it makes for a much more dramatic and energetic piece of animation than paper cut-out usually allows.

Instead of a puzzle to be solved, Panacée is a landscape to be admired, with gorgeous artwork that recalls Moebius' elegant lines, imaginative structures and twilit colours

It's as much about the beauty of the natural surroundings, heavily inspired by BC's Saltspring Island and the Pacific rainforests, as it is about the fox's journey, which is abstract at best.

The CRT glow and chunky lines recall old Amiga art, and the constant morphing between keyframes gives the whole thing an eerie feeling—more of a ghost of technology past than an exercise in nostalgia.

Lori Damiano's film compresses a lot of wisdom into 15 minutes, on the difference between observation and experience, the burdens created by the past and the future, the need for appreciation of simple moments.

It tells you the things the game will let you discover—it can even be useful in showing you the frame of mind the game is meant to be played in—but it's a different piece of art from the game itself.

Dr. Breakfast isn't exactly normal, but it is straightforward, mixing a crisp, traditionally cartoony style, an easy-to-follow narrative and a sense of humour that's alternately manic and deadpan.

It isn't easy to walk the line between irritating and charming, but the singing in Choir Tour pulls it off perfectly.

The straightforward style lets LaCerte focus on the story, a melancholy parable despite the presence of handsome horses and shiny bald strangers. It's downbeat, but it isn't a downer.

A delightfully weird and beautiful film of fun creatures making up their bodies and adapting to constant change in their unique ecosystem

We couldn’t be more excited by the pure ambiance and rich emotional curiosity that exudes from the GIRAF19 promo bumper.

Voices doesn't make you guess. It's direct, but no less deep for that, discussing fears and anxieties that haven't changed much in the intervening decades.

making your own movies isn't about having the fanciest technology, it's about having an idea, some determination, and whatever setup gets the job done.

Ten seconds into Jesse Schmal Strauss' Sub!, I was already 100% sold on it.

Deadpan humour and sincere existential yearning are an uneasy mix, and Ménard never really resolves the tension between the two moods.

The pervasive sense of melancholy, the dream-like story structure, the dark, dry humour; all of them create a mood that's hard to describe and equally hard to forget. 

The pervasive sense of melancholy, the dream-like story structure, the dark, dry humour; all of them create a mood that's hard to describe and equally hard to forget. 

Brandon Blommaert's 2015 film e:e:e:e:e: might just be the most successful exploration of synesthesia I've seen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A fable about greed for greed's sake, it's hard to watch it and not be impressed by the generosity of detail that's gone into every scene. 

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Matthew Rankin's The Tesla World Light doesn't stretch the Serbian inventor's story into fiction, but it does make it mythic, in a grandly tragic sort of way.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.