Monday Shorts

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Man on the Chair is a film focused on doubts, with a sense of uncertainty that goes beyond asking why we are here to whether we are here at all. Director Jeong Dahee doesn't seem especially interested in finding answers—it's the feeling of sitting within questions that seems to interest her.

Nata Metlukh pokes fun at social cues misfiring with a fun house-mirror reflection of our social incompetence

Looking back at Glucose four years later, it's easy to see why folks were so excited. For lack of a better word, and at the risk of sounding absurdly unhip, it just looks and sounds cool.

An animation that focuses on the subtle movements and rhythms that unconsciously happen at an owambe, a Nigerian street party. As people come together in joy, their hearts begin to beat to the same rhythm, as if united in happiness.

Kibwe Tavares' sci-fi short is far from your typical architecture school project, but his eye for the intersection of class, race, and the built environment is all over this film.

Even before seeing a frame of Erika Grace Strada's student short, the title brings some very specific imagery to mind. It suggests alien landscapes, strange creatures, and a healthy dose of cosmic horror—and it delivers most of that. The jaunty soundtrack dispels any sense of dread, but with a different score, the film's opening could easily set the stage for some true cosmic horror.

A short documentary based on the writing of a real sweeper master, The Chimney Swift is whole lot bleaker than Mary Poppins' "Chim Chim Cheree" would lead you to believe

An animation legend transforms a Renaissance painting into a densely woven dance of shapes and colour.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frankly, some things are more fun when you choose not to overthink them.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.