Monday Shorts

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.

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.

"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.

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?

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.

Farzaneh acknowledges Iran is "not the best place to come from these days," but she still wanted to be a good ambassador for her country, a representative of everyday life in a Persian culture with a rich and complicated history.

Set in Berlin in the summertime, the film follows Julius as he suffers from a bout of persistent insomnia. Determined to clear his head, he decides to head on a road trip to shake up his routine, but just like sleep, the trip never seems to come, delayed by an increasing pileup of small setbacks.

L'après-midi de Clémence (Clémence's Afternoon) is as muted in tone as it is in its colour scheme. It's a mood piece, set on a lazy afternoon, with an unhurried pace perfectly suiting the long days of summer. But just as the tasteful patches of colour stand out from the more subdued backdrops, the script's well observed moments feel even more heartbreaking against what should be an innocent afternoon.

One day, without warning, the Earth's gravity reverses. Most of the population instantly launches into space — along with most of the wildlife, water, and pretty much anything else that wasn't either indoors or firmly anchored to the crust.

As soon as his 2007 student film transitions from a series of warm Polaroids to the more complex reality, the film becomes a dance. Each movement has rhythm, intent, fluidity, and weight; there's a precision to it that can only come from someone who's put a lot of thought into the meaning of movement.

In the moments before death, one of the Battling Gods recalls his defeat in a magnificent fight. That battle transcended meta worlds, time and parallel universes as the Battling God faced off with another of his kind. All living creatures celebrated their fight with cries of joy.

We don't know if Daria Dedok's A Boy I Never Knew was created during the COVID-19 pandemic or if it's just well timed, but it almost doesn't matter. The mood it captures, of listlessness and disconnection, boredom and alienation, is one with a powerful resonance in our current moment.

A typhoon looms in the background, but it isn't a film about disaster. It's inspired by her parents' youth, but it isn't a family story, either. Instead, it's a portrait of a time and place, capturing the hazy, humid Hong Kong of her parents' memory in a series of beautifully rendered, smartly observed moments. 

Behind the western setting and cartoon trappings lies an exploration of some heavy topics — of our relationship to the environment, and especially of powerlessness in the face of destruction. Lane keeps the film emotionally honest, even as its world reveals itself to be deeply strange.

The sound of cracking joints is bad enough even when it's harmless—a sort of reverse ASMR that sends pure discomfort own the spine—and it isn't even close to harmless in Revenge Story's inciting incident. Here, that crackling represents a disfiguring chiropractic accident, leaving a ballerina disfigured, and seeking revenge.

This video is as sumptuous as it gets, with cascades of magical creatures swelling and fading in hypnotic pulses. The sheer number of visual layers is enough to overwhelm—which is a testament to Inaba's compositional skills.

Phosphena is a story of a mating ritual gone wrong, loosely inspired by the intricate constructions of bowerbirds. Described in those terms, it sounds almost straightforward—but that's the difference between talking about art and experiencing it.

One of very few videos where we might actually recommend seeing it on a smaller screen, just to make the imagery a little more manageable. Watch it maxed out, too, but be ready for a barrage of nonstop, sensory-overwhelming imagery—it can be disorienting and dizzying, but it's also absolutely engrossing.