Monday Shorts

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.

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.