Your favorite animated music video for the next five minutes: Birdy Nam Nam’s “The Parachute Ending” directed by Steve Scott and illustrated by Will Sweeney. There’s a healthy dose of René Laloux and Moebius mixed in there, but the overall results are fresh and fun. According to Scott, it was influenced by Laloux’s Planet Sauvage, bad 80s kids cartoons, Metal Hurlant, Nausicaa and Prog Rock album covers. It was created over four weeks in Flash and AfterEffects.

Crew credits are:
James Littlemore - Editor / Compositor
Geoff McDowall - Animator
Ed Willmore - Animator
Roland Edwards - Animator
Dele Nuga - Digital Painter

(Thanks, Christy Karacas and Chris McD)

MGMT released a new music video tonight for their song “Kids” (directed by Ray Tintori). There’s only about a minute of animation in the video, but it’s one damn solid and creative minute. The animation was directed by Superjail co-creator Christy Karacas, and the animators on the piece were Karacas, Lizzi Akana and Henry Thurlow. The animation on the last shot is nuts! I want to frame-by-frame all that trippy goodness.

Following this recent post, many readers demanded better animated and funnier fruit people. So I present to you Joel Trussell’s new Kid 606 video “Mr. Wobble’s Nightmare.” Watch it here. Credits for the video are as follows:

Director: Joel Trussell
Animators: Anna & Mike Hollingsworth, Joel Trussell
DP & Editor: Michael Samstag
Camera: Matthew Rogers
Lighting: Jeff Reed

The winners were announced last night at the 40th annual ASIFA-East Animation Festival. The top Best in Show prize was awarded to the short film Q&A by the Rauch Brothers, comprised of brothers Tim and Mike. The film, which also competes in Annecy next month, is a gentle, funny and touching real-life conversation between a child with Asperger’s Syndrome and his mother. The other prize-winning film that really stood out for me was the Nullsleep music video “Dirty Rom Dance” created by Plasticflesh (aka Stieg Retlin). The 8-bit artwork style is dime-a-dozen nowadays which makes it all the more rare to see somebody take that visual approach and do something truly original and inventive with it. The video won for Excellence in Soundtrack, a dubious compliment in my opinion; the video game-y music is fine but it was the filmmaker’s pitch-perfect melding of hyperkinetic imagery with sound that truly made this film stand out, not to mention the incredible design and storytelling delivered via a limited palette. Neither Q&A nor “Dirty Rom Dance” are available on-line but keep an eye out for both of them.

Hamster Squaredance is one of the more visually distinctive music videos I’ve run across in a while. It was created for the musician Mr. Hayday by New Zealand-based Laurent Antonczak and Patricia Burgetsmaier. The lengthy description of the project on their Vimeo page does leave me slightly confused though:

The framework of “Hamster Squaredance” explores an aesthetic and conceptual relationship of rhythm and narrative by developing a new visual approach for displaying on small screens, mainly iPHONE. Furthermore “Hamster Squaredance” explores a new narrative structure (short-duration, screen limitations, narrative synchronised with music) and reinterprets the aesthetics of computer game industry from the early 80s into nowadays trend. While using basic, modular and simple graphics, which denote the early stage of computer development and its graphics, it develops yet highly crafted visuals, using the most advantageous elements of photography, illustrations and mix-media technique.

I love this. Using both praxinoscopes and a technique of matching up the frame rate of the spinning record to that of the camera, animator David Wilson used no computers to create this music video. Watch him explain it all, below:

(Thanks, Tom Knott via Motionographer)

Filmmaker David Lynch directed this animated video for a song Shot in the Back of the Head off of Moby’s upcoming album. I don’t care what you say - I like it.

(via Vanity Fair)

A visually impressive Space Invaders-themed music video directed by Reuben Sutherland of Joyrider Films for Röyksopp’s new single “Happy Up Here.” At first glance, I thought it was a mix of live and CG, but upon closer examination, it appears to be almost entirely CG. It’s a fun piece in which the visual elements and cutting perfectly match the energy of song’s beats.