Karnival is a series of super-short animated pieces created by Jun seo Hahm at Portland commercial studio Bent Image Lab. The first two episodes are up at Karnival.tv with additional episodes debuting every two weeks. The films defy easy categorization though I thought the first couple pieces were amusing and original bits of animation. The characters have a strong 3D aesthetic but the films are actually “hand-drawn digital vectorized 2D animation,” according to the filmmaker.

Storytime (1968) was the first film directed by Terry Gilliam. The visual style should be familiar to all Gilliam fans.

(via MetaFilter)

This cartoon series is a surprising and joyful discovery for me. From what I’ve read online though, it seems to be a well known classic among Czech viewers. Between 1965 and 1967, Czechoslovakian animator Bretislav Pojar made a series of six shorts called Hey Mister, Let’s Play. The mostly stop-motion cartoons star two bears—one smart, the other not so much. Pojar made five more episodes featuring the same bears in the early-1970s, this time calling it Who Threw That, Gentlemen?.

Below is the first short—”Potkali se u Kolina” (”How They Met At Kolin”)—which introduces the characters. The cartoon is over forty years old yet it looks as fresh and vital as any cartoon being produced today. How did they ever manage to create something with so much charm and appeal? It’s not an easy thing to accomplish, and director Pojar and designer Miroslav Stepanek make it all look so effortless. The animation of the characters is particularly fun to watch with stylized movement and graphic inventiveness abound.

For those who want to see more and can understand the following website, two dvds of these shorts can be purchased here.

Fred Bastard is a pilot for an adult animated series that London-based Uli Meyer Animation produced in 2001. The content is crude—the show was a possible vehicle for English comedian Johnny Vegas—but it’s well animated. The inking style and designs remind me of French comics.

The dvd single of Don Hertzfeldt’s latest (and in my opinion, strongest and most intensely cinematic) short Everything Will Be OK goes on pre-order sale today at noon (Pacific time). According to his Bitter Films website, “all pre-orders will receive a free ‘everything will be ok’ FILM STRIP, clipped from a 35mm print from Don Hertzfeldt’s collection.” Additionally, a limited number of signed art prints are also available this morning for people who pre-order the dvd.

I’ll admit that when I first discovered Don’s films (around ‘98 or so), I wasn’t exactly his biggest fan. His early films like Ah L’Amour and Billy’s Balloon, though amusing, were too trivial to capture my interest. It wasn’t until Rejected that I really began to warm up to his work and get past the stick figure hurdle.

Early on the difficulty I was having with his work is that it seemed like the stick-people might be the entire gimmick, that it wasn’t really about his stories, but the fact that stick figures were telling these stories. The exquisitely crafted Lily and Jim should have convinced me otherwise, but I’m slow sometimes. (Sidenote: Lily and Jim is all the more impressive when one realizes Don was only 20 years old when he made it). His new films, however, have completely erased any doubts about his capabilities as a filmmaker. While Don uses simple figures in his animation, he manages to evoke more with these frugal pencil marks than most animators do with their fully-articulated anatomy-laden characters. The real meat in Hertzfeldt’s work is his ability to use the film medium to tell engaging, funny and interesting stories, and while his drawing style is one of the more striking and obvious aspects of his work, it is only a minor component in the overall picture of his films.

Don recently told an interviewer, “I’m not the kind of guy who’s gonna struggle for weeks getting someone’s ankle to look just right, you know? Actually I don’t even draw ankles. I animate to tell these stories…” While true, the comment belies the careful attention that Hertzfeldt invests into the visual side of his shorts. His characters are often crudely drawn, but the cinematic and visual potential of the animation medium is never ignored. The humor in Rejected is equally divided between the visual and verbal, The Meaning of Life is a largely visual narrative, with the dialogue in the film used more to add mood than anything else, and the in-camera optical effects and live photography in Everything Will Be OK create an unexpectedly rich and textured visual experience.

With the graphic evolution and non-linear narrative experimentations of his previous three films — Rejected, The Meaning of Life and Everything Will Be OK — Don has clearly established himself as an animation original. If you’re familiar with Hertzfeldt’s work, you’re sure to enjoy his latest Everything Will Be OK, and if you’re not, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of the exhaustively complete Bitter Films Volume 1 dvd which contains all of his earlier shorts through The Meaning of Life. It’s a fine introduction to the work of a still-evolving filmmaker who easily ranks among the most exciting indie animators currently on the American scene.

For all things Hertzfeldt, visit BitterFilms.com

(Thanks Andres Silva)

[Video link was removed from Google]

Horton Hears A Who is a 1992 Russian animated short directed by Alexei Karayev, who also directed another Dr. Seuss adaptation that we’d linked to earlier called Welcome (1986). The English translation of the piece, producd at Pilot Studio, was done by Niffiwan who writes more about the film on his excellent Russian animation blog Animatsiya in English.

Haven’t had a moment to watch the film yet, although the man-elephant design of the title character is a bit off-putting at first glance. Niffiwan writes, “The art took me a little time to get used to, but I soon realized that it is really quite beautiful…It shows the exaggerated, overly-saturated, slightly unreal world of the creatures which must seem like gods to the people on the dust speck.” He also offers a thought about how this Russian version compares to the recent trailer for Blue Sky’s Horton:

I think that Pilot Studio’s version changes the surface layer by using an utterly different art style (among other things), but keeps the heart and soul of the story completely intact. The Blue Sky adaptation looks like it will do the opposite; keep the pretty crust and toss the insides.

Here’s a nice environmentally-themed complement to the Koji Yamamura piece posted on the Brew yesterday. Spilled Oil is a new hand-drawn short produced as an internal project at Minneapolis-based animation studio Make. It was animated by Andrew Chesworth and Aaron Quist. The film can be viewed at SpilledOil.com and a ‘making of’ version with pencil tests can be viewed here.

(via No Fat Clips)