Three nerds turn a nativity scene into a roleplaying battleground.

Matt Burnett and Ben Levin spent a year animating this entirely by hand, on paper with pencils, and fancied it up in Photoshop and After Effects. Here’s their studio website, where you can also find a Quicktime version.

Virgin America’s cool in-flight Safety Film has popped up on You Tube. This piece alone would sway me toward using the upscale, low-cost air carrier. It was produced by Anomaly, with animation by Wild Brain.

(Thanks, Chet Gulland)

It’s debatable whether the films below qualify as “animation” but the filmmaker behind them, Fred Mogubgub, was an important part of New York’s indie animation scene in the 1960s and 1970s, and a founder of the commercial studio Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz. Whatever you want to call them, they are excellent examples of pop art filmmaking. The videos were posted onto YouTube courtesy of the NY studio Asterisk Animation.

The Pop Show: A Pop Art extravaganza by Fred Mogubgub from the late-1960s, innovative in the use of the quick cut, this film is a parade of pop icons of its time. Features a pre-Playboy, pre-N. O. W. Gloria Steinem.

Enter Hamlet: A film set to Maurice Evans’ recording of Hamlet’s soliloquy.

The Great Society: A parade of popular consumer items cut to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.

In honor of today’s release of the next big leap in three dimensional, digitally enhanced CG — I give you Mike Grimshaw’s One D:

Who needs paper? Your flesh will do just as well…

Apparently this clever little short was commissioned for use as a viral video by Samsung — to promote its new cell phone with video editing capabilities. More info about how it was done is posted here.

I recently stumbled upon the work of Polish director Julian Józef Antonisz (1941-1987), a previously unknown (to me) master of the camera-less animation technique. Like most people, when I think of camera-less animation, the type of films that immediately pop to mind are by filmmakers like Len Lye and Norman McLaren. It’s a revelation to discover Antonisz who has such a refreshingly unique take on the technique. A well known figure of the Polish animation scene, Antonisz made dozens of films between 1967 and 1986, including the anarchic Dada-infused How a Sausage Dog Works which can be viewed below. YouTube also offers us his first film, Phobia (1967).

Antonisz is a largely unknown figure in the West, but if the nearly 100,000 views on YouTube and dozens of comments in Polish are any indication, his work seems to be better recognized in his native Poland. I discovered a rough English translation of the film courtesy of YouTube user Wodzu and have posted it below the film, though chances are it’ll simply add to your confusion.

Translation
[min:sec]
[00:04] this is how a simple electrical mechanical “hitter-knocker” works
[00:18] this is how a cherry-”kapacitron”(???) works
[00:23] this is how a dyfusional pimbdziaula works
[00:30] this is how a electro-”cabbager” works
[00:38] this is how a steel-koziówka(???) works
[00:45] this is how a safety pin works
[00:49] and other very very-complex inventions
[00:59] and how does a dachshund work?
[01:06] this is how a dachshund works
[02:26] dachshunds have a head
[02:34] a middle
[02:39] and rear part of body
[02:44] inside he have intestine
[02:47] eventually, everything that lives, have some intestines inside
[02:57] dachshund have 3 emotional states
[03:05] he can be angry
[03:11] furious
[03:20] and he can be sad, sorrowful
[03:27] he can be joyful, happy
[03:32] he can be happy
[03:41] [song] …because i’m afraid of emotions, here and there
[03:45] he can be cheerful
[04:00] EWARYST (it’s very strange and funny first name)
[05:02] don’t destroy a dachshund! because it is very complicated mechanism. even a computer is a piece of cake, compared to dachshund
[05:29] don’t destroy the kitty!
[05:38] don’t destroy the pike!
[05:50] don’t destroy the “zurawka”!
[06:12] because these are animals which we need to live
[06:21] rather try to model ourselfs on a nature
[06:30] let’s build quiet muscle-power engine!
[06:41] small estimate
[06:53] one butterfly’ eye is built from thousands of biological photo-diodes
[07:05] the cost of one german photo-diode type FG-70 is 75zl
[07:15] times 20.000 = 1.500.000
[07:28] times 2 eyes…
[07:33] 3.000.000
[07:34] when we destroy one butterfly, we destroy very high class device with biological value
[07:45] 30 million zlotych! (yes, she should have said 3 milion zl, but director of this film asked caretaker of block of flats where he lived for giving her voice to film, that’s why announcer sometimes has problems with the reading ;) )
[07:54] don’t destroy the dachshund!!!

If you have any desire to watch and own some of the best animated shorts of the last twenty years, Acme Filmworks has just released 18 DVD compilations of these films - available individually or in three box sets.

The filmmakers on these sets are a virtual who’s-who of the best contemporary independent animators: Cordell Barker, Borge Ring, Mark Baker, John Dilworth and on and on. The shorts collected include Bill Plympton’s THE FAN AND THE FLOWER, Gaelle Denis’ CITY PARADISE, Marv Newland’s ANIJAM, Virgil Widrich’s FAST FILM, Chris Landreth’s RYAN, Michael Dudok de Wit’s FATHER AND DAUGHTER, Paul Driessen’s 3 MISSES, Wendy Tilby & Amanda Forbis’ WHEN THE DAY BREAKS, Koji Yamamura’s MT. HEAD, Richard Condie’s THE BIG SNIT and Joanna’s Quinn’s GIRL’S NIGHT OUT, amongst many others.

You can buy them on individual DVDs (containing three shorts each) for $5.00 or you can obtain all 54 shorts in three box sets for $30 $90 bucks. An incredible bargain if you ask me. The DVDs are only available through AWN’s www.filmporium.com and the AWN Store.

NFB director Théodore Ushev writes to let me know that his gorgeous Constructivist-flavored short Tower Bawher is now viewable for free on the NFB website for at least a couple of weeks thanks to their World Animation Day celebration. Check it out HERE. Ushev’s work also appears on the Brew as the illustrations for Chris Robinson’s column “Alone, Stinking and Unafraid.”