I’m a sucker for retro-nonsense like this:

Paul Badilla and his friends in Chile made this for an exhibition for the artist Marcela Trujillo. I have no idea what the point of this piece is supposed to be, but here’s a production blog in Spanish with plenty of images of artists at work.

Rooftop Films, the yearly film festival that takes place across the rooftops of New York City, is currently accepting submissions for its 2009 summer series. Next year’s festival, the 13th anniversary of Rooftop, runs from May through September. The early submission deadline is January 5, 2009. Submission fees are a reasonable $9, and everybody who submits receives two free passes to any Rooftop Films show. They’re a solid filmmaker-friendly organization that I hear only good things about and should be commended for supporting both animation and live-action filmmakers. Complete submission info can be found on the Rootop Films website.

Joe Dante’s Trailers From Hell is down for Christmas week, so instead of trailer commentaries he’s running The Hangman, a rarely-seen 1964 short subject designed by Paul Julian and co-directed by Julian and Les Goldman, based on Maurice Ogden’s classic poem. If you are only familiar with Julian’s work through his years of background design for Warner cartoons or UPA’s version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1953), you know you are in for a treat. Haunting and moody – believe it or not, they used to show this to us in public school in the 1960s!

Thanks, Joe!

A cute Christmas greeting from our animator pal Boris Hiestand…

When I presented my 2008 animation picks last week, I didn’t offer up any student shorts on my list. That’s not because I didn’t see any good student work during this past year. Far from it, I saw quite a few nice pieces. Nothing blew me away though to the extent that I had to include it on the list. That’s all changed now because I’ve just seen Story from North America, an awesomely excellent film animated by Kirsten Lepore and Garrett Davis, with music written and performed by Davis. Created at the Maryland Institute College of Art, it is a combination of surprisingly poignant song-driven storytelling and some of the most crazily inventive and funny hand-drawn animation I’ve seen in recent times. The short may have less polish and sheen than other student films, but its originality and creative use of the animation medium makes it one short I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

(Thanks, Kelly Toon)

I saw Compost a few months back and was really pleased to discover that it’s online. It’s a beautiful piece of work. Husband-and-wife filmmaking team Jim and Diane Downer talk about their filmmaking process in this interview with Rooftop Films:

“It wasn’t apparent to me at first, but now looking back on the project I see it as a documentary, a record of all the walks Diane and I took together with our four dogs to collect specimens. Things go by so quickly on the screen, when in reality they took months to collect and assemble. There’s a lot of wonderfully peaceful memories associated with this film. Also, along with being entertaining the film also has scientific value. It represents a cross section, a sampling of Rochester’s biomass. Grade-school children always seem to make that connection when they watch the film.”