El Empleo, created by Santiago Bou Grasso from Argentina, is a five-minute film that I feel should be about three minutes long.  Usually, I find this an inexcusable crime on the part of the filmmaker, one of the cardinal sins of making a short film (to me it shows a lack of respect to the viewer and a lack of self-awareness on the part of the filmmaker).  But, in the case of El Empleo, I still like the core idea a lot and find the film recommendable despite my issues with its pacing.  It’s got a clever hook, and the filmmaker explores his idea thoroughly and structures it well.

Francis Thompson (1908-2003) made this striking work, NY, NY: A Day in New York, in 1957. Trained as a painter, he was interested in finding a way to capture the effects of Surrealism and Cubism in photography. He achieved that through a variety of lenses, reflectors, optical effects and editing tricks. The film works both in the abstract and narrative sense, and while it’s not animated, Thompson’s creative use of the cinema medium is fresher and more emotionally engaging than many of today’s artificial worlds created through motion graphics and digital means. Thompson was secretive about how he made the film, describing the production simply as, “a magic, secret process of bending, twisting, and turning inside out. It was a self-funded project that involved my roaming about New York City with a camera over my shoulder.”

Aldous Huxley once wrote about this film:

“And then there is what may be called the Distorted Documentary a new form of visionary art, admirably exemplified by Mr. Francis Thompson’s film, NY, NY. In this very strange and beautiful picture we see the city of New York as it appears when photographed through multiplying prisms, or reflected in the backs of spoons, polished hub caps, spherical and parabolic mirrors. We still recognize houses, people, shop fronts, taxicabs, but recognize them as elements in one of those living geometries which are so characteristic of the visionary experience. The invention of this new cinematographic art seems to presage (thank heaven!) the supersession and early demise of non-representational painting. It used to be said by the non-representationalists that colored photography had reduced the old-fashioned portrait and the old-fashioned landscape to the rank of otiose absurdities. This, of course, is completely untrue. Colored photography merely records and preserves, in an easily reproducible form, the raw materials with which portraitists and landscape painters work. Used as Mr. Thompson has used it, colored cinematography does much more than merely record and preserve the raw materials of non-representational art; it actually turns out the finished product. Looking at NY, NY, I was amazed to see that virtually every pictorial device invented by the old masters of non-representational art and reproduced ad nauseam by the academicians and mannerists of the school, for the last forty years or more, makes its appearance, alive, glowing, intensely significant, in the sequences of Mr. Thompson’s film.

Nature is an experimental animator. This is a video of long-exposure photos of bugs moving under a street light. While the process is not animation, the results evoke scratch-on-film techniques, not to mention the more obvious comparison to PikaPika.

(via Kottke)

I haven’t seen a new piece of animation by stop-motion animator Corky Quackenbush in what seems like forever, so I was pleasantly surprised to run across his latest: Harry Potter and the Office of Unemployment.

I also found this “sex and violence” reel with clips from Quakenbush’s familiar classics along with newer works that I hadn’t seen. Family Guy could stand to take a lesson from Corky about what it means to be edgy and outrageous.

For more about Corky, visit his charmingly outdated website SpaceBassFilms.com.

We linked to a preview of Justin Weber’s Juiced and Jazzed a few months ago, but now the whole film is viewable online at liquorflicker.com

The cartoon began as Weber’s senior film at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It was completed at MAKE in Minneapolis. Weber writes:

“I graduated in December 2008, having completed a black and white version of the cartoon, I was employed at MAKE, a design studio in Minneapolis that specializes in motion graphics and animation. There, with the help of fellow MCAD graduates Andrew Chesworth, Aaron Quist, and Joe Kim, we colored and finished the cartoon. It premiered at the Palm Springs International ShortFest in June and won 2nd Place in the Animation category.”

The cartoon features the recordings “The Uptown Lowdown” by Joe Venuti and “The Charelston” by Spike Jones. I always have a soft spot for “retro-30s” rubber hose tributes like this. Well done, Justin.

“Fly Day” is the latest episode of Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield, a UK-based director on the Tandem Films roster. It’s refreshing to see animation that hinges everything on the quality of acting, characterization, and observation. Tofield directs our attention towards the character’s personality to the point of not including any color, camera moves, or cuts in the entire episode. Simon’s Cat is also a fine example of an on-line animation success story. In a little over a year, the four previous episodes of the cartoon have reached nearly 30 million pageviews, which has led to a book deal for Tofield. More details on the book are available at SimonsCat.com.

(Thanks, David K.)

Another one of my memorable finds at the Anima Mundi festival is Jam by Japanese artist Mirai Mizue. The short, which can be viewed HERE, does an expert job of building up tension through a carefully orchestrated layering of sound and imagery. Although the online screen size is too small, it still communicates the unique artistic achievement of Mizue’s work.

I’m having an unforgettably fantastic time at Anima Mundi in Brazil. One of the films that picked up an award at the festival is Mon Chinois (2008) by Cédric Villain, which looks at how the Western world stereotypes Chinese people. The film does a good job of evoking both laughter and unease from the viewer. It’s in French, but I think you’ll be able to figure it out.