This animated viral Avatar spoof by Harry Partridge is XXX-rated - but it’s also very funny (if you’ve seen the film) and I had to share it here.

This is one of the most beautiful short films of the year. Everything you see is CG except for the photographer (shot on greenscreen), pigeons, timelapsed growing flowers, the flying airplane and sky backgrounds. Stunning realism, artfully done.

(Thanks, Gibbs Rainock)

An animated short directed by Sam Stephens from Humble’s in-house directing collaborative Hydra. The film combines photography of decomposing fruit with CG characters on top. In the words of the filmmaker, Homunculus is:

a dark and twisted fable of spontaneous generation and untrammeled id. Taking its title from the Latin word for “Little Human”, the piece is an associative mashup between the two concepts behind the word: The first being middle-age alchemical beliefs that “little men” could be spontaneous generated from dead or decaying matter. The second being Carl Jung’s usage as a personification of pure id. These ideas, combined with our love of Dutch still life’s “beautiful decay,” sowed the seeds for this unique little monster of a film.

(Thanks, Mike Johnson)

I saw Ian Miller’s one-minute short last year at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, when I was a member of the festival’s three-person short film jury. We gave it an honorable mention for the undergraduate animation category (it was created at UArts in Philly). Looking at it again, I remain impressed by the insane amount of graphic inventiveness that Ian fits into every frame of his animation. There is nothing cliche about the way anything moves in this film. The ideas flow straight out of Ian’s twisted mind onto the screen, and it’s loads of fun to watch.

(Thanks, Brian Lonano, for the link)

This is the trailer for Tussilago, the latest short by Swedish director Jonas Odell. Story doesn’t sound like typical fare: “In 1977 West German terrorist Norbert Kröcher was arrested for having planned to kidnap the Swedish politician Anna-Great Leijon. Among the people arrested during the following raids was Kröcher’s former girlfriend ‘A.’ This is her story.”

Stylistically, it builds on Odell’s prior two shorts—Lies and Never Like the First Time!—which were biographical narratives combining an artistic use of rotoscope and live-actors with motion graphic embellishments. Tussilago debuts the end of this month at the Göteborg International Film Festival and will screen at the Berlin International Film Festival next month. Other festivals will undoubtedly follow. On a related note, Revolver, a beloved early short that Odell co-directed, can be seen in its entirety on the Filmtecknarna website.

Hulu’s library of animated TV shows, shorts and features is growing more impressive by the week. Hulu’s content includes current series (The Simpsons, Family Guy), anime (One Piece, Inuyasha), animated shorts (the Koji Yamamura library, Pink Panther, Ant and the Aardvark, Tijuana Toads), features (American Pop, The Secret of NIMH), and old TV series (Stressed Eric, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Fat Albert, Drawn Together, He-Man). Hulu isn’t perfect—most of their content is geo-targeted for specific territories, some of the animation is only available for limited periods of time, and the videos have embedded advertising (though the percentage of ads relative to content isn’t unbearable). But even with these issues, it’s a small price to pay for the opportunity to program your personal ‘cartoon network.’ Here’s to hoping that Hulu continues to emphasize animation amongst their other offerings.

Here’s an example of what can be found on Hulu—Koji Yamamura’s Kid’s Castle:

(Thanks, Max Porter)

I got a kick out of this trailer for Storm, a nine-minute animated short based on a ‘beat poem’ by Australian comedian and writer Tim Minchin. The film is directed by DC Turner, and animated by Turner and Fraser Davidson. The filmmakers have a blog where they’re sharing artwork from the short while Minchin’s original poem can be heard here.

(Thanks, Dan Pinto)

Here’s a film I hadn’t seen before, and I want thank Brew reader Michael Lanigan for bringing it to my attention. It’s a great example of current Russian animation, much of which is still unseen by the Western world. The Stormy Petrel (2004) is by Alexei Turkus (full credits here), and was produced at Russia’s leading animation studio Argus International. It satirizes the poem Song of the Stormy Petrel by Maxim Gorky and serves as a commentary on the Russian educational system. It’s nine minutes and definitely worth watching - it gets crazier and crazier as it goes on.