The Black Dog’s Progress

By
on

Count me in as a fan of Stephen Irwin’s eccentric little animated shorts (check them out here). The Black Dog’s Progress may be his most ambitious one yet. It tells the sad story of the Black Dog, created by animating dozens of small flipbooks:

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  • http://tomboycomics.blogspot.com Emily

    Wow, congrats to the artist. I’d like to hang that animation on my wall. I love how each of the flip books fluctuate a little–makes for a unique collage of animation.

  • Mike

    wow. i really loved that!

  • http://www.rohitiyer.com/ Rohit Iyer

    Quite brilliant.

    The music is just as good as the animation.

  • http://michaelspornanimation.com/splog/ Michael Sporn

    Thanks, Jerry, for introducing me to Stephen Irwin’s work. I went to his site and watched all of them – each one is as good as the next. He’s a real find, and I hope we hear more about him. He’s an artist.

  • http://www.frankrause.com Fran Krause

    The visual style is great. The storytelling is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to bleak for my taste.

  • Jay Taylor

    Well, I tried to watch it, but I couldn’t put up with the music. It just keeps droning on and on and on… but from what I saw it looked really neat.

  • http://www.elliotelliotelliot.com Elliot Cowan

    Bleak?
    I love bleak!

  • http://exitplanetwhom.blogspot.com gavin mouldey

    Well, for a series of flipbooks, I was closer to crying than any Disney feature ever made me. The hundred and one Dalmations never had it this bad. Brilliant, especially with the music.

  • eero

    wow, one of the most astonishing things I´ve seen on the brew for a while!

  • http://checkeredgeekcartoons.blogspot.com Zach

    Does anyone remember the animated short, “Tango”? This sort of reminds me of that, only instead of building up and slowing down, this film builds up and then completely falls apart, which I think I like better.

    I enjoyed this.

  • http://www.inforthekrill.com Greg Holfeld

    In the interests of minimizing the amount of ranting negativity appearing in the comments section, I swallowed huge amounts of bitterness and bile over that CGI Astroboy posting a few days back, so it’s nice to log on and find this sort of mad genius that only animation can create.

    Brilliant. Thank you.

  • http://www.animateprojects.org Animate Projects

    It’s fantastic to hear such glowing praise for The Black Dog. If you’d like to hear more from the man himself, we have an interview with Stephen Irwin here about the film: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/films_2008/atv_s_irwin

    Enjoy
    /P

  • http://blog.ninapaley.com Nina Paley

    What Fran said. The style and visual technique are amazing. The story is pure bummer, pain with no payoff.

  • Kelly

    Great film; really creative and well done. Honestly, it almost made me…uncomfortable to watch it. The music fit perfectly, and just watching the…well, the progress of the black dog was heartbreaking. But hey – I guess evoking something out of your audience is what good filmaking is all about, eh?

  • Sam

    Yeah this isn’t the best thing to watch the day after your dog just died…

    Now I’m just bummed.