Awesome Animation

This incredible short film, directed and animated by Duncan Hatch, takes us on a surreal journey that travels from outer space to a cubicle farm to a colorful forest populated with weird creatures. Noah Kowalski’s sound design and Tom Ippolito’s music deliver a sense of immersion that is truly headphone-worthy.

This way-too-short film from Yeti Pictures and director Tony Zagoraios features a series of miniature vignettes inspired by classic movie scenes, including The Exorcist, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and more. The animation and modeling team did a great job making it look like it was filmed with models and action figures, but it’s all CGI.

There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos featuring various objects being jammed into industrial shredders. Atomic Marvel went to the extreme and stuck the entire sun into a shredder to see what would happen. We’re surprised it didn’t melt the machine as soon as it hit the gears with its 10,000-degree surface temperature.

Whether you’re a snail or a gazelle, you must move around to survive in this world. In the latest comparison video from RED SIDE, they animated the vast differences in the movements of all kinds of animals, from ants to elephants and everything in between. Watch it in 4K if you’ve got the bandwidth, and find out if a human can outrun a hippo.

It’s been over 50 years since Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. To celebrate the occasion, drummer Nick Mason asked fans to create their own animated music videos for each song on the classic prog rock album. This playlist is gradually revealing all ten winners plus behind-the-scenes interviews with the artists.

The mighty Dog of Wisdom is back. A year to the day since his last appearance, the all-knowing canine is here to school a chihuahua on the value of a good bone. Then, our favorite animated wiener dog turns up to grant the Dog of Wisdom a wish.

The Instagram page for keta_valve has a strange assortment of industrial equipment and DIY animations of pandas. This video falls into the latter category, showing off a clever animation technique that uses an iPhone moving through a sequence of paper cutouts to create motion. Watching how it was made was just as entertaining as the finished animation.

Created by writer and director SouthernShotty, this family-friendly animated short film tells the story of a girl born from a watermelon seed in the belly of a fallen King. But instead of following the same selfish path of her maker, she’s sent on a quest for a new home and a journey of self-discovery. (Thanks, Rob!)

Jared Owen presents another fascinating animation of a complex machine—or, in this case, multiple machines working together. In this video, he walks us through the automated donut factory, which you can find at many Krispy Kreme locations. These machines can crank out up to 3000 donuts per hour. Our favorite part is the glaze waterfall.

Animals come in all shapes and sizes. In this video from Posit Pixel, they use pixel art to describe some of the extremes of the animal kingdom, from diminutive parasitic wasps to a 42-foot-long snake. Along the way, you’ll learn about a fingernail-sized frog and Quetzalcoatlus, an extinct flying animal with a wingspan as big as a single-engine airplane.

For his latest 3D challenge, Clinton Jones, aka Pwnisher, asked CG artists to create scenes based on a template of a character climbing a curved staircase. After receiving 2800 entries from around the world, here are the top 100 renders edited together to create a seemingly endless climb, set to music by Feverkin. It’s hard to choose a favorite interpretation.

Andymation is known for his creative flipbook animations. He once created a flipbook smaller than a penny, but that wasn’t good enough for Andy, so he made an even smaller one. It took some work to get the camera and lens setup right; then, he got to work drawing each tiny frame with a sharp pencil. After that came the challenge of stacking them.

“Some things don’t have words. So we have to be close enough to feel them.” A mother explains to her daughter how she came to understand the way her father expresses his love and support. Julian Curi aka Righteous Robot spent almost three years creating this paper stop-motion short film as a way of coping with his father’s passing.

Can you imagine if Danny DeVito joined the X-Men? Imagine no longer. The VFX team from Corridor used their creativity and modern animation tools to put together an insane fake trailer that sends Frank Reynolds to Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, where he embraces his inner Wolverito. In a hurry? Cut right to the chase.

This animated film follows the story of Roz, a robot that crashlands on an uninhabited island. Along the way, Roz finds ways to survive and thrive, and eventually, a place among the animals. Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal head up a star-studded voice cast, along with Mark Hamill, Matt Berry, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, and Ving Rhames.

Artist LeopARTnik creates hilarious short animations by drawing arms on birds. This compilation video shows some of his best doodles from 2023, including a bird putting a guitar smackdown on a kitten, a chicken on tiny skis, and a parrot that washes windows. Quantastic put together a couple more videos of his work.

This charming animated short by 16-year-old CG artist John Torres looks at a day in the life of a robotic farmer as it patiently waits to harvest vegetables to put into a pot of homemade soup. John says his film “highlights the virtues of perseverance, mindfulness, and the joy that can be found in the simplest of tasks.” Created with Blender.

We’re lovestruck by Patator’s animated music video for French trip-hop group Chinese Man’s poetic track Too Late. The stop-motion clip drops us into a magical world where horses breakdance and scratch records and storied lives play out on a human-sized hamster wheel.

Here’s a different take on Disney’s Steamboat Willie now that it’s in the public domain. d o g took Ub Iwerks’ 1928 classic cartoon and converted it into retro pixel art animation. You can play the video now, or, of you’re feeling more ambitions, load up the DOSbox emulator and load this XDV file into XDC Play.

Animator Lee Hardcastle is known for his gory and twisted claymation shorts, including Rick and Morty’s Non Canonical Adventures. In Dreaming Child, we’re transported into the mind of a young boy whose dream starts out joyful but quickly turns into a surreal nightmare.

This animated/live-action series from Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge stars Zach Woods as an NPR talk show host who awkwardly interviews real-world celebrities. Season one guests include Hugh Laurie, Mike Tyson, and Nicole Byer. It’s a similar premise to Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Earth to Ned, without the aliens. Coming to Peacock 1.25.2024.

Graham Mason’s silly animated short is basically what would happen if Dunder-Mifflin was a rock quarry, and the office staff was made up entirely of rocks. Instead of Jim and Pam, we get a duo of blobby boulders with a similarly charming and challenged work-personal relationship. Created for Adult Swim Smalls.

This award-winning animated film from École des Nouvelles Images drops us onto an island where a volcanic eruption threatens a flock of birds. As the cloud of dust and lava bursts into the sky, two birds try their best to save their eggs from disaster. The short does a great job of ramping up the tension while remaining lighthearted in its approach.