Awesome Animation

Green screens are used in live-action movies to change backgrounds and add VFX. But we didn’t think they were necessary for animation until we watched this silly short which shows the technique in use. Directed, designed, and animated by Russ Etheridge, Ricard Badia, and Milo Targett, with sound by Mutant Jukebox.

Animist creates some of the smoothest stop-motion animations we’ve seen. In this clip, they recreated Shotaro Kaneda’s classic motorcycle scene from AKIRA, complete with lightning bolts and smoke. Though Kaneda’s quick moves have a different motivation here. The behind-the-scenes footage is worth a watch too.

Fractal art can be beautiful, hypnotic, and colorful. But with the proper arrangement of pixels, these mathematical patterns can also be dark and downright unsettling. Motion designer Chris Lavelle’s short fractal animation Creation 1 is especially disturbing, especially for those who suffer from trypophobia.

An anime adaptation of Mark Millar and Leinil Yu’s Super Crooks comic books is coming to Netflix. The story about a group of supervillains is like Oceans Eleven, but the heist crew has superpowers. Premieres 11.25.2021 spanning thirteen 30-minute episodes.

Artist and animator Daihei Shibata has a little fun in this series of playful vignettes for Japan’s NHK broadcast network. Each of the 30-second spots fools around with NHK’s typographic logo and incorporates an adorable anthropomorphic television.

After a little old lady buys some cookies to snack on at the train station, she finds herself the victim of a snack thief when she sits next to him on a bench. Eduardo Verastegui’s lighthearted animated short film reminds us that not everything is as it may appear at first.

Filmmaker Sam Mason and a talented team of collaborators created this visually spectacular and emotive animated music video for the late Mac Miller’s 2014 collab with Thundercat, Colors and Shapes. The video follows Miller’s dog Ralph as heads on a metaphorical journey through a world filled with characters inspired by the song.

“Ever since Metallica cut their hair, they’ve been bad.” A narrow-minded, politically incorrect broadcaster sits in his trailer, ranting about various issues and taking credit for all of The Smashing Pumpkins’ hits in this hilarious animated short by Joe Bennett and Conner O’ Malley.

After his animations started to crash Adobe After Effects, Cyriak decided to create his own animation system. Naturally, the results are as hilariously weird as you’d expect from the famed surrealist animator.

Motocross Saito created this captivating pixel art short that showcases how work culture has evolved since the 1920s in Japan. From the days when workers crowded into cramped offices, to 1980s workaholism, to the modern work-from-home era, the Japanese work ethic has remained one of the strongest on Earth.

100Bombs Studios dusted off footage from the 1990s Spider-Man animated series and edited it to match the audio from the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer. Using scenes between Spidey, Doctor Strange, and Doc Ock, it syncs up surprisingly well.

Lord Victor Haegelin aka Patagraph shared behind-the-scenes footage of an awesome stop-motion loop they created on that follows a runner’s journey. The top half shows the top-down footage of the puppets being rigged, while the bottom half shows the finished piece. Flip to the second slide for a look at the animatic it was based on.

Filmmaker, skier, and animator Sämi Ortlieb combined his passions to create this unconventional take on a ski action film. Through the use of stop-motion techniques, its skiers traverse obstacles that didn’t exist a split-second before they arrived at them.

Hong Kong is loaded with tall and colorful apartment buildings like the ones we saw in The Block Tower. Artist Max Hattler created this experimental animation by taking thousands of individual building photos and sequencing them to create vertical and horizontal movements.

3D artist and motion designer Matthieu Braccini has been working in his spare time on a science fiction short film about a humanoid alone in space. He hasn’t had time to finish it, so in the meantime, he shared this short sequence that reveals the main character coming to life from a sea of seemingly random shapes.

It’s been more than a decade since Swedish band Rymdreglage released their stop-motion LEGO animated video 8-Bit Trip. Now they’re back with a follow-up video that celebrates 8-bit and 16-bit games (and haircuts). It incorporates some cool 3D effects achieved with a motion-controlled camera rig.

Professional animator Rich Webber’s stop-motion short is “a film about sharing.” The story of two strangers on a park bench serves as a standalone comedic film with a great punchline but works on another level, satirizing the relationship between society’s haves and have-nots.

Spend an evening among the animals through this series of short but impactful vignettes. Scott Wenner’s animated short film does a wonderful job creating a mood and sense of time and place through its sepia-tone color palette and silhouetted imagery.

Filmmakers Ryo Kitabatake and Takuma Sasaki created this experimental short film about the everyday pressures that weigh on all of us. The tentacled mass that tugs at our protagonist is boldly symbolic of the complex and intertwined nature of modern life’s responsibilities. Music and sound design by Max Cooper.

Phil Tippett is the stop-motion genius behind scenes like the marching AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back and ED-209 in the original Robocop. Now, some 30 years in the making, his passion project is complete. MAD GOD is described as a sci-fi/horror “set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mutants, and mad scientists.”

(PG-13: Language) Animator Steve Smith’s hilariously weird short film drops us into a post-apocalyptic world where all that remains are electronically augmented mutants who float around flooded cities collecting garbage that humanity left behind. Can we get a S.L.U.G.Z. feature film now?

Some of our earliest childhood memories involve colorful Fisher-Price toys with big buttons, spinny parts, and other tactile things to play with. This short animation from NYC creative house Bullpen envisions the evolution of these toys as we grow into adulthood, better representing life, from the mundane to the downright dangerous.

Stop-motion animator Bebop cooks up a delicious pizza with the help of some unconventional ingredients, including 2×2, 2×3, 2×4, and other studded plastic blocks. The 2-minute film is comprised of roughly 3,300 photos, and an unknown quantity of LEGO bricks.