Awesome Animation

This animation features a monologue by a monster who was once an alchemist, expressing regrets after attaining the power he sought. Cory Williams of Daydream Studios wrote and directed the short film using Unreal Engine 5 and assets from the Unreal Marketplace. We love the design of Dary Palasky’s creature, Wasserman. (Thanks, Rob!)

After creating their Woodworking without Tools video, animator Omozoc was approached by Casio to create a similar short film for them. While the clip is ultimately a promo to celebrate 40 years of G-SHOCK watches, it’s also a wonderfully-executed example of stop-motion animation and smart product placement.

(PG-13: Animated Nudity) After a power outage awakens a woman, she has trouble getting back to sleep, and ghosts of her past start to appear around her. Ida Melum’s award-winning animated short film explores the lasting impressions that negative experiences can have on one’s psyche, and how we ultimately need to embrace them as part of us.

Annie “Ancho” Choi is a brilliant young artist whose wonderful animations landed her a gig working for the famed Studio Ghibli. Her Instagram and TikTok feature a selection of her beautifully rendered visuals, each of which features an unexpected transformation. We especially love her wearable bread loafers.

After a rat’s prized flower goes missing, his fellow woodland creatures join him on a hunt for the thief. But a case of mistaken identity leads to tragic consequences and proves the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Jorn Leeuwerink award-winning animated short film won numerous awards since its debut in 2017, but this is the first time we’ve seen it.

Blender Studio shows off more of what’s possible with their CG software with a slapstick animated short film. Combining 2D and 3D techniques, Rik Schutte’s Wing It! introduces us to a brilliant inventor (who happens to be a cat) and the dopey dog who might ruin his hard work. As a Blender Open Movie, you can download the production assets used to create the film.

Artist Felix Colgrave is known for his weird and trippy animations, populated with strange-looking creatures. The Lost Suburbs drops us into a maze of streets where a highly energetic character keeps popping up and proceeds to take us on a wild ride. It’s not really an hour long, but you can let it play as long as you’d like.

CG artist pwnisher called on 3D artists again, challenging them to create renders based on a theme and a template. The goal this time: create a short scene featuring the most epic boss battle they could dream up. This video compiles the top 100 pieces of eye candy out of 2,800 submissions, with music by Disasterpiece. We want to play all of these games now.

Peter Ahern’s short film Buzzkill is an animated horror-comedy that starts as a happy little story about a new couple about to enjoy their first kiss. And we emphasize the “about to” because it’s just not going to happen. You see, neither of our protagonists is what they seem, and one of them is about to meet an untimely demise.

When you think about something being microscopic, it all seems the same size from our perspective. But this video from RED SIDE cleverly demonstrates the vast differences in the size of things we can’t see with the naked eye, from the tiniest atom to the relatively gargantuan amoeba. Also, there are way too many viruses.

Hypno Motion makes stop-motion animation. In this short clip, they took some brick-built LEGO chicken legs, battered them up in 1×1 bricks,  and fried them in a pot. Of course, you can’t have fried chicken without a side dish, so they also cooked up some french fries. Their Hidden Patterns Inside video series is a fascinating watch, too.

(Flashing images) Filmmaker Conner Griffith created this riveting short video from public domain images found on Wikimedia Commons. It starts with a single-cell organism, and as each frame advances, the subjects evolve into larger and increasingly complex things. Conner’s 2023 showreel is also well worth a watch.

Artist Alain Biet created this mindblowing short film, which starts out with an artist painting an image of a pencil. As soon as he’s done with that one, more everyday objects start appearing and accumulating until the frame is completely filled. We can’t imagine how long it took Alain to create all 8,000 watercolor paintings. Music by Yan Volsy + Pablo Pico

Textile artist Greg Climer creates quilts that look like pixelated photographs. After filming a brief scene of his friends kissing, he transformed them into a series of 36″ x 48″ quilts which he animated into a 3-second sequence. In total, he made 36 quilts from about 59,000 squares of fabric. It took him roughly five years to complete the project. (Thanks, Rusty!)

There are tons of stop-motion LEGO animations out there, but Legotto’s approach is different. Rather than moving models and minifigs, they create frame-by-frame pixel art animations using 1×1 LEGO bricks. This process requires great patience and attention to detail, but the results are impressive. Check out their octopus, slime, and Pokémon animations.

Sellatorful created a gory hand-drawn sequence that depicts how Alien’s Xenomorphs are born and grow. But the original was missing an appropriate soundtrack. So Bag Ingi added Michael Giacchino’s tune Married Life, the music from Pixar’s Up that underscores Carl and Ellie’s sweet but heartbreaking life story.

Animator MootroidXproductions loves to create stop-motion shorts using action figures and toys. This epic battle sequence features a confrontation between multiple building-stomping Godzillas and a powerful human/Pikachu hybrid, all set to a jazzy soundtrack. They followed it up with Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Pexachu.

Curious George has always lived up to his name, relying on the kindness of The Man in the Yellow Hat to get him out of all sorts of monkey business. But all those years of curiosity have taken their toll on the now grown-up primate. Matt Shaver, Alex Martens, and Joel Haver offer their take on a weary George’s final days in a very real world.

Mike Doughty is best known for his time leading Soul Coughing in the 1990s. But he’s still making great music as both a solo artist in Ghost of Vroom with Andrew “Scrap” Livingston. Produced and mixed by Beastie Boys collaborator Mario Caldado, Jr., the alt-rap track Still Getting It Done offers a groovy electronic rhythm and a fun vertical music video by SWIVS.

Alan Becker’s Animation vs. series usually has stick figures battling the animation process or other stick figures. But in this short, our stick figure hero encounters a new challenge – mathematics. Things start with simple addition and subtraction, but the calculations quickly become harder to solve, especially when Euler’s Identity shows up.

We always enjoy watching size and speed comparison videos. This clip from Data World Studio looks at the relative sizes of the major characters from Pixar’s animated universe. So now we finally know how much bigger Buzz Lightyear is than Remy from Ratatouille and how much smaller they are compared to The Incredibles.

Looney Tunes cartoons are known for iconic characters like Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, and Foghorn Leghorn. The animators who created these characters and their voices often are mentioned, but the artists who created the background images are rarely mentioned. The Gaze gives credit where credit is due with this video essay focused on artist Maurice Noble.

A typical flipbook animation displays its images at roughly 12 frames per second. Andymation wanted to know if he could smooth out the steps in his flipbooks by filling extra frames with AI interpolation software. Will the additional frames improve the look of his animations or make them just look incredibly weird?