Awesome Animation

Diatomic studio created and directed this compelling black-and-white short film which uses basic geometric shapes to create hypnotic visuals. By combining, rotating, moving, and scaling the individual objects, hypnotic patterns come to life. Watch it once from a distance, then watch it again, focusing on an specific point.

We’ve seen a LEGO machine that could make pancakes, so the idea of a brick-built cake bakery isn’t that far-fetched. But Tomosteen made their LEGO cake factory using stop-motion animation. The fanciful facility is run by a team of tiny cats, who surprisingly don’t lap up the batter before it can be baked in the LEGO brick oven.

Digital artist and illustrator Markos Kay created this captivating short film that features surreal and otherworldly life forms that look like nothing we’ve ever seen before. They definitely look organic, though, combining elements of plants and animals. Markos’ Vimeo channel is loaded with many more strange beings.

Artist DariusTwin has made some amazing stop-motion animations using point sources of light and long exposures. This short vertical video transports us to a magical, rainbow-filled world set to the tune of the classic song Dream (When You’re Feeling Blue).

Sean Buckelew’s animated film explores what might happen if the government combined artificial intelligence and drone technology to enable a war machine that makes “objective, compassionate, and ethical” decisions. While live-streaming a demo of its capabilities, a programming error causes it to rethink its purpose.

In this video from The Q, he shows us how he made a hand-cranked machine for displaying animations using cardboard, rubber bands, and a few pieces of hardware. The zoetrope-like device has a series of 25 animation frames on each of its tiers, creating the illusion of movement when it spins.

Felix Colgrave is known for his weirdly imaginative animations. His latest short film features a collage of silly creatures made of objects at the bottom of the sea. “Donks” comes from his 2-year-old’s pronunciation of “gonks,” the artist’s term for “things that are not categorically blocks or figurines or anything describable.”

This animated short film envisions Earth 100,000 years in the future. After changes in the environment and climate have left the planet ravaged, new lifeforms emerge from the primordial soup, adapting and evolving to thrive in a very different world than we know today. Directed and animated by Wang & Söderström.

Stop-motion animator tomosteen takes us on a trip inside a unique vending machine that serves up delicious burgers. Each tiny sandwich is prepared with love by a legless skeleton who works with a team of bird and kitty cat sous chefs. And if you think that sounds weird, it’s because it is.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the short film, Nitro WarriorsSpaceCamperBike, Paul Greer’s Vanguard Pictures is back with another action-packed stop-motion car chase. This time, a truck carrying valuable cargo is pursued by a dragon car and a crew of malicious motorists. After the cops show up, a T-Rex gets in on the action.

Eclectic Method is known for his creative music remixes and video edits. Now, he’s started to experiment with AI-generated imagery. In this animated music video, you’ll spot scenes from films like Saturday Night Fever, Dirty Dancing, Pulp Fiction, and Footloose, only with digitally-created characters performing the choreography.

The late Bob Ross had a distinctive style to his serene landscape paintings. After training an AI image generator on Bob’s paintings, Miha Mastnak created this wild video that makes it look like the artist painted an animated river, lazily winding through a valley. Watch the 60-second view of the canvas here.

We’ve been following the work of animator Cyriak for more than a decade. His music video for prog rock band Light’s track Betray makes us of the artist’s surreal, kaleidoscopic collage style to tell a story of murderous mayhem bubbling beneath the surface of 1950s idealism.

Animator MIKAN used the Unity game and graphics engine to create this engrossing video of an imaginary factory that churns out humanoids by the dozens. Watch as the individual components come together to form each figure, then stick around to the end to see how many pass the rigorous quality assurance testing.

The opening credits of King of the Hill are still one of our favorites ever. Udge created this great bit of machinima that replicates the opening of Mike Judge’s classic comedy, but with characters from the Nintendo 3D platformer Donkey Kong 64 along with sounds from the game. Here’s a side-by-side comparison for fun.

Animator, LEGO and Batman fan Idan Kotzen created this fantastic animated short celebrating some of the various Batmobiles over the years. The stop-motion and clever use of lighting give the cars a great sense of movement, as LEGO Batman gives chase to the evildoers of Gotham.

Superman has always been seen as one of the more powerful superheroes. But there are others with similar superpowers – some good, some evil. Mighty Raccoon! imagines what might happen if Supes found himself face-to-face and fist-to-fist with One-Punch Man’s Saitama, The Boys’ Homelander, and Invincible’s Omni-Man.

Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma’s animated short is one of the most artful things we’ve seen rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and its production design and storytelling are top-notch. It chronicles two sisters, and the evil one of them unleashes when jealousy takes over. Their behind-the-scenes series delves deep into the filmmaking process.

This experimental animated film takes us deep into a web of humans and technology. The surreal effect was created by artist ThomasDotCodes with the help of VQGAN-CLIP – a natural language image generation toolkit. Watch in 1080p or higher in full-screen mode for maximum impact. Then, go deeper into the Matrix.

(PG-13: Gore) A thousand years from now, civilization has fallen, and chaos rules the wasteland. Fortunately, there’s one way out of the HOT FUTURE – epic dance moves. This bonkers 3-part animated series comes to us courtesy of Mike Anderson and Ryan Dickie for Adult Swim SMALLS.

RPGs and fantasy movies often send their characters on a quest for a mythical object. The Minute Hour and animator slouch take a jab at the trope with a cartoon about a man and his quest to capture an orb that possesses such mysterious powers that even we shall not understand them by the end of the video.

With the help of AI image generation tech, Corridor created this short fan film in the style of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The crossover imagines that The Avengers (and a whole lot of Spider-Men variants) found their way into the Spider-Verse as a result of the events of Doctor Strange’s actions. Go behind the scenes here.

The Beatles song I’m Only Sleeping debuted on the 1966 album Yesterday and Today. Now has a brand new music video, and it’s a true work of art. Filmmaker Em Cooper created this dreamlike animated video by painting each and every frame by hand. The video was comissioned to celebrate the Special Edition remaster of Revolver.