Awesome Animation

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.

A man has been trapped aboard his own spaceship for years, as his robot guardian insists that not a single planet they’ve visited is habitable. But what’s the real reason he’s not allowed to disembark? Gökalp Gönen’s short film is a thought-provoking and creative work of science fiction with a fantastic style and mood.

Animator Lazy Square create this fun little 43-second clip which imagines the evolution of a little red sedan from its humble beginnings in 1989 through its retirement and eventual rebirth as something straight out of Doc Brown’s laboratory in Back to the Future.