Awesome Animation

Seth Everman’s hilarious take on video game music and sound tropes gets a fresh coat of paint, courtesy of animator Sherbies, who added some appropriate game imagery to the original soundtrack. So when can we play Legend of Selma, Bintendo folks?

We could all use a little bit of silliness in these trying times, so we want to send a big thank you to animator AJ Jefferies for a much needed smile. His goofy short video has one very simple premise: “A horse struggles to exist.” We know you can do it, horsey! Go for it!

Stop-motion animator Keshen presents an action-packed LEGO short. Watch as our protagonist minifig (who looks strikingly like The Stig) hacks his way into a mysterious building, and locates a high-value, artificially-intelligent bounty. The only trick, it wants desperately to annihilate him.

Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time and Duncan Trussell of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour team up for a trippy Netflix animated series about an interstellar broadcaster who roams the universe looking for beings to interview. It sounds like Space Ghost Coast to Coast meets Rick and Morty. Drops on 4/20/20, of course.

Norway-based creative studio Rebel Unit shows off an incredible work of motion design, as they envision the birth and development of an artificially-intelligent character. The excerpt comes from filmmaker Tonje Hessen-Schei’s documentary iHuman. (Thanks Bjørn!)

Andrew B. Myers‘ experimental short film uses a combination of animation techniques to fill the frame with dozens of tiny objects constantly in motion. There’s so much going on that you’ll need to go back and watch it multiple times to catch all of the neat little details.

Visual artist Kevin McGloughlin used countless images from Google Earth along with audio samples from NASA to provide “a visual representation of our connection to earth and it’s vulnerable glory.” It’s amazing how these static satellite images can tell such a story.

Lightfarm Studios and Area 23’s intense award-winning animated short film features takes us un a truly wild ride, as a baby finds itself under attack from a universe of terrifying monsters. But if you stick around until the end, you’ll find out the real reason things seem so unsettling.

There’s so much to love about the style, stories, creatures, and characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s catalog of animated films. But what is it about these artful pieces of cinema that make them so dear to us? Kaptain Kristian digs into how Studio Ghibli breathes such life into every frame.

Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson of Wriggles and Robins created this fun stop-motion animation that tells the story of a boy’s action-packed journey to the moon, using pancakes as their medium. They cooked up about 600 pancakes to capture the action, though we’re not sure how many of those they ended up eating.

This beautiful visual treat comes from 3D artist Eidy Knowles and UK musicians Speakman Sound, with vocals by Simo Lagnawi. The inspiration for the track and the music video was a traditional Gnawan song about a spiritual leader and his relationship with the spirits around him.

Motion collage artist Erik Winkowski takes a very simple concept and takes it to the extreme. By compositing hundreds of images of a man doing toe-touches into a series of sine wave patterns, he basically creates an ocean made of humans.

Inspired by an ancient Chinese myth about creation, Taiko Studios‘ animated short film tells the story of a god who has the ability to conjure worlds from nothing. When he realizes the one thing missing is a child, he makes a son in his own image. But will independent thought drive them apart, or bring them closer together?

Like Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote, and Elmer Fudd, Groompy the rabbit perpetually plays the foil in his cartoons. But when he heads home, the monotony and frustration of his life lead him to a dark place. Luis Usón and Andrés Aguilar’s animated short film is brilliantly executed, but incredibly somber.

Written and directed by Mike Burakoff, the animated music video for The Strokes stripped-down new track “At the Door” has a fantastic look. Inspired by classic anime style, it tells an abstract tale of a boy torn between his reality and a dark alternative universe. From The New Abnormal, due out 4/10/2020.

Stop-motion animator Alex Unger of Guldies shared this brief, but well-executed test video in which he demonstrates how he gets jewels out of rocks. In this case, the jewels are simply beads you could buy at any craft store. If only it was this easy to extract precious gems in real life.

The guys from Toronto creative studio reactiv like to play with their food. In this lighthearted animated short, they imagine that edibles were actually used for playing various sports, and making quite the mess in the process.

Charlie Stewart’s beautifully minimal animated short film takes us on a journey to a far-off planet, where two scientists have been left to explore, and two AI-powered digital assistants who strike up a conversation as they wonder where their human masters have gone.

As Charlotte peers out into space from her observatory, she sees what can only be described as a literal black hole. As it approaches the Earth, she dives in and experiences a new perspective on her home planet. A wonderfully imaginative short film by animator Marlies van der Wel with music by Pieter de Graaf.

From living rooms on wheels, to 3D printed humans, to transporter beams, to robotic construction workers, Animator Loek Vugs’ short film muses on some of the likely and unlikely technologies which lie ahead for future of humanity.

We only recently came across this ESMA animated film from 2016, but it’s too good not to share. The award-winning CGI short follows the story of the guardians of a sand castle, as they make their last stand against a terrifying enemy.

What do you get when you take a bunch of old Garfield comic strips and feed them into a machine learning algorithm designed to morph them into a cohesive animation sequence? Nightmares, that’s what. Go figure it was the guy behind Garfield Gameboy’d that tipped us off to Daniel Hanley’s bizarre AI experiment.

Andymation spent over 35 days over the course of 3 months creating this insanely-thick flipbook. The 658-page anime-style sequence only takes about 50 seconds to watch, but it’s a serious testament to the artist’s illustration skill and dedication. Skip to 15:07 for the money shot.