Awesome Animation

Because of their positions at the top and bottom of the Earth, the North Pole and South Pole experience both the longest and shortest days of the year. This fascinating time-lapse animation shows how the top of our planet goes from 24 hours of sunlight a day in the summertime to complete darkness in the winter.

This wildly inventive 60-second promo spot for Amazon Music combines a variety of different filmmaking techniques including stop-motion, 2D and 3D animation, rotoscoping, and even puppetry – each executed with top-notch quality. Directed by Stevie Gee & Essy May for Blink.

Animator Master Tingus loves to create brief cartoons which generally start out with an animal or a person, but turn strange and unexpected as the motion starts. In addition to this compilation video, we recommend checking out their TikTok and Instagram channels for much more weirdness.

When it comes to action figures, more points of articulation are usually better – especially when it comes to dancing. But what happens when your figure can only swivel its head and bend at the hips? TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin shows us that it’s not just about your moves, but also your attitude in this charming animation.

Animator Tomohiro Okazaki of Swimming Design offers up a series of soundless stop motion scenes, each of which features matchsticks as its central focus. Okazaki’s fastidious and precise animation work is simply out of this world, and the motion is some of the smoothest we’ve ever seen in a frame-by-frame animation.

Repeater is a vibrant and inventive animated short film about non-conformity, rejection, and ultimately finding your place in the world. It was directed by Carbon’s Ian Bradley as the title film for the 2021 OFFF Dach Festival. Sound design and music by Antfood. Read more about the story here.

Stop-motion filmmaker and artist Andrea Love shared another one of her wonderfully creative short films. Using nothing more than a needle, felt, and her creativity, she baked up a tiny textile pizza that looks good enough to eat. Her Belgian waffles look yummy too.

(PG-13: Language) The creators of Big Mouth take us inside the department that assigns hormone monsters, shame wizards, love bugs, and depression kitties. Expect plenty of warped adult humor, along with guest spots from the likes of Hugh Jackman, Helen Mirren, and Lupita Nyong’o. Drops 3.18.22 on Netflix.

Visual artist Darren “Darius Twin” Pearson is known for his long-exposure light paintings. He has a particular fondness for skeletons. For the short film Fiat Lux, he captured more than 680 hand-painted scenes, then assembled them into an animation. Each of the 11 scenes is also available as an NFT.

When a scrap dealer is about to crush two old gondola cars, he realizes that there might be more to their story than just some inanimate hunks of metal and glass. This sweet and charming animated short was created by French animation collective MegaComputeur.

Despite an intentionally low frame rate, the animation in Olivier Lescot’s short film The Rift is impeccable, producing a great sense of movement through the use of motion blur and other visual techniques. Strap in for a brief but action-packed ride as a man finds himself chased into the night by a mysterious and heavily-armed crew.

Hayk Manukyan has been creating hand-drawn animations for over 20 years. Over that time, he’s worked for studios like Walt Disney, Warner Bros., FOX, HBO, Comedy Central, CN, Nickelodeon, and MTV. For fun, he created this brief and joyful cartoon of a character named Harut, an ordinary man with some extraordinary dance moves.

(PG-13) Prime Video is starting to expand The Boys universe with the roll-out of its first spin-off. Diabolical is an eight-part animated series, each illustrated in a different style, and each telling a tale that lives in the same warped universe as the main show. Expect plenty of violence, gore, and chaos when it lands 3.4.2022.

Cat Burglar is an interactive cartoon from the creators of Black Mirror. Inspired by the slapstick of Tex Avery, your answers to questions guide Rowdy Cat against Peanut the Security Pup in a museum heist. Your choices result in more than 100 different 10-minute cartoons. Hits Netflix 2.22.22.

Shinrashinge creates amazing interactive manga which play out with the turn of a pencil. Each one is made from a series of opaque and tracing paper rolls that overlay and combine to tell a story. Watch three more of their tear-jerking manga machine stories here, here, and here.

Filmmakers Paul Bush and Lana Tankosa Nikolic created this inventive short film entirely from everyday plastic items. It’s a colorful statement on just how much plastic we use as a society and was created for Plastic Change, a Danish organization working to reduce our dependence on difficult to recycle plastics.

Artist and filmmaker Andrea Love created this gigantic bullfrog sculpture using a wire armature, foam, and needle-felted wool. She captured the two-day process as a stop-motion video, and the frog would go on to appear in the award-winning short film Tulip, a collaboration with children’s book author Phoebe Wahl.

Nathan Boey and Spy Films enlisted the help of 39 fellow animators to create this collaborative short film. The concept is simple: animate a ball for three seconds, then hand it off to another animator in a different country to pick up where they left off. The result is an inventive and engaging 2-minute animation in a variety of styles.

(Gore) Amazon’s uber-violent superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys gets its first spin-off. This animated anthology consists of eight short stories, each told with a unique visual style. This brief first-look teaser introduces us to a baby with similar superpowers to Homelander and the same disregard for human life. Premieres 3.4.22.

Marvelous Media Engine created this awesome animated music box based on the Catbus from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro. What’s even more impressive about this is that it’s all CGI, using Blender3D and other CG animation software to pull off the photorealistic look of the zoetrope.

The Belchers finally get their own big-screen movie. The musical comedy-adventure follows the family as a gigantic sinkhole that opens up in front of Bob’s Burgers and the mysteries they unravel trying to get to the bottom of things. In theaters 5.27.2022.

Animator xtremee_ghost loves the 1980s cartoon Thundercats so much that they created a remastered version of the show’s intro sequence. The new version features crisp, clean lines and vibrant colors in high-definition, versus the grainy old VHS transfers we’re used to seeing. Here’s the original for comparison.

Stop-motion animator Omozoc created this short film which makes it look like wood can be chopped up as easily as vegetables, nails can be tapped in with a spoon, and sanding could be done with a butter knife. The animation was made from 2854 individual images, and no computer visual effects were added.