Awesome Animations

Capybaras are giant, silly-looking rodents that can weigh more than 100 pounds. We assumed that they were built similarly to other mammals, but it looks like we were wrong. According to WVW, these furry critters are piloted by a crew of smaller capybara ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Now, enjoy a song about capybara.

We think Earth is just the right size. It’s big enough to hold billions of people and other creatures, and if you’re dedicated enough, you can visit most of it in a lifetime. But what if we lived on a bigger planet? What If created an animated visualization that shows how big other planets are by stuffing them full of Earth-sized planets.

Recently, Red Side created an animation comparing the speeds of vehicles and other fast-moving objects. This new video switches up the perspective, letting us see how quickly they move from a first- or third-person view. While we love to go fast, a lazy cruise in that Apollo lunar rover looks like a nice way to spend the day.

Some may dismiss the use of generative AI for creating art, but in the hands of the right person, it can be used to create things none of us imagined possible. Filmmaker James Gerde used AI tech to help create animations that imagine humans if they were made of noodles. Each clip is based on footage of talented dancers, and Gerde made them into pasta.

Private space exploration company SpaceX has been launching rockets from Florida’s Cape Canaveral for more than a decade. Hazegrayart put together this captivating digital animation, which shows each launch attempt through the end of 2023, and does a great job demonstrating the increasing frequency of blast-offs. (Thanks, Frenk!)

Mangazi Music has an awesome way of showing off his guitar-playing skills: the neck of his electric guitar shows lyrics and animations in sync with his performance. It appears that he uses a green screen and motion tracking to superimpose perfectly timed graphics onto the guitar, and the results are impressive.

We recently learned that cats are not what they seem. Here’s another unexpected hiding place for a weapon courtesy of snov and nav9 technologies. This garden gnome with a nuclear warhead under his hat should effectively deter annoying neighbors from trespassing on your lawn.

With the advent of computers, typewriters became pretty much obsolete. But it’s still amazing to see the incredible engineering that went into this once ubiquitous office equipment. Jake from Animagraffs takes us deep into the inner workings of a mechanical typewriter using a detailed 3D model of an early 20th-century Underwood.

City dwellers take elevators for granted. But without these engineered marvels, we’d be stuck climbing staircases and probably not have skyscrapers. Illustrator and educator Jared Owen shares another informative 3D animation explaining the inner workings of these metal boxes we trust with our lives on an everyday basis.

Most cars sold these days have an automatic transmission. But it’s hard to beat a manual gearbox and its three-pedal setup when it comes to driver engagement. Jake O’Neill from Animagraphs created this 3D animation that shows us how the clutch, gears, and shifter work in concert to send power to the drivetrain.

Universal Everything teamed with Hyundai to celebrate the brand’s commitment to sustainable design and green energy. The animated clip features a runner that represents water, hydrogen, and oxygen as it transforms through various states and returns to nature. The large-scale visual is on display at Hyundai Motorstudio Busan.

Motion designer and editor Duncan Robson has been painstakingly cropping, aligning, and sequencing images from movie posters in order to create the illusion that each featured actor is turning their head. You can view the individual animations over on the project’s Instagram page.

Ever wonder how the mechanism in those toy cars work so you simply pull them back, and then they zoom forward? Explainer of things Jared Owen’s animation shows us the inner workings of these spring-powered cars and how they store and release energy.

Animator Veljko Popović’s surreal short film tells the tale of a man who finds his life fragmented and disjointed after an accident with a deer changes his life forever. As his world comes apart, so do the polygonal shapes of his universe.

Motion designer Peter Tomaszewicz’s animated short film messes with our expectations, transforming what should be solid surfaces into sand, fluids, fabrics, gas, and bendy materials using CGI physics simulations.

Wes Anderson returns to the world of stop-motion animation in his latest film, about a future in which dog overpopulation leads to an evil overlord quarantining our best friends on an island filled with junk and garbage. Stars pretty much everyone in the universe.