Awesome Surreal

This incredible short film, directed and animated by Duncan Hatch, takes us on a surreal journey that travels from outer space to a cubicle farm to a colorful forest populated with weird creatures. Noah Kowalski’s sound design and Tom Ippolito’s music deliver a sense of immersion that is truly headphone-worthy.

A faction of the computer graphic Demoscene prides itself on creating visuals with the least code possible. Programmer Alcatraz turned up at the Revision 2024 demo party with this surreal scene – a post-apocalyptic black-and-white city created with just 256 bytes of Gopher code running on DOS. Revision posted some competing 256-byte demos here.

Animator Lee Hardcastle is known for his gory and twisted claymation shorts, including Rick and Morty’s Non Canonical Adventures. In Dreaming Child, we’re transported into the mind of a young boy whose dream starts out joyful but quickly turns into a surreal nightmare.

Scandinavian brand Indigofera is known for its oversized Norwegian wool blankets. They teamed up with artist Björn Atldax to create a series of eye-catching textile art. The surrealist images incorporate skulls, monsters, and traditional Mixtec symbology. Each blanket measures 2 m x 1.5 m (~6.56 ft x 4.92 ft) and will wrap you in warmth and weirdness.

From the late 1970s to the 1990s, George Lucas was featured in a number of ad spots for Japanese electronic brands Panasonic and Technics. On their own, the commercials are a little strange and awkward, but in the hands of editor Neil Cicierega, the weird factor just hit Level 9000.

Artist Guldies spent a year working on their latest short film, a wonderfully weird and inventive stop-motion animation featuring objects that morph between organic and man-made forms. In all, there are more than 4400 individual frames, each composed of hand-sculpted Plastilina and Fimo clay.

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.

(PG-13) Academy Award-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Babel, Birdman, The Revenant) is the mind behind this epic film about a Mexican journalist and documentarian whose return to his country triggers memories and fears from his past. The film’s surrealist visual approach is sure to wow some and bewilder others.

TikTok channel The Art Room is packed with colorful illustrations created with pastels, pencils, correction fluid, and masking tape. This particular image features two people creating a beautiful sky with their flashlights. They took some artistic license with their additive color mixing.

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.

Could you use a vacation? Perhaps a trip to Convergence Station is in order. But when we say “a trip” we mean, like on acid. Andreas Nilsson’s short starts out as a retro travel promo but quickly descends into madness as its true destination is revealed. All aboard!

We’re no strangers to weird internet videos and short films. In this video essay from Now You See It, they explore the visual splendor and surprising depth that comes along with bizarre classics like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected, and the ubiquitous Oogachaka Baby.

If Valdimar Jóhannsson’s movie Lamb lives up to its intense trailer, it looks like it’s gonna be one wild ride. It follows the story of a childless couple in Iceland who adopt a newborn lamb on their farm, but after they start treating the animal as a member of the family, it may just end up ripping them apart.

In 1996, photographer Charles O’Rear snapped a photo that would appear on over a billion desktops thanks to its selection as the default Windows XP wallpaper. Animator Zachary Loren Jones revisits the story of this iconic image and its impact on the zeitgeist with an imaginative and surreal retrospective.

Visual effects artist RubenFro creates imaginative 3D worlds. He starts by capturing a point cloud matrix of locales using 360º cameras, then manipulates and renders the dots using a custom shader in Unity, resulting in incredible, ethereal imagery. This footage was captured in the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam.

In the midst of the COVID-19 shutdown, filmmaker Dan Denegre of Space Race Studio headed to the streets of San Francisco with his drone. There, he captured this surreal and disquieting footage of the normally bustling city all but shuttered. Similarly haunting footage is popping up all around the world.

A homeowner decided to use BriefCam’s Rapid Recap tech in his FLIR FX security camera to capture all of the activity that took place one morning in his front yard. The tech superimposes time-lapse images on a static background, providing a quick glimpse at a day’s activities, and some awesomely surreal video footage.

(PG-13: Language) Writer/director Stephan Zlotescu and cinematographer H1 teamed up to create this short film that envisions an insane future in which our obsession with commercial goods has driven corporations to genetically engineer real-world versions of their mascots.

A hilariously weird, darkly comic short film about two soccer moms living in a surreal world where superficiality and nonchalance lead to some very strange outcomes indeed. From the warped minds of Upright Citizens Brigade alums Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe.

This surreal puzzle game takes players on a fantastic voyage through the human body, as realized through imagery inspired by artist and science writer Fritz Kahn. The game envisions the inner workings of the body as a 1920s factory. Available on iOS and Android now.

Director Murat Sayginer’s abstract, purple-hued animation is filled with imagery so bold and surreal, that it could do double duty as the title sequence for a Netflix or HBO drama.

Animator Felix Cosgrave’s latest short took him over 2 years to create, but the result was well worth the wait, as he transports us to a weird and wild universe where strange characters take turns trying to steal the crown of a surreal kingdom. What the heck did we just watch?

Before thrilling us with his sci-fi movies Timecrimes and Extraterrestrial, writer and director Nacho Vigalondo showed off his mastery at combining the mundane and the surreal in this short film that elevates what would otherwise be a cheesy rom com scene.