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A nightmarish sequence of animation for a play about autism from Julia Pott

Bustykelp’s Wood Imps

While trawling YouTube yesterday I came upon this tiny bit of animation. I love it. It’s so well done with the camera shake and the quality of the imps that you instantly believe in them. There’s something about the way they’re acted that reminds me of the Dark Crystal and other Henson classics.

Higher quality version and a clip from another short film Kelpie can be found on the Bustykelp website

Dog by Suzie Templeton

Something a little darker again here… Dog by BAFTA and Academy Award winning animator Suzie Templeton tells a story of a boy, grieving for his dead mother and seeking reassurance from his father. This is probably one you’d want to watch before showing to your kids in case it’s too dark!

When the Day Breaks

And now for something totally different. This is like a kitchen sink drama with farmyard animals. The point of view dips and swirls through the day in the life of a pig and a chicken. This short film is beautifully drawn and executed by Canadian animators Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbes. No wonder it was nominated for an Oscar back in 2001 for Best Animated Short.

Born Button Presser

Many of us love to press buttons or flick switches…

By Zack Mathew, his final project for the Digital Character Animation program at the Vancouver Film School.

I Lived on the Moon

Here’s a rather haunting song from Parisian band Kwoon set to some impressive animation from a chap called Yannick Puig, a French animator living in Valencia, Spain. It features a young boy taking a strange, sometimes sad and yet wonderful trip to the moon.

Puig describes it like this: “A father speaks to his son. He explains how was his life on the moon. A place filled with flying snakes, fireflies and three tailed monkeys.A beautiful place, safe and far away from the human culture. A place for imagination, a place in which you’ll find the entrance only if you open your mind.”

There’s more about the film at Puig’s website

More Spookiness with the Biteneck Beatniks

Curtis Jobling of Frankenstein’s Cat fame has created another spooky kids TV series concept called Biteneck Beatniks. It’s currently in development with a Canadian company Sardine Productions. Hopefully it will make it beyond the development phase into the real world. You really can’t have enough spooky kids animations in my book! Here are a couple of trailers for the series with some smooth music!

Moral and Dark

I’m very fond of those European and Russian folk tales that are both moral but dark too. Things like the Grimm Fairy Tales and those featured in Jim Henson’s Storyteller series.

One series of animations which stood out for me as a teenager was Shakespeare – The Animated Tales which were shortened versions of the classic plays told with earthy, scratchy animations and slightly unsettling puppetry. I loved these off-kilter productions for their honest rawness and their lack of fluff. One of the artists who contributed was Nikolai Serebryakov. Although his tales for the Shakespeare series were cel, below is an earlier work from 1968 which uses puppets.

Ball of Wool is tale of fortune, status envy and greed. Or it’s a tale about an old lady and a cute dog. It depends how you look at it.