originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/749746...
Hey everyone! It’s animation night! I was going to run this one much earlier, but I got sidetracked arguing about the future of humanity, which is something that happens more often than I care to admit.
To make up for that, I have a really tasty slate of short films for you tonight!
We have long time fave Gooseworx getting a studio, blasting through the popularity records with her new web series! The second episode dropped just days ago!
We have the long-awaited return of Paul Robertson with a suitably deranged story of pixel babies on an adventure in hell! Rivals Looney Tunes for density of sight gags!
We have extraordinarily detailed renditions of Metal Gear by one Mitchell Hammond, seamlessly blending 2D animation and 3D-rotoscoping! The madman’s trying to animate the whole game and he might just pull it off!
We have the gorgeously intricate transhuman visions of Melänovis! Hard scifi spaceships blending with cathedrals, machine lifeforms bowling asteroids, and more! I sure hope they can finish this one some day!
We have freaky music videos channeling the ghost of the 2000s for the band A.G. Cook!
We have a loving tribute to Animusic by Lasers, Lights and Music! If you know Animusic you know what’s up - if not they were this wonderful series of short CG films in which elaborate Rube Goldberg machines play music from around the 2000s. LL&M have created software to make this kinda thing with MIDI.
Even There She Is! came back! For real! Who the fuck saw that coming? As it turns out, this short was crowdfunded way back in 2016, and saw a DVD release in 2021, but now it’s finally returned to the web, the original home of There She Is! This one features cat-bunny hybrids.
And I’m sure I’m gonna come across more cool shit before the night is out, tell me your fave cool shit you saw on the web~
Naturally we ended up watching a bunch more! It was a great night, thanks to everyone who came by (and especially to thegrungler for maintaining an incredible degree of enthusiasm the entire night). So here’s a roundup~
Julie Zheng brings us Play With Me!, bringing an incredibly charming Yuasa-like animation style to portray the most shaped cat you’ve ever seen. For how laid back it feels, it doesn’t seem possible that so much can happen in two minutes.
We watched a fair few videos by Hoolopee, who’s doing incredible things with both lofi PSX style and uncanny valley hyperrealism. Most of his videos riff on games, but his recent film Two Pipes takes the style to an original story to great effect!
We revisited some of the older films by some of the creators above! Old Animation Night-heads might know these ones…
Paul Robertson originally landed on the scene some eight years ago with the utterly relentless Kings of Power 4 Billion %. [If you have photosensitive epilepsy don’t watch this one, there’s a lot of strobe effects.]
We rewatched the absolutely brilliant How and Why Don Jose Dissipated by Animoshe, a film to genuinely warrant use of the word psychedelic. A tourist with two faces has a strangely intimate interaction with a fly before going on a mad chase after a duck that leads to him becoming one with the universe. This film is really something special, a perfect combination of visuals and music.
This short film by Suzan Pitt aired on Liquid Television back in the 90s. It’s about a suicidally depressed woman and a monkey from an ashtray, reflecting Pitt’s own experiences in Mexico. Fascinating blend of colours and animation styles - the contrast between the rubber hose monkey and the more realist woman in particular. Suzan Pitt sadly died in 2019, but I def mean to track down more of her films for future Animation Nights!
We also checked a couple of the films I saw at Annecy last year from the WTF2023 block! Sadly there is still no web release of A Kind of Testament, but we could check out the absolute earworm Du vélo à St-Malo, du kayak à St-Briac by the band Astéréotypie, animated by Fabian Dores Pais.
And of course I had to show everyone Uncle Babysitter 2 by Chinese animator tungwood, because one crazy baby film was not enough! I actually got to chat with tungwood at Annecy, he was an incredibly sweet and quiet guy, you would never guess he’d be the one to make this…
Since we were gonna check out Digital Circus to finish, it seemed only right to make sure all are up to speed on Gooseworx’s earlier work, in this case the Elain the Bounty Hunter series! Definitely check out the elaborate sequel Elain Gets Adopted, and Gooseworx’s other fantastic short Little Runmo.
Speaking of Digital Circus! Gooseworx now has the backing of Glitch Productions, the studio behind Murder Drones, and is riding out a somewhat mindbreaking wave of attention - hundreds of millions of views. I do miss the wild energy and abstract reality breakdowns of her earlier works, though Digital Circus Ep 2 was definitely very strong - stronger than the pilot imo, with the story of Pomni and the NPC bandit a highlight. I did appreciate the nods to the history of 3DCG in there, the Utah teapots and Perlin noise.
The more Digital Circus can move away from roots of ‘zany thing happens, characters quip’, the better it will be. Regardless, the animation is an absolute treat - 3D with the super snappy timing, squishiness and bounciness of 2D.
Did you know the whole thing is rendered in Unreal? It’s crazy how a realtime engine can handle bright scenes full of indirect lighting like this.
As a coda, we watched this super slick chuuni piece BELTZ BLADEZ by tumblr’s own @streetdevil96 (Ziplok)…
I love the chunky angular proportions and bright reds of this OC, sick work.
Huge thanks everyone who came by tonight! Web/indie animation nights are some of my favourites, and I love getting to share all a this with everyone~ I can’t wait to bring you more animation from Glasgow in a couple weeks time!
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