originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/764250...
Hey everyone, it’s Animation Night! Nobody I know is having emergency operations this week, so I can get back into the swing of things~
I’ve been, as is my habit, accumulating short films over the last few weeks. There have been some pretty exciting ones, too! Lots of familiar faces, but some incredible new ones too…
The most exciting to me is the unbelievably stylish Kamigoroshi prologue, solo animated by Tomoyuki Niho. Niho is one of those ‘webgen’ animators - animators who taught themselves online before entering anime as key animators with unique styles - and among an earlier wave at that, appearing on landmark projects like Birdy the Mighty: Decode.
That in the end led to some controversies, as in the second season of Birdy, Niho animated a divisive scene in which he took the characters very loose and off model to have more dramatic movement and camerawork… which upset fans to the point that the scene which would end up reanimated in a more conventional way on the home release. Niho was, thankfully, not deterred and continued to contribute lots of complex action and effects shots on a number of major series, from fullmetal alchemist to jujutsu kaisen.
But over the last few years, he was working on something bigger - something glimpsed only in brief clips uploaded to youtube over the last few years, which finally dropped a month ago. And it’s nuts. We watch a fox man building a miniature diorama city and populating it with tiny people, only for the people to stage a rebellion against their creator - all with a uniquely strange and intriguingly unsettling vibe, and sakuga juice from every pore. Safe to say it’s worth the wait.
So we’ll be watching that for sure!
Gooseworx and Glitch Productions have dropped the latest episode of The Amazing Digital Circus last week, which you have no doubt already heard about :p I talked a little about this series back on AN 182: Gooseworx toned down her surrealism a tad from her solo works, but the show makes up for it with exceptional and charming character animation, all playfully toying with the history of 3DCG. With all the fuss, I actually haven’t watched this episode yet, so I’ll get to experience it with you. I hear Pomni gets possessed in this one?
The Gobelins animation school is back, kicking off the season with a Layla, a spicy one about a group of three naive teenagers who acquire a sexbot but then realise they’d rather have her as a skating buddy. This one’s already gone round quite a bit when I posted it a couple weeks ago, but we’ll definitely be giving it a watch.
The next groub of students give us Wormwood, in which two scientists reenter a zone rendered unihabitable for ten years by a Chernobyl-style disaster - one of them seeking his childhood home. This one is pure vibes and mood, playing hard with negative space and excellent sound design.
PxAY OFF! by Marco Cárdenas is channeling Imaishi’s Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt very hard, in a good way! A debt collector gets in a fight/baseball match with a band of monkeys. It’s frenetic and funny in all the ways it should be.
Perpetual fave Vewn gives us a face reveal, presenting a tutorial on how to make an animated film… but it’s a Vewn film so let’s just say it’s more than that. lmao.
And continuing our streak of ‘students being just too damn good’, the students at ChungKang Animation School in Korea, directed by Jihye Yang, give us this film Macguffin - an exceptionally cool piece about students immersed in a weird, atmospheric fantasy game with strong echoes of Puparia, Heavenly Vessel and similar god-tier short films. The animation, colour design and overall atmosphere in this one is just extroardinary.
All of that in just the last month - but there’s some delicious old films to watch too. Because sometimes Youtube will just serve you up a fascinating Armenian short film about astronauts turning into animals. Урок/ The lesson (which won’t embed for some reason) is a 1987 film from Armenia’s Sahakyant Animation Studio, and it’s so much, at every moment. Robert Sahakyants, the counterculture animator in the eastern-bloc scene who founded the studio (and quite possibly the director of this film), is surely worthy of a proper night in his own right - when I have a chance to digest AniObsessive’s detailed article on his career. But let’s enjoy this little taste for now!
Do you remember this little 48hr bee yuri anime film we showed the other night? Turns out that the animator was my friend @catnumbers’s roommate at CalArts, and the two of them made this absolutely extraordinary 48hr film together:
So clean; and cat animated the awesome action shot at the end so make sure to give her lots of praise for that :p
On another track entirely, palaeontology youtuber Mario Lanzas put together this awesome tribute to oldschool paleoart, Antediluvian. The pictures made before people had the faintest idea of what dinosaurs were and their best bet was when they lived was before Noah’s flood, now brought to life in a gorgeous ecosystem…
And to round us out, Ian Hubert has released the second episode of his incredible Blender-vfx scifi series Dynamo Dream. Hubert is pretty much the GOAT of compositing people into elaborate scifi scenes using Blender, and has created all kinds of tutorials to show how surprisingly simple methods can accomplish these spectacles - the latest episode sees a bit of elaboration on the main couple’s dystopian situation and a descent into the dark…
….crap that didn’t embed either, goddamnit youtube.
That’s me at the ten-video limit, and it’s about time we got started, so come join us at twitch.tv/canmom for a crazy cool month’s worth of short films!
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