Two Animated Short Films

Back in 2000 (or so) I went to see the Spike and Mike's Animation Festival, and one of the standouts (likely the only piece I do remember) was Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. The premise of the piece is that Hertzfeldt is recruited to animate some promotional pieces for a television channel and then a manufacturing company, and in the end each of the animated promos were rejected. The animation seems at first crude, being stick figures and on a plain void, but the concept takes off as their world collapses on itself.

Hertzfeldt's work is a mix of hilarious, profound, simple and grotesque. Billy's Balloon was a student film that was entered in the Cannes Film Festival, was a finalist, and Don had to ask permission to miss class at UCSB to attend the ceremony. His professor gave him a B on the piece.

But the piece de resistance in the Hertzfeldt cannon (as of 2016) was World of Tomorrow. I've been meaning on spending some time writing a deep dive on this animated film, but I just haven't gotten to it. It's been called---separately---one of the best animated films ever and one of the best sci-fi films ever. It's combines beautifully the stick-figure design ethos with the profoundness and philosophical weight that considering happiness, cloning, time-travel, and the end of humanity on Earth demands. It also contains an all-timer line of dialogue: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." The character of Emily Prime is voiced by a legitimately un-coached four year old, to a give it a sense of reality that can't be faked. That's her on the poster below:

One reason that I haven't made time to write deeply about it may be that in the last ten years Hertzfeldt made two more, er, episodes. Each subsequent piece, Episode 2: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts, and Episode 3: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, have been equally hailed as masterpieces, and I've yet to purchase the Blu-Ray, as they're not available on YouTube like the first.

The second poster above is for the Portuguese Joao Gonzalez's Ice Merchants. I'm a sucker for hand-drawn animated projects, and this is a classic. It has heart and tension, a cliff-house and a cliff-diving-commute. It shows what you can do with backgrounds.

(I also kinda just wanted to get these links all in one place.)

While I was contemplating this post and other hand-drawn animation, I couldn'y help but think of those ubiquitous 'Red Bull gives you wings' ads. This is the studio that's been making those ads for two-and-a-half decades now, and while they're pretty corny, and it seems like they're universally panned online, I think the hand-drawn and traditionally animated work deserves a nod. And, holy hell, it's SO different that what the Red Bull Studios seem to be involved in.