Now, who follows me at No Fat Clips!!! knows it: I often indulge in introducing the movies I post with passages quite unrelated to the film itself, while more connected with my feelings while watching it. And so it seems like I’m doing it again. But maybe not.

After all, Tokyo/Glow is, in a sense, about self discovery: a glitch occurs in the reality continuum (well, not really), and the traffic light man, the green one that tells people it’s time to walk, comes out of the box where he supposedly spent all his life since then, embarking in a voyage that brings new experience to him and wonderful imagery to us. Of course, I was hearing Queen’s “Innuendo” in my head while watching the short for the second time; you know, the part about surrendering your ego and being free with your tempo, which might have influenced this interpretation.

Directed by Jonathan Bensimon and produced at Canada’s Industry Films, Tokyo/Glow is actually a branded short film for shoe designer The Generic Man, even though I didn’t even realize it was sponsored by anything until I read it on ‘boards.

Tempo I was saying. Time and rhythm are perhaps the real protagonist of this short. The short uses the technique of the timelapse photography. But the light man is actually free with his tempo, slowly making his way in the city while the night life of Tokyo flows with its crazy speed all around him, aimlessly and purposelessly. Our illuminated friend, instead, seems to know exactly what to do, when and where to go.

The use of the light suit deserves a word on its own. While serving both the narrative (our hero was/is a light sign) and the concept of illumination (my interpretation, at least…), it is also a perfect visual device, allowing us to spot the man while he’s surrounded by thousands of other persons, and then inviting us to get ahold of that light ourselves, to stay focused on ourselves. To shine.

Or maybe I’m just reading too much into a commercial. Maybe you should just watch it yourself. And whatever will be, will be.

(Many thanks to Davide for the tip!)

It’s good to see an evolution of this technique present in his latest piece, The Black Dog’s Progress. The film opens to the disquieting strains of Sorenious Bonk’s score with a single repeating flipbook panel, surround by soon to be populated white space, which depicts the Black Dog’s arrival in a gift box. His new owner promptly sneezes all over him and to say that this is as good as things will get for the Black Dog would be the understatement of the year. Animation or not, this certainly isn’t one for the kids! As the panels appear and shift to make room for each other, we’re presented with an interconnected mosaic of abuse and indignity piled on our four legged friend that belies the pleasant cartoon style of the drawing (somewhat reminiscent of the transformed creatures in Shynola’s promo for UNKLE’s An Eye for An Eye). At its height, the frame contains 24 flipbook panels of action, which your eyes continuously flit around in fear of missing something. However, Irwin quickly focuses our attention with a spotlight that guides us through the gruesome tableau.

Using inspiration from William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1733) as a jumping off point, The Black Dog’s Progress was originally conceived as an online commission for Animate, which Irwin has said influenced the development of the concept as he envisaged viewers being able to “explore the narrative and scrub through the timeline at their own pace.” After designing the multi-frame layout and deciding how each panel would interact with its neighbours, Irwin created 50 physical flipbooks (with additional variants as needed) that were then scanned to create the animation.

As disturbing as it is, The Black Dog’s Progress is a short that demands repeated viewing, inviting you to return time and time again to marvel in the decent of its protagonist, as if you were the one forcing him through the pages of his story.

Shot in one week in the Charente region of France, the short film conveys a strong sense of astonishment thanks to insightful planning, effective color correction, and the filmmaker’s masterful sense of composition. With very little happening on screen, every scene plays like a (breathtaking) photograph. In fact, I found myself hoping nothing would happen that might draw my mind away from the perfect harmony I felt while watching.

Our hero searches for inspiration in books and technology before extending his quest to the outside world with an umbrella to protect himself from the inclement weather—perhaps from the world itself one might think. On his next journey, might it be luck or the voice of Billie Holiday or maybe the lack of his umbrella, he finds what he is looking for: a flower to make his solemn days worth living.

In trying to make sense of Solitude, my advice is to follow the path of our man and after the first failed attempt, just let the stream of images flow over your corneas. But, as always, I leave any further considerations up to you.

Lastly, I want to point you to a series of inspirational photographs the director took as a test six months before the actual shooting. Based on a slighly different idea than the final short (being shot in a different season of the year), the images are inspired (among other things) by the work of Andrew Wyeth and feature the protagonist with his face covered with bandages. You’ll find this test photos on Robin’s website—under the link “Solitude”, click on “Alpha”.

Place the family round the dinner table, include the grown up kids and grandparents – nine guests in all plus dog – provide ample red wine, alcohol-free for the grandparents, place the digital voice recorder on the table and let things roll. Such is the technique of Tom Senior, final year student at the Farnham campus of the UK’s University of the Creative Arts (UCA), a fine institution boasting three Oscar winners amongst its illustrious alumni in Daniel Greaves, Michael Dudok de Wit and Suzie Templeton.

Before discussing the animation technique used let me say that the sheer naturalness of the dialogue is a delight. Meals in my home are not unlike this and, whereas accents the world over fluctuate, I recognise something of me in at least one of the characters. The tiny conflicts and moments of alcohol -(or is it just happiness) fuelled daftness strike a chord, the dialogue being full of the myriad irrelevances of real speech, occasional tensions, the peaks and troughs of real life. As the food goes down a treat, not to mention the red liquid, dad licks his spoon, then gets tired and, the central event of the piece other than simply eating, the taking of the family photograph cannot be put off any longer. So dad pulls himself together, sets the remote control and, hey presto, the family is preserved for posterity, all smiling for (or is it because of ) the camera.

Now to the technique. At first sight I thought Tom had rotoscoped the action. In fact the drawings are all digitally hand drawn, 2D computer images, the animator’s quick hands and eyes for detail tracing the essential action and character. Thus the food glides from plate to mouth, the youth stretches, the dishes accumulate by the sink, the table cloth devours the serving plate, the faces are satisfied and full. The backdrop is a sketchily dabbed stroke or two of predominantly yellow watercolour and sometimes the artist focuses on the mouth as a barest disembodied confusion of lines, gyrating busily as the food is devoured. It is all very sketchily done, lovely semblance of watercolour throughout, with that minimalist attention to form you just know is beautifully done. It matches the meandering quality of the dialogue to perfection.

A director and illustrator by trade, CISMA spent four years as a senior motion designer at Brazilian studio Lobo, which has through the years become unquestionably known as an unofficial finishing school for some of the finest creatives we have in the wild today, such as Guilherme Marcondes and Marcelo Garcia.

Made for around $6,000 and shot on the Arri SrIII super 16 using Zeiss 1.3 prime lenses, Handmade may be CISMA’s first move into the live action space, but exhibits his mastery of colour to dictate tone throughout, alongside animation effects which take us into the mind of our lovelorn lead. I also totally love the dual concepts of the hugging sweaters which literally wrap our protagonists in a loving embrace, balanced against a drink of sadness and rejection brewed from choice words taken from a Dear John letter.

As a side note, if you fell in love with the paper clip looking font Relava that makes up Handmade’s title, CISMA has made it available to buy via his site http://www.cisma.com.br for your writing pleasure.

She’s naturally enough concerned for her son in all respects, even including the possibility of his eloping with the Moonies. Moms worry themselves with things like that. Or flying saucers. She (and he) put down his problems to transferring from Catholic School to Public School. Traumas like that have a debilitating effect on one’s adolescence. Back to the disease. How exactly he acquired AIDS is not exactly clear, though it appears to be largely the responsibility of a contaminated hamburger consumed in the classroom. Hamburgers are the root of all evil and guilt for a good Catholic boy in a non-Catholic school.

Some homespun advice from Mom and semi-official advice later leads to further neurotic behavior: a period where they abstain from the cup at communion and instructions to her boy to stay clear of sharp toys. All goes well until he has cereal at his friend Ryan’s house. Ryan loses his trousers and throws a puppet at the boy’s face. It’s AIDS time again, and this time almost too much for mom and son to bear.

Made with Mirage, now TVPaint, the hilarious mix of styles—real images of hamburgers, paired with black and white movies contrasting with gaudy coloured animation conspire to share one modern nuclear family’s guilt. You’ll love it. Suburban angst.

Score: 7/10
A Sundance 10/10 film: now online

Magnetic Movie makes the ambitious attempt to visualize the intangible discoveries of today’s best scientists. Their explanations lay score to scenes of empty labs where these discoveries play out as erratic experiments that slowly grow out of control—a fitting analogy to the discoveries themselves.

A Sundance 10/10 film: now online

Before you can even get through to watch Daylight the site hits you up with a snippet of an electric loungecore version of Yesterday, over the picture of a crystal finned model staring off into the middle distance; that’s the point he pretty much had me.

I don’t know much about the details of the film or the man himself for that matter (his site is one of the sparsest I’ve seen) outside of what’s written below it: “A film created for the runway of Beckmans fashion designer Sarah Törnqvist. Based upon her themes of sadness, insomnia and disconnect from reality.”

The film’s approach of featuring lone models placed in stark muted spaces, which are gradually filled with light is haunting and pretty much compels you to paint a world around them based on the little you know. Also the cinematography by Marcus Palmqvist and Martin Steinberg is lusciously combined with jump cuts and speed ramps. A part of my brain couldn’t shake the feeling (or hope?) I was seeing sections from a new Vincent Gallo or Gus Van Sant film.

While you’re on Igor’s site take some time to explore his other pieces. I’m trying to find a way to have him style my life.

Blu, a street artist based in Buenos Aires, isn’t new to animation. In past work he’s explored animating across the white walls of unfinished rooms—characters morphing as they move from surface to surface. Muto takes his pioneering style a step further by bringing his characters to life in the public streets. Painted in large scale across the public walls and buildings of Buenos Aires and Baden over this past summer (Argentinian winter), Muto is a mad mash-up of man and machine where the body’s mechanics are distorted and deformed across graffitied brick walls and sidewalks.

In true street art fashion, Blu allows the limitations and obstacles of the environment to shape the action. He looks at his canvas not as a large blank sheet, but as a complex 3-dimensional surface—a setting. The weather and lighting shift with the day, pedestrians make split-second cameos, cars blur by unknowing—all unchoreographed occurances of the natural environment. Muto takes the true spirit of street art and brings it to life.

Blu is no newcomer to large-scale public work. His art is finding a larger audience, and you can now find his mutilated bodies on such respected establishments as the Tate Modern Museum of Art in London.

The Autobiography of Tom Stern, Chapter Six: The New Science wastes no time easing into the story but instead plunges head first into the world of Him and his likes illustrated with rapid fire stills. If you had more time to decompress on the journey from here to the world of Tom Stern you might feel that there was a danger of the dialogue being too hip, “And then, which is now, I want to leave you,” or the caped fight scene overly quirky, but the thing is, it somehow isn’t which is a mighty hard trick to pull off.

Perhaps it’s the clean unfussed look of The New Science coupled with Sean Foley’s (as Tom Stern) direct to camera delivery that sells this off-kilter world just as convincingly as Hal Hartly having Martin Donovan break into dance mid-scene.

Director Tom Stern was awarded Best of 2007 in Microcinema International’s Independent Exposure touring series for the New Science and has made the jump to features with his indie debut This is a Business. The New Science is but a single chapter from an ongoing autobiography of Tom Stern, according to the man himself. Me only wishes that He would hurry up to make more for We to watch.

The NFB Focus on Animation site is wonderful for its educational content as well as its film collection, with a superb series of articles documenting key techniques, films and filmmakers in the history of animation. Le Paysagiste is a perfect representative of what the NFB site has to offer. Created in 1976 using an obscure technique known as pinscreen animation, Le Paysagiste is considered by many the crowning achievement of the rare, but beautiful form. Instead of simply hosting the film, the sites supplementary articles represent some of the best resources for information about both pinscreen animation and the filmmaker.

At its essence, pinscreen works through shadow. A screen is poked through with groups of “pins” that can be moved in and out, and then is lit from the side. When sticking out, the pins cast a long shadow, which creates black on the screen. When pushed in, they cause no shadow and create white. Intermediate distances create different lengths of shadow and white, allowing for a whole scale of gray.

The results are what you see in Le Paysagiste, a beautiful tapestry that looks like charcoal sketches put in motion. Drouin exploits this impressionistic form in order to create a stream of conscious tour through the mind of an artist. In the film an artist is painting a lovely landscape when he finds himself able to step into the picture. Entering into this foreign world that is in fact his own, he begins a tour of psychological symbolism and random association, as objects and settings twist and morph around him.

The fleeting, transitory nature of the images belies the intense and meticulous work needed to create them. Pinscreen is a very labor-intensive technique, which is a big reason for why it has been virtually abandoned as an art. The NFB’s Focus on Animation site though reclaims and highlights historically vital works such as Le Paysagiste, making it a great resource for animation lovers.

Directed by German brothers Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein, Balance is a remarkable piece of animation that has held up very well through the years. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1989 , it has been featured in a few animation collections on video, including the now sadly out of print, “The World’s Greatest Animation”, where it headlined alongside another famous film we reviewed on this site, Nick Park’s Creature Comforts. But thankfully the internet has saved us once again and this film has been uploaded to at least half a dozen user-generated content sites. These uploads might be unauthorized, but I doubt the Lauenstein brothers care as it is sure to act as a great calling card for their commercial film production house.

In fact, Balance is a perfect reel highlight for commercial direction because it displays simple confidence in concept. The film uses stop-motion to animate, but is ultimately not much to look at. It is not pretty and the character motions lack the artistry and polish of some of the more experienced practitioners of the craft. When made though, Cristoph was still in school for his Fine Arts degree. So, in the midst of such brilliance, this shortcoming is easily forgiven.

What shines here instead is idea and execution. A film without words like Balance is frequently an exercise given to young animators and film students alike. New storytellers often overwhelm audiences with exposition, so instead are asked to concentrate on telling a story visually, focusing on expression and craft to carry a viewer through. It is difficult enough to simply tell a story that makes sense, let alone interest your audience, let alone raise greater social issues, all of which Balance does.

In execution, the film is accomplished. The cuts do a fine job of relaying the action, the physics of balance are realistic enough, and key actions by characters are imbued with a forceful purpose. Several memorable shots punctuate the film and prove haunting. As an idea, it works as a parable and an allegory, and more remarkably the two contrast. It strikingly moralizes the dilemma of human beings working in cooperation. Like a story out of Game Theory, if the men were to cooperate they could all enjoy the box together, but it is selfishness that dooms them.

Add though a context. A time and place to the film’s creation. Germany, 1989. If you do, you realize a whole host of additional readings and levels are available to enjoy. The fact that the men are identical but for their numbers, is this not a oft-used symbol for the anonymity desired of those in a Communist society? That they are all the same and thus interchangeable? The cooperation they display at first is perhaps indicative of Socialism, and the box, what is the meaning of the music it plays, the dancing it inspired? Radio Free Europe used to broadcast American music, such as the jazz heard coming out of the box, into Communist countries throughout the Cold War. Perhaps the box is a symbol of possibility, of what is outside the closed system, which inevitably undermines said system.

And so a parable about selfishness becomes an allegory about German society and Soviet Communism at its fall. The sad and ironic ending of Balance, who is at fault? The men that fail to do what is best for them? Or the system that fails to acknowledge this human quality?

Then, a film comes along and reminds me that “experimental” can be more than an exploration of form. The experimentation in Far West explores film’s purest intention—the suspension of disbelief—the moment where we fall into the story and drop reason at the doorstep. Nieto cleverly blurs that seam—where does reality end and the story begin?

Far West is less a film and more of a live performance. Nieto stands at the front of a crowd with an artist’s table and a camera looking over his shoulder projecting an image of the table for the crowd. He takes the crowd through the typical construction of an animated scene using cut shapes of cacti and a phony sunset. Then, something unexpected happens. You feel it coming, but it’s a surprise nonetheless. The gasps of the crowd reflect back to the stories we’ve been told of film’s infancy where crowds ran screaming from images of oncoming trains. Moments later you find that seam—that break—and return to reality. But you can’t help but believe it, if even for just a split second, your reason will hang suspended.

I’m surprised by how little has been published about Far West or Nieto for he truly is one of the most refreshing filmmakers to storm the experimental scene. Another equally-inspiring film of his, Carlitopolis, involves a box and a lab mouse (also on YouTube).

Nieto is a young Columbian filmmaker working in Paris who, on his personal website, calls himself a “perversionist artist… persecuted by animals defensors and Hare Krischna.” Capucine, Nieto’s next experiment involving the capucine monkey’s ability to communicate with humans, is scheduled for release in 2008. On this and others, Neito has teamed up with the production crew at Autour de Minuit, the same group behind another Short of the Week selection, Collision.

Made for a special program at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, the story is about a scientist named Anna who studies the “Heart of the World!” and two brothers who are both in love with her. The Heart of the World (envisioned here in a literal way) is susceptible to heart attack though. What can be done? What choices will they make?

The film can be difficult to watch, it is all energy and motion, quick cuts, and non-sequiturs. There are layers and layers of symbolism at play here, and the references are numerous and wacky. What it means I have no clue, but what it is, is pure melodrama, larger than life characters with larger than life aims, and watching it is a blast. What is clear is that Maddin has a true love for cinema, and that spirit is fully expressed here.

The animation is bold and simple—well-paced, with excellent timing. But the real show-maker is the sound design—breathing life into the abstract visuals. Radar satellites beep, incoming missiles scream, and explosions rock your desktop speakers. Ultimately, the symbiotic relationship between sound and sight transforms the stiff, geometric patterns into real-world weapons of war.

So who is Max Hattler? Well, on MySpace he is a self-declared “artist filmmaker, music video director and VJ based in London.” A past graduate of the Royal College of Art in London (where he created Collision), Max is now a director with Bermuda Shorts and has shown his work at over 200 international film festivals and events. His next short animation, Spin, is set to be completed in 2008. It will feature toy soldiers and question the line between destruction and entertainment. Stay tuned.

In this surrealist masterpiece, Ho has reconstructed the psychological state of desperation using every image, sound, and motion means necessary. The framed compositions are dynamically stunning, always drawing strong contrasts; black to white, extreme distance to extreme close-up, fast frenetic movement to slow calming movement.

Emannuel Ho is from Winnipeg (Canada). Little else is publicly known about him. This video was created for the music label, Secretly Canadian. Check out Ho’s website for more animations by one of Canada’s best secrets

Visually, Birds is a masterful work of slow-motion photography. Ears flap and fur flies as every imaginable composition is explored. Aurally, Vitalic’s driving bass beat keeps the pace building.

Pleix is a virtual community of 3D artists, musicians, and designers based in Paris. They host a handful of short films and music videos they’ve created.

All hand drawn, each frame was scanned, individually painted in Photoshop and then composited in After Effects. It’s clearly a student film—full of aimless exploration and small indulgences—but this one proves it can be done well and still hold a cohesive story.

I saw MKLB for the first time at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival (in the same program as my own short animation, Push For Signal), and it was an easy favorite of mine. Learn more about Lizzi on her MySpace page.

The illustrative style is very simple and child-like with incredibly simple and graceful motion. Every subtle movement draws an incredible amount of attention to the mundane tasks that constitute a typical day. It is a very refreshing contrast.

Asa Arnehed is a very talented illustrator and animator from Sweden. She has a small collection of short animations on her personal website that are definitely worth checking out.