Short of the Moment

Word arrived Stateside this morning, not through any official announcement, but through the tweets of his friends and collaborators. Kon Satoshi, one of the leading lights of Anime, director of…

You don’t come across the winners of big, big awards on online sojourns often. DVD compilations and the omnipresent Shorts International seem to suck them up. I consider BAFTA to…

MARS! from Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham on Vimeo.
This stylized, short animation by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham tells the painfully familiar tale of one species colonizing another and sucking its…

It’s almost summer, and we’re heading into the thick of the festival season. A pretty big one just wrapped up in Toronto over the weekend, the Worldwide Short Film Festival,…

To keep you abreast of notable developments in the world of short film, I’ll weigh in on what has become a well-reported event on the internets—on Monday IGN released on…

We’ve been taking it easy the last month, but we’re ready to kick it into high gear again with quality recommends. First though I want to weigh in on a…

I’ll be upfront, this is not a free film. It is available for $1 from Mubi, the new name of the website “The Auteurs”,  a nice service which fills a…

A really exciting independent student animation, creator Christian Schlaeffer managed to find the geek buttons hidden somewhere on my body and hit them so hard that they overrode my brain—which…

I have to imagine you all are getting a bit tired of these overly short films I keep highlighting. Let’s see…1, 2, 3…by my count this is the 7th(!) of…

More animation-porn for all of you today. Well…now that I pause and think about it that’s a terrible description since there IS actual animated porn out there. What I meant…

Busy week for shorts and Absolut is partly to blame. Well known as a patron of the arts, Absolut has turned its grace toward short-film, unveiling Spike Jonze’s I’m Here and…

Osbert Parker has been one of the UK’s prize jewels. His two famous short films, Film Noir and Yours Truly have won awards across the world due to his innovative collage and…

If you hadn’t heard, Spike Jonze has continued his sustained assault on the short film medium, this time with his long-anticipated “secret robot short film”,  I’m Here. This of course…

Brilliant stop-motion from Hayley Morris, a young animator working now for Curious Pictures. The 6 minute Undone was her thesis film from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and…

To get it out of the way in advance, this film is a bit graphic. That means boobies, hoo hoos and even a ding dong. What’s really graphic though for…

The Machine, by Rob Shaw of Bent Image Lab, is an entertaining stop-motion fable about a man-made machine who knows no bounds to his power. I’ve had this in my…

A new film from Spy Films is always an event. This is the house that brought us Alive in Joburg, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film, and Trevor Cawood’s Terminus,…

In keeping with the Sundance theme, this Short of the Moment is a documentary that was well-received at the 2003 festival. It is a portrait of Fred Harwin, who straddles…

For once I didn’t have to look for a film, this one found me all by itself! Front page of the New York Times web site, in a fancy pull-down…

Animated cartoons that strike a chord with audiences young and old are the gold that the Hollywood studios dream. Too bad most end up smothered by pop culture references and…

It blew up last week after Motionographer blogged it, but through teasers and stills it would be in error to say it hadn’t been anticipated. The reason? CG so fine it’s…

As much as arbitrary demarcations of time (Happy New Year!) serve as an opportunity to reaffirm one’s faith in a better future, they are similarly useful in enforcing a reflection…

Anxious for your creepy holiday films, I know, so allow me to present Alma. This 3D animation by Pixar alum, Rodrigo Blaas, is beautiful to watch and very well-crafted as a…

An extremely fun 4min no-budget short. Its runtime is small, but the length feels interminable—not because it’s dreck mind you, but because the minimalist suspense conjured by writer/director Damian McCarthy…

Doug Purver out of NYC runs a one-man production outfit called RoadNorth. This film was shot for Psst!3, but evolved into this 3 min gem about a boy fishing in…