Flying Books

Books have the power to transfix a reader. A turn of the page provides an alternate story to live, be it a line prose or a hefty epic. Moonbot Studios' animated short "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" highlights the delight of literature through its very own story.
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" was one of five nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards' Best Animated Short category, announced Jan. 24. The Shreveport, Louisiana-based studio released the short as its first animation project.
Directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, the 15-minute film draws from Hurricane Katrina, "The Wizard of Oz," Buster Keaton and, of course, a love for books. The story starts in New Orleans with the Keaton-like Mr. Morris Lessmore writing a book on the balcony of a hotel. A menacing storm swirls into town, blowing away houses and street signs, taking Mr. Lessmore and his unfinished book with it. Lessmore is transported to a land filled with fluttering novels; a land where he can dedicate his life to filling his book with the abundance of words he is now surrounded with.
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" has already won 13 awards, including "Best Animated Short" and "Audience Award Winner" at the Austin Film Festival, and "Best Animated Short" at the Cinequest Film Fest.
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Walt Disney, Syphilis and Gonorrhea

As VD Attack Plan begins, we hear an air raid siren and an explosion as the letters “VD” flash on the screen. The letters “Attack Plan” are spelled out with machine gun fire. A narrator announces: “This is a war story. It could be anywhere in the world.

It could involve anyone. It could only take place within the human body.”
The next scene is of an animated germ wearing a spiked Kaiser helmet, the Sergeant (played by Keenan Wynn – perhaps best known for his role as Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano in Dr. Strangelove) briefing his troops of the Contagion Corps. The troops are syphilis and gonorrhea germs that wear berets with their initials on them (‘S’ and ‘G’).
via othercinema.com

A Penis Duel (not in Ein Hod)

Created anonymously by a group of professional animators in about 1929, the silent short Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is a gleeful exploration of the penetrative arts. The four-and-a-half-minute short follows the travails of the uncomfortably well-endowed title character as he wanders a barren landscape in search of satisfaction.


Along the way, he encounters a self-pleasuring maiden, various sexually aroused animals, a surprised husband, and a donkey-humping farmer, whom Harton challenges to a duel. A penis duel.(read more...)

Funny but it is not that funny

David Shrigley occupies a strange place within British art, being at once admired by critics for his loose drawing style and admonished for his sloppy penmanship; applauded for his sense of humour and yet being dismissed by some because of it. With his work as likely to adorn a T-shirt or greetings card as it is to appear in a gallery, Shrigley is very much a populist; his cartoon-style drawings are on show in books, the pages of the Guardian and in advertising. Something of an artistic fidget, he makes sculpture and films, and has designed record sleeves and recorded a spoken word CD.
But think of the British art establishment and Shrigley’s is not a name on the tip of your tongue. On the level of pure popularity and ease of recognition of his work, he should be up there with the Chapmans or Tracey Emin, yet the tall, softly spoken 38-year-old seems as far as ever from a Turner Prize nomination.
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Books, iPAD and Piet Kroon's DaDa

In DaDA, everybody walks around carrying books on their heads. The more books stacked on your cranium, the smarter you are perceived to be. The story takes off when a little boy is born with a perfectly round head. To the horror of his parents no books will stay put, no matter what they try. Ultimately, they take their son to a hospital, where a learned scholar saws off the top of the kid's skull to study his brain. The doctor discovers the kid is really a genius. He realizes that it is not the books you carry around that matter, it is how you "process" them and create something new out of them. The final twist of the film, that somehow seems to be especially shocking to American audiences (maybe because they are suckered out of a happy ending), is that the father feeds the brilliant brain to the cat. Because with the top sawed off, he can pile an infinite amount of books on his son's head. He'd rather have a kid that looks intelligent, than an intelligent child.
Piet Kroon was storyboard artist for "The Iron Giant, the acclaimed animated feature based on a story by Ted Hughes. His previous feature film credits include that of storyboard artist on the animated feature Quest for Camelot and animator on the Universal Pictures' release An American Tail II: Fievel Goes West.
Kroon's animated short film, T.R.A.N.S.I.T., was short-listed for the 1997 Academy Awards and was nominated for both a British Academy Award and the Cartoon D'or. T.R.A.N.S.I.T was also named Best Animated Short Film of 1998 by the Los Angeles Times Film Critics Association. Another of his animated short films, Dada, was screened at the 1996 Brussels International Film Festival where it won the Best European Short Film Award.
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Allegro non troppo

Something of a Fantasia for adults, Allegro Non Troppo intercuts slapstick live-action sequences -- which relay the story of a beleaguered animator's (Maurizio Nichetti) ongoing battle with an Oliver Hardy-like orchestra conductor -- and animated sequences, set to classical music, which visually interpret selected works of Debussy, Dvorak, Ravel, Sibelius, Vivaldi, and Stravinsky. The liveliest piece, set to Ravel's &Bolero, delineates a series of "spontaneous generations" from an abandoned Coke bottle. The most haunting piece, set to Sibelius' &Valse Triste, depicts a forlorn cat wandering the ruins of a condemned building and constantly hallucinating that he is back in the lap of luxury. Allegro Non Troppo is the brainchild of gifted Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto.

A state of mind

Directed by Santiago Bou Grasso of Argentina in 2008, Le Empleo tells a story about how we all have our little job to do in order to make a little money. Simple and beautifully animated, with graceful character animation perfectly conveying a state of mind or existence that seems natural and mundane until you closely examine it – or make a film about it.

No Problem

Craig Welch was born in 1948 in Windsor, Ontario. He originally studied graphic design at the Centre for Creative Studies in Detroit. After a brief foray into the world of design, he got fed up. Instead, he opened a bookstore and ran it for eight years.
In 1984, Craig enrolled in the animation program at Sheridan College in Ontario. There he created his acclaimed film Disconnected, about the consequences of living a routine life. Although he has had exhibitions of drawings and paintings in Toronto galleries, Craig now considers animation to be the perfect medium for self-expression. In addition to commercial animation work, he assisted on the NFB production Peep and the Big Wide World (1988), before directing his first animated film for the NFB, No Problem (1992). The film uses humour in an emotionally provocative way to reach an adult audience.

Odious Number: 69

The aliquot sum of sixty-nine is 27 within the aliquot sequence (69,27,13,1,0) 69 being the third composite number in the 13-aliquot tree. 69 is a semiprime. Furthermore, since the two factors of 69 are both Gaussian primes, 69 is a Blum integer. Adding up the divisors of 1 through 9 gives 69. Because 69 has an odd number of 1s in its binary representation, it is sometimes called an "odious number." Of note is that 69² (4 761) and 69³ (328 509) uses every digit from 0-9. 69 is equal to 105 octal, while 105 is equal to 69 hexadecimal. This same property can be applied to all numbers from 64 to 69. On many handheld scientific and graphing calculators, the highest factorial that can be computed within memory limitations is 69! or 1.711224524*1098. The number 69 can be rotated 180° and remain the same...

House of Small Cubes (Tsumiki no Ie)

Kunio Kato
"La Maison en Petits Cubes"
The 12-minute film, which means "House of Small Cubes," centers on an old man reflecting upon his life as floodwaters slowly rise at his home. It marked the first Academy Award nomination and win for Kato, who wrote and directed the piece.
"It's so heavy," said Kato of the award. A native of Japan, he struggled with his English in good humor before a star-studded audience. "Thank you very much. Thank you, my supporters. Thank you, all my staff. Thank you, academy. . . . Thank you, my company. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto."
Kato's film career was not his first choice. As a child, he wanted to be a veterinarian but gave it up because of an allergy to cats.

Rare books for his services:Kigeki ova

Legend tells of a lone swordsman who lives in the Demon's Castle, the ruins near the Black Forest. This mysterious stranger only accepts rare books for his services, books from the ancient past. Comedy tells the story of a young girl who desperately wishes for her family and village to be saved from the coming English soldiers' wrath, and is willing to trade a precious book in exchange for the deed. With only her legs beneath her, she runs towards the Black Forest, hoping to get there in time...

Jack Pajack and Kirkas Kiss

Jack Pajack joins Kirkas Kiss (Pocket Circus in hebrew)is the name of a theatre group from Ein Hod. Yael and Alain Koginsky, both members of UNIMA, founded the group, create the puppets props and costumes, produce and act in its shows.
The repertoire includes puupet shows for all ages as well as street events with giant puppets & actors..
Kirkas Kiss productions have toured in all National and International festivals all over Israel (The Israel Festival of Jerusalem 1998 & 1999 , the Acco Fringe Theatre Festival 1997 & 1998, the International Street Theatre Festival of Holon 1996, 1999 & 2000,), the Jerusalem International Puppet Festival (2001) & many more.
Kirkas Kiss productions include puppet theatre productions such as"The Cabaret Circus Show" & "The story of Yekutiel & Mitzi" and street theatre shows featuring giant puppets such as in" The Royal Colour Parade".(read more...)

Pigs and Flowers

Isle of Flowers (Portuguese: Ilha das Flores) is a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado. It tracks the path of a tomato from garden to dump with the help of a monotone voiceover and a collection of bizarre images. While a very humorous film, the message it delivers about how human beings treat each other is anything but such. The director himself has stated that the film was inspired by the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Alain Resnais, among others.
The film has been denounced as "materialistic" because one of its early credits displays the phrase "God doesn't exist". Nevertheless, critic Jean-Claude Bernardet defined Isle of Flowers "a religious film", and the Brazilian National Bishop Confederation awarded the film with the Margarida de Prata (Silver Daisy), calling it "the best Brazilian film of the year" in 1990. In 1995, Isle of Flowers was chosen by the European critics as one of the 100 most important short films of the century.(read more...)

Red Hot Implied Bestiality Riding Hood

Not everyone in Hollywood was so enamored of order or happy endings or the sentimental school of mindless, grinning "funny little animals." Perhaps the least enamored was Tex Avery, who during his stint at Warner Bros. and MGM made seven formal, recognizable fairy tales and one blackout film ("A Gander at Mother Goose") between 1937 ("Little Red Walking Hood") and 1949 ("Little Rural Riding Hood").
In the opening sequence of "Red Hot Riding Hood," a simpering narrator says, "Good evening, kiddies! Once upon a time Little Red Riding Hood was skipping through the woods…" But this time the Wolf stops and refuses to continue: "I'm fed up with that sissy stuff … Every Hollywood studio has done it this way!" Taken aback by this sudden revolt, which Granny and Red also join in, the shocked narrator agrees to try a new tack. Thus the terrified little-girl Red is reborn as a red-hot mama who performs at the local nightclub. Her lyrics are unapologetic in demanding material reward for sexual favors: "Hey Daddy … you better get the best for me!" But, as in "Swing Shift Cinderella," Avery surprises by devoting most of the time to the Wolf's frantic attempts to escape the violent attentions of an older woman, Granny, who's now a sex-mad hepcat.The film's original conclusion, deleted for reasons of implied bestiality, had Grandma marrying the wolf at a shotgun wedding (with a caricature of Tex Avery as the Justice of the Peace who marries them), and having the unhappy couple and their half-human half-wolf children attend Red's show. However, a military officer arranged for an uncut version for military audiences overseas.
(read more...)(via Presurfer)

Art by Creature Comforts

"It works, largely because most of the interviews seem selected to be not wacky but low-key and conversational. Am I proud of laughing? No, but I don't care."
James Posiewozik, Time.com
"Each juxtaposition of voice and creature, even or especially the most unexpected, creates something wonderful. The domestic version, which like it s predecessor is made by Aardman Animations, is every bit as good as the original. While the animation is masterful – beautifully timed and fully attendant to character, even when a character is merely listening – what makes "Creature Comforts" valuable is the unscripted, and unscriptable voice of the people."
Robert Lloyd, LA Times
"Hilarious feat of animated clay. Four Stars. So if it took until the second season for an American version of "The Office" to approximate the quality and charm of the British original, how long will it take for an Americanized "Creature Comforts" to prove itself? About five seconds. The series, 'featuring the voices of your fellow Americans' finds just as many eccentric regional dialects here as in England, and uses them hilariously from the start. I can't remember the last time I laughed so quickly and loudly at a new TV series. And it just keeps delivering gold – even from a goldfish who is heard complaining of her latest medical malady. "Dry skin," she says while floating in her goldfish bowl. "Can you believe it?"
New York Daily News

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Spinning the Wheel

The Potter
The story begins as we enter a ceramic studio. The atmosphere is somber, enhanced with the use of a monochromatic palette. The potter's wheel spins as we see the hands of the potter sculpting something, which initially, is not visible to the human eye. When the potter's wheel comes to a stop, a clay figure emerges between the artist's hands.
The animation consists of a motion sequence performed by the clay figure, which is a metaphor for the emotions, which the artist experiences during the creation process. As the story unfolds, this sequence is also a visual metaphor for the potter's own healing process.
Composer: Nicolai Dunger
Filmmaker: Lena Dolata

10 000 Books and a Decent Stout-only in Ein Hod

Getting the perfect pour on a pint of Guinness is considered part art and part science. Animators at The Mill in London faced a similar challenge when asked to create a Guinness pour out of thousands of books with flipping pages for the commercial "Tipping Point." Set in an Argentinean mountain village, the commercial follows an elaborate domino project that starts in a small house then grows to include everything from wheels to cars to flaming bales of hay. The action culminates in a three dimensional tower of books where the pages flip in sequence to create a dramatic working model of the classic Guinness pour.
To produce this unique commercial the production company of Guinness contracted the world record holder in domino toppling Weijers Domino Productions from the Netherlands.The Guinness ad, directed by Bravia-balls guy Nicolai Fuglsig. Cost a mere 15 (fifteen, that is) million euro (thanks to Judith)
Ein Hod Books and Pottery
Danny's The Best Beer in Ein Hod

The Linear Sex

La Linea ("The Line") is an Italian animated series of about 150 episodes created by Osvaldo Cavandoli in 1969. Due to its short duration (usually 2 minutes 30 seconds), it is often used as an interstitial program.
The cartoon features a man (known as "Mr. Linea" or, in some parts of Europe, "Balou", as well as "Linus på linjen" (Linus on the Line) in Sweden, "Złośniczek" in Poland, "Menő Manó" in Hungary, "Mar Kav" in Israel, "Streken" in Norway, "Bay Meraklı" in Turkey and "Lineman" in the U.S.), drawn as a single outline around his silhouette, walking on an infinite line of which he is a part

Rejected Don Hertzfeldt

The film premiered in 2000 at the San Diego Comic Convention to an audience of over 1,000 and blew the roof off the place. Don totalled his car on the way home from the premiere.
"Rejected" became one of the lowest budgeted films ever nominated for an Academy Award in 2001. To date it has received twenty-seven awards.
A year into the film's theatrical release there was a small but growing confusion over whether "Rejected" was 'real'. A few urban legends circled around the film, particularly fueled whenever a lazy film critic would rehash a synopsis in lieu of actually watching the cartoon; thus going to press with descriptions of the film as a non-fiction document of rejected commercials. The legends later found new life when "Rejected" was due for its American television premiere, uncut and commercial free, on the Cartoon Network in 2001. The air date was delayed for a year due to internal trouble with the network's standards and practices department, then finally given a green light to premiere in November 2002. After a week of promoting the film, the network then yanked it 48 hours before its scheduled time in a very unusual move, for reasons still mysterious. With beautiful irony, "Rejected" became truly rejected and more confusion over its true history grew. Unfortunately the film has yet to air anywhere on American television, despite having now been played on international networks for years. (..more>> )

Nuclei, proteins and lipids

The Inner Life of the Cell is a short 3D animation demonstrating various biological mechanisms that occur within the cells of the human body.
When teaching biology, professors will often generate 3D animations to demonstrate certain concepts to their students in a much more visual way than would otherwise be possible. In the case of The Inner Life of the Cell the creators aimed for a much more cinematic, as opposed to academic, feel.
David Bolinsky, former lead medical illustrator at Yale, lead animator John Liebler, and Mike Astrachan are some of the creators at XVIVO who made the movie. They created the animation for Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Most of the processes animated were the result of Alain Viel's, Ph.D. work describing the processes to the team. Alain Viel is an associate director of undergraduate research at Harvard University.
(more on wired)