Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and some 50 interchangeable mouths to convey the singing. To get the movements right, Lye filmed his new wife, Jane, a prize-winning rumba dancer.
Bambi is nibbling the grass, unaware of the upcoming encounter with Godzilla. Who will win when they finally meet? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.
A deliciously scary story about a boy who outsmarts an old witch-woman before she can have him and his brothers for dinner.
Mad God is a fully practical stop-motion film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs.
Wallace Carlson walks viewers through the production of an animated short at Bray Studios.
Binta, a little girl from Senegal, tells us about the everyday life in her village, the importance of education for the girls, and about her father's great idea to make the world a better place.
Sergeant Jeong Cheol-min's squad are in a renovated stock room with no window. The squad members are well known to be a hardworking group until Councellor Hong Yeong-soo comes in and starts causing trouble. Hong Yeong-soo seems to have difficulties adjusting to this environment. Things in the army changes rapidly, Jeong Cheol-min and his crew find themselves under attack perceived as the aggressors.
Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect. Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.
When the clock strikes twelve in a toy store a bunch of paint tubes come to life.
A young sailor dozes off in the grass in Frederiksberg Have and wakes up surrounded by supernatural fairylike creatures. They take him to the mermaid Capriciosa, who gives him a magic, inexhaustible wallet. The only rule he must abide is never to share his fortune with his family. (stumfilm.dk)
Automata is the eerie, black-humoured story of Henry, the last in a long line of duck hunters. The film examines the connection between hunter and prey and obsession in the face of extinction. It posits the question 'what would happen to someone at the tipping point; the moment where they are directly responsible for the extinction of an entire species' Duck hunting in Australia is a very contentious issue and every year hunters and protesters clash. The experimental side is evidenced with the lack of dialog, non-linear narrative and a 'score' by Belgian sound designer Christina Clar. The majority of the sound tracking and design was completed before the edit in Australia, thus reversing the usual process. The sound post production was completed in Brussels and includes recordings from deep within remote caves.
The boozy mercenary of the title, based on the actual historical figure of Naoyuki Ban (1567-1615), attempts to rid a haunted castle of spooks.
The Farmer is abducted by a capering Jungle Goddess. As pre-Code as a Terrytoon ever got. Most animation is by Frank Moser; with him are Art Babbitt, Jerry Shields, Bill Tytla and others.
The youngest witch is preparing for the magical exam.
Many years after having been locked in the basement by his father, Samuel believes he is still grounded.
The ultimate manual when it comes to the proper handling of the living dead. Recommended behavioural patterns in case of imminent Zombie epidemics are explained in comprehensible steps and vividly executed.
A scarce and seldom seen cartoon from 1937 with excellent hot jazz and containing caricatures of Cab Calloway, Ted Lewis and Bessie Smith.