The Animation List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

[knives]

Once Disney lost Iwerks from pushing against him his rather middle class sensibility overtook the company. It reminds me a bit of Matt Groening actually who really prefers the new Simpsons animation for how on point it is with robotic consistency versus the early seasons' weirdness. If take a look at something like Plane Crazy which was entirely done by Iwerks it's jaw dropping how inventive and good how bizarre and inventive the animation is in that rough style.

[matrixschmatrix]

Hmm, I think for me that moves a bit too far in the other direction- it's got a sort of and-then construction with no real spine, so the gags keep coming but don't really build on one another, and the animation is sooo squashy that some of the most inventive gags don't really land, because the world's not solid enough for them to play against anything. That said, there are probably ten times as many brilliant bits in that short as you'd find in the entirety of later Mickey stuff, and things like him pushing the cow's tail to extend its neck or transforming the car into an airplane by stretching it out only work because the world is so plastic.

I think for me, the ideal would be a medium- like, in the Simpsons, the first season and a half or so were so stretchy that the characterization sometimes got lost, and obviously the most recent seasons have sacrificed all the expressive power of cartoons for computerized consistency, but the seasons 2 or 3-8 or 9 golden age is characterized by, among other things, really brilliantly selective use of off model drawings. Like, the perfection of Homer's heart attack is heightened by the degree to which we're not used to seeing him so distorted- if he were a bag of goo like a Ren and Stimpy character, it wouldn't pop all that much.

[knives]

That's definitely true for narrative stuff, but I'm approaching this conversation and thread exclusively from a pure animation point of view in which case Ren and Stimpy fare is simply the best. This really hit me a week or so ago after watching Tales of the Night which is a typically horrible Ocelot effort, but the animation is some of the best and most inventive I've seen in a recent feature. That lead me to thinking of Ratatouille which as a film is great, but as animation doesn't strike me as particularly useful especially when compared to Ocelot's film. That really made me think that if I were to vote for something like the Bird works no matter how much I love them I don't think I'd be making an animation list. Likewise even if Plane Crazy doesn't work on a story level (which is basically a constant with Iwerks if you've seen those Image sets) as animation it is probably the best thing made under the Disney banner. That said your medium would probably be Robert McKimson who I would argue is the best traditional style animator ever even going back to his work with Clampett. As director he really and wonderfully consolidated this later solid style of animation with the medium itself in a way that allowed for visual inventiveness on the level of rubber hose while remaining solid.

[matrixschmatrix]

For me, the form and content are part of the same package, and reinforce one another- one of the virtues of animation is in the way it can tell a story, and I think for me ignoring storytelling in considering a piece of animation would be ignoring a huge part of the artistry of it. It can do wild and crazy things, true, but it can also create worlds in a way that no other medium can, and create stories within those worlds- whether they be as down to earth as King of the Hill or as squashy as Adventure Time, it's still the convergence of the two and how each serves the other that determine the value of it to me. I mean, if we were doing TV, I think Justice League Unlimited would be pretty near the top of my list, and that's in an almost wholly realist style. The animation is useful both because it allows the possible and the impossible to interact on a totally even field- no matter how good CGI gets, there's always a gap between the real and the unreal, and having everything animated eliminates that gap- and because I really like the acting that comes from the abstraction of simple lines, rather than the totality of human features.

As far as McKimson goes- I recall enjoying a lot of the Looney Tunes stuff I saw with McKimson's name attached, but I still haven't developed the eye to be able to distinguish one director from another there without checking the credits, so I don't know that I can speak to him as an auteur or anything.

[knives]

The easiest way to tell McKimson apart from the others is his character design is always far fatter. The most obvious examples of this is Foghorn Leghorn and the Tazmanian Devil though examples are constant in his work. As for your actual point, I don't disagree but I think it is important in the context of the thread to ask how does this form expand upon the animation. Also I specifically spoke of story rather than form. I could not tell you a single great piece of animation in which the story was the reason for praise especially in the short medium. Certainly the form of say Street of Crocodiles is absolutely essential, but the story I wouldn't say is. As we go further to the side to Fischinger and McLaren type experiments I don't think an argument could ever be made for story. Even in something like the best works of Clampett, Freleng, or McKimson just to list some favorites usually the plot is a bunk excuse to play through a style. The Three Little Bops for example is about turning the animation into jazz with the story just serving as a template. Hell the best piece of American animation I've seen, Swing You Sinners, is just an excuse for Willard Bowsky to draw everything that his brain has ever imagined.

To stick with Fleischer for a second their Superman cartoons are rightly considered some of the best animation ever and have served as the basis for all dramatic animation ever since. When I was watching them last name though it became clear that that greatness was exclusively in the animation. With the exception of Bowsky's love for trying something new each film has the same plot of Superman punching a mad scientist. The ideas of the films are not in the story plain and simple. The animation though with its debt to art deco is phenomenal with strong geometric lines and a future bound look of blacks and greys. Each frame is a masterpiece and to see, say, the arctic giant in motion is one of the most impressive things of film rather than just animation. That too is key. With each film I watched or rewatched for this list I asked myself why is this animation instead of live action? In the case of many of those '50s and '40s Disney shorts I don't always have an answer. It's not just sitcom stories, but sitcom visual designs.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think, to me, that your set goals are overly limiting- I love Fishinger too, but I think that there's room for traditional narrative along with the more abstract, and I think something like My Neighbor Totoro is impressive because of the way that it uses a distinct world created by animation to tell a story- if it were just a series of images, it would have nothing like the level of impact. It furthers the craft of animation by using the tools of animation to create a great work of art; why should it have to be technically innovative at the same time?

[knives]

I suppose that would be a better comparison against the Disney thing I've been talking about since it utilizes certain things that to this day can only be accomplished in animation to expand on its story. The story of the film is basically nothing. Kids fuck around in the Japanese countryside during the war with magical creatures is the best I could come up with. The way that Miyazaki and his team expand upon these characters and their situation with the animation is what makes it such a unique experience. Some of the things like the meeting with their mother probably could by replicated in live action, but other things like that very specifically Miyazakian facial expressiveness is purely animation. Comparing that to, say, Up which is probably the biggest Miyazaki knock off by Pixar reveals a lot I think. The facial expressions on Carl and the other characters are very much modeled on normal human expressions and give me the same feeling I would have if it were Ed Asner or Christopher Plummer there. I can't say the same for the joy on the little girl's face when she first flies in My Neighbor Totoro for example. The animation adds to the story for Miyazaki. I can't say the same for a lot of those Disney shorts.

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, when I say something is noteworthy for its storytelling, I don't mean that it necessarily has a complex or abstruse plot- I mean, really, who gives a shit about the plot of Ulysses or The Great Gatsby? The narrative is still vital, though, and the things you're pointing to- the detailed characterization in the drawings, and the sense of movement they conjure- are part of storytelling, because they're part of characterization. I mean, obviously, we can disagree on how much Up is hindered by being overly representational, but I think when you drop storytelling from the criteria for great works, you cut off a lot of the great animated works out there arbitrarily. I mean, does a live action movie have to be something that couldn't possibly be told via animation to be a great or important work?

I would also say that some Disney features, like Sleeping Beauty, are victories of technical animation over storytelling, though I'm voting for it anyway. Disney's certainly not always concerned with building real feeling characters and putting them through a well crafted arc- I think that's far more true of Pixar, though I don't see it as a limitation.

[knives]

I think we are agreeing largely though the issue is that I'm taking the animation header very seriously as a critique (similarly many horror films I love didn't make that list because I didn't find them to function as horror terribly well). So I'm not arguing for Up as a bad movie or something, but I do think it features bad animation (the backgrounds are phenomenal though).

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, horses for courses, I suppose. I think I wouldn't vote for something that was extremely pedestrian animation but great in all other respects, and I am voting for The Thief and the Cobbler, which is pretty much the inverse, but broadly I'm most interested in what feels like impressive work overall, rather than what specifically seems like groundbreaking animation. I get the feeling that I'm going to have a lot more features than some other lists, too- though the final list may be mostly features just due to the intense vote splitting amongst shorts.

[knives]

I guess you'd know that better than anyone else grand listmaster.

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha, there are only two lists in, any guess I make right now is a shot in the dark.

[knives]

Hopefully you get more in the next ten days.

[swo17]

Since I last posted my shortlist, I've watched hundreds and hundreds more films. (Funny how many you can fit in when you focus primarily on shorts.) As a result, I've added the following films to my shortlist, which naturally is getting shorter and shorter and longer and longer each day. I know this is a gigantic post, but watching all of these shorts would only take about 2 ½ hours in total, and I highly recommend them all.

Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein, 11 min)
Don't make the same mistake I did and go most of your life without having seen this.

Mindscape (Jacques Drouin, 8 min)
The highlight for me from this lovely set of pinscreen works. Which, I might add, is supposedly one of the most difficult ways to make an animated film. (You have to enter your location at the NFB's site before that link will work.)

Spacy (Takashi Ito, 10 min)
This unfortunately kicked Rybczyński off my list, as it takes the craft of Oh! I Can't Stop! into whole other dimensions. Imagine if the monster from that film had the ability to shuffle between different planes of reality, some parallel, and some perpendicular. Spacy is what it might look like when that monster worked out at the gym. (On DVD here.)

Fortunately though, Rybczyński would not leave my list for long...

Tango (8 min)
This film won an Oscar, so perhaps you have heard of it?

Media (2 min)
This was so deceptively simple that I didn't even think much of it at first. It took a second (and third, and fourth, etc.) viewing to realize just how much skill and effort must have gone into making it look as effortless as it does.

The Public Voice (Lejf Marcussen, 11 min)*
And here's another deceptively simple film that initially doesn't even appear to constitute animation. Which I suppose is possible, if instead of animating this slow, surrealist zoom-out, Marcussen actually made a painting many miles wide, intricately detailed in the center and proportionately less so all around, and then filmed it from a slowly rising helicopter.

Bus Stop (Andrea Gomez, 7 min)*
This is animated with watercolors, which I believe is unique, though the subject matter (the grotesquerie of city life) isn't what you would normally associate with the medium. The score has an achingly beautiful Gavin Bryars quality to it that brings all the underlying sadness of the images right to the surface and then some.

Fugue (Georges Schwizgebel, 7 min)
The Diary (Nedeljko Dragić, 8 min)
In case you missed our discovery of this Schwizgebel DVD a few weeks ago, it's well worth getting (though it excludes some excellent films made since its production in 2004). Perhaps it's just that Fugue was my introduction to the director, but it still feels like the standout to me. In truth, there are at least a few other films of his that are just as spectacular from an animation standpoint, but I also just really, really love the score for this one (by Patrick Bokanowski's wife).

The Diary strikes me as a nice companion piece to Fugue, as it also traffics in people and buildings morphing into one another, though it's also unmistakably a product of Yugoslavia in the '70s, which is to say, pretty out there.

Newsprint (Guy Sherwin, 4 min)
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 4 min)
Over the course of the project, I've come to refine my definition of animation to encompass anything that is constructed frame by frame, as opposed to letting the camera roll continuously while its subject moves (or doesn't) of its own accord. This technically rules in a lot of experimental films, but I'm really only considering those that I a) find phenomenal and b) find compelling from an animation perspective. Newsprint fits both criteria for me, even if it's still a bit of a gray area. (The film was constructed not by taking numerous shots of word-filled pages, as in Latham's also great Encyclopedia Brittanica, but by literally pasting strips of newspaper onto film stock, including the audio strip so that we hear the sounds of the paper as well.) As the director himself describes in the book for this fantastic set, we normally process writing with it remaining static and our eyes fluttering over it; here the process is reversed, with our eyes remaining static while the projector animates the writing. This link shows footage from a live performance of the film, which I'd say basically counts as having seen it if you don't have time to get the DVD before the deadline. In any event, even if you don't classify Newsprint as animation, it certainly qualifies as a '70s film.

Mothlight is another fascinating expansion on the definition of animation, if it is permitted to be considered as such. Actual dead moth parts are fixed to the film stock to reanimate them in a sense when the film is played back, but the film also imagines a sort of heaven for the moths, eternally uniting them with their Beatrice, the light.

Virile Games (Jan Švankmajer, 18 min)
I've seen most all of Švankmajer's films by now, but somehow this one had escaped me until a couple months ago. Which is odd, given that it's now perhaps the first film that I'd recommend to anyone unfamiliar with his work. I may just feel this way for personal reasons though, as the film perfectly captures how I feel about sports.

The Trip (Kihachiro Kawamoto, 12 min)
And this film pretty well sums up how I feel about traveling.

Lucía, Luis & the Wolf (Atallah, Cociña & León, 8 min)*
A film in two parts, integrating charcoal drawings with stop motion animation. It's set in real world spaces that resemble your bedroom, just to make it that much more likely to give you nightmares.

Balloon (Ken Lidster, 12 min)*
Another hybrid of multiple animation styles. Somehow this wicked little number was not included in the Burton/Elfman regimen that Hollywood prescribed for my formative years. Just further evidence that I have to do everything for myself.

Rejected (Don Hertzfeldt, 9 min)
Y'know, It's Such a Beautiful Day is probably Hertzfeldt's towering achievement, but I can't help but make a big Richard D. James grin just thinking about Rejected. In both films, the crude stick figure characters belie the complexity of the animation when it becomes necessary to portray that the characters' world is falling apart.

Star Guitar (Michel Gondry, 4 min)
An oversight from my original shortlist, this music video replicates all the joys of sticking your head out the window during a train ride with none of the risk of serious injury.

Big Bang Big Boom (BLU, 10 min)
Fresh Guacamole (PES, 2 min)*
What's with modern animators working under three-letter all-caps pseudonyms? In any case, both of these guys seem to be bringing something really fresh to the table.

There were tons of other great recommendations in this thread (thanks to everyone for your suggestions!) but of course there's only so much room in a top 50.


*If anyone knows of DVDs where any of these films or other of the directors' work might be available, I would very much like to know!

[zedz]

Well, having checked (or re-checked) a couple of those, it looks like I'll have to overhaul my list. GEE THANKS.

Media is indeed insanely accomplished for a throwaway. Zbig Ryb, like Lye, Fischinger and McLaren before him (and Gondry afterwards), had the kind of imagination that could dream up entirely new ways of making films, and the skills to instantly master them.

Spacy is quite a find, but it lacks the virtue of being hilarious, so my monster stays put. In exactly the same vein, but even more ambitious, are a couple of (Australian?) shorts from the 90s. I keep thinking one of them was called 'Eternity' or 'Infinity', but I can't turn anything up on IMDB that seems correct. I'll do some more detective work. Basically, it's the same 'track in on a photograph' trope, but each photograph takes us to a different location, and I think some of them are even animated (i.e. they're changing the focal postcard with every frame, so you're zooming in on another world that's already in motion). It's completely exhilarating and a monstrous logistical achievement. If I can remember what either film is called, one at least will be making my list. The latter one was in colour and a bit more polished, but they're both essentially the same idea.

Virile Games might just be my least favourite Svankmajer short (but it's still brilliant).

[knives]

I'm with Zedz on the Svankmajer. It's a good short, but compared to (sticking with animation) A Game of Stones or Food it's clearly the runt of the litter.

[knives]

Which reminds me I should probably promote (again) two of my favorites from that sort of field. The Quay's Songs for Dead Children (found on the Blu for Institute Benjameta is just an unique play on music and grease in that frighteningly beautiful Quay way. It really gets to the heart of isolation as a child seeming like what a fevered twelve year old would hallucinate. The other is Jiri Barta's A Ballad About Green Wood which is the best nature rebels film ever.

[Gregory]

I had forgotten when in July the deadline was, and seeing that it's about a week away makes me realize I've been slacking on my viewing for this a little and would need an extension of the deadline to get a halfway decent list together and see more of the films discussed above. Would others agree with that idea?

[matrixschmatrix]

I'm all right either way- I wouldn't mind an extra week, both to wrap this one up and get some work started on the forthcoming one, but I also don't know that I desperately need it. I'll put it off to the 6th for now, to give myself a weekend to work on the tabulation, though.

[swo17]

I'd like to add three spotlight titles if I may, all of them shorts:

Mindscape (8 min)
Spacy (10 min)
Inspirace (11 min)

The first two I just barely talked about the other day. The third one is a wonderfully colorful piece animated with glass, which surely must win some kind of award for most difficult medium to work with.

-----------------------------------------

Another recent discovery of mine is Lillian Schwartz, who did a lot of early-computer-based abstract animation in the '70s. She's been quietly remastering her films and uploading them to Vimeo over the past year, most of them since this project started. A few of my favorites from what I've seen:

Mutations
Bagatelles
Pixillation

[flyonthewall2983]

I don't know if this has been brought up, and anyone can feel free to shoot this down since I'm not really participating in these lists. But what about a Disney list?

[knives]

Even including live action Disney I don't think I could come up with twenty let alone fifty.

[matrixschmatrix]

I saw Monsters University on Friday, and it's... ok. Better than Cars 2, surely, but not something I'd even bother to bring up here, normally. However, the short that runs before it- The Blue Umbrella- is absolutely brilliant, and a direction for Pixar that seems as new and different as Luxo Jr or Knick Knack must have back when they were new. I'm actually going to spoiler what I have to say about it, because the conceit of the piece is probably my favorite part.

Spoiler

Essentially, it's animation of various mundane objects- grates and drain pipes and signs and so forth, with the semi-recognizable faces built into them, lain over live action footage. The footage plays for a few beats before you see the inanimate objects move, and it really captures the feeling of the unseen world all around us in a way that seems as new as the early shorts must have- it's really beautifully integrated.

The action of the piece is relatively perfunctory- a red and blue umbrella pass, connect, and are separated by their owners, at which point the blue umbrella gets itself blown off to rendezvous with its partner. The development is really likable, though, where all of the other objects do the minor actions in their power, changing signs or spurting water or blowing wind or whatever, in an effort to aid the leads. The umbrellas themselves have more-obviously animated faces than everything else, faces that don't seem like they could always be there if you looked in the right way, but they're still wonderfully simple and minimalist. I'm not sure how this will look in the future, but for now it's terribly exciting and seems worth listing for that alone.

[Gregory]

A spotlight short for anyone so inclined:
For a long time Begone Dull Care was my favorite McLaren film, and thus one of the best animated films ever made and one of the best films made about one of my favorite types of music . It was the first one of his I ever saw, I loved it, and each time I've seen it has brought the same enjoyment, but I've since come to see Blinkity Blank as a greater and more inventive work.
Its most immediate charm is in the continuity it has in spite of the sheer speed it changes completely and incorporates so many completely different drawings and images. The music also provides a wonderful counterpoint, blending the wind quintet with sounds produced directly on the film, at the same time that the images blend abstraction with familiar shapes. The first part of the film acclimates us to the technical, physical properties of the film and its motion. Then we have the recognizable shapes, which perform a dance like nothing else seen before.
Truffaut described it as "an erotic ballet of male and female elements," but I don't see clear genders in it at all.
The use of black frames is something that only becomes more apparent on multiple viewings. Most of the film is completely unengraved black frames. Within that empty space are moments when an image can only be seen in a single frame for 1/48 second. Other moments show us continuous motion. A third type of moment in the film is what McLaren termed "frame-clusters" which group together a string of discontinuous etched images, one frame after another, which leave a very complex overall impression and add another level to the interplay going on in the film. I believe that seeing this on film or even blu-ray would be really greater than either of the DVD transfers I own, which of course have MPEG-2 compression, something that can't process such fast unpredictable as the frame-clusters well at all. I definitely would not recommend seeing this in any streaming form. Watch it from a DVD in a dark room and it's an unbelievable film. This is certainly top-10 or even top-5 for me. There are so many other great McLarens to choose from, too, but I'll probably limit myself to three.

[zedz]

I figured I only had room for two McLarens - and those are the two I chose.