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So far I've watched nine of the recommendations on here and have seen some marvelous films, a few of which will definitely make their way to my list. However, none has had a greater impact on me than Jimmy T. Murakami's When the Wind Blows. The simple animation style (though he does incorporate live footage and an extremely jarring, but effective, sequence where the bomb drops and animations changes) belies an emotionally rich and complex tale of the horrors of nuclear warfare. For those who haven't seen it yet, I'll continue the rest in invisotext.

Spoiler

It seemed rather obvious to me from the beginning that there would be no happy ending here. I suppose that since part of the film's purpose is to serve as an anti-nuclear polemic, the couple's fate was inevitable. Despite the fatalism of the narrative, the emotional impact of Jim and Hilda's slow demise from radiation poisoning wasn't the least bit diminished for me. Nor was it effected by their rather one-dimensional characterization of a pair of well meaning simpletons, broken only by Jim's horror when the alarm sounded. The way that the deceptively simple narrative pulled you in to the fate of the two and made you care for them reminded me of another film about the horrors of war: Grave of the Fireflies. Although the two films couldn't be tonally more different, both charted the sad, inevitable fates of a pair of innocents who suffered and died from the decisions of their leaders. This is definitely top ten material.

Oh, and for what it's worth, despite Jim's undeniable naivete, I suspect that he understood that the two of them were dying. His constant reassuring along the lines of "these things happen at our age" seemed to me to be a way of covering up what he realized was going on. Whether it was self-delusion or a means of keeping his wife at ease, I cannot say. Of course I might be misreading this, but for a man who discussed his research on nuclear war at various points, it would be quite odd if he didn't know what radiation poisoning was like.

Next up you should check out the first Barefoot Gen which starts off as a stereotypical Japanese family drama with some incidental war time elements before it becomes really horrifying. It might not be as long term disturbing as When the Wind Blows, but the short visceral sequence more than makes up for that.

I've held off putting together any spotlights since this forum's knowledge of animation seems to have far eclipsed my own. That's worked out quite well in my favor since it means that I've gotten a number of outstanding recommendations, but I doubt that I can pick any obscure gems that the majority of readers here haven't already seen. Consequently, I'll highlight a pair of personal favorites that, while by no means obscure, have yet to be mentioned in the thread.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America: If you look beyond the stupid you'll find one of the funniest and most trenchant satires of mid-1990s life. The MTV show (thankfully the last thing that I've ever watched on that wretched channel) was one of the staples of my Jr. High & High School days, telling a story that often seemed to reflect the daily idiocy of early teen burnouts (myself included) that rang true to me. The film took things a step further, getting the duo off of their couch, away from their music videos, and into a cross country adventure. The plot is truly meaningless. Ostensibly the film charts the course of a stolen nerve agent stitched into the lining of Beavis' shorts. Of course, this a little more than an excuse to set the boys up for their picaresque adventure. Is it dumb? Absolutely. Is it funny? Truly hilarious.

Availability: I could have sworn that it was one of the myriad of OOP Paramount titles, but Amazon has it in stock. Indeed, it can be streamed for free by prime members. Netflix also stocks it.

Princes et princesses: I wanted to include at least one film by Michel Ocelot. Though I've yet to see a few of his films, I'm generally a big fan of work. I oscillated between Princes et princesses and Kirikou and the Sorceress, but since the latter latter is more well known (the BFI has a wonderful release that I reviewed here), I decided to go with the more obscure title. If you judged the film by the description, you might think that it was rather weak. The plot centers around a trio of animators using a futuristic machine to craft stories of...princes and princesses. They come up with several, ranging from the ancient world to the distant future. All are creative and entertaining, but like any anthology, it has its stronger and weaker segments (I won't try to prejudice anyone by labeling them here). Of course any viewing will draw comparisons with Lotte Reiniger's work. Beyond the obvious use of silhouettes, Ocelot's film also shares the same wondrous and adventuresome themes of works like The Adventures of Prince Achmed, where heroes battle villains for the love of a beautiful damsel. This is familiar territory, but done in such a loving and beautiful way that it certainly merits viewing.

Availability: I own the French DVD, which I reviewed here. There is a North American release available on Amazon and netflix, though I can't speak for its quality.


Oh, and I'm glad to see the love for Waking Life here, since I'm always happy when films seriously address philosophical questions (and the fact that the father of one of the interviewees is a friend of mine doesn't hurt either). I've shown it in class before as a general wrap up to an introduction to philosophy course, but haven't done so in years.

knives wrote:Next up you should check out the first Barefoot Gen which starts off as a stereotypical Japanese family drama with some incidental war time elements before it becomes really horrifying. It might not be as long term disturbing as When the Wind Blows, but the short visceral sequence more than makes up for that.

Thanks for the recommendation. It's on my "to see" list and I'll probably get around to it tomorrow or Friday.

bamwc2 wrote: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America: If you look beyond the stupid you'll find one of the funniest and most trenchant satires of mid-1990s life. The MTV show (thankfully the last thing that I've ever watched on that wretched channel) was one of the staples of my Jr. High & High School days, telling a story that often seemed to reflect the daily idiocy of early teen burnouts (myself included) that rang true to me. The film took things a step further, getting the duo off of their couch, away from their music videos, and into a cross country adventure. The plot is truly meaningless. Ostensibly the film charts the course of a stolen nerve agent stitched into the lining of Beavis' shorts. Of course, this a little more than an excuse to set the boys up for their picaresque adventure. Is it dumb? Absolutely. Is it funny? Truly hilarious.

I'm legitimately considering voting for the South Park movie, so you won't be totally orphaned in a love for lowbrow but somehow smart 90s TV cartoons turned movies. I'm not consistently a fan of either show, but I think the movies brought out the best in both of them.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I'm legitimately considering voting for the South Park movie, so you won't be totally orphaned in a love for lowbrow but somehow smart 90s TV cartoons turned movies. I'm not consistently a fan of either show, but I think the movies brought out the best in both of them.

Yes, South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut may find a place on my list as well. I haven't started ordering them yet. I have a job interview tomorrow that I've been preparing for (currently just a visiting professor). Perhaps I'll reward myself with developing the first draft of a list in the afternoon. My OCD would love that.

In terms of animation in When The Wind Blows, I particularly like the way that you have the 'live action' sets that have the animated characters walking through them. I don't know if it was intended as such but it adds an extra degree of physicality to the environment that works beautifully during the early sections where Jim is building the shelter by taking the house's doors off their hinges, or the way that Hilda's tea set and meals are neatly laid out. It suggests an 'Englishman's home is his castle' primacy of the home but also that kind of more 'present' texture of the surroundings of the present day contrasts well with the more classically animated interludes showing the wider world, or the stock footage and sepia animation of the flashbacks and memories, as if they are somehow less 'real' and more subject to remembrance bias, or broad stokes in the way that they are shown.

Of course the 'realness' of the house set also factors into the post-bomb scene of devastation, where all those 'real' objects are shattered, broken and ruined (with only the animated human characters retaining some sense of short-lived vitality).

I'll always remember that the first time I watched When The Wind Blows after recording a television showing of it my video tape ran out close to the end but during the sequence where Jim has his final supreme rose-tinted dream of working as a Blitz era fireman. That was quite frustrating at first from the point of view of wanting to see how the film ended (inevitable but still shocking that it went there, especially in the context of Raymond Briggs' other works more aimed at children - though come to think of it The Snowman hinges on a similarly inevitable-yet-devastating when it happens conclusion), yet the more I look back on that accident of fate the more I like the way that my recording abruptly cut off leaving the character in mid-reverie!

I really think that When The Wind Blows is valuable not just as a brutal warning about the devastation of nuclear war and the futility of measures (busy work) to survive it provided by the government, but also as a quite blunt critique of a Second World War generation stuck in a past full of moral certainties, heroes and villains and the right way to approach the next war that simply doesn't apply to a global nuclear conflict.

I've got to say, I'm finding it pretty ominous that the vast majority of discussion in this thread seems to be about features. To me that's a bit like focussing on 'comedy westerns' in the Westerns discussion thread. Okay, okay, maybe not quite that disastrous, but I still think this is a field in which 80+% of the best work has been in short forms.

But I guess I should put my money where my mouth is, or rather my mouth where my mouth is, and discuss some of those overlooked masterpieces:

The Sinking of the Lusitania (McCay, 1918) - To the best of my knowledge, this is a singular film in the history of cinema: an animated newsreel. There were no cameras in the middle of the Atlantic to capture the tragedy, so McCay puts one there. It's an extraordinary idea, and it packs an emotional wallop, but what makes this so great is that it's a phenomenal and exquisite feat of animation: the images are beautiful yet awful (in both senses of the word). In purely technical terms, animation wouldn't catch up to McCay until Disney's height in the mid-thirties, and by that time it took a factory of geniuses to do it. (This is on YouTube, but the copy I found was so hopelessly pixillated that it should be avoided.)

Screen Play (Purves, 1993) - And here's another amazing technical feat. Absolutely exquisite stop-motion animation that imagines a brilliant narrative grammar out of sliding screens and other moving parts. It looks like the most astonishing stage production you've ever seen (Robert Lepage, eat your heart out) and then. . . it leaves the stage. You can see it on YouTube, so I won't spoil it for you.

Hotel E (Parn, 1991) - I've seen this political allegory several times on the big screen, and I'm still completely at a loss to understand what it's all about, except in the most general terms, but I always get swept up in the specificity of what's going on, and am always impressed by the startling stylistic juxtopositions within the film. The initial 'American Dream' segment alone would make my list in its own right, but enriched and complicated by the other material, it's even more hypnotically acidic. YouTube.

Sing, Beast, Sing! (Newland, 1980) - Marv Newland will probably get in, if at all, with Bambi Meets Godzilla, though that's more a brilliant idea than a brilliant piece of animation. This, for me, is the best International Rocketship film, a bizarrely hilarious juxtposition of the Toledo Mung Beast belting out Willie Mabon's Chess classic "I'm Mad" while his pal Black Ear the Dog drinks. The superb deadpan timing is enhanced by the patient, Tarkovskian lateral tracking shots and marvellous use of off-screen space (quite a rarity in animation, where the frame is very often the world). YouTube.

The Hardest Button to Button (Gondry, 2003) - Like the best of Gondry's music videos, this is a fiendishly clever idea that's conceptually straightforward and self-explanatory, extremely difficult to pull off, perfectly suited to the music, and, in its execution, given far more expressive nuance than you'd expect. Those are all extremely rare talents for any filmmaker, and ones which tend not to translate well (or if they do, only fitfully) to features, which is why Gondry's music videos remain by far the strongest part of his oeuvre. Enjoy.

I'm not sure if in my right mind I could call the Gondry animation. It uses animation tools, but it doesn't seem to be using that to portray movement if that makes sense.

That's an interesting thought, but I'd say the 'movement' being animated is on a more abstract plane than the people in the frame: it's the line of drums / speakers etc. marching across the landscape that constitutes the animation, same as if somebody pixillated a dining table zooming across a field toward the camera. This is actually one of the piece's great visual coups, since the multiples within the frame expose the illusion (thus, it's clearly not your conventional 'stop-motion moving object') while also preserving it.

It does remind me of pintilation (I hope that's the right word) a great deal, but that ultimately gives me the sense that we are seeing something like a Chris Marker film with overlays of the old photos being present. The result for me is almost against animation, again if that makes sense.

Maybe it's an animation Rorschach test, depending on whether you see moving columns of equipment (like I do) or a series of static tableaux?

I'm conflicted as well - I certainly agree on Gondry's music videos being stunning, but am not sure how pure animation they are. Hardest Button To Button, Come Into My World, Lucas With The Lid Off and something as wonderful as Let Forever Be feels like live action, on-set creation and editing tricks used to create an animation-like effect. That is what gives it the unique Gondry-esque 'hand-created' style, making it of a piece with the longer works (which I agree are weaker as in his features he feels the need to put in material to fill in/justify the handmade parts rather than just jumping right into it).

From that Gondry "Director's Series" DVD perhaps Fell In Love With A Girl might count more? Or Les Callioux? Perhaps even Star Guitar for the way it is turning live action elements into animated environments.

If a combination of animation and live action is OK, I'd like to vote for one of my favourite music videos for The Test by The Chemical Brothers. Plus in what other music video about a drug experience do you get a homage to Buster Keaton?

From that initial list, I wouldn't count any of those apart from Button as animation. As far as I recall, none of them uses any animation techniques (unlike the stop-motion of Button, which is really just a descendant of McLaren's Neighbours). Fell in Love with Girl is clearly animation, but nowhere near as good or as inventive as Button, in my opinion.

Star Guitar is wholly CGI, isn't it? I was including it on my list on those grounds, but if he actually spent $300 billion constructing all that infrastructure so he could stick his camera on a train and speed through it for a few minutes, I stand corrected!

I agree on Star Guitar, I just assume that he picked elements from the 'real world' (a train signal here, a chap in a red shirt there) and manipulated them through CG into the wholly fantastical 'train journey to music' we get in the video!

I still think Hardest Button To Button fits with that initial group, in that the 'animation' feel to the action is created through getting a whole lot of drum kits and guitars into position for real and then editing from position to position rather than actually with the intention of creating a seamless illusion of movement in inanimate objects. Though I agree that it is a borderline 'not quite stop-motion' case and an interesting argument to make about the video!

Honestly, I think I'd class Button more as Melies style trick photography than anything meant to create the illusion of motion, except perhaps for the sequence where the column of Meg's drums seem to act as a volume level bar. It's hard to view something as stop motion when they're moving within each frame. I do think his video for Bjork's Joga fits, though I think I like that one more conceptually than in execution (the CGI landscape looks pretty dated, particularly back to back with the real footage.)

I think if I were to vote for a video, off the top of my head, it be Cunningham's for Bjork's All is Full of Love.

colinr0380 wrote:I still think Hardest Button To Button fits with that initial group, in that the 'animation' feel to the action is created through getting a whole lot of drum kits and guitars into position for real and then editing from position to position rather than actually with the intention of creating a seamless illusion of movement in inanimate objects. Though I agree that it is a borderline 'not quite stop-motion' case and an interesting argument to make about the video!

Oh, I'd never argue that it was intended to be 'seamless': the aesthetic he's exploring in the film is entirely about the seams. And you do realise that "getting a whole lot of [objects] into position for real and then editing from position to position" is the very definition of "stop-motion animation"? The only difference here is the number of frames he snaps of any given position, and that's wildly variable between practitioners and examples of the form anyway.

Absolutely and I did hesitate before posting for exactly that reason but on my (purely made up) sliding scale from Melies editing trick through to full animation, I think that the comment still works and on this occasion I would perhaps err on the side of editing marvel rather than animation marvel.

But I think that this is purely arbitray distrinction on my part, and I wouldn't prevent anyone from voting for it - I also had a pause to think about Švankmajer in regard to that use of live action elements as if they were animated elements and would not have as many qualms there, perhaps because more character is expressed through the movement than simple appearance/disappaearance of objects in jump cuts.

I watched Barefoot Gen yesterday. It's wasn't the visceral punch in the guts of When the Wind Blows, but it was still quite good.

I think a lot of the most interesting animation challenges our understanding of what the form can be. Good luck untangling animation from live action in Surviving Life! I saw a great short a few years ago which was animated with drawings all over pieces of paper which were folded / unfolded / refolded to create the movements.

I'll be voting for Rybczyzinski's Oh! I Can't Stop, in which what is animated is not visible. (Oh my god, maybe it was The White Stripes!) That will probably also fall into your 'edited not animated' bin.

zedz wrote:I saw a great short a few years ago which was animated with drawings all over pieces of paper which were folded / unfolded / refolded to create the movements.

This?

swo17 wrote:

zedz wrote:I saw a great short a few years ago which was animated with drawings all over pieces of paper which were folded / unfolded / refolded to create the movements.

This?

Bingo!

I might just have to find a spot on my list for that after all.

zedz wrote:That will probably also fall into your 'edited not animated' bin.

It might be only a slight distinction but I prefer to think of it less as throwing the video 'into the bin' than saving the video for its high spot in any future "Editing List Discussion & Suggestions" project (where it can take its rightful place alongisde other 'edited not animated' or 'animated through being edited' classics such as Koyaanisqatsi)

But these discussions on the borderlines really highlight the main issue that any of these genre lists should be bringing up: that placing material within categories, while helpful for classifying and grouping material and identifying shared themes etc, is always a restrictive and arbitrary process of boxing in and limiting a work within certain expectations. And that some of the best works often refuse to neatly play by those rules, or slide between rigid definitions of form, genre, 'auteur theory' etc, etc.

bamwc2 wrote:

matrixschmatrix wrote:I'm legitimately considering voting for the South Park movie, so you won't be totally orphaned in a love for lowbrow but somehow smart 90s TV cartoons turned movies. I'm not consistently a fan of either show, but I think the movies brought out the best in both of them.

Yes, South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut may find a place on my list as well. I haven't started ordering them yet. I have a job interview tomorrow that I've been preparing for (currently just a visiting professor). Perhaps I'll reward myself with developing the first draft of a list in the afternoon. My OCD would love that.

I'm thinking of including the South Park movie somewhere in my list too, if only for the "La Resistance" musical number which has only become more amusing and relevant in these post-Les Misérables times.

zedz wrote:I've got to say, I'm finding it pretty ominous that the vast majority of discussion in this thread seems to be about features.

For what it's worth, at the moment only 13 entries in my list are features. It's scarily easy to come up with fifty top-notch short cartoons even just limiting to the classic eras of the biggest studios... whereas I don't know if I can't name fifty animated features I even like, much less consider truly great.

I'll throw in two animators of note, who will definitely place somewhere on my list: Michael Dudok de Wit and Paul Driessen. Both are Dutch (though Paul Driessen later emigrated to Canada, where he made films for the NFB), and both have completely different yet utterly distinctive styles.

Dudok de Wit has a subdued, elegant form using sparse watercolors, inspired by the art and philosophy of East Asia. Paul Driessen's style is deliberately cluttered and cartoonish, full of squiggly lines and bizarre sound effects; he occasionally employs multiple frames within a film.

They have a variety of striking films, and I encourage you to explore them in-depth (Dudok de Wit has only made a handful). But I'll limit my discussion to a few films.

Michael Dudok de Wit: His two best films are The Monk and the Fish and Father and Daughter (which won an Oscar in 2000). Both are readily available online (The Monk and the Fish and Father and Daughter) in reasonable quality, and both are under ten minutes. Of the two, I prefer The Monk and the Fish by a narrow margin, for its visual beauty, its playfulness, and its delightful fusion of music and image. But Father and Daughter is sublime, and one of the more deserving Oscar winners I've seen.

Paul Driessen: He has so many films it's hard to narrow it down, but I'd have to recommend The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg as the best I've seen (available here for free, legally, and in good shape, courtesy of the NFB). Aside from that, I've enjoyed all of his films, but a particularly interesting one is his mildly experimental The End of the World in Four Seasons, which utilizes several frames at once.