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The YouTube algorithm has done it again: Outside In, which both soothes and creates a headache as two unseen voices discuss how to turn a sphere inside out without folding or creasing it as early era CGI illustrates the problem at hand in yellow and purple. Probably once every minute I kind of understood what was going on, only for it to completely lose me and send me like eighteen steps back. Adult Swim before Adult Swim. An incredible whatsit

These are cute--stop-motion animation with wool!

It’s been disheartening to revisit many old Looney Tunes sketches in recent stages of adulthood with significantly diminished returns, many of them falling completely flat with slapstick ideas revealed as cheap and uninspired. Though every once in a while, there’s an adult-centered newbie that just hits all the marks right. For me, that episode is Birds Anonymous, a hysterical and thoroughly apt application of self-help addiction programs like Alcoholics Anonymous to Sylvester’s compulsions to eat birds. The skit covers a lot of ground in a short seven minutes: interventions, meetings, relapse, withdrawals, rumination on will power, and a denouement of sky cruelty where Tweety Bird pathologizes the addict with a line that’s both fair and demeaning, depending on how you read it or which perspective you attach to: the addict or the victims of addiction. Wall-to-wall genius.

I finally caught Studio Ghibli’s When Marnie was There and enjoyed it more that I thought I would, being a sweet story with some Ghibli charm. Its themes of loneliness feel more grounded and painful than in say, Kiki’s Delivery Service, but it’s a much more uneven film. While the ending is kind of clever, I can’t understand why this coming of age film veered so much into

Spoiler

LGBQT territory, only to fake you out at the end. To me there’s a certain bitter taste left over from not capitalizing on what it was obviously building up to, especially in regard to throwing light on the generational pain of those not able to come out.

The denouement is also way too long.

When Marnie Was There, despite some flaws, struck me as a much more rewarding movie than any of Miyazaki's own films after Spirited Away. Not as good as Takahata's last film, of course, but all in all one of the best of the later Ghibli films. I've always meant to read the source book -- but have never gotten around to it.

Wladyslaw Starewicz's 1927 short, Le Rat des villes et le rat des champs, is a lot of manic fun, moving at such an exhaustively zany rhythm that I was beyond impressed at how much spatial awareness had to be planned out in the filmmaker's mind during the creation, rather than just editing process, in order to actualize such a busy composition of stop-motion. I was reminded of the central tunnel scenes in Fantastic Mr. Fox or the intricate tracking of Rube Goldberg activity in Isle of Dogs, and while there are clear limitations to the medium prohibiting the same degree of consistent detailing in those two films, believing this is how Wes Anderson might approach a silent comedy a century ago is as high a compliment as I can give

YouTube's algorithm recommended me another animated short about a cat, and while it's no Cat City (what is), My Cat Lucy is pretty cute and demonic and only a two minutes long. Extremely impressed to learn this was a thesis film by a college student, it looks as polished as a major studio work

Daffy in Wackyland (2023), available on Max and also upped in full to YouTube as of this writing, is a short so wild that it’s hard to believe it’s a licensed cartoon from Looney Tunes. Using stop motion animation (or CGI that convincingly fooled me), the film’s bizarre sense of texture and pattern (Daffy’s eyes at default gleam with the starlight of a distant galaxy, etc) coupled with an appropriately weird cast of denizens and character designs assists in giving a singular sensory experience. There’s such a wonderfully intuitive nature to how the rando weirdnesses blend into each other, and the camera goes on some impressively bonkers perspective-shift set-ups that feel more effectively “zany” than any other animation I can think of. I must admit I didn’t think it was all that funny, but I don’t think that really matters here anyways

Great rec, wall-to-wall fun and impressive mechanics, but I didn't laugh much either - with the exception of once they arrive at Wackyland. So many strong gags jam-packed into like thirty seconds there

Apparently WB knew what they had here and this was supposed to be attached to the aborted theatrical release of Coyote vs Acme. Can only imagine how wild this would be to watch on the big screen, and of course now the short is not eligible for an Oscar (which it would rightly have deserved and surely would have won)

Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, 2022)(trailer)

May not qualify as animation more than any other work that leans heavy on digital compositing, but Beavers’ Looney Tunes foundations should find it fans here.

Co-creators Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews previously made Lake Michigan Monster, a Maddin-inspired stylistic exercise that flailed to find material and a consistent tone beyond self-amusement. They're on firmer ground here, assembling reenactments of time-worn gags along a video game structure toward supposedly pure and obvious goals: Survival, self-improvement, gettin’ the gal. Basically: A master distiller (Tews) in frontier-era Green Bay finds himself out of business when the titular varmints descend on a celebratory harvest drunk; he wakes alone in a barren snow-covered landscape and has to build a new life hunting critters.

Doesn’t help that Beavers takes longer than a Looney Tune to get going: The mostly wordless feature starts with a shouted expository ditty, and when Tews goes through the first cycle of each inherited bit it’s more cute/clever than funny. But this is a movie about utilizing acquired knowledge, and gags accumulate and compound and everything pays off eventually. Sometimes several times over, and sometimes self-consciously mocking its own m.o. Though Tews is given to mugging and the soundtrack gets heavy with his tiresome verbal interjections, Cheslik is dedicated to visual humor and rewards attention with tangents and throwaways. A motif about impressions in snow turns rabbit tracking into a family epic; Dogs Playing Poker initiates a desperate progression; a Titanic-shaped ice floe floats by. As if to highlight its proficiency at information management, the movie metes its opening credits until it’s time for the closing ones.

Silent films of all stripe serve inspiration, but the tone is always cartoon and Tews’ starting point is Elmer Fudd/Wile E. Coyote. He is pathetic, hungover, and lonely. Masochistic and prone to repeated failure, but persistently optimistic. Tews is playing opposite man-sized men-in-suit critters (you’re welcome, furries) which evens the odds more than humanizing the prey. (They bleed Styrofoam peanuts.) For a while, at least: This is a Fudd/Coyote who can learn from his mistakes and innovate, and while the movie shrewdly introduces new threats (wolves, a potential father-in-law, pursuant detectives) and regularly returns to his struggles with alcohol, as the hunter’s goals move beyond pure survival it hangs heavier question marks on its hero. Psychotic shades to his chirpy nature show through, a pointed confusion of should-I with can-do. He has made use of his own laughable screams of anguish and passes the pain along. The violence is hilarious and horrifying, competing notions of wanton destruction are weighed.

Cheslik (who also edited) has sharp comic timing but Beavers drags down the stretch, especially when action sequences too closely mimic video games. It’s bold to set so much of this against white, it burns the eyes and can emphasize flatness. Rare cuts to dynamic angles are bracing. Most of the beauty in Lake Michigan Monster took place against darkness, and there’s more than relief those times Beavers lets night come or moves indoors. But I fell for its escalations and laughed a lot, a good watch when your brain is broiling and you want to fantasize about frostbite.

I was rewatching Little Nemo (always better than I remember) and I forgot just how packed the crew is here. Sherman brothers, work by some of Disney’s old men, designs by Moebius, story credits from Bradbury with Chris Columbus turning in one of his best scripts. Robert Towne is even given credit for giving the film a once over. It seems like everyone involved with the film is a major figure in one way or another b

colinr0380 wrote: Wed Sep 03, 2025 10:55 am Apparently Nelvana Animation closed down last Friday

They made the excellent Tintin series back in the day.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Jun 19, 2024 4:01 pm Apparently WB knew what they had here and this was supposed to be attached to the aborted theatrical release of Coyote vs Acme. Can only imagine how wild this would be to watch on the big screen, and of course now the short is not eligible for an Oscar (which it would rightly have deserved and surely would have won)

I guess he’ll have to settle for a couple Emmys

Decided to watch Jonni Pepper’s Wasteland, which is actually compromised of 5 different segments (originally released as standalone shorts but are best viewed together in one single viewing), because of her connection to forum favorite animator Victoria Vincent (who voices pops up in a couple of times in Pepper’s series including an animated segment in The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia) and I just want to put in the good word for her because her stuff is truly great!

The Earth Is Flat is a solid short to start things off with, bridging several different styles of animation together in a manner that, rather than feeling gimmicky, adds to the demented nature of the short which flows with so much manic energy and deranged pieces of dialogue compressed into 5 minutes that it feels like you’re watching someone’s brain actually break down.

Goodbye Forever Party however is a complete 180 from The Earth Is Flat, initially starting off as a hysterical dark comedy centered in the world of a lost kids show until we’re suddenly placed into the lives of one of the mascot performers and Peppers delivers a series of heartbreaking gut punches. There’s also a clear link in this to Don Hertzfeldt, not only in their deceptively simple one-man-band style of animation but also in just how both filmmakers mix their surreal worlds or occurrences with a genuine, almost personal sense of empathy towards the people in them as they battle their mental health struggles (I wouldn’t be surprised if Peppers was taking inspiration from his masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day during several moments in this, especially the ending). I found an introduction from Peppers mentioning how this is meant to be a documentary and while I imagine it was just a tongue-in-cheek remark, there does seem to be a lot of Peppers being channeled into Lilith and feels like her confronting her own life & her own mental health issues dead-on, which just adds so much to what is already an excellent short because you just know that everything is coming from a place of genuine sincerity that just flows out of the screen.

Dr. Sam Mulaney’s Burden is a quick 4 minute short about a doctor’s crisis after removing a hot dog from someone’s eye. I guess since I was making Hertzfeldt comparisons before, the short this reminded me most of was Hertzfeldt’s Wisdom Teeth but less graphic. It’s certainly not as good as Goodbye Forever Party, but it is still a wonderfully surreal short and one that moves breezily enough that I was consistently engaged throughout.

We Are All Dying in the Wasteland is mainly just meant to connect all the previous segments together, basically it’s a wraparound, it’s a fun watch although nothing special but I do appreciate just how much Peppers packs into this 4 minute short and if nothing else, it is pretty funny.

I came into The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, the final part of Wasteland, with very high expectations and oh my goodness did it meet them and then some. In context, it’s an excellent wraparound to everything that came before, not only adding depth to seemingly inconsequential characters and details presented throughout the other shorts but also expanding on the shared ideas across of those shorts of lonely outsiders finding something to latch onto in a truly beautiful manner. Outside of the context of Wasteland though it’s also just a tremendous film, not only a genuinely empathetic and warm film but also loose & playful, hopeful yet bleak, somber but also occasionally hysterical, all building towards an ending that you hope won’t happen only to reveal an even sadder ending in its place. If you can only watch one of these segments, please make it this one, it’s only about 40 minutes and to me, it is to Jonni Peppers what I imagine the World of Tomorrow series is to Don Hertzfeldt and the result is nothing less than masterful. In case you can’t tell, I really love this movie and I’m really excited to see what else Peppers has in store.

Decided to finish up what’s currently available in Jonni Peppers’ Blindfold Series and while Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners and Barber Westchester are both really good in their own ways (especially Barber, which is genuinely such a warm, surreal blast of energy that deals with the remnants of trying to move on from your life after realizing everything you’ve been building towards is meaningless), Take Off the Blindfold, Adjust Your Eyes, and See the Face of Your Mother is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Not one of the best animated films, one of the best films period. The title itself is a key to understanding one of the major reasons I love this film so much, which is that it demonstrates Peppers’ jaw-dropping ability to re-contextualize everything that’s come before in the Blindfold series from adding depth and new details to seemingly one-sided characters, tying in details together from all her previous entries in a way that somehow feels a lot more coherent than it should be, and on top of that, Peppers offers completely new perspectives to her previous work that manages to reconstruct those works into something much more emotional than they previously were (I never expected to cry watching anything related to the eyeball hotdog bit from Wasteland but here we are). The other major strength of Peppers’ film is in its creativity and playfulness, she never repeats a bit twice and always manages to throw something at the wall and always manages to bring out a simultaneous sense of awe and sadness out of it (it feels wrong to compare such an original artist to a contemporary but there’s a lot that feels like it would’ve fit perfectly into a Don Hertzfeldt film, which is always a plus for me). And the effect of her seemingly endless creativity and playfulness is just this perfect juxtaposition between it and the smaller, more intimate moments she puts into her films which make her such a compelling artist. Please check this (and the rest of her Blindfold series) out, it’s an exceptional piece of work and I’m genuinely so excited to see the conclusion to her saga when it comes out!