For most of the '70s and '80's, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was the center of international creativity in animation. Artists from all over the world came to experiment with new styles, media, techniques, and content. The results were not only intriguing and challenging but often very funny, as this exceptional collection demonstrates. Richard Condie's Oscar-nominated "The Big Snit" …
Beginning in the mid-'50s, the husband-and-wife team of John and Faith Hubley broke new ground in animation with their explorations of complex ideas, cutting-edge graphics, and jazz soundtracks. When jazz was still largely marginalized as an art form in America, the Hubleys worked with Quincy Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Lionel Hampton. For vis…
If you ever played a video game back in the late '80s or early '90s you'll get a sense of what Computer Animation Festival has to offer. In this day and age of virtual reality and a more accomplished Nintendo and Playstation mentality, this DVD is strictly shareware and historical archive. Though it contains 19 of the "best" of computer animation shorts, almost everything in the volume feels da…
Felix the Cat was the first animated superstar, and these early shorts reveal the source of the character's phenomenal popularity. Animator Otto Messmer created Felix for "Feline Follies," a one-shot cartoon designed to fill a gap in an installment of the Paramount Screen Magazine. Messmer had learned how to use mime and expressions by studying the films of Charlie Chaplin, and even in his…
There's a dark underpinning of meanness and a lack of humanity contained within several of the short films in Short 6: Insanity. The animated "Bad Plant" and "Billy's Balloon" are both misanthropic contributions, and only "Franky Goes to Hollywood," which documents a day in the life and career of the dog who starred in Armageddon, and the Sound Bit featurette, "Beyond the Rhythm," really transc…
This is the eighth in a series of DVDs designed to highlight short films and interactive content. Each issue is loosely curated according to a theme: Dreams, Utopia, Seduction, or, in this case, Vision. It's also divided into four sections: narrative, documentary, music, and spoken word. As with most short-film collections, there is a tendency here to try to appeal to everybody, which leads to …