Listicles, part of The L Magazine from New York, is a blog for which every post is a list of some kind, has posted an interesting list of 10 Surreal Animated Short Films.

These are culled from various sources (including the Goeblins Annecy animations) and are a mix of hand drawn and CGI animation.

All of them are interesting, and collectively make for a good bit of amusement and fascination.

(Images above: “Galileo” by Avrillon Ghislain, “The Lady and the Reaper” by Javier Recio Garcia, Music Video for “Where Dream & Day Collide” by Madder Mortem, directed by Christian Ruud and Kim Holm, “Garuda” by Nicolas Athane, Meryl Frack, Alexis Liddell, Andres Salaff and Maïlys Vallade)

The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside and Going West are two more short animated films picked out by Irene Gallo for her continuing weekly list of “Saturday Morning Cartoons” on the Tor Books site.

The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside (image above, top) is wonderfully stylized in an almost cubist design, artfully realized and emotionally resonant. There are wonderful touches in the handling of the background, lighting and scene compositions.

Going West (above, bottom) is an evocative homage to the transportive magic of reading, told with terrific paper cut-out animation.

While you’re on Gallo’s Saturday Morning Cartoon Index, take a look through the rest of her list (time-sink warning). Here are my previous posts about The Saturday Morning Cartoon Index, the Tor Books site and Gallo’s blog, The Art Depatment.

Austrian production and character designer Florian Satzinger has a drawing style with a snap and verve that harken back to the best of classic Disney and mid 20th Century Warner Brothers animation.

The lines with which he delineates his characters zing, bounce and swoop so delightfully that they suggest lively motion even before they’re animated.

Satzinger is the co-founder of Satzinger & Hardenberg Features, and the creator of Star Ducks and Toby Skybuckle.

He studied with Ken Southworth, a well regarded animator and animation director who worked with Disney, Haanna-Barberra, Warner Brothers, MGM Walter Lance and Filmation. Southworth’s credits include Disney’s original Alice in Wonderland and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Hanna Barbara’s The Flintstones and Space Ghost.

Satzinger credits Southworth as his major influence, and his work in the style of great classic hand-drawn animation shows his continuation of that tradition.

There is an interview with Satzinger on the Character Design Blog.

In addition to his character design and production work, Satzinger teaches character design, animation and animation history at the University of the Applied Sciences in Salzburg.

For the past week or so, Stephen Worth, Director of the always amazing ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive (which I have mentioned on several occasions) has been guest blogger on Boing Boing.

During that stint he has given us a series of treats including the Boing Boing Cartoon Circus, a list of some wonderful classic cartoons.

These are almost forgotten gems from an age when cartoon characters, and the imaginations of the artists, were wildly flexible.

The list includes such bizarre and delightful wonders as Grim Natwick’s Swing You Sinners (which Worth bills as “The Weirdest Cartoon Ever”); Terry-Toons’ The Last Roundup, in which Gandy Goose faces Adolf Hitler in the form of a pig; the Fleischer brother’s Popeye in Goonland, a delightfully looney excursion into weirdness (see my previous posts on Max Fleischer and the studio’s amazing Superman and Betty Boop cartoons); Bob Clampett’s Tin Pan Alley Cats, with a parody of Fats Waller; and the beautifully realized Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, a masterpiece by Grim Natwick under the direction of Ub Iwerks, which has some of the character of a Winsor McCay comic strip brought to life.

All in all a treat for fans of cartoon animation, swing jazz and/or overall weirdness.

For more, see the links on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive under item #7 on The Top Ten Reasons to Contribute to A-HAA, for links to even more classic cartoons.

(Images at left: Swing You Sinners, The Last Roundup, Popeye in Goonland, Tin Pan Alley Cats, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp)

This Is Where We Live is a short stop-motion animation by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

It is a promo for 4th Estate Publishers, and the “where” it refers to is the world of books. The designers and animators have taken a literal take on the phrase and created a world made, literally, from books.

You can see a time-lapse video of the animators preparing materials and another of them arranging a shot for the film here.

The animation was produced over a three week period in 2008, and was produced to mark the publisher’s 25th anniversary.

It starts, aptly enough, with a bit of flip book style animation in the pages of a book, and transitions nicely into a walk through the the book world; including nicely atmospheric “night” scenes, in which the darker side of things is displayed.

Charming, imaginative and beautifully done.

[Via Metafilter]

This is an amusing little animation that was made as a course assignment by a design degree student in Singapore, who goes by the handle “saggyarmpit” on Vimeo.

She points out that it was done fairly quickly, the drawings illustrated with technical pen and rough around the edges, and expresses surprise at the degree of attention the piece is getting.

What’s amusing and appealing about the piece is her clever use of folded paper, flip book techniques and stop motion animation to move the character through his parkour motions.

(Parkour, or “the art of moving”, is a practice originating in France of traversing an environment, usually urban, by physically adapting to it using climbing, jumping and running skills that are honed in a way comparable to martial arts training. You may have seen it displayed in the opening of the Casino Royale James Bond film from 2006.)

Here the artist, with post production help from Noel Lee, moves the figure through the illustrated environment, her hands acting as part of the stop motion action.

“Saggyarmpit” does not have a web site yet, but promises one soon.

In the 1990’s, Richard Williams, the Canadian animator responsible for the brilliant animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, began teaching an Animation Masterclass in various locations around the world. It was attended by members of major studios like Disney, Pixar, ILM, Dreamworks/PDI and Warner Brothers; who knew a Good Thing when they saw it.

Williams’ Masterclasses became somewhat legendary, with participants often claiming that the course changed their lives, or at least the way in which they saw, understood and created animation. The courses, and Williams’ approach, are founded on an understanding and keen observation of motion, particularly human motion.

His influential lectures were later codified in a book called The Animator’s Survival Kit, considered a must-have standard by knowledgeable animators and animation students.

Williams also created a series of videos for which he gave his Masterclass lectures in front of the camera; and additionally created over 400 special animations illustrating various points and techniques.

A newly revised version of the series has been released as a 16-DVD boxed set, The Animator’s Survival Kit – Animated.

At over $1,000.00 USD, the set is not inexpensive; but neither would be a classroom course of this quality and depth, if you could find one.

Even the short clips on the web site, meant give you a taste of the video set’s major sections, are instructive and fascinating in themselves (4 bottom images above); though many aspiring animators may not like the first one (grin).

Just look at his brilliant description of how to make a character correctly mouth the word “Hello” (#13 Dialog 1, top left of this page). All of the others are worth watching as well.

I absolutely love the group walk cycle animation on the home page (still image at top), and the animated intro from which it is taken.

This review from Daniel Briney may give you some additional perspective on the course.

[Via Articles & Texticles, which has a 10 minute audio interview with Williams on the post]

I’m fond of retro-futurism, the appreciation of past visions of the future; often the “future” in which we are currently living.

I’m particularly delighted with future visions rendered out in that wonderful ’50s & ’60s modern cartoon style that seems to be having a bit of a revival these days.

Disney’s Magic Highway, USA is a classic in the genre. Originally part of a TV program aired in 1958, it took off from visionary speculation about the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the construction of which had just been authorized two years prior.

The animation presaged some of the realistic aspects of that system, which had been championed by then-President Eisenhower as a national defense initiative. The animators then carried on into flights of imaginative fantasy about the future of automobile transportation.

It is at once naive, silly, fanciful, astute, ridiculous, clever and, at times, surprisingly predictive of things like rear-view cameras, digital dashboard read-outs (”onboard teletypes”) and the equivalent of GPS map displays.

Remember this is pre-Interstate Highway, pre-Jetsons, pre-space travel, pre-widespread commercial jet travel and produced at a time when computers as powerful as an iPhone took a up an entire room.

It is also remarkably insightful in the prediction of the de-centralization of urban areas into an idyllic version of contemporary suburban sprawl.

The animation and design work are a delight. Disney, both in animation and in their theme parks, often indulges in futurism, and this is one of the best examples from their animation studios.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of a source for the animation credits.

[Via Daring Fireball]

NuFormer is a design firm based in the Netherlands. They have developed a computer-based projection system for creating the illusion of moving, 3-dimensional alterations to the surfaces of buildings.

The results are striking, as you can see in this video on Vimeo. Bear in mind that these are not CGI in the usual sense, the computer imagery is in the projections on the buildings, not in the manipulation of the video images themselves. This is essentially what you would see if you were standing on the street in front of the buildings.

Take note of what each of the two buildings actually looks like early in the video, as their actual appearance will be delightfully called into question in the course of the display.

[Via Metafilter]

Like its predecessor, The Zoomquilt I, which I wrote about in 2006, The Zoomquilt II is a collaborative art project by 34 different artists.

Basically an amusement, this is an animated sequence of scenes, each one of which is related to the others by a transitional area within the image that allows for a continuous zoom, one scene leading into the next, leading into the next and so on.

The effect is nicely hypnotic, and the images are fun pseudo-Surrealism, full of monsters and trippy landscapes. You can control the speed and direction of the zoom with a slider on a pop-out panel at the left, that also contains the credits.

The Flash based animation is set to render to the size of the browser window, so maximize your browser for best effect.

In what may turn out to be an unfortunate choice, one of the participants used Disney characters in one of the scenes, so if the web site is hosted anywhere that has a copyright treaty with the U.S. this version may not be available for long. Enjoy it while you can.

[Via BoingBoing]