The Family Circus

My Friend Friedrich opens on awkward, bespectacled Columbia student Nate having a heart to heart on the phone with his mother. Then, in a philosophy class, he almost succeeds in landing a date by lobbing an illustrated invitation at his love interest, Emma. All goes awry when a taller, more confident, bespectacled Columbia student cuts him off at the knees. So far, so very New York student film, but a conceit arrives to distinguish this story of Ivy League dating woes: the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche appears before Nate to guide him towards self-actualization.

A deliciously scary story about a boy who outsmarts an old witch-woman before she can have him and his brothers for dinner.

The boozy mercenary of the title, based on the actual historical figure of Naoyuki Ban (1567-1615), attempts to rid a haunted castle of spooks.

The Farmer is abducted by a capering Jungle Goddess. As pre-Code as a Terrytoon ever got. Most animation is by Frank Moser; with him are Art Babbitt, Jerry Shields, Bill Tytla and others.

'Toon star Roger is worried that his wife Jessica is playing pattycake with someone else, so the studio hires detective Eddie Valiant to snoop on her. But the stakes are quickly raised when Marvin Acme is found dead and Roger is the prime suspect.

A scarce and seldom seen cartoon from 1937 with excellent hot jazz and containing caricatures of Cab Calloway, Ted Lewis and Bessie Smith.

A pawnbroker's assistant deals with his grumpy boss, his annoying co-worker and some eccentric customers as he flirts with the pawnbroker's daughter, until a perfidious crook with bad intentions arrives at the pawnshop.

A tailor's apprentice burns Count Broko's clothes while ironing them and the tailor fires him. Later, the tailor discovers a note explaining that the count cannot attend a dance party, so he dresses as such to take his place; but the apprentice has also gone to the mansion where the party is celebrated and bumps into the tailor in disguise…

A young llama named Koro discovers that the grass is always greener on the other side (of the fence).

Koro wants to get to the other side of the road.

A series of trick film hallucinations and scary doubling effects result when Patachon smokes an opium cigarette.

The ultimate manual when it comes to the proper handling of the living dead. Recommended behavioural patterns in case of imminent Zombie epidemics are explained in comprehensible steps and vividly executed.

Mad God is a fully practical stop-motion film set in a Miltonesque world of monsters, mad scientists, and war pigs.

A chain-smoking woman has an encounter with a vampire.

Bambi is nibbling the grass, unaware of the upcoming encounter with Godzilla. Who will win when they finally meet? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2009.

A cut-out of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sails over newspaper articles as they take place. Combines live photography and collage animation in one film.

Bambi's tale unfolds from season to season as the young prince of the forest learns about life, love, and friends.

An animated musical love story about a young man who lives inside a billboard and is charged with updating the advertisements. When he falls in love with a beautiful lady living across the highway, he has to use the only method he knows to get his message across - advertising

Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect. Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.

One of the most exciting and memorable stories in the history of the World Trade Towers is that of Philippe Petit, a French man who walked a tightrope between the massive monuments in 1974. Narrated by Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, this is an animated adaptation of the lyrical Caldecott Award-winning book by Mordecai Gerstein. Directed and animated by Michael Sporn, with music by Michael Bacon (of the Bacon Brothers).