The Wild Swans

Snooze buttons, sunlight…the inescapable cacophony of alarm alerts: waking up in the morning is a battle between the present and the future state of mind. A dream-like war with yourself and other objects that seem to take a life of its own.

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.

Animation short by Baoying Liu.

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.

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

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

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.

Wallace Carlson walks viewers through the production of an animated short at Bray Studios.

Flint must quickly alter his plans for a romantic date with Sam after his monkey-cleaning invention goes awry.

Flint's mischievous gummy bear grows to 50-feet by using his new food-modifying invention.

The Foodimals join Earl's scouting program but are very competitive.

Manny saves an adorable kitty with his many skills.

Nancy and Sluggo do their bit for the USO.

Len Lye scraped together enough funding and borrowed equipment to produce a two-minute short featuring his self-made monkey, singing and dancing to 'Peanut Vendor', a 1931 jazz hit for Red Nichols. The two foot high monkey had bolted, moveable joints and some 50 interchangeable mouths to convey the singing. To get the movements right, Lye filmed his new wife, Jane, a prize-winning rumba dancer.

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.

When the clock strikes twelve in a toy store a bunch of paint tubes come to life.

Dog racing is used as a metaphor for the futility of human existence.

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).