Inklings, Issue 12

A solitary man works in a tall office building. The only moment in his drab life that's out of the ordinary each year seems to be opening the birthday card and gift from his mother. Usually it's a tie, but one year it's an accordion. It goes into the closet with his many ties. A year or two later, he discovers what happens to the papers he processes every day. His discovery sends him first to the building's top floor, then to his closet.

In this animated short, a terrible curse deprives Balthasar's kingdom of its stories. Taking the unicorn's horn back into The Belly of the Earth is the solution. Poppety will lead an expedition, by chance uncovering a hitherto closely guarded family secret.

Julius goes rabbit hunting while Alice goes bear hunting. Alice and her cat learn at their own expense that one shouldn't bother animals, whether those be rabbits or bears.

Oswald's sweetheart is stolen by a schoolyard bully, so he has to fight him during recess to win her back.

A 15-minute-long musical short animated film created in 2008 which depicts Judas Iscariot, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene as sheep. It has minimal dialogue, and coordinates many actions with sound effects that are part of the score.

Second animation about Gena and Cheburashka.

Bugs Bunny once again making that "wrong turn at Albuquerque" burrows into a bullring, where a magnificent bull is making short work of a toreador. The bull bucks Bugs out of the arena, prompting the bunny to declare "Of course you realize, this means war!" The deft Bugs' arsenal comes plenty packed, as he uses anvils, well-placed face slaps and the bull's horns as a slingshot. The bull fights back, using his horns as a shotgun barrel. The bull's comeback is short-lived; just after Bugs makes out his will, he lures the bull out of the arena, just in time to set up a rube-like device that leads to the bull's defeat.

Skazka Skazok (Tale of Tales) is a 27-minute animated short film, considered the masterpiece of influential Russian animator Yuri Norstein. Told in a non-narrative style by free association, the film employs various techniques including puppets, cut-outs, and traditional cell animation. Using classical music and '30s jazz tunes instead of dialogue.

Synopsis: A rabbit couple tries to survive in a dying forest...

A stop-motion film from Émile Cohl with tin soldiers, children's drawings and cannibals.

Follow a day of the life of Big Buck Bunny when he meets three bullying rodents: Frank, Rinky, and Gamera. The rodents amuse themselves by harassing helpless creatures by throwing fruits, nuts and rocks at them. After the deaths of two of Bunny's favorite butterflies, and an offensive attack on Bunny himself, Bunny sets aside his gentle nature and orchestrates a complex plan for revenge.

Ebenezer Scrooge is far too greedy to understand that Christmas is a time for kindness and generosity. But with the guidance of some new found friends, Scrooge learns to embrace the spirit of the season. A retelling of the classic Dickens tale with Disney's classic characters.

Krazy is at his house reading a magazine. Ignatz comes in and goes inside a jar of jam. Krazy is aware of this, and tries to get the rodent out of the jar. After getting bitten in the paws, he decides to discard the container, along with Ignatz.

In this one, Max has run low on ink, so Ko-Ko finishes drawing himself and then heads over to the camera room, where he creates his own characters, a mechanical dancing Dresden doll with whom he falls in love and a couple of automaton musicians. He gets rid of the musicians, but, alas, the projectionist gets oil onto Ko-Ko's soon-to-be bride, melting her.

Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden. They discover that flowers can bring both joy and solace.

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.

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.

A friend of KoKo's animator draws a haunted house, and KoKo and his dog Fitz go inside. There, they encounter frightening hallways where every door leads to a new spook.

A runaway train speeds down the track.

In Happy-Go-Luckies a pair of ukulele-strumming railroad hoboes fake their way into a dog show and make off with the prize loot. “Two heads are better than one” is the moral. To modern eyes, our trickster duo may look like two dogs—in the show they pretend to be one long dog—but audiences of the ’20s would have recognized a dog-and-cat team. The black body, white face, and sharp ears would have been most familiar from the greatest jazz-era trickster cat, Felix. Dogs and cats—much easier to animate than humans—were everywhere in silent cartoons. Terry, like most early film animators, had begun as a newspaper cartoonist, and his first strip, working with his brother as a teenager for the San Francisco Call, was about the adventures of a dog named Alonzo.