Bird of Prey

On behalf of "oppressed bugs everywhere," an inventive ant named Flik hires a troupe of warrior bugs to defend his bustling colony from a horde of freeloading grasshoppers led by the evil-minded Hopper.

The conflict between ducklings and frogs escalates into war. However, a lightning strike makes the fighters realize the trivial nature of their battle.

Arichan the Ant finds a violin in a sandbox and keeps it. However, realizing how important it is to its owner, he returns it to her.

In 1955 Tadahito Mochinaga was asked to create commercials for Asahi beer, which he created using stop-motion, followed by the 1956 short film "Beer Mukashi Mukashi" (Beer, those were the days...), created specifically for theatres. With the help of Kikachiro Kawamoto and Noburo Ofuji, this is the first animated short/commercial in stop-motion made for Japanese cinemas!

Fuku-chan was one of the most popular newspaper comic strip boy-characters in Japan at the time. The film portrays a submarine attack on an enemy cargo ship. Though this, too, was to boost patriotism, Japanese children particularly enjoyed the scenes in which the kitchen crew cooked in the submarine kitchen. Released in November of the same year, the food shortage was quite serious in Japan, and the abundant food supply in the submarine kitchen -- vegetables, fruit, fish, rice, and more which were already luxury items in Japan at the time -- was prepared into various dishes along with a merry, rhythmic song.

When a samurai witnesses a dancing maiden being kidnapped by ruffians, he rescues the poor damsel and takes her to the spring flower dance.

An early silhouette animated film by Hidehiko Okuda, Hakusan Kimura and Tomu Uchida. The original story is a Buddhist tale of a young lady who saved a crab (a spiritual being according to Japanese Buddhist faith) from being eaten, and was later saved from danger by the same crab.

A western occupation propaganda film in which a boy repairs a western style doll that comes to life and uses a magic pen to rebuild his bleak and war torn world into a happy place resembling western civilization.

A war propaganda film by Oofuji Noburou.

Short animated film from 1947

Butterfly, a faithful Japanese wife, waits patiently in Nagasaki for the return of her American husband, Pinkerton. She sees the Stars and Stripes fluttering atop an approaching ship and rightly surmises that Pinkerton is onboard. However, the feckless foreigner is arriving in the company of his "real" Caucasian wife, causing the heartbroken Butterfly to commit suicide. This masterpiece of Japanese silhouette animation makes the best of its source material.

Short animated film by Yasuji Murata

A story of three little bears going on an adventure to find the lost little duck.

Short animated film by Mitsuyo Seo

A Vietnamese short anti-American propaganda animation.

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 film about a flight of stairs. Directed by David Lynch.

General Electric sponsors this explanation of atomic energy, detailing some of its uses besides the bomb. Using animation and an off-screen narrator, the film describes the atom, elements and isotopes, the discovery of transmutation, experiments in artificial transmutation, and the reasons for the power of nuclear fission. The film argues that now, besides war, the atomic age holds promise for energy, farming, medicine, and research. The promise of the atomic age will depend on human wisdom.

A monkey comes home and uses a magic wand to make himself dinner. No sooner as he falls asleep, a hungry burglar enters his house. This short film was made by Segundo de Chomón in 1923 in his private studio with the help of his wife and son, outside of any studio structure, and has never had a regular distribution.

Lonely Tree is about to lose all hope in the war Man initiated against Nature.