What's Opera, Doc?

In the modern village of the future, everything is mechanized, but the dreams of the village musician remain the same. He wants to become an artist. Thanks to the fact that an Art Nouveau goddess gave him a helping hand, Janko Muzykant saves his life and escapes from the village on a Pegasus.

On a small Kalahari farm things look bleak. It hasn't rained for ages and the well has run dry and the residents are just about hanging on with what little they have. As the farmers' daughter prepares to gamble on the final few seeds they have left something appears on the horizon which could be the salvation they have been praying for.

“Trigger Happy” was made with hundreds of objects found on the streets and sidewalks of New York. It began as an attempt to make an animated ballet, but as I was shooting the dance turned rowdy, into more of a nocturnal revel. It was shot on a lightbox with high-contrast film. The backlight silhouetted the objects, making them into graphic icons of themselves. The resulting film is a negative, which turned the objects white and the background black as asphalt. It makes the dance almost phantasmagoric. The trigger I was happy about was on the camera, but the title also fits the velocity of the imagery. Much of the animation happens by the rapid replacement of one object with another. It’s the afterimage in your eyes that animates the difference between the shapes, as one is replaced by another, and another… The music by Shay Lynch perfectly captures the idea of dancing in the streets.” —Jeffrey Noyes Scher

A futuristic cruise ship with a crew of robots is ready to take its first flight. A boy follows his curious dog on board of the ship, but then the ship takes off. The robots sees the boy as a blind passenger and try to get him off the flying ship.

A simplistically rendered girl screams and cries, and her environment changes to reflect her thoughts and mood.

A mysterious knock in an instant destroys the usual life that four lonely, calm people lead.

Short film by director Carlos Lascano.

An artistic animated short showing the life in secondary school.

An absent-minded traveler arrives at a Spanish beach where chaos is about to break out. (Followed by Mad in Xpain, 2020.)

Animation that illustrates five of Augusto Monterroso's fables.

An outcast duckling's search for a family to accept him leads to constant rejection before learning his true identity as a swan.

Scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images.

It has been a year since Tod's death, yet Pla Thong still cannot move on.

A scientist has been attacked and a secret recipe stolen, so a private detective duo is hired to unravel the mystery.

Robert Lepage’s remarkable Met Opera production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the 2013 Grammy Award Winner for Best Opera Recording, is now available as individual DVDs. Siegfried features Bryn Terfel, Jay Hunter Morris, and Deborah Voigt, with Fabio Luisi conducting.

Ring Cycle, pt 4. Siegfried is drugged and tricked into kidnapping his wife, since she has the Ring now. More double-crossings, Siegfried ends up dead. Brunnhilde has had enough of this, tosses the Ring into the river and torches the place.

A young sailor descends from a local train. He goes to a nearby forest, which is full of strange men in medical uniforms behaving in an absurd and eccentric manner. The sailor falls under their influence and masochistically gives himself up to them only to be disemboweled by the werewolf orderlies. The sailor’s last unconscious image is a “white ship sailing towards the horizon”—a Soviet symbol for happiness and joy.

Buenas noches, mi pequeño pan tostado

Clay-on-glass under-the-camera animated interpretation of Emily Dickinson's poem by animator Lynn Tomlinson.

Holly plays basketball at school with her best friend Ramtha. Two boys, Jonny and Daniel, challenge them to a girls against boys game. When Holly and Ramtha is winning, Daniel pulls down Holly’s pants in front of everybody... A clay-animation short film.