Wild Waves

Oscar nominated animated short film from Czechoslovakia, 1960. Two characters fight over their claim to a small sunny spot on a beach.

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

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.

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

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.

An animated short about the 75 years of Superman.

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).

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.

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

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

Глаша и кикимора

The youngest witch is preparing for the magical exam.

Animation film about boy Ivashka's adventures in the country of fairy tales.

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…

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.