I'm always dismayed when I encounter a fellow cineaste willing to dismiss animation. Why do I personally love animated films? To paraphrase Annie Oakley: anything live action can do, animation can do better. And cheaper!
These are some animated shorts that I've been enjoying online, beginning with an Academy Award nominee (1999 - Best Short Film, Animated):
More 1998 United States, Mark Osborne.
I'm actually not in love with this film for the same reason that Pauline Kael resented Fantasia. She wrote about that film that it wrecked music by "forcing us to hear it forever after with incongruous images welded to it" (New Yorker 11 November 1972). I can no longer hear New Order's "Elegia" without seeing Osborne's film. Of course, this is also a testament to just how well the images complement the music.
What impresses me most about this film is Osborne's use of color and its absence for emotional affect. It's extraordinarily difficult to manipulate color like this in a live action film without simply switching between black and white and color, which as often as not feels contrived.
Animators can also appropriate the aesthetics of other artistic mediums much more successfully than live action filmmakers. For instance:
What Barry Says 2004 United Kingdom, Simon Robson.
The film's politics aside, Robson has basically taken contemporary political street propaganda and turned it into film art. Animators can actually incorporate their source material into their work, whereas live action filmmakers have to settle for imitation (as in Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, which tried to recreate the look of a three-color comic strip).
Thinking along these same lines, animators can also create an entire film out of other movies, as in the collage film:
Fast Film 2003 Austria/Luxembourg, Virgil Widrich.
Fast Film is both a love letter to and a critique of classical Hollywood cinema. The film was made by making 65,000 photocopies from over 300 different films and arranging them into a prototypical Hollywood film. I absolutely love Widrich's commentary on the interchangeability of actors during the studio era and on Hollywood's treatment of women.
Godard once said that best way to critique a film is to make another one of your own. Animation can do him one better by actually using the films in question!
Talking about the animated shorts of Chuck Jones, Roger Ebert noted that "no director has more power than a director of animated films" (RogerEbert.com 15 January 2006). Because they have absolute control over their universe they are best able to draw attention to filmmaking's inherent artifice. Such is the aim of:
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