It's no secret to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with video-hosting sites like YouTube and TikTok that they're positively overrun with animated shorts, and many streaming services also carry a sizable number of them, often packaged together as anthologies. Shorts are a form of film arguably better suited to today's ever-shortening attention spans; and with the increasing availability and sophistication of image-generating AI, just about anyone with a computer and some time to spare can create one. Whether that's a positive or negative development is debatable, but there's no question that it's difficult to find gems amidst all the dross.
So, for this post I've collected a dozen of some of the most aesthetically exciting and creative animated shorts I could find. As there's only so much you can write about something only a few minutes long, I've tried to keep things concise.
There's no better place to start than the music video for the rock band Cruisr's breezy song "All Over," (2014) directed by Chris Carboni. (YouTube) Quite simply, it consists of bite-sized visual references to famous (mostly American) movies morphing into each other at a very rapid pace, usually involving iconic couples or pairings of characters. It's drawn in a flat, 2-D, somewhat caricaturist style with bold colors and minimal detail - just enough to make the characters identifiable. Despite only being about a decade old, it has a distinct late 1960s/early 70s feel, with a hind of psychedelia. Describing it hardly does justice to it; better to just watch it - and have fun seeing how many characters and scenes you can recognize.
Another innovative music video is "Gimme the Sweet and Lowdown" by the California punk rock band Social Distortion (2012), directed by Olya and Vera Ishchuk. (YouTube) In black-and-white and drawn in the style of classic tattoo art, the video and song are a sort of mini-biography of the band's vocalist/lead guitarist/primary songwriter/only constant member, Mike Ness, who experienced much of what is depicted in the video. The video pays homage to Ness's musical influences, from Hank Williams to Billie Holiday to Joey Ramone; aficianados of classic country, rock, and punk will see many of the genre's most prominent figures immortalized here. Again, part of the fun is simply watching the video to see who you can recognize.
An abrupt stylistic shift brings us to the more sedate Rain Town (2011), directed by Hiroyasu Ishida. (YouTube) Apparently created as a student film by a Japanese animator, it has no dialogue or narration, with unaccompanied piano as a score. It's a surreal, near-abstract story of a girl living in a perpetually-drenched derelict town who befriends what appears to be a semi-organic robot with a flowerpot-shaped head. The color palette is very subdued, mostly blues and greys, except for the brighter-colored human characters (and the ending, which I won't spoil). It's a melancholy, wistful and very ambient experience; but not depressing to watch, and very open to interpretation about what it all means.
From the quiet to frantic - the Polish short Paths Of Hate (2010) directed by Damian Nenow. (Kanopy, YouTube) This is rendered in cel-shaded CGI, giving it the look of a particularly smooth hand-drawn 2-D animation. A war film in the purest sense of the term, it consists of almost nothing but a vicious, one-on-one aerial dogfight between two unnamed pilots flying World War II-era piston-engine fighter planes over a stunning winter landscape. This short contains what is probably the best-animated dogfight I've ever seen, rivaled only by those in the 2008 anime feature The Sky Crawlers. The soundtrack is just as visceral; while it contains some instrumental heavy metal, it's comprised largely of roaring engines, rattling machine guns, and the pilots' ragged breathing. It veers into more surrealistic horror territory towards the end; I won't spoil what happens, but it can safely be said that no one wins.
Machinery also plays a starring role in The Lonely Orbit (2021), directed by Frederic Siegel and Benjamin Morard. (Kanopy, YouTube) This uses a (mostly) orange, blue, and white color palette with no outlines. It presents a unique visualization of the modern telecommunications network, in a rumination about the nature of digital connectiveness and the illusions of closeness that it provides - both to people and, as it turns out, to satellites. The short poses a pertinent question: What if one of the many satellites that modern people depend on for communication became lonely and wanted to meet the Earth? Flaming reentry and utter chaos, of course.
The flames also roar in Yellowstone 88: Song Of Fire (2021) directed by Jerry van de Beek and Betsy de Fries. (Kanopy, YouTube) This is a poetic dramatization about the destructive wildfires that burned much of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, beginning with the dry conditions that led to the fires and ending with the burgeoning forests in its aftermath. The poem that serves as the short's narration was written Betsy de Fries and is read by Peter Coyote. The short is animated in Flash-style 2-D CGI, with objects shaded and thickly layered to give a sense of depth. The background is comprised of silhouettes and heavily stylized landscapes, with animals drawn in a Native-American animated woodcut style. Though the short depicts an event that was widely considered a disaster, it doesn't present the fires as an irrecoverable apocalypse. As destructive as they were, the flames were only part of a cycle - many animals and plants survived them, and the forest rekindled itself afterwards, as it's done many times before.
A somewhat less hopeful outlook is presented in Framed (2020) directed by Marco Jemolo. (Kanopy, YouTube) (Please note: You probably shouldn't watch this if you're currently afflicted by paranoia or deep anxiety. I'm not joking.) This was created with classic Claymation-style stop-motion animation. The primary goal with stop-motion is always to imbue inanimate objects with the illusion of life. What, then, would it be life if a stop-motion figure really was alive - not in a fictional world, but in this one - and experienced every moment of their existence, from being cut out of a block of clay to being forced to pose for the camera, over and over and over again? Framed answers that question; suffice to say, it ain't pleasant. In fact, it's a Kafkaesque nightmare that ends in an emotional breakdown.
Particularly surreal nightmares might also come to mind when viewing Freeze Frame (2021), directed by Soetkin Verstegen. (Kanopy) Also stop-motion animated, it uses a strictly monochromatic color palette, with no dialogue or music. Beginning with traditional Scandinavian ice harvesting on a frozen lake, it turns into meditation about motion, transcendence, and the fragility of life - as well as the bleak and deadly beauty of subfreezing winter. It's animated with what appear to be ice cubes with small animal figurines frozen inside of them, interspersed with ice sculptures of bones and skeletons, all formatted as a combination slideshow/early 20th century silent film. In terms of aesthetics alone, it is truly unique; I've never seen anything else remotely like it. Think of it as the sequential photography of Edward Muybridge by way of Disney's Frozen, and you won't be too far off.
The bleak-yet-photogenic tone continues with Falling Down (2020) directed by Swann and Yoann Chesnel. (Kanopy) This is one of the few animated shorts I've seen that's formatted to look like a smartphone video, in a 9:18 aspect ratio - the better to evoke the verticality of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, where much of it is set. Accompanied by the song "A Photo" by Superpoze, it's a combination of photorealistic CGI, short clips of live-action film, and photo montages that flip by so quickly that they look animated, like a rapid-fire slideshow. As best as I can determine, the short is a statement about the social impact of the then-current Covid-19 pandemic and the world's concurrent societal and environmental ills. It manages to be quite poignant without being overly preachy, and reaches a remarkable crescendo in its 4-minute runtime.
Now, let's take a breather from the contemporary with An Optical Poem (1938) directed by Oskar Fischinger. (Kanopy, YouTube) Despite being about as uncommercial as a cartoon can be, this was officially released by MGM Studios - it's even preceded by the famous roaring lion logo! It's an abstract animation set to the energetic music of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt; more notably, it's the only animation I can think of that was created with mobiles - paper cutouts suspended with invisible wires. Multicolored solid shapes fly through space, spin, approach and retreat, and orbit as though Liszt's music has taken over gravity's job for the day. I was reminded of Fantasia's more abstract moments (like the sequence set to Bach's Tocatta and Fugue), but with more of a cutting-edge flair. This was incredible visual effects work for its time, and leaves the viewer wondering why more film effects didn't take cues from this, instead of using more difficult and expensive (and usually less convincing) techniques like optical compositing.
Somewhat less abstract, but arguably even more surreal, is Our Lady Of The Sphere (1969) directed by Lawrence Jordan. (Kanopy, YouTube) Possibly the hardest of all these shorts to describe, the closest equivalents that I can think of are Terry Gilliam's minimally-animated interludes in Monty Python's Flying Circus. The short is sort of an animated collage, produced from line engravings and cutouts, tinted in vivid red, green, and blue over a black background. The story (I'm guessing that one was intended) involves a boy, a deep-sea diver, a crystal ball-headed woman, and an awful lot of buzzing. If a person living in Victorian London had a fever dream after seeing too many Punch cartoons, it might well resemble this odd absurdity.
...And one last jump to the recent brings us to Concrete (2021) directed by Aira Joana, Luca Struchen, Nicolas Roth, and Pirmin Bieri. (Kanopy, YouTube) This is CGI, with the 3-D elements rendered in a very blocky, angular art style, with heavy use of textures. It depicts an encounter between a size-shifting 3-D man and a 2-D fox in a giant concrete structure, in an otherwise deserted landscape. The fox, being two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world, can only move along flat surfaces - slabs of concrete, in this case. Though the fox dwells in one plane of existence and the man in another, they can still interact to a limited degree, and seem to come to a kind of accommodation with each other. There's no dialogue, and appropriately eerie music. Concrete is another dreamlike short; things seem to have meanings and purposes, but it isn't immediately obvious what they are. Kinda like this blog that way!
Despite great strides made in recognition of its artistic merits over the past few decades, animation is still often dismissed by critics and audiences as "kid stuff," or as an art form occupying a lower and less lucrative tier than live-action film. It is neither; I would argue, based on this very small collection, that animation has potentialities that have only begun to be explored, and many of the world's most original and creative artists have worked, and are working, as animators. May they continue to do so, with or without the help of AI (and whatever technical innovations inevitably supersede it).
