Here is a collection of animation excerpts that I think are good quality and show a range of styles and techniques. I’ll be updating as I find more cool things to add over time.
- Sita Sings the Blues (excerpt): Tweening-style animation mimicking Javanese shadow puppets. One of the more interesting/creative uses of this Flash style that I’ve seen. This film as a whole has a very interesting history around copyright and creative commons as a result of its soundtrack (the recordings are in the public domain, but the compositions are not). It is also a film about an Indian story that is being told by a Jewish-American woman, and for older students could be an interesting case study for conversations about the ethics of cultural appropriation.
- The Thief and the Cobbler (War Machine excerpt): Classical animation at 24 frames per second. Ludicrously fluid. This film was in production for around 30 years and was never finished by its original creator, although two commercial releases that were finished by others exist, as well as a restoration of the original intent using storyboards/animatics. This is one of those projects that genuinely furthers the medium as an art form, and if you have the chance to show the Recobbled Cut in full, do it.
- Mob Psycho 100 (credit sequence): This show generally pushes the boundaries of television production and budgetary constraints to produce some stellar animation, but this ending sequence is of note for being produced through paint-on-glass, a notoriously difficult and painstaking process where the artist manipulates slow-drying paint and photographing each frame. My favourite part is around 1:11 where the viewpoint character sees a cat. Miyu Sato, the animator, produced paint-on-glass sequences within the series proper to create surreal ghosts.
- The Old Man and the Sea: A very different example of paint-on-glass, an Academy Award winning short by Alexander Petrov. What is most interesting to me are the sequences where not just the characters, but also the environment are moving, a rarely seen technique in commercial animation – these are also present in the Mob Psycho 100 clip.
- Running Up That Hill Music Video: (PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING) This Meg Myers cover uses rotoscoping (traced live-action film) in an interesting way, making each frame a black and white colouring page that was given to children to colour in – 3202 frames total for a ~5 minute clip. The effect is surreal – shout out to the child who put cats in space.
- Minnie the Moocher: Basically any Cab Calloway/Fleischer collaboration (e.g., Snow White, Old Man on the Mountain) is worth looking at. These shorts are not always the most technically impressive, but they are WEIRD and use the medium to show stories and visuals that would never be possible in live-action, like Betty Boop’s father’s head turning into a phonograph. This particular short also includes a rotoscope sequence of Cab Calloway as a ghost walrus, which is what we all need in our lives, really.
- The Tech of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse: Okay, this one is about 3D animation, but it is an interesting examination of how this film mimics 2D style in a 3D movie.
- NFB Hothouse Apprenticeship: The National Film Board of Canada does a 12 week animation apprenticeship every few years with interesting results. The most recent one, in 2019, included only indigenous creators. The NFB is generally a great place to find interesting animation.