Animation Spotlight: Forget

Balloons, nested dolls, and a man with a cardboard box on his head.

Today’s short-and-sweet is a possibly bizarre but positively breathtaking music video for Vania & The Master‘s Forget, directed and animated by German motion graphics artist Michael Fragstein.

Enjoy.

We Got Time: Hand-Illustration Meets In-Camera Animation Magic

What a French invention from 1877 has to do with superb modern animation.

A couple of weeks ago, a fantastic video for Moray McLaren‘s We Got Time made waves with its brilliant in-camera animation magic. It’s pure creative genius — despite the utter visual indulgence, it isn’t stop-motion, no computer super-imposing was used, and everything you see is exactly what rolled off the camera.

The animations in the side-on views were produced by the camera capturing the moving reflections from the mirrored carousels, and the animations in the top-down views were created by matching the cameras frame rate to that of spinning record.

Now, we go behind the scenes with London-based animator David Wilson, who directed it and hand-drew all the illustration.

Beyond being a pure joy to watch, We Got Time is a testament to our belief that creativity is simply the genius of combining existing resources — knowledge, ideas, inspiration — in completely revolutionary ways: In this case, a vintage Praxinoscope device and old-school hand-drawn illustration.

Brilliant.

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The Sale of Manhattan: A Saul Bass Gem Circa 1962

What Saul Bass has to do with George W, or why Manhattan is worth $32 worth of junk jewelry.

Today’s short-and-sweet is a cultural gem in more ways than we can count — illustrated by iconic graphic designer Saul Bass, this animation segment comes from the 1962 ABC hit special Stan Freberg Presents: The Chun King Chow Mein Hour and tells, humorously and creatively, the story of The Sale of Manhattan.

Although undeniably marked with the stylistic stamp of that era, it isn’t hard to see how this short is a distant predecesor to the animated political comedy of today. (JibJab’s This Land, we’re looking at you.)

Or, it’s simply a testament to our timeless cultural need for storytelling, humor and art.

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