Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Animated Documentaries

Stop-motion animation and documentary are our two favorite film genres. Naturally, we’re all over Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Documentaries, a highly unusual and highly rewarding marriage of the two, showcasing 13 remarkable animated documentaries from around the world. With entries from Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, France, Finland, Canada, Belgium and the United States, the compilation covers an impressive range of themes, animation techniques and storytelling styles.

Animating Reality ties nicely into our recent streak of animation-based “documentaries” — from last week’s superb animation of Möbius strip animation of Flatland to yesterday’s uncovered 1968 Saul Bass gem exploring the origin of creativity.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Why Man Creates: A Saul Bass Gem from 1968

We love iconic graphic designer Saul Bass and have a soft spot for luminaries’ musings on the nature of creativity.

Naturally, we’re head over heels with Why Man Creates — a remarkable short documentary from 1968, animated by Bass and alluringly subtitled “a series of explorations, episodes & comments on creativity.”

Playful yet profound, the film is a series of sequences that at first appear unconnected but eventually converge into a compelling exploration of (wo)man’s most fundamental impetus to create, featuring such delightful tongue-in-cheek vehicles as this exchange between Michelangelo and da Vinci:

Whaddaya doin?” ‘I’m painting the ceiling! Whadda you doin?” “I’m painting the floor!”

For more on Bass’s design legacy, and its place in the context of other seminal design work, we highly recommend Six Chapters in Design: Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka, Henryk Tomaszewski which, nearly 15 years later, is still an absolute pillar of understanding and contextualizing modern graphic design.

via BoingBoing

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Hezârfen: The Story of the First Human Flight, Animated

What kvetching chickens have to do with the history of aviation and Turkish folk heroes.

One fine day in 1632, legendary Ottoman inventor Ahmed Çelebi took the first sustained unpowered human flight, which earned him the name Hezârfen, meaning “thousand sciences” — an ancient term for “polymath.” His flight was brief, but epic:

The veracity of the incident has been disputed for centuries, but the writing of 17th century Turkish traveler and historian Evliyâ Çelebi describes it as follows:

First he practiced by flying over the pulpit of Okmeydani eight or nine times with eagle wings, using the force of the wind. Then, as Sultan Murad Khan (Murad IV) was watching from the Sinan Pasha mansion at Sarayburnu, he flew from the very top of the Galata Tower and landed in the Do?anc?lar square in Üsküdar, with the help of the south-west wind. Then Murad Khan granted him a sack of golden coins, and said: ‘This is a scary man. He is capable of doing anything he wishes. It is not right to keep such people,’ and thus sent him to Algeria on exile. He died there.” ~ Evliyâ Çelebi

This lovely 3D animated short film, the collaborative effort of a team of animators, artists and sound designers, captures the story of Hezârfen with wonderful, poetic romanticism — the kind of rewriting of history we often see in folk hero tales which, inaccurate as it may be, is the fundamental storytelling fabric of human civilizations.

For more on Hezârfen’s story and the human hunger for the azure, Mastering the Sky: A History of Aviation from Ancient Times to the Present is worth a look.

via fubiz

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.