Our latest selection of animation and ‘cartoon’ capers to feast your eyes on
There are multiple methods, styles and means of making animation – bringing characters and landscapes to life, communicating messages and ultimately, telling those all important stories. How we see: it’s all about making masses of pixels move in some shape or form.
From traditional hand drawings, to etchings and pieces of material shot frame-by-frame, to multi- media mash ups, the mixing of inks and paints, to more modern machinations involving manipulation of graphics on a computer screen. Whatever your preference, there’s never been more ways to express ideas and make vision a reality.
Continuing our on-going series, we pick out some of the latest animations that caught our attention. We hope you’ll appreciate the sheer level of effort and creative love that goes into these pieces of work. As we focus on a bunch of cartoon based fun from creators based in Russia, Germany, USA and the UK.
Lay-Far – Seasons Change
DJ/Producer Alexander Lay-Far’s collaborates with Moscow-based illustrator Dasha Chukhrova to make this fun short trailer for his ‘Seasons Change’ EP that features a lovingly coloured, bouncey tiger at centre stage. Taking on all manner of shapes and forms, the sequence is cut to the beat, switching shapes and spaces. As if they’d re-imagined the notion of Tetris, all the way to a new space.
Abogar and Robert Seidel – People part I
The experimental music of Abogar meets the granular textures of ink drawings and analogue video artefacts of Robert Seidel. Blending together a retro-futuristic hybrid of paint like aesthetics and unsteady perspectives, they collide in abraded surfaces and oscillation between finely pored sculptures and destabilisation. Guided by the compositional structure of the Abogar’s music song, you can’t help but feel displacement and connection simultaneously.
Chris Carboni – Mourn in the USA
A simple yet powerful piece from filmmaker Chris Carboni with sound design by Ambrose Yu, he uses all his knowhow to produce this stirring narrative. As he puts it: “The story of unarmed black people killed by police in the US is really the story of systemic racism in this country. It’s the story of how the systems put in place to protect citizens can often yield the opposite result for many. It’s the story of Americans killed by America, and it’s a story that needs a new ending.”
Flying Lotus – Remind U
Directed by Winston Hacking for the mighty WARP records, Flying Lotus presents this dreamy ditty “Remind U”, taken from his new double LP “Flamagra”. Erring nonchalantly through time and space, Hacking summons the spirit and style of the evergreen Terry Gilliam in this purely delightful flow of surreal imagery and cut out montage.
Serafima Serafimova – Still life
Celebrating the beauty of movement and human connection in her dancingly short ‘Still Life’, Serafima Serafimova’s channels her yearning for the time before enforced stillness and separation into a transfixing fusion of rotoscoped dance and heavily stylised design. She artfully celebrates the beauty of movement and human contact across 90 transfixing seconds, using drawn techniques to fuel her animation style to beautiful effect.
