ANIMATOR.....IT'S ALIVE!!! (fiendish laughter...)

When I was a kid, my parents exposed us to alot of really interesting and unusual events, and artists, films, etc....to which I am eternally grateful...It was not your normal existence...All kinds of things were discussed at the dinner table...(something in and of itself unusual, as I later discovered from friends)....I often felt I was watching my own family when watching various films, like Merchant Ivory's Room with a View....) a multi-faceted, and eccentric group of personalities...

One of the things my dad would do, was take some of us to the Festivals of animation...These were movies at the local art houses (like the beautiful RIALTO THEATER) featuring short animated films from all over the world...There was even one of these that featured commercials from all over the globe....This cemented my eternal love of animation, and gave me a view of the world, and all the creative souls at work in it, that has never left me....Later, when I was inevitablly exposed to the BROTHERS QUAY, and their strange STREET OF CROCODILES...(very loosely based on Polish author BRUNO SHULZ's work of the same name- a masterpiece in its own right....whose career was sadly shortened when he was shot coming home after curfew one night by a nazi soldier in occupied Poland...), I knew that someday I would embark on my own animated work...(I have an idea for a short stop-motion piece in the QUAY vein that has slowly been gestating within me for some years...Even in grade school I remember toiling away, while one teacher or another droned on and on about something that meant nothing to me, on elaborate flip books in the margins of my textbooks (GOD!! How I wish I still had some of those...), later even obcessive-compulsively colorizing some of them....

While I have occasionally checked out Youtube for some "obscure" little gem, recommended by a friend, it was only a few days ago, remembering a film seen over a year and a half ago, while bartending at Mike Judge's animation celebration screening at the Moore Theater in Seattle, that I realized how a vast wealth of animation was just a click away via Youtube...(what an amazing site!!!). I started hunting down old favorites...some from my father's forays with us, and new favorite's, discovered while hungrily searching on the site....And a bonfire has been rekindled to my love of all impossible things rendered possible, via the amazing medium of animation....

Here are a few samples to send you down your own path to that incredible art:

RABBIT ,by Run Wrake: a brilliant allegory to greed, canabalizing old childrens illustrations by Geoffrey Highgam, and a soundtrack collab with HOWIE B(!!!), very hip...

MINILOGUE/HITCHHIKERS CHOICE, by some very talented guy...there are even remakes of this one by other artists that are really cool as well...

BALANCE, an old favorite, with the dark humor only a German can bring to these stories...again about that good old sin: GREED...

FATHER AND DAUGHTER, by Michael Dubok de Wit, if this doesn't move you, then there's a rock in the place where yer heart should be....(reminds me somewhat of TRIPLETS OF BELLVILLE, or is that just because of the accordion?...)